1187	----	Transcribed from the 1912 Macmillan edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org WAR OF THE CLASSES BY JACK LONDON AUTHOR OF "THE SEA-WOLF," "CALL OF THE WILD," ETC. THE REGENT PRESS NEW YORK Copyright, 1905, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1905. Reprinted June, October, November, 1905; January, 1906; May, 1907; April, 1908; March, 19010; April, 1912. Printed and Bound by J. J. Little & Ives Company New York Contents: Preface The Class Struggle The Tramp The Scab The Question of the Maximum A Review Wanted: A New Land of Development How I Became a Socialist PREFACE When I was a youngster I was looked upon as a weird sort of creature, because, forsooth, I was a socialist. Reporters from local papers interviewed me, and the interviews, when published, were pathological studies of a strange and abnormal specimen of man. At that time (nine or ten years ago), because I made a stand in my native town for municipal ownership of public utilities, I was branded a "red-shirt," a "dynamiter," and an "anarchist"; and really decent fellows, who liked me very well, drew the line at my appearing in public with their sisters. But the times changed. There came a day when I heard, in my native town, a Republican mayor publicly proclaim that "municipal ownership was a fixed American policy." And in that day I found myself picking up in the world. No longer did the pathologist study me, while the really decent fellows did not mind in the least the propinquity of myself and their sisters in the public eye. My political and sociological ideas were ascribed to the vagaries of youth, and good-natured elderly men patronized me and told me that I would grow up some day and become an unusually intelligent member of the community. Also they told me that my views were biassed by my empty pockets, and that some day, when I had gathered to me a few dollars, my views would be wholly different,--in short, that my views would be their views. And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,--still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable. Romance, to the bourgeois mind, was respectable because it was not dangerous. As a "red-shirt," with bombs in all his pockets, I was dangerous. As a youth with nothing more menacing than a few philosophical ideas, Germanic in their origin, I was an interesting and pleasing personality. Through all this experience I noted one thing. It was not I that changed, but the community. In fact, my socialistic views grew solider and more pronounced. I repeat, it was the community that changed, and to my chagrin I discovered that the community changed to such purpose that it was not above stealing my thunder. The community branded me a "red-shirt" because I stood for municipal ownership; a little later it applauded its mayor when he proclaimed municipal ownership to be a fixed American policy. He stole my thunder, and the community applauded the theft. And today the community is able to come around and give me points on municipal ownership. What happened to me has been in no wise different from what has happened to the socialist movement as a whole in the United States. In the bourgeois mind socialism has changed from a terrible disease to a youthful vagary, and later on had its thunder stolen by the two old parties,--socialism, like a meek and thrifty workingman, being exploited became respectable. Only dangerous things are abhorrent. The thing that is not dangerous is always respectable. And so with socialism in the United States. For several years it has been very respectable,--a sweet and beautiful Utopian dream, in the bourgeois mind, yet a dream, only a dream. During this period, which has just ended, socialism was tolerated because it was impossible and non-menacing. Much of its thunder had been stolen, and the workingmen had been made happy with full dinner-pails. There was nothing to fear. The kind old world spun on, coupons were clipped, and larger profits than ever were extracted from the toilers. Coupon-clipping and profit-extracting would continue to the end of time. These were functions divine in origin and held by divine right. The newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so, and what they say, of course, is so--to the bourgeois mind. Then came the presidential election of 1904. Like a bolt out of a clear sky was the socialist vote of 435,000,--an increase of nearly 400 per cent in four years, the largest third-party vote, with one exception, since the Civil War. Socialism had shown that it was a very live and growing revolutionary force, and all its old menace revived. I am afraid that neither it nor I are any longer respectable. The capitalist press of the country confirms me in my opinion, and herewith I give a few post-election utterances of the capitalist press:-- "The Democratic party of the constitution is dead. The Social-Democratic party of continental Europe, preaching discontent and class hatred, assailing law, property, and personal rights, and insinuating confiscation and plunder, is here."--Chicago Chronicle. "That over forty thousand votes should have been cast in this city to make such a person as Eugene V. Debs the President of the United States is about the worst kind of advertising that Chicago could receive."--Chicago Inter-Ocean. "We cannot blink the fact that socialism is making rapid growth in this country, where, of all others, there would seem to be less inspiration for it."--Brooklyn Daily Eagle. "Upon the hands of the Republican party an awful responsibility was placed last Tuesday. . . It knows that reforms--great, far-sweeping reforms--are necessary, and it has the power to make them. God help our civilization if it does not! . . . It must repress the trusts or stand before the world responsible for our system of government being changed into a social republic. The arbitrary cutting down of wages must cease, or socialism will seize another lever to lift itself into power."--The Chicago New World. "Scarcely any phase of the election is more sinisterly interesting than the increase in the socialist vote. Before election we said that we could not afford to give aid and comfort to the socialists in any manner. . . It (socialism) must be fought in all its phases, in its every manifestation."--San Francisco Argonaut. And far be it from me to deny that socialism is a menace. It is its purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of present-day society. It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever occurred in the history of the world. It presents a new spectacle to the astonished world,--that of an _organized_, _international_, _revolutionary movement_. In the bourgeois mind a class struggle is a terrible and hateful thing, and yet that is precisely what socialism is,--a world-wide class struggle between the propertyless workers and the propertied masters of workers. It is the prime preachment of socialism that the struggle is a class struggle. The working class, in the process of social evolution, (in the very nature of things), is bound to revolt from the sway of the capitalist class and to overthrow the capitalist class. This is the menace of socialism, and in affirming it and in tallying myself an adherent of it, I accept my own consequent unrespectability. As yet, to the average bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace, vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class, when he discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his own mouth. He does not know the literature of socialism, its philosophy, nor its politics. He wags his head sagely and rattles the dry bones of dead and buried ideas. His lips mumble mouldy phrases, such as, "Men are not born equal and never can be;" "It is Utopian and impossible;" "Abstinence should be rewarded;" "Man will first have to be born again;" "Cooperative colonies have always failed;" and "What if we do divide up? in ten years there would be rich and poor men such as there are today." It surely is time that the capitalists knew something about this socialism that they feel menaces them. And it is the hope of the writer that the socialistic studies in this volume may in some slight degree enlighten a few capitalistic minds. The capitalist must learn, first and for always, that socialism is based, not upon the equality, but upon the inequality, of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for goodness, for renunciation and sacrifice, and with conscience, stern and awful, at times blazingly imperious, demanding the right,--the right, nothing more nor less than the right. JACK LONDON. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA. January 12, 1905. THE CLASS STRUGGLE Unfortunately or otherwise, people are prone to believe in the reality of the things they think ought to be so. This comes of the cheery optimism which is innate with life itself; and, while it may sometimes be deplored, it must never be censured, for, as a rule, it is productive of more good than harm, and of about all the achievement there is in the world. There are cases where this optimism has been disastrous, as with the people who lived in Pompeii during its last quivering days; or with the aristocrats of the time of Louis XVI, who confidently expected the Deluge to overwhelm their children, or their children's children, but never themselves. But there is small likelihood that the case of perverse optimism here to be considered will end in such disaster, while there is every reason to believe that the great change now manifesting itself in society will be as peaceful and orderly in its culmination as it is in its present development. Out of their constitutional optimism, and because a class struggle is an abhorred and dangerous thing, the great American people are unanimous in asserting that there is no class struggle. And by "American people" is meant the recognized and authoritative mouth-pieces of the American people, which are the press, the pulpit, and the university. The journalists, the preachers, and the professors are practically of one voice in declaring that there is no such thing as a class struggle now going on, much less that a class struggle will ever go on, in the United States. And this declaration they continually make in the face of a multitude of facts which impeach, not so much their sincerity, as affirm, rather, their optimism. There are two ways of approaching the subject of the class struggle. The existence of this struggle can be shown theoretically, and it can be shown actually. For a class struggle to exist in society there must be, first, a class inequality, a superior class and an inferior class (as measured by power); and, second, the outlets must be closed whereby the strength and ferment of the inferior class have been permitted to escape. That there are even classes in the United States is vigorously denied by many; but it is incontrovertible, when a group of individuals is formed, wherein the members are bound together by common interests which are peculiarly their interests and not the interests of individuals outside the group, that such a group is a class. The owners of capital, with their dependents, form a class of this nature in the United States; the working people form a similar class. The interest of the capitalist class, say, in the matter of income tax, is quite contrary to the interest of the laboring class; and, _vice versa_, in the matter of poll-tax. If between these two classes there be a clear and vital conflict of interest, all the factors are present which make a class struggle; but this struggle will lie dormant if the strong and capable members of the inferior class be permitted to leave that class and join the ranks of the superior class. The capitalist class and the working class have existed side by side and for a long time in the United States; but hitherto all the strong, energetic members of the working class have been able to rise out of their class and become owners of capital. They were enabled to do this because an undeveloped country with an expanding frontier gave equality of opportunity to all. In the almost lottery-like scramble for the ownership of vast unowned natural resources, and in the exploitation of which there was little or no competition of capital, (the capital itself rising out of the exploitation), the capable, intelligent member of the working class found a field in which to use his brains to his own advancement. Instead of being discontented in direct ratio with his intelligence and ambitions, and of radiating amongst his fellows a spirit of revolt as capable as he was capable, he left them to their fate and carved his own way to a place in the superior class. But the day of an expanding frontier, of a lottery-like scramble for the ownership of natural resources, and of the upbuilding of new industries, is past. Farthest West has been reached, and an immense volume of surplus capital roams for investment and nips in the bud the patient efforts of the embryo capitalist to rise through slow increment from small beginnings. The gateway of opportunity after opportunity has been closed, and closed for all time. Rockefeller has shut the door on oil, the American Tobacco Company on tobacco, and Carnegie on steel. After Carnegie came Morgan, who triple-locked the door. These doors will not open again, and before them pause thousands of ambitious young men to read the placard: NO THOROUGH-FARE. And day by day more doors are shut, while the ambitious young men continue to be born. It is they, denied the opportunity to rise from the working class, who preach revolt to the working class. Had he been born fifty years later, Andrew Carnegie, the poor Scotch boy, might have risen to be president of his union, or of a federation of unions; but that he would never have become the builder of Homestead and the founder of multitudinous libraries, is as certain as it is certain that some other man would have developed the steel industry had Andrew Carnegie never been born. Theoretically, then, there exist in the United States all the factors which go to make a class struggle. There are the capitalists and working classes, the interests of which conflict, while the working class is no longer being emasculated to the extent it was in the past by having drawn off from it its best blood and brains. Its more capable members are no longer able to rise out of it and leave the great mass leaderless and helpless. They remain to be its leaders. But the optimistic mouthpieces of the great American people, who are themselves deft theoreticians, are not to be convinced by mere theoretics. So it remains to demonstrate the existence of the class struggle by a marshalling of the facts. When nearly two millions of men, finding themselves knit together by certain interests peculiarly their own, band together in a strong organization for the aggressive pursuit of those interests, it is evident that society has within it a hostile and warring class. But when the interests which this class aggressively pursues conflict sharply and vitally with the interests of another class, class antagonism arises and a class struggle is the inevitable result. One great organization of labor alone has a membership of 1,700,000 in the United States. This is the American Federation of Labor, and outside of it are many other large organizations. All these men are banded together for the frank purpose of bettering their condition, regardless of the harm worked thereby upon all other classes. They are in open antagonism with the capitalist class, while the manifestos of their leaders state that the struggle is one which can never end until the capitalist class is exterminated. Their leaders will largely deny this last statement, but an examination of their utterances, their actions, and the situation will forestall such denial. In the first place, the conflict between labor and capital is over the division of the join product. Capital and labor apply themselves to raw material and make it into a finished product. The difference between the value of the raw material and the value of the finished product is the value they have added to it by their joint effort. This added value is, therefore, their joint product, and it is over the division of this joint product that the struggle between labor and capital takes place. Labor takes its share in wages; capital takes its share in profits. It is patent, if capital took in profits the whole joint product, that labor would perish. And it is equally patent, if labor took in wages the whole joint product, that capital would perish. Yet this last is the very thing labor aspires to do, and that it will never be content with anything less than the whole joint product is evidenced by the words of its leaders. Mr. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, has said: "The workers want more wages; more of the comforts of life; more leisure; more chance for self-improvement as men, as trade-unionists, as citizens. _These were the wants of yesterday_; _they are the wants of today_; _they will be the wants of tomorrow_, _and of tomorrow's morrow_. The struggle may assume new forms, but the issue is the immemorial one,--an effort of the producers to obtain an increasing measure of the wealth that flows from their production." Mr. Henry White, secretary of the United Garment Workers of America and a member of the Industrial Committee of the National Civic Federation, speaking of the National Civic Federation soon after its inception, said: "To fall into one another's arms, to avow friendship, to express regret at the injury which has been done, would not alter the facts of the situation. Workingmen will continue to demand more pay, and the employer will naturally oppose them. The readiness and ability of the workmen to fight will, as usual, largely determine the amount of their wages or their share in the product. . . But when it comes to dividing the proceeds, there is the rub. We can also agree that the larger the product through the employment of labor-saving methods the better, as there will be more to be divided, but again the question of the division. . . . A Conciliation Committee, having the confidence of the community, and composed of men possessing practical knowledge of industrial affairs, can therefore aid in mitigating this antagonism, in preventing avoidable conflicts, in bringing about a _truce_; I use the word 'truce' because understandings can only be temporary." Here is a man who might have owned cattle on a thousand hills, been a lumber baron or a railroad king, had he been born a few years sooner. As it is, he remains in his class, is secretary of the United Garment Workers of America, and is so thoroughly saturated with the class struggle that he speaks of the dispute between capital and labor in terms of war,--workmen _fight_ with employers; it is possible to avoid some _conflicts_; in certain cases _truces_ may be, for the time being, effected. Man being man and a great deal short of the angels, the quarrel over the division of the joint product is irreconcilable. For the last twenty years in the United States, there has been an average of over a thousand strikes per year; and year by year these strikes increase in magnitude, and the front of the labor army grows more imposing. And it is a class struggle, pure and simple. Labor as a class is fighting with capital as a class. Workingmen will continue to demand more pay, and employers will continue to oppose them. This is the key-note to _laissez faire_,--everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost. It is upon this that the rampant individualist bases his individualism. It is the let-alone policy, the struggle for existence, which strengthens the strong, destroys the weak, and makes a finer and more capable breed of men. But the individual has passed away and the group has come, for better or worse, and the struggle has become, not a struggle between individuals, but a struggle between groups. So the query rises: Has the individualist never speculated upon the labor group becoming strong enough to destroy the capitalist group, and take to itself and run for itself the machinery of industry? And, further, has the individualist never speculated upon this being still a triumphant expression of individualism,--of group individualism,--if the confusion of terms may be permitted? But the facts of the class struggle are deeper and more significant than have so far been presented. A million or so of workmen may organize for the pursuit of interests which engender class antagonism and strife, and at the same time be unconscious of what is engendered. But when a million or so of workmen show unmistakable signs of being conscious of their class,--of being, in short, class conscious,--then the situation grows serious. The uncompromising and terrible hatred of the trade-unionist for a scab is the hatred of a class for a traitor to that class,--while the hatred of a trade-unionist for the militia is the hatred of a class for a weapon wielded by the class with which it is fighting. No workman can be true to his class and at the same time be a member of the militia: this is the dictum of the labor leaders. In the town of the writer, the good citizens, when they get up a Fourth of July parade and invite the labor unions to participate, are informed by the unions that they will not march in the parade if the militia marches. Article 8 of the constitution of the Painters' and Decorators' Union of Schenectady provides that a member must not be a "militiaman, special police officer, or deputy marshal in the employ of corporations or individuals during strikes, lockouts, or other labor difficulties, and any member occupying any of the above positions will be debarred from membership." Mr. William Potter was a member of this union and a member of the National Guard. As a result, because he obeyed the order of the Governor when his company was ordered out to suppress rioting, he was expelled from his union. Also his union demanded his employers, Shafer & Barry, to discharge him from their service. This they complied with, rather than face the threatened strike. Mr. Robert L. Walker, first lieutenant of the Light Guards, a New Haven militia company, recently resigned. His reason was, that he was a member of the Car Builders' Union, and that the two organizations were antagonistic to each other. During a New Orleans street-car strike not long ago, a whole company of militia, called out to protect non-union men, resigned in a body. Mr. John Mulholland, president of the International Association of Allied Metal Mechanics, has stated that he does not want the members to join the militia. The Local Trades' Assembly of Syracuse, New York, has passed a resolution, by unanimous vote, requiring union men who are members of the National Guard to resign, under pain of expulsion, from the unions. The Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers' Association has incorporated in its constitution an amendment excluding from membership in its organization "any person a member of the regular army, or of the State militia or naval reserve." The Illinois State Federation of Labor, at a recent convention, passed without a dissenting vote a resolution declaring that membership in military organizations is a violation of labor union obligations, and requesting all union men to withdraw from the militia. The president of the Federation, Mr. Albert Young, declared that the militia was a menace not only to unions, but to all workers throughout the country. These instances may be multiplied a thousand fold. The union workmen are becoming conscious of their class, and of the struggle their class is waging with the capitalist class. To be a member of the militia is to be a traitor to the union, for the militia is a weapon wielded by the employers to crush the workers in the struggle between the warring groups. Another interesting, and even more pregnant, phase of the class struggle is the political aspect of it as displayed by the socialists. Five men, standing together, may perform prodigies; 500 men, marching as marched the historic Five Hundred of Marseilles, may sack a palace and destroy a king; while 500,000 men, passionately preaching the propaganda of a class struggle, waging a class struggle along political lines, and backed by the moral and intellectual support of 10,000,000 more men of like convictions throughout the world, may come pretty close to realizing a class struggle in these United States of ours. In 1900 these men cast 150,000 votes; two years later, in 1902, they cast 300,000 votes; and in 1904 they cast 450,000. They have behind them a most imposing philosophic and scientific literature; they own illustrated magazines and reviews, high in quality, dignity, and restraint; they possess countless daily and weekly papers which circulate throughout the land, and single papers which have subscribers by the hundreds of thousands; and they literally swamp the working classes in a vast sea of tracts and pamphlets. No political party in the United States, no church organization nor mission effort, has as indefatigable workers as has the socialist party. They multiply themselves, know of no effort nor sacrifice too great to make for the Cause; and "Cause," with them, is spelled out in capitals. They work for it with a religious zeal, and would die for it with a willingness similar to that of the Christian martyrs. These men are preaching an uncompromising and deadly class struggle. In fact, they are organized upon the basis of a class struggle. "The history of society," they say, "is a history of class struggles. Patrician struggled with plebeian in early Rome; the king and the burghers, with the nobles in the Middle Ages; later on, the king and the nobles with the bourgeoisie; and today the struggle is on between the triumphant bourgeoisie and the rising proletariat. By 'proletariat' is meant the class of people without capital which sells its labor for a living. "That the proletariat shall conquer," (mark the note of fatalism), "is as certain as the rising sun. Just as the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century wanted democracy applied to politics, so the proletariat of the twentieth century wants democracy applied to industry. As the bourgeoisie complained against the government being run by and for the nobles, so the proletariat complains against the government and industry being run by and for the bourgeoisie; and so, following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the proletariat will possess itself of the government, apply democracy to industry, abolish wages, which are merely legalized robbery, and run the business of the country in its own interest." "Their aim," they say, "is to organize the working class, and those in sympathy with it, into a political party, with the object of conquering the powers of government and of using them for the purpose of transforming the present system of private ownership of the means of production and distribution into collective ownership by the entire people." Briefly stated, this is the battle plan of these 450,000 men who call themselves "socialists." And, in the face of the existence of such an aggressive group of men, a class struggle cannot very well be denied by the optimistic Americans who say: "A class struggle is monstrous. Sir, there is no class struggle." The class struggle is here, and the optimistic American had better gird himself for the fray and put a stop to it, rather than sit idly declaiming that what ought not to be is not, and never will be. But the socialists, fanatics and dreamers though they may well be, betray a foresight and insight, and a genius for organization, which put to shame the class with which they are openly at war. Failing of rapid success in waging a sheer political propaganda, and finding that they were alienating the most intelligent and most easily organized portion of the voters, the socialists lessoned from the experience and turned their energies upon the trade-union movement. To win the trade unions was well-nigh to win the war, and recent events show that they have done far more winning in this direction than have the capitalists. Instead of antagonizing the unions, which had been their previous policy, the socialists proceeded to conciliate the unions. "Let every good socialist join the union of his trade," the edict went forth. "Bore from within and capture the trade-union movement." And this policy, only several years old, has reaped fruits far beyond their fondest expectations. Today the great labor unions are honeycombed with socialists, "boring from within," as they picturesquely term their undermining labor. At work and at play, at business meeting and council, their insidious propaganda goes on. At the shoulder of the trade-unionist is the socialist, sympathizing with him, aiding him with head and hand, suggesting--perpetually suggesting--the necessity for political action. As the _Journal_, of Lansing, Michigan, a republican paper, has remarked: "The socialists in the labor unions are tireless workers. They are sincere, energetic, and self-sacrificing. . . . They stick to the union and work all the while, thus making a showing which, reckoned by ordinary standards, is out of all proportion to their numbers. Their cause is growing among union laborers, and their long fight, intended to turn the Federation into a political organization, is likely to win." They miss no opportunity of driving home the necessity for political action, the necessity for capturing the political machinery of society whereby they may master society. As an instance of this is the avidity with which the American socialists seized upon the famous Taft-Vale Decision in England, which was to the effect that an unincorporated union could be sued and its treasury rifled by process of law. Throughout the United States, the socialists pointed the moral in similar fashion to the way it was pointed by the Social-Democratic Herald, which advised the trade-unionists, in view of the decision, to stop trying to fight capital with money, which they lacked, and to begin fighting with the ballot, which was their strongest weapon. Night and day, tireless and unrelenting, they labor at their self-imposed task of undermining society. Mr. M. G. Cunniff, who lately made an intimate study of trade-unionism, says: "All through the unions socialism filters. Almost every other man is a socialist, preaching that unionism is but a makeshift." "Malthus be damned," they told him, "for the good time was coming when every man should be able to rear his family in comfort." In one union, with two thousand members, Mr. Cunniff found every man a socialist, and from his experiences Mr. Cunniff was forced to confess, "I lived in a world that showed our industrial life a-tremble from beneath with a never-ceasing ferment." The socialists have already captured the Western Federation of Miners, the Western Hotel and Restaurant Employees' Union, and the Patternmakers' National Association. The Western Federation of Miners, at a recent convention, declared: "The strike has failed to secure to the working classes their liberty; we therefore call upon the workers to strike as one man for their liberties at the ballot box. . . . We put ourselves on record as committed to the programme of independent political action. . . . We indorse the platform of the socialist party, and accept it as the declaration of principles of our organization. We call upon our members as individuals to commence immediately the organization of the socialist movement in their respective towns and states, and to cooperate in every way for the furtherance of the principles of socialism and of the socialist party. In states where the socialist party has not perfected its organization, we advise that every assistance be given by our members to that end. . . . We therefore call for organizers, capable and well-versed in the whole programme of the labor movement, to be sent into each state to preach the necessity of organization on the political as well as on the economic field." The capitalist class has a glimmering consciousness of the class struggle which is shaping itself in the midst of society; but the capitalists, as a class, seem to lack the ability for organizing, for coming together, such as is possessed by the working class. No American capitalist ever aids an English capitalist in the common fight, while workmen have formed international unions, the socialists a world-wide international organization, and on all sides space and race are bridged in the effort to achieve solidarity. Resolutions of sympathy, and, fully as important, donations of money, pass back and forth across the sea to wherever labor is fighting its pitched battles. For divers reasons, the capitalist class lacks this cohesion or solidarity, chief among which is the optimism bred of past success. And, again, the capitalist class is divided; it has within itself a class struggle of no mean proportions, which tends to irritate and harass it and to confuse the situation. The small capitalist and the large capitalist are grappled with each other, struggling over what Achille Loria calls the "bi-partition of the revenues." Such a struggle, though not precisely analogous, was waged between the landlords and manufacturers of England when the one brought about the passage of the Factory Acts and the other the abolition of the Corn Laws. Here and there, however, certain members of the capitalist class see clearly the cleavage in society along which the struggle is beginning to show itself, while the press and magazines are beginning to raise an occasional and troubled voice. Two leagues of class-conscious capitalists have been formed for the purpose of carrying on their side of the struggle. Like the socialists, they do not mince matters, but state boldly and plainly that they are fighting to subjugate the opposing class. It is the barons against the commons. One of these leagues, the National Association of Manufacturers, is stopping short of nothing in what it conceives to be a life-and-death struggle. Mr. D. M. Parry, who is the president of the league, as well as president of the National Metal Trades' Association, is leaving no stone unturned in what he feels to be a desperate effort to organize his class. He has issued the call to arms in terms everything but ambiguous: "_There is still time in the United States to head off the socialistic programme_, _which_, _unrestrained_, _is sure to wreck our country_." As he says, the work is for "federating employers in order that we may meet with a united front all issues that affect us. We must come to this sooner or later. . . . The work immediately before the National Association of Manufacturers is, first, _keep the vicious eight-hour Bill off the books_; second, to _destroy the Anti-injunction Bill_, which wrests your business from you and places it in the hands of your employees; third, to secure the _passage of the Department of Commerce and Industry Bill_; the latter would go through with a rush were it not for the hectoring opposition of Organized Labor." By this department, he further says, "business interests would have direct and sympathetic representation at Washington." In a later letter, issued broadcast to the capitalists outside the League, President Parry points out the success which is already beginning to attend the efforts of the League at Washington. "We have contributed more than any other influence to the quick passage of the new Department of Commerce Bill. It is said that the activities of this office are numerous and satisfactory; but of that I must not say too much--or anything. . . . At Washington the Association is not represented too much, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes it is known in a most powerful way that it is represented vigorously and unitedly. Sometimes it is not known that it is represented at all." The second class-conscious capitalist organization is called the National Economic League. It likewise manifests the frankness of men who do not dilly-dally with terms, but who say what they mean, and who mean to settle down to a long, hard fight. Their letter of invitation to prospective members opens boldly. "We beg to inform you that the National Economic League will render its services in an impartial educational movement _to oppose socialism and class hatred_." Among its class-conscious members, men who recognize that the opening guns of the class struggle have been fired, may be instanced the following names: Hon. Lyman J. Gage, Ex-Secretary U. S. Treasury; Hon. Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Ex-Minister to France; Rev. Henry C. Potter, Bishop New York Diocese; Hon. John D. Long, Ex-Secretary U. S. Navy; Hon. Levi P. Morton, Ex-Vice President United States; Henry Clews; John F. Dryden, President Prudential Life Insurance Co.; John A. McCall, President New York Life Insurance Co.; J. L. Greatsinger, President Brooklyn Rapid Transit Co.; the shipbuilding firm of William Cramp & Sons, the Southern Railway system, and the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway Company. Instances of the troubled editorial voice have not been rare during the last several years. There were many cries from the press during the last days of the anthracite coal strike that the mine owners, by their stubbornness, were sowing the regrettable seeds of socialism. The World's Work for December, 1902, said: "The next significant fact is the recommendation by the Illinois State Federation of Labor that all members of labor unions who are also members of the state militia shall resign from the militia. This proposition has been favorably regarded by some other labor organizations. It has done more than any other single recent declaration or action to cause a public distrust of such unions as favor it. _It hints of a class separation that in turn hints of anarchy_." The _Outlook_, February 14, 1903, in reference to the rioting at Waterbury, remarks, "That all this disorder should have occurred in a city of the character and intelligence of Waterbury indicates that the industrial war spirit is by no means confined to the immigrant or ignorant working classes." That President Roosevelt has smelt the smoke from the firing line of the class struggle is evidenced by his words, "Above all we need to remember that any kind of _class animosity in the political world_ is, if possible, even more destructive to national welfare than sectional, race, or religious animosity." The chief thing to be noted here is President Roosevelt's tacit recognition of class animosity in the industrial world, and his fear, which language cannot portray stronger, that this class animosity may spread to the political world. Yet this is the very policy which the socialists have announced in their declaration of war against present-day society--to capture the political machinery of society and by that machinery destroy present-day society. The New York Independent for February 12, 1903, recognized without qualification the class struggle. "It is impossible fairly to pass upon the methods of labor unions, or to devise plans for remedying their abuses, until it is recognized, to begin with, that unions are based upon class antagonism and that their policies are dictated by the necessities of social warfare. A strike is a rebellion against the owners of property. The rights of property are protected by government. And a strike, under certain provocation, may extend as far as did the general strike in Belgium a few years since, when practically the entire wage-earning population stopped work in order to force political concessions from the property-owning classes. This is an extreme case, but it brings out vividly the real nature of labor organization as a species of warfare whose object is the coercion of one class by another class." It has been shown, theoretically and actually, that there is a class struggle in the United States. The quarrel over the division of the joint product is irreconcilable. The working class is no longer losing its strongest and most capable members. These men, denied room for their ambition in the capitalist ranks, remain to be the leaders of the workers, to spur them to discontent, to make them conscious of their class, to lead them to revolt. This revolt, appearing spontaneously all over the industrial field in the form of demands for an increased share of the joint product, is being carefully and shrewdly shaped for a political assault upon society. The leaders, with the carelessness of fatalists, do not hesitate for an instant to publish their intentions to the world. They intend to direct the labor revolt to the capture of the political machinery of society. With the political machinery once in their hands, which will also give them the control of the police, the army, the navy, and the courts, they will confiscate, with or without remuneration, all the possessions of the capitalist class which are used in the production and distribution of the necessaries and luxuries of life. By this, they mean to apply the law of eminent domain to the land, and to extend the law of eminent domain till it embraces the mines, the factories, the railroads, and the ocean carriers. In short, they intend to destroy present-day society, which they contend is run in the interest of another class, and from the materials to construct a new society, which will be run in their interest. On the other hand, the capitalist class is beginning to grow conscious of itself and of the struggle which is being waged. It is already forming offensive and defensive leagues, while some of the most prominent figures in the nation are preparing to lead it in the attack upon socialism. The question to be solved is not one of Malthusianism, "projected efficiency," nor ethics. It is a question of might. Whichever class is to win, will win by virtue of superior strength; for the workers are beginning to say, as they said to Mr. Cunniff, "Malthus be damned." In their own minds they find no sanction for continuing the individual struggle for the survival of the fittest. As Mr. Gompers has said, they want more, and more, and more. The ethical import of Mr. Kidd's plan of the present generation putting up with less in order that race efficiency may be projected into a remote future, has no bearing upon their actions. They refuse to be the "glad perishers" so glowingly described by Nietzsche. It remains to be seen how promptly the capitalist class will respond to the call to arms. Upon its promptness rests its existence, for if it sits idly by, soothfully proclaiming that what ought not to be cannot be, it will find the roof beams crashing about its head. The capitalist class is in the numerical minority, and bids fair to be outvoted if it does not put a stop to the vast propaganda being waged by its enemy. It is no longer a question of whether or not there is a class struggle. The question now is, what will be the outcome of the class struggle? THE TRAMP Mr. Francis O'Neil, General Superintendent of Police, Chicago, speaking of the tramp, says: "Despite the most stringent police regulations, a great city will have a certain number of homeless vagrants to shelter through the winter." "Despite,"--mark the word, a confession of organized helplessness as against unorganized necessity. If police regulations are stringent and yet fail, then that which makes them fail, namely, the tramp, must have still more stringent reasons for succeeding. This being so, it should be of interest to inquire into these reasons, to attempt to discover why the nameless and homeless vagrant sets at naught the right arm of the corporate power of our great cities, why all that is weak and worthless is stronger than all that is strong and of value. Mr. O'Neil is a man of wide experience on the subject of tramps. He may be called a specialist. As he says of himself: "As an old-time desk sergeant and police captain, I have had almost unlimited opportunity to study and analyze this class of floating population, which seeks the city in winter and scatters abroad through the country in the spring." He then continues: "This experience reiterated the lesson that the vast majority of these wanderers are of the class with whom a life of vagrancy is a chosen means of living without work." Not only is it to be inferred from this that there is a large class in society which lives without work, for Mr. O'Neil's testimony further shows that this class is forced to live without work. He says: "I have been astonished at the multitude of those who have unfortunately engaged in occupations which practically force them to become loafers for at least a third of the year. And it is from this class that the tramps are largely recruited. I recall a certain winter when it seemed to me that a large portion of the inhabitants of Chicago belonged to this army of unfortunates. I was stationed at a police station not far from where an ice harvest was ready for the cutters. The ice company advertised for helpers, and the very night this call appeared in the newspapers our station was packed with homeless men, who asked shelter in order to be at hand for the morning's work. Every foot of floor space was given over to these lodgers and scores were still unaccommodated." And again: "And it must be confessed that the man who is willing to do honest labor for food and shelter is a rare specimen in this vast army of shabby and tattered wanderers who seek the warmth of the city with the coming of the first snow." Taking into consideration the crowd of honest laborers that swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house on the way to the ice-cutting, it is patent, if all tramps were looking for honest labor instead of a small minority, that the honest laborers would have a far harder task finding something honest to do for food and shelter. If the opinion of the honest laborers who swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house were asked, one could rest confident that each and every man would express a preference for fewer honest laborers on the morrow when he asked the ice foreman for a job. And, finally, Mr. O'Neil says: "The humane and generous treatment which this city has accorded the great army of homeless unfortunates has made it the victim of wholesale imposition, and this well-intended policy of kindness has resulted in making Chicago the winter Mecca of a vast and undesirable floating population." That is to say, because of her kindness, Chicago had more than her fair share of tramps; because she was humane and generous she suffered whole-sale imposition. From this we must conclude that it does not do to be _humane_ and _generous_ to our fellow-men--when they are tramps. Mr. O'Neil is right, and that this is no sophism it is the intention of this article, among other things, to show. In a general way we may draw the following inferences from the remarks of Mr. O'Neil: (1) The tramp is stronger than organized society and cannot be put down; (2) The tramp is "shabby," "tattered," "homeless," "unfortunate"; (3) There is a "vast" number of tramps; (4) Very few tramps are willing to do honest work; (5) Those tramps who are willing to do honest work have to hunt very hard to find it; (6) The tramp is undesirable. To this last let the contention be appended that the tramp is only _personally_ undesirable; that he is _negatively_ desirable; that the function he performs in society is a negative function; and that he is the by-product of economic necessity. It is very easy to demonstrate that there are more men than there is work for men to do. For instance, what would happen tomorrow if one hundred thousand tramps should become suddenly inspired with an overmastering desire for work? It is a fair question. "Go to work" is preached to the tramp every day of his life. The judge on the bench, the pedestrian in the street, the housewife at the kitchen door, all unite in advising him to go to work. So what would happen tomorrow if one hundred thousand tramps acted upon this advice and strenuously and indomitably sought work? Why, by the end of the week one hundred thousand workers, their places taken by the tramps, would receive their time and be "hitting the road" for a job. Ella Wheeler Wilcox unwittingly and uncomfortably demonstrated the disparity between men and work. {1} She made a casual reference, in a newspaper column she conducts, to the difficulty two business men found in obtaining good employees. The first morning mail brought her seventy-five applications for the position, and at the end of two weeks over two hundred people had applied. Still more strikingly was the same proposition recently demonstrated in San Francisco. A sympathetic strike called out a whole federation of trades' unions. Thousands of men, in many branches of trade, quit work,--draymen, sand teamsters, porters and packers, longshoremen, stevedores, warehousemen, stationary engineers, sailors, marine firemen, stewards, sea-cooks, and so forth,--an interminable list. It was a strike of large proportions. Every Pacific coast shipping city was involved, and the entire coasting service, from San Diego to Puget Sound, was virtually tied up. The time was considered auspicious. The Philippines and Alaska had drained the Pacific coast of surplus labor. It was summer-time, when the agricultural demand for laborers was at its height, and when the cities were bare of their floating populations. And yet there remained a body of surplus labor sufficient to take the places of the strikers. No matter what occupation, sea-cook or stationary engineer, sand teamster or warehouseman, in every case there was an idle worker ready to do the work. And not only ready but anxious. They fought for a chance to work. Men were killed, hundreds of heads were broken, the hospitals were filled with injured men, and thousands of assaults were committed. And still surplus laborers, "scabs," came forward to replace the strikers. The question arises: _Whence came this second army of workers to replace the first army_? One thing is certain: the trades' unions did not scab on one another. Another thing is certain: no industry on the Pacific slope was crippled in the slightest degree by its workers being drawn away to fill the places of the strikers. A third thing is certain: the agricultural workers did not flock to the cities to replace the strikers. In this last instance it is worth while to note that the agricultural laborers wailed to High Heaven when a few of the strikers went into the country to compete with them in unskilled employments. So there is no accounting for this second army of workers. It simply was. It was there all this time, a surplus labor army in the year of our Lord 1901, a year adjudged most prosperous in the annals of the United States. {2} The existence of the surplus labor army being established, there remains to be established the economic necessity for the surplus labor army. The simplest and most obvious need is that brought about by the fluctuation of production. If, when production is at low ebb, all men are at work, it necessarily follows that when production increases there will be no men to do the increased work. This may seem almost childish, and, if not childish, at least easily remedied. At low ebb let the men work shorter time; at high flood let them work overtime. The main objection to this is, that it is not done, and that we are considering what is, not what might be or should be. Then there are great irregular and periodical demands for labor which must be met. Under the first head come all the big building and engineering enterprises. When a canal is to be dug or a railroad put through, requiring thousands of laborers, it would be hurtful to withdraw these laborers from the constant industries. And whether it is a canal to be dug or a cellar, whether five thousand men are required or five, it is well, in society as at present organized, that they be taken from the surplus labor army. The surplus labor army is the reserve fund of social energy, and this is one of the reasons for its existence. Under the second head, periodical demands, come the harvests. Throughout the year, huge labor tides sweep back and forth across the United States. That which is sown and tended by few men, comes to sudden ripeness and must be gathered by many men; and it is inevitable that these many men form floating populations. In the late spring the berries must be picked, in the summer the grain garnered, in the fall, the hops gathered, in the winter the ice harvested. In California a man may pick berries in Siskiyou, peaches in Santa Clara, grapes in the San Joaquin, and oranges in Los Angeles, going from job to job as the season advances, and travelling a thousand miles ere the season is done. But the great demand for agricultural labor is in the summer. In the winter, work is slack, and these floating populations eddy into the cities to eke out a precarious existence and harrow the souls of the police officers until the return of warm weather and work. If there were constant work at good wages for every man, who would harvest the crops? But the last and most significant need for the surplus labor army remains to be stated. This surplus labor acts as a check upon all employed labor. It is the lash by which the masters hold the workers to their tasks, or drive them back to their tasks when they have revolted. It is the goad which forces the workers into the compulsory "free contracts" against which they now and again rebel. There is only one reason under the sun that strikes fail, and that is because there are always plenty of men to take the strikers' places. The strength of the union today, other things remaining equal, is proportionate to the skill of the trade, or, in other words, proportionate to the pressure the surplus labor army can put upon it. If a thousand ditch-diggers strike, it is easy to replace them, wherefore the ditch-diggers have little or no organized strength. But a thousand highly skilled machinists are somewhat harder to replace, and in consequence the machinist unions are strong. The ditch-diggers are wholly at the mercy of the surplus labor army, the machinists only partly. To be invincible, a union must be a monopoly. It must control every man in its particular trade, and regulate apprentices so that the supply of skilled workmen may remain constant; this is the dream of the "Labor Trust" on the part of the captains of labor. Once, in England, after the Great Plague, labor awoke to find there was more work for men than there were men to work. Instead of workers competing for favors from employers, employers were competing for favors from the workers. Wages went up and up, and continued to go up, until the workers demanded the full product of their toil. Now it is clear that, when labor receives its full product capital must perish. And so the pygmy capitalists of that post-Plague day found their existence threatened by this untoward condition of affairs. To save themselves, they set a maximum wage, restrained the workers from moving about from place to place, smashed incipient organization, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal penalties punished those who disobeyed. After that, things went on as before. The point of this, of course, is to demonstrate the need of the surplus labor army. Without such an army, our present capitalist society would be powerless. Labor would organize as it never organized before, and the last least worker would be gathered into the unions. The full product of toil would be demanded, and capitalist society would crumble away. Nor could capitalist society save itself as did the post-Plague capitalist society. The time is past when a handful of masters, by imprisonment and barbarous punishment, can drive the legions of the workers to their tasks. Without a surplus labor army, the courts, police, and military are impotent. In such matters the function of the courts, police, and military is to preserve order, and to fill the places of strikers with surplus labor. If there be no surplus labor to instate, there is no function to perform; for disorder arises only during the process of instatement, when the striking labor army and the surplus labor army clash together. That is to say, that which maintains the integrity of the present industrial society more potently than the courts, police, and military is the surplus labor army. * * * * * It has been shown that there are more men than there is work for men, and that the surplus labor army is an economic necessity. To show how the tramp is a by-product of this economic necessity, it is necessary to inquire into the composition of the surplus labor army. What men form it? Why are they there? What do they do? In the first place, since the workers must compete for employment, it inevitably follows that it is the fit and efficient who find employment. The skilled worker holds his place by virtue of his skill and efficiency. Were he less skilled, or were he unreliable or erratic, he would be swiftly replaced by a stronger competitor. The skilled and steady employments are not cumbered with clowns and idiots. A man finds his place according to his ability and the needs of the system, and those without ability, or incapable of satisfying the needs of the system, have no place. Thus, the poor telegrapher may develop into an excellent wood-chopper. But if the poor telegrapher cherishes the delusion that he is a good telegrapher, and at the same time disdains all other employments, he will have no employment at all, or he will be so poor at all other employments that he will work only now and again in lieu of better men. He will be among the first let off when times are dull, and among the last taken on when times are good. Or, to the point, he will be a member of the surplus labor army. So the conclusion is reached that the less fit and less efficient, or the unfit and inefficient, compose the surplus labor army. Here are to be found the men who have tried and failed, the men who cannot hold jobs,--the plumber apprentice who could not become a journeyman, and the plumber journeyman too clumsy and dull to retain employment; switchmen who wreck trains; clerks who cannot balance books; blacksmiths who lame horses; lawyers who cannot plead; in short, the failures of every trade and profession, and failures, many of them, in divers trades and professions. Failure is writ large, and in their wretchedness they bear the stamp of social disapprobation. Common work, any kind of work, wherever or however they can obtain it, is their portion. But these hereditary inefficients do not alone compose the surplus labor army. There are the skilled but unsteady and unreliable men; and the old men, once skilled, but, with dwindling powers, no longer skilled. {3} And there are good men, too, splendidly skilled and efficient, but thrust out of the employment of dying or disaster-smitten industries. In this connection it is not out of place to note the misfortune of the workers in the British iron trades, who are suffering because of American inroads. And, last of all, are the unskilled laborers, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the ditch-diggers, the men of pick and shovel, the helpers, lumpers, roustabouts. If trade is slack on a seacoast of two thousand miles, or the harvests are light in a great interior valley, myriads of these laborers lie idle, or make life miserable for their fellows in kindred unskilled employments. A constant filtration goes on in the working world, and good material is continually drawn from the surplus labor army. Strikes and industrial dislocations shake up the workers, bring good men to the surface and sink men as good or not so good. The hope of the skilled striker is in that the scabs are less skilled, or less capable of becoming skilled; yet each strike attests to the efficiency that lurks beneath. After the Pullman strike, a few thousand railroad men were chagrined to find the work they had flung down taken up by men as good as themselves. But one thing must be considered here. Under the present system, if the weakest and least fit were as strong and fit as the best, and the best were correspondingly stronger and fitter, the same condition would obtain. There would be the same army of employed labor, the same army of surplus labor. The whole thing is relative. There is no absolute standard of efficiency. * * * * * Comes now the tramp. And all conclusions may be anticipated by saying at once that he is a tramp because some one has to be a tramp. If he left the "road" and became a _very_ efficient common laborer, some _ordinarily efficient_ common laborer would have to take to the "road." The nooks and crannies are crowded by the surplus laborers; and when the first snow flies, and the tramps are driven into the cities, things become overcrowded and stringent police regulations are necessary. The tramp is one of two kinds of men: he is either a discouraged worker or a discouraged criminal. Now a discouraged criminal, on investigation, proves to be a discouraged worker, or the descendant of discouraged workers; so that, in the last analysis, the tramp is a discouraged worker. Since there is not work for all, discouragement for some is unavoidable. How, then, does this process of discouragement operate? The lower the employment in the industrial scale, the harder the conditions. The finer, the more delicate, the more skilled the trade, the higher is it lifted above the struggle. There is less pressure, less sordidness, less savagery. There are fewer glass-blowers proportionate to the needs of the glass-blowing industry than there are ditch-diggers proportionate to the needs of the ditch-digging industry. And not only this, for it requires a glass-blower to take the place of a striking glass-blower, while any kind of a striker or out-of-work can take the place of a ditch-digger. So the skilled trades are more independent, have more individuality and latitude. They may confer with their masters, make demands, assert themselves. The unskilled laborers, on the other hand, have no voice in their affairs. The settlement of terms is none of their business. "Free contract" is all that remains to them. They may take what is offered, or leave it. There are plenty more of their kind. They do not count. They are members of the surplus labor army, and must be content with a hand-to-mouth existence. The reward is likewise proportioned. The strong, fit worker in a skilled trade, where there is little labor pressure, is well compensated. He is a king compared with his less fortunate brothers in the unskilled occupations where the labor pressure is great. The mediocre worker not only is forced to be idle a large portion of the time, but when employed is forced to accept a pittance. A dollar a day on some days and nothing on other days will hardly support a man and wife and send children to school. And not only do the masters bear heavily upon him, and his own kind struggle for the morsel at his mouth, but all skilled and organized labor adds to his woe. Union men do not scab on one another, but in strikes, or when work is slack, it is considered "fair" for them to descend and take away the work of the common laborers. And take it away they do; for, as a matter of fact, a well-fed, ambitious machinist or a core-maker will transiently shovel coal better than an ill-fed, spiritless laborer. Thus there is no encouragement for the unfit, inefficient, and mediocre. Their very inefficiency and mediocrity make them helpless as cattle and add to their misery. And the whole tendency for such is downward, until, at the bottom of the social pit, they are wretched, inarticulate beasts, living like beasts, breeding like beasts, dying like beasts. And how do they fare, these creatures born mediocre, whose heritage is neither brains nor brawn nor endurance? They are sweated in the slums in an atmosphere of discouragement and despair. There is no strength in weakness, no encouragement in foul air, vile food, and dank dens. They are there because they are so made that they are not fit to be higher up; but filth and obscenity do not strengthen the neck, nor does chronic emptiness of belly stiffen the back. For the mediocre there is no hope. Mediocrity is a sin. Poverty is the penalty of failure,--poverty, from whose loins spring the criminal and the tramp, both failures, both discouraged workers. Poverty is the inferno where ignorance festers and vice corrodes, and where the physical, mental, and moral parts of nature are aborted and denied. That the charge of rashness in splashing the picture be not incurred, let the following authoritative evidence be considered: first, the work and wages of mediocrity and inefficiency, and, second, the habitat: The New York Sun of February 28, 1901, describes the opening of a factory in New York City by the American Tobacco Company. Cheroots were to be made in this factory in competition with other factories which refused to be absorbed by the trust. The trust advertised for girls. The crowd of men and boys who wanted work was so great in front of the building that the police were forced with their clubs to clear them away. The wage paid the girls was $2.50 per week, sixty cents of which went for car fare. {4} Miss Nellie Mason Auten, a graduate student of the department of sociology at the University of Chicago, recently made a thorough investigation of the garment trades of Chicago. Her figures were published in the American Journal of Sociology, and commented upon by the Literary Digest. She found women working ten hours a day, six days a week, for forty cents per week (a rate of two-thirds of a cent an hour). Many women earned less than a dollar a week, and none of them worked every week. The following table will best summarize Miss Auten's investigations among a portion of the garment-workers: INDUSTRY AVERAGE AVERAGE NUMBER AVERAGE YEARLY INDIVIDUAL OF WEEKS EARNINGS WEEKLY WAGES EMPLOYED Dressmakers $.90 42. $37.00 Pants-Finishers 1.31 27.58 42.41 Housewives and 1.58 30.21 47.49 Pants-Finishers Seamstresses 2.03 32.78 64.10 Pants-makers 2.13 30.77 75.61 Miscellaneous 2.77 29. 81.80 Tailors 6.22 31.96 211.92 General 2.48 31.18 76.74 Averages Walter A. Wyckoff, who is as great an authority upon the worker as Josiah Flynt is on the tramp, furnishes the following Chicago experience: "Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity. One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I overheard, early one morning at a factory gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew, who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to support. He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater's den, {5} barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work. "The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the man, he told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and his ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly gone, and the blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and a contemptuous laugh; and I watched the fellow as he turned down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no mortal tongue can speak." Concerning habitat, Mr. Jacob Riis has stated that in New York City, in the block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge streets, the size of which is 200 by 300, there is a warren of 2244 human beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, and Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand human creatures,--quite a comfortable New England village to crowd into one city block. The Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the block bounded by Canal, Hester, Eldridge, and Forsyth streets, says: "In a room 12 by 8 and 5.5 feet high, it was found that nine persons slept and prepared their food. . . . In another room, located in a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of seventeen, two women and four boys,--nine, ten, eleven, and fifteen years old,--fourteen persons in all." Here humanity rots. Its victims, with grim humor, call it "tenant-house rot." Or, as a legislative report puts it: "Here infantile life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary. Here youth is ugly with loathsome disease, and the deformities which follow physical degeneration." These are the men and women who are what they are because they were not better born, or because they happened to be unluckily born in time and space. Gauged by the needs of the system, they are weak and worthless. The hospital and the pauper's grave await them, and they offer no encouragement to the mediocre worker who has failed higher up in the industrial structure. Such a worker, conscious that he has failed, conscious from the hard fact that he cannot obtain work in the higher employments, finds several courses open to him. He may come down and be a beast in the social pit, for instance; but if he be of a certain caliber, the effect of the social pit will be to discourage him from work. In his blood a rebellion will quicken, and he will elect to become either a felon or a tramp. If he have fought the hard fight he is not unacquainted with the lure of the "road." When out of work and still undiscouraged, he has been forced to "hit the road" between large cities in his quest for a job. He has loafed, seen the country and green things, laughed in joy, lain on his back and listened to the birds singing overhead, unannoyed by factory whistles and bosses' harsh commands; and, most significant of all, _he has lived_! That is the point! He has not starved to death. Not only has he been care-free and happy, but he has lived! And from the knowledge that he has idled and is still alive, he achieves a new outlook on life; and the more he experiences the unenviable lot of the poor worker, the more the blandishments of the "road" take hold of him. And finally he flings his challenge in the face of society, imposes a valorous boycott on all work, and joins the far-wanderers of Hoboland, the gypsy folk of this latter day. But the tramp does not usually come from the slums. His place of birth is ordinarily a bit above, and sometimes a very great bit above. A confessed failure, he yet refuses to accept the punishment, and swerves aside from the slum to vagabondage. The average beast in the social pit is either too much of a beast, or too much of a slave to the bourgeois ethics and ideals of his masters, to manifest this flicker of rebellion. But the social pit, out of its discouragement and viciousness, breeds criminals, men who prefer being beasts of prey to being beasts of work. And the mediocre criminal, in turn, the unfit and inefficient criminal, is discouraged by the strong arm of the law and goes over to trampdom. These men, the discouraged worker and the discouraged criminal, voluntarily withdraw themselves from the struggle for work. Industry does not need them. There are no factories shut down through lack of labor, no projected railroads unbuilt for want of pick-and-shovel men. Women are still glad to toil for a dollar a week, and men and boys to clamor and fight for work at the factory gates. No one misses these discouraged men, and in going away they have made it somewhat easier for those that remain. * * * * * So the case stands thus: There being more men than there is work for men to do, a surplus labor army inevitably results. The surplus labor army is an economic necessity; without it, present society would fall to pieces. Into the surplus labor army are herded the mediocre, the inefficient, the unfit, and those incapable of satisfying the industrial needs of the system. The struggle for work between the members of the surplus labor army is sordid and savage, and at the bottom of the social pit the struggle is vicious and beastly. This struggle tends to discouragement, and the victims of this discouragement are the criminal and the tramp. The tramp is not an economic necessity such as the surplus labor army, but he is the by-product of an economic necessity. The "road" is one of the safety-valves through which the waste of the social organism is given off. And _being given off_ constitutes the negative function of the tramp. Society, as at present organized, makes much waste of human life. This waste must be eliminated. Chloroform or electrocution would be a simple, merciful solution of this problem of elimination; but the ruling ethics, while permitting the human waste, will not permit a humane elimination of that waste. This paradox demonstrates the irreconcilability of theoretical ethics and industrial need. And so the tramp becomes self-eliminating. And not only self! Since he is manifestly unfit for things as they are, and since kind is prone to beget kind, it is necessary that his kind cease with him, that his progeny shall not be, that he play the eunuch's part in this twentieth century after Christ. And he plays it. He does not breed. Sterility is his portion, as it is the portion of the woman on the street. They might have been mates, but society has decreed otherwise. And, while it is not nice that these men should die, it is ordained that they must die, and we should not quarrel with them if they cumber our highways and kitchen stoops with their perambulating carcasses. This is a form of elimination we not only countenance but compel. Therefore let us be cheerful and honest about it. Let us be as stringent as we please with our police regulations, but for goodness' sake let us refrain from telling the tramp to go to work. Not only is it unkind, but it is untrue and hypocritical. We know there is no work for him. As the scapegoat to our economic and industrial sinning, or to the plan of things, if you will, we should give him credit. Let us be just. He is so made. Society made him. He did not make himself. THE SCAB In a competitive society, where men struggle with one another for food and shelter, what is more natural than that generosity, when it diminishes the food and shelter of men other than he who is generous, should be held an accursed thing? Wise old saws to the contrary, he who takes from a man's purse takes from his existence. To strike at a man's food and shelter is to strike at his life; and in a society organized on a tooth-and-nail basis, such an act, performed though it may be under the guise of generosity, is none the less menacing and terrible. It is for this reason that a laborer is so fiercely hostile to another laborer who offers to work for less pay or longer hours. To hold his place, (which is to live), he must offset this offer by another equally liberal, which is equivalent to giving away somewhat from the food and shelter he enjoys. To sell his day's work for $2, instead of $2.50, means that he, his wife, and his children will not have so good a roof over their heads, so warm clothes on their backs, so substantial food in their stomachs. Meat will be bought less frequently and it will be tougher and less nutritious, stout new shoes will go less often on the children's feet, and disease and death will be more imminent in a cheaper house and neighborhood. Thus the generous laborer, giving more of a day's work for less return, (measured in terms of food and shelter), threatens the life of his less generous brother laborer, and at the best, if he does not destroy that life, he diminishes it. Whereupon the less generous laborer looks upon him as an enemy, and, as men are inclined to do in a tooth-and-nail society, he tries to kill the man who is trying to kill him. When a striker kills with a brick the man who has taken his place, he has no sense of wrong-doing. In the deepest holds of his being, though he does not reason the impulse, he has an ethical sanction. He feels dimly that he has justification, just as the home-defending Boer felt, though more sharply, with each bullet he fired at the invading English. Behind every brick thrown by a striker is the selfish will "to live" of himself, and the slightly altruistic will "to live" of his family. The family group came into the world before the State group, and society, being still on the primitive basis of tooth and nail, the will "to live" of the State is not so compelling to the striker as is the will "to live" of his family and himself. In addition to the use of bricks, clubs, and bullets, the selfish laborer finds it necessary to express his feelings in speech. Just as the peaceful country-dweller calls the sea-rover a "pirate," and the stout burgher calls the man who breaks into his strong-box a "robber," so the selfish laborer applies the opprobrious epithet a "scab" to the laborer who takes from him food and shelter by being more generous in the disposal of his labor power. The sentimental connotation of "scab" is as terrific as that of "traitor" or "Judas," and a sentimental definition would be as deep and varied as the human heart. It is far easier to arrive at what may be called a technical definition, worded in commercial terms, as, for instance, that _a scab is one who gives more value for the same price than another_. The laborer who gives more time or strength or skill for the same wage than another, or equal time or strength or skill for a less wage, is a scab. This generousness on his part is hurtful to his fellow-laborers, for it compels them to an equal generousness which is not to their liking, and which gives them less of food and shelter. But a word may be said for the scab. Just as his act makes his rivals compulsorily generous, so do they, by fortune of birth and training, make compulsory his act of generousness. He does not scab because he wants to scab. No whim of the spirit, no burgeoning of the heart, leads him to give more of his labor power than they for a certain sum. It is because he cannot get work on the same terms as they that he is a scab. There is less work than there are men to do work. This is patent, else the scab would not loom so large on the labor-market horizon. Because they are stronger than he, or more skilled, or more energetic, it is impossible for him to take their places at the same wage. To take their places he must give more value, must work longer hours or receive a smaller wage. He does so, and he cannot help it, for his will "to live" is driving him on as well as they are being driven on by their will "to live"; and to live he must win food and shelter, which he can do only by receiving permission to work from some man who owns a bit of land or a piece of machinery. And to receive permission from this man, he must make the transaction profitable for him. Viewed in this light, the scab, who gives more labor power for a certain price than his fellows, is not so generous after all. He is no more generous with his energy than the chattel slave and the convict laborer, who, by the way, are the almost perfect scabs. They give their labor power for about the minimum possible price. But, within limits, they may loaf and malinger, and, as scabs, are exceeded by the machine, which never loafs and malingers and which is the ideally perfect scab. It is not nice to be a scab. Not only is it not in good social taste and comradeship, but, from the standpoint of food and shelter, it is bad business policy. Nobody desires to scab, to give most for least. The ambition of every individual is quite the opposite, to give least for most; and, as a result, living in a tooth-and-nail society, battle royal is waged by the ambitious individuals. But in its most salient aspect, that of the struggle over the division of the joint product, it is no longer a battle between individuals, but between groups of individuals. Capital and labor apply themselves to raw material, make something useful out of it, add to its value, and then proceed to quarrel over the division of the added value. Neither cares to give most for least. Each is intent on giving less than the other and on receiving more. Labor combines into its unions, capital into partnerships, associations, corporations, and trusts. A group-struggle is the result, in which the individuals, as individuals, play no part. The Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, for instance, serves notice on the Master Builders' Association that it demands an increase of the wage of its members from $3.50 a day to $4, and a Saturday half-holiday without pay. This means that the carpenters are trying to give less for more. Where they received $21 for six full days, they are endeavoring to get $22 for five days and a half,--that is, they will work half a day less each week and receive a dollar more. Also, they expect the Saturday half-holiday to give work to one additional man for each eleven previously employed. This last affords a splendid example of the development of the group idea. In this particular struggle the individual has no chance at all for life. The individual carpenter would be crushed like a mote by the Master Builders' Association, and like a mote the individual master builder would be crushed by the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. In the group-struggle over the division of the joint product, labor utilizes the union with its two great weapons, the strike and the boycott; while capital utilizes the trust and the association, the weapons of which are the black-list, the lockout, and the scab. The scab is by far the most formidable weapon of the three. He is the man who breaks strikes and causes all the trouble. Without him there would be no trouble, for the strikers are willing to remain out peacefully and indefinitely so long as other men are not in their places, and so long as the particular aggregation of capital with which they are fighting is eating its head off in enforced idleness. But both warring groups have reserve weapons. Were it not for the scab, these weapons would not be brought into play. But the scab takes the place of the striker, who begins at once to wield a most powerful weapon, terrorism. The will "to live" of the scab recoils from the menace of broken bones and violent death. With all due respect to the labor leaders, who are not to be blamed for volubly asseverating otherwise, terrorism is a well-defined and eminently successful policy of the labor unions. It has probably won them more strikes than all the rest of the weapons in their arsenal. This terrorism, however, must be clearly understood. It is directed solely against the scab, placing him in such fear for life and limb as to drive him out of the contest. But when terrorism gets out of hand and inoffensive non-combatants are injured, law and order threatened, and property destroyed, it becomes an edged tool that cuts both ways. This sort of terrorism is sincerely deplored by the labor leaders, for it has probably lost them as many strikes as have been lost by any other single cause. The scab is powerless under terrorism. As a rule, he is not so good nor gritty a man as the men he is displacing, and he lacks their fighting organization. He stands in dire need of stiffening and backing. His employers, the capitalists, draw their two remaining weapons, the ownership of which is debatable, but which they for the time being happen to control. These two weapons may be called the political and judicial machinery of society. When the scab crumples up and is ready to go down before the fists, bricks, and bullets of the labor group, the capitalist group puts the police and soldiers into the field, and begins a general bombardment of injunctions. Victory usually follows, for the labor group cannot withstand the combined assault of gatling guns and injunctions. But it has been noted that the ownership of the political and judicial machinery of society is debatable. In the Titanic struggle over the division of the joint product, each group reaches out for every available weapon. Nor are they blinded by the smoke of conflict. They fight their battles as coolly and collectedly as ever battles were fought on paper. The capitalist group has long since realized the immense importance of controlling the political and judicial machinery of society. Taught by gatlings and injunctions, which have smashed many an otherwise successful strike, the labor group is beginning to realize that it all depends upon who is behind and who is before the gatlings and the injunctions. And he who knows the labor movement knows that there is slowly growing up and being formulated a clear and definite policy for the capture of the political and judicial machinery. This is the terrible spectre which Mr. John Graham Brooks sees looming portentously over the twentieth century world. No man may boast a more intimate knowledge of the labor movement than he; and he reiterates again and again the dangerous likelihood of the whole labor group capturing the political machinery of society. As he says in his recent book: {6} "It is not probable that employers can destroy unionism in the United States. Adroit and desperate attempts will, however, be made, if we mean by unionism the undisciplined and aggressive fact of vigorous and determined organizations. If capital should prove too strong in this struggle, the result is easy to predict. The employers have only to convince organized labor that it cannot hold its own against the capitalist manager, and the whole energy that now goes to the union will turn to an aggressive political socialism. It will not be the harmless sympathy with increased city and state functions which trade unions already feel; it will become a turbulent political force bent upon using every weapon of taxation against the rich." This struggle not to be a scab, to avoid giving more for less and to succeed in giving less for more, is more vital than it would appear on the surface. The capitalist and labor groups are locked together in desperate battle, and neither side is swayed by moral considerations more than skin-deep. The labor group hires business agents, lawyers, and organizers, and is beginning to intimidate legislators by the strength of its solid vote; and more directly, in the near future, it will attempt to control legislation by capturing it bodily through the ballot-box. On the other hand, the capitalist group, numerically weaker, hires newspapers, universities, and legislatures, and strives to bend to its need all the forces which go to mould public opinion. The only honest morality displayed by either side is white-hot indignation at the iniquities of the other side. The striking teamster complacently takes a scab driver into an alley, and with an iron bar breaks his arms, so that he can drive no more, but cries out to high Heaven for justice when the capitalist breaks his skull by means of a club in the hands of a policeman. Nay, the members of a union will declaim in impassioned rhetoric for the God-given right of an eight-hour day, and at the time be working their own business agent seventeen hours out of the twenty-four. A capitalist such as Collis P. Huntington, and his name is Legion, after a long life spent in buying the aid of countless legislatures, will wax virtuously wrathful, and condemn in unmeasured terms "the dangerous tendency of crying out to the Government for aid" in the way of labor legislation. Without a quiver, a member of the capitalist group will run tens of thousands of pitiful child-laborers through his life-destroying cotton factories, and weep maudlin and constitutional tears over one scab hit in the back with a brick. He will drive a "compulsory" free contract with an unorganized laborer on the basis of a starvation wage, saying, "Take it or leave it," knowing that to leave it means to die of hunger, and in the next breath, when the organizer entices that laborer into a union, will storm patriotically about the inalienable right of all men to work. In short, the chief moral concern of either side is with the morals of the other side. They are not in the business for their moral welfare, but to achieve the enviable position of the non-scab who gets more than he gives. But there is more to the question than has yet been discussed. The labor scab is no more detestable to his brother laborers than is the capitalist scab to his brother capitalists. A capitalist may get most for least in dealing with his laborers, and in so far be a non-scab; but at the same time, in his dealings with his fellow-capitalists, he may give most for least and be the very worst kind of scab. The most heinous crime an employer of labor can commit is to scab on his fellow-employers of labor. Just as the individual laborers have organized into groups to protect themselves from the peril of the scab laborer, so have the employers organized into groups to protect themselves from the peril of the scab employer. The employers' federations, associations, and trusts are nothing more nor less than unions. They are organized to destroy scabbing amongst themselves and to encourage scabbing amongst others. For this reason they pool interests, determine prices, and present an unbroken and aggressive front to the labor group. As has been said before, nobody likes to play the compulsorily generous role of scab. It is a bad business proposition on the face of it. And it is patent that there would be no capitalist scabs if there were not more capital than there is work for capital to do. When there are enough factories in existence to supply, with occasional stoppages, a certain commodity, the building of new factories by a rival concern, for the production of that commodity, is plain advertisement that that capital is out of a job. The first act of this new aggregation of capital will be to cut prices, to give more for less,--in short to scab, to strike at the very existence of the less generous aggregation of capital the work of which it is trying to do. No scab capitalist strives to give more for less for any other reason than that he hopes, by undercutting a competitor and driving that competitor out of the market, to get that market and its profits for himself. His ambition is to achieve the day when he shall stand alone in the field both as buyer and seller,--when he will be the royal non-scab, buying most for least, selling least for most, and reducing all about him, the small buyers and sellers, (the consumers and the laborers), to a general condition of scabdom. This, for example, has been the history of Mr. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company. Through all the sordid villanies of scabdom he has passed, until today he is a most regal non-scab. However, to continue in this enviable position, he must be prepared at a moment's notice to go scabbing again. And he is prepared. Whenever a competitor arises, Mr. Rockefeller changes about from giving least for most and gives most for least with such a vengeance as to drive the competitor out of existence. The banded capitalists discriminate against a scab capitalist by refusing him trade advantages, and by combining against him in most relentless fashion. The banded laborers, discriminating against a scab laborer in more primitive fashion, with a club, are no more merciless than the banded capitalists. Mr. Casson tells of a New York capitalist who withdrew from the Sugar Union several years ago and became a scab. He was worth something like twenty millions of dollars. But the Sugar Union, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Railroad Union and several other unions, beat him to his knees till he cried, "Enough." So frightfully did they beat him that he was obliged to turn over to his creditors his home, his chickens, and his gold watch. In point of fact, he was as thoroughly bludgeoned by the Federation of Capitalist Unions as ever scab workman was bludgeoned by a labor union. The intent in either case is the same,--to destroy the scab's producing power. The labor scab with concussion of the brain is put out of business, and so is the capitalist scab who has lost all his dollars down to his chickens and his watch. But the role of scab passes beyond the individual. Just as individuals scab on other individuals, so do groups scab on other groups. And the principle involved is precisely the same as in the case of the simple labor scab. A group, in the nature of its organization, is often compelled to give most for least, and, so doing, to strike at the life of another group. At the present moment all Europe is appalled by that colossal scab, the United States. And Europe is clamorous with agitation for a Federation of National Unions to protect her from the United States. It may be remarked, in passing, that in its prime essentials this agitation in no wise differs from the trade-union agitation among workmen in any industry. The trouble is caused by the scab who is giving most for least. The result of the American scab's nefarious actions will be to strike at the food and shelter of Europe. The way for Europe to protect herself is to quit bickering among her parts and to form a union against the scab. And if the union is formed, armies and navies may be expected to be brought into play in fashion similar to the bricks and clubs in ordinary labor struggles. In this connection, and as one of many walking delegates for the nations, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, the noted French economist, may well be quoted. In a letter to the Vienna Tageblatt, he advocates an economic alliance among the Continental nations for the purpose of barring out American goods, an economic alliance, in his own language, "_which may possibly and desirably develop into a political alliance_." It will be noted, in the utterances of the Continental walking delegates, that, one and all, they leave England out of the proposed union. And in England herself the feeling is growing that her days are numbered if she cannot unite for offence and defence with the great American scab. As Andrew Carnegie said some time ago, "The only course for Great Britain seems to be reunion with her grandchild or sure decline to a secondary place, and then to comparative insignificance in the future annals of the English-speaking race." Cecil Rhodes, speaking of what would have obtained but for the pig-headedness of George III, and of what will obtain when England and the United States are united, said, "_No cannon would. . . be fired on either hemisphere but by permission of The English race_." It would seem that England, fronted by the hostile Continental Union and flanked by the great American scab, has nothing left but to join with the scab and play the historic labor role of armed Pinkerton. Granting the words of Cecil Rhodes, the United States would be enabled to scab without let or hindrance on Europe, while England, as professional strike-breaker and policeman, destroyed the unions and kept order. All this may appear fantastic and erroneous, but there is in it a soul of truth vastly more significant than it may seem. Civilization may be expressed today in terms of trade-unionism. Individual struggles have largely passed away, but group-struggles increase prodigiously. And the things for which the groups struggle are the same as of old. Shorn of all subtleties and complexities, the chief struggle of men, and of groups of men, is for food and shelter. And, as of old they struggled with tooth and nail, so today they struggle with teeth and nails elongated into armies and navies, machines, and economic advantages. Under the definition that a scab is _one who gives more value for the same price than another_, it would seem that society can be generally divided into the two classes of the scabs and the non-scabs. But on closer investigation, however, it will be seen that the non-scab is a vanishing quantity. In the social jungle, everybody is preying upon everybody else. As in the case of Mr. Rockefeller, he who was a scab yesterday is a non-scab today, and tomorrow may be a scab again. The woman stenographer or book-keeper who receives forty dollars per month where a man was receiving seventy-five is a scab. So is the woman who does a man's work at a weaving-machine, and the child who goes into the mill or factory. And the father, who is scabbed out of work by the wives and children of other men, sends his own wife and children to scab in order to save himself. When a publisher offers an author better royalties than other publishers have been paying him, he is scabbing on those other publishers. The reporter on a newspaper, who feels he should be receiving a larger salary for his work, says so, and is shown the door, is replaced by a reporter who is a scab; whereupon, when the belly-need presses, the displaced reporter goes to another paper and scabs himself. The minister who hardens his heart to a call, and waits for a certain congregation to offer him say $500 a year more, often finds himself scabbed upon by another and more impecunious minister; and the next time it is _his_ turn to scab while a brother minister is hardening his heart to a call. The scab is everywhere. The professional strike-breakers, who as a class receive large wages, will scab on one another, while scab unions are even formed to prevent scabbing upon scabs. There are non-scabs, but they are usually born so, and are protected by the whole might of society in the possession of their food and shelter. King Edward is such a type, as are all individuals who receive hereditary food-and-shelter privileges,--such as the present Duke of Bedford, for instance, who yearly receives $75,000 from the good people of London because some former king gave some former ancestor of his the market privileges of Covent Garden. The irresponsible rich are likewise non-scabs,--and by them is meant that coupon-clipping class which hires its managers and brains to invest the money usually left it by its ancestors. Outside these lucky creatures, all the rest, at one time or another in their lives, are scabs, at one time or another are engaged in giving more for a certain price than any one else. The meek professor in some endowed institution, by his meek suppression of his convictions, is giving more for his salary than gave the other and more outspoken professor whose chair he occupies. And when a political party dangles a full dinner-pail in the eyes of the toiling masses, it is offering more for a vote than the dubious dollar of the opposing party. Even a money-lender is not above taking a slightly lower rate of interest and saying nothing about it. Such is the tangle of conflicting interests in a tooth-and-nail society that people cannot avoid being scabs, are often made so against their desires, and are often unconsciously made so. When several trades in a certain locality demand and receive an advance in wages, they are unwittingly making scabs of their fellow-laborers in that district who have received no advance in wages. In San Francisco the barbers, laundry-workers, and milk-wagon drivers received such an advance in wages. Their employers promptly added the amount of this advance to the selling price of their wares. The price of shaves, of washing, and of milk went up. This reduced the purchasing power of the unorganized laborers, and, in point of fact, reduced their wages and made them greater scabs. Because the British laborer is disinclined to scab,--that is, because he restricts his output in order to give less for the wage he receives,--it is to a certain extent made possible for the American capitalist, who receives a less restricted output from his laborers, to play the scab on the English capitalist. As a result of this, (of course combined with other causes), the American capitalist and the American laborer are striking at the food and shelter of the English capitalist and laborer. The English laborer is starving today because, among other things, he is not a scab. He practises the policy of "ca' canny," which may be defined as "go easy." In order to get most for least, in many trades he performs but from one-fourth to one-sixth of the labor he is well able to perform. An instance of this is found in the building of the Westinghouse Electric Works at Manchester. The British limit per man was 400 bricks per day. The Westinghouse Company imported a "driving" American contractor, aided by half a dozen "driving" American foremen, and the British bricklayer swiftly attained an average of 1800 bricks per day, with a maximum of 2500 bricks for the plainest work. But, the British laborer's policy of "ca' canny," which is the very honorable one of giving least for most, and which is likewise the policy of the English capitalist, is nevertheless frowned upon by the English capitalist, whose business existence is threatened by the great American scab. From the rise of the factory system, the English capitalist gladly embraced the opportunity, wherever he found it, of giving least for most. He did it all over the world whenever he enjoyed a market monopoly, and he did it at home with the laborers employed in his mills, destroying them like flies till prevented, within limits, by the passage of the Factory Acts. Some of the proudest fortunes of England today may trace their origin to the giving of least for most to the miserable slaves of the factory towns. But at the present time the English capitalist is outraged because his laborers are employing against him precisely the same policy he employed against them, and which he would employ again did the chance present itself. Yet "ca' canny" is a disastrous thing to the British laborer. It has driven ship-building from England to Scotland, bottle-making from Scotland to Belgium, flint-glass-making from England to Germany, and today is steadily driving industry after industry to other countries. A correspondent from Northampton wrote not long ago: "Factories are working half and third time. . . . There is no strike, there is no real labor trouble, but the masters and men are alike suffering from sheer lack of employment. Markets which were once theirs are now American." It would seem that the unfortunate British laborer is 'twixt the devil and the deep sea. If he gives most for least, he faces a frightful slavery such as marked the beginning of the factory system. If he gives least for most, he drives industry away to other countries and has no work at all. But the union laborers of the United States have nothing of which to boast, while, according to their trade-union ethics, they have a great deal of which to be ashamed. They passionately preach short hours and big wages, the shorter the hours and the bigger the wages the better. Their hatred for a scab is as terrible as the hatred of a patriot for a traitor, of a Christian for a Judas. And in the face of all this, they are as colossal scabs as the United States is a colossal scab. For all of their boasted unions and high labor ideals, they are about the most thoroughgoing scabs on the planet. Receiving $4.50 per day, because of his proficiency and immense working power, the American laborer has been known to scab upon scabs (so called) who took his place and received only $0.90 per day for a longer day. In this particular instance, five Chinese coolies, working longer hours, gave less value for the price received from their employer than did one American laborer. It is upon his brother laborers overseas that the American laborer most outrageously scabs. As Mr. Casson has shown, an English nail-maker gets $3 per week, while an American nail-maker gets $30. But the English worker turns out 200 pounds of nails per week, while the American turns out 5500 pounds. If he were as "fair" as his English brother, other things being equal, he would be receiving, at the English worker's rate of pay, $82.50. As it is, he is scabbing upon his English brother to the tune of $79.50 per week. Dr. Schultze-Gaevernitz has shown that a German weaver produces 466 yards of cotton a week at a cost of .303 per yard, while an American weaver produces 1200 yards at a cost of .02 per yard. But, it may be objected, a great part of this is due to the more improved American machinery. Very true, but none the less a great part is still due to the superior energy, skill, and willingness of the American laborer. The English laborer is faithful to the policy of "ca' canny." He refuses point-blank to get the work out of a machine that the New World scab gets out of a machine. Mr. Maxim, observing a wasteful hand-labor process in his English factory, invented a machine which he proved capable of displacing several men. But workman after workman was put at the machine, and without exception they turned out neither more nor less than a workman turned out by hand. They obeyed the mandate of the union and went easy, while Mr. Maxim gave up in despair. Nor will the British workman run machines at as high speed as the American, nor will he run so many. An American workman will "give equal attention simultaneously to three, four, or six machines or tools, while the British workman is compelled by his trade union to limit his attention to one, so that employment may be given to half a dozen men." But for scabbing, no blame attaches itself anywhere. With rare exceptions, all the people in the world are scabs. The strong, capable workman gets a job and holds it because of his strength and capacity. And he holds it because out of his strength and capacity he gives a better value for his wage than does the weaker and less capable workman. Therefore he is scabbing upon his weaker and less capable brother workman. He is giving more value for the price paid by the employer. The superior workman scabs upon the inferior workman because he is so constituted and cannot help it. The one, by fortune of birth and upbringing, is strong and capable; the other, by fortune of birth and upbringing, is not so strong nor capable. It is for the same reason that one country scabs upon another. That country which has the good fortune to possess great natural resources, a finer sun and soil, unhampering institutions, and a deft and intelligent labor class and capitalist class is bound to scab upon a country less fortunately situated. It is the good fortune of the United States that is making her the colossal scab, just as it is the good fortune of one man to be born with a straight back while his brother is born with a hump. It is not good to give most for least, not good to be a scab. The word has gained universal opprobrium. On the other hand, to be a non-scab, to give least for most, is universally branded as stingy, selfish, and unchristian-like. So all the world, like the British workman, is 'twixt the devil and the deep sea. It is treason to one's fellows to scab, it is unchristian-like not to scab. Since to give least for most, and to give most for least, are universally bad, what remains? Equity remains, which is to give like for like, the same for the same, neither more nor less. But this equity, society, as at present constituted, cannot give. It is not in the nature of present-day society for men to give like for like, the same for the same. And so long as men continue to live in this competitive society, struggling tooth and nail with one another for food and shelter, (which is to struggle tooth and nail with one another for life), that long will the scab continue to exist. His will "to live" will force him to exist. He may be flouted and jeered by his brothers, he may be beaten with bricks and clubs by the men who by superior strength and capacity scab upon him as he scabs upon them by longer hours and smaller wages, but through it all he will persist, giving a bit more of most for least than they are giving. THE QUESTION OF THE MAXIMUM For any social movement or development there must be a maximum limit beyond which it cannot proceed. That civilization which does not advance must decline, and so, when the maximum of development has been reached in any given direction, society must either retrograde or change the direction of its advance. There are many families of men that have failed, in the critical period of their economic evolution, to effect a change in direction, and were forced to fall back. Vanquished at the moment of their maximum, they have dropped out of the whirl of the world. There was no room for them. Stronger competitors have taken their places, and they have either rotted into oblivion or remain to be crushed under the iron heel of the dominant races in as remorseless a struggle as the world has yet witnessed. But in this struggle fair women and chivalrous men will play no part. Types and ideals have changed. Helens and Launcelots are anachronisms. Blows will be given and taken, and men fight and die, but not for faiths and altars. Shrines will be desecrated, but they will be the shrines, not of temples, but market-places. Prophets will arise, but they will be the prophets of prices and products. Battles will be waged, not for honor and glory, nor for thrones and sceptres, but for dollars and cents and for marts and exchanges. Brain and not brawn will endure, and the captains of war will be commanded by the captains of industry. In short, it will be a contest for the mastery of the world's commerce and for industrial supremacy. It is more significant, this struggle into which we have plunged, for the fact that it is the first struggle to involve the globe. No general movement of man has been so wide-spreading, so far-reaching. Quite local was the supremacy of any ancient people; likewise the rise to empire of Macedonia and Rome, the waves of Arabian valor and fanaticism, and the mediaeval crusades to the Holy Sepulchre. But since those times the planet has undergone a unique shrinkage. The world of Homer, limited by the coast-lines of the Mediterranean and Black seas, was a far vaster world than ours of today, which we weigh, measure, and compute as accurately and as easily as if it were a child's play-ball. Steam has made its parts accessible and drawn them closer together. The telegraph annihilates space and time. Each morning, every part knows what every other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A discovery in a German laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within twenty-four hours. A book written in South Africa is published by simultaneous copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the day following is in the hands of the translators. The death of an obscure missionary in China, or of a whiskey-smuggler in the South Seas, is served, the world over, with the morning toast. The wheat output of Argentine or the gold of Klondike are known wherever men meet and trade. Shrinkage, or centralization, has become such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis may place his hand on the pulse of the world. The planet has indeed grown very small; and because of this, no vital movement can remain in the clime or country where it takes its rise. And so today the economic and industrial impulse is world-wide. It is a matter of import to every people. None may be careless of it. To do so is to perish. It is become a battle, the fruits of which are to the strong, and to none but the strongest of the strong. As the movement approaches its maximum, centralization accelerates and competition grows keener and closer. The competitor nations cannot all succeed. So long as the movement continues its present direction, not only will there not be room for all, but the room that is will become less and less; and when the moment of the maximum is at hand, there will be no room at all. Capitalistic production will have overreached itself, and a change of direction will then be inevitable. Divers queries arise: What is the maximum of commercial development the world can sustain? How far can it be exploited? How much capital is necessary? Can sufficient capital be accumulated? A brief resume of the industrial history of the last one hundred years or so will be relevant at this stage of the discussion. Capitalistic production, in its modern significance, was born of the industrial revolution in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The great inventions of that period were both its father and its mother, while, as Mr. Brooks Adams has shown, the looted treasure of India was the potent midwife. Had there not been an unwonted increase of capital, the impetus would not have been given to invention, while even steam might have languished for generations instead of at once becoming, as it did, the most prominent factor in the new method of production. The improved application of these inventions in the first decades of the nineteenth century mark the transition from the domestic to the factory system of manufacture and inaugurated the era of capitalism. The magnitude of this revolution is manifested by the fact that England alone had invented the means and equipped herself with the machinery whereby she could overstock the world's markets. The home market could not consume a tithe of the home product. To manufacture this home product she had sacrificed her agriculture. She must buy her food from abroad, and to do so she must sell her goods abroad. But the struggle for commercial supremacy had not yet really begun. England was without a rival. Her navies controlled the sea. Her armies and her insular position gave her peace at home. The world was hers to exploit. For nearly fifty years she dominated the European, American, and Indian trade, while the great wars then convulsing society were destroying possible competitive capital and straining consumption to its utmost. The pioneer of the industrial nations, she thus received such a start in the new race for wealth that it is only today the other nations have succeeded in overtaking her. In 1820 the volume of her trade (imports and exports) was 68,000,000 pounds. In 1899 it had increased to 815,000,000 pounds,--an increase of 1200 per cent in the volume of trade. For nearly one hundred years England has been producing surplus value. She has been producing far more than she consumes, and this excess has swelled the volume of her capital. This capital has been invested in her enterprises at home and abroad, and in her shipping. In 1898 the Stock Exchange estimated British capital invested abroad at 1,900,000,000 pounds. But hand in hand with her foreign investments have grown her adverse balances of trade. For the ten years ending with 1868, her average yearly adverse balance was 52,000,000 pounds; ending with 1878, 81,000,000 pounds; ending with 1888, 101,000,000 pounds; and ending with 1898, 133,000,000 pounds. In the single year of 1897 it reached the portentous sum of 157,000,000 pounds. But England's adverse balances of trade in themselves are nothing at which to be frightened. Hitherto they have been paid from out the earnings of her shipping and the interest on her foreign investments. But what does cause anxiety, however, is that, relative to the trade development of other countries, her export trade is falling off, without a corresponding diminution of her imports, and that her securities and foreign holdings do not seem able to stand the added strain. These she is being forced to sell in order to pull even. As the London Times gloomily remarks, "We are entering the twentieth century on the down grade, after a prolonged period of business activity, high wages, high profits, and overflowing revenue." In other words, the mighty grasp England held over the resources and capital of the world is being relaxed. The control of its commerce and banking is slipping through her fingers. The sale of her foreign holdings advertises the fact that other nations are capable of buying them, and, further, that these other nations are busily producing surplus value. The movement has become general. Today, passing from country to country, an ever-increasing tide of capital is welling up. Production is doubling and quadrupling upon itself. It used to be that the impoverished or undeveloped nations turned to England when it came to borrowing, but now Germany is competing keenly with her in this matter. France is not averse to lending great sums to Russia, and Austria-Hungary has capital and to spare for foreign holdings. Nor has the United States failed to pass from the side of the debtor to that of the creditor nations. She, too, has become wise in the way of producing surplus value. She has been successful in her efforts to secure economic emancipation. Possessing but 5 per cent of the world's population and producing 32 per cent of the world's food supply, she has been looked upon as the world's farmer; but now, amidst general consternation, she comes forward as the world's manufacturer. In 1888 her manufactured exports amounted to $130,300,087; in 1896, to $253,681,541; in 1897, to $279,652,721; in 1898, to $307,924,994; in 1899, to $338,667,794; and in 1900, to $432,000,000. Regarding her growing favorable balances of trade, it may be noted that not only are her imports not increasing, but they are actually falling off, while her exports in the last decade have increased 72.4 per cent. In ten years her imports from Europe have been reduced from $474,000,000 to $439,000,000; while in the same time her exports have increased from $682,000,000 to $1,111,000,000. Her balance of trade in her favor in 1895 was $75,000,000; in 1896, over $100,000,000; in 1897, nearly $300,000,000; in 1898, $615,000,000; in 1899, $530,000,000; and in 1900, $648,000,000. In the matter of iron, the United States, which in 1840 had not dreamed of entering the field of international competition, in 1897, as much to her own surprise as any one else's, undersold the English in their own London market. In 1899 there was but one American locomotive in Great Britain; but, of the five hundred locomotives sold abroad by the United States in 1902, England bought more than any other country. Russia is operating a thousand of them on her own roads today. In one instance the American manufacturers contracted to deliver a locomotive in four and one-half months for $9250, the English manufacturers requiring twenty-four months for delivery at $14,000. The Clyde shipbuilders recently placed orders for 150,000 tons of plates at a saving of $250,000, and the American steel going into the making of the new London subway is taken as a matter of course. American tools stand above competition the world over. Ready-made boots and shoes are beginning to flood Europe,--the same with machinery, bicycles, agricultural implements, and all kinds of manufactured goods. A correspondent from Hamburg, speaking of the invasion of American trade, says: "Incidentally, it may be remarked that the typewriting machine with which this article is written, as well as the thousands--nay, hundreds of thousands--of others that are in use throughout the world, were made in America; that it stands on an American table, in an office furnished with American desks, bookcases, and chairs, which cannot be made in Europe of equal quality, so practical and convenient, for a similar price." In 1893 and 1894, because of the distrust of foreign capital, the United States was forced to buy back American securities held abroad; but in 1897 and 1898 she bought back American securities held abroad, not because she had to, but because she chose to. And not only has she bought back her own securities, but in the last eight years she has become a buyer of the securities of other countries. In the money markets of London, Paris, and Berlin she is a lender of money. Carrying the largest stock of gold in the world, the world, in moments of danger, when crises of international finance loom large, looks to her vast lending ability for safety. Thus, in a few swift years, has the United States drawn up to the van where the great industrial nations are fighting for commercial and financial empire. The figures of the race, in which she passed England, are interesting: Year United States Exports United Kingdom Exports 1875 $497,263,737 $1,087,497,000 1885 673,593,506 1,037,124,000 1895 807,742,415 1,100,452,000 1896 986,830,080 1,168,671,000 1897 1,079,834,296 1,139,882,000 1898 1,233,564,828 1,135,642,000 1899 1,253,466,000 1,287,971,000 1900 1,453,013,659 1,418,348,000 As Mr. Henry Demarest Lloyd has noted, "When the news reached Germany of the new steel trust in America, the stocks of the iron and steel mills listed on the Berlin Bourse fell." While Europe has been talking and dreaming of the greatness which was, the United States has been thinking and planning and doing for the greatness to be. Her captains of industry and kings of finance have toiled and sweated at organizing and consolidating production and transportation. But this has been merely the developmental stage, the tuning-up of the orchestra. With the twentieth century rises the curtain on the play,--a play which shall have much in it of comedy and a vast deal of tragedy, and which has been well named The Capitalistic Conquest of Europe by America. Nations do not die easily, and one of the first moves of Europe will be the erection of tariff walls. America, however, will fittingly reply, for already her manufacturers are establishing works in France and Germany. And when the German trade journals refused to accept American advertisements, they found their country flamingly bill-boarded in buccaneer American fashion. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, the French economist, is passionately preaching a commercial combination of the whole Continent against the United States,--a commercial alliance which, he boldly declares, should become a political alliance. And in this he is not alone, finding ready sympathy and ardent support in Austria, Italy, and Germany. Lord Rosebery said, in a recent speech before the Wolverhampton Chamber of Commerce: "The Americans, with their vast and almost incalculable resources, their acuteness and enterprise, and their huge population, which will probably be 100,000,000 in twenty years, together with the plan they have adopted for putting accumulated wealth into great cooperative syndicates or trusts for the purpose of carrying on this great commercial warfare, are the most formidable . . . rivals to be feared." The London Times says: "It is useless to disguise the fact that Great Britain is being outdistanced. The competition does not come from the glut caused by miscalculation as to the home demand. Our own steel-makers know better and are alarmed. The threatened competition in markets hitherto our own comes from efficiency in production such as never before has been seen." Even the British naval supremacy is in danger, continues the same paper, "for, if we lose our engineering supremacy, our naval supremacy will follow, unless held on sufferance by our successful rivals." And the Edinburgh Evening News says, with editorial gloom: "The iron and steel trades have gone from us. When the fictitious prosperity caused by the expenditure of our own Government and that of European nations on armaments ceases, half of the men employed in these industries will be turned into the streets. The outlook is appalling. What suffering will have to be endured before the workers realize that there is nothing left for them but emigration!" * * * * * That there must be a limit to the accumulation of capital is obvious. The downward course of the rate of interest, notwithstanding that many new employments have been made possible for capital, indicates how large is the increase of surplus value. This decline of the interest rate is in accord with Bohm-Bawerk's law of "diminishing returns." That is, when capital, like anything else, has become over-plentiful, less lucrative use can only be found for the excess. This excess, not being able to earn so much as when capital was less plentiful, competes for safe investments and forces down the interest rate on all capital. Mr. Charles A. Conant has well described the keenness of the scramble for safe investments, even at the prevailing low rates of interest. At the close of the war with Turkey, the Greek loan, guaranteed by Great Britain, France, and Russia, was floated with striking ease. Regardless of the small return, the amount offered at Paris, (41,000,000 francs), was subscribed for twenty-three times over. Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian States, of recent years, have all engaged in converting their securities from 5 per cents to 4 per cents, from 4.5 per cents to 3.5 per cents, and the 3.5 per cents into 3 per cents. Great Britain, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, according to the calculation taken in 1895 by the International Statistical Institute, hold forty-six billions of capital invested in negotiable securities alone. Yet Paris subscribed for her portion of the Greek loan twenty-three times over! In short, money is cheap. Andrew Carnegie and his brother bourgeois kings give away millions annually, but still the tide wells up. These vast accumulations have made possible "wild-catting," fraudulent combinations, fake enterprises, Hooleyism; but such stealings, great though they be, have little or no effect in reducing the volume. The time is past when startling inventions, or revolutions in the method of production, can break up the growing congestion; yet this saved capital demands an outlet, somewhere, somehow. When a great nation has equipped itself to produce far more than it can, under the present division of the product, consume, it seeks other markets for its surplus products. When a second nation finds itself similarly circumstanced, competition for these other markets naturally follows. With the advent of a third, a fourth, a fifth, and of divers other nations, the question of the disposal of surplus products grows serious. And with each of these nations possessing, over and beyond its active capital, great and growing masses of idle capital, and when the very foreign markets for which they are competing are beginning to produce similar wares for themselves, the question passes the serious stage and becomes critical. Never has the struggle for foreign markets been sharper than at the present. They are the one great outlet for congested accumulations. Predatory capital wanders the world over, seeking where it may establish itself. This urgent need for foreign markets is forcing upon the world-stage an era of great colonial empire. But this does not stand, as in the past, for the subjugation of peoples and countries for the sake of gaining their products, but for the privilege of selling them products. The theory once was, that the colony owed its existence and prosperity to the mother country; but today it is the mother country that owes its existence and prosperity to the colony. And in the future, when that supporting colony becomes wise in the way of producing surplus value and sends its goods back to sell to the mother country, what then? Then the world will have been exploited, and capitalistic production will have attained its maximum development. Foreign markets and undeveloped countries largely retard that moment. The favored portions of the earth's surface are already occupied, though the resources of many are yet virgin. That they have not long since been wrested from the hands of the barbarous and decadent peoples who possess them is due, not to the military prowess of such peoples, but to the jealous vigilance of the industrial nations. The powers hold one another back. The Turk lives because the way is not yet clear to an amicable division of him among the powers. And the United States, supreme though she is, opposes the partition of China, and intervenes her huge bulk between the hungry nations and the mongrel Spanish republics. Capital stands in its own way, welling up and welling up against the inevitable moment when it shall burst all bonds and sweep resistlessly across such vast stretches as China and South America. And then there will be no more worlds to exploit, and capitalism will either fall back, crushed under its own weight, or a change of direction will take place which will mark a new era in history. The Far East affords an illuminating spectacle. While the Western nations are crowding hungrily in, while the Partition of China is commingled with the clamor for the Spheres of Influence and the Open Door, other forces are none the less potently at work. Not only are the young Western peoples pressing the older ones to the wall, but the East itself is beginning to awake. American trade is advancing, and British trade is losing ground, while Japan, China, and India are taking a hand in the game themselves. In 1893, 100,000 pieces of American drills were imported into China; in 1897, 349,000. In 1893, 252,000 pieces of American sheetings were imported against 71,000 British; but in 1897, 566,000 pieces of American sheetings were imported against only 10,000 British. The cotton goods and yarn trade (which forms 40 per cent of the whole trade with China) shows a remarkable advance on the part of the United States. During the last ten years America has increased her importation of plain goods by 121 per cent in quantity and 59.5 per cent in value, while that of England and India combined has decreased 13.75 per cent in quantity and 8 per cent in value. Lord Charles Beresford, from whose "Break-up of China" these figures are taken, states that English yarn has receded and Indian yarn advanced to the front. In 1897, 140,000 piculs of Indian yarn were imported, 18,000 of Japanese, 4500 of Shanghai-manufactured, and 700 of English. Japan, who but yesterday emerged from the mediaeval rule of the Shogunate and seized in one fell swoop the scientific knowledge and culture of the Occident, is already today showing what wisdom she has acquired in the production of surplus value, and is preparing herself that she may tomorrow play the part to Asia that England did to Europe one hundred years ago. That the difference in the world's affairs wrought by those one hundred years will prevent her succeeding is manifest; but it is equally manifest that they cannot prevent her playing a leading part in the industrial drama which has commenced on the Eastern stage. Her imports into the port of Newchang in 1891 amounted to but 22,000 taels; but in 1897 they had increased to 280,000 taels. In manufactured goods, from matches, watches, and clocks to the rolling stock of railways, she has already given stiff shocks to her competitors in the Asiatic markets; and this while she is virtually yet in the equipment stage of production. Erelong she, too, will be furnishing her share to the growing mass of the world's capital. As regards Great Britain, the giant trader who has so long overshadowed Asiatic commerce, Lord Charles Beresford says: "But competition is telling adversely; the energy of the British merchant is being equalled by other nationals. . . The competition of the Chinese and the introduction of steam into the country are also combining to produce changed conditions in China." But far more ominous is the plaintive note he sounds when he says: "New industries must be opened up, and I would especially direct the attention of the Chambers of Commerce (British) to . . . the fact that the more the native competes with the British manufacturer in certain classes of trade, the more machinery he will need, and the orders for such machinery will come to this country if our machinery manufacturers are enterprising enough." The Orient is beginning to show what an important factor it will become, under Western supervision, in the creation of surplus value. Even before the barriers which restrain Western capital are removed, the East will be in a fair way toward being exploited. An analysis of Lord Beresford's message to the Chambers of Commerce discloses, first, that the East is beginning to manufacture for itself; and, second, that there is a promise of keen competition in the West for the privilege of selling the required machinery. The inexorable query arises: _What is the West to do when it has furnished this machinery_? And when not only the East, but all the now undeveloped countries, confront, with surplus products in their hands, the old industrial nations, capitalistic production will have attained its maximum development. But before that time must intervene a period which bids one pause for breath. A new romance, like unto none in all the past, the economic romance, will be born. For the dazzling prize of world-empire will the nations of the earth go up in harness. Powers will rise and fall, and mighty coalitions shape and dissolve in the swift whirl of events. Vassal nations and subject territories will be bandied back and forth like so many articles of trade. And with the inevitable displacement of economic centres, it is fair to presume that populations will shift to and fro, as they once did from the South to the North of England on the rise of the factory towns, or from the Old World to the New. Colossal enterprises will be projected and carried through, and combinations of capital and federations of labor be effected on a cyclopean scale. Concentration and organization will be perfected in ways hitherto undreamed. The nation which would keep its head above the tide must accurately adjust supply to demand, and eliminate waste to the last least particle. Standards of living will most likely descend for millions of people. With the increase of capital, the competition for safe investments, and the consequent fall of the interest rate, the principal which today earns a comfortable income would not then support a bare existence. Saving toward old age would cease among the working classes. And as the merchant cities of Italy crashed when trade slipped from their hands on the discovery of the new route to the Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope, so will there come times of trembling for such nations as have failed to grasp the prize of world-empire. In that given direction they will have attained their maximum development, before the whole world, in the same direction, has attained its. There will no longer be room for them. But if they can survive the shock of being flung out of the world's industrial orbit, a change in direction may then be easily effected. That the decadent and barbarous peoples will be crushed is a fair presumption; likewise that the stronger breeds will survive, entering upon the transition stage to which all the world must ultimately come. This change of direction must be either toward industrial oligarchies or socialism. Either the functions of private corporations will increase till they absorb the central government, or the functions of government will increase till it absorbs the corporations. Much may be said on the chance of the oligarchy. Should an old manufacturing nation lose its foreign trade, it is safe to predict that a strong effort would be made to build a socialistic government, but it does not follow that this effort would be successful. With the moneyed class controlling the State and its revenues and all the means of subsistence, and guarding its own interests with jealous care, it is not at all impossible that a strong curb could be put upon the masses till the crisis were past. It has been done before. There is no reason why it should not be done again. At the close of the last century, such a movement was crushed by its own folly and immaturity. In 1871 the soldiers of the economic rulers stamped out, root and branch, a whole generation of militant socialists. Once the crisis were past, the ruling class, still holding the curb in order to make itself more secure, would proceed to readjust things and to balance consumption with production. Having a monopoly of the safe investments, the great masses of unremunerative capital would be directed, not to the production of more surplus value, but to the making of permanent improvements, which would give employment to the people, and make them content with the new order of things. Highways, parks, public buildings, monuments, could be builded; nor would it be out of place to give better factories and homes to the workers. Such in itself would be socialistic, save that it would be done by the oligarchs, a class apart. With the interest rate down to zero, and no field for the investment of sporadic capital, savings among the people would utterly cease, and old-age pensions be granted as a matter of course. It is also a logical necessity of such a system that, when the population began to press against the means of subsistence, (expansion being impossible), the birth rate of the lower classes would be lessened. Whether by their own initiative, or by the interference of the rulers, it would have to be done, and it would be done. In other words, the oligarchy would mean the capitalization of labor and the enslavement of the whole population. But it would be a fairer, juster form of slavery than any the world has yet seen. The per capita wage and consumption would be increased, and, with a stringent control of the birth rate, there is no reason why such a country should not be so ruled through many generations. On the other hand, as the capitalistic exploitation of the planet approaches its maximum, and countries are crowded out of the field of foreign exchanges, there is a large likelihood that their change in direction will be toward socialism. Were the theory of collective ownership and operation then to arise for the first time, such a movement would stand small chance of success. But such is not the case. The doctrine of socialism has flourished and grown throughout the nineteenth century; its tenets have been preached wherever the interests of labor and capital have clashed; and it has received exemplification time and again by the State's assumption of functions which had always belonged solely to the individual. When capitalistic production has attained its maximum development, it must confront a dividing of the ways; and the strength of capital on the one hand, and the education and wisdom of the workers on the other, will determine which path society is to travel. It is possible, considering the inertia of the masses, that the whole world might in time come to be dominated by a group of industrial oligarchies, or by one great oligarchy, but it is not probable. That sporadic oligarchies may flourish for definite periods of time is highly possible; that they may continue to do so is as highly improbable. The procession of the ages has marked not only the rise of man, but the rise of the common man. From the chattel slave, or the serf chained to the soil, to the highest seats in modern society, he has risen, rung by rung, amid the crumbling of the divine right of kings and the crash of falling sceptres. That he has done this, only in the end to pass into the perpetual slavery of the industrial oligarch, is something at which his whole past cries in protest. The common man is worthy of a better future, or else he is not worthy of his past. * * * * * NOTE.--The above article was written as long ago as 1898. The only alteration has been the bringing up to 1900 of a few of its statistics. As a commercial venture of an author, it has an interesting history. It was promptly accepted by one of the leading magazines and paid for. The editor confessed that it was "one of those articles one could not possibly let go of after it was once in his possession." Publication was voluntarily promised to be immediate. Then the editor became afraid of its too radical nature, forfeited the sum paid for it, and did not publish it. Nor, offered far and wide, could any other editor of bourgeois periodicals be found who was rash enough to publish it. Thus, for the first time, after seven years, it appears in print. A REVIEW Two remarkable books are Ghent's "Our Benevolent Feudalism" {7} and Brooks's "The Social Unrest." {8} In these two books the opposite sides of the labor problem are expounded, each writer devoting himself with apprehension to the side he fears and views with disfavor. It would appear that they have set themselves the task of collating, as a warning, the phenomena of two counter social forces. Mr. Ghent, who is sympathetic with the socialist movement, follows with cynic fear every aggressive act of the capitalist class. Mr. Brooks, who yearns for the perpetuation of the capitalist system as long as possible, follows with grave dismay each aggressive act of the labor and socialist organizations. Mr. Ghent traces the emasculation of labor by capital, and Mr. Brooks traces the emasculation of independent competing capital by labor. In short, each marshals the facts of a side in the two sides which go to make a struggle so great that even the French Revolution is insignificant beside it; for this later struggle, for the first time in the history of struggles, is not confined to any particular portion of the globe, but involves the whole of it. Starting on the assumption that society is at present in a state of flux, Mr. Ghent sees it rapidly crystallizing into a status which can best be described as something in the nature of a benevolent feudalism. He laughs to scorn any immediate realization of the Marxian dream, while Tolstoyan utopias and Kropotkinian communistic unions of shop and farm are too wild to merit consideration. The coming status which Mr. Ghent depicts is a class domination by the capitalists. Labor will take its definite place as a dependent class, living in a condition of machine servitude fairly analogous to the land servitude of the Middle Ages. That is to say, labor will be bound to the machine, though less harshly, in fashion somewhat similar to that in which the earlier serf was bound to the soil. As he says, "Bondage to the land was the basis of villeinage in the old regime; bondage to the job will be the basis of villeinage in the new." At the top of the new society will tower the magnate, the new feudal baron; at the bottom will be found the wastrels and the inefficients. The new society he grades as follows: "I. The barons, graded on the basis of possessions. "II. The court agents and retainers. (This class will include the editors of 'respectable' and 'safe' newspapers, the pastors of 'conservative' and 'wealthy' churches, the professors and teachers in endowed colleges and schools, lawyers generally, and most judges and politicians). "III. The workers in pure and applied science, artists, and physicians. "IV. The entrepreneurs, the managers of the great industries, transformed into a salaried class. "V. The foremen and superintendents. This class has heretofore been recruited largely from the skilled workers, but with the growth of technical education in schools and colleges, and the development of fixed caste, it is likely to become entirely differentiated. "VI. The villeins of the cities and towns, more or less regularly employed, who do skilled work and are partially protected by organization. "VII. The villeins of the cities and towns who do unskilled work and are unprotected by organization. They will comprise the laborers, domestics, and clerks. "VIII. The villeins of the manorial estates, of the great farms, the mines, and the forests. "IX. The small-unit farmers (land-owning), the petty tradesmen, and manufacturers. "X. The subtenants of the manorial estates and great farms (corresponding to the class of 'free tenants' in the old Feudalism). "XI. The cotters. "XII. The tramps, the occasionally employed, the unemployed--the wastrels of the city and country." "The new Feudalism, like most autocracies, will foster not only the arts, but also certain kinds of learning--particularly the kinds which are unlikely to disturb the minds of the multitude. A future Marsh, or Cope, or Le Comte will be liberally patronized and left free to discover what he will; and so, too, an Edison or a Marconi. Only they must not meddle with anything relating to social science." It must be confessed that Mr. Ghent's arguments are cunningly contrived and arrayed. They must be read to be appreciated. As an example of his style, which at the same time generalizes a portion of his argument, the following may well be given: "The new Feudalism will be but an orderly outgrowth of present tendencies and conditions. All societies evolve naturally out of their predecessors. In sociology, as in biology, there is no cell without a parent cell. The society of each generation develops a multitude of spontaneous and acquired variations, and out of these, by a blending process of natural and conscious selection, the succeeding society is evolved. The new order will differ in no important respects from the present, except in the completer development of its more salient features. The visitor from another planet who had known the old and should see the new would note but few changes. Alter et Idem--another yet the same--he would say. From magnate to baron, from workman to villein, from publicist to court agent and retainer, will be changes of state and function so slight as to elude all but the keenest eyes." And in conclusion, to show how benevolent and beautiful this new feudalism of ours will be, Mr. Ghent says: "Peace and stability it will maintain at all hazards; and the mass, remembering the chaos, the turmoil, the insecurity of the past, will bless its reign. . . . Efficiency--the faculty of getting things--is at last rewarded as it should be, for the efficient have inherited the earth and its fulness. The lowly, whose happiness is greater and whose welfare is more thoroughly conserved when governed than when governing, as a twentieth-century philosopher said of them, are settled and happy in the state which reason and experience teach is their God-appointed lot. They are comfortable too; and if the patriarchal ideal of a vine and fig tree for each is not yet attained, at least each has his rented patch in the country or his rented cell in a city building. Bread and the circus are freely given to the deserving, and as for the undeserving, they are merely reaping the rewards of their contumacy and pride. Order reigns, each has his justly appointed share, and the state rests, in security, 'lapt in universal law.'" Mr. Brooks, on the other hand, sees rising and dissolving and rising again in the social flux the ominous forms of a new society which is the direct antithesis of a benevolent feudalism. He trembles at the rash intrepidity of the capitalists who fight the labor unions, for by such rashness he greatly fears that labor will be driven to express its aims and strength in political terms, which terms will inevitably be socialistic terms. To keep down the rising tide of socialism, he preaches greater meekness and benevolence to the capitalists. No longer may they claim the right to run their own business, to beat down the laborer's standard of living for the sake of increased profits, to dictate terms of employment to individual workers, to wax righteously indignant when organized labor takes a hand in their business. No longer may the capitalist say "my" business, or even think "my" business; he must say "our" business, and think "our" business as well, accepting labor as a partner whose voice must be heard. And if the capitalists do not become more meek and benevolent in their dealings with labor, labor will be antagonized and will proceed to wreak terrible political vengeance, and the present social flux will harden into a status of socialism. Mr. Brooks dreams of a society at which Mr. Ghent sneers as "a slightly modified individualism, wherein each unit secures the just reward of his capacity and service." To attain this happy state, Mr. Brooks imposes circumspection upon the capitalists in their relations with labor. "If the socialistic spirit is to be held in abeyance in this country, businesses of this character (anthracite coal mining) must be handled with extraordinary caution." Which is to say, that to withstand the advance of socialism, a great and greater measure of Mr. Ghent's _benevolence_ will be required. Again and again, Mr. Brooks reiterates the danger he sees in harshly treating labor. "It is not probable that employers can destroy unionism in the United States. Adroit and desperate attempts will, however, be made, if we mean by unionism the undisciplined and aggressive fact of vigorous and determined organizations. If capital should prove too strong in this struggle, the result is easy to predict. The employers have only to convince organized labor that it cannot hold its own against the capitalist manager, and the whole energy that now goes to the union will turn to an aggressive political socialism. It will not be the harmless sympathy with increased city and state functions which trade unions already feel; it will become a turbulent political force bent upon using every weapon of taxation against the rich." "The most concrete impulse that now favors socialism in this country is the insane purpose to deprive labor organizations of the full and complete rights that go with federated unionism." "That which teaches a union that it cannot succeed as a union turns it toward socialism. In long strikes in towns like Marlboro and Brookfield strong unions are defeated. Hundreds of men leave these towns for shoe-centres like Brockton, where they are now voting the socialist ticket. The socialist mayor of this city tells me, 'The men who come to us now from towns where they have been thoroughly whipped in a strike are among our most active working socialists.' The bitterness engendered by this sense of defeat is turned to politics, as it will throughout the whole country, if organization of labor is deprived of its rights." "This enmity of capital to the trade union is watched with glee by every intelligent socialist in our midst. Every union that is beaten or discouraged in its struggle is ripening fruit for socialism." "The real peril which we now face is the threat of a class conflict. If capitalism insists upon the policy of outraging the saving aspiration of the American workman to raise his standard of comfort and leisure, every element of class conflict will strengthen among us." "We have only to humiliate what is best in the trade union, and then every worst feature of socialism is fastened upon us." This strong tendency in the ranks of the workers toward socialism is what Mr. Brooks characterizes the "social unrest"; and he hopes to see the Republican, the Cleveland Democrat, and the conservative and large property interests "band together against this common foe," which is socialism. And he is not above feeling grave and well-contained satisfaction wherever the socialist doctrinaire has been contradicted by men attempting to practise cooperation in the midst of the competitive system, as in Belgium. Nevertheless, he catches fleeting glimpses of an extreme and tyrannically benevolent feudalism very like to Mr. Ghent's, as witness the following: "I asked one of the largest employers of labor in the South if he feared the coming of the trade union. 'No,' he said, 'it is one good result of race prejudice, that the negro will enable us in the long run to weaken the trade union so that it cannot harm us. We can keep wages down with the negro and we can prevent too much organization.' "It is in this spirit that the lower standards are to be used. If this purpose should succeed, it has but one issue,--the immense strengthening of a plutocratic administration at the top, served by an army of high-salaried helpers, with an elite of skilled and well-paid workmen, but all resting on what would essentially be a serf class of low-paid labor and this mass kept in order by an increased use of military force." In brief summary of these two notable books, it may be said that Mr. Ghent is alarmed, (though he does not flatly say so), at the too great social restfulness in the community, which is permitting the capitalists to form the new society to their liking; and that Mr. Brooks is alarmed, (and he flatly says so), at the social unrest which threatens the modified individualism into which he would like to see society evolve. Mr. Ghent beholds the capitalist class rising to dominate the state and the working class; Mr. Brooks beholds the working class rising to dominate the state and the capitalist class. One fears the paternalism of a class; the other, the tyranny of the mass. WANTED: A NEW LAW OF DEVELOPMENT Evolution is no longer a mere tentative hypothesis. One by one, step by step, each division and subdivision of science has contributed its evidence, until now the case is complete and the verdict rendered. While there is still discussion as to the method of evolution, none the less, as a process sufficient to explain all biological phenomena, all differentiations of life into widely diverse species, families, and even kingdoms, evolution is flatly accepted. Likewise has been accepted its law of development: _That_, _in the struggle for existence_, _the strong and fit and the progeny of the strong and fit have a better opportunity for survival than the weak and less fit and the progeny of the weak and less fit_. It is in the struggle of the species with other species and against all other hostile forces in the environment, that this law operates; also in the struggle between the individuals of the same species. In this struggle, which is for food and shelter, the weak individuals must obviously win less food and shelter than the strong. Because of this, their hold on life relaxes and they are eliminated. And for the same reason that they may not win for themselves adequate food and shelter, the weak cannot give to their progeny the chance for survival that the strong give. And thus, since the weak are prone to beget weakness, the species is constantly purged of its inefficient members. Because of this, a premium is placed upon strength, and so long as the struggle for food and shelter obtains, just so long will the average strength of each generation increase. On the other hand, should conditions so change that all, and the progeny of all, the weak as well as the strong, have an equal chance for survival, then, at once, the average strength of each generation will begin to diminish. Never yet, however, in animal life, has there been such a state of affairs. Natural selection has always obtained. The strong and their progeny, at the expense of the weak, have always survived. This law of development has operated down all the past upon all life; it so operates today, and it is not rash to say that it will continue to operate in the future--at least upon all life existing in a state of nature. Man, preeminent though he is in the animal kingdom, capable of reacting upon and making suitable an unsuitable environment, nevertheless remains the creature of this same law of development. The social selection to which he is subject is merely another form of natural selection. True, within certain narrow limits he modifies the struggle for existence and renders less precarious the tenure of life for the weak. The extremely weak, diseased, and inefficient are housed in hospitals and asylums. The strength of the viciously strong, when inimical to society, is tempered by penal institutions and by the gallows. The short-sighted are provided with spectacles, and the sickly (when they can pay for it) with sanitariums. Pestilential marshes are drained, plagues are checked, and disasters averted. Yet, for all that, the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and the weak are crushed out. The men strong of brain are masters as of yore. They dominate society and gather to themselves the wealth of society. With this wealth they maintain themselves and equip their progeny for the struggle. They build their homes in healthful places, purchase the best fruits, meats, and vegetables the market affords, and buy themselves the ministrations of the most brilliant and learned of the professional classes. The weak man, as of yore, is the servant, the doer of things at the master's call. The weaker and less efficient he is, the poorer is his reward. The weakest work for a living wage, (when they can get work), live in unsanitary slums, on vile and insufficient food, at the lowest depths of human degradation. Their grasp on life is indeed precarious, their mortality excessive, their infant death-rate appalling. That some should be born to preferment and others to ignominy in order that the race may progress, is cruel and sad; but none the less they are so born. The weeding out of human souls, some for fatness and smiles, some for leanness and tears, is surely a heartless selective process--as heartless as it is natural. And the human family, for all its wonderful record of adventure and achievement, has not yet succeeded in avoiding this process. That it is incapable of doing this is not to be hazarded. Not only is it capable, but the whole trend of society is in that direction. All the social forces are driving man on to a time when the old selective law will be annulled. There is no escaping it, save by the intervention of catastrophes and cataclysms quite unthinkable. It is inexorable. It is inexorable because the common man demands it. The twentieth century, the common man says, is his day; the common man's day, or, rather, the dawning of the common man's day. Nor can it be denied. The evidence is with him. The previous centuries, and more notably the nineteenth, have marked the rise of the common man. From chattel slavery to serfdom, and from serfdom to what he bitterly terms "wage slavery," he has risen. Never was he so strong as he is today, and never so menacing. He does the work of the world, and he is beginning to know it. The world cannot get along without him, and this also he is beginning to know. All the human knowledge of the past, all the scientific discovery, governmental experiment, and invention of machinery, have tended to his advancement. His standard of living is higher. His common school education would shame princes ten centuries past. His civil and religious liberty makes him a free man, and his ballot the peer of his betters. And all this has tended to make him conscious, conscious of himself, conscious of his class. He looks about him and questions that ancient law of development. It is cruel and wrong, he is beginning to declare. It is an anachronism. Let it be abolished. Why should there be one empty belly in all the world, when the work of ten men can feed a hundred? What if my brother be not so strong as I? He has not sinned. Wherefore should he hunger--he and his sinless little ones? Away with the old law. There is food and shelter for all, therefore let all receive food and shelter. As fast as labor has become conscious it has organized. The ambition of these class-conscious men is that the movement shall become general, that all labor shall become conscious of itself and its class interests. And the day that witnesses the solidarity of labor, they triumphantly affirm, will be a day when labor dominates the world. This growing consciousness has led to the organization of two movements, both separate and distinct, but both converging toward a common goal--one, the labor movement, known as Trade Unionism; the other, the political movement, known as Socialism. Both are grim and silent forces, unheralded and virtually unknown to the general public save in moments of stress. The sleeping labor giant receives little notice from the capitalistic press, and when he stirs uneasily, a column of surprise, indignation, and horror suffices. It is only now and then, after long periods of silence, that the labor movement puts in its claim for notice. All is quiet. The kind old world spins on, and the bourgeois masters clip their coupons in smug complacency. But the grim and silent forces are at work. Suddenly, like a clap of thunder from a clear sky, comes a disruption of industry. From ocean to ocean the wheels of a great chain of railroads cease to run. A quarter of a million miners throw down pick and shovel and outrage the sun with their pale, bleached faces. The street railways of a swarming metropolis stand idle, or the rumble of machinery in vast manufactories dies away to silence. There is alarm and panic. Arson and homicide stalk forth. There is a cry in the night, and quick anger and sudden death. Peaceful cities are affrighted by the crack of rifles and the snarl of machine-guns, and the hearts of the shuddering are shaken by the roar of dynamite. There is hurrying and skurrying. The wires are kept hot between the centre of government and the seat of trouble. The chiefs of state ponder gravely and advise, and governors of states implore. There is assembling of militia and massing of troops, and the streets resound to the tramp of armed men. There are separate and joint conferences between the captains of industry and the captains of labor. And then, finally, all is quiet again, and the memory of it is like the memory of a bad dream. But these strikes become olympiads, things to date from; and common on the lips of men become such phrases as "The Great Dock Strike," "The Great Coal Strike," "The Great Railroad Strike." Never before did labor do these things. After the Great Plague in England, labor, finding itself in demand and innocently obeying the economic law, asked higher wages. But the masters set a maximum wage, restrained workingmen from moving about from place to place, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal methods punished those who disobeyed. But labor is accorded greater respect today. Such a policy, put into effect in this the first decade of the twentieth century, would sweep the masters from their seats in one mighty crash. And the masters know it and are respectful. A fair instance of the growing solidarity of labor is afforded by an unimportant recent strike in San Francisco. The restaurant cooks and waiters were completely unorganized, working at any and all hours for whatever wages they could get. A representative of the American Federation of Labor went among them and organized them. Within a few weeks nearly two thousand men were enrolled, and they had five thousand dollars on deposit. Then they put in their demand for increased wages and shorter hours. Forthwith their employers organized. The demand was denied, and the Cooks' and Waiters' Union walked out. All organized employers stood back of the restaurant owners, in sympathy with them and willing to aid them if they dared. And at the back of the Cooks' and Waiters' Union stood the organized labor of the city, 40,000 strong. If a business man was caught patronizing an "unfair" restaurant, he was boycotted; if a union man was caught, he was fined heavily by his union or expelled. The oyster companies and the slaughter houses made an attempt to refuse to sell oysters and meat to union restaurants. The Butchers and Meat Cutters, and the Teamsters, in retaliation, refused to work for or to deliver to non-union restaurants. Upon this the oyster companies and slaughter houses acknowledged themselves beaten and peace reigned. But the Restaurant Bakers in non-union places were ordered out, and the Bakery Wagon Drivers declined to deliver to unfair houses. Every American Federation of Labor union in the city was prepared to strike, and waited only the word. And behind all, a handful of men, known as the Labor Council, directed the fight. One by one, blow upon blow, they were able if they deemed it necessary to call out the unions--the Laundry Workers, who do the washing; the Hackmen, who haul men to and from restaurants; the Butchers, Meat Cutters, and Teamsters; and the Milkers, Milk Drivers, and Chicken Pickers; and after that, in pure sympathy, the Retail Clerks, the Horse Shoers, the Gas and Electrical Fixture Hangers, the Metal Roofers, the Blacksmiths, the Blacksmiths' Helpers, the Stablemen, the Machinists, the Brewers, the Coast Seamen, the Varnishers and Polishers, the Confectioners, the Upholsterers, the Paper Hangers and Fresco Painters, the Drug Clerks, the Fitters and Helpers, the Metal Workers, the Boiler Makers and Iron Ship Builders, the Assistant Undertakers, the Carriage and Wagon Workers, and so on down the lengthy list of organizations. For, over all these trades, over all these thousands of men, is the Labor Council. When it speaks its voice is heard, and when it orders it is obeyed. But it, in turn, is dominated by the National Labor Council, with which it is constantly in touch. In this wholly unimportant little local strike it is of interest to note the stands taken by the different sides. The legal representative and official mouthpiece of the Employers' Association said: "This organization is formed for defensive purposes, and it may be driven to take offensive steps, and if so, will be strong enough to follow them up. Labor cannot be allowed to dictate to capital and say how business shall be conducted. There is no objection to the formation of unions and trades councils, but membership must not be compulsory. It is repugnant to the American idea of liberty and cannot be tolerated." On the other hand, the president of the Team Drivers' Union said: "The employers of labor in this city are generally against the trade-union movement and there seems to be a concerted effort on their part to check the progress of organized labor. Such action as has been taken by them in sympathy with the present labor troubles may, if continued, lead to a serious conflict, the outcome of which might be most calamitous for the business and industrial interests of San Francisco." And the secretary of the United Brewery Workmen: "I regard a sympathetic strike as the last weapon which organized labor should use in its defence. When, however, associations of employers band together to defeat organized labor, or one of its branches, then we should not and will not hesitate ourselves to employ the same instrument in retaliation." Thus, in a little corner of the world, is exemplified the growing solidarity of labor. The organization of labor has not only kept pace with the organization of industry, but it has gained upon it. In one winter, in the anthracite coal region, $160,000,000 in mines and $600,000,000 in transportation and distribution consolidated its ownership and control. And at once, arrayed as solidly on the other side, were the 150,000 anthracite miners. The bituminous mines, however, were not consolidated; yet the 250,000 men employed therein were already combined. And not only that, but they were also combined with the anthracite miners, these 400,000 men being under the control and direction of one supreme labor council. And in this and the other great councils are to be found captains of labor of splendid abilities, who, in understanding of economic and industrial conditions, are undeniably the equals of their opponents, the captains of industry. The United States is honeycombed with labor organizations. And the big federations which these go to compose aggregate millions of members, and in their various branches handle millions of dollars yearly. And not only this; for the international brotherhoods and unions are forming, and moneys for the aid of strikers pass back and forth across the seas. The Machinists, in their demand for a nine-hour day, affected 500,000 men in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In England the membership of working-class organizations is approximated by Keir Hardie at 2,500,000, with reserve funds of $18,000,000. There the cooperative movement has a membership of 1,500,000, and every year turns over in distribution more than $100,000,000. In France, one-eighth of the whole working class is unionized. In Belgium the unions are very rich and powerful, and so able to defy the masters that many of the smaller manufacturers, unable to resist, "are removing their works to other countries where the workmen's organizations are not so potential." And in all other countries, according to the stage of their economic and political development, like figures obtain. And Europe, today, confesses that her greatest social problem is the labor problem, and that it is the one most closely engrossing the attention of her statesmen. The organization of labor is one of the chief acknowledged factors in the retrogression of British trade. The workers have become class conscious as never before. The wrong of one is the wrong of all. They have come to realize, in a short-sighted way, that their masters' interests are not their interests. The harder they work, they believe, the more wealth they create for their masters. Further, the more work they do in one day, the fewer men will be needed to do the work. So the unions place a day's stint upon their members, beyond which they are not permitted to go. In "A Study of Trade Unionism," by Benjamin Taylor in the "Nineteenth Century" of April, 1898, are furnished some interesting corroborations. The facts here set forth were collected by the Executive Board of the Employers' Federation, the documentary proofs of which are in the hands of the secretaries. In a certain firm the union workmen made eight ammunition boxes a day. Nor could they be persuaded into making more. A young Swiss, who could not speak English, was set to work, and in the first day he made fifty boxes. In the same firm the skilled union hands filed up the outside handles of one machine-gun a day. That was their stint. No one was known ever to do more. A non-union filer came into the shop and did twelve a day. A Manchester firm found that to plane a large bed-casting took union workmen one hundred and ninety hours, and non-union workmen one hundred and thirty-five hours. In another instance a man, resigning from his union, day by day did double the amount of work he had done formerly. And to cap it all, an English gentleman, going out to look at a wall being put up for him by union bricklayers, found one of their number with his right arm strapped to his body, doing all the work with his left arm--forsooth, because he was such an energetic fellow that otherwise he would involuntarily lay more bricks than his union permitted. All England resounds to the cry, "Wake up, England!" But the sulky giant is not stirred. "Let England's trade go to pot," he says; "what have I to lose?" And England is powerless. The capacity of her workmen is represented by 1, in comparison with the 2.25 capacity of the American workman. And because of the solidarity of labor and the destructiveness of strikes, British capitalists dare not even strive to emulate the enterprise of American capitalists. So England watches trade slipping through her fingers and wails unavailingly. As a correspondent writes: "The enormous power of the trade unions hangs, a sullen cloud, over the whole industrial world here, affecting men and masters alike." The political movement known as Socialism is, perhaps, even less realized by the general public. The great strides it has taken and the portentous front it today exhibits are not comprehended; and, fastened though it is in every land, it is given little space by the capitalistic press. For all its plea and passion and warmth, it wells upward like a great, cold tidal wave, irresistible, inexorable, ingulfing present-day society level by level. By its own preachment it is inexorable. Just as societies have sprung into existence, fulfilled their function, and passed away, it claims, just as surely is present society hastening on to its dissolution. This is a transition period--and destined to be a very short one. Barely a century old, capitalism is ripening so rapidly that it can never live to see a second birthday. There is no hope for it, the Socialists say. It is doomed. The cardinal tenet of Socialism is that forbidding doctrine, the materialistic conception of history. Men are not the masters of their souls. They are the puppets of great, blind forces. The lives they live and the deaths they die are compulsory. All social codes are but the reflexes of existing economic conditions, plus certain survivals of past economic conditions. The institutions men build they are compelled to build. Economic laws determine at any given time what these institutions shall be, how long they shall operate, and by what they shall be replaced. And so, through the economic process, the Socialist preaches the ripening of the capitalistic society and the coming of the new cooperative society. The second great tenet of Socialism, itself a phase of the materialistic conception of history, is the class struggle. In the social struggle for existence, men are forced into classes. "The history of all society thus far is the history of class strife." In existing society the capitalist class exploits the working class, the proletariat. The interests of the exploiter are not the interests of the exploited. "Profits are legitimate," says the one. "Profits are unpaid wages," replies the other, when he has become conscious of his class, "therefore profits are robbery." The capitalist enforces his profits because he is the legal owner of all the means of production. He is the legal owner because he controls the political machinery of society. The Socialist sets to work to capture the political machinery, so that he may make illegal the capitalist's ownership of the means of production, and make legal his own ownership of the means of production. And it is this struggle, between these two classes, upon which the world has at last entered. Scientific Socialism is very young. Only yesterday it was in swaddling clothes. But today it is a vigorous young giant, well braced to battle for what it wants, and knowing precisely what it wants. It holds its international conventions, where world-policies are formulated by the representatives of millions of Socialists. In little Belgium there are three-quarters of a million of men who work for the cause; in Germany, 3,000,000; Austria, between 1895 and 1897, raised her socialist vote from 90,000 to 750,000. France in 1871 had a whole generation of Socialists wiped out; yet in 1885 there were 30,000, and in 1898, 1,000,000. Ere the last Spaniard had evacuated Cuba, Socialist groups were forming. And from far Japan, in these first days of the twentieth century, writes one Tomoyoshi Murai: "The interest of our people on Socialism has been greatly awakened these days, especially among our laboring people on one hand and young students' circle on the other, as much as we can draw an earnest and enthusiastic audience and fill our hall, which holds two thousand. . . . It is gratifying to say that we have a number of fine and well-trained public orators among our leaders of Socialism in Japan. The first speaker tonight is Mr. Kiyoshi Kawakami, editor of one of our city (Tokyo) dailies, a strong, independent, and decidedly socialistic paper, circulated far and wide. Mr. Kawakami is a scholar as well as a popular writer. He is going to speak tonight on the subject, 'The Essence of Socialism--the Fundamental Principles.' The next speaker is Professor Iso Abe, president of our association, whose subject of address is, 'Socialism and the Existing Social System.' The third speaker is Mr. Naoe Kinosita, the editor of another strong journal of the city. He speaks on the subject, 'How to Realize the Socialist Ideals and Plans.' Next is Mr. Shigeyoshi Sugiyama, a graduate of Hartford Theological Seminary and an advocate of Social Christianity, who is to speak on 'Socialism and Municipal Problems.' And the last speaker is the editor of the 'Labor World,' the foremost leader of the labor-union movement in our country, Mr. Sen Katayama, who speaks on the subject, 'The Outlook of Socialism in Europe and America.' These addresses are going to be published in book form and to be distributed among our people to enlighten their minds on the subject." And in the struggle for the political machinery of society, Socialism is no longer confined to mere propaganda. Italy, Austria, Belgium, England, have Socialist members in their national bodies. Out of the one hundred and thirty-two members of the London County Council, ninety-one are denounced by the conservative element as Socialists. The Emperor of Germany grows anxious and angry at the increasing numbers which are returned to the Reichstag. In France, many of the large cities, such as Marseilles, are in the hands of the Socialists. A large body of them is in the Chamber of Deputies, and Millerand, Socialist, sits in the cabinet. Of him M. Leroy-Beaulieu says with horror: "M. Millerand is the open enemy of private property, private capital, the resolute advocate of the socialization of production . . . a constant incitement to violence . . . a collectivist, avowed and militant, taking part in the government, dominating the departments of commerce and industry, preparing all the laws and presiding at the passage of all measures which should be submitted to merchants and tradesmen." In the United States there are already Socialist mayors of towns and members of State legislatures, a vast literature, and single Socialist papers with subscription lists running up into the hundreds of thousands. In 1896, 36,000 votes were cast for the Socialist candidate for President; in 1900, nearly 200,000; in 1904, 450,000. And the United States, young as it is, is ripening rapidly, and the Socialists claim, according to the materialistic conception of history, that the United States will be the first country in the world wherein the toilers will capture the political machinery and expropriate the bourgeoisie. * * * * * But the Socialist and labor movements have recently entered upon a new phase. There has been a remarkable change in attitude on both sides. For a long time the labor unions refrained from going in for political action. On the other hand, the Socialists claimed that without political action labor was powerless. And because of this there was much ill feeling between them, even open hostilities, and no concerted action. But now the Socialists grant that the labor movement has held up wages and decreased the hours of labor, and the labor unions find that political action is necessary. Today both parties have drawn closely together in the common fight. In the United States this friendly feeling grows. The Socialist papers espouse the cause of labor, and the unions have opened their ears once more to the wiles of the Socialists. They are all leavened with Socialist workmen, "boring from within," and many of their leaders have already succumbed. In England, where class consciousness is more developed, the name "Unionism" has been replaced by "The New Unionism," the main object of which is "to capture existing social structures in the interests of the wage-earners." There the Socialist, the trade-union, and other working-class organizations are beginning to cooperate in securing the return of representatives to the House of Commons. And in France, where the city councils and mayors of Marseilles and Monteaules-Mines are Socialistic, thousands of francs of municipal money were voted for the aid of the unions in the recent great strikes. For centuries the world has been preparing for the coming of the common man. And the period of preparation virtually past, labor, conscious of itself and its desires, has begun a definite movement toward solidarity. It believes the time is not far distant when the historian will speak not only of the dark ages of feudalism, but of the dark ages of capitalism. And labor sincerely believes itself justified in this by the terrible indictment it brings against capitalistic society. In the face of its enormous wealth, capitalistic society forfeits its right to existence when it permits widespread, bestial poverty. The philosophy of the survival of the fittest does not soothe the class-conscious worker when he learns through his class literature that among the Italian pants-finishers of Chicago {9} the average weekly wage is $1.31, and the average number of weeks employed in the year is 27.85. Likewise when he reads: {10} "Every room in these reeking tenements houses a family or two. In one room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recovering from her confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. Here live a widow and her six children, two of whom are ill with scarlet fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters, from twenty-nine years of age downward, live, eat, and sleep together." And likewise, when he reads: {11} "When one man, fifty years old, who has worked all his life, is compelled to beg a little money to bury his dead baby, and another man, fifty years old, can give ten million dollars to enable his daughter to live in luxury and bolster up a decaying foreign aristocracy, do you see nothing amiss?" And on the other hand, the class-conscious worker reads the statistics of the wealthy classes, knows what their incomes are, and how they get them. True, down all the past he has known his own material misery and the material comfort of the dominant classes, and often has this knowledge led him to intemperate acts and unwise rebellion. But today, and for the first time, because both society and he have evolved, he is beginning to see a possible way out. His ears are opening to the propaganda of Socialism, the passionate gospel of the dispossessed. But it does not inculcate a turning back. The way through is the way out, he understands, and with this in mind he draws up the programme. It is quite simple, this programme. Everything is moving in his direction, toward the day when he will take charge. The trust? Ah, no. Unlike the trembling middle-class man and the small capitalist, he sees nothing at which to be frightened. He likes the trust. He exults in the trust, for it is largely doing the task for him. It socializes production; this done, there remains nothing for him to do but socialize distribution, and all is accomplished. The trust? "It organizes industry on an enormous, labor-saving scale, and abolishes childish, wasteful competition." It is a gigantic object lesson, and it preaches his political economy far more potently than he can preach it. He points to the trust, laughing scornfully in the face of the orthodox economists. "You told me this thing could not be," {12} he thunders. "Behold, the thing is!" He sees competition in the realm of production passing away. When the captains of industry have thoroughly organized production, and got everything running smoothly, it will be very easy for him to eliminate the profits by stepping in and having the thing run for himself. And the captain of industry, if he be good, may be given the privilege of continuing the management on a fair salary. The sixty millions of dividends which the Standard Oil Company annually declares will be distributed among the workers. The same with the great United States Steel Corporation. The president of that corporation knows his business. Very good. Let him become Secretary of the Department of Iron and Steel of the United States. But, since the chief executive of a nation of seventy-odd millions works for $50,000 a year, the Secretary of the Department of Iron and Steel must expect to have his salary cut accordingly. And not only will the workers take to themselves the profits of national and municipal monopolies, but also the immense revenues which the dominant classes today draw from rents, and mines, and factories, and all manner of enterprises. * * * * * All this would seem very like a dream, even to the worker, if it were not for the fact that like things have been done before. He points triumphantly to the aristocrat of the eighteenth century, who fought, legislated, governed, and dominated society, but who was shorn of power and displaced by the rising bourgeoisie. Ay, the thing was done, he holds. And it shall be done again, but this time it is the proletariat who does the shearing. Sociology has taught him that m-i-g-h-t spells "right." Every society has been ruled by classes, and the classes have ruled by sheer strength, and have been overthrown by sheer strength. The bourgeoisie, because it was the stronger, dragged down the nobility of the sword; and the proletariat, because it is the strongest of all, can and will drag down the bourgeoisie. And in that day, for better or worse, the common man becomes the master--for better, he believes. It is his intention to make the sum of human happiness far greater. No man shall work for a bare living wage, which is degradation. Every man shall have work to do, and shall be paid exceedingly well for doing it. There shall be no slum classes, no beggars. Nor shall there be hundreds of thousands of men and women condemned, for economic reasons, to lives of celibacy or sexual infertility. Every man shall be able to marry, to live in healthy, comfortable quarters, and to have all he wants to eat as many times a day as he wishes. There shall no longer be a life-and-death struggle for food and shelter. The old heartless law of development shall be annulled. All of which is very good and very fine. And when these things have come to pass, what then? Of old, by virtue of their weakness and inefficiency in the struggle for food and shelter, the race was purged of its weak and inefficient members. But this will no longer obtain. Under the new order the weak and the progeny of the weak will have a chance for survival equal to that of the strong and the progeny of the strong. This being so, the premium upon strength will have been withdrawn, and on the face of it the average strength of each generation, instead of continuing to rise, will begin to decline. When the common man's day shall have arrived, the new social institutions of that day will prevent the weeding out of weakness and inefficiency. All, the weak and the strong, will have an equal chance for procreation. And the progeny of all, of the weak as well as the strong, will have an equal chance for survival. This being so, and if no new effective law of development be put into operation, then progress must cease. And not only progress, for deterioration would at once set in. It is a pregnant problem. What will be the nature of this new and most necessary law of development? Can the common man pause long enough from his undermining labors to answer? Since he is bent upon dragging down the bourgeoisie and reconstructing society, can he so reconstruct that a premium, in some unguessed way or other, will still be laid upon the strong and efficient so that the human type will continue to develop? Can the common man, or the uncommon men who are allied with him, devise such a law? Or have they already devised one? And if so, what is it? HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST It is quite fair to say that I became a Socialist in a fashion somewhat similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians--it was hammered into me. Not only was I not looking for Socialism at the time of my conversion, but I was fighting it. I was very young and callow, did not know much of anything, and though I had never even heard of a school called "Individualism," I sang the paean of the strong with all my heart. This was because I was strong myself. By strong I mean that I had good health and hard muscles, both of which possessions are easily accounted for. I had lived my childhood on California ranches, my boyhood hustling newspapers on the streets of a healthy Western city, and my youth on the ozone-laden waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. I loved life in the open, and I toiled in the open, at the hardest kinds of work. Learning no trade, but drifting along from job to job, I looked on the world and called it good, every bit of it. Let me repeat, this optimism was because I was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor weaknesses, never turned down by the boss because I did not look fit, able always to get a job at shovelling coal, sailorizing, or manual labor of some sort. And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my own at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. It was very natural. I was a winner. Wherefore I called the game, as I saw it played, or thought I saw it played, a very proper game for MEN. To be a MAN was to write man in large capitals on my heart. To adventure like a man, and fight like a man, and do a man's work (even for a boy's pay)--these were things that reached right in and gripped hold of me as no other thing could. And I looked ahead into long vistas of a hazy and interminable future, into which, playing what I conceived to be MAN'S game, I should continue to travel with unfailing health, without accidents, and with muscles ever vigorous. As I say, this future was interminable. I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche's _blond-beasts_, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength. As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed, I must confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely felt that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to real hard, and could work just as well. Accidents? Well, they represented FATE, also spelled out in capitals, and there was no getting around FATE. Napoleon had had an accident at Waterloo, but that did not dampen my desire to be another and later Napoleon. Further, the optimism bred of a stomach which could digest scrap iron and a body which flourished on hardships did not permit me to consider accidents as even remotely related to my glorious personality. I hope I have made it clear that I was proud to be one of Nature's strong-armed noblemen. The dignity of labor was to me the most impressive thing in the world. Without having read Carlyle, or Kipling, I formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you. It is almost inconceivable to me as I look back upon it. I was as faithful a wage slave as ever capitalist exploited. To shirk or malinger on the man who paid me my wages was a sin, first, against myself, and second, against him. I considered it a crime second only to treason and just about as bad. In short, my joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I read the bourgeois papers, listened to the bourgeois preachers, and shouted at the sonorous platitudes of the bourgeois politicians. And I doubt not, if other events had not changed my career, that I should have evolved into a professional strike-breaker, (one of President Eliot's American heroes), and had my head and my earning power irrevocably smashed by a club in the hands of some militant trades-unionist. Just about this time, returning from a seven months' voyage before the mast, and just turned eighteen, I took it into my head to go tramping. On rods and blind baggages I fought my way from the open West where men bucked big and the job hunted the man, to the congested labor centres of the East, where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth. And on this new _blond-beast_ adventure I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different angle. I had dropped down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the "submerged tenth," and I was startled to discover the way in which that submerged tenth was recruited. I found there all sorts of men, many of whom had once been as good as myself and just as _blond-beast_; sailor-men, soldier-men, labor-men, all wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and hardship and accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many old horses. I battered on the drag and slammed back gates with them, or shivered with them in box cars and city parks, listening the while to life-histories which began under auspices as fair as mine, with digestions and bodies equal to and better than mine, and which ended there before my eyes in the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit. And as I listened my brain began to work. The woman of the streets and the man of the gutter drew very close to me. I saw the picture of the Social Pit as vividly as though it were a concrete thing, and at the bottom of the Pit I saw them, myself above them, not far, and hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat. And I confess a terror seized me. What when my strength failed? when I should be unable to work shoulder to shoulder with the strong men who were as yet babes unborn? And there and then I swore a great oath. It ran something like this: _All my days I have worked hard with my body_, _and according to the number of days I have worked_, _by just that much am I nearer the bottom of the Pit_. _I shall climb out of the Pit_, _but not by the muscles of my body shall I climb out_. _I shall do no more hard work_, _and may God strike me dead if I do another day's hard work with my body more than I absolutely have to do_. And I have been busy ever since running away from hard work. Incidentally, while tramping some ten thousand miles through the United States and Canada, I strayed into Niagara Falls, was nabbed by a fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty, sentenced out of hand to thirty days' imprisonment for having no fixed abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed and chained to a bunch of men similarly circumstanced, carted down country to Buffalo, registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had my head clipped and my budding mustache shaved, was dressed in convict stripes, compulsorily vaccinated by a medical student who practised on such as we, made to march the lock-step, and put to work under the eyes of guards armed with Winchester rifles--all for adventuring in _blond-beastly_ fashion. Concerning further details deponent sayeth not, though he may hint that some of his plethoric national patriotism simmered down and leaked out of the bottom of his soul somewhere--at least, since that experience he finds that he cares more for men and women and little children than for imaginary geographical lines. * * * * * To return to my conversion. I think it is apparent that my rampant individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and something else as effectively hammered in. But, just as I had been an individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without knowing it, withal, an unscientific one. I had been reborn, but not renamed, and I was running around to find out what manner of thing I was. I ran back to California and opened the books. I do not remember which ones I opened first. It is an unimportant detail anyway. I was already It, whatever It was, and by aid of the books I discovered that It was a Socialist. Since that day I have opened many books, but no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom. FOOTNOTES: {1} "From 43 to 52 per cent of all applicants need work rather than relief."--Report of the Charity Organization Society of New York City. {2} Mr. Leiter, who owns a coal mine at the town of Zeigler, Illinois, in an interview printed in the Chicago Record-Herald of December 6, 1904, said: "When I go into the market to purchase labor, I propose to retain just as much freedom as does a purchaser in any other kind of a market. . . . There is no difficulty whatever in obtaining labor, _for the country is full of unemployed men_." {3} "Despondent and weary with vain attempts to struggle against an unsympathetic world, two old men were brought before Police Judge McHugh this afternoon to see whether some means could not be provided for their support, at least until springtime. "George Westlake was the first one to receive the consideration of the court. Westlake is seventy-two years old. A charge of habitual drunkenness was placed against him, and he was sentenced to a term in the county jail, though it is more than probable that he was never under the influence of intoxicating liquor in his life. The act on the part of the authorities was one of kindness for him, as in the county jail he will be provided with a good place to sleep and plenty to eat. "Joe Coat, aged sixty-nine years, will serve ninety days in the county jail for much the same reason as Westlake. He states that, if given a chance to do so, he will go out to a wood-camp and cut timber during the winter, but the police authorities realize that he could not long survive such a task."--From the Butte (Montana) Miner, December 7th, 1904. "'I end my life because I have reached the age limit, and there is no place for me in this world. Please notify my wife, No. 222 West 129th Street, New York.' Having summed up the cause of his despondency in this final message, James Hollander, fifty-six years old, shot himself through the left temple, in his room at the Stafford Hotel today."--New York Herald. {4} In the San Francisco Examiner of November 16, 1904, there is an account of the use of fire-hose to drive away three hundred men who wanted work at unloading a vessel in the harbor. So anxious were the men to get the two or three hours' job that they made a veritable mob and had to be driven off. {5} "It was no uncommon thing in these sweatshops for men to sit bent over a sewing-machine continuously from eleven to fifteen hours a day in July weather, operating a sewing-machine by foot-power, and often so driven that they could not stop for lunch. The seasonal character of the work meant demoralizing toil for a few months in the year, and a not less demoralizing idleness for the remainder of the time. Consumption, the plague of the tenements and the especial plague of the garment industry, carried off many of these workers; poor nutrition and exhaustion, many more."--From McClure's Magazine. {6} The Social Unrest. Macmillan Company. {7} "Our Benevolent Feudalism." By W. J. Ghent. The Macmillan Company. {8} "The Social Unrest." By John Graham Brooks. The Macmillan Company. {9} From figures presented by Miss Nellie Mason Auten in the American Journal of Sociology, and copied extensively by the trade-union and Socialist press. {10} "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London." {11} An item from the Social Democratic Herald. Hundreds of these items, culled from current happenings, are published weekly in the papers of the workers. {12} Karl Marx, the great Socialist, worked out the trust development forty years ago, for which he was laughed at by the orthodox economists. 
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22651	----	at http://www.eBookForge.net THE UNSOLVED RIDDLE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE BY STEPHEN LEACOCK =B. A., Ph. D., Litt. D., F. R. S. C.= _Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal_ Author of "Essays and Literary Studies," Etc. NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY: MCMXX BY STEPHEN LEACOCK FRENZIED FICTION FURTHER FOOLISHNESS BEHIND THE BEYOND NONSENSE NOVELS LITERARY LAPSES SUNSHINE SKETCHES ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH ESSAYS AND LITERARY STUDIES MOONBEAMS FROM THE LARGER LUNACY THE HOHENZOLLERNS IN AMERICA Copyright, 1920, By John Lane Company _CONTENTS_ CHAPTER PAGE I. The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour 9 II. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness 33 III. The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty 48 IV. Work and Wages 66 V. The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist 88 VI. How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward 103 VII. What Is Possible and What Is Not 124 THE UNSOLVED RIDDLEOF SOCIAL JUSTICE _I.--The Troubled Outlook of the Present Hour_ THESE are troubled times. As the echoes of the war die away the sound of a new conflict rises on our ears. All the world is filled with industrial unrest. Strike follows upon strike. A world that has known five years of fighting has lost its taste for the honest drudgery of work. Cincinnatus will not back to his plow, or, at the best, stands sullenly between his plow-handles arguing for a higher wage. The wheels of industry are threatening to stop. The laborer will not work because the pay is too low and the hours are too long. The producer cannot employ him because the wage is too high, and the hours are too short. If the high wage is paid and the short hours are granted, then the price of the thing made, so it seems, rises higher still. Even the high wages will not buy it. The process apparently moves in a circle with no cessation to it. The increased wages seem only to aggravate the increasing prices. Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetually for more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper credit in the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer based on the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats upon the mere atmosphere of expectation. But the sheer quantity of the inflated currency and false money forces prices higher still. The familiar landmarks of wages, salaries and prices are being obliterated. The "scrap of paper" with which the war began stays with us as its legacy. It lies upon the industrial landscape like snow, covering up, as best it may, the bare poverty of a world desolated by war. Under such circumstances national finance seems turned into a delirium. Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thought extravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fully computed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. But the debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or is it poverty? The world seems filled with money and short of goods, while even in this very scarcity a new luxury has broken out. The capitalist rides in his ten thousand dollar motor car. The seven-dollar-a-day artisan plays merrily on his gramophone in the broad daylight of his afternoon that is saved, like all else, by being "borrowed" from the morning. He calls the capitalist a "profiteer." The capitalist retorts with calling him a "Bolshevik." Worse portents appear. Over the rim of the Russian horizon are seen the fierce eyes and the unshorn face of the real and undoubted Bolshevik, waving his red flag. Vast areas of what was a fertile populated world are overwhelmed in chaos. Over Russia there lies a great darkness, spreading ominously westward into Central Europe. The criminal sits among his corpses. He feeds upon the wreck of a civilization that was. The infection spreads. All over the world the just claims of organized labor are intermingled with the underground conspiracy of social revolution. The public mind is confused. Something approaching to a social panic appears. To some minds the demand for law and order overwhelms all other thoughts. To others the fierce desire for social justice obliterates all fear of a general catastrophe. They push nearer and nearer to the brink of the abyss. The warning cry of "back" is challenged by the eager shout of "forward!" The older methods of social progress are abandoned as too slow. The older weapons of social defense are thrown aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion is powerless. It limps in the wake of the popular movement. The "state", as we knew it, threatens to dissolve into labor unions, conventions, boards of conciliation, and conferences. Society shaken to its base, hurls itself into the industrial suicide of the general strike, refusing to feed itself, denying its own wants. This is a time such as there never was before. It represents a vast social transformation in which there is at stake, and may be lost, all that has been gained in the slow centuries of material progress and in which there may be achieved some part of all that has been dreamed in the age-long passion for social justice. For the time being, the constituted governments of the world survive as best they may and accomplish such things as they can, planless, or planning at best only for the day. Sufficient, and more than sufficient, for the day is the evil thereof. Never then was there a moment in which there was greater need for sane and serious thought. It is necessary to consider from the ground up the social organization in which we live and the means whereby it may be altered and expanded to meet the needs of the time to come. We must do this or perish. If we do not mend the machine, there are forces moving in the world that will break it. The blind Samson of labor will seize upon the pillars of society and bring them down in a common destruction. * * * * * Few persons can attain to adult life without being profoundly impressed by the appalling inequalities of our human lot. Riches and poverty jostle one another upon our streets. The tattered outcast dozes on his bench while the chariot of the wealthy is drawn by. The palace is the neighbor of the slum. We are, in modern life, so used to this that we no longer see it. Inequality begins from the very cradle. Some are born into an easy and sheltered affluence. Others are the children of mean and sordid want. For some the long toil of life begins in the very bloom time of childhood and ends only when the broken and exhausted body sinks into a penurious old age. For others life is but a foolish leisure with mock activities and mimic avocations to mask its uselessness. And as the circumstances vary so too does the native endowment of the body and the mind. Some born in poverty rise to wealth. An inborn energy and capacity bid defiance to the ill-will of fate. Others sink. The careless hand lets fall the cradle gift of wealth. Thus all about us is the moving and shifting spectacle of riches and poverty, side by side, inextricable. The human mind, lost in a maze of inequalities that it cannot explain and evils that it cannot, singly, remedy, must adapt itself as best it can. An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price at which we live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal relief is the mere drop that any one of us alone can cast into the vast ocean of human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we too perish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of our lighted houses against the indigent and the hungry. What else can we do? If we shelter _one_ what is that? And if we try to shelter all, we are ourselves shelterless. But the contrast thus presented is one that has acquired a new meaning in the age in which we live. The poverty of earlier days was the outcome of the insufficiency of human labor to meet the primal needs of human kind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about a century and a half old--the age of machinery and power. Our common reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is there to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed their leaders, and their names are forgotten. But written thus our history has obscured the greatest fact that ever came into it--the colossal change that separates our little era of a century and a half from all the preceding history of mankind--separates it so completely that a great gulf lies between, across which comparison can scarcely pass, and on the other side of which a new world begins. It has been the custom of our history to use the phrase the "new world" to mark the discoveries of Columbus and the treasure-hunt of a Cortes or a Pizarro. But what of that? The America that they annexed to Europe was merely a new domain added to a world already old. The "new world" was really found in the wonder-years of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mankind really entered upon it when the sudden progress of liberated science bound the fierce energy of expanding stream and drew the eager lightning from the cloud. Here began indeed, in the drab surroundings of the workshop, in the silent mystery of the laboratory, the magic of the new age. But we do not commonly realize the vastness of the change. Much of our life and much of our thought still belongs to the old world. Our education is still largely framed on the old pattern. And our views of poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are still largely conditioned by it. In the old world, poverty seemed, and poverty was, the natural and inevitable lot of the greater portion of mankind. It was difficult, with the mean appliances of the time, to wring subsistence from the reluctant earth. For the simplest necessaries and comforts of life all, or nearly all, must work hard. Many must perish for want of them. Poverty was inevitable and perpetual. The poor must look to the brightness of a future world for the consolation that they were denied in this. Seen thus poverty became rather a blessing than a curse, or at least a dispensation prescribing the proper lot of man. Life itself was but a preparation and a trial--a threshing floor where, under the "tribulation" of want, the wheat was beaten from the straw. Of this older view much still survives, and much that is ennobling. Nor is there any need to say goodby to it. Even if poverty were gone, the flail could still beat hard enough upon the grain and chaff of humanity. But turn to consider the magnitude of the change that has come about with the era of machinery and the indescribable increase which it has brought to man's power over his environment. There is no need to recite here in detail the marvelous record of mechanical progress that constituted the "industrial revolution" of the eighteenth century. The utilization of coal for the smelting of iron ore; the invention of machinery that could spin and weave; the application of the undreamed energy of steam as a motive force, the building of canals and the making of stone roads--these proved but the beginnings. Each stage of invention called for a further advance. The quickening of one part of the process necessitated the "speeding up" of all the others. It placed a premium--a reward already in sight--upon the next advance. Mechanical spinning called forth the power loom. The increase in production called for new means of transport. The improvement of transport still further swelled the volume of production. The steamboat of 1809 and the steam locomotive of 1830 were the direct result of what had gone before. Most important of all, the movement had become a conscious one. Invention was no longer the fortuitous result of a happy chance. Mechanical progress, the continual increase of power and the continual surplus of product became an essential part of the environment, and an unconscious element in the thought and outlook of the civilized world. No wonder that the first aspect of the age of machinery was one of triumph. Man had vanquished nature. The elemental forces of wind and fire, of rushing water and driving storm before which the savage had cowered low for shelter, these had become his servants. The forest that had blocked his path became his field. The desert blossomed as his garden. The aspect of industrial life altered. The domestic industry of the cottage and the individual labor of the artisan gave place to the factory with its regiment of workers and its steam-driven machinery. The economic isolation of the single worker, of the village, even of the district and the nation, was lost in the general cohesion in which the whole industrial world merged into one. The life of the individual changed accordingly. In the old world his little sphere was allotted to him and there he stayed. His village was his horizon. The son of the weaver wove and the smith reared his children to his trade. Each did his duty, or was adjured to do it, in the "state of life to which it had pleased God to call him." Migration to distant occupations or to foreign lands was but for the adventurous few. The ne'er-do-well blew, like seed before the wind, to distant places, but mankind at large stayed at home. Here and there exceptional industry or extraordinary capacity raised the artisan to wealth and turned the "man" into the "master." But for the most part even industry and endowment were powerless against the inertia of custom and the dead-weight of environment. The universal ignorance of the working class broke down the aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious Miltons were buried in country churchyards. In the new world all this changed. The individual became but a shifting atom in the vast complex, moving from place to place, from occupation to occupation and from gradation to gradation of material fortune. The process went further and further. The machine penetrated everywhere, thrusting aside with its gigantic arm the feeble efforts of handicraft. It laid its hold upon agriculture, sowing and reaping the grain and transporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth century drew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made commonplace by achievements of the era of electricity. All this is familiar enough. The record of the age of machinery is known to all. But the strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed within its organization, is realized by but few. It offers, to those who see it aright, the most perplexing industrial paradox ever presented in the history of mankind. With all our wealth, we are still poor. After a century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still conquers us. And more than this. There are many senses in which the machine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilized humanity, the working part of it, worse off instead of better. The nature of our work has changed. No man now makes anything. He makes only a part of something, feeding and tending a machine that moves with relentless monotony in the routine of which both the machine and its tender are only a fractional part. For the great majority of the workers, the interest of work as such is gone. It is a task done consciously for a wage, one eye upon the clock. The brave independence of the keeper of the little shop contrasts favorably with the mock dignity of a floor walker in an "establishment." The varied craftsmanship of the artisan had in it something of the creative element that was the parent motive of sustained industry. The dull routine of the factory hand in a cotton mill has gone. The life of a pioneer settler in America two hundred years ago, penurious and dangerous as it was, stands out brightly beside the dull and meaningless toil of his descendant. The picture must not be drawn in colors too sinister. In the dullest work and in the meanest lives in the new world to-day there are elements that were lacking in the work of the old world. The universal spread of elementary education, the universal access to the printed page, and the universal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one's children, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism of to-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivity of the older world. Only a false mediævalism can paint the past in colors superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims the mountains with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into the soft glory of retrospect. Misled by these, the sentimentalist may often sigh for an age that in a nearer view would be seen filled with cruelty and suffering. But even when we have made every allowance for the all too human tendency to soften down the past, it remains true that in many senses the processes of industry for the worker have lost in attractiveness and power of absorption of the mind during the very period when they have gained so enormously in effectiveness and in power of production. The essential contrast lies between the vastly increased power of production and its apparent inability to satisfy for all humanity the most elementary human wants; between the immeasurable saving of labor effected by machinery and the brute fact of the continuance of hard-driven, unceasing toil. Of the extent of this increased power of production we can only speak in general terms. No one, as far as I am aware, has yet essayed to measure it. Nor have we any form of calculus or computation that can easily be applied. If we wish to compare the gross total of production effected to-day with that accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the means, the basis of calculation, is lacking. Vast numbers of the things produced now were not then in existence. A great part of our production of to-day culminates not in productive goods, but in services, as in forms of motion, or in ability to talk across a distance. It is true that statistics that deal with the world's production of cotton, or of oil, or of iron and steel present stupendous results. But even these do not go far enough. For the basic raw materials are worked into finer and finer forms to supply new "wants" as they are called, and to represent a vast quantity of "satisfactions" not existing before. Nor is the money calculus of any avail. Comparison by prices breaks down entirely. A bushel of wheat stands about where it stood before and could be calculated. But the computation, let us say, in price-values of the Sunday newspapers produced in one week in New York or the annual output of photographic apparatus, would defy comparison. Of the enormous increase in the gross total of human goods there is no doubt. We have only to look about us to see it. The endless miles of railways, the vast apparatus of the factories, the soaring structures of the cities bear easy witness to it. Yet it would be difficult indeed to compute by what factor the effectiveness of human labor working with machinery has been increased. But suppose we say, since one figure is as good as another, that it has been increased a hundred times. This calculation must be well within the facts and can be used as merely a more concrete way of saying that the power of production has been vastly increased. During the period of this increase, the numbers of mankind in the industrial countries have perhaps been multiplied by three to one. This again is inexact, since there are no precise figures of population that cover the period. But all that is meant is that the increase in one case is, quite obviously, colossal, and in the other case is evidently not very much. Here then is the paradox. If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times better off. But it is not. Or else, as the other possible alternative, the working hours of the world should have been cut down to about one in thirty of what they were before. But they are not. How, then, are we to explain this extraordinary discrepancy between human power and resulting human happiness? The more we look at our mechanism of production the more perplexing it seems. Suppose an observer were to look down from the cold distance of the moon upon the seething ant-hill of human labor presented on the surface of our globe; and suppose that such an observer knew nothing of our system of individual property, of money payments and wages and contracts, but viewed our labor as merely that of a mass of animated beings trying to supply their wants. The spectacle to his eyes would be strange indeed. Mankind viewed in the mass would be seen to produce a certain amount of absolutely necessary things, such as food, and then to stop. In spite of the fact that there was not food enough to go round, and that large numbers must die of starvation or perish slowly from under-nutrition, the production of food would stop at some point a good deal short of universal satisfaction. So, too, with the production of clothing, shelter and other necessary things; never enough would seem to be produced, and this apparently not by accident or miscalculation, but as if some peculiar social law were at work adjusting production to the point where there is just not enough, and leaving it there. The countless millions of workers would be seen to turn their untired energies and their all-powerful machinery away from the production of necessary things to the making of mere comforts; and from these, again, while still stopping short of a general satisfaction, to the making of luxuries and superfluities. The wheels would never stop. The activity would never tire. Mankind, mad with the energy of activity, would be seen to pursue the fleeing phantom of insatiable desire. Thus among the huge mass of accumulated commodities the simplest wants would go unsatisfied. Half-fed men would dig for diamonds, and men sheltered by a crazy roof erect the marble walls of palaces. The observer might well remain perplexed at the pathetic discord between human work and human wants. Something, he would feel assured, must be at fault either with the social instincts of man or with the social order under which he lives. And herein lies the supreme problem that faces us in this opening century. The period of five years of war has shown it to us in a clearer light than fifty years of peace. War is destruction--the annihilation of human life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor, the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful to making what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven million lives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneath the sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive labor to the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day and night at making the weapons of destruction. One might well have thought that such a gigantic misdirection of human energy would have brought the industrial world to a standstill within a year. So people did think. So thought a great number, perhaps the greater number, of the financiers and economists and industrial leaders trained in the world in which we used to live. The expectation was unfounded. Great as is the destruction of war, not even five years of it have broken the productive machine. And the reason is now plain enough. Peace, also--or peace under the old conditions of industry--is infinitely wasteful of human energy. Not more than one adult worker in ten--so at least it might with confidence be estimated--is employed on necessary things. The other nine perform superfluous services. War turns them from making the glittering superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. But while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with its dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace. These I propose in the succeeding chapters to examine. But it might be well before doing so to lay stress upon the fact that while admitting all the shortcomings and the injustices of the régime under which we have lived, I am not one of those who are able to see a short and single remedy. Many people when presented with the argument above, would settle it at once with the word "socialism." Here, they say, is the immediate and natural remedy. I confess at the outset, and shall develop later, that I cannot view it so. Socialism is a mere beautiful dream, possible only for the angels. The attempt to establish it would hurl us over the abyss. Our present lot is sad, but the frying pan is at least better than the fire. _II.--Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness_ "ALL men," wrote Thomas Jefferson in framing the Declaration of Independence, "have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The words are more than a felicitous phrase. They express even more than the creed of a nation. They embody in themselves the uppermost thought of the era that was dawning when they were written. They stand for the same view of society which, in that very year of 1776, Adam Smith put before the world in his immortal "Wealth of Nations" as the "System of Natural Liberty." In this system mankind placed its hopes for over half a century and under it the industrial civilization of the age of machinery rose to the plenitude of its power. In the preceding chapter an examination has been made of the purely mechanical side of the era of machine production. It has been shown that the age of machinery has been in a certain sense one of triumph, of the triumphant conquest of nature, but in another sense one of perplexing failure. The new forces controlled by mankind have been powerless as yet to remove want and destitution, hard work and social discontent. In the midst of accumulated wealth social justice seems as far away as ever. It remains now to discuss the intellectual development of the modern age of machinery and the way in which it has moulded the thoughts and the outlook of mankind. Few men think for themselves. The thoughts of most of us are little more than imitations and adaptations of the ideas of stronger minds. The influence of environment conditions, if it does not control, the mind of man. So it comes about that every age or generation has its dominant and uppermost thoughts, its peculiar way of looking at things and its peculiar basis of opinion on which its collective action and its social regulations rest. All this is largely unconscious. The average citizen of three generations ago was probably not aware that he was an extreme individualist. The average citizen of to-day is not conscious of the fact that he has ceased to be one. The man of three generations ago had certain ideas which he held to be axiomatic, such as that his house was his castle, and that property was property and that what was his was his. But these were to him things so obvious that he could not conceive any reasonable person doubting them. So, too, with the man of to-day. He has come to believe in such things as old age pensions and national insurance. He submits to bachelor taxes and he pays for the education of other people's children; he speculates much on the limits of inheritance, and he even meditates profound alterations in the right of property in land. His house is no longer his castle. He has taken down its fences, and "boulevarded" its grounds till it merges into those of his neighbors. Indeed he probably does not live in a house at all, but in a mere "apartment" or subdivision of a house which he shares with a multiplicity of people. Nor does he any longer draw water from his own well or go to bed by the light of his own candle: for such services as these his life is so mixed up with "franchises" and "public utilities" and other things unheard of by his own great-grandfather, that it is hopelessly intertangled with that of his fellow citizens. In fine, there is little left but his own conscience into which he can withdraw. Such a man is well aware that times have changed since his great-grandfather's day. But he is not aware of the profound extent to which his own opinions have been affected by the changing times. He is no longer an individualist. He has become by brute force of circumstances a sort of collectivist, puzzled only as to how much of a collectivist to be. Individualism of the extreme type is, therefore, long since out of date. To attack it is merely to kick a dead dog. But the essential problem of to-day is to know how far we are to depart from its principles. There are those who tell us--and they number many millions--that we must abandon them entirely. Industrial society, they say, must be reorganized from top to bottom; private industry must cease. All must work for the state; only in a socialist commonwealth can social justice be found. There are others, of whom the present writer is one, who see in such a programme nothing but disaster: yet who consider that the individualist principle of "every man for himself" while it makes for national wealth and accumulated power, favors overmuch the few at the expense of the many, puts an over-great premium upon capacity, assigns too harsh a punishment for easy indolence, and, what is worse, exposes the individual human being too cruelly to the mere accidents of birth and fortune. Under such a system, in short, to those who have is given and from those who have not is taken away even that which they have. There are others again who still view individualism just as the vast majority of our great-grandfathers viewed it, as a system hard but just: as awarding to every man the fruit of his own labor and the punishment of his own idleness, and as visiting, in accordance with the stern but necessary ordination of our existence, the sins of the father upon the child. The proper starting point, then, for all discussion of the social problem is the consideration of the individualist theory of industrial society. This grew up, as all the world knows, along with the era of machinery itself. It had its counterpart on the political side in the rise of representative democratic government. Machinery, industrial liberty, political democracy--these three things represent the basis of the progress of the nineteenth century. The chief exposition of the system is found in the work of the classical economists--Adam Smith and his followers of half a century--who created the modern science of political economy. Beginning as controversialists anxious to overset a particular system of trade regulation, they ended by becoming the exponents of a new social order. Modified and amended as their system is in its practical application, it still largely conditions our outlook to-day. It is to this system that we must turn. The general outline of the classical theory of political economy is so clear and so simple that it can be presented within the briefest compass. It began with certain postulates, or assumptions, to a great extent unconscious, of the conditions to which it applied. It assumed the existence of the state and of contract. It took for granted the existence of individual property, in consumption goods, in capital goods, and, with a certain hesitation, in land. The last assumption was not perhaps without misgivings: Adam Smith was disposed to look askance at landlords as men who gathered where they had not sown. John Stuart Mill, as is well known, was more and more inclined, with advancing reflection, to question the sanctity of landed property as the basis of social institutions. But for the most part property, contract and the coercive state were fundamental assumptions with the classicists. With this there went, on the psychological side, the further assumption of a general selfishness or self-seeking as the principal motive of the individual in the economic sphere. Oddly enough this assumption--the most warrantable of the lot--was the earliest to fall under disrepute. The plain assertion that every man looks out for himself (or at best for himself and his immediate family) touches the tender conscience of humanity. It is an unpalatable truth. None the less it is the most nearly true of all the broad generalizations that can be attempted in regard to mankind. The essential problem then of the classicists was to ask what would happen if an industrial community, possessed of the modern control over machinery and power, were allowed to follow the promptings of "enlightened selfishness" in an environment based upon free contract and the right of property in land and goods. The answer was of the most cheering description. The result would be a progressive amelioration of society, increasing in proportion to the completeness with which the fundamental principles involved were allowed to act, and tending ultimately towards something like a social millennium or perfection of human society. One easily recalls the almost reverent attitude of Adam Smith towards this system of industrial liberty which he exalted into a kind of natural theology: and the way in which Mill, a deist but not a Christian, was able to fit the whole apparatus of individual liberty into its place in an ordered universe. The world "runs of itself," said the economist. We have only to leave it alone. And the maxim of _laissez faire_ became the last word of social wisdom. The argument of the classicists ran thus. If there is everywhere complete economic freedom, then there will ensue in consequence a régime of social justice. If every man is allowed to buy and sell goods, labor and property, just as suits his own interest, then the prices and wages that result are either in the exact measure of social justice or, at least, are perpetually moving towards it. The price of any commodity at any moment is, it is true, a "market price," the resultant of the demand and the supply; but behind this operates continually the inexorable law of the cost of production. Sooner or later every price must represent the actual cost of producing the commodity concerned, or, at least, must oscillate now above and now below that point which it is always endeavoring to meet. For if temporary circumstances force the price well above the cost of producing the article in question, then the large profits to be made induce a greater and greater production. The increased volume of the supply thus produced inevitably forces down the price till it sinks to the point of cost. If circumstances (such, for example, as miscalculation and an over-great supply) depress the price below the point of cost, then the discouragement of further production presently shortens the supply and brings the price up again. Price is thus like an oscillating pendulum seeking its point of rest, or like the waves of the sea rising and falling about its level. By this same mechanism the quantity and direction of production, argued the economists, respond automatically to the needs of humanity, or, at least, to the "effective demand," which the classicist mistook for the same thing. Just as much wheat or bricks or diamonds would be produced as the world called for; to produce too much of any one thing was to violate a natural law; the falling price and the resulting temporary loss sternly rebuked the producer. In the same way the technical form and mechanism of production were presumed to respond to an automatic stimulus. Inventions and improved processes met their own reward. Labor, so it was argued, was perpetually being saved by the constant introduction of new uses of machinery. By a parity of reasoning, the shares received by all the participants and claimants in the general process of production were seen to be regulated in accordance with natural law. Interest on capital was treated merely as a particular case under the general theory of price. It was the purchase price needed to call forth the "saving" (a form, so to speak, of production) which brought the capital into the market. The "profits" of the employer represented the necessary price paid by society for his services, just enough and not more than enough to keep him and his fellows in operative activity, and always tending under the happy operation of competition to fall to the minimum consistent with social progress. Rent, the share of the land-owner, offered to the classicist a rather peculiar case. There was here a physical basis of surplus over cost. But, granted the operation of the factors and forces concerned, rent emerged as a differential payment to the fortunate owner of the soil. It did not in any way affect prices or wages, which were rendered neither greater nor less thereby. The full implication of the rent doctrine and its relation to social justice remained obscured to the eye of the classical economist; the fixed conviction that what a man owns is his own created a mist through which the light could not pass. Wages, finally, were but a further case of value. There was a demand for labor, represented by the capital waiting to remunerate it, and a supply of labor represented by the existing and increasing working class. Hence wages, like all other shares and factors, corresponded, so it was argued, to social justice. Whether wages were high or low, whether hours were long or short, at least the laborer like everybody else "got what was coming to him." All possibility of a general increase of wages depended on the relation of available capital to the numbers of the working men. Thus the system as applied to society at large could be summed up in the consoling doctrine that every man got what he was worth, and was worth what he got; that industry and energy brought their own reward; that national wealth and individual welfare were one and the same; that all that was needed for social progress was hard work, more machinery, more saving of labor and a prudent limitation of the numbers of the population. The application of such a system to legislation and public policy was obvious. It carried with it the principle of _laissez-faire_. The doctrine of international free trade, albeit the most conspicuous of its applications, was but one case under the general law. It taught that the mere organization of labor was powerless to raise wages; that strikes were of no avail, or could at best put a shilling into the pocket of one artisan by taking it out of that of another; that wages and prices could not be regulated by law; that poverty was to a large extent a biological phenomenon representing the fierce struggle of germinating life against the environment that throttles part of it. The poor were like the fringe of grass that fades or dies where it meets the sand of the desert. There could be no social remedy for poverty except the almost impossible remedy of the limitation of life itself. Failing this the economist could wash his hands of the poor. These are the days of relative judgments and the classical economy, like all else, must be viewed in the light of time and circumstance. With all its fallacies, or rather its shortcomings, it served a magnificent purpose. It opened a road never before trodden from social slavery towards social freedom, from the mediæval autocratic régime of fixed caste and hereditary status towards a régime of equal social justice. In this sense the classical economy was but the fruition, or rather represented the final consciousness of a process that had been going on for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of the universal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The end of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the long pilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the economists guided us in the right turning. If we turn again in a new direction, it will at any rate not be in the direction of a return to autocratic mediævalism. But when all is said in favor of its historic usefulness, the failures and the fallacies of natural liberty have now become so manifest that the system is destined in the coming era to be revised from top to bottom. It is to these failures and fallacies that attention will be drawn in the next chapter. _III.--The Failures and Fallacies of Natural Liberty_ THE rewards and punishments of the economic world are singularly unequal. One man earns as much in a week or even in a day as another does in a year. This man by hard, manual labor makes only enough to pay for humble shelter and plain food. This other by what seems a congenial activity, fascinating as a game of chess, acquires uncounted millions. A third stands idle in the market place asking in vain for work. A fourth lives upon rent, dozing in his chair, and neither toils nor spins. A fifth by the sheer hazard of a lucky "deal" acquires a fortune without work at all. A sixth, scorning to work, earns nothing and gets nothing; in him survives a primitive dislike of labor not yet fully "evoluted out;" he slips through the meshes of civilization to become a "tramp," cadges his food where he can, suns his tattered rags when it is warm and shivers when it is cold, migrating with the birds and reappearing with the flowers of spring. Yet all are free. This is the distinguishing mark of them as children of our era. They may work or stop. There is no compulsion from without. No man is a slave. Each has his "natural liberty," and each in his degree, great or small, receives his allotted reward. But is the allotment correct and the reward proportioned by his efforts? Is it fair or unfair, and does it stand for the true measure of social justice? This is the profound problem of the twentieth century. The economists and the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century were in no doubt about this question. It was their firm conviction that the system under which we live was, in its broad outline, a system of even justice. They held it true that every man under free competition and individual liberty is awarded just what he is worth and is worth exactly what he gets: that the reason why a plain laborer is paid only two or three dollars a day is because he only "produces" two or three dollars a day: and that why a skilled engineer is paid ten times as much is because he "produces" ten times as much. His work is "worth" ten times that of the plain laborer. By the same reasoning the salary of a corporation president who receives fifty thousand dollars a year merely reflects the fact that the man produces--earns--brings in to the corporation that amount or even more. The big salary corresponds to the big efficiency. And there is much in the common experience of life and the common conduct of business that seems to support this view. It is undoubtedly true if we look at any little portion of business activity taken as a fragment by itself. On the most purely selfish grounds I may find that it "pays" to hire an expert at a hundred dollars a day, and might find that it spelled ruin to attempt to raise the wages of my workingmen beyond four dollars a day. Everybody knows that in any particular business at any particular place and time with prices at any particular point, there is a wage that can be paid and a wage that can not. And everybody, or nearly everybody, bases on these obvious facts a series of entirely erroneous conclusions. Because we cannot change the part we are apt to think we cannot change the whole. Because one brick in the wall is immovable, we forget that the wall itself might be rebuilt. The single employer rightly knows that there is a wage higher than he can pay and hours shorter than he can grant. But are the limits that frame him in, real and necessary limits, resulting from the very nature of things, or are they mere products of particular circumstances? This, as a piece of pure economics, does not interest the individual employer a particle. It belongs in the same category as the question of the immortality of the soul and other profundities that have nothing to do with business. But to society at large the question is of an infinite importance. Now the older economists taught, and the educated world for about a century believed, that these limitations which hedged the particular employer about were fixed and assigned by natural economic law. They represented, as has been explained, the operation of the system of natural liberty by which every man got what he is worth. And it is quite true that the particular employer can no more break away from these limits than he can jump out of his own skin. He can only violate them at the expense of ceasing to be an economic being at all and degenerating into a philanthropist. But consider for a moment the peculiar nature of the limitations themselves. Every man's limit of what he can pay and what he can take, of how much he can offer and how much he will receive, is based on the similar limitations of other people. They are reciprocal to one another. Why should one factory owner not pay ten dollars a day to his hands? Because the others don't. But suppose they all do? Then the output could not be sold at the present price. But why not sell the produce at a higher price? Because at a higher price the consumer can't afford to buy it. But suppose that the consumer, for the things which he himself makes and sells, or for the work which he performs, receives more? What then? The whole thing begins to have a jigsaw look, like a child's toy rack with wooden soldiers on it, expanding and contracting. One searches in vain for the basis on which the relationship rests. And at the end of the analysis one finds nothing but a mere anarchical play of forces, nothing but a give-and-take resting on relative bargaining strength. Every man gets what he can and gives what he has to. Observe that this is not in the slightest the conclusion of the orthodox economists. Every man, they said, gets what he actually makes, or, by exchange, those things which exactly correspond to it as regards the cost of making them--which have, to use the key-word of the theory, the same value. Let us take a very simple example. If I go fishing with a net which I have myself constructed out of fibers and sticks, and if I catch a fish and if I then roast the fish over a fire which I have made without so much as the intervention of a lucifer match, then it is I and I alone who have "produced" the roast fish. That is plain enough. But what if I catch the fish by using a hired boat and a hired net, or by buying worms as bait from some one who has dug them? Or what if I do not fish at all, but get my roast fish by paying for it a part of the wages I receive for working in a saw mill? Here are a new set of relationships. How much of the fish is "produced" by each of the people concerned? And what part of my wages ought I to pay in return for the part of the fish that I buy? Here opens up, very evidently, a perfect labyrinth of complexity. But it was the labyrinth for which the earlier economist held, so he thought, the thread. No matter how dark the passage, he still clung tight to it. And his thread was his "fundamental equation of value" whereby each thing and everything is sold (or tends to be sold) under free competition for exactly its cost of production. There it was; as simple as A. B. C.; making the cost of everything proportional to the cost of everything else, and in itself natural and just; explaining and justifying the variations of wages and salaries on what seems a stern basis of fact. Here is your selling price as a starting point. Given that, you can see at once the reason for the wages paid and the full measure of the payment. To pay more is impossible. To pay less is to invite a competition that will force the payment of more. Or take, if you like, the wages as the starting point: there you are again,--simplicity itself: the selling price will exactly and nicely correspond to cost. True, a part of the cost concerned will be represented not by wages, but by cost of materials; but these, on analysis, dissolve into past wages. Hence the whole process and its explanation revolves around this simple fundamental equation that selling value equals the cost of production. This was the central part of the economic structure. It was the keystone of the arch. If it holds, all holds. Knock it out and the whole edifice falls into fragments. A technical student of the schools would digress here, to the great confusion of the reader, into a discussion of the controversy in the economic cloister between the rival schools of economists as to whether cost governs value or value governs cost. The point needs no discussion here, but just such fleeting passing mention as may indicate that the writer is well and wearily conversant with it. The fundamental equation of the economist, then, is that the value of everything is proportionate to its cost. It requires no little hardihood to say that this proposition is a fallacy. It lays one open at once, most illogically, to the charge of being a socialist. In sober truth it might as well lay one open to the charge of being an ornithologist. I will not, therefore, say that the proposition that the value of everything equals the cost of production is false. I will say that it is _true_; in fact, that is just as true as that two and two make four: exactly as true as that, but let it be noted most profoundly, _only as true as that_. In other words, it is a truism, mere equation in terms, telling nothing whatever. When I say that two and two make four I find, after deep thought, that I have really said _nothing_, or nothing that was not already said at the moment I defined two and defined four. The new statement that two and two make four adds nothing. So with the majestic equation of the cost of production. It means, as far as social application goes, as far as any moral significance or bearing on social reform and the social outlook goes, _absolutely nothing_. It is not in itself fallacious; how could it be? But all the social inferences drawn from it are absolute, complete and malicious fallacies. Any socialist who says this, is quite right. Where he goes wrong is when he tries to build up as truth a set of inferences more fallacious and more malicious still. But the central economic doctrine of cost can not be shaken by mere denunciation. Let us examine it and see what is the matter with it. We restate the equation. _Under perfectly free competition the value or selling price of everything equals, or is perpetually tending to equal, the cost of its production._ This is the proposition itself, and the inferences derived from it are that there is a "natural price" of everything, and that all "natural prices" are proportionate to cost and to one another; that all wages, apart from temporary fluctuations, are derived from, and limited by, the natural prices paid for the things made: that all payments for the use of capital (interest) are similarly derived and similarly limited; and that consequently the whole economic arrangement, by giving to each person exactly and precisely the fruit of his own labor, conforms exactly to social justice. Now the trouble with the main proposition just quoted is that each side of the equation is used as the measure of the other. In order to show what natural price is, we add up all the wages that have been paid, and declare that to be the cost and then say that the cost governs the price. Then if we are asked why are wages what they are, we turn the argument backward and say that since the selling price is so and so the wages that can be paid out of it only amount to such and such. This explains nothing. It is a mere argument in a circle. It is as if one tried to explain why one blade of a pair of scissors is four inches long by saying that it has to be the same length as the other. This is quite true of either blade if one takes the length of the other for granted, but as applied to the explanation of the length of the scissors it is worse than meaningless. This reasoning may seem to many persons mere casuistry, mere sophistical juggling with words. After all, they say, there is such a thing as relative cost, relative difficulty of making things, a difference which rests upon a physical basis. To make one thing requires a lot of labor and trouble and much skill: to make another thing requires very little labor and no skill out of the common. Here then is your basis of value, obvious and beyond argument. A primitive savage makes a bow and arrow in a day: it takes him a fortnight to make a bark canoe. On that fact rests the exchange value between the two. The relative quantity of labor embodied in each object is the basis of its value. This line of reasoning has a very convincing sound. It appears in nearly every book on economic theory from Adam Smith and Ricardo till to-day. "Labor alone," wrote Smith, "never varying in its own value is above the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared." But the idea that _quantity of labor governs_ value will not stand examination for a moment. What is _quantity_ of labor and how is it measured? As long as we draw our illustrations from primitive life where one man's work is much the same as another's and where all operations are simple, we seem easily able to measure and compare. One day is the same as another and one man about as capable as his fellow. But in the complexity of modern industrial life such a calculation no longer applies: the differences of skill, of native ingenuity, and technical preparation become enormous. The hour's work of a common laborer is not the same thing as the hour's work of a watchmaker mending a watch, or of an engineer directing the building of a bridge, or of an architect drawing a plan. There is no way of reducing these hours to a common basis. We may think, if we like, that the quantity of labor _ought_ to be the basis of value and exchange. Such is always the dream of the socialist. But on a closer view it is shattered like any other dream. For we have, alas, no means of finding out what the quantity of labor is and how it can be measured. We cannot measure it in terms of time. We have no calculus for comparing relative amounts of skill and energy. We can not measure it by the amount of its contribution to the product, for that is the very matter that we want to discover. What the economist does is to slip out of the difficulty altogether by begging the whole question. He deliberately measures the quantity of labor _by what is paid for it_. Skilled labor is worth, let us say, three times as much as common labor; and brain work, speaking broadly, is worth several times as much again. Hence by adding up all the wages and salaries paid we get something that seems to indicate the total quantity of labor, measured not simply in time, but with an allowance for skill and technical competency. By describing this allowance as a coefficient we can give our statement a false air of mathematical certainty and so muddle up the essential question that the truth is lost from sight like a pea under a thimble. Now you see it and now you don't. The thing is, in fact, a mere piece of intellectual conjuring. The conjurer has slipped the phrase, "quantity of labor," up his sleeve, and when it reappears it has turned into "the expense of hiring labor." This is a quite different thing. But as both conceptions are related somehow to the idea of cost, the substitution is never discovered. On this false basis a vast structure is erected. All prices, provided that competition is free, are made to appear as the necessary result of natural forces. They are "natural" or "normal" prices. All wages are explained, and low wages are exonerated, on what seems to be an undeniable ground of fact. They are what they are. You may wish them otherwise, but they are not. As a philanthropist, you may feel sorry that a humble laborer should work through a long day to receive two dollars, but as an economist you console yourself with the reflection that that is all he produces. You may at times, as a sentimentalist, wonder whether the vast sums drawn as interest on capital are consistent with social fairness; but if it is shown that interest is simply the "natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" of the capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similar qualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous "unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land who toils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult of justification. But after all, land is only one particular case of ownership under the one and the same system. The rent for which the owner can lease it, emerges simply as a consequence of the existing state of wages and prices. High rent, says the economist, does not make big prices: it merely follows as a consequence or result of them. Dear bread is not caused by the high rents paid by tenant farmers for the land: the train of cause and effect runs in the contrary direction. And the selling price of land is merely a consequence of its rental value, a simple case of capitalization of annual return into a present sum. City land, though it looks different from farm land, is seen in the light of this same analysis, to earn its rent in just the same way. The high rent of a Broadway store, says the economist, does not add a single cent to the price of the things sold in it. It is because prices are what they are that the rent is and can be paid. Hence on examination the same canon of social justice that covers and explains prices, wages, and interest applies with perfect propriety to rent. Or finally, to take the strongest case of all, one may, as a citizen, feel apprehension at times at the colossal fortune of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller. For it does seem passing strange that one human being should control as property the mass of coin, goods, houses, factories, land and mines, represented by a billion dollars; stranger still that at his death he should write upon a piece of paper his commands as to what his surviving fellow creatures are to do with it. But if it can be shown to be true that Mr. Rockefeller "made" his fortune in the same sense that a man makes a log house by felling trees and putting them one upon another, then the fortune belongs to Mr. Rockefeller in the same way as the log house belongs to the pioneer. And if the social inferences that are drawn from the theory of natural liberty and natural value are correct, the millionaire and the landlord, the plutocrat and the pioneer, the wage earner and the capitalist, have each all the right to do what he will with his own. For every man in this just world gets what is coming to him. He gets what he is worth, and he is worth what he gets. But if one knocks out the keystone of the arch in the form of a proposition that natural value conforms to the cost of production, then the whole edifice collapses and must be set up again, upon another plan and on another foundation, stone by stone. _IV.--Work and Wages_ WAGES and prices, then, if the argument recited in the preceding chapter of this series holds good, do not under free competition tend towards social justice. It is not true that every man gets what he produces. It is not true that enormous salaries represent enormous productive services and that humble wages correspond to a humble contribution to the welfare of society. Prices, wages, salaries, interest, rent and profits do not, if left to themselves, follow the simple law of natural justice. To think so is an idle dream, the dream of the quietist who may slumber too long and be roused to a rude awakening or perish, perhaps, in his sleep. His dream is not so dangerous as the contrasted dream of the socialist, now threatening to walk abroad in his sleep, but both in their degree are dreams and nothing more. The real truth is that prices and wages and all the various payments from hand to hand in industrial society, are the outcome of a complex of competing forces that are not based upon justice but upon "economic strength." To elucidate this it is necessary to plunge into the jungle of pure economic theory. The way is arduous. There are no flowers upon the path. And out of this thicket, alas, no two people ever emerge hand in hand in concord. Yet it is a path that must be traversed. Let us take, then, as a beginning the very simplest case of the making of a price. It is the one which is sometimes called in books on economics the case of an unique monopoly. Suppose that I offer for sale the manuscript of the Pickwick Papers, or Shakespere's skull, or, for the matter of that, the skull of John Smith, what is the sum that I shall receive for it? It is the utmost that any one is willing to give for it. That is all one can say about it. There is no question here of cost or what I paid for the article or of anything else except the amount of the willingness to pay on the part of the highest bidder. It would be possible, indeed, for a bidder to take the article from me by force. But this we presume to be prevented by the law, and for this reason we referred above not to the physical strength, but to the "economic strength" of the parties to a bargain. By this is meant the relation that arises out of the condition of the supply and the demand, the willingness or eagerness, or the sheer necessity, of the buyers and the sellers. People may offer much because the thing to be acquired is an absolute necessity without which they perish; a drowning man would sell all that he had for a life belt. Or they may offer much through the sheer abundance of their other possessions. A millionaire might offer more for a life belt as a souvenir than a drowning man could pay for it to save his life. Yet out of any particular conjunction between desires on the one hand and goods or services on the other arises a particular equation of demand and supply, represented by a particular price. All of this, of course, is A. B. C., and I am not aware that anybody doubts it. Now let us make the example a little more elaborate. Suppose that one single person owned all the food supply of a community isolated from the outside world. The price which he could exact would be the full measure of all the possessions of his neighbors up to the point at least where they would commit suicide rather than pay. True, in such a case as this, "economic strength" would probably be broken down by the intrusion of physical violence. But in so far as it held good the price of food would be based upon it. Prices such as are indicated here were dismissed by the earlier economist as mere economic curiosities. John Stuart Mill has something to say about the price of a "music box in the wilds of Lake Superior," which, as he perceived, would not be connected with the expense of producing it, but might be vastly more or perhaps decidedly less. But Mill might have said the same thing about the price of a music box, provided it was properly patented, anywhere at all. For the music box and Shakespere's skull and the corner in wheat are all merely different kinds of examples of the things called a monopoly sale. Now let us change the example a little further. Suppose that the monopolist has for sale not simply a fixed and definite quantity of a certain article, but something which he can produce in larger quantities as desired. At what price will he now sell? If he offers the article at a very high price only a few people will take it: if he lowers the price there will be more and more purchasers. His interest seems divided. He will want to put the price as high as possible so that the profit on each single article (over what it costs him to produce it) will be as great as possible. But he will also want to make as many sales as he possibly can, which will induce him to set the price low enough to bring in new buyers. But, of course, if he puts the price so low that it only covers the cost of making the goods his profit is all gone and the mere multiplicity of sales is no good to him. He must try therefore to find a point of maximum profit where, having in view both the number of sales and the profit over cost on each sale the net profit is at its greatest. This gives us the fundamental law of monopoly price. It is to be noted that under modern conditions of production the cost of manufacture per article decreases to a great extent in proportion as a larger and larger number is produced and thus the widening of the sale lowers the proportionate cost. In any particular case, therefore, it may turn out that the price that suits the monopolist's own interest is quite a low price, one such as to allow for an enormous quantity of sales and a very low cost of manufacture. This, we say, _may_ be the case. But it is not so of necessity. In and of itself the monopoly price corresponds to the monopolist's profit and not to cheapness of sale. The price _may_ be set far above the cost. And now notice the peculiar relation that is set up between the monopolist's production and the satisfaction of human wants. In proportion as the quantity produced is increased the lower must the price be set in order to sell the whole output. If the monopolist insisted on turning out more and more of his goods, the price that people would give would fall until it barely covered the cost, then till it was less than cost, then to a mere fraction of the cost and finally to nothing at all. In other words, if one produces a large enough quantity of anything it becomes worthless. It loses all its value just as soon as there is enough of it to satisfy, and over-satisfy the wants of humanity. Thus if the world produces three and a half billion bushels of wheat it can be sold, let us say, at two dollars a bushel; but if it produced twice as much it might well be found that it would only sell for fifty cents a bushel. The value of the bigger supply as a total would actually be less than that of the smaller. And if the supply were big enough it would be worth, in the economic sense, just nothing at all. This peculiarity is spoken of in economic theory as the paradox of value. It is referred to in the older books either as an economic curiosity or as a mere illustration in extreme terms of the relation of supply to price. Thus in many books the story is related of how the East India Companies used at times deliberately to destroy a large quantity of tea in order that by selling a lesser amount they might reap a larger profit than by selling a greater. But in reality this paradox of value is the most fundamental proposition in economic science. Precisely here is found the key to the operation of the economic society in which we live. The world's production is aimed at producing "values," not in producing plenty. If by some mad access of misdirected industry we produced enough and too much of everything, our whole machinery of buying and selling would break down. This indeed does happen constantly on a small scale in the familiar phenomenon of over-production. But in the organization in which we live over-production tends to check itself at once. If the world's machinery threatens to produce a too great plenty of any particular thing, then it turns itself towards producing something else of which there is not yet enough. This is done quite unconsciously without any philanthropic intent on the part of the individual producer and without any general direction in the way of a social command. The machine does it of itself. When there is _enough_ the wheels slacken and stop. This sounds at first hearing most admirable. But let it be noted that the "_enough_" here in question does not mean enough to satisfy human wants. In fact it means precisely the converse. It means enough _not_ to satisfy them, and to leave the selling price of the things made at the point of profit. Let it be observed also that we have hitherto been speaking as if all things were produced under a monopoly. The objection might at once be raised that with competitive producers the price will also keep falling down towards cost and will not be based upon the point of maximum profit. We shall turn to this objection in a moment. But one or two other points must be considered before doing so. In the first place in following out such an argument as the present in regard to the peculiar shortcomings of the system under which we live, it is necessary again and again to warn the reader against a hasty conclusion to the possibilities of altering and amending it. The socialist reads such criticism as the above with impatient approval. "Very well," he says, "the whole organization is wrong and works badly. Now let us abolish it altogether and make a better one." But in doing so he begs the whole question at issue. The point is, _can_ we make a better one or must we be content with patching up the old one? Take an illustration. Scientists tell us that from the point of view of optics the human eye is a clumsy instrument poorly contrived for its work. A certain great authority once said that if he had made it he would have been ashamed of it. This may be true. But the eye unfortunately is all we have to see by. If we destroy our eyes in the hope of making better ones we may go blind. The best that we can do is to improve our sight by adding a pair of spectacles. So it is with the organization of society. Faulty though it is, it does the work after a certain fashion. We may apply to it with advantage the spectacles of social reform, but what the socialist offers us is total blindness. But of this presently. To return to the argument. Let us consider next what wages the monopolist in the cases described above will have to pay. We take for granted that he will only pay as much as he has to. How much will this be? Clearly enough it will depend altogether on the number of available working men capable of doing the work in question and the situation in which they find themselves. It is again a case of relative "economic strength." The situation may be altogether in favor of the employer or altogether in favor of the men, or may occupy a middle ground. If the men are so numerous that there are more of them than are needed for the work, and if there is no other occupation for them they must accept a starvation wage. If they are so few in number that they can _all_ be employed, and if they are so well organized as to act together, they can in their turn exact any wage up to the point that leaves no profit for the employer himself at all. Indeed for a short time wages might even pass this point, the monopolist employer being willing (for various reasons, all quite obvious) actually to pay more as wages than he gets as return and to carry on business at a loss for the sake of carrying it on at all. Clearly, then, wages, as Adam Smith said, "are the result of a dispute" in which either party must be pushed to the wall. The employer may have to pay so much that there is nothing or practically nothing left for himself, or so little that his workmen can just exist and no more. These are the upward and downward limits of the wages in the cases described. It is therefore obvious that if all the industries in the world were carried on as a series of separate monopolies, there would be exactly the kind of rivalry or competition of forces represented by the consumer insisting on paying as little as possible, the producer charging the most profitable price and paying the lowest wage that he could, and the wage earner demanding the highest wage that he could get. The equilibrium would be an unstable one. It would be constantly displaced and shifted by the movement of all sorts of social forces--by changes of fashion, by abundance or scarcity of crops, by alterations in the technique of industry and by the cohesion or the slackening of the organization of any group of workers. But the balanced forces once displaced would be seen constantly to come to an equilibrium at a new point. All this has been said of industry under monopoly. But it will be seen to apply in its essentials to what we call competitive industry. Here indeed certain new features come in. Not one employer but many produce each kind of article. And, as far as each employer can see by looking at his own horizon, what he does is merely to produce as much as he can sell at a price that pays him. Since all the other employers are doing this, there will be, under competition, a constant tendency to cut the prices down to the lowest that is consistent with what the employer has to pay as wages and interest. This point, which was called by the orthodox economists the "cost," is not in any true and fundamental sense of the words the "cost" at all. It is merely a limit represented by what the other parties to the bargain are able to exact. The whole situation is in a condition of unstable equilibrium in which the conflicting forces represented by the interests of the various parties pull in different directions. The employers in any one line of industry and all their wage earners and salaried assistants have one and the same interest as against the consumer. They want the selling price to be as high as possible. But the employers are against one another as wanting, each of them, to make as many sales as possible, and each and all the employers are against the wage earners in wanting to pay as low wages as possible. If all the employers unite, the situation turns to a monopoly, and the price paid by the consumer is settled on the monopoly basis already described. The employers can then dispute it out with their working men as to how much wages shall be. If the employers are not united, then at each and every moment they are in conflict both with the consumer and with their wage earners. Thus the whole scene of industry represents a vast and unending conflict, a fermentation in which the moving bubbles crowd for space, expanding and breaking one against the other. There is no point of rest. There is no real fixed "cost" acting as a basis. Anything that any one person or group of persons--worker or master, landlord or capitalist--is able to exact owing to the existing conditions of demand or supply, becomes a "cost" from the point of view of all the others. There is nothing in this "cost" which proportions to it the quantity of labor, or of time, or of skill or of any other measure physical or psychological of the effort involved. And there is nothing whatever in it which proportions to it social justice. It is the war of each against all. Its only mitigation is that it is carried on under the set of rules represented by the state and the law. The tendencies involved may be best illustrated by taking one or two extreme or exaggerated examples, not meant as facts but only to make clear the nature of social and industrial forces among which we live. What, for example, will be the absolute maximum to which wages in general could be forced? Conceivably and in the purest and thinnest of theory, they could include the whole product of the labor of society with just such a small fraction left over for the employers, the owners of capital and the owners of land to induce them to continue acting as part of the machine. That is to say, if all the laborers all over the world, to the last one, were united under a single control they could force the other economic classes of society to something approaching a starvation living. In practice this is nonsense. In theory it is an excellent starting point for thought. And how short could the hours of the universal united workers be made? As short as ever they liked: An hour a day: ten minutes, anything they like; but of course with the proviso that the shorter the hours the less the total of things produced to be divided. It is true that up to a certain point shortening the hours of labor actually increases the total product. A ten-hour day, speaking in general terms and leaving out individual exceptions, is probably more productive than a day of twelve. It may very well be that an eight-hour day will prove, presently if not immediately, to be more productive than one of ten. But somewhere the limit is reached and gross production falls. The supply of things in general gets shorter. But note that this itself would not matter much, if somehow and in some way not yet found, the shortening of the production of goods cut out the luxuries and superfluities first. Mankind at large might well trade leisure for luxuries. The shortening of hours with the corresponding changes in the direction of production is really the central problem in social reform. I propose to return to it in the concluding chapter of these papers, but for the present it is only noted in connection with the general scheme of industrial relations. Now let us ask to what extent any particular section or part of industrial society can succeed in forcing up wages or prices as against the others. In pure theory they may do this almost to any extent, provided that the thing concerned is a necessity and is without a substitute and provided that their organization is complete and unbreakable. If all the people concerned in producing coal, masters and men, owners of mines and operators of machinery, could stand out for their price, there is no limit, short of putting all the rest of the world on starvation rations, to what they might get. In practice and in reality a thousand things intervene--the impossibility of such complete unity, the organization of the other parties, the existing of national divisions among industrial society, sentiment, decency, fear. The proposition is only "pure theory." But its use as such is to dispose of any such idea as that there is a natural price of coal or of anything else. The above is true of any article of necessity. It is true though in a less degree of things of luxury. If all the makers of instruments of music, masters and men, capitalists and workers, were banded together in a tight and unbreakable union, then the other economic classes must either face the horrors of a world without pianolas and trombones, or hand over the price demanded. And what is true of coal and music is true all through the whole mechanism of industry. Or take the supreme case of the owners of land. If all of them acted together, with their legal rights added into one, they could order the rest of the world either to get off it or to work at starvation wages. Industrial society is therefore mobile, elastic, standing at any moment in a temporary and unstable equilibrium. But at any particular moment the possibility of a huge and catastrophic shift such as those described is out of the question except at the price of a general collapse. Even a minor dislocation breaks down a certain part of the machinery of society. Particular groups of workers are thrown out of place. There is no other place where they can fit in, or at any rate not immediately. The machine labors heavily. Ominous mutterings are heard. The legal framework of the State and of obedience to the law in which industrial society is set threatens to break asunder. The attempt at social change threatens a social revolution in which the whole elaborate mechanism would burst into fragments. In any social movement, then, change and alteration in a new direction must be balanced against the demands of social stability. Some things are possible and some are not; some are impossible to-day, and possible or easy to-morrow. Others are forever out of the question. But this much at least ought to appear clear if the line of argument indicated above is accepted, namely, that there is no great hope for universal betterment of society by the mere advance of technical industrial progress and by the unaided play of the motive of every man for himself. The enormous increase in the productivity of industrial effort would never of itself have elevated by one inch the lot of the working class. The rise of wages in the nineteenth century and the shortening of hours that went with it was due neither to the advance in mechanical power nor to the advance in diligence and industriousness, nor to the advance, if there was any, in general kindliness. It was due to the organization of labor. Mechanical progress makes higher wages possible. It does not, of itself, advance them by a single farthing. Labor saving machinery does not of itself save the working world a single hour of toil: it only shifts it from one task to another. Against a system of unrestrained individualism, energy, industriousness and honesty might shatter itself in vain. The thing is merely a race in which only one can be first no matter how great the speed of all; a struggle in which one, and not all, can stand upon the shoulders of the others. It is the restriction of individualism by the force of organization and by legislation that has brought to the world whatever social advance has been achieved by the great mass of the people. The present moment is in a sense the wrong time to say this. We no longer live in an age when down-trodden laborers meet by candlelight with the ban of the law upon their meeting. These are the days when "labor" is triumphant, and when it ever threatens in the overweening strength of its own power to break industrial society in pieces in the fierce attempt to do in a day what can only be done in a generation. But truth is truth. And any one who writes of the history of the progress of industrial society owes it to the truth to acknowledge the vast social achievement of organized labor in the past. And what of the future? By what means and in what stages can social progress be further accelerated? This I propose to treat in the succeeding chapters, dealing first with the proposals of the socialists and the revolutionaries, and finally with the prospect for a sane, orderly and continuous social reform. _V.--The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist_ WHO is there that has not turned at times from the fever and fret of the world we live in, from the spectacle of its wasted energy, its wild frenzy of work and its bitter inequality, to the land of dreams, to the pictured vision of the world as it might be? Such a vision has haunted in all ages the brooding mind of mankind; and every age has fashioned for itself the image of a "somewhere" or "nowhere"--a Utopia in which there should be equality and justice for all. The vision itself is an outcome of that divine discontent which raises man above his environment. Every age has had its socialism, its communism, its dream of bread and work for all. But the dream has varied always in the likeness of the thought of the time. In earlier days the dream was not one of social wealth. It was rather a vision of the abnegation of riches, of humble possessions shared in common after the manner of the unrealized ideal of the Christian faith. It remained for the age of machinery and power to bring forth another and a vastly more potent socialism. This was no longer a plan whereby all might be poor together, but a proposal that all should be rich together. The collectivist state advocated by the socialist of to-day has scarcely anything in common with the communism of the middle ages. Modern socialism is the direct outcome of the age of machine production. It takes its first inspiration from glaring contrasts between riches and poverty presented by the modern era, from the strange paradox that has been described above between human power and its failure to satisfy human want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and the factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and city slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new industrial poverty that lay in the shadow behind it. The years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 were in many senses years of unexampled misery. The accumulated burden of the war lay heavy upon Europe. The rise of the new machine power had dislocated the older system. A multitude of landless men clamored for bread and work. Pauperism spread like a plague. Each new invention threw thousands of hand-workers out of employment. The law still branded as conspiracy any united attempt of workingmen to raise wages or to shorten the hours of work. At the very moment when the coming of steam power and the use of modern machinery were piling up industrial fortunes undreamed of before, destitution, pauperism and unemployment seemed more widespread and more ominous than ever. In this rank atmosphere germinated modern socialism. The writings of Marx and Engels and Louis Blanc were inspired by what they saw about them. From its very cradle socialism showed the double aspect which has distinguished it ever since. To the minds of some it was the faith of the insurrectionist, something to be achieved by force; "bourgeois" society must be overthrown by force of arms; if open and fair fighting was not possible against such great odds, it must be blown skyhigh with gunpowder. Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, came to the revolutionary at the very moment when it was most wanted. To the men of violence, socialism was the twin brother of anarchism, born at the same time, advocating the same means and differing only as to the final end. But to others, socialism was from the beginning, as it is to-day, a creed of peace. It advocated the betterment of society not by violence but by persuasion, by peaceful argument and the recognized rule of the majority. It is true that the earlier socialists almost to a man included, in the first passion of their denunciation, things not necessarily within the compass of purely economic reform. As children of misery they cried out against all human institutions. The bond of marriage seemed an accursed thing, the mere slavery of women. The family--the one institution in which the better side of human nature shines with an undimmed light--was to them but an engine of class oppression; the Christian churches merely the parasitic servants of the tyrannous power of a plutocratic state. The whole history of human civilization was denounced as an unredeemed record of the spoliation of the weak by the strong. Even the domain of the philosopher was needlessly invaded and all forms of speculative belief were rudely thrown aside in favor of a wooden materialism as dogmatic as any of the creeds or theories which it proposed to replace. Thus seen, socialism appeared as the very antithesis of law and order, of love and chastity, and of religion itself. It was a tainted creed. There was blood upon its hands and bloody menace in its thoughts. It was a thing to be stamped out, to be torn up by the roots. The very soil in which it grew must be burned out with the flame of avenging justice. Such it still appears to many people to-day. The unspeakable savagery of bolshevism has made good the wildest threats of the partisans of violence and fulfilled the sternest warnings of the conservative. To-day more than ever socialism is in danger of becoming a proscribed creed, its very name under the ban of the law, its literature burned by the hangman and a gag placed upon its mouth. But this is neither right nor wise. Socialism, like every other impassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It will languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion. For it must always be remembered in fairness that the creed of violence has no necessary connection with socialism. In its essential nature socialism is nothing but a proposal for certain kinds of economic reform. A man has just as much right to declare himself a socialist as he has to call himself a Seventh Day Adventist or a Prohibitionist, or a Perpetual Motionist. It is, or should be, open to him to convert others to his way of thinking. It is only time to restrain him when he proposes to convert others by means of a shotgun or by dynamite, and by forcible interference with their own rights. When he does this he ceases to be a socialist pure and simple and becomes a criminal as well. The law can deal with him as such. But with socialism itself the law, in a free country, should have no kind of quarrel. For in the whole program of peaceful socialism there is nothing wrong at all except one thing. Apart from this it is a high and ennobling ideal truly fitted for a community of saints. And the one thing that is wrong with socialism is that it won't work. That is all. It is, as it were, a beautiful machine of which the wheels, dependent upon some unknown and uninvented motive power, refuse to turn. The unknown motive force in this case means a power of altruism, of unselfishness, of willingness to labor for the good of others, such as the human race has never known, nor is ever likely to know. But the worst public policy to pursue in reference to such a machine is to lock it up, to prohibit all examination of it and to allow it to become a hidden mystery, the whispered hope of its martyred advocates. Better far to stand it out into the open daylight, to let all who will inspect it, and to prove even to the simplest that such a contrivance once and for all and for ever cannot be made to run. Let us turn to examine the machine. We may omit here all discussion of the historical progress of socialism and the stages whereby it changed from the creed of a few theorists and revolutionists to being the accepted platform of great political parties, counting its adherents by the million. All of this belongs elsewhere. It suffices here to note that in the process of its rise it has chafed away much of the superfluous growth that clung to it and has become a purely economic doctrine. There is no longer any need to discuss in connection with it the justification of marriage and the family, and the rightness or wrongness of Christianity: no need to decide whether the materialistic theory of history is true or false, since nine socialists out of ten to-day have forgotten, or have never heard, what the materialistic theory of history is: no need to examine whether human history is, or is not, a mere record of class exploitation, since the controversy has long shifted to other grounds. The essential thing to-day is not the past, but the future. The question is, what does the socialist have to say about the conditions under which we live and the means that he advocates for the betterment of them? His case stands thus. He begins his discussion with an indictment of the manifold weaknesses and the obvious injustices of the system under which we live. And in this the socialist is very largely right. He shows that under free individual competition there is a perpetual waste of energy. Competing rivals cover the same field. Even the simplest services are performed with an almost ludicrous waste of energy. In every modern city the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from door to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, each leaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion as haphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, the wasted labors of the milkman with the orderly and systematic performance of the postman, himself a little fragment of socialism. And the milkman, they tell us, is typical of modern industrial society. Competing railways run trains on parallel tracks, with empty cars that might be filled and with vast executive organizations which do ten times over the work that might be done by one. Competing stores needlessly occupy the time of hundreds of thousands of employees in a mixture of idleness and industry. An inconceivable quantity of human effort is spent on advertising, mere shouting and display, as unproductive in the social sense as the beating of a drum. Competition breaks into a dozen inefficient parts the process that might conceivably be carried out, with an infinite saving of effort, by a single guiding hand. The socialist looking thus at the world we live in sees in it nothing but waste and selfishness and inefficiency. He looks so long that a mist comes before his eyes. He loses sight of the supreme fact that after all, in its own poor, clumsy fashion, the machine does work. He loses sight of the possibility of our falling into social chaos. He sees no longer the brink of the abyss beside which the path of progress picks its painful way. He leaps with a shout of exultation over the cliff. And he lands, at least in imagination, in his ideal state, his Utopia. Here the noise and clamor of competitive industry is stilled. We look about us at a peaceful landscape where men and women brightly clothed and abundantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. There is enough for all and more than enough. Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. The children play among the flowers. The youths and maidens are at school. There are no figures here bent with premature toil, no faces dulled and furrowed with a life of hardship. The light of education and culture has shone full on every face and illuminated it into all that it might be. The cheerful hours of easy labor vary but do not destroy the pursuit of pleasure and of recreation. Youth in such a Utopia is a very springtime of hope: adult life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, watching from its shady bench beneath a spreading tree the labors of its children, is but a gentle retrospect from which material care has passed away. It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent colors of a soap bubble. It is the vision of a garden of Eden from which the demon has been banished. And the Demon in question is the Private Ownership of the Means of Production. His name is less romantic than those of the wonted demons of legend and folklore. But it is at least suitable for the matter-of-fact age of machinery which he is supposed to haunt and on which he casts his evil spell. Let him be once exorcised and the ills of humanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest. Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means of production and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as his mediæval predecessors did at the touch of a thimbleful of holy water. This, then, is the socialist's program. Let "the state" take over all the means of production--all the farms, the mines, the factories, the workshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it direct the workers towards their task in accordance with the needs of society. Let each labor for all in the measure of his strength and talent. Let each receive from all in the measure of his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: nothing is to be done twice that need only be done once. All must work and none must be idle: but the amount of work needed under these conditions will be so small, the hours so short, and the effort so slight, that work itself will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil that we know to-day, but a congenial activity pleasant in itself. A thousand times this picture has been presented. The visionary with uplifted eyes, his gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating bubble, has voiced it from a thousand platforms. The earnest youth grinding at the academic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of his studious labor. The impassioned pedant has written it in heavy prose smothering its brightness in the dull web of his own thought. The brilliant imaginative mind has woven it into romance, making its colors brighter still with the sunlight of inspired phantasy. But never, I think, has the picture of socialism at work been so ably and so dexterously presented as in a book that begins to be forgotten now, but which some thirty years ago took the continent by storm. This was the volume in which Mr. Edward Bellamy "looked backward" from his supposed point of vantage in the year 2000 A. D. and saw us as we are and as we shall be. No two plans of a socialist state are ever quite alike. But the scheme of society outlined in "Looking Backward" may be examined as the most attractive and the most consistent outline of a socialist state that has, within the knowledge of the present writer, ever been put forward. It is worth while, in the succeeding chapter to examine it in detail. No better starting point for the criticism of collectivist theories can be found than in a view of the basis on which is supposed to rest the halcyon life of Mr. Bellamy's charming commonwealth. _VI.--How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward_ THE reading public is as wayward and as fickle as a bee among the flowers. It will not long pause anywhere, and it easily leaves each blossom for a better. But like the bee, while impelled by an instinct that makes it search for sugar, it sucks in therewith its solid sustenance. I am not quite certain that the bee does exactly do this; but it is just the kind of thing that the bee is likely to do. And in any case it is precisely the thing which the reading public does. It will not read unless it is tempted by the sugary sweetness of the romantic interest. It must have its hero and its heroine and its course of love that never will run smooth. For information the reader cares nothing. If he absorbs it, it must be by accident, and unawares. He passes over the heavy tomes filled with valuable fact, and settles like the random bee upon the bright flowers of contemporary romance. Hence if the reader is to be ensnared into absorbing something useful, it must be hidden somehow among the flowers. A treatise on religion must be disguised as a love story in which a young clergyman, sworn into holy orders, falls in love with an actress. The facts of history are imparted by a love story centering around the adventures of a hitherto unknown son of Louis the Fourteenth. And a discussion of the relations of labor and capital takes the form of a romance in which the daughter of a multi-millionaire steps voluntarily out of her Fifth Avenue home to work in a steam laundry. Such is the recognized method by which the great unthinking public is taught to think. Slavery was not fully known till Mrs. Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the slow tyranny of the law's delay was taught to the world for ever in the pages of "Bleak House." So it has been with socialism. No single influence ever brought its ideas and its propaganda so forcibly and clearly before the public mind as Mr. Edward Bellamy's brilliant novel, "Looking Backward," published some thirty years ago. The task was arduous. Social and economic theory is heavy to the verge of being indigestible. There is no such thing as a gay book on political economy for reading in a hammock. Yet Mr. Bellamy succeeded. His book is in cold reality nothing but a series of conversations explaining how a socialist commonwealth is supposed to work. Yet he contrives to bring into it a hero and a heroine, and somehow the warm beating of their hearts and the stolen glances in their eyes breathe into the dry dust of economic argument the breath of life. Nor was ever a better presentation made of the essential program of socialism. It is worth while then, as was said in the preceding chapter, to consider Mr. Bellamy's commonwealth as the most typical and the most carefully constructed of all the ready-made socialisms that have been put forward. The mere machinery of the story can be lightly passed over. It is intended simply as the sugar that lures the random bee. The hero, living in Boston in 1887, is supposed to fall asleep in a deep, underground chamber which he has made for himself as a remedy against a harassing insomnia. Unknown to the sleeper the house above his retreat is burned down. He remains in a trance for a hundred and thirteen years and awakes to find himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. Kind hands remove him from his sepulcher. He is revived. He finds himself under the care of a certain learned and genial Dr. Leete, whose house stands on the very site where once the sleeper lived. The beautiful daughter of Dr. Leete looks upon the newcomer from the lost world with eyes in which, to the mind of the sagacious reader, love is seen at once to dawn. In reality she is the great-granddaughter of the fiancée whom the sleeper was to have married in his former life; thus a faint suggestion of the transmigration of souls illuminates their intercourse. Beyond that there is no story and at the end of the book the sleeper, in another dream, is conveniently transported back to 1887 which he can now contrast, in horror, with the ideal world of 2000 A. D. And what was this world? The sleeper's first vision of it was given him by Dr. Leete, who took him to the house top and let him see the Boston of the future. Wide avenues replace the crowded, noisy streets. There are no shops but only here and there among the trees great marble buildings, the emporiums from which the goods are delivered to the purple public. And the goods are delivered indeed! Dr. Leete explains it all with intervals of grateful cigar smoking and of music and promenades with the beautiful Edith, and meals in wonderful communistic restaurants with romantic waiters, who feel themselves, _mirabile dictu_, quite independent. And this is how the commonwealth operates. Everybody works or at least works until the age of forty, so that it may be truly said in these halcyon days everybody works but father. But the work of life does not begin till education ends at the age of twenty-one. After that all the young men and women pass for three years into the general "Industrial Army," much as the young men used to pass into the ranks of conscription. Afterwards each person may select any trade that he likes. But the hours are made longer or shorter according to whether too many or too few young people apply to come in. A gardener works for more hours than a scavenger. Yet all occupations are equally honorable. The wages of all the people are equal; or rather there are no wages at all, as the workers merely receive cards, which entitle them to goods of such and such a quantity at any of the emporiums. The cards are punched out as the goods are used. The goods are all valued according to the amount of time used in their making and each citizen draws out the same total amount. But he may take it out in installments just as he likes, drawing many things one month and few the next. He may even get goods in advance if he has any special need. He may, within a certain time limit, save up his cards, but it must be remembered that the one thing which no card can buy and which no citizens can own is the "means of production." These belong collectively to all. Land, mines, machinery, factories and the whole mechanism of transport, these things are public property managed by the State. Its workers in their use of them are all directed by public authority as to what they shall make and when they shall make it, and how much shall be made. On these terms all share alike; the cripple receives as much as the giant; the worker of exceptional dexterity and energy the same as his slower and less gifted fellow. All the management, the control--and let this be noted, for there is no escape from it either by Mr. Bellamy or by anybody else--is exercised by boards of officials elected by the people. All the complex organization by which production goes on by which the workers are supervised and shifted from trade to trade, by which their requests for a change of work or an extension of credit are heard and judged--all of this is done by the elected "bosses." One lays stress on this not because it is Mr. Bellamy's plan, but because it is, and it _has to be_, the plan of anybody who constructs a socialist commonwealth. Mr. Bellamy has many ingenious arrangements to meet the needs of people who want to be singers or actors or writers,--in other words, who do not want to work. They may sing or act as much as they like, provided that enough other people will hand over enough of their food cards to keep them going. But if no one wants to hear them sing or see them act they may starve,--just as they do now. Here the author harks back unconsciously to his nineteenth century individualism; he need not have done so; other socialist writers would have it that one of the everlasting boards would "sit on" every aspiring actor or author before he was allowed to begin. But we may take it either way. It is not the major point. There is no need to discuss the question of how to deal with the artist under socialism. If the rest of it were all right, no one need worry about the artist. Perhaps he would do better without being remunerated at all. It is doubtful whether the huge commercial premium that greets success to-day does good or harm. But let it pass. It is immaterial to the present matter. One comes back to the essential question of the structure of the commonwealth. Can such a thing, or anything conceived in its likeness, possibly work? The answer is, and must be, absolutely and emphatically no. Let anyone conversant with modern democracy as it is,--not as its founders dreamed of it,--picture to himself the operation of a system whereby anything and everything is controlled by elected officials, from whom there is no escape, outside of whom is no livelihood and to whom all men must bow! Democracy, let us grant it, is the best system of government as yet operative in this world of sin. Beside autocratic kingship it shines with a white light; it is obviously the portal of the future. But we know it now too well to idealize its merits. A century and a half ago when the world was painfully struggling out of the tyranny of autocratic kingship, when English liberalism was in its cradle, when Thomas Jefferson was composing the immortal phrases of the Declaration of Independence and unknown patriots dreamed of freedom in France,--at such an epoch it was but natural that the principle of popular election should be idealized as the sovereign remedy for the political evils of mankind. It was natural and salutary that it should be so. The force of such idealization helped to carry forward the human race to a new milestone on the path of progress. But when it is proposed to entrust to the method of elective control not a part but the whole of the fortunes of humanity, to commit to it not merely the form of government and the necessary maintenance of law, order and public safety, but the whole operation of the production and distribution of the world's goods, the case is altered. The time is ripe then for retrospect over the experience of the nineteenth century and for a realization of what has proved in that experience the peculiar defects of elective democracy. Mr. Bellamy pictures his elected managers,--as every socialist has to do,--as a sagacious and paternal group, free from the interest of self and the play of the baser passions and animated only by the thought of the public good. Gravely they deliberate; wisely and justly they decide. Their gray heads--for Bellamy prefers them old--are bowed in quiet confabulation over the nice adjustment of the national production, over the petition of this or that citizen. The public care sits heavily on their breast. Their own peculiar fortune they have lightly passed by. They do not favor their relations or their friends. They do not count their hours of toil. They do not enumerate their gain. They work, in short, as work the angels. Now let me ask in the name of sanity where are such officials to be found? Here and there, perhaps, one sees in the world of to-day in the stern virtue of an honorable public servant some approximation to such a civic ideal. But how much, too, has been seen of the rule of "cliques" and "interests" and "bosses;" of the election of genial incompetents popular as spendthrifts; of crooked partisans warm to their friends and bitter to their enemies; of administration by a party for a party; and of the insidious poison of commercial greed defiling the wells of public honesty. The unending conflict between business and politics, between the private gain and the public good, has been for two generations the despair of modern democracy. It turns this way and that in its vain effort to escape corruption. It puts its faith now in representative legislatures, and now in appointed boards and commissions; it appeals to the vote of the whole people or it places an almost autocratic power and a supreme responsibility in the hands of a single man. And nowhere has the escape been found. The melancholy lesson is being learned that the path of human progress is arduous and its forward movement slow and that no mere form of government can aid unless it is inspired by a higher public spirit of the individual citizen than we have yet managed to achieve. And of the world of to-day, be it remembered, elective democratic control covers only a part of the field. Under socialism it covers it all. To-day in our haphazard world a man is his own master; often indeed the mastership is but a pitiful thing, little more than being master of his own failure and starvation; often indeed the dead weight of circumstance, the accident of birth, the want of education, may so press him down that his freedom is only a mockery. Let us grant all that. But under socialism freedom is gone. There is nothing but the rule of the elected boss. The worker is commanded to his task and obey he must. If he will not, there is, there can only be, the prison and the scourge, or to be cast out in the wilderness to starve. Consider what it would mean to be under a socialist state. Here for example is a worker who is, who says he is, too ill to work. He begs that he may be set free. The grave official, as Mr. Bellamy sees him, looks at the worker's tongue. "My poor fellow," says he, "you are indeed ill. Go and rest yourself under a shady tree while the others are busy with the harvest." So speaks the ideal official dealing with the ideal citizen in the dream life among the angels. But suppose that the worker, being not an angel but a human being, is but a mere hulking, lazy brute who prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then? How could one face a régime in which the everlasting taskmaster held control? There is nothing like it among us at the present day except within the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and there only, the socialist system is in operation. Who can deny that under such a system the man with the glib tongue and the persuasive manner, the babbling talker and the scheming organizer, would secure all the places of power and profit, while patient merit went to the wall? Or turn from the gray officials to the purple citizens of the soap bubble commonwealth of socialism. All work, we are told, and all receive their remuneration. We must not think of it as money-wages, but, all said and done, an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a card, comes pretty much to the same thing. The wages that the citizens receive must either be equal or not equal. That at least is plain logic. Either everybody gets exactly the same wages irrespective of capability and diligence, or else the wages or salaries or whatever one calls them, are graded, so that one receives much and the other little. Now either of these alternatives spells disaster. If the wages are graded according to capacity, then the grading is done by the everlasting elective officials. They can, and they will, vote themselves and their friends or adherents into the good jobs and the high places. The advancement of a bright and capable young man will depend, not upon what he does, but upon what the elected bosses are pleased to do with him; not upon the strength of his own hands, but upon the strength of the "pull" that he has with the bosses who run the part of the industry that he is in. Unequal wages under socialism would mean a fierce and corrupt scramble for power, office and emolument, beside which the utmost aberrations of Tammany Hall would seem as innocuous as a Sunday School picnic. "But," objects Mr. Bellamy or any other socialist, "you forget. Please remember that under socialism the scramble for wealth is limited; no man can own capital, but only consumption goods. The most that any man may acquire is merely the articles that he wants to consume, not the engines and machinery of production itself. Hence even avarice dwindles and dies, when its wonted food of 'capitalism' is withdrawn." But surely this point of view is the very converse of the teachings of common sense. "Consumption goods" are the very things that we _do_ want. All else is but a means to them. One admits, as per exception, the queer acquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his own sake. Undoubtedly he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of the system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis of individualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present or future, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. Give me the houses and the gardens, the yachts, the motor cars and the champagne and I do not care who owns the gravel crusher and the steam plow. And if under a socialist commonwealth a man can vote to himself or gain by the votes of his adherents, a vast income of consumption goods and leave to his unhappy fellow a narrow minimum of subsistence, then the resulting evil of inequality is worse, far worse than it could even be to-day. Or try, if one will, the other horn of the dilemma. That, too, one will find as ill a resting place as an upright thistle. Let the wages,--as with Mr. Bellamy,--all be equal. The managers then cannot vote themselves large emoluments if they try. But what about the purple citizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their purple garments and loaf? Work? Why should they work, their pay is there "fresh and fresh"? Why should they turn up on time for their task? Why should they not dawdle at their labor sitting upon the fence in endless colloquy while the harvest rots upon the stalk? If among them is one who cares to work with a fever of industry that even socialism cannot calm, let him do it. We, his fellows, will take our time. Our pay is there as certain and as sound as his. Not for us the eager industry and the fond plans for the future,--for the home and competence--that spurred on the strenuous youth of old days,--not for us the earnest planning of the husband and wife thoughtful and anxious for the future of their little ones. Not for us the honest penny saved for a rainy day. Here in the dreamland of socialism there are no rainy days. It is sunshine all the time in this lotus land of the loafer. And for the future, let the "State" provide; for the children's welfare let the "State" take thought; while we live it shall feed us, when we fall ill it shall tend us and when we die it shall bury us. Meantime let us eat, drink and be merry and work as little as we may. Let us sit among the flowers. It is too hot to labor. Let us warm ourselves beside the public stove. It is too cold to work. But what? Such conduct, you say, will not be allowed in the commonwealth. Idleness and slovenly, careless work will be forbidden? Ah! then you must mean that beside the worker will be the overseer with the whip; the time-clock will mark his energy upon its dial; the machine will register his effort; and if he will not work there is lurking for him in the background the shadowed door of the prison. Exactly and logically so. Socialism, in other words, is slavery. But here the socialist and his school interpose at once with an objection. Under the socialist commonwealth, they say, the people will want to work; they will have acquired a new civic spirit; they will work eagerly and cheerfully for the sake of the public good and from their love of the system under which they live. The loafer will be extinct. The sponge and the parasite will have perished. Even crime itself, so the socialist tells us, will diminish to the vanishing point, till there is nothing of it except here and there a sort of pathological survival, an atavism, or a "throwing back" to the forgotten sins of the grandfathers. Here and there, some poor fellow afflicted with this disease may break into my socialistic house and steal my pictures and my wine. Poor chap! Deal with him very gently. He is not wicked. He is ill. This last argument, in a word, begs the whole question. With perfect citizens any government is good. In a population of angels a socialistic commonwealth would work to perfection. But until we have the angels we must keep the commonwealth waiting. Nor is it necessary here to discuss the hundred and one modifications of the socialistic plan. Each and all fail for one and the same reason. The municipal socialist, despairing of the huge collective state, dreams of his little town as an organic unit in which all share alike; the syndicalist in his fancy sees his trade united into a co-operative body in which all are equal; the gradualist, in whose mind lingers the leaven of doubt, frames for himself a hazy vision of a prolonged preparation for the future, of socialism achieved little by little, the citizens being trained as it goes on till they are to reach somehow or somewhere in cloud land the nirvana of the elimination of self; like indeed, they are, to the horse in the ancient fable that was being trained to live without food but died, alas, just as the experiment was succeeding. There is no way out. Socialism is but a dream, a bubble floating in the air. In the light of its opalescent colors we may see many visions of what we might be if we were better than we are, we may learn much that is useful as to what we can be even as we are; but if we mistake the floating bubble for the marble palaces of the city of desire, it will lead us forward in our pursuit till we fall over the edge of the abyss beyond which is chaos. _VII.--What Is Possible and What Is Not_ SOCIALISM, then, will not work, and neither will individualism, or at least the older individualism that we have hitherto made the basis of the social order. Here, therefore, stands humanity, in the middle of its narrow path in sheer perplexity, not knowing which way to turn. On either side is the brink of an abyss. On one hand is the yawning gulf of social catastrophe represented by socialism. On the other, the slower, but no less inevitable disaster that would attend the continuation in its present form of the system under which we have lived. Either way lies destruction; the one swift and immediate as a fall from a great height; the other gradual, but equally dreadful, as the slow strangulation in a morass. Somewhere between the two lies such narrow safety as may be found. The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position that has been reached at the present crisis in the course of human progress. When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism, its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and the bitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, we are inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear to the easy promises of the idealist. But when we turn to the contrasted fallacies of socialism, its obvious impracticality and the dark gulf of social chaos that yawns behind it, we are driven back shuddering to cherish rather the ills we have than fly to others we know not of. Yet out of the whole discussion of the matter some few things begin to merge into the clearness of certain day. It is clear enough on the one hand that we can expect no sudden and complete transformation of the world in which we live. Such a process is impossible. The industrial system is too complex, its roots are too deeply struck and its whole organism of too delicate a growth to permit us to tear it from the soil. Nor is humanity itself fitted for the kind of transformation which fills the dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that has been the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled from the slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. In the long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. It has not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism were opened to-morrow, there are but few fitted to enter. But on the other hand it is equally clear that the doctrine of "every man for himself," as it used to be applied, is done with forever. The time has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; when the listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheeded of his fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want and broken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will end these things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever gripped his property with the iron clasp of legal right relaxes his grasp a little when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. In this respect five years of war have taught us more than a century of peace. It has set in a clear light new forms of social obligation. The war brought with it conscription--not as we used to see it, as the last horror of military tyranny, but as the crowning pride of democracy. An inconceivable revolution in the thought of the English speaking peoples has taken place in respect to it. The obligation of every man, according to his age and circumstance, to take up arms for his country and, if need be, to die for it, is henceforth the recognized basis of progressive democracy. But conscription has its other side. The obligation to die must carry with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen the opportunity of a livelihood. "Unemployment," in the case of the willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women "out of work," looking for occupation and unable to find it. Work must either be found or must be provided by the State itself. Yet it is clear that a policy of state work and state pay for all who are otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties. The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money, for the undertaking of public works of no real utility and for the subsidizing of an army of loafers. But the difficulties, great though they are, are not insuperable. The payment for state labor of this kind can be kept low enough to make it the last resort rather than the ultimate ambition of the worker. Nor need the work be useless. In new countries, especially such as Canada and the United States and Australia, the development of latent natural assets could absorb the labor of generations. There are still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearly enough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essential for such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able to enlist in the service of the commonwealth. But without it we perish. Social betterment must depend at every stage on the force of public spirit and public morality that inspires it. So much for the case of those who are able and willing to work. There remain still the uncounted thousands who by accident or illness, age or infirmity, are unable to maintain themselves. For these people, under the older dispensation, there was nothing but the poorhouse, the jail or starvation by the roadside. The narrow individualism of the nineteenth century refused to recognize the social duty of supporting somebody else's grandmother. Such charity began, and ended, at home. But even with the passing of the nineteenth century an awakened sense of the collective responsibility of society towards its weaker members began to impress itself upon public policy. Old age pension laws and national insurance against illness and accident were already being built into the legislative codes of the democratic countries. The experience of the war has enormously increased this sense of social solidarity. It is clear now that our fortunes are not in our individual keeping. We stand or fall as a nation. And the nation which neglects the aged and infirm, or which leaves a family to be shipwrecked as the result of a single accident to a breadwinner, cannot survive as against a nation in which the welfare of each is regarded as contributory to the safety of all. Even the purest selfishness would dictate a policy of social insurance. There is no need to discuss the particular way in which this policy can best be carried out. It will vary with the circumstances of each community. The action of the municipality, or of the state or province, or of the central government itself may be called into play. But in one form or another, the economic loss involved in illness and infirmity must be shifted from the shoulders of the individual to those of society at large. There was but little realization of this obligation in the nineteenth century. Only in the sensational moments of famine, flood or pestilence was a general social effort called forth. But in the clearer view of the social bond which the war has given us we can see that famine and pestilence are merely exaggerated forms of what is happening every day in our midst. We spoke much during the war of "man power." We suddenly realized that after all the greatness and strength of a nation is made up of the men and women who compose it. Its money, in the narrow sense, is nothing; a set of meaningless chips and counters piled upon a banker's table ready to fall at a touch. Even before the war we had begun to talk eagerly and anxiously of the conservation of national resources, of the need of safeguarding the forests and fisheries and the mines. These are important things. But the war has shown that the most important thing of all is the conservation of men and women. The attitude of the nineteenth century upon this point was little short of insane. The melancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the public mind. Because it was difficult for a poor man to bring up a family, the hasty conclusion was reached that a family ought not to be brought up. But the war has entirely inverted and corrected this point of view. The father and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons to the conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these six sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants," viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the strength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one way to increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easier method of increase could be found in the wholesale import of Austrians, Bulgarians and Czecho-Slovaks. The newer nations boasted proudly of their immigration tables. The fallacy is apparent now. Those who really count in a nation and those who govern its destinies for good or ill are those who are born in it. It is difficult to over-estimate the harm that has been done to public policy by this same Malthusian theory. It has opposed to every proposal of social reform an obstacle that seemed insuperable,--the danger of a rapid overincrease of population that would pauperize the community. Population, it was said, tends always to press upon the heels of subsistence. If the poor are pampered, they will breed fast: the time will come when there will not be food for all and we shall perish in a common destruction. Seen in this light, infant mortality and the cruel wastage of disease were viewed with complacence. It was "Nature's" own process at work. The "unfit," so called, were being winnowed out that only the best might survive. The biological doctrine of evolution was misinterpreted and misapplied to social policy. But in the organic world there is no such thing as the "fit" or the "unfit," in any higher or moral sense. The most hideous forms of life may "survive" and thrust aside the most beautiful. It is only by a confusion of thought that the processes of organic nature which render every foot of fertile ground the scene of unending conflict can be used to explain away the death of children of the slums. The whole theory of survival is only a statement of what is, not of what ought to be. The moment that we introduce the operation of human volition and activity, that, too, becomes one of the factors of "survival." The dog, the cat, and the cow live by man's will, where the wolf and the hyena have perished. But it is time that the Malthusian doctrine,--the fear of over-population as a hindrance to social reform,--was dismissed from consideration. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow shaking its vain rags in the wind. Population, it is true, increases in a geometrical ratio. The human race, if favored by environment, can easily double itself every twenty-five years. If it did this, the time must come, through sheer power of multiplication, when there would not be standing room for it on the globe. All of this is undeniable, but it is quite wide of the mark. It is time enough to cross a bridge when we come to it. The "standing room" problem is still removed from us by such uncounted generations that we need give no thought to it. The physical resources of the globe are as yet only tapped, and not exhausted. We have done little more than scratch the surface. Because we are crowded here and there in the ant-hills of our cities, we dream that the world is full. Because, under our present system, we do not raise enough food for all, we fear that the food supply is running short. All this is pure fancy. Let any one consider in his mind's eye the enormous untouched assets still remaining for mankind in the vast spaces filled with the tangled forests of South America, or the exuberant fertility of equatorial Africa or the huge plains of Canada, Australia, Southern Siberia and the United States, as yet only thinly dotted with human settlement. There is no need to draw up an anxious balance sheet of our assets. There is still an uncounted plenty. And every human being born upon the world represents a power of work that, rightly directed, more than supplies his wants. The fact that as an infant he does not maintain himself has nothing to do with the case. This was true even in the Garden of Eden. The fundamental error of the Malthusian theory of population and poverty is to confound the difficulties of human organization with the question of physical production. Our existing poverty is purely a problem in the direction and distribution of human effort. It has no connection as yet with the question of the total available means of subsistence. Some day, in a remote future, in which under an improved social system the numbers of mankind might increase to the full power of the natural capacity of multiplication, such a question might conceivably disturb the equanimity of mankind. But it need not now. It is only one of many disasters that must sooner or later overtake mankind. The sun, so the astronomer tells us, is cooling down; the night is coming; an all-pervading cold will some day chill into rigid death the last vestige of organic life. Our poor planet will be but a silent ghost whirling on its dark path in the starlight. This ultimate disaster is, as far as our vision goes, inevitable. Yet no one concerns himself with it. So should it be with the danger of the ultimate overcrowding of the globe. I lay stress upon this problem of the increase of population because, to my thinking, it is in this connection that the main work and the best hope of social reform can be found. The children of the race should be the very blossom of its fondest hopes. Under the present order and with the present gloomy preconceptions they have been the least of its collective cares. Yet here--and here more than anywhere--is the point towards which social effort and social legislation may be directed immediately and successfully. The moment that we get away from the idea that the child is a mere appendage of the parent, bound to share good fortune and ill, wealth and starvation, according to the parent's lot, the moment we regard the child as itself a member of society--clothed in social rights--a burden for the moment but an asset for the future--we turn over a new leaf in the book of human development, we pass a new milestone on the upward path of progress. It should be recognized in the coming order of society, that every child of the nation has the right to be clothed and fed and trained irrespective of its parents' lot. Our feeble beginnings in the direction of housing, sanitation, child welfare and education, should be expanded at whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. The ancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's children should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's children should fight for them. The obligation must apply both ways. No society is properly organized until every child that is born into it shall have an opportunity in life. Success in life and capacity to live we cannot give. But opportunity we can. We can at least see that the gifts that are laid in the child's cradle by nature are not obliterated by the cruel fortune of the accident of birth: that its brain and body are not stunted by lack of food and air and by the heavy burden of premature toil. The playtime of childhood should be held sacred by the nation. This, as I see it, should be the first and the greatest effort of social reform. For the adult generation of to-day many things are no longer possible. The time has passed. We are, as viewed with a comprehensive eye, a damaged race. Few of us in mind or body are what we might be; and millions of us, the vast majority of industrial mankind known as the working class, are distorted beyond repair from what they might have been. In older societies this was taken for granted: the poor and the humble and the lowly reproduced from generation to generation, as they grew to adult life, the starved brains and stunted outlook of their forbears,--starved and stunted only by lack of opportunity. For nature knows of no such differences in original capacity between the children of the fortunate and the unfortunate. Yet on this inequality, made by circumstance, was based the whole system of caste, the stratification of the gentle and the simple on which society rested. In the past it may have been necessary. It is not so now. If, with all our vast apparatus of machinery and power, we cannot so arrange society that each child has an opportunity in life, it would be better to break the machinery in pieces and return to the woods from which we came. Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are saying that the government of every country ought to supply work and pay for the unemployed, maintenance for the infirm and aged, and education and opportunity for the children. These are vast tasks. And they involve, of course, a financial burden not dreamed of before the war. But here again the war has taught us many things. It would have seemed inconceivable before, that a man of great wealth should give one-half of his income to the state. The financial burden of the war, as the full measure of it dawned upon our minds, seemed to betoken a universal bankruptcy. But the sequel is going to show that the finance of the war will prove to be a lesson in the finance of peace. The new burden has come to stay. No modern state can hope to survive unless it meets the kind of social claims on the part of the unemployed, the destitute and the children that have been described above. And it cannot do this unless it continues to use the terrific engine of taxation already fashioned in the war. Undoubtedly the progressive income tax and the tax on profits and taxation of inheritance must be maintained to an extent never dreamed of before. But the peace finance and the war finance will differ in one most important respect. The war finance was purely destructive. From it came national security and the triumph of right over wrong. No one would belittle the worth of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense of production, of bread winning, there came nothing; or nothing except a new power of organization, a new technical skill and a new aspiration towards better things. But the burden of peace finance directed towards social efforts will bring a direct return. Every cent that is spent upon the betterment of the population will come back, sooner or later, as two. But all of this deals as yet only with the field of industry and conduct in which the state rules supreme. Governmental care of the unemployed, the infant and the infirm, sounds like a chapter in socialism. If the same régime were extended over the whole area of production, we should have socialism itself and a mere soap-bubble bursting into fragments. There is no need, however, to extend the régime of compulsion over the whole field. The vast mass of human industrial effort must still lie outside of the immediate control of the government. Every man will still earn his own living and that of his family as best he can, relying first and foremost upon his own efforts. One naturally asks, then, To what extent can social reform penetrate into the ordinary operation of industry itself? Granted that it is impossible for the state to take over the whole industry of the nation, does that mean that the present inequalities must continue? The framework in which our industrial life is set cannot be readily broken asunder. But we can to a great extent ease the rigidity of its outlines. A legislative code that starts from sounder principles than those which have obtained hitherto can do a great deal towards progressive betterment. Each decade can be an improvement upon the last. Hitherto we have been hampered at every turn by the supposed obstacle of immutable economic laws. The theory of "natural" wages and prices of a supposed economic order that could not be disturbed, set up a sort of legislative paralysis. The first thing needed is to get away entirely from all such preconceptions, to recognize that the "natural" order of society, based on the "natural" liberty, does not correspond with real justice and real liberty at all, but works injustice at every turn. And at every turn intrusive social legislation must seek to prevent such injustice. It is no part of the present essay to attempt to detail the particulars of a code of social legislation. That must depend in every case upon the particular circumstances of the community concerned. But some indication may be given here of the kind of legislation that may serve to render the conditions of industry more in conformity with social justice. Let us take, as a conspicuous example, the case of the Minimum wage law. Here is a thing sternly condemned in the older thought as an economic impossibility. It was claimed, as we have seen, that under free contract a man was paid what he earned and no law could make it more. But the older theory was wrong. The minimum wage law ought to form, in one fashion or another, a part of the code of every community. It may be applied by specific legislation from a central power, or it may be applied by the discretionary authority of district boards, or it may be regulated,--as it has been in some of the beginnings already made,--within the compass of each industry or trade. But the principle involved is sound. The wage as paid becomes a part of the conditions of industry. Interest, profits and, later, the direction of consumption and then of production, conform themselves to it. True it is, that in this as in all cases of social legislation, no application of the law can be made so sweeping and so immediate as to dislocate the machine and bring industry to a stop. It is probable that at any particular time and place the legislative minimum wage cannot be very much in advance of the ordinary or average wage of the people in employment. But its virtue lies in its progression. The modest increase of to-day leads to the fuller increase of to-morrow. Properly applied, the capitalist and the employer of labor need have nothing to fear from it. Its ultimate effect will not fall upon them, but will serve merely to alter the direction of human effort. Precisely the same reasoning holds good of the shortening of the hours of labor both by legislative enactment and by collective organization. Here again the first thing necessary is a clear vision of the goal towards which we are to strive. The hours of labor are too long. The world has been caught in the wheels of its own machinery which will not stop. With each advance in invention and mechanical power it works harder still. New and feverish desires for luxuries replace each older want as satisfied. The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest. It should be sent, as nerve patients are, to the seaside or the quiet of the hills. Failing this, it should at least slacken the pace of its work and shorten its working day. And for this the thing needed is an altered public opinion on the subject of work in relation to human character and development. The nineteenth century glorified work. The poet, sitting beneath a shady tree, sang of its glories. The working man was incited to contemplate the beauty of the night's rest that followed on the exhaustion of the day. It was proved to him that if his day was dull at least his sleep was sound. The ideal of society was the cheery artisan and the honest blacksmith, awake and singing with the lark and busy all day long at the loom and the anvil, till the grateful night soothed them into well-earned slumber. This, they were told, was better than the distracted sleep of princes. The educated world repeated to itself these grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raising here the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be shortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that a working day of eight hours is too long for the full and proper development of human capacity and for the rational enjoyment of life. There is no need to quote here to the contrary the long and sustained toil of the pioneer, the eager labor of the student, unmindful of the silent hours, or the fierce acquisitive activity of the money-maker that knows no pause. Activities such as these differ with a whole sky from the wage-work of the modern industrial worker. The task in one case is done for its own sake. It is life itself. The other is done only for the sake of the wage it brings. It is, or should be, a mere preliminary to living. Let it be granted, of course, that a certain amount of work is an absolute necessity for human character. There is no more pathetic spectacle on our human stage than the figure of poor puppy in his beach suit and his tuxedo jacket seeking in vain to amuse himself for ever. A leisure class no sooner arises than the melancholy monotony of amusement forces it into mimic work and make-believe activities. It dare not face the empty day. But when all is said about the horror of idleness the broad fact remains that the hours of work are too long. If we could in imagination disregard for a moment all question of how the hours of work are to be shortened and how production is to be maintained and ask only what would be the ideal number of the daily hours of compulsory work, for character's sake, few of us would put them at more than four or five. Many of us, as applied to ourselves, at least, would take a chance on character at two. The shortening of the general hours of work, then, should be among the primary aims of social reform. There need be no fear that with shortened hours of labor the sum total of production would fall short of human needs. This, as has been shown from beginning to end of this essay, is out of the question. Human _desires_ would eat up the result of ten times the work we now accomplish. Human _needs_ would be satisfied with a fraction of it. But the real difficulty in the shortening of hours lies elsewhere. Here, as in the parallel case of the minimum wage, the danger is that the attempt to alter things too rapidly may dislocate the industrial machine. We ought to attempt such a shortening as will strain the machine to a breaking point, but never break it. This can be done, as with the minimum wage, partly by positive legislation and partly collective action. Not much can be done at once. But the process can be continuous. The short hours achieved with acclamation to-day will later be denounced as the long hours of to-morrow. The essential point to grasp, however, is that society at large has nothing to lose by the process. The shortened hours become a part of the framework of production. It adapts itself to it. Hitherto we have been caught in the running of our own machine: it is time that we altered the gearing of it. The two cases selected,--the minimum wage and the legislative shortening of hours,--have been chosen merely as illustrations and are not exhaustive of the things that can be done in the field of possible and practical reform. It is plain enough that in many other directions the same principles may be applied. The rectification of the ownership of land so as to eliminate the haphazard gains of the speculator and the unearned increment of wealth created by the efforts of others, is an obvious case in point. The "single taxer" sees in this a cure-all for the ills of society. But his vision is distorted. The private ownership of land is one of the greatest incentives to human effort that the world has ever known. It would be folly to abolish it, even if we could. But here as elsewhere we can seek to re-define and regulate the conditions of ownership so as to bring them more into keeping with a common sense view of social justice. But the inordinate and fortuitous gains from land are really only one example from a general class. The war discovered the "profiteer." The law-makers of the world are busy now with smoking him out from his lair. But he was there all the time. Inordinate and fortuitous gain, resting on such things as monopoly, or trickery, or the mere hazards of abundance and scarcity, complying with the letter of the law but violating its spirit, are fit objects for appropriate taxation. The ways and means are difficult, but the social principle involved is clear. We may thus form some sort of vision of the social future into which we are passing. The details are indistinct. But the outline at least in which it is framed is clear enough. The safety of the future lies in a progressive movement of social control alleviating the misery which it cannot obliterate and based upon the broad general principle of equality of opportunity. The chief immediate direction of social effort should be towards the attempt to give to every human being in childhood adequate food, clothing, education and an opportunity in life. This will prove to be the beginning of many things. THE END * * * * * Transcriber's Note: Page 67, "are" changed to "and" (wages and all) 
18603	----	* * * * * +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | The original from which this text is transcribed uses an | | unusual capitalization style which has been faithfully | | reproduced. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this | | text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of this | | document. | | | | With no copyright notice, the 1951 intro falls under Rule | | 5, and is therefore public domain. | | | +------------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * WHAT SOCIAL CLASSES OWE TO EACH OTHER By WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER First published by Harper & Brothers, 1883 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE FOREWORD 5 INTRODUCTION 7 I. ON A NEW PHILOSOPHY: THAT POVERTY IS THE BEST POLICY 13 II. THAT A FREE MAN IS A SOVEREIGN, BUT THAT A SOVEREIGN CANNOT TAKE "TIPS" 25 III. THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICH: NAY, EVEN, THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICHER THAN ONE'S NEIGHBOR 38 IV. ON THE REASONS WHY MAN IS NOT ALTOGETHER A BRUTE 51 V. THAT WE MUST HAVE FEW MEN, IF WE WANT STRONG MEN 63 VI. THAT HE WHO WOULD BE WELL TAKEN CARE OF MUST TAKE CARE OF HIMSELF 71 VII. CONCERNING SOME OLD FOES UNDER NEW FACES 88 VIII. ON THE VALUE, AS A SOCIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE, OF THE RULE TO MIND ONE'S OWN BUSINESS 97 IX. ON THE CASE OF A CERTAIN MAN WHO IS NEVER THOUGHT OF 107 X. THE CASE OF THE FORGOTTEN MAN FARTHER CONSIDERED 116 XI. WHEREFORE WE SHOULD LOVE ONE ANOTHER 132 FOREWORD Written more than fifty years ago--in 1883--WHAT SOCIAL CLASSES OWE TO EACH OTHER is even more pertinent today than at the time of its first publication. Then the arguments and "movements" for penalizing the thrifty, energetic, and competent by placing upon them more and more of the burdens of the thriftless, lazy and incompetent, were just beginning to make headway in our country, wherein these "social reforms" now all but dominate political and so-called "social" thinking. Among the great nations of the world today, only the United States of America champions the rights of the individual as against the state and organized pressure groups, and our faith has been dangerously weakened--watered down by a blind and essentially false and cruel sentimentalism. In "Social Classes" Sumner defined and emphasized the basically important role in our social and economic development played by "The Forgotten Man." The misappropriation of this title and its application to a character the exact opposite of the one for whom Sumner invented the phrase is, unfortunately, but typical of the perversion of words and phrases indulged in by our present-day "liberals" in their attempt to further their revolution by diverting the loyalties of individualists to collectivist theories and beliefs. How often have you said: "If only someone had the vision to see and the courage and ability to state the truth about these false theories which today are attracting our youth and confusing well-meaning people everywhere!" Well, here is the answer to your prayer--the everlasting truth upon the greatest of issues in social science stated for you by the master of them all in this field. If this edition calls this great work to the attention of any of you for the first time, that alone will amply justify its republication. To those of you who have read it before, we commend it anew as the most up-to-date and best discussion you can find anywhere of the most important questions of these critical days. --WILLIAM C. MULLENDORE Los Angeles, California November 15, 1951 WHAT SOCIAL CLASSES OWE TO EACH OTHER INTRODUCTION We are told every day that great social problems stand before us and demand a solution, and we are assailed by oracles, threats, and warnings in reference to those problems. There is a school of writers who are playing quite a _rôle_ as the heralds of the coming duty and the coming woe. They assume to speak for a large, but vague and undefined, constituency, who set the task, exact a fulfillment, and threaten punishment for default. The task or problem is not specifically defined. Part of the task which devolves on those who are subject to the duty is to define the problem. They are told only that something is the matter: that it behooves them to find out what it is, and how to correct it, and then to work out the cure. All this is more or less truculently set forth. After reading and listening to a great deal of this sort of assertion I find that the question forms itself with more and more distinctness in my mind: Who are those who assume to put hard questions to other people and to demand a solution of them? How did they acquire the right to demand that others should solve their world-problems for them? Who are they who are held to consider and solve all questions, and how did they fall under this duty? So far as I can find out what the classes are who are respectively endowed with the rights and duties of posing and solving social problems, they are as follows: Those who are bound to solve the problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated, and healthy; those whose right it is to set the problems are those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence. The problem itself seems to be, How shall the latter be made as comfortable as the former? To solve this problem, and make us all equally well off, is assumed to be the duty of the former class; the penalty, if they fail of this, is to be bloodshed and destruction. If they cannot make everybody else as well off as themselves, they are to be brought down to the same misery as others. During the last ten years I have read a great many books and articles, especially by German writers, in which an attempt has been made to set up "the State" as an entity having conscience, power, and will sublimated above human limitations, and as constituting a tutelary genius over us all. I have never been able to find in history or experience anything to fit this concept. I once lived in Germany for two years, but I certainly saw nothing of it there then. Whether the State which Bismarck is moulding will fit the notion is at best a matter of faith and hope. My notion of the State has dwindled with growing experience of life. As an abstraction, the State is to me only All-of-us. In practice--that is, when it exercises will or adopts a line of action--it is only a little group of men chosen in a very haphazard way by the majority of us to perform certain services for all of us. The majority do not go about their selection very rationally, and they are almost always disappointed by the results of their own operation. Hence "the State," instead of offering resources of wisdom, right reason, and pure moral sense beyond what the average of us possess, generally offers much less of all those things. Furthermore, it often turns out in practice that "the State" is not even the known and accredited servants of the State, but, as has been well said, is only some obscure clerk, hidden in the recesses of a Government bureau, into whose power the chance has fallen for the moment to pull one of the stops which control the Government machine. In former days it often happened that "The State" was a barber, a fiddler, or a bad woman. In our day it often happens that "the State" is a little functionary on whom a big functionary is forced to depend. I cannot see the sense of spending time to read and write observations, such as I find in the writings of many men of great attainments and of great influence, of which the following might be a general type: If the statesmen could attain to the requisite knowledge and wisdom, it is conceivable that the State might perform important regulative functions in the production and distribution of wealth, against which no positive and sweeping theoretical objection could be made from the side of economic science; but statesmen never can acquire the requisite knowledge and wisdom.--To me this seems a mere waste of words. The inadequacy of the State to regulative tasks is agreed upon, as a matter of fact, by all. Why, then, bring State regulation into the discussion simply in order to throw it out again? The whole subject ought to be discussed and settled aside from the hypothesis of State regulation. The little group of public servants who, as I have said, constitute the State, when the State determines on anything, could not do much for themselves or anybody else by their own force. If they do anything, they must dispose of men, as in an army, or of capital, as in a treasury. But the army, or police, or _posse comitatus_, is more or less All-of-us, and the capital in the treasury is the product of the labor and saving of All-of-us. Therefore, when the State means power-to-do it means All-of-us, as brute force or as industrial force. If anybody is to benefit from the action of the State it must be Some-of-us. If, then, the question is raised, What ought the State to do for labor, for trade, for manufactures, for the poor, for the learned professions? etc., etc.--that is, for a class or an interest--it is really the question, What ought All-of-us to do for Some-of-us? But Some-of-us are included in All-of-us, and, so far as they get the benefit of their own efforts, it is the same as if they worked for themselves, and they may be cancelled out of All-of-us. Then the question which remains is, What ought Some-of-us to do for Others-of-us? or, What do social classes owe to each other? I now propose to try to find out whether there is any class in society which lies under the duty and burden of fighting the battles of life for any other class, or of solving social problems for the satisfaction of any other class; also, whether there is any class which has the right to formulate demands on "society"--that is, on other classes; also, whether there is anything but a fallacy and a superstition in the notion that "the State" owes anything to anybody except peace, order, and the guarantees of rights. I have in view, throughout the discussion, the economic, social, and political circumstances which exist in the United States. I. _ON A NEW PHILOSOPHY: THAT POVERTY IS THE BEST POLICY._ It is commonly asserted that there are in the United States no classes, and any allusion to classes is resented. On the other hand, we constantly read and hear discussions of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a simple fact. "The poor," "the weak," "the laborers," are expressions which are used as if they had exact and well-understood definition. Discussions are made to bear upon the assumed rights, wrongs, and misfortunes of certain social classes; and all public speaking and writing consists, in a large measure, of the discussion of general plans for meeting the wishes of classes of people who have not been able to satisfy their own desires. These classes are sometimes discontented, and sometimes not. Sometimes they do not know that anything is amiss with them until the "friends of humanity" come to them with offers of aid. Sometimes they are discontented and envious. They do not take their achievements as a fair measure of their rights. They do not blame themselves or their parents for their lot, as compared with that of other people. Sometimes they claim that they have a right to everything of which they feel the need for their happiness on earth. To make such a claim against God and Nature would, of course, be only to say that we claim a right to live on earth if we can. But God and Nature have ordained the chances and conditions of life on earth once for all. The case cannot be reopened. We cannot get a revision of the laws of human life. We are absolutely shut up to the need and duty, if we would learn how to live happily, of investigating the laws of Nature, and deducing the rules of right living in the world as it is. These are very wearisome and commonplace tasks. They consist in labor and self-denial repeated over and over again in learning and doing. When the people whose claims we are considering are told to apply themselves to these tasks they become irritated and feel almost insulted. They formulate their claims as rights against society--that is, against some other men. In their view they have a right, not only to _pursue_ happiness, but to _get_ it; and if they fail to get it, they think they have a claim to the aid of other men--that is, to the labor and self-denial of other men--to get it for them. They find orators and poets who tell them that they have grievances, so long as they have unsatisfied desires. Now, if there are groups of people who have a claim to other people's labor and self-denial, and if there are other people whose labor and self-denial are liable to be claimed by the first groups, then there certainly are "classes," and classes of the oldest and most vicious type. For a man who can command another man's labor and self-denial for the support of his own existence is a privileged person of the highest species conceivable on earth. Princes and paupers meet on this plane, and no other men are on it all. On the other hand, a man whose labor and self-denial may be diverted from his maintenance to that of some other man is not a free man, and approaches more or less toward the position of a slave. Therefore we shall find that, in all the notions which we are to discuss, this elementary contradiction, that there are classes and that there are not classes, will produce repeated confusion and absurdity. We shall find that, in our efforts to eliminate the old vices of class government, we are impeded and defeated by new products of the worst class theory. We shall find that all the schemes for producing equality and obliterating the organization of society produce a new differentiation based on the worst possible distinction--the right to claim and the duty to give one man's effort for another man's satisfaction. We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty. It is very popular to pose as a "friend of humanity," or a "friend of the working classes." The character, however, is quite exotic in the United States. It is borrowed from England, where some men, otherwise of small account, have assumed it with great success and advantage. Anything which has a charitable sound and a kind-hearted tone generally passes without investigation, because it is disagreeable to assail it. Sermons, essays, and orations assume a conventional standpoint with regard to the poor, the weak, etc.; and it is allowed to pass as an unquestioned doctrine in regard to social classes that "the rich" ought to "care for the poor"; that Churches especially ought to collect capital from the rich and spend it for the poor; that parishes ought to be clusters of institutions by means of which one social class should perform its duties to another; and that clergymen, economists, and social philosophers have a technical and professional duty to devise schemes for "helping the poor." The preaching in England used all to be done to the poor--that they ought to be contented with their lot and respectful to their betters. Now, the greatest part of the preaching in America consists in injunctions to those who have taken care of themselves to perform their assumed duty to take care of others. Whatever may be one's private sentiments, the fear of appearing cold and hard-hearted causes these conventional theories of social duty and these assumptions of social fact to pass unchallenged. Let us notice some distinctions which are of prime importance to a correct consideration of the subject which we intend to treat. Certain ills belong to the hardships of human life. They are natural. They are part of the struggle with Nature for existence. We cannot blame our fellow-men for our share of these. My neighbor and I are both struggling to free ourselves from these ills. The fact that my neighbor has succeeded in this struggle better than I constitutes no grievance for me. Certain other ills are due to the malice of men, and to the imperfections or errors of civil institutions. These ills are an object of agitation, and a subject for discussion. The former class of ills is to be met only by manly effort and energy; the latter may be corrected by associated effort. The former class of ills is constantly grouped and generalized, and made the object of social schemes. We shall see, as we go on, what that means. The second class of ills may fall on certain social classes, and reform will take the form of interference by other classes in favor of that one. The last fact is, no doubt, the reason why people have been led, not noticing distinctions, to believe that the same method was applicable to the other class of ills. The distinction here made between the ills which belong to the struggle for existence and those which are due to the faults of human institutions is of prime importance. It will also be important, in order to clear up our ideas about the notions which are in fashion, to note the relation of the economic to the political significance of assumed duties of one class to another. That is to say, we may discuss the question whether one class owes duties to another by reference to the economic effects which will be produced on the classes and society; or we may discuss the political expediency of formulating and enforcing rights and duties respectively between the parties. In the former case we might assume that the givers of aid were willing to give it, and we might discuss the benefit or mischief of their activity. In the other case we must assume that some at least of those who were forced to give aid did so unwillingly. Here, then, there would be a question of rights. The question whether voluntary charity is mischievous or not is one thing; the question whether legislation which forces one man to aid another is right and wise, as well as economically beneficial, is quite another question. Great confusion and consequent error is produced by allowing these two questions to become entangled in the discussion. Especially we shall need to notice the attempts to apply legislative methods of reform to the ills which belong to the order of Nature. There is no possible definition of "a poor man." A pauper is a person who cannot earn his living; whose producing powers have fallen positively below his necessary consumption; who cannot, therefore, pay his way. A human society needs the active co-operation and productive energy of every person in it. A man who is present as a consumer, yet who does not contribute either by land, labor, or capital to the work of society, is a burden. On no sound political theory ought such a person to share in the political power of the State. He drops out of the ranks of workers and producers. Society must support him. It accepts the burden, but he must be cancelled from the ranks of the rulers likewise. So much for the pauper. About him no more need be said. But he is not the "poor man." The "poor man" is an elastic term, under which any number of social fallacies may be hidden. Neither is there any possible definition of "the weak." Some are weak in one way, and some in another; and those who are weak in one sense are strong in another. In general, however, it may be said that those whom humanitarians and philanthropists call the weak are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are wasted. They constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things. Whether the people who mean no harm, but are weak in the essential powers necessary to the performance of one's duties in life, or those who are malicious and vicious, do the more mischief, is a question not easy to answer. Under the names of the poor and the weak, the negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent are fastened upon the industrious and prudent as a responsibility and a duty. On the one side, the terms are extended to cover the idle, intemperate, and vicious, who, by the combination, gain credit which they do not deserve, and which they could not get if they stood alone. On the other hand, the terms are extended to include wage-receivers of the humblest rank, who are degraded by the combination. The reader who desires to guard himself against fallacies should always scrutinize the terms "poor" and "weak" as used, so as to see which or how many of these classes they are made to cover. The humanitarians, philanthropists, and reformers, looking at the facts of life as they present themselves, find enough which is sad and unpromising in the condition of many members of society. They see wealth and poverty side by side. They note great inequality of social position and social chances. They eagerly set about the attempt to account for what they see, and to devise schemes for remedying what they do not like. In their eagerness to recommend the less fortunate classes to pity and consideration they forget all about the rights of other classes; they gloss over all the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of property, distorting rights and perpetuating injustice, as anyone is sure to do who sets about the readjustment of social relations with the interests of one group distinctly before his mind, and the interests of all other groups thrown into the background. When I have read certain of these discussions I have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one's own way and earn one's own living, and that the only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing. The man who by his own effort raises himself above poverty appears, in these discussions, to be of no account. The man who has done nothing to raise himself above poverty finds that the social doctors flock about him, bringing the capital which they have collected from the other class, and promising him the aid of the State to give him what the other had to work for. In all these schemes and projects the organized intervention of society through the State is either planned or hoped for, and the State is thus made to become the protector and guardian of certain classes. The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists. Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type--that A and B decide what C shall do for D. It will be interesting to inquire, at a later period of our discussion, who C is, and what the effect is upon him of all these arrangements. In all the discussions attention is concentrated on A and B, the noble social reformers, and on D, the "poor man." I call C the Forgotten Man, because I have never seen that any notice was taken of him in any of the discussions. When we have disposed of A, B, and D we can better appreciate the case of C, and I think that we shall find that he deserves our attention, for the worth of his character and the magnitude of his unmerited burdens. Here it may suffice to observe that, on the theories of the social philosophers to whom I have referred, we should get a new maxim of judicious living: Poverty is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will have to support other people; if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you. No doubt one chief reason for the unclear and contradictory theories of class relations lies in the fact that our society, largely controlled in all its organization by one set of doctrines, still contains survivals of old social theories which are totally inconsistent with the former. In the Middle Ages men were united by custom and prescription into associations, ranks, guilds, and communities of various kinds. These ties endured as long as life lasted. Consequently society was dependent, throughout all its details, on status, and the tie, or bond, was sentimental. In our modern state, and in the United States more than anywhere else, the social structure is based on contract, and status is of the least importance. Contract, however, is rational--even rationalistic. It is also realistic, cold, and matter-of-fact. A contract relation is based on a sufficient reason, not on custom or prescription. It is not permanent. It endures only so long as the reason for it endures. In a state based on contract sentiment is out of place in any public or common affairs. It is relegated to the sphere of private and personal relations, where it depends not at all on class types, but on personal acquaintance and personal estimates. The sentimentalists among us always seize upon the survivals of the old order. They want to save them and restore them. Much of the loose thinking also which troubles us in our social discussions arises from the fact that men do not distinguish the elements of status and of contract which may be found in our society. Whether social philosophers think it desirable or not, it is out of the question to go back to status or to the sentimental relations which once united baron and retainer, master and servant, teacher and pupil, comrade and comrade. That we have lost some grace and elegance is undeniable. That life once held more poetry and romance is true enough. But it seems impossible that any one who has studied the matter should doubt that we have gained immeasurably, and that our farther gains lie in going forward, not in going backward. The feudal ties can never be restored. If they could be restored they would bring back personal caprice, favoritism, sycophancy, and intrigue. A society based on contract is a society of free and independent men, who form ties without favor or obligation, and co-operate without cringing or intrigue. A society based on contract, therefore, gives the utmost room and chance for individual development, and for all the self-reliance and dignity of a free man. That a society of free men, co-operating under contract, is by far the strongest society which has ever yet existed; that no such society has ever yet developed the full measure of strength of which it is capable; and that the only social improvements which are now conceivable lie in the direction of more complete realization of a society of free men united by contract, are points which cannot be controverted. It follows, however, that one man, in a free state, cannot claim help from, and cannot be charged to give help to, another. To understand the full meaning of this assertion it will be worth while to see what a free democracy is. II. _THAT A FREE MAN IS A SOVEREIGN, BUT THAT A SOVEREIGN CANNOT TAKE "TIPS."_ A free man, a free country, liberty, and equality are terms of constant use among us. They are employed as watchwords as soon as any social questions come into discussion. It is right that they should be so used. They ought to contain the broadest convictions and most positive faiths of the nation, and so they ought to be available for the decision of questions of detail. In order, however, that they may be so employed successfully and correctly it is essential that the terms should be correctly defined, and that their popular use should conform to correct definitions. No doubt it is generally believed that the terms are easily understood, and present no difficulty. Probably the popular notion is, that liberty means doing as one has a mind to, and that it is a metaphysical or sentimental good. A little observation shows that there is no such thing in this world as doing as one has a mind to. There is no man, from the tramp up to the President, the Pope, or the Czar, who can do as he has a mind to. There never has been any man, from the primitive barbarian up to a Humboldt or a Darwin, who could do as he had a mind to. The "Bohemian" who determines to realize some sort of liberty of this kind accomplishes his purpose only by sacrificing most of the rights and turning his back on most of the duties of a civilized man, while filching as much as he can of the advantages of living in a civilized state. Moreover, liberty is not a metaphysical or sentimental thing at all. It is positive, practical, and actual. It is produced and maintained by law and institutions, and is, therefore, concrete and historical. Sometimes we speak distinctively of civil liberty; but if there be any liberty other than civil liberty--that is, liberty under law--it is a mere fiction of the schoolmen, which they may be left to discuss. Even as I write, however, I find in a leading review the following definition of liberty: Civil liberty is "the result of the restraint exercised by the sovereign people on the more powerful individuals and classes of the community, preventing them from availing themselves of the excess of their power to the detriment of the other classes." This definition lays the foundation for the result which it is apparently desired to reach, that "a government by the people can in no case become a paternal government, since its law-makers are its mandatories and servants carrying out its will, and not its fathers or its masters." Here we have the most mischievous fallacy under the general topic which I am discussing distinctly formulated. In the definition of liberty it will be noticed that liberty is construed as the act of the sovereign people against somebody who must, of course, be differentiated from the sovereign people. Whenever "people" is used in this sense for anything less than the total population, man, woman, child, and baby, and whenever the great dogmas which contain the word "people" are construed under the limited definition of "people," there is always fallacy. History is only a tiresome repetition of one story. Persons and classes have sought to win possession of the power of the State in order to live luxuriously out of the earnings of others. Autocracies, aristocracies, theocracies, and all other organizations for holding political power, have exhibited only the same line of action. It is the extreme of political error to say that if political power is only taken away from generals, nobles, priests, millionaires, and scholars, and given to artisans and peasants, these latter may be trusted to do only right and justice, and never to abuse the power; that they will repress all excess in others, and commit none themselves. They will commit abuse, if they can and dare, just as others have done. The reason for the excesses of the old governing classes lies in the vices and passions of human nature--cupidity, lust, vindictiveness, ambition, and vanity. These vices are confined to no nation, class, or age. They appear in the church, the academy, the workshop, and the hovel, as well as in the army or the palace. They have appeared in autocracies, aristocracies, theocracies, democracies, and ochlocracies, all alike. The only thing which has ever restrained these vices of human nature in those who had political power is law sustained by impersonal institutions. If political power be given to the masses who have not hitherto had it, nothing will stop them from abusing it but laws and institutions. To say that a popular government cannot be paternal is to give it a charter that it can do no wrong. The trouble is that a democratic government is in greater danger than any other of becoming paternal, for it is sure of itself, and ready to undertake anything, and its power is excessive and pitiless against dissentients. What history shows is, that rights are safe only when guaranteed against all arbitrary power, and all class and personal interest. Around an autocrat there has grown up an oligarchy of priests and soldiers. In time a class of nobles has been developed, who have broken into the oligarchy and made an aristocracy. Later the _demos_, rising into an independent development, has assumed power and made a democracy. Then the mob of a capital city has overwhelmed the democracy in an ochlocracy. Then the "idol of the people," or the military "savior of society," or both in one, has made himself autocrat, and the same old vicious round has recommenced. Where in all this is liberty? There has been no liberty at all, save where a state has known how to break out, once for all, from this delusive round; to set barriers to selfishness, cupidity, envy, and lust, in _all_ classes, from highest to lowest, by laws and institutions; and to create great organs of civil life which can eliminate, as far as possible, arbitrary and personal elements from the adjustment of interests and the definition of rights. Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule. The notion of a free state is entirely modern. It has been developed with the development of the middle class, and with the growth of a commercial and industrial civilization. Horror at human slavery is not a century old as a common sentiment in a civilized state. The idea of the "free man," as we understand it, is the product of a revolt against mediaeval and feudal ideas; and our notion of equality, when it is true and practical, can be explained only by that revolt. It was in England that the modern idea found birth. It has been strengthened by the industrial and commercial development of that country. It has been inherited by all the English-speaking nations, who have made liberty real because they have inherited it, not as a notion, but as a body of institutions. It has been borrowed and imitated by the military and police state of the European continent so fast as they have felt the influence of the expanding industrial civilization; but they have realized it only imperfectly, because they have no body of local institutions or traditions, and it remains for them as yet too much a matter of "declarations" and pronunciamentos. The notion of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of _a status created for the individual by laws and institutions, the effect of which is that each man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers exclusively for his own welfare_. It is not at all a matter of elections, or universal suffrage, or democracy. All institutions are to be tested by the degree to which they guarantee liberty. It is not to be admitted for a moment that liberty is a means to social ends, and that it may be impaired for major considerations. Any one who so argues has lost the bearing and relation of all the facts and factors in a free state. A human being has a life to live, a career to run. He is a centre of powers to work, and of capacities to suffer. What his powers may be--whether they can carry him far or not; what his chances may be, whether wide or restricted; what his fortune may be, whether to suffer much or little--are questions of his personal destiny which he must work out and endure as he can; but for all that concerns the bearing of the society and its institutions upon that man, and upon the sum of happiness to which he can attain during his life on earth, the product of all history and all philosophy up to this time is summed up in the doctrine, that he should be left free to do the most for himself that he can, and should be guaranteed the exclusive enjoyment of all that he does. If the society--that is to say, in plain terms, if his fellow-men, either individually, by groups, or in a mass--impinge upon him otherwise than to surround him with neutral conditions of security, they must do so under the strictest responsibility to justify themselves. Jealousy and prejudice against all such interferences are high political virtues in a free man. It is not at all the function of the State to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk. The functions of the State lie entirely in the conditions or chances under which the pursuit of happiness is carried on, so far as those conditions or chances can be affected by civil organization. Hence, liberty for labor and security for earnings are the ends for which civil institutions exist, not means which may be employed for ulterior ends. Now, the cardinal doctrine of any sound political system is, that rights and duties should be in equilibrium. A monarchical or aristocratic system is not immoral, if the rights and duties of persons and classes are in equilibrium, although the rights and duties of different persons and classes are unequal. An immoral political system is created whenever there are privileged classes--that is, classes who have arrogated to themselves rights while throwing the duties upon others. In a democracy all have equal political rights. That is the fundamental political principle. A democracy, then, becomes immoral, if all have not equal political duties. This is unquestionably the doctrine which needs to be reiterated and inculcated beyond all others, if the democracy is to be made sound and permanent. Our orators and writers never speak of it, and do not seem often to know anything about it; but the real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties--that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have. Democracy, in order to be true to itself, and to develop into a sound working system, must oppose the same cold resistance to any claims for favor on the ground of poverty, as on the ground of birth and rank. It can no more admit to public discussion, as within the range of possible action, any schemes for coddling and helping wage-receivers than it could entertain schemes for restricting political power to wage-payers. It must put down schemes for making "the rich" pay for whatever "the poor" want, just as it tramples on the old theories that only the rich are fit to regulate society. One needs but to watch our periodical literature to see the danger that democracy will be construed as a system of favoring a new privileged class of the many and the poor. Holding in mind, now, the notions of liberty and democracy as we have defined them, we see that it is not altogether a matter of fanfaronade when the American citizen calls himself a "sovereign." A member of a free democracy is, in a sense, a sovereign. He has no superior. He has reached his sovereignty, however, by a process of reduction and division of power which leaves him no inferior. It is very grand to call one's self a sovereign, but it is greatly to the purpose to notice that the political responsibilities of the free man have been intensified and aggregated just in proportion as political rights have been reduced and divided. Many monarchs have been incapable of sovereignty and unfit for it. Placed in exalted situations, and inheritors of grand opportunities they have exhibited only their own imbecility and vice. The reason was, because they thought only of the gratification of their own vanity, and not at all of their duty. The free man who steps forward to claim his inheritance and endowment as a free and equal member of a great civil body must understand that his duties and responsibilities are measured to him by the same scale as his rights and his powers. He wants to be subject to no man. He wants to be equal to his fellows, as all sovereigns are equal. So be it; but he cannot escape the deduction that he can call no man to his aid. The other sovereigns will not respect his independence if he becomes dependent, and they cannot respect his equality if he sues for favors. The free man in a free democracy, when he cut off all the ties which might pull him down, severed also all the ties by which he might have made others pull him up. He must take all the consequences of his new status. He is, in a certain sense, an isolated man. The family tie does not bring to him disgrace for the misdeeds of his relatives, as it once would have done, but neither does it furnish him with the support which it once would have given. The relations of men are open and free, but they are also loose. A free man in a free democracy derogates from his rank if he takes a favor for which he does not render an equivalent. A free man in a free democracy has no duty whatever toward other men of the same rank and standing, except respect, courtesy, and good-will. We cannot say that there are no classes, when we are speaking politically, and then say that there are classes, when we are telling A what it is his duty to do for B. In a free state every man is held and expected to take care of himself and his family, to make no trouble for his neighbor, and to contribute his full share to public interests and common necessities. If he fails in this he throws burdens on others. He does not thereby acquire rights against the others. On the contrary, he only accumulates obligations toward them; and if he is allowed to make his deficiencies a ground of new claims, he passes over into the position of a privileged or petted person-emancipated from duties, endowed with claims. This is the inevitable result of combining democratic political theories with humanitarian social theories. It would be aside from my present purpose to show, but it is worth noticing in passing, that one result of such inconsistency must surely be to undermine democracy, to increase the power of wealth in the democracy, and to hasten the subjection of democracy to plutocracy; for a man who accepts any share which he has not earned in another man's capital cannot be an independent citizen. It is often affirmed that the educated and wealthy have an obligation to those who have less education and property, just because the latter have political equality with the former, and oracles and warnings are uttered about what will happen if the uneducated classes who have the suffrage are not instructed at the care and expense of the other classes. In this view of the matter universal suffrage is not a measure for _strengthening_ the State by bringing to its support the aid and affection of all classes, but it is a new burden, and, in fact, a peril. Those who favor it represent it as a peril. This doctrine is politically immoral and vicious. When a community establishes universal suffrage, it is as if it said to each new-comer, or to each young man: "We give you every chance that any one else has. Now come along with us; take care of yourself, and contribute your share to the burdens which we all have to bear in order to support social institutions." Certainly, liberty, and universal suffrage, and democracy are not pledges of care and protection, but they carry with them the exaction of individual responsibility. The State gives equal rights and equal chances just because it does not mean to give anything else. It sets each man on his feet, and gives him leave to run, just because it does not mean to carry him. Having obtained his chances, he must take upon himself the responsibility for his own success or failure. It is a pure misfortune to the community, and one which will redound to its injury, if any man has been endowed with political power who is a heavier burden then than he was before; but it cannot be said that there is any new _duty_ created for the good citizens toward the bad by the fact that the bad citizens are a harm to the State. III. _THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICH; NAY, EVEN, THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICHER THAN ONE'S NEIGHBOR_ I have before me a newspaper slip on which a writer expresses the opinion that no one should be allowed to possess more than one million dollars' worth of property. Alongside of it is another slip, on which another writer expresses the opinion that the limit should be five millions. I do not know what the comparative wealth of the two writers is, but it is interesting to notice that there is a wide margin between their ideas of how rich they would allow their fellow-citizens to become, and of the point at which they ("the State," of course) would step in to rob a man of his earnings. These two writers only represent a great deal of crude thinking and declaiming which is in fashion. I never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice of accumulation. A good father believes that he does wisely to encourage enterprise, productive skill, prudent self-denial, and judicious expenditure on the part of his son. The object is to teach the boy to accumulate capital. If, however, the boy should read many of the diatribes against "the rich" which are afloat in our literature; if he should read or hear some of the current discussion about "capital"; and if, with the ingenuousness of youth, he should take these productions at their literal sense, instead of discounting them, as his father does, he would be forced to believe that he was on the path of infamy when he was earning and saving capital. It is worth while to consider which we mean or what we mean. Is it wicked to be rich? Is it mean to be a capitalist? If the question is one of degree only, and it is right to be rich up to a certain point and wrong to be richer, how shall we find the point? Certainly, for practical purposes, we ought to define the point nearer than between one and five millions of dollars. There is an old ecclesiastical prejudice in favor of the poor and against the rich. In days when men acted by ecclesiastical rules these prejudices produced waste of capital, and helped mightily to replunge Europe into barbarism. The prejudices are not yet dead, but they survive in our society as ludicrous contradictions and inconsistencies. One thing must be granted to the rich: they are good-natured. Perhaps they do not recognize themselves, for a rich man is even harder to define than a poor one. It is not uncommon to hear a clergyman utter from the pulpit all the old prejudice in favor of the poor and against the rich, while asking the rich to do something for the poor; and the rich comply, without apparently having their feelings hurt at all by the invidious comparison. We all agree that he is a good member of society who works his way up from poverty to wealth, but as soon as he has worked his way up we begin to regard him with suspicion, as a dangerous member of society. A newspaper starts the silly fallacy that "the rich are rich because the poor are industrious," and it is copied from one end of the country to the other as if it were a brilliant apothegm. "Capital" is denounced by writers and speakers who have never taken the trouble to find out what capital is, and who use the word in two or three different senses in as many pages. Labor organizations are formed, not to employ combined effort for a common object, but to indulge in declamation and denunciation, and especially to furnish an easy living to some officers who do not want to work. People who have rejected dogmatic religion, and retained only a residuum of religious sentimentalism, find a special field in the discussion of the rights of the poor and the duties of the rich. We have denunciations of banks, corporations, and monopolies, which denunciations encourage only helpless rage and animosity, because they are not controlled by any definitions or limitations, or by any distinctions between what is indispensably necessary and what is abuse, between what is established in the order of nature and what is legislative error. Think, for instance, of a journal which makes it its special business to denounce monopolies, yet favors a protective tariff, and has not a word to say against trades-unions or patents! Think of public teachers who say that the farmer is ruined by the cost of transportation, when they mean that he cannot make any profits because his farm is too far from the market, and who denounce the railroad because it does not correct for the farmer, at the expense of its stockholders, the disadvantage which lies in the physical situation of the farm! Think of that construction of this situation which attributes all the trouble to the greed of "moneyed corporations!" Think of the piles of rubbish that one has read about corners, and watering stocks, and selling futures! Undoubtedly there are, in connection with each of these things, cases of fraud, swindling, and other financial crimes; that is to say, the greed and selfishness of men are perpetual. They put on new phases, they adjust themselves to new forms of business, and constantly devise new methods of fraud and robbery, just as burglars devise new artifices to circumvent every new precaution of the lock-makers. The criminal law needs to be improved to meet new forms of crime, but to denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud, is ridiculous and unworthy of the age in which we live. Fifty years ago good old English Tories used to denounce all joint-stock companies in the same way, and for similar reasons. All the denunciations and declamations which have been referred to are made in the interest of "the poor man." His name never ceases to echo in the halls of legislation, and he is the excuse and reason for all the acts which are passed. He is never forgotten in poetry, sermon, or essay. His interest is invoked to defend every doubtful procedure and every questionable institution. Yet where is he? Who is he? Who ever saw him? When did he ever get the benefit of any of the numberless efforts in his behalf? When, rather, were his name and interest ever invoked, when, upon examination, it did not plainly appear that somebody else was to win--somebody who was far too "smart" ever to be poor, far too lazy ever to be rich by industry and economy? A great deal is said about the unearned increment from land, especially with a view to the large gains of landlords in old countries. The unearned increment from land has indeed made the position of an English land-owner, for the last two hundred years, the most fortunate that any class of mortals ever has enjoyed; but the present moment, when the rent of agricultural land in England is declining under the competition of American land, is not well chosen for attacking the old advantage. Furthermore, the unearned increment from land appears in the United States as a gain to the first comers, who have here laid the foundations of a new State. Since the land is a monopoly, the unearned increment lies in the laws of Nature. Then the only question is, Who shall have it?--the man who has the ownership by prescription, or some or all others? It is a beneficent incident of the ownership of land that a pioneer who reduces it to use, and helps to lay the foundations of a new State, finds a profit in the increasing value of land as the new State grows up. It would be unjust to take that profit away from him, or from any successor to whom he has sold it. Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society. A tax on land and a succession or probate duty on capital might be perfectly justified by these facts. Unquestionably capital accumulates with a rapidity which follows in some high series the security, good government, peaceful order of the State in which it is employed; and if the State steps in, on the death of the holder, to claim a share of the inheritance, such a claim may be fully justified. The laborer likewise gains by carrying on his labor in a strong, highly civilized, and well-governed State far more than he could gain with equal industry on the frontier or in the midst of anarchy. He gains greater remuneration for his services, and he also shares in the enjoyment of all that accumulated capital of a wealthy community which is public or semi-public in its nature. It is often said that the earth belongs to the race, as if raw land was a boon, or gift. Raw land is only a _chance_ to prosecute the struggle for existence, and the man who tries to earn a living by the subjugation of raw land makes that attempt under the most unfavorable conditions, for land can be brought into use only by great hardship and exertion. The boon, or gift, would be to get some land after somebody else had made it fit for use. Any one in the world today can have raw land by going to it; but there are millions who would regard it simply as "transportation for life," if they were forced to go and live on new land and get their living out of it. Private ownership of land is only division of labor. If it is true in any sense that we all own the soil in common, the best use we can make of our undivided interests is to vest them all gratuitously (just as we now do) in any who will assume the function of directly treating the soil, while the rest of us take other shares in the social organization. The reason is, because in this way we all get more than we would if each one owned some land and used it directly. Supply and demand now determine the distribution of population between the direct use of land and other pursuits; and if the total profits and chances of land-culture were reduced by taking all the "unearned increment" in taxes, there would simply be a redistribution of industry until the profits of land-culture, less taxes and without chances from increasing value, were equal to the profits of other pursuits under exemption from taxation. It is remarkable that jealousy of individual property in land often goes along with very exaggerated doctrines of tribal or national property in land. We are told that John, James, and William ought not to possess part of the earth's surface because it belongs to all men; but it is held that Egyptians, Nicaraguans, or Indians have such right to the territory which they occupy, that they may bar the avenues of commerce and civilization if they choose, and that it is wrong to override their prejudices or expropriate their land. The truth is, that the notion that the race own the earth has practical meaning only for the latter class of cases. The great gains of a great capitalist in a modern state must be put under the head of wages of superintendence. Anyone who believes that any great enterprise of an industrial character can be started without labor must have little experience of life. Let anyone try to get a railroad built, or to start a factory and win reputation for its products, or to start a school and win a reputation for it, or to found a newspaper and make it a success, or to start any other enterprise, and he will find what obstacles must be overcome, what risks must be taken, what perseverance and courage are required, what foresight and sagacity are necessary. Especially in a new country, where many tasks are waiting, where resources are strained to the utmost all the time, the judgment, courage, and perseverance required to organize new enterprizes and carry them to success are sometimes heroic. Persons who possess the necessary qualifications obtain great rewards. They ought to do so. It is foolish to rail at them. Then, again, the ability to organize and conduct industrial, commercial, or financial enterprises is rare; the great captains of industry are as rare as great generals. The great weakness of all co-operative enterprises is in the matter of supervision. Men of routine or men who can do what they are told are not hard to find; but men who can think and plan and tell the routine men what to do are very rare. They are paid in proportion to the supply and demand of them. If Mr. A.T. Stewart made a great fortune by collecting and bringing dry-goods to the people of the United States, he did so because he understood how to do that thing better than any other man of his generation. He proved it, because he carried the business through commercial crises and war, and kept increasing its dimensions. If, when he died, he left no competent successor, the business must break up, and pass into new organization in the hands of other men. Some have said that Mr. Stewart made his fortune out of those who worked for him or with him. But would those persons have been able to come together, organize themselves, and earn what they did earn without him? Not at all. They would have been comparatively helpless. He and they together formed a great system of factories, stores, transportation, under his guidance and judgment. It was for the benefit of all; but he contributed to it what no one else was able to contribute--the one guiding mind which made the whole thing possible. In no sense whatever does a man who accumulates a fortune by legitimate industry exploit his employés, or make his capital "out of" anybody else. The wealth which he wins would not be but for him. The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted. On the contrary, it is a necessary condition of many forms of social advance. If we should set a limit to the accumulation of wealth, we should say to our most valuable producers, "We do not want you to do us the services which you best understand how to perform, beyond a certain point." It would be like killing off our generals in war. A great deal is said, in the cant of a certain school about "ethical views of wealth," and we are told that some day men will be found of such public spirit that, after they have accumulated a few millions, they will be willing to go on and labor simply for the pleasure of paying the taxes of their fellow-citizens. Possibly this is true. It is a prophecy. It is as impossible to deny it as it is silly to affirm it. For if a time ever comes when there are men of this kind, the men of that age will arrange their affairs accordingly. There are no such men now, and those of us who live now cannot arrange our affairs by what men will be a hundred generations hence. There is every indication that we are to see new developments of the power of aggregated capital to serve civilization, and that the new developments will be made right here in America. Joint-stock companies are yet in their infancy, and incorporated capital, instead of being a thing which can be overturned, is a thing which is becoming more and more indispensable. I shall have something to say in another chapter about the necessary checks and guarantees, in a political point of view, which must be established. Economically speaking, aggregated capital will be more and more essential to the performance of our social tasks. Furthermore, it seems to me certain that all aggregated capital will fall more and more under personal control. Each great company will be known as controlled by one master mind. The reason for this lies in the great superiority of personal management over management by boards and committees. This tendency is in the public interest, for it is in the direction of more satisfactory responsibility. The great hindrance to the development of this continent has lain in the lack of capital. The capital which we have had has been wasted by division and dissipation, and by injudicious applications. The waste of capital, in proportion to the total capital, in this country between 1800 and 1850, in the attempts which were made to establish means of communication and transportation, was enormous. The waste was chiefly due to ignorance and bad management, especially to State control of public works. We are to see the development of the country pushed forward at an unprecedented rate by an aggregation of capital, and a systematic application of it under the direction of competent men. This development will be for the benefit of all, and it will enable each one of us, in his measure and way, to increase his wealth. We may each of us go ahead to do so, and we have every reason to rejoice in each other's prosperity. There ought to be no laws to guarantee property against the folly of its possessors. In the absence of such laws, capital inherited by a spendthrift will be squandered and re-accumulated in the hands of men who are fit and competent to hold it. So it should be, and under such a state of things there is no reason to desire to limit the property which any man may acquire. IV. _ON THE REASONS WHY MAN IS NOT ALTOGETHER A BRUTE._ The Arabs have a story of a man who desired to test which of his three sons loved him most. He sent them out to see which of the three would bring him the most valuable present. The three sons met in a distant city, and compared the gifts they had found. The first had a carpet on which he could transport himself and others whithersoever he would. The second had a medicine which would cure any disease. The third had a glass in which he could see what was going on at any place he might name. The third used his glass to see what was going on at home: he saw his father ill in bed. The first transported all three to their home on his carpet. The second administered the medicine and saved the father's life. The perplexity of the father when he had to decide which son's gift had been of the most value to him illustrates very fairly the difficulty of saying whether land, labor, or capital is most essential to production. No production is possible without the co-operation of all three. We know that men once lived on the spontaneous fruits of the earth, just as other animals do. In that stage of existence a man was just like the brutes. His existence was at the sport of Nature. He got what he could by way of food, and ate what he could get, but he depended on finding what Nature gave. He could wrest nothing from Nature; he could make her produce nothing; and he had only his limbs with which to appropriate what she offered. His existence was almost entirely controlled by accident; he possessed no capital; he lived out of his product, and production had only the two elements of land and labor of appropriation. At the present time man is an intelligent animal. He knows something of the laws of Nature; he can avail himself of what is favorable, and avert what is unfavorable, in nature, to a certain extent; he has narrowed the sphere of accident, and in some respects reduced it to computations which lessen its importance; he can bring the productive forces of Nature into service, and make them produce food, clothing, and shelter. How has the change been brought about? The answer is, By capital. If we can come to an understanding of what capital is, and what a place it occupies in civilization, it will clear up our ideas about a great many of these schemes and philosophies which are put forward to criticise social arrangements, or as a basis of proposed reforms. The first beginnings of capital are lost in the obscurity which covers all the germs of civilization. The more one comes to understand the case of the primitive man, the more wonderful it seems that man ever started on the road to civilization. Among the lower animals we find some inchoate forms of capital, but from them to the lowest forms of real capital there is a great stride. It does not seem possible that man could have taken that stride without intelligent reflection, and everything we know about the primitive man shows us that he did not reflect. No doubt accident controlled the first steps. They may have been won and lost again many times. There was one natural element which man learned to use so early that we cannot find any trace of him when he had it not--fire. There was one tool-weapon in nature--the flint. Beyond the man who was so far superior to the brutes that he knew how to use fire and had the use of flints we cannot go. A man of lower civilization than that was so like the brutes that, like them, he could leave no sign of his presence on the earth save his bones. The man who had a flint no longer need be a prey to a wild animal, but could make a prey of it. He could get meat food. He who had meat food could provide his food in such time as to get leisure to improve his flint tools. He could get skins for clothing, bones for needles, tendons for thread. He next devised traps and snares by which to take animals alive. He domesticated them, and lived on their increase. He made them beasts of draught and burden, and so got the use of a natural force. He who had beasts of draught and burden could make a road and trade, and so get the advantage of all soils and all climates. He could make a boat, and use the winds as force. He now had such tools, science, and skill that he could till the ground, and make it give him more food. So from the first step that man made above the brute the thing which made his civilization possible was capital. Every step of capital won made the next step possible, up to the present hour. Not a step has been or can be made without capital. It is labor accumulated, multiplied into itself--raised to a higher power, as the mathematicians say. The locomotive is only possible today because, from the flint-knife up, one achievement has been multiplied into another through thousands of generations. We cannot now stir a step in our life without capital. We cannot build a school, a hospital, a church, or employ a missionary society, without capital, any more than we could build a palace or a factory without capital. We have ourselves, and we have the earth; the thing which limits what we can do is the third requisite--capital. Capital is force, human energy stored or accumulated, and very few people ever come to appreciate its importance to civilized life. We get so used to it that we do not see its use. The industrial organization of society has undergone a development with the development of capital. Nothing has ever made men spread over the earth and develop the arts but necessity--that is, the need of getting a living, and the hardships endured in trying to meet that need. The human race has had to pay with its blood at every step. It has had to buy its experience. The thing which has kept up the necessity of more migration or more power over Nature has been increase of population. Where population has become chronically excessive, and where the population has succumbed and sunk, instead of developing energy enough for a new advance, there races have degenerated and settled into permanent barbarism. They have lost the power to rise again, and have made no inventions. Where life has been so easy and ample that it cost no effort, few improvements have been made. It is in the middle range, with enough social pressure to make energy needful, and not enough social pressure to produce despair, that the most progress has been made. At first all labor was forced. Men forced it on women, who were drudges and slaves. Men reserved for themselves only the work of hunting or war. Strange and often horrible shadows of all the old primitive barbarism are now to be found in the slums of great cities, and in the lowest groups of men, in the midst of civilized nations. Men impose labor on women in some such groups today. Through various grades of slavery, serfdom, villeinage, and through various organizations of castes and guilds, the industrial organization has been modified and developed up to the modern system. Some men have been found to denounce and deride the modern system--what they call the capitalist system. The modern system is based on liberty, on contract, and on private property. It has been reached through a gradual emancipation of the mass of mankind from old bonds both to Nature and to their fellow-men. Village communities, which excite the romantic admiration of some writers, were fit only for a most elementary and unorganized society. They were fit neither to cope with the natural difficulties of winning much food from little land, nor to cope with the malice of men. Hence they perished. In the modern society the organization of labor is high. Some are land-owners and agriculturists, some are transporters, bankers, merchants, teachers; some advance the product by manufacture. It is a system of division of functions, which is being refined all the time by subdivision of trade and occupation, and by the differentiation of new trades. The ties by which all are held together are those of free co-operation and contract. If we look back for comparison to anything of which human history gives us a type or experiment, we see that the modern free system of industry offers to every living human being chances of happiness indescribably in excess of what former generations have possessed. It offers no such guarantees as were once possessed by some, that they should in no case suffer. We have an instance right at hand. The Negroes, once slaves in the United States, used to be assured care, medicine, and support; but they spent their efforts, and other men took the products. They have been set free. That means only just this: they now work and hold their own products, and are assured of nothing but what they earn. In escaping from subjection they have lost claims. Care, medicine, and support they get, if they earn it. Will any one say that the black men have not gained? Will any one deny that individual black men may seem worse off? Will any one allow such observations to blind them to the true significance of the change? If any one thinks that there are or ought to be somewhere in society guarantees that no man shall suffer hardship, let him understand that there can be no such guarantees, unless other men give them--that is, unless we go back to slavery, and make one man's effort conduce to another man's welfare. Of course, if a speculator breaks loose from science and history, and plans out an ideal society in which all the conditions are to be different, he is a law-giver or prophet, and those may listen to him who have leisure. The modern industrial system is a great social co-operation. It is automatic and instinctive in its operation. The adjustments of the organs take place naturally. The parties are held together by impersonal force--supply and demand. They may never see each other; they may be separated by half the circumference of the globe. Their co-operation in the social effort is combined and distributed again by financial machinery, and the rights and interests are measured and satisfied without any special treaty or convention at all. All this goes on so smoothly and naturally that we forget to notice it. We think that it costs nothing--does itself, as it were. The truth is, that this great co-operative effort is one of the great products of civilization--one of its costliest products and highest refinements, because here, more than anywhere else, intelligence comes in, but intelligence so clear and correct that it does not need expression. Now, by the great social organization the whole civilized body (and soon we shall say the whole human race) keeps up a combined assault on Nature for the means of subsistence. Civilized society may be said to be maintained in an unnatural position, at an elevation above the earth, or above the natural state of human society. It can be maintained there only by an efficient organization of the social effort and by capital. At its elevation it supports far greater numbers than it could support on any lower stage. Members of society who come into it as it is today can live only by entering into the organization. If numbers increase, the organization must be perfected, and capital must increase--_i.e._, power over Nature. If the society does not keep up its power, if it lowers its organization or wastes its capital, it falls back toward the natural state of barbarism from which it rose, and in so doing it must sacrifice thousands of its weakest members. Hence human society lives at a constant strain forward and upward, and those who have most interest that this strain be successfully kept up, that the social organization be perfected, and that capital be increased, are those at the bottom. The notion of property which prevails among us today is, that a man has a right to the thing which he has made by his labor. This is a very modern and highly civilized conception. Singularly enough, it has been brought forward dogmatically to prove that property in land is not reasonable, because man did not make land. A man cannot "make" a chattel or product of any kind whatever without first appropriating land, so as to get the ore, wood, wool, cotton, fur, or other raw material. All that men ever appropriate land for is to get out of it the natural materials on which they exercise their industry. Appropriation, therefore, precedes labor-production, both historically and logically. Primitive races regarded, and often now regard, appropriation as the best title to property. As usual, they are logical. It is the simplest and most natural mode of thinking to regard a thing as belonging to that man who has, by carrying, wearing, or handling it, associated it for a certain time with his person. I once heard a little boy of four years say to his mother, "Why is not this pencil mine now? It used to be my brother's, but I have been using it all day." He was reasoning with the logic of his barbarian ancestors. The reason for allowing private property in land is, that two men cannot eat the same loaf of bread. If A has taken a piece of land, and is at work getting his loaf out of it, B cannot use the same land at the same time for the same purpose. Priority of appropriation is the only title of right which can supersede the title of greater force. The reason why man is not altogether a brute is, because he has learned to accumulate capital, to use capital, to advance to a higher organization of society, to develop a completer co-operation, and so to win greater and greater control over Nature. It is a great delusion to look about us and select those men who occupy the most advanced position in respect to worldly circumstances as the standard to which we think that all might be and ought to be brought. All the complaints and criticisms about the inequality of men apply to inequalities in property, luxury, and creature comforts, not to knowledge, virtue, or even physical beauty and strength. But it is plainly impossible that we should all attain to equality on the level of the best of us. The history of civilization shows us that the human race has by no means marched on in a solid and even phalanx. It has had its advance-guard, its rear-guard, and its stragglers. It presents us the same picture today; for it embraces every grade, from the most civilized nations down to the lowest surviving types of barbarians. Furthermore, if we analyze the society of the most civilized state, especially in one of the great cities where the highest triumphs of culture are presented, we find survivals of every form of barbarism and lower civilization. Hence, those who today enjoy the most complete emancipation from the hardships of human life, and the greatest command over the conditions of existence, simply show us the best that man has yet been able to do. Can we all reach that standard by wishing for it? Can we all vote it to each other? If we pull down those who are most fortunate and successful, shall we not by that very act defeat our own object? Those who are trying to reason out any issue from this tangle of false notions of society and of history are only involving themselves in hopeless absurdities and contradictions. If any man is not in the first rank who might get there, let him put forth new energy and take his place. If any man is not in the front rank, although he has done his best, how can he be advanced at all? Certainly in no way save by pushing down any one else who is forced to contribute to his advancement. It is often said that the mass of mankind are yet buried in poverty, ignorance, and brutishness. It would be a correct statement of the facts intended, from an historical and sociological point of view, to say, Only a small fraction of the human race have as yet, by thousands of years of struggle, been partially emancipated from poverty, ignorance, and brutishness. When once this simple correction is made in the general point of view, we gain most important corollaries for all the subordinate questions about the relations of races, nations, and classes. V. _THAT WE MUST HAVE FEW MEN, IF WE WANT STRONG MEN._ In our modern revolt against the mediaeval notions of hereditary honor and hereditary shame we have gone too far, for we have lost the appreciation of the true dependence of children on parents. We have a glib phrase about "the accident of birth," but it would puzzle anybody to tell what it means. If A takes B to wife, it is not an accident that he took B rather than C, D, or any other woman; and if A and B have a child, X, that child's ties to ancestry and posterity, and his relations to the human race, into which he has been born through A and B, are in no sense accidental. The child's interest in the question whether A should have married B or C is as material as anything one can conceive of, and the fortune which made X the son of A, and not of another man, is the most material fact in his destiny. If those things were better understood public opinion about the ethics of marriage and parentage would undergo a most salutary change. In following the modern tendency of opinion we have lost sight of the due responsibility of parents, and our legislation has thrown upon some parents the responsibility, not only of their own children, but of those of others. The relation of parents and children is the only case of sacrifice in Nature. Elsewhere equivalence of exchange prevails rigorously. The parents, however, hand down to their children the return for all which they had themselves inherited from their ancestors. They ought to hand down the inheritance with increase. It is by this relation that the human race keeps up a constantly advancing contest with Nature. The penalty of ceasing an aggressive behavior toward the hardships of life on the part of mankind is, that we go backward. We cannot stand still. Now, parental affection constitutes the personal motive which drives every man in his place to an aggressive and conquering policy toward the limiting conditions of human life. Affection for wife and children is also the greatest motive to social ambition and personal self-respect--that is, to what is technically called a "high standard of living." Some people are greatly shocked to read of what is called Malthusianism, when they read it in a book, who would be greatly ashamed of themselves if they did not practise Malthusianism in their own affairs. Among respectable people a man who took upon himself the cares and expenses of a family before he had secured a regular trade or profession, or had accumulated some capital, and who allowed his wife to lose caste, and his children to be dirty, ragged, and neglected, would be severely blamed by the public opinion of the community. The standard of living which a man makes for himself and his family, if he means to earn it, and does not formulate it as a demand which he means to make on his fellow-men, is a gauge of his self-respect; and a high standard of living is the moral limit which an intelligent body of men sets for itself far inside of the natural limits of the sustaining power of the land, which latter limit is set by starvation, pestilence, and war. But a high standard of living restrains population; that is, if we hold up to the higher standard of men, we must have fewer of them. Taking men as they have been and are, they are subjects of passion, emotion, and instinct. Only the _élite_ of the race has yet been raised to the point where reason and conscience can even curb the lower motive forces. For the mass of mankind, therefore, the price of better things is too severe, for that price can be summed up in one word--self-control. The consequence is, that for all but a few of us the limit of attainment in life in the best case is to live out our term, to pay our debts, to place three or four children in a position to support themselves in a position as good as the father's was, and there to make the account balance. Since we must all live, in the civilized organization of society, on the existing capital; and since those who have only come out even have not accumulated any of the capital, have no claim to own it, and cannot leave it to their children; and since those who own land have parted with their capital for it, which capital has passed back through other hands into industrial employment, how is a man who has inherited neither land nor capital to secure a living? He must give his productive energy to apply capital to land for the further production of wealth, and he must secure a share in the existing capital by a contract relation to those who own it. Undoubtedly the man who possesses capital has a great advantage over the man who has no capital, in all the struggle for existence. Think of two men who want to lift a weight, one of whom has a lever, and the other must apply his hands directly; think of two men tilling the soil, one of whom uses his hands or a stick, while the other has a horse and a plough; think of two men in conflict with a wild animal, one of whom has only a stick or a stone, while the other has a repeating rifle; think of two men who are sick, one of whom can travel, command medical skill, get space, light, air, and water, while the other lacks all these things. This does not mean that one man has an advantage _against_ the other, but that, when they are rivals in the effort to get the means of subsistence from Nature, the one who has capital has immeasurable advantages over the other. If it were not so capital would not be formed. Capital is only formed by self-denial, and if the possession of it did not secure advantages and superiorities of a high order men would never submit to what is necessary to get it. The first accumulation costs by far the most, and the rate of increase by profits at first seems pitiful. Among the metaphors which partially illustrate capital--all of which, however, are imperfect and inadequate--the snow-ball is useful to show some facts about capital. Its first accumulation is slow, but as it proceeds the accumulation becomes rapid in a high ratio, and the element of self-denial declines. This fact, also, is favorable to the accumulation of capital, for if the self-denial continued to be as great per unit when the accumulation had become great, there would speedily come a point at which further accumulation would not pay. The man who has capital has secured his future, won leisure which he can employ in winning secondary objects of necessity and advantage, and emancipated himself from those things in life which are gross and belittling. The possession of capital is, therefore, an indispensable prerequisite of educational, scientific, and moral goods. This is not saying that a man in the narrowest circumstances may not be a good man. It is saying that the extension and elevation of all the moral and metaphysical interests of the race are conditioned on that extension of civilization of which capital is the prerequisite, and that he who has capital can participate in and move along with the highest developments of his time. Hence it appears that the man who has his self-denial before him, however good may be his intention, cannot be as the man who has his self-denial behind him. Some seem to think that this is very unjust, but they get their notions of justice from some occult source of inspiration, not from observing the facts of this world as it has been made and exists. The maxim, or injunction, to which a study of capital leads us is, Get capital. In a community where the standard of living is high, and the conditions of production are favorable, there is a wide margin within which an individual may practise self-denial and win capital without suffering, if he has not the charge of a family. That it requires energy, courage, perseverance, and prudence is not to be denied. Any one who believes that any good thing on this earth can be got without those virtues may believe in the philosopher's stone or the fountain of youth. If there were any Utopia its inhabitants would certainly be very insipid and characterless. Those who have neither capital nor land unquestionably have a closer class interest than landlords or capitalists. If one of those who are in either of the latter classes is a spendthrift he loses his advantage. If the non-capitalists increase their numbers, they surrender themselves into the hands of the landlords and capitalists. They compete with each other for food until they run up the rent of land, and they compete with each other for wages until they give the capitalist a great amount of productive energy for a given amount of capital. If some of them are economical and prudent in the midst of a class which saves nothing and marries early, the few prudent suffer for the folly of the rest, since they can only get current rates of wages; and if these are low the margin out of which to make savings by special personal effort is narrow. No instance has yet been seen of a society composed of a class of great capitalists and a class of laborers who had fallen into a caste of permanent drudges. Probably no such thing is possible so long as landlords especially remain as a third class, and so long as society continues to develop strong classes of merchants, financiers, professional men, and other classes. If it were conceivable that non-capitalist laborers should give up struggling to become capitalists, should give way to vulgar enjoyments and passions, should recklessly increase their numbers, and should become a permanent caste, they might with some justice be called proletarians. The name has been adopted by some professed labor leaders, but it really should be considered insulting. If there were such a proletariat it would be hopelessly in the hands of a body of plutocratic capitalists, and a society so organized would, no doubt, be far worse than a society composed only of nobles and serfs, which is the worst society the world has seen in modern times. At every turn, therefore, it appears that the number of men and the quality of men limit each other, and that the question whether we shall have more men or better men is of most importance to the class which has neither land nor capital. VI. _THAT HE WHO WOULD BE WELL TAKEN CARE OF MUST TAKE CARE OF HIMSELF._ The discussion of "the relations of labor and capital" has not hitherto been very fruitful. It has been confused by ambiguous definitions, and it has been based upon assumptions about the rights and duties of social classes which are, to say the least, open to serious question as regards their truth and justice. If, then, we correct and limit the definitions, and if we test the assumptions, we shall find out whether there is anything to discuss about the relations of "labor and capital," and, if anything, what it is. Let us first examine the terms. 1. Labor means properly _toil_, irksome exertion, expenditure of productive energy. 2. The term is used, secondly, by a figure of speech, and in a collective sense, to designate the body of _persons_ who, having neither capital nor land, come into the industrial organization offering productive services in exchange for means of subsistence. These persons are united by community of interest into a group, or class, or interest, and, when interests come to be adjusted, the interests of this group will undoubtedly be limited by those of other groups. 3. The term labor is used, thirdly, in a more restricted, very popular and current, but very ill-defined way, to designate a limited sub-group among those who live by contributing productive efforts to the work of society. Every one is a laborer who is not a person of leisure. Public men, or other workers, if any, who labor but receive no pay, might be excluded from the category, and we should immediately pass, by such a restriction, from a broad and philosophical to a technical definition of the labor class. But merchants, bankers, professional men, and all whose labor is, to an important degree, mental as well as manual, are excluded from this third use of the term labor. The result is, that the word is used, in a sense at once loosely popular and strictly technical, to designate a group of laborers who separate their interests from those of other laborers. Whether farmers are included under "labor" in this third sense or not I have not been able to determine. It seems that they are or are not, as the interest of the disputants may require. 1. Capital is any _product_ of labor which is used to assist production. 2. This term also is used, by a figure of speech, and in a collective sense, for the _persons_ who possess capital, and who come into the industrial organization to get their living by using capital for profit. To do this they need to exchange capital for productive services. These persons constitute an interest, group, or class, although they are not united by any such community of interest as laborers, and, in the adjustment of interests, the interests of the owners of capital must be limited by the interests of other groups. 3. Capital, however, is also used in a vague and popular sense which it is hard to define. In general it is used, and in this sense, to mean employers of laborers, but it seems to be restricted to those who are employers on a large scale. It does not seem to include those who employ only domestic servants. Those also are excluded who own capital and lend it, but do not directly employ people to use it. It is evident that if we take for discussion "capital and labor," if each of the terms has three definitions, and if one definition of each is loose and doubtful, we have everything prepared for a discussion which shall be interminable and fruitless, which shall offer every attraction to undisciplined thinkers, and repel everybody else. The real collision of interest, which is the centre of the dispute, is that of employers and employed; and the first condition of successful study of the question, or of successful investigation to see if there is any question, is to throw aside the technical economic terms, and to look at the subject in its true meaning, expressed in untechnical language. We will use the terms "capital" and "labor" only in their strict economic significance, viz., the first definition given above under each term, and we will use the terms "laborers" and "capitalists" when we mean the persons described in the second definition under each term. It is a common assertion that the interests of employers and employed are identical, that they are partners in an enterprise, etc. These sayings spring from a disposition, which may often be noticed, to find consoling and encouraging observations in the facts of sociology, and to refute, if possible, any unpleasant observations. If we try to learn what is true, we shall both do what is alone right, and we shall do the best for ourselves in the end. The interests of employers and employed as parties to a contract are antagonistic in certain respects and united in others, as in the case wherever supply and demand operate. If John gives cloth to James in exchange for wheat, John's interest is that cloth be good and attractive but not plentiful, but that wheat be good and plentiful; James' interest is that wheat be good and attractive but not plentiful, but that cloth be good and plentiful. All men have a common interest that all things be good, and that all things but the one which each produces be plentiful. The employer is interested that capital be good but rare, and productive energy good and plentiful; the employé is interested that capital be good and plentiful, but that productive energy be good and rare. When one man alone can do a service, and he can do it very well, he represents the laborer's ideal. To say that employers and employed are partners in an enterprise is only a delusive figure of speech. It is plainly based on no facts in the industrial system. Employers and employed make contracts on the best terms which they can agree upon, like buyers and sellers, renters and hirers, borrowers and lenders. Their relations are, therefore, controlled by the universal law of supply and demand. The employer assumes the direction of the business, and takes all the risk, for the capital must be consumed in the industrial process, and whether it will be found again in the product or not depends upon the good judgment and foresight with which the capital and labor have been applied. Under the wages system the employer and the employé contract for time. The employé fulfils the contract if he obeys orders during the time, and treats the capital as he is told to treat it. Hence he is free from all responsibility, risk, and speculation. That this is the most advantageous arrangement for him, on the whole and in the great majority of cases, is very certain. Salaried men and wage-receivers are in precisely the same circumstances, except that the former, by custom and usage, are those who have special skill or training, which is almost always an investment of capital, and which narrows the range of competition in their case. Physicians, lawyers, and others paid by fees are workers by the piece. To the capital in existence all must come for their subsistence and their tools. Association is the lowest and simplest mode of attaining accord and concord between men. It is now the mode best suited to the condition and chances of employés. Employers formerly made use of guilds to secure common action for a common interest. They have given up this mode of union because it has been superseded by a better one. Correspondence, travel, newspapers, circulars, and telegrams bring to employers and capitalists the information which they need for the defense of their interests. The combination between them is automatic and instinctive. It is not formal and regulated by rule. It is all the stronger on that account, because intelligent men, holding the same general maxims of policy, and obtaining the same information, pursue similar lines of action, while retaining all the ease, freedom, and elasticity of personal independence. At present employés have not the leisure necessary for the higher modes of communication. Capital is also necessary to establish the ties of common action under the higher forms. Moreover, there is, no doubt, an incidental disadvantage connected with the release which the employé gets under the wages system from all responsibility for the conduct of the business. That is, that employés do not learn to watch or study the course of industry, and do not plan for their own advantage, as other classes do. There is an especial field for combined action in the case of employés. Employers are generally separated by jealousy and pride in regard to all but the most universal class interests. Employés have a much closer interest in each other's wisdom. Competition of capitalists for profits redounds to the benefit of laborers. Competition of laborers for subsistence redounds to the benefit of capitalists. It is utterly futile to plan and scheme so that either party can make a "corner" on the other. If employers withdraw capital from employment in an attempt to lower wages, they lose profits. If employés withdraw from competition in order to raise wages, they starve to death. Capital and labor are the two things which least admit of monopoly. Employers can, however, if they have foresight of the movements of industry and commerce, and if they make skillful use of credit, win exceptional profits for a limited period. One great means of exceptional profit lies in the very fact that the employés have not exercised the same foresight, but have plodded along and waited for the slow and successive action of the industrial system through successive periods of production, while the employer has anticipated and synchronized several successive steps. No bargain is fairly made if one of the parties to it fails to maintain his interest. If one party to a contract is well informed and the other ill informed, the former is sure to win an advantage. No doctrine that a true adjustment of interest follows from the free play of interests can be construed to mean that an interest which is neglected will get its rights. The employés have no means of information which is as good and legitimate as association, and it is fair and necessary that their action should be united in behalf of their interests. They are not in a position for the unrestricted development of individualism in regard to many of their interests. Unquestionably the better ones lose by this, and the development of individualism is to be looked forward to and hoped for as a great gain. In the meantime the labor market, in which wages are fixed, cannot reach fair adjustments unless the interest of the laborers is fairly defended, and that cannot, perhaps, yet be done without associations of laborers. No newspapers yet report the labor market. If they give any notices of it--of its rise and fall, of its variations in different districts and in different trades--such notices are always made for the interest of the employers. Re-distribution of employés, both locally and trade-wise (so far as the latter is possible), is a legitimate and useful mode of raising wages. The illegitimate attempt to raise wages by limiting the number of apprentices is the great abuse of trades-unions. I shall discuss that in the ninth chapter. It appears that the English trades were forced to contend, during the first half of this century, for the wages which the market really would give them, but which, under the old traditions and restrictions which remained, they could not get without a positive struggle. They formed the opinion that a strike could raise wages. They were educated so to think by the success which they had won in certain attempts. It appears to have become a traditional opinion, in which no account is taken of the state of the labor market. It would be hard to find a case of any strike within thirty or forty years, either in England or the United States, which has paid. If a strike occurs, it certainly wastes capital and hinders production. It must, therefore, lower wages subsequently below what they would have been if there had been no strike. If a strike succeeds, the question arises whether an advance of wages as great or greater would not have occurred within a limited period without a strike. Nevertheless, a strike is a legitimate resort at last. It is like war, for it is war. All that can be said is that those who have recourse to it at last ought to understand that they assume a great responsibility, and that they can only be justified by the circumstances of the case. I cannot believe that a strike for wages ever is expedient. There are other purposes, to be mentioned in a moment, for which a strike may be expedient; but a strike for wages is a clear case of a strife in which ultimate success is a complete test of the justifiability of the course of those who made the strife. If the men win an advance, it proves that they ought to have made it. If they do not win, it proves that they were wrong to strike. If they strike with the market in their favor, they win. If they strike with the market against them, they fail. It is in human nature that a man whose income is increased is happy and satisfied, although, if he demanded it, he might perhaps at that very moment get more. A man whose income is lessened is displeased and irritated, and he is more likely to strike then, when it may be in vain. Strikes in industry are not nearly so peculiar a phenomenon as they are often thought to be. Buyers strike when they refuse to buy commodities of which the price has risen. Either the price remains high, and they permanently learn to do without the commodity, or the price is lowered, and they buy again. Tenants strike when house rents rise too high for them. They seek smaller houses or parts of houses until there is a complete readjustment. Borrowers strike when the rates for capital are so high that they cannot employ it to advantage and pay those rates. Laborers may strike and emigrate, or, in this country, take to the land. This kind of strike is a regular application of legitimate means, and is sure to succeed. Of course, strikes with violence against employers or other employés are not to be discussed at all. Trades-unions, then, are right and useful, and it may be that they are necessary. They may do much by way of true economic means to raise wages. They are useful to spread information, to maintain _esprit de corps_, to elevate the public opinion of the class. They have been greatly abused in the past. In this country they are in constant danger of being used by political schemers--a fact which does more than anything else to disparage them in the eyes of the best workmen. The economic notions most in favor in the trades-unions are erroneous, although not more so than those which find favor in the counting-room. A man who believes that he can raise wages by doing bad work, wasting time, allowing material to be wasted, and giving generally the least possible service in the allotted time, is not to be distinguished from the man who says that wages can be raised by putting protective taxes on all clothing, furniture, crockery, bedding, books, fuel, utensils, and tools. One lowers the services given for the capital, and the other lowers the capital given for the services. Trades-unionism in the higher classes consists in jobbery. There is a great deal of it in the professions. I once heard a group of lawyers of high standing sneer at an executor who hoped to get a large estate through probate without allowing any lawyers to get big fees out of it. They all approved of steps which had been taken to force a contest, which steps had forced the executor to retain two or three lawyers. No one of the speakers had been retained. Trades-unions need development, correction, and perfection. They ought, however, to get this from the men themselves. If the men do not feel any need of such institutions, the patronage of other persons who come to them and give them these institutions will do harm and not good. Especially trades-unions ought to be perfected so as to undertake a great range of improvement duties for which we now rely on Government inspection, which never gives what we need. The safety of workmen from machinery, the ventilation and sanitary arrangements required by factories, the special precautions of certain processes, the hours of labor of women and children, the schooling of children, the limits of age for employed children, Sunday work, hours of labor--these and other like matters ought to be controlled by the men themselves through their organizations. The laborers about whom we are talking are free men in a free state. If they want to be protected they must protect themselves. They ought to protect their own women and children. Their own class opinion ought to secure the education of the children of their class. If an individual workman is not bold enough to protest against a wrong to laborers, the agent of a trades-union might with propriety do it on behalf of the body of workmen. Here is a great and important need, and, instead of applying suitable and adequate means to supply it, we have demagogues declaiming, trades-union officers resolving, and Government inspectors drawing salaries, while little or nothing is done. I have said that trades-unions are right and useful, and perhaps, necessary; but trades-unions are, in fact, in this country, an exotic and imported institution, and a great many of their rules and modes of procedure, having been developed in England to meet English circumstances, are out of place here. The institution itself does not flourish here as it would if it were in a thoroughly congenial environment. It needs to be supported by special exertion and care. Two things here work against it. First, the great mobility of our population. A trades-union, to be strong, needs to be composed of men who have grown up together, who have close personal acquaintance and mutual confidence, who have been trained to the same code, and who expect to live on together in the same circumstances and interests. In this country, where workmen move about frequently and with facility, the unions suffer in their harmony and stability. It was a significant fact that the unions declined during the hard times. It was only when the men were prosperous that they could afford to keep up the unions, as a kind of social luxury. When the time came to use the union it ceased to be. Secondly, the American workman really has such personal independence, and such an independent and strong position in the labor market, that he does not need the union. He is farther on the road toward the point where personal liberty supplants the associative principle than any other workman. Hence the association is likely to be a clog to him, especially if he is a good laborer, rather than an assistance. If it were not for the notion brought from England, that trades-unions are, in some mysterious way, beneficial to the workmen--which notion has now become an article of faith--it is very doubtful whether American workmen would find that the unions were of any use, unless they were converted into organizations for accomplishing the purposes enumerated in the last paragraph. The fashion of the time is to run to Government boards, commissions, and inspectors to set right everything which is wrong. No experience seems to damp the faith of our public in these instrumentalities. The English Liberals in the middle of this century seemed to have full grasp of the principle of liberty, and to be fixed and established in favor of non-interference. Since they have come to power, however, they have adopted the old instrumentalities, and have greatly multiplied them since they have had a great number of reforms to carry out. They seem to think that interference is good if only they interfere. In this country the party which is "in" always interferes, and the party which is "out" favors non-interference. The system of interference is a complete failure to the ends it aims at, and sooner or later it will fall of its own expense and be swept away. The two notions--one to regulate things by a committee of control, and the other to let things regulate themselves by the conflict of interests between free men--are diametrically opposed; and the former is corrupting to free institutions, because men who are taught to expect Government inspectors to come and take care of them lose all true education in liberty. If we have been all wrong for the last three hundred years in aiming at a fuller realization of individual liberty, as a condition of general and widely-diffused happiness, then we must turn back to paternalism, discipline, and authority; but to have a combination of liberty and dependence is impossible. I have read a great many diatribes within the last ten years against employers, and a great many declamations about the wrongs of employés. I have never seen a defense of the employer. Who dares say that he is not the friend of the poor man? Who dares say that he is the friend of the employer? I will try to say what I think is true. There are bad, harsh, cross employers; there are slovenly, negligent workmen; there are just about as many proportionately of one of these classes as of the other. The employers of the United States--as a class, proper exceptions being understood--have no advantage over their workmen. They could not oppress them if they wanted to do so. The advantage, taking good and bad times together, is with the workmen. The employers wish the welfare of the workmen in all respects, and would give redress for any grievance which was brought to their attention. They are considerate of the circumstances and interests of the laborers. They remember the interests of the workmen when driven to consider the necessity of closing or reducing hours. They go on, and take risk and trouble on themselves in working through bad times, rather than close their works. The whole class of those-who-have are quick in their sympathy for any form of distress or suffering. They are too quick. Their sympathies need regulating, not stimulating. They are more likely to give away capital recklessly than to withhold it stingily when any alleged case of misfortune is before them. They rejoice to see any man succeed in improving his position. They will aid him with counsel and information if he desires it, and any man who needs and deserves help because he is trying to help himself will be sure to meet with sympathy, encouragement, and assistance from those who are better off. If those who are in that position are related to him as employers to employé, that tie will be recognized as giving him an especial claim. VII. _CONCERNING SOME OLD FOES UNDER NEW FACES._ The history of the human race is one long story of attempts by certain persons and classes to obtain control of the power of the State, so as to win earthly gratifications at the expense of others. People constantly assume that there is something metaphysical and sentimental about government. At bottom there are two chief things with which government has to deal. They are, the property of men and the honor of women. These it has to defend against crime. The capital which, as we have seen, is the condition of all welfare on earth, the fortification of existence, and the means of growth, is an object of cupidity. Some want to get it without paying the price of industry and economy. In ancient times they made use of force. They organized bands of robbers. They plundered laborers and merchants. Chief of all, however, they found that means of robbery which consisted in gaining control of the civil organization--the State--and using its poetry and romance as a glamour under cover of which they made robbery lawful. They developed high-spun theories of nationality, patriotism, and loyalty. They took all the rank, glory, power, and prestige of the great civil organization, and they took all the rights. They threw on others the burdens and the duties. At one time, no doubt, feudalism was an organization which drew together again the fragments of a dissolved society; but when the lawyers had applied the Roman law to modern kings, and feudal nobles had been converted into an aristocracy of court nobles, the feudal nobility no longer served any purpose. In modern times the great phenomenon has been the growth of the middle class out of the mediaeval cities, the accumulation of wealth, and the encroachment of wealth, as a social power, on the ground formerly occupied by rank and birth. The middle class has been obliged to fight for its rights against the feudal class, and it has, during three or four centuries, gradually invented and established institutions to guarantee personal and property rights against the arbitrary will of kings and nobles. In its turn wealth is now becoming a power in three or four centuries, gradually invented and the State, and, like every other power, it is liable to abuse unless restrained by checks and guarantees. There is an insolence of wealth, as there is an insolence of rank. A plutocracy might be even far worse than an aristocracy. Aristocrats have always had their class vices and their class virtues. They have always been, as a class, chargeable with licentiousness and gambling. They have, however, as a class, despised lying and stealing. They have always pretended to maintain a standard of honor, although the definition and the code of honor have suffered many changes and shocking deterioration. The middle class has always abhorred gambling and licentiousness, but it has not always been strict about truth and pecuniary fidelity. That there is a code and standard of mercantile honor which is quite as pure and grand as any military code, is beyond question, but it has never yet been established and defined by long usage and the concurrent support of a large and influential society. The feudal code has, through centuries, bred a high type of men, and constituted a caste. The mercantile code has not yet done so, but the wealthy class has attempted to merge itself in or to imitate the feudal class. The consequence is, that the wealth-power has been developed, while the moral and social sanctions by which that power ought to be controlled have not yet been developed. A plutocracy would be a civil organization in which the power resides in wealth, in which a man might have whatever he could buy, in which the rights, interests, and feelings of those who could not pay would be overridden. There is a plain tendency of all civilized governments toward plutocracy. The power of wealth in the English House of Commons has steadily increased for fifty years. The history of the present French Republic has shown an extraordinary development of plutocratic spirit and measures. In the United States many plutocratic doctrines have a currency which is not granted them anywhere else; that is, a man's right to have almost anything which he can pay for is more popularly recognized here than elsewhere. So far the most successful limitation on plutocracy has come from aristocracy, for the prestige of rank is still great wherever it exists. The social sanctions of aristocracy tell with great force on the plutocrats, more especially on their wives and daughters. It has already resulted that a class of wealthy men is growing up in regard to whom the old sarcasms of the novels and the stage about _parvenus_ are entirely thrown away. They are men who have no superiors, by whatever standard one chooses to measure them. Such an interplay of social forces would, indeed, be a great and happy solution of a new social problem, if the aristocratic forces were strong enough for the magnitude of the task. If the feudal aristocracy, or its modern representative--which is, in reality, not at all feudal--could carry down into the new era and transmit to the new masters of society the grace, elegance, breeding, and culture of the past, society would certainly gain by that course of things, as compared with any such rupture between past and present as occurred in the French Revolution. The dogmatic radicals who assail "on principle" the inherited social notions and distinctions are not serving civilization. Society can do without patricians, but it cannot do without patrician virtues. In the United States the opponent of plutocracy is democracy. Nowhere else in the world has the power of wealth come to be discussed in its political aspects as it is here. Nowhere else does the question arise as it does here. I have given some reasons for this in former chapters. Nowhere in the world is the danger of plutocracy as formidable as it is here. To it we oppose the power of numbers as it is presented by democracy. Democracy itself, however, is new and experimental. It has not yet existed long enough to find its appropriate forms. It has no prestige from antiquity such as aristocracy possesses. It has, indeed, none of the surroundings which appeal to the imagination. On the other hand, democracy is rooted in the physical, economic, and social circumstances of the United States. This country cannot be other than democratic for an indefinite period in the future. Its political processes will also be republican. The affection of the people for democracy makes them blind and uncritical in regard to it, and they are as fond of the political fallacies to which democracy lends itself as they are of its sound and correct interpretation, or fonder. Can democracy develop itself and at the same time curb plutocracy? Already the question presents itself as one of life or death to democracy. Legislative and judicial scandals show us that the conflict is already opened, and that it is serious. The lobby is the army of the plutocracy. An elective judiciary is a device so much in the interest of plutocracy, that it must be regarded as a striking proof of the toughness of the judicial institution that it has resisted the corruption so much as it has. The caucus, convention, and committee lend themselves most readily to the purposes of interested speculators and jobbers. It is just such machinery as they might have invented if they had been trying to make political devices to serve their purpose, and their processes call in question nothing less than the possibility of free self-government under the forms of a democratic republic. For now I come to the particular point which I desire to bring forward against all the denunciations and complainings about the power of chartered corporations and aggregated capital. If charters have been given which confer undue powers, who gave them? Our legislators did. Who elected these legislators. We did. If we are a free, self-governing people, we must understand that it costs vigilance and exertion to be self-governing. It costs far more vigilance and exertion to be so under the democratic form, where we have no aids from tradition or prestige, than under other forms. If we are a free, self-governing people, we can blame nobody but ourselves for our misfortunes. No one will come to help us out of them. It will do no good to heap law upon law, or to try by constitutional provisions simply to abstain from the use of powers which we find we always abuse. How can we get bad legislators to pass a law which shall hinder bad legislators from passing a bad law? That is what we are trying to do by many of our proposed remedies. The task before us, however, is one which calls for fresh reserves of moral force and political virtue from the very foundations of the social body. Surely it is not a new thing to us to learn that men are greedy and covetous, and that they will be selfish and tyrannical if they dare. The plutocrats are simply trying to do what the generals, nobles, and priests have done in the past--get the power of the State into their hands, so as to bend the rights of others to their own advantage; and what we need to do is to recognize the fact that we are face to face with the same old foes--the vices and passions of human nature. One of the oldest and most mischievous fallacies in this country has been the notion that we are better than other nations, and that Government has a smaller and easier task here than elsewhere. This fallacy has hindered us from recognizing our old foes as soon as we should have done. Then, again, these vices and passions take good care here to deck themselves out in the trappings of democratic watchwords and phrases, so that they are more often greeted with cheers than with opposition when they first appear. The plan of electing men to represent us who systematically surrender public to private interests, and then trying to cure the mischief by newspaper and platform declamation against capital and corporations, is an entire failure. The new foes must be met, as the old ones were met--by institutions and guarantees. The problem of civil liberty is constantly renewed. Solved once, it re-appears in a new form. The old constitutional guarantees were all aimed against king and nobles. New ones must be invented to hold the power of wealth to that responsibility without which no power whatever is consistent with liberty. The judiciary has given the most satisfactory evidence that it is competent to the new duty which devolves upon it. The courts have proved, in every case in which they have been called upon, that there are remedies, that they are adequate, and that they can be brought to bear upon the cases. The chief need seems to be more power of voluntary combination and co-operation among those who are aggrieved. Such co-operation is a constant necessity under free self-government; and when, in any community, men lose the power of voluntary co-operation in furtherance or defense of their own interests, they deserve to suffer, with no other remedy than newspaper denunciations and platform declamations. Of course, in such a state of things, political mountebanks come forward and propose fierce measures which can be paraded for political effect. Such measures would be hostile to all our institutions, would destroy capital, overthrow credit, and impair the most essential interests of society. On the side of political machinery there is no ground for hope, but only for fear. On the side of constitutional guarantees and the independent action of self-governing freemen there is every ground for hope. VIII. _ON THE VALUE, AS A SOCIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE, OF THE RULE TO MIND ONE'S OWN BUSINESS._ The passion for dealing with social questions is one of the marks of our time. Every man gets some experience of, and makes some observations on social affairs. Except matters of health, probably none have such general interest as matters of society. Except matters of health, none are so much afflicted by dogmatism and crude speculation as those which appertain to society. The amateurs in social science always ask: What shall we do? What shall we do with Neighbor A? What shall we do for Neighbor B? What shall we make Neighbor A do for Neighbor B? It is a fine thing to be planning and discussing broad and general theories of wide application. The amateurs always plan to use the individual for some constructive and inferential social purpose, or to use the society for some constructive and inferential individual purpose. For A to sit down and think, What shall I do? is commonplace; but to think what B ought to do is interesting, romantic, moral, self-flattering, and public-spirited all at once. It satisfies a great number of human weaknesses at once. To go on and plan what a whole class of people ought to do is to feel one's self a power on earth, to win a public position, to clothe one's self in dignity. Hence we have an unlimited supply of reformers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and would-be managers-in-general of society. Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately, the matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one's self individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one's place in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when the former is done. The common notion, however, seems to be that one has a duty to society, as a special and separate thing, and that this duty consists in considering and deciding what other people ought to do. Now, the man who can do anything for or about anybody else than himself is fit to be head of a family; and when he becomes head of a family he has duties to his wife and his children, in addition to the former big duty. Then, again, any man who can take care of himself and his family is in a very exceptional position, if he does not find in his immediate surroundings people who need his care and have some sort of a personal claim upon him. If, now, he is able to fulfill all this, and to take care of anybody outside his family and his dependents, he must have a surplus of energy, wisdom, and moral virtue beyond what he needs for his own business. No man has this; for a family is a charge which is capable of infinite development, and no man could suffice to the full measure of duty for which a family may draw upon him. Neither can a man give to society so advantageous an employment of his services, whatever they are, in any other way as by spending them on his family. Upon this, however, I will not insist. I recur to the observation that a man who proposes to take care of other people must have himself and his family taken care of, after some sort of a fashion, and must have an as yet unexhausted store of energy. The danger of minding other people's business is twofold. First, there is the danger that a man may leave his own business unattended to; and, second, there is the danger of an impertinent interference with another's affairs. The "friends of humanity" almost always run into both dangers. I am one of humanity, and I do not want any volunteer friends. I regard friendship as mutual, and I want to have my say about it. I suppose that other components of humanity feel in the same way about it. If so, they must regard any one who assumes the _rôle_ of a friend of humanity as impertinent. The reference to the friend of humanity back to his own business is obviously the next step. Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way. Some people have decided to spend Sunday in a certain way, and they want laws passed to make other people spend Sunday in the same way. Some people have resolved to be teetotalers, and they want a law passed to make everybody else a teetotaler. Some people have resolved to eschew luxury, and they want taxes laid to make others eschew luxury. The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches. Sometimes there is an element of self-interest in the proposed reformation, as when a publisher wanted a duty imposed on books, to keep Americans from reading books which would unsettle their Americanisms; and when artists wanted a tax laid on pictures, to save Americans from buying bad paintings. I make no reference here to the giving and taking of counsel and aid between man and man: of that I shall say something in the last chapter. The very sacredness of the relation in which two men stand to one another when one of them rescues the other from vice separates that relation from any connection with the work of the social busybody, the professional philanthropist, and the empirical legislator. The amateur social doctors are like the amateur physicians--they always begin with the question of _remedies_, and they go at this without any diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society. They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks is, to mind their own business. The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We have a great many social difficulties and hardships to contend with. Poverty, pain, disease, and misfortune surround our existence. We fight against them all the time. The individual is a centre of hopes, affections, desires, and sufferings. When he dies, life changes its form, but does not cease. That means that the person--the centre of all the hopes, affections, etc.--after struggling as long as he can, is sure to succumb at last. We would, therefore, as far as the hardships of the human lot are concerned, go on struggling to the best of our ability against them but for the social doctors, and we would endure what we could not cure. But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science. It is a fact worth noticing, just when there seems to be a revival of faith in legislative agencies, that our States are generally providing against the experienced evils of over-legislation by ordering that the Legislature shall sit only every other year. During the hard times, when Congress had a real chance to make or mar the public welfare, the final adjournment of that body was hailed year after year with cries of relief from a great anxiety. The greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in undoing the work of statesmen in the past, and the greatest difficulty in the way of reform is to find out how to undo their work without injury to what is natural and sound. All this mischief has been done by men who sat down to consider the problem (as I heard an apprentice of theirs once express it), What kind of a society do we want to make? When they had settled this question _a priori_ to their satisfaction, they set to work to make their ideal society, and today we suffer the consequences. Human society tries hard to adapt itself to any conditions in which it finds itself, and we have been warped and distorted until we have got used to it, as the foot adapts itself to an ill-made boot. Next, we have come to think that that is the right way for things to be; and it is true that a change to a sound and normal condition would for a time hurt us, as a man whose foot has been distorted would suffer if he tried to wear a well-shaped boot. Finally, we have produced a lot of economists and social philosophers who have invented sophisms for fitting our thinking to the distorted facts. Society, therefore, does not need any care or supervision. If we can acquire a science of society, based on observation of phenomena and study of forces, we may hope to gain some ground slowly toward the elimination of old errors and the re-establishment of a sound and natural social order. Whatever we gain that way will be by growth, never in the world by any reconstruction of society on the plan of some enthusiastic social architect. The latter is only repeating the old error over again, and postponing all our chances of real improvement. Society needs first of all to be freed from these meddlers--that is, to be let alone. Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine--_Laissez faire_. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way. If his sphere of action and interest impinges on that of any other man, there will have to be compromise and adjustment. Wait for the occasion. Do not attempt to generalize those interferences or to plan for them _a priori_. We have a body of laws and institutions which have grown up as occasion has occurred for adjusting rights. Let the same process go on. Practise the utmost reserve possible in your interferences even of this kind, and by no means seize occasion for interfering with natural adjustments. Try first long and patiently whether the natural adjustment will not come about through the play of interests and the voluntary concessions of the parties. I have said that we have an empirical political economy and social science to fit the distortions of our society. The test of empiricism in this matter is the attitude which one takes up toward _laissez faire_. It no doubt wounds the vanity of a philosopher who is just ready with a new solution of the universe to be told to mind his own business. So he goes on to tell us that if we think that we shall, by being let alone, attain a perfect happiness on earth, we are mistaken. The half-way men--the professional socialists--join him. They solemnly shake their heads, and tell us that he is right--that letting us alone will never secure us perfect happiness. Under all this lies the familiar logical fallacy, never expressed, but really the point of the whole, that we _shall_ get perfect happiness if we put ourselves in the hands of the world-reformer. We never supposed that _laissez faire_ would give us perfect happiness. We have left perfect happiness entirely out of our account. If the social doctors will mind their own business, we shall have no troubles but what belong to Nature. Those we will endure or combat as we can. What we desire is, that the friends of humanity should cease to add to them. Our disposition toward the ills which our fellow-man inflicts on us through malice or meddling is quite different from our disposition toward the ills which are inherent in the conditions of human life. To mind one's own business is a purely negative and unproductive injunction, but, taking social matters as they are just now, it is a sociological principle of the first importance. There might be developed a grand philosophy on the basis of minding one's own business. IX. _ON THE CASE OF A CERTAIN MAN WHO IS NEVER THOUGHT OF._ The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man. For once let us look him up and consider his case, for the characteristic of all social doctors is, that they fix their minds on some man or group of men whose case appeals to the sympathies and the imagination, and they plan remedies addressed to the particular trouble; they do not understand that all the parts of society hold together, and that forces which are set in action act and react throughout the whole organism, until an equilibrium is produced by a readjustment of all interests and rights. They therefore ignore entirely the source from which they must draw all the energy which they employ in their remedies, and they ignore all the effects on other members of society than the ones they have in view. They are always under the dominion of the superstition of government, and, forgetting that a government produces nothing at all, they leave out of sight the first fact to be remembered in all social discussion--that the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man. The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings toward "the poor," "the weak," "the laborers," and others of whom they make pets. They generalize these classes, and render them impersonal, and so constitute the classes into social pets. They turn to other classes and appeal to sympathy and generosity, and to all the other noble sentiments of the human heart. Action in the line proposed consists in a transfer of capital from the better off to the worse off. Capital, however, as we have seen, is the force by which civilization is maintained and carried on. The same piece of capital cannot be used in two ways. Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it was put to reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient and productive laborer. Hence the real sufferer by that kind of benevolence which consists in an expenditure of capital to protect the good-for-nothing is the industrious laborer. The latter, however, is never thought of in this connection. It is assumed that he is provided for and out of the account. Such a notion only shows how little true notions of political economy have as yet become popularized. There is an almost invincible prejudice that a man who gives a dollar to a beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but that a man who refuses the beggar and puts the dollar in a savings-bank is stingy and mean. The former is putting capital where it is very sure to be wasted, and where it will be a kind of seed for a long succession of future dollars, which must be wasted to ward off a greater strain on the sympathies than would have been occasioned by a refusal in the first place. Inasmuch as the dollar might have been turned into capital and given to a laborer who, while earning it, would have reproduced it, it must be regarded as taken from the latter. When a millionaire gives a dollar to a beggar the gain of utility to the beggar is enormous, and the loss of utility to the millionaire is insignificant. Generally the discussion is allowed to rest there. But if the millionaire makes capital of the dollar, it must go upon the labor market, as a demand for productive services. Hence there is another party in interest--the person who supplies productive services. There always are two parties. The second one is always the Forgotten Man, and any one who wants to truly understand the matter in question must go and search for the Forgotten Man. He will be found to be worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting. He is not, technically, "poor" or "weak"; he minds his own business, and makes no complaint. Consequently the philanthropists never think of him, and trample on him. We hear a great deal of schemes for "improving the condition of the working-man." In the United States the farther down we go in the grade of labor, the greater is the advantage which the laborer has over the higher classes. A hod-carrier or digger here can, by one day's labor, command many times more days' labor of a carpenter, surveyor, bookkeeper, or doctor than an unskilled laborer in Europe could command by one day's labor. The same is true, in a less degree, of the carpenter, as compared with the bookkeeper, surveyor, and doctor. This is why the United States is the great country for the unskilled laborer. The economic conditions all favor that class. There is a great continent to be subdued, and there is a fertile soil available to labor, with scarcely any need of capital. Hence the people who have the strong arms have what is most needed, and, if it were not for social consideration, higher education would not pay. Such being the case, the working-man needs no improvement in his condition except to be freed from the parasites who are living on him. All schemes for patronizing "the working classes" savor of condescension. They are impertinent and out of place in this free democracy. There is not, in fact, any such state of things or any such relation as would make projects of this kind appropriate. Such projects demoralize both parties, flattering the vanity of one and undermining the self-respect of the other. For our present purpose it is most important to notice that if we lift any man up we must have a fulcrum, or point of reaction. In society that means that to lift one man up we push another down. The schemes for improving the condition of the working classes interfere in the competition of workmen with each other. The beneficiaries are selected by favoritism, and are apt to be those who have recommended themselves to the friends of humanity by language or conduct which does not betoken independence and energy. Those who suffer a corresponding depression by the interference are the independent and self-reliant, who once more are forgotten or passed over; and the friends of humanity once more appear, in their zeal to help somebody, to be trampling on those who are trying to help themselves. Trades-unions adopt various devices for raising wages, and those who give their time to philanthropy are interested in these devices, and wish them success. They fix their minds entirely on the workmen for the time being _in_ the trade, and do not take note of any other _workmen_ as interested in the matter. It is supposed that the fight is between the workmen and their employers, and it is believed that one can give sympathy in that contest to the workmen without feeling responsibility for anything farther. It is soon seen, however, that the employer adds the trades-union and strike risk to the other risks of his business, and settles down to it philosophically. If, now, we go farther, we see that he takes it philosophically because he has passed the loss along on the public. It then appears that the public wealth has been diminished, and that the danger of a trade war, like the danger of a revolution, is a constant reduction of the well-being of all. So far, however, we have seen only things which could _lower_ wages--nothing which could raise them. The employer is worried, but that does not raise wages. The public loses, but the loss goes to cover extra risk, and that does not raise wages. A trades-union raises wages (aside from the legitimate and economic means noticed in Chapter VI.) by restricting the number of apprentices who may be taken into the trade. This device acts directly on the supply of laborers, and that produces effects on wages. If, however, the number of apprentices is limited, some are kept out who want to get in. Those who are in have, therefore, made a monopoly, and constituted themselves a privileged class on a basis exactly analogous to that of the old privileged aristocracies. But whatever is gained by this arrangement for those who are in is won at a greater loss to those who are kept out. Hence it is not upon the masters nor upon the public that trades-unions exert the pressure by which they raise wages; it is upon other persons of the labor class who want to get into the trades, but, not being able to do so, are pushed down into the unskilled labor class. These persons, however, are passed by entirely without notice in all the discussions about trades-unions. They are the Forgotten Men. But, since they want to get into the trade and win their living in it, it is fair to suppose that they are fit for it, would succeed at it, would do well for themselves and society in it; that is to say, that, of all persons interested or concerned, they most deserve our sympathy and attention. The cases already mentioned involve no legislation. Society, however, maintains police, sheriffs, and various institutions, the object of which is to protect people against themselves--that is, against their own vices. Almost all legislative effort to prevent vice is really protective of vice, because all such legislation saves the vicious man from the penalty of his vice. Nature's remedies against vice are terrible. She removes the victims without pity. A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set up on him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness. Gambling and other less mentionable vices carry their own penalties with them. Now, we never can annihilate a penalty. We can only divert it from the head of the man who has incurred it to the heads of others who have not incurred it. A vast amount of "social reform" consists in just this operation. The consequence is that those who have gone astray, being relieved from Nature's fierce discipline, go on to worse, and that there is a constantly heavier burden for the others to bear. Who are the others? When we see a drunkard in the gutter we pity him. If a policeman picks him up, we say that society has interfered to save him from perishing. "Society" is a fine word, and it saves us the trouble of thinking. The industrious and sober workman, who is mulcted of a percentage of his day's wages to pay the policeman, is the one who bears the penalty. But he is the Forgotten Man. He passes by and is never noticed, because he has behaved himself, fulfilled his contracts, and asked for nothing. The fallacy of all prohibitory, sumptuary, and moral legislation is the same. A and B determine to be teetotalers, which is often a wise determination, and sometimes a necessary one. If A and B are moved by considerations which seem to them good, that is enough. But A and B put their heads together to get a law passed which shall force C to be a teetotaler for the sake of D, who is in danger of drinking too much. There is no pressure on A and B. They are having their own way, and they like it. There is rarely any pressure on D. He does not like it, and evades it. The pressure all comes on C. The question then arises, Who is C? He is the man who wants alcoholic liquors for any honest purpose whatsoever, who would use his liberty without abusing it, who would occasion no public question, and trouble nobody at all. He is the Forgotten Man again, and as soon as he is drawn from his obscurity we see that he is just what each one of us ought to be. X. _THE CASE OF THE FORGOTTEN MAN FARTHER CONSIDERED._ There is a beautiful notion afloat in our literature and in the minds of our people that men are born to certain "natural rights." If that were true, there would be something on earth which was got for nothing, and this world would not be the place it is at all. The fact is, that there is no right whatever inherited by man which has not an equivalent and corresponding duty by the side of it, as the price of it. The rights, advantages, capital, knowledge, and all other goods which we inherit from past generations have been won by the struggles and sufferings of past generations; and the fact that the race lives, though men die, and that the race can by heredity accumulate within some cycle its victories over Nature, is one of the facts which make civilization possible. The struggles of the race as a whole produce the possessions of the race as a whole. Something for nothing is not to be found on earth. If there were such things as natural rights, the question would arise, Against whom are they good? Who has the corresponding obligation to satisfy these rights? There can be no rights against Nature, except to get out of her whatever we can, which is only the fact of the struggle for existence stated over again. The common assertion is, that the rights are good against society; that is, that society is bound to obtain and secure them for the persons interested. Society, however, is only the persons interested plus some other persons; and as the persons interested have by the hypothesis failed to win the rights, we come to this, that natural rights are the claims which certain persons have by prerogative against some other persons. Such is the actual interpretation in practice of natural rights--claims which some people have by prerogative on other people. This theory is a very far-reaching one, and of course it is adequate to furnish a foundation for a whole social philosophy. In its widest extension it comes to mean that if any man finds himself uncomfortable in this world, it must be somebody else's fault, and that somebody is bound to come and make him comfortable. Now, the people who are most uncomfortable in this world (for if we should tell all our troubles it would not be found to be a very comfortable world for anybody) are those who have neglected their duties, and consequently have failed to get their rights. The people who can be called upon to serve the uncomfortable must be those who have done their duty, as the world goes, tolerably well. Consequently the doctrine which we are discussing turns out to be in practice only a scheme for making injustice prevail in human society by reversing the distribution of rewards and punishments between those who have done their duty and those who have not. We are constantly preached at by our public teachers, as if respectable people were to blame because some people are not respectable--as if the man who has done his duty in his own sphere was responsible in some way for another man who has not done his duty in his sphere. There are relations of employer and employé which need to be regulated by compromise and treaty. There are sanitary precautions which need to be taken in factories and houses. There are precautions against fire which are necessary. There is care needed that children be not employed too young, and that they have an education. There is care needed that banks, insurance companies, and railroads be well managed, and that officers do not abuse their trusts. There is a duty in each case on the interested parties to defend their own interest. The penalty of neglect is suffering. The system of providing for these things by boards and inspectors throws the cost of it, not on the interested parties, but on the tax-payers. Some of them, no doubt, are the interested parties, and they may consider that they are exercising the proper care by paying taxes to support an inspector. If so, they only get their fair deserts when the railroad inspector finds out that a bridge is not safe after it is broken down, or when the bank examiner comes in to find out why a bank failed after the cashier has stolen all the funds. The real victim is the Forgotten Man again--the man who has watched his own investments, made his own machinery safe, attended to his own plumbing, and educated his own children, and who, just when he wants to enjoy the fruits of his care, is told that it is his duty to go and take care of some of his negligent neighbors, or, if he does not go, to pay an inspector to go. No doubt it is often in his interest to go or to send, rather than to have the matter neglected, on account of his own connection with the thing neglected, and his own secondary peril; but the point now is, that if preaching and philosophizing can do any good in the premises, it is all wrong to preach to the Forgotten Man that it is his duty to go and remedy other people's neglect. It is not his duty. It is a harsh and unjust burden which is laid upon him, and it is only the more unjust because no one thinks of him when laying the burden so that it falls on him. The exhortations ought to be expended on the negligent--that they take care of themselves. It is an especially vicious extension of the false doctrine above mentioned that criminals have some sort of a right against or claim on society. Many reformatory plans are based on a doctrine of this kind when they are urged upon the public conscience. A criminal is a man who, instead of working with and for the society, has turned against it, and become destructive and injurious. His punishment means that society rules him out of its membership, and separates him from its association, by execution or imprisonment, according to the gravity of his offense. He has no claims against society at all. What shall be done with him is a question of expediency to be settled in view of the interests of society--that is, of the non-criminals. The French writers of the school of '48 used to represent the badness of the bad men as the fault of "society." As the object of this statement was to show that the badness of the bad men was not the fault of the bad men, and as society contains only good men and bad men, it followed that the badness of the bad men was the fault of the good men. On that theory, of course the good men owed a great deal to the bad men who were in prison and at the galleys on their account. If we do not admit that theory, it behooves us to remember that any claim which we allow to the criminal against the "State" is only so much burden laid upon those who have never cost the State anything for discipline or correction. The punishments of society are just like those of God and Nature--they are warnings to the wrong-doer to reform himself. When public offices are to be filled numerous candidates at once appear. Some are urged on the ground that they are poor, or cannot earn a living, or want support while getting an education, or have female relatives dependent on them, or are in poor health, or belong in a particular district, or are related to certain persons, or have done meritorious service in some other line of work than that which they apply to do. The abuses of the public service are to be condemned on account of the harm to the public interest, but there is an incidental injustice of the same general character with that which we are discussing. If an office is granted by favoritism or for any personal reason to A, it cannot be given to B. If an office is filled by a person who is unfit for it, he always keeps out somebody somewhere who is fit for it; that is, the social injustice has a victim in an unknown person--the Forgotten Man--and he is some person who has no political influence, and who has known no way in which to secure the chances of life except to deserve them. He is passed by for the noisy, pushing, importunate, and incompetent. I have said something disparagingly in a previous chapter about the popular rage against combined capital, corporations, corners, selling futures, etc., etc. The popular rage is not without reason, but it is sadly misdirected and the real things which deserve attack are thriving all the time. The greatest social evil with which we have to contend is jobbery. Whatever there is in legislative charters, watering stocks, etc., etc., which is objectionable, comes under the head of jobbery. Jobbery is any scheme which aims to gain, not by the legitimate fruits of industry and enterprise, but by extorting from somebody a part of his product under guise of some pretended industrial undertaking. Of course it is only a modification when the undertaking in question has some legitimate character, but the occasion is used to graft upon it devices for obtaining what has not been earned. Jobbery is the vice of plutocracy, and it is the especial form under which plutocracy corrupts a democratic and republican form of government. The United States is deeply afflicted with it, and the problem of civil liberty here is to conquer it. It affects everything which we really need to have done to such an extent that we have to do without public objects which we need through fear of jobbery. Our public buildings are jobs--not always, but often. They are not needed, or are costly beyond all necessity or even decent luxury. Internal improvements are jobs. They are not made because they are needed to meet needs which have been experienced. They are made to serve private ends, often incidentally the political interests of the persons who vote the appropriations. Pensions have become jobs. In England pensions used to be given to aristocrats, because aristocrats had political influence, in order to corrupt them. Here pensions are given to the great democratic mass, because they have political power, to corrupt them. Instead of going out where there is plenty of land and making a farm there, some people go down under the Mississippi River to make a farm, and then they want to tax all the people in the United States to make dikes to keep the river off their farms. The California gold-miners have washed out gold, and have washed the dirt down into the rivers and on the farms below. They want the Federal Government to now clean out the rivers and restore the farms. The silver-miners found their product declining in value, and they got the Federal Government to go into the market and buy what the public did not want, in order to sustain (as they hoped) the price of silver. The Federal Government is called upon to buy or hire unsalable ships, to build canals which will not pay, to furnish capital for all sorts of experiments, and to provide capital for enterprises of which private individuals will win the profits. All this is called "developing our resources," but it is, in truth, the great plan of all living on each other. The greatest job of all is a protective tariff. It includes the biggest log-rolling and the widest corruption of economic and political ideas. It was said that there would be a rebellion if the taxes were not taken off whiskey and tobacco, which taxes were paid into the public Treasury. Just then the importations of Sumatra tobacco became important enough to affect the market. The Connecticut tobacco-growers at once called for an import duty on tobacco which would keep up the price of their product. So it appears that if the tax on tobacco is paid to the Federal Treasury there will be a rebellion, but if it is paid to the Connecticut tobacco-raisers there will be no rebellion at all. The farmers have long paid tribute to the manufacturers; now the manufacturing and other laborers are to pay tribute to the farmers. The system is made more comprehensive and complete, and we all are living on each other more than ever. Now, the plan of plundering each other produces nothing. It only wastes. All the material over which the protected interests wrangle and grab must be got from somebody outside of their circle. The talk is all about the American laborer and American industry, but in every case in which there is not an actual production of wealth by industry there are two laborers and two industries to be considered--the one who gets and the one who gives. Every protected industry has to plead, as the major premise of its argument, that any industry which does not pay _ought_ to be carried on at the expense of the consumers of the product, and, as its minor premise, that the industry in question does not pay; that is, that it cannot reproduce a capital equal in value to that which it consumes plus the current rate of profit. Hence every such industry must be a parasite on some other industry. What is the other industry? Who is the other man? This, the real question, is always overlooked. In all jobbery the case is the same. There is a victim somewhere who is paying for it all. The doors of waste and extravagance stand open, and there seems to be a general agreement to squander and spend. It all belongs to somebody. There is somebody who had to contribute it, and who will have to find more. Nothing is ever said about him. Attention is all absorbed by the clamorous interests, the importunate petitioners, the plausible schemers, the pitiless bores. Now, who is the victim? He is the Forgotten Man. If we go to find him, we shall find him hard at work tilling the soil to get out of it the fund for all the jobbery, the object of all the plunder, the cost of all the economic quackery, and the pay of all the politicians and statesmen who have sacrificed his interests to his enemies. We shall find him an honest, sober, industrious citizen, unknown outside his little circle, paying his debts and his taxes, supporting the church and the school, reading his party newspaper, and cheering for his pet politician. We must not overlook the fact that the Forgotten Man is not infrequently a woman. I have before me a newspaper which contains five letters from corset-stitchers who complain that they cannot earn more than seventy-five cents a day with a machine, and that they have to provide the thread. The tax on the grade of thread used by them is prohibitory as to all importation, and it is the corset-stitchers who have to pay day by day out of their time and labor the total enhancement of price due to the tax. Women who earn their own living probably earn on an average seventy-five cents per day of ten hours. Twenty-four minutes' work ought to buy a spool of thread at the retail price, if the American work-woman were allowed to exchange her labor for thread on the best terms that the art and commerce of today would allow; but after she has done twenty-four minutes' work for the thread she is forced by the laws of her country to go back and work sixteen minutes longer to pay the tax--that is, to support the thread-mill. The thread-mill, therefore, is not an institution for getting thread for the American people, but for making thread harder to get than it would be if there were no such institution. In justification, now, of an arrangement so monstrously unjust and out of place in a free country, it is said that the employés in the thread-mill get high wages, and that, but for the tax, American laborers must come down to the low wages of foreign thread-makers. It is not true that American thread-makers get any more than the market rate of wages, and they would not get less if the tax were entirely removed, because the market rate of wages in the United States would be controlled then, as it is now, by the supply and demand of laborers under the natural advantages and opportunities of industry in this country. It makes a great impression on the imagination, however, to go to a manufacturing town and see great mills and a crowd of operatives; and such a sight is put forward, _under the special allegation that it would not exist but for a protective tax_, as a proof that protective taxes are wise. But if it be true that the thread-mill would not exist but for the tax, or that the operatives would not get such good wages but for the tax, then how can we form a judgment as to whether the protective system is wise or not unless we call to mind all the seamstresses, washer-women, servants, factory-hands, saleswomen, teachers, and laborers' wives and daughters, scattered in the garrets and tenements of great cities and in cottages all over the country, who are paying the tax which keeps the mill going and pays the extra wages? If the sewing-women, teachers, servants, and washer-women could once be collected over against the thread-mill, then some inferences could be drawn which would be worth something. Then some light might be thrown upon the obstinate fallacy of "creating an industry," and we might begin to understand the difference between wanting thread and wanting a thread-mill. Some nations spend capital on great palaces, others on standing armies, others on iron-clad ships of war. Those things are all glorious, and strike the imagination with great force when they are seen; but no one doubts that they make life harder for the scattered insignificant peasants and laborers who have to pay for them all. They "support a great many people," they "make work," they "give employment to other industries." We Americans have no palaces, armies, or iron-clads, but we spend our earnings on protected industries. A big protected factory, if it really needs the protection for its support, is a heavier load for the Forgotten Men and Women than an iron-clad ship of war in time of peace. It is plain that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the real productive strength of the country. The Forgotten Man works and votes--generally he prays--but his chief business in life is to pay. His name never gets into the newspapers except when he marries or dies. He is an obscure man. He may grumble sometimes to his wife, but he does not frequent the grocery, and he does not talk politics at the tavern. So he is forgotten. Yet who is there whom the statesman, economist, and social philosopher ought to think of before this man? If any student of social science comes to appreciate the case of the Forgotten Man, he will become an unflinching advocate of strict scientific thinking in sociology, and a hard-hearted skeptic as regards any scheme of social amelioration. He will always want to know, Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all? The Forgotten Man is not a pauper. It belongs to his character to save something. Hence he is a capitalist, though never a great one. He is a "poor" man in the popular sense of the word, but not in a correct sense. In fact, one of the most constant and trustworthy signs that the Forgotten Man is in danger of a new assault is, that "the poor man" is brought into the discussion. Since the Forgotten Man has some capital, any one who cares for his interest will try to make capital secure by securing the inviolability of contracts, the stability of currency, and the firmness of credit. Any one, therefore, who cares for the Forgotten Man will be sure to be considered a friend of the capitalist and an enemy of the poor man. It is the Forgotten Man who is threatened by every extension of the paternal theory of government. It is he who must work and pay. When, therefore, the statesmen and social philosophers sit down to think what the State can do or ought to do, they really mean to decide what the Forgotten Man shall do. What the Forgotten Man wants, therefore, is a fuller realization of constitutional liberty. He is suffering from the fact that there are yet mixed in our institutions mediaeval theories of protection, regulation, and authority, and modern theories of independence and individual liberty and responsibility. The consequence of this mixed state of things is, that those who are clever enough to get into control use the paternal theory by which to measure their own rights--that is, they assume privileges; and they use the theory of liberty to measure their own duties--that is, when it comes to the duties, they want to be "let alone." The Forgotten Man never gets into control. He has to pay both ways. His rights are measured to him by the theory of liberty--that is, he has only such as he can conquer; his duties are measured to him on the paternal theory--that is, he must discharge all which are laid upon him, as is the fortune of parents. In a paternal relation there are always two parties, a father and a child; and when we use the paternal relation metaphorically, it is of the first importance to know who is to be father and who is to be child. The _rôle_ of parent falls always to the Forgotten Man. What he wants, therefore, is that ambiguities in our institutions be cleared up, and that liberty be more fully realized. It behooves any economist or social philosopher, whatever be the grade of his orthodoxy, who proposes to enlarge the sphere of the "State," or to take any steps whatever having in view the welfare of any class whatever, to pursue the analysis of the social effects of his proposition until he finds that other group whose interests must be curtailed or whose energies must be placed under contribution by the course of action which he proposes; and he cannot maintain his proposition until he has demonstrated that it will be more advantageous, _both quantitatively and qualitatively_, to those who must bear the weight of it than complete non-interference by the State with the relations of the parties in question. XI. _WHEREFORE WE SHOULD LOVE ONE ANOTHER._ Suppose that a man, going through a wood, should be struck by a falling tree and pinned down beneath it. Suppose that another man, coming that way and finding him there, should, instead of hastening to give or to bring aid, begin to lecture on the law of gravitation, taking the tree as an illustration. Suppose, again, that a person lecturing on the law of gravitation should state the law of falling bodies, and suppose that an objector should say: You state your law as a cold, mathematical fact and you declare that all bodies will fall conformably to it. How heartless! You do not reflect that it may be a beautiful little child falling from a window. These two suppositions may be of some use to us as illustrations. Let us take the second first. It is the objection of the sentimentalist; and, ridiculous as the mode of discussion appears when applied to the laws of natural philosophy, the sociologist is constantly met by objections of just that character. Especially when the subject under discussion is charity in any of its public forms, the attempt to bring method and clearness into the discussion is sure to be crossed by suggestions which are as far from the point and as foreign to any really intelligent point of view as the supposed speech in the illustration. In the first place, a child would fall just as a stone would fall. Nature's forces know no pity. Just so in sociology. The forces know no pity. In the second place, if a natural philosopher should discuss all the bodies which may fall, he would go entirely astray, and would certainly do no good. The same is true of the sociologist. He must concentrate, not scatter, and study laws, not all conceivable combinations of force which may occur in practice. In the third place, nobody ever saw a body fall as the philosophers say it will fall, because they can accomplish nothing unless they study forces separately, and allow for their combined action in all concrete and actual phenomena. The same is true in sociology, with the additional fact that the forces and their combinations in sociology are far the most complex which we have to deal with. In the fourth place, any natural philosopher who should stop, after stating the law of falling bodies, to warn mothers not to let their children fall out of the window, would make himself ridiculous. Just so a sociologist who should attach moral applications and practical maxims to his investigations would entirely miss his proper business. There is the force of gravity as a fact in the world. If we understand this, the necessity of care to conform to the action of gravity meets us at every step in our private life and personal experience. The fact in sociology is in no wise different. If, for instance, we take political economy, that science does not teach an individual how to get rich. It is a social science. It treats of the laws of the material welfare of human societies. It is, therefore, only one science among all the sciences which inform us about the laws and conditions of our life on earth. Education has for its object to give a man knowledge of the conditions and laws of living, so that, in any case in which the individual stands face to face with the necessity of deciding what to do, if he is an educated man, he may know how to make a wise and intelligent decision. If he knows chemistry, physics, geology, and other sciences, he will know what he must encounter of obstacle or help in Nature in what he proposes to do. If he knows physiology and hygiene, he will know what effects on health he must expect in one course or another. If he knows political economy, he will know what effect on wealth and on the welfare of society one course or another will produce. There is no injunction, no "ought" in political economy at all. It does not assume to tell man what he ought to do, any more than chemistry tells us that we ought to mix things, or mathematics that we ought to solve equations. It only gives one element necessary to an intelligent decision, and in every practical and concrete case the responsibility of deciding what to do rests on the man who has to act. The economist, therefore, does not say to any one, You ought never to give money to charity. He contradicts anybody who says, You ought to give money to charity; and, in opposition to any such person, he says, Let me show you what difference it makes to you, to others, to society, whether you give money to charity or not, so that you can make a wise and intelligent decision. Certainly there is no harder thing to do than to employ capital charitably. It would be extreme folly to say that nothing of that sort ought to be done, but I fully believe that today the next pernicious thing to vice is charity in its broad and popular sense. In the preceding chapters I have discussed the public and social relations of classes, and those social topics in which groups of persons are considered as groups or classes, without regard to personal merits or demerits. I have relegated all charitable work to the domain of private relations, where personal acquaintance and personal estimates may furnish the proper limitations and guarantees. A man who had no sympathies and no sentiments would be a very poor creature; but the public charities, more especially the legislative charities, nourish no man's sympathies and sentiments. Furthermore, it ought to be distinctly perceived that any charitable and benevolent effort which any man desires to make voluntarily, to see if he can do any good, lies entirely beyond the field of discussion. It would be as impertinent to prevent his effort as it is to force co-operation in an effort on some one who does not want to participate in it. What I choose to do by way of exercising my own sympathies under my own reason and conscience is one thing; what another man forces me to do of a sympathetic character, because his reason and conscience approve of it, is quite another thing. What, now, is the reason why we should help each other? This carries us back to the other illustration with which we started. We may philosophize as coolly and correctly as we choose about our duties and about the laws of right living; no one of us lives up to what he knows. The man struck by the falling tree has, perhaps, been careless. We are all careless. Environed as we are by risks and perils, which befall us as misfortunes, no man of us is in a position to say, "I know all the laws, and am sure to obey them all; therefore I shall never need aid and sympathy." At the very best, one of us fails in one way and another in another, if we do not fail altogether. Therefore the man under the tree is the one of us who for the moment is smitten. It may be you to-morrow, and I next day. It is the common frailty in the midst of a common peril which gives us a kind of solidarity of interest to rescue the one for whom the chances of life have turned out badly just now. Probably the victim is to blame. He almost always is so. A lecture to that effect in the crisis of his peril would be out of place, because it would not fit the need of the moment; but it would be very much in place at another time, when the need was to avert the repetition of such an accident to somebody else. Men, therefore, owe to men, in the chances and perils of this life, aid and sympathy, on account of the common participation in human frailty and folly. This observation, however, puts aid and sympathy in the field of private and personal relations, under the regulation of reason and conscience, and gives no ground for mechanical and impersonal schemes. We may, then, distinguish four things: 1. The function of science is to investigate truth. Science is colorless and impersonal. It investigates the force of gravity, and finds out the laws of that force, and has nothing to do with the weal or woe of men under the operation of the law. 2. The moral deductions as to what one ought to do are to be drawn by the reason and conscience of the individual man who is instructed by science. Let him take note of the force of gravity, and see to it that he does not walk off a precipice or get in the way of a falling body. 3. On account of the number and variety of perils of all kinds by which our lives are environed, and on account of ignorance, carelessness, and folly, we all neglect to obey the moral deductions which we have learned, so that, in fact, the wisest and the best of us act foolishly and suffer. 4. The law of sympathy, by which we share each others' burdens, is to do as we would be done by. It is not a scientific principle, and does not admit of such generalization or interpretation that A can tell B what this law enjoins on B to do. Hence the relations of sympathy and sentiment are essentially limited to two persons only, and they cannot be made a basis for the relations of groups of persons, or for discussion by any third party. Social improvement is not to be won by direct effort. It is secondary, and results from physical or economic improvements. That is the reason why schemes of direct social amelioration always have an arbitrary, sentimental, and artificial character, while true social advance must be a product and a growth. The efforts which are being put forth for every kind of progress in the arts and sciences are, therefore, contributing to true social progress. Let any one learn what hardship was involved, even for a wealthy person, a century ago, in crossing the Atlantic, and then let him compare that hardship even with a steerage passage at the present time, considering time and money cost. This improvement in transportation by which "the poor and weak" can be carried from the crowded centres of population to the new land is worth more to them than all the schemes of all the social reformers. An improvement in surgical instruments or in anaesthetics really does more for those who are not well off than all the declamations of the orators and pious wishes of the reformers. Civil service reform would be a greater gain to the laborers than innumerable factory acts and eight-hour laws. Free trade would be a greater blessing to "the poor man" than all the devices of all the friends of humanity if they could be realized. If the economists could satisfactorily solve the problem of the regulation of paper currency, they would do more for the wages class than could be accomplished by all the artificial doctrines about wages which they seem to feel bound to encourage. If we could get firm and good laws passed for the management of savings-banks, and then refrain from the amendments by which those laws are gradually broken down, we should do more for the non-capitalist class than by volumes of laws against "corporations" and the "excessive power of capital." We each owe to the other mutual redress of grievances. It has been said, in answer to my argument in the last chapter about the Forgotten Women and thread, that the tax on thread is "only a little thing," and that it cannot hurt the women much, and also that, if the women do not want to pay two cents a spool tax, there is thread of an inferior quality, which they can buy cheaper. These answers represent the bitterest and basest social injustice. Every honest citizen of a free state owes it to himself, to the community, and especially to those who are at once weak and wronged, to go to their assistance and to help redress their wrongs. Whenever a law or social arrangement acts so as to injure any one, and that one the humblest, then there is a duty on those who are stronger, or who know better, to demand and fight for redress and correction. When generalized this means that it is the duty of All-of-us (that is, the State) to establish justice for all, from the least to the greatest, and in all matters. This, however, is no new doctrine. It is only the old, true, and indisputable function of the State; and in working for a redress of wrongs and a correction of legislative abuses, we are only struggling to a fuller realization of it--that is, working to improve civil government. We each owe it to the other to guarantee rights. Rights do not pertain to _results_, but only to _chances_. They pertain to the _conditions_ of the struggle for existence, not to any of the results of it; to the _pursuit_ of happiness, not to the possession of happiness. It cannot be said that each one has a right to have some property, because if one man had such a right some other man or men would be under a corresponding obligation to provide him with some property. Each has a right to acquire and possess property if he can. It is plain what fallacies are developed when we overlook this distinction. Those fallacies run through _all_ socialistic schemes and theories. If we take rights to pertain to results, and then say that rights must be equal, we come to say that men have a right to be equally happy, and so on in all the details. Rights should be equal, because they pertain to chances, and all ought to have equal chances so far as chances are provided or limited by the action of society. This, however, will not produce equal results, but it is right just because it will produce unequal results--that is, results which shall be proportioned to the merits of individuals. We each owe it to the other to guarantee mutually the chance to earn, to possess, to learn, to marry, etc., etc., against any interference which would prevent the exercise of those rights by a person who wishes to prosecute and enjoy them in peace for the pursuit of happiness. If we generalize this, it means that All-of-us ought to guarantee rights to each of us. But our modern free, constitutional States are constructed entirely on the notion of rights, and we regard them as performing their functions more and more perfectly according as they guarantee rights in consonance with the constantly corrected and expanded notions of rights from one generation to another. Therefore, when we say that we owe it to each other to guarantee rights we only say that we ought to prosecute and improve our political science. If we have in mind the value of chances to earn, learn, possess, etc., for a man of independent energy, we can go on one step farther in our deductions about help. The only help which is generally expedient, even within the limits of the private and personal relations of two persons to each other, is that which consists in helping a man to help himself. This always consists in opening the chances. A man of assured position can by an effort which is of no appreciable importance to him, give aid which is of incalculable value to a man who is all ready to make his own career if he can only get a chance. The truest and deepest pathos in this world is not that of suffering but that of brave struggling. The truest sympathy is not compassion, but a fellow-feeling with courage and fortitude in the midst of noble effort. Now, the aid which helps a man to help himself is not in the least akin to the aid which is given in charity. If alms are given, or if we "make work" for a man, or "give him employment," or "protect" him, we simply take a product from one and give it to another. If we help a man to help himself, by opening the chances around him, we put him in a position to add to the wealth of the community by putting new powers in operation to produce. It would seem that the difference between getting something already in existence from the one who has it, and producing a new thing by applying new labor to natural materials, would be so plain as never to be forgotten; but the fallacy of confusing the two is one of the commonest in all social discussions. We have now seen that the current discussions about the claims and rights of social classes on each other are radically erroneous and fallacious, and we have seen that an analysis of the general obligations which we all have to each other leads us to nothing but an emphatic repetition of old but well acknowledged obligations to perfect our political institutions. We have been led to restriction, not extension, of the functions of the State, but we have also been led to see the necessity of purifying and perfecting the operation of the State in the functions which properly belong to it. If we refuse to recognize any classes as existing in society when, perhaps, a claim might be set up that the wealthy, educated, and virtuous have acquired special rights and precedence, we certainly cannot recognize any classes when it is attempted to establish such distinctions for the sake of imposing burdens and duties on one group for the benefit of others. The men who have not done their duty in this world never can be equal to those who have done their duty more or less well. If words like wise and foolish, thrifty and extravagant, prudent and negligent, have any meaning in language, then it must make some difference how people behave in this world, and the difference will appear in the position they acquire in the body of society, and in relation to the chances of life. They may, then, be classified in reference to these facts. Such classes always will exist; no other social distinctions can endure. If, then, we look to the origin and definition of these classes, we shall find it impossible to deduce any obligations which one of them bears to the other. The class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them. Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to _increase, multiply, and extend the chances_. Such is the work of civilization. Every old error or abuse which is removed opens new chances of development to all the new energy of society. Every improvement in education, science, art, or government expands the chances of man on earth. Such expansion is no guarantee of equality. On the contrary, if there be liberty, some will profit by the chances eagerly and some will neglect them altogether. Therefore, the greater the chances the more unequal will be the fortune of these two sets of men. So it ought to be, in all justice and right reason. The yearning after equality is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization. But if we can expand the chances we can count on a general and steady growth of civilization and advancement of society by and through its best members. In the prosecution of these chances we all owe to each other good-will, mutual respect, and mutual guarantees of liberty and security. Beyond this nothing can be affirmed as a duty of one group to another in a free state. * * * * * +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 27: millionnaires replaced by millionaires | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
29393	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) Barbara Weinstock Lectures on The Morals of Trade SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM. By John Bates Clark. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PRIVATE MONOPOLY AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP. By John Graham Brooks. COMMERCIALISM AND JOURNALISM. By Hamilton Holt. THE BUSINESS CAREER IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONS. By Albert Shaw. SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM BY JOHN BATES CLARK PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1914 COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED _Published April 1914_ BARBARA WEINSTOCK LECTURES ON THE MORALS OF TRADE This series will contain essays by representative scholars and men of affairs dealing with the various phases of the moral law in its bearing on business life under the new economic order, first delivered at the University of California on the Weinstock foundation. SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM It is currently reported that the late King Edward once said, "We are all Socialists, now": and if the term "Socialism" meant to-day what His Majesty probably meant by it, many of us could truthfully make a similar statement. Without any doubt, we could do so if we attached to the term the meaning which it had when it was first invented. It came into use in the thirties of the last century, and expressed a certain disappointment over the result of political reform. The bill which gave more men the right to vote did not give them higher wages. The conditions of labor were deplorable before the Reform Bill was passed and they continued to be so for some time afterwards. A merely political change, therefore, was not all that was wanted, and it was necessary to carry democracy into a social sphere in order to improve the condition of the poorer classes. The term "Socialism," therefore, was chosen to describe a play of forces that would act in this way on society itself, and was an excellent term for describing this right and just tendency. The name was quickly adopted by those with whose practical plans most of us do not agree; but its original idea was democracy carried into business, and at present that is the dominant tendency of all successful parties. For six months we have been living under what may be called "triumphant democracy," not because the Democratic Party has beaten its rivals and come into control of the Government, but for a much deeper reason, namely, that a democracy carried into industrial life is the dominating principle of every political body that can hope for success. Every party must show by its action that it values the man more than the dollar. To this extent we are all democrats and wish the Government to act for the people as well as to be controlled by the people. When we differ, it is in deciding on the means to carry out our common purpose; and here we differ very widely. Some would use the power of the State to correct and improve our system of industry, and these constitute a party of reform. Others would abolish that system and substitute something untried. For private capital they would put public capital and for private management, public management--either in the whole field of industry or in that great part of it where large capital rules. These are Socialists in the modern and current sense of the term. One difference of view which was formerly very sharp is now scarcely traceable. Every one knows that we must invoke the aid of the State in order to make industry what it should be. The rule that would bid the State keep its hands off the entire field of business, the extreme _laissez-faire_ policy once dominant in literature and thought, now finds few persons bold enough to advocate it or foolish enough to believe in it. In a very chastened form, however, the spirit that would put a reasonable limit on what the State shall be asked to do happily does survive and is powerful. It seeks a golden mean between letting the State do nothing and asking it to do everything. It is this plan of action that I shall try to outline, and it will appear that even this plan requires that the State should do very much. Under an inert government the industrial system would suffer irreparably. The thing first to be rescued is competition--meaning that healthful rivalry between different producers which has always been the guaranty of technical progress. That such progress has gone on with bewildering rapidity since the invention of the steam engine is nowhere denied; and neither is it denied that competition of the normal kind--the effort of rivals to excel in productive processes--has caused it. It has multiplied the product of labor here tenfold, there, twentyfold, and elsewhere a hundredfold and more. This increased power to produce has rescued us from an appalling evil. Without it, such a crowding of population as some countries have experienced would have carried their peoples to and below the starvation level. Machinery now enables us to live; and if world-crowding were to go on in the future as it has done, and the technical progress should cease, many of us could not live. Poverty would increase till its cruelest effects would be realized and lives enough would be crushed out to enable the survivors to get a living. Of all conditions of human happiness, the one which is most underestimated is progress in power to produce. Hardly any of those who would revolutionize the industrial State, and not all of those who would reform it, have any conception of the importance of this progress. It is the _sine qua non_ of any hopeful outlook for the future of mankind. I am to speak, however, of _justice_ in the business relations of life, and it might seem that this shut out the mere question of general prosperity. The most obvious issue between different social classes concerns the division of whatever income exists. Whatever there is, be it large or small, may be divided rightly or wrongly; but I am not able to see that the mere division of it exhausts the application of the principle of justice. While it is clearly wrong for one party to plunder another, it is almost as clearly wrong for one party to reduce the general income and so, in a sense, rob everybody. A party that should systematically hinder production and reduce its fruits would rob a myriad of honest laborers who are ill prepared to stand this loss and have a perfect right to be protected from it. Every man, woman, and child has a right to demand that the powers that be remove hindrances in the way of production, and not only allow the general income to be large and grow larger, but do everything that they possibly can do to make it grow larger. It is an unjust act to reduce general earnings, even though no one is singled out for particular injury. On this ground we insist on trust legislation, tariff reform, the conservation of natural resources, etc. I am prepared to claim that it is in this spirit that we demand that private initiative, which has given us the amount of prosperity that we have thus far obtained, shall be enabled to continue its work without being supplanted by monopoly. In a general way I should include public monopoly as well as private among the things which would put a damper on the progress of improvement and lessen the income on which the comfort of laborers in the near future will be dependent. Monopoly of any sort is hostile to improvement, and in this chiefly lies the menace which it holds for mankind. It is a fairly safe prediction that, if a public monopoly were to exist in every part of the industrial field, the _per capita_ income would grow less, and that it would be only a question of time, and a short time at that, when the laborers would be worse off than they are now. Though, at the outset, they might absorb the entire incomes of the well-to-do classes, the amount thus gained would shrink in their hands until their position would be worse than their present one. They would have pulled down the capitalists without more than a momentary benefit for themselves and with a prospect of soon sinking to a lower level than as a class they have thus far reached. The impulse to revolutionize the system comes from the belief that it is irreclaimably bad. The first thing to be done is to see how much reclaiming the system is capable of; and the only sure way to test this question is to use all our power in the effort to improve it. When all such efforts shall have failed, it will be time for desperate measures. Our industrial system has many faults:--here we are happily agreed. It is the inferences we draw from this fact that are different. The one that I draw is like one which is recorded in a famous case in antiquity. When the Macedonian armies seemed about to overwhelm Greece, Demosthenes encouraged the Athenians by this very sound bit of philosophy: "The worst fact in our past affords the brightest hope for our future. It is the fact that our misfortunes have come because of our own faults. If they had come when we were doing our best, there would be no hope for us." Now the evils of our own social system which result from mistakes or faults are just such a ground of hope. Every such evil which can be cited describes one possible reform, and the longer the list of evils, the greater is the sum total of gain which we can make by doing away with them. If we cite them all _seriatim_, what impression shall we get? Will it merely show how badly off we are? Will it make us despair for our future? On the contrary, it should fill us with hope for the future. We start from the fact that we have thus far survived in spite of the faults. The worst off among us is above starvation and most of us are in a tolerable state. If we can remove the evils that exist, we shall make our state very much more than tolerable. The greatness of the evils measures the gain from removing them. Every single one that is removed improves the status of our people. We can take, as it were, a social account of stock, measure our present state, measure the extent to which we can improve it by putting an end to one bad influence, count the number of such bad influences, and so get an estimate of the gains of carrying out a complete reformatory programme. It will show an enormous possibility of improvement. In the struggle for reforms we have the great middle class with us. All honest capitalists, great and small alike, are natural allies of honest labor, and they are interested mainly in the same reforms as are the members of the working-class. If we recognize a necessity for a struggle of classes, it is not one that marshals labor against all wealth. The contention is rather between honest wealth allied with honest labor, on the one hand, and dishonest wealth on the other; and in a contest so aligned, victory for the former party means social justice. There is a preliminary reform to be carried through as a condition of securing most of the others. Who can estimate the benefit which would come from merely making our Government what it purports to be--government by the people? The initiative, the referendum, the recall, the short ballot, direct primaries, and proportionate representation are all designed to transfer power from rings and bosses to the people themselves. If they actually do it, as sooner or later those or kindred measures probably will, they will so far restore the democracy of our earlier and simpler days as to make us look back on the rule of rings and bosses as on a nightmare of the past. When the Government is thus really controlled by the people we can count on having its full power exerted for them. What are a few of the things that we shall then try to get? The working day is too long. In some occupations it covers far too many hours, and in most occupations it covers more than it ideally should. There are doubtless some industries in which hours might be reduced with no lessening of wages, because profits are large enough to bear some reduction. In these cases a strong union might get either more pay for a day of the present length or the present rate for a shorter day. A universal reduction of the period of labor would have to mean a reduction of the product of industry, and without immediate improvements in method of production it would entail smaller wages. Improvements, however, might soon obviate that necessity. With machinery growing more and more efficient, the day may be shortened with no diminution of wages; and the natural effect of increasing power to produce has always been some shortening of labor-time coupled with some enlargement of pay. Within the last one hundred years the period of daily labor in some types of manufacturing has come to cover only a little over one third of the twenty-four hours, instead of more nearly two thirds; while the earnings have become much larger than they were at the beginning of the period. Normally this progress should continue, and long before the dawn of the twenty-first century we should see work still less severe, less prolonged, and better paid. Where, as in some departments of steel-making, labor in two shifts continues through the twenty-four hours, there is a chance to make this gain without appreciable waiting; and elsewhere it should be possible to make it without waiting for the twenty-first century to come much nearer than it is. Dangerous and injurious occupations still continue; and our country is slower than others in remedying this trouble. Many safeguards that are easily obtainable are neglected. Protection for the workers and indemnities for injuries when they occur can be insured by well-made laws, properly enforced. Sanitary regulations and pure-food laws need to be strengthened and more fully enforced. Our protective tariff bears heavily on the poor man. His wardrobe contains little or nothing that is made of wool, and he may well sigh for the mixed cotton and shoddy of earlier days. Our import duties, which do, indeed, try to spare his dinner-pail, should be made to spare his wardrobe and the modest comforts of his life. Commercial crises still occur and are followed by hard times; and while a really wise reform of money and banking would not wholly prevent them, it would greatly mitigate their severity.[1] [1] This was written before the recent reforms of import duties and of the banking system had been enacted. Emergency employment is desperately needed when hard times come. European Governments excel our own in providing it, but it is entirely possible to adopt their methods and improve on them. Our natural resources have been wasted in a prodigal way. Forests have been recklessly cut, fires been invited and the soil itself has been sacrificed. Natural gas and oil have been burned with no regard for the future. Coal and other minerals have not been husbanded. It should be possible for us to cease to play the spendthrift with the patrimony that nature has given to us. We have the beginnings of a parcel post, but we need a more highly developed one that will come nearer to the standards maintained in other countries. With it we need telephone and telegraph systems that can be universally used. In our larger cities, we are struggling to get rapid transit and shall have to continue the struggle; but we ought to have, with urban railroads, subways, and the like, measures that would reduce the amount of traveling that has to be done between homes and places of labor. A free use of the principle of "eminent domain" would make it possible to acquire land for carrying out any policy of general beneficence, and that, too, without robbing the owners of it. By resorting to this measure much of the manufacturing which exposes great cities to imminent danger of conflagration might and should be moved bodily to outlying districts. Of all industrial abuses of the past the cruelest has been the crushing of the life of young children by hard and prolonged labor. We are making headway in removing this evil, but much still remains to be gained; and a vast amount is to be gained by a comprehensive policy for improving the status of working-women. Social justice demands some effective means of getting legal justice. We have courts, certainly. Do they give the service that we need and, in particular, do they give it to the poor? We do not here impugn the motives of judges. Generally speaking, they are honest; but the whole system of court procedure is hampered by detailed statutes and technical rules, that mean an amount of cost and delay which in itself is the very quintessence of injustice. A citizen is offered a choice between submitting to the wrong inflicted by a fellow-citizen and accepting the wrong inflicted by a dilatory and crushingly costly legal procedure. We probably excel some nations in the rightfulness of the decisions we can get if we live long enough and have money enough to get them; but there are few civilized nations that do not excel us in the rapidity and cheapness of the process. A Chinese student in Columbia University served, during the first year of his residence in New York, as judge of Chinatown, and, by giving up only the Saturday evening of each week to the service, he settled the disputes which arose between Chinese residents. As he was learned in the principles of Confucius, I doubt not he settled them justly, and many a time in that same city I have sighed for his services for native Americans. The line of division between labor and capital ought not always to be the sharp boundary that it is. Labor should be enabled to acquire a modest share of capital and to invest it securely. Protection for small investments is urgently needed, and would do much to change a proletariat into an independent working-class. This is an essential feature of the social system we wish for and work for. The man who hereafter shall correspond to Longfellow's "village blacksmith" will perhaps be the owner of a hundred shares in some corporation. In agriculture small holdings may always survive; but there may be large ones also, and in that case the farmer of the future may have either five acres and a hoe, or forty acres and a mule, or a hundred and sixty acres and a reaper, or an undivided share in a thousand acres and a traction engine. If we could carry through even the reforms thus far enumerated, it would make us feel as if we had been lifted from a slough and placed on a plateau abounding in air and sunlight; but if we stopped with this, we should leave much to be desired. There are still more pressing measures to be enacted. Nearly the greatest evil we are facing is monopoly. This is not the universal view. Though there are few who approve of monopoly, there are those who regard it with toleration and think that, if we accept it and regulate prices under it, we shall fare sufficiently well. As yet, it is in an incipient stage of development and has by no means revealed its full power for evil. If we let it grow freely, we shall find later what it is capable of. Wise measures, adopted even now, will come early enough to prevent it from ever growing to maturity. With the steel trust, the Standard Oil trust, and other combinations before our eyes, it seems an absurdity to speak of monopolies as being in an incipient stage. Is it possible that anything whatever which these great combinations represent can be nipped in the bud? Are they not already in the fullest flower, and big and mature as they are ever likely to be? The companies themselves, with their vast material plants, certainly are so. What we are talking about, however, is not the mere size of the companies, but _the element of monopoly that is in them_. Have they such a power that they can safely charge anything they please for their products? Is it as though they were licensed by the Government to be the sole makers and vendors of their special wares? Business men know that this is not the case; and that something puts a check on their action. They can make their prices higher than they should be--higher than it is for the interest of the country to have them; but they cannot make them as high as they would be under a real and secure monopoly. The point I am making is that we can destroy such monopolistic power as they have. We can liberate competition, which has, in the main, afforded reasonable prices, and has also guaranteed that progress which is indispensable for maintaining a human life that is worth living. It is to-day the only means of insuring a constantly increasing power over nature--an ability to turn out, in greater and greater abundance, the things which make life comfortable. These combinations now possess a power which it is highly perilous to let them keep. They can disable their rivals by foul play, which would be impossible under proper rules of the ring. By securing control of raw materials, by selling goods below cost in the territory where a small rival is operating and keeping up the prices everywhere else, by forcing merchants to boycott independent manufacturers, by getting, in spite of laws and commissions, some advantages from railroads, and by other similar practices, they can drive competitors out of business. Yet every one of these practices can be defined and prohibited, and resorting to any of them can be, if not wholly prevented, at least made so perilous that the practices will become extinct. It is possible to give to every competitor a fair field and no favor, and, in so doing, to infuse again into the industrial system the life and vigor which competition guarantees. This and only this will insure that progress in production itself which is the _sine qua non_ of future comfort. It may then be expected that inventions will continue, that machines will become more perfect, and that the power of society to pay wages will grow larger. Labor will then be the heir of the centuries, and under proper laws can claim and get its inheritance. If the world crowds itself fuller and fuller of population and progress at the same time stagnates, nothing can prevent an increase of poverty unrelieved by any bright outlook. Technical progress, power to make two blades of grass grow where one grows now, and to do it in the various departments where men labor, is the sole condition of a sound hope for the future of the wage-earner. It will be as necessary under Socialism as under the present system; but under Socialism it will be difficult to get. In so far as it is possible to judge, it depends on the preservation of normal competition in the general economic field. Leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World have recently announced an intention of forcing the hours of labor downward from ten hours per day to eight, six, and finally, four, while at the same time the pay will be forced up in a more or less corresponding ratio. They have also announced an intention of making capital useless to its owners, by crippling its productive power, and so making it easier to seize it. It goes without saying that a four-hour day and high wages can never come by a war which destroys most of the income to be divided. Make the figures more moderate and allow time enough for it, and it may be made to come by the diametrically opposite plan of making industry more and more fruitful. The ten-hour day succeeded the twelve- or fourteen-hour one of former times in exactly that way. The division of the social income is of vital importance as well as the general size of it. I have claimed for the regulation of monopoly that it is nearly the greatest of possible reforms. Perhaps the very greatest is a change in the mode of adjusting wages. They are fixed at present in a rough-and-ready way, though not without some reference to what labor produces and what employers can pay, and not, therefore, without the action of a principle which makes, in a powerful way, for justice. Any method, however, which involves many strikes and lockouts, is bad economically and worse morally. The contests are always costly, and they easily run into violent warfare; but underneath all these struggles and the hates and horrors that result, there is working, if we will see it, a law that makes for peace founded on justice. It tends in the direction of a fair division of products between employers and employed, and if it could work entirely without hindrances, would actually give to every laborer substantially what he produces. In the midst of all prevalent abuses this basic law asserts itself like a law of gravitation, and so long as monopoly is excluded and competition is free,--so long as both labor and capital can move without hindrance to the points at which they can create the largest products and get the largest rewards--its action cannot be stopped, while that of the forces that disturb it can be so. In this is the most inspiriting fact for the social reformer. If there are "inspiration points" on the mountain-tops of science, as well as on those of nature, this is one of them, and it is reached whenever a man discovers that in a highly imperfect society the fundamental law makes for justice, that it is impossible to prevent it from working and that it is entirely possible to remove the hindrances it encounters and let it have the first play. Nature is behind the reformer, often unseen, always efficient, and, in the end, resistless. To get a glimpse of what it can do and what man can help it do is to get a vision of the kingdoms of the earth, and the glory of them--a glory that may come from a moral redemption of the economic system. It is a redemption that man and nature can together bring about if only man himself is worthy of this alliance. Differences of mere interest between the various social classes are inevitable. There will never be a time when, in the division of any common property, the mere bald interests of the claimants are alike. When two fishermen own one boat and fish together, each one is interested in taking the whole catch. They divide, however, by a fair rule and live in peace. Any similar division may proceed in harmony if what the parties want is justice. Till recently American workmen have lived with their employers without hating them; and if wages can be fixed now by some appeal to the principle of justice, they can live with them in that way again. This means a better method of adjudicating claims than by a crude test of strength. There is no time to discuss a scheme by which this can be done. I must claim that it can be done, and take the responsibility of proving it when more time is available. There are beginnings of a good method in New Zealand, in Australia, and in Canada, and the point I am making now is that if we get a plan which works well in the United States, we shall save a deplorable waste and do more to revive the spirit of fraternity than we can by any measure ever attempted. Struggles of classes there may be, as there are between buyers and sellers everywhere; but this need not make the parties enemies. Its effects do not need to extend to the heart and character and to put distrust and hatred in the place of confidence and good will. The moral effects of this reform will be the best ones, but the economic effects also will be vast and beneficent. I am not predicting a complete millennium merely as the result of the reforms I have described. That would require also the moral perfection of the human race. Not a little moral improvement is to be expected as the effect of these measures, but it is too much to claim that they will repress all vice and crime, reclaim all criminals, and give to the race generally a keen devotion to duty. A belief in a State where even this will be realized is deeply implanted in human nature, and Socialism itself might easily get a major premise from it. The syllogism would run thus: (1) A better State is bound to come. (2) It cannot come under the system of private capital. (3) Therefore that system must be abolished. So would we all say if the minor premise were true--"The good State is impossible under private capital." We claim that it is possible and that we can see how to realize it. We can trace the forces which, without revolution, will make work lighter, pay better. We also can make a syllogism, and it reads thus: (1) The present State is tolerable. (2) Every reform will make it better, and there are many to be made. (3) The coming State will be whatever we have wit and energy enough to make it. Our plea for the justice of the coming system will not convince any man who starts with the assertion that capital ought to have _no_ return whatever, and that interest is robbery, and that the men who bring empty hands to the mill should take all the product of it. To most men's instinctive judgment this view does not appeal. The general verdict is that it is right for capital to get something. If we are fishing together from the shore and I make a canoe which multiplies my catch by five, I have a right to the extra return which my new instrument gives me. If my neighbor asks me to lend it to him and I do so, I deprive myself of the extra product I have been getting by means of it, and it is right for him to pay me interest on the cost of the boat. He can do it and make money by the transaction. If his catch is now five times what it was, he can afford to pay me a part of the extra return and still be better off than he was before. If my share is still large, other men will make boats and offer them for hire. They will compete in lending them till a modest percentage of the cost is all that any owner can get. The borrowers will then get the major benefit. This implies competition and shows the necessity of preserving it. If, in lieu of lending my canoe, I persuade another man to take it and fish for me, I shall have to give him more fish than he was originally catching; and the more the boats multiply, the larger the share which will have to be given to the men who are hired to work them, and the smaller the share which will be kept by the owner of any one boat. _Under a normal condition, multiplying capital means in itself higher wages._ Higher wages mean that laborers, in the end, begin to get boats of their own, or shares in boats, and that the laboring-class and the capitalist class are more and more merged. Invention--that is, devising and introducing canoes--and accumulation of capital--that is, active canoe-building--mean for laborers higher pay and a chance to save capital. Do you tell me that this is a primitive State, an Eden of the past and hopelessly vanished from the present earth; that it is a lost Paradise whose gates are forever barred? The whole point of the economic study of which I have given the briefest outline is that it is practicable to create in complex modern life the most essential condition of this primitive life--its tendency toward justice. In the Scriptures the primitive Eden was a garden, but the New Jerusalem is a city. What we have before us for study is a vast centralized economic system suggesting the city; and we have to see what can be made of it. It is something extremely good. The late Edward Atkinson was fond of saying that, if improvements are allowed to do their best, the time will come when, as he expressed it, "it will not pay to be rich." The workers will be so comfortable that the care of a great capital will more than offset any additional comfort a man can get by owning it. Grotesquely exaggerated as this claim may appear to be, it was based on serious economic study. There are forces at work which, if they have free play, will carry human life very far in the direction of the State so described, with its comfort, contentment, and fraternity. That fraternity is possible in spite of sharp contention is clear whenever athletic teams meet and celebrate a game which has been a victory for one and a defeat for the other; and the parties that contend in the great industrial field may be equally brotherly if they play fairly. Foul play always means enmity, and fair play, friendship. The finest possible type of character grows up in the course of keen but honorable rivalry. The noblest manhood that can anywhere be developed would come from competing vigorously in the market and living together as brothers when the contest closes. The beaten man may not enjoy his defeat, but he may act rightly and feel rightly toward the victor. Develop in these economic contests the sense of justice--let both parties seek to follow a rule of right--and men's hearts, at least, will not need to be embittered. You will then see a contest, which, when it is waged with bombs and bludgeons, looks like a Sheol, so changed that it shall open the way to a transformed world and make the hope of a future Eden no day-dream, but a scientific deduction from cosmic law. We may build a new earth out of the difficult material we have to work with, and cause justice and kindness to rule in the very place where strife now holds sway. A New Jerusalem may actually arise out of the fierce contentions of the modern market. The wrath of men may praise God and his Kingdom may come, not in spite of, but by means of the contests of the economic sphere. Socialism can have no monopoly of beatific visions. It offers much in that direction. It draws a picture of a future State of great riches and general equality; and the picture is glorified by a vision of general brotherhood. To some this seems more attractive than any other which imagination can create. I confess to a preference for a prospect which assures, before all else, the continuance of progress, and shows humanity striving to make forward steps and actually making them so long as the universe shall exist. As between a stationary paradise and a progressive purgatory, I should prefer the latter, for the sake of the permanent well-being of the human race; but what I should choose in preference to either is a progressive paradise. The capacity for further improvement is the essential trait of the best condition now in sight. The reformer can point to his delectable mountains and trace an unending route to and over them, as they rise range beyond range and lose themselves in the distance. Men are, in general, following the route, and each generation advances beyond the point attained by its predecessor. Every step is forward and upward, and the nearest goal will soon be reached and passed. Our descendants will reach a better and more distant goal and then press on to something remoter and still better. Again and again barriers seemingly insurmountable will be passed. The impossibility of to-day will be the reality of to-morrow, and the dazzling vision of to-day will be the reality of the future and the starting-point for still grander achievements. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A 
1140	----	LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS. by Thomas Carlyle But as yet struggles the twelfth hour of the Night. Birds of darkness are on the wing; spectres uproar; the dead walk; the living dream. Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt make the Day dawn!--JEAN PAUL. Then said his Lordship, "Well. God mend all!"--"Nay, by God, Donald, we must help him to mend it!" said the other.-- RUSHWORTH (_Sir David Ramsay and Lord Rea, in 1630_). CONTENTS. I. THE PRESENT TIME II. MODEL PRISONS III. DOWNING STREET IV. THE NEW DOWNING STREET V. STUMP-ORATOR NO. I. THE PRESENT TIME. [February 1, 1850.] The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a "New Era" to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look: to know _it_, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us. This new Day, sent us out of Heaven, this also has its heavenly omens;--amid the bustling trivialities and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot read and obey, it will not be well with us! No;--nor is there any sin more fearfully avenged on men and Nations than that same, which indeed includes and presupposes all manner of sins: the sin which our old pious fathers called "judicial blindness;"--which we, with our light habits, may still call misinterpretation of the Time that now is; disloyalty to its real meanings and monitions, stupid disregard of these, stupid adherence active or passive to the counterfeits and mere current semblances of these. This is true of all times and days. But in the days that are now passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded: if they are not days of endless hope too, then they are days of utter despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal. There must be a new world, if there is to be any world at all! That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there; this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal new-birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is a Time to make the dullest man consider; and ask himself, Whence _he_ came? Whither he is bound?--A veritable "New Era," to the foolish as well as to the wise. Not long ago, the world saw, with thoughtless joy which might have been very thoughtful joy, a real miracle not heretofore considered possible or conceivable in the world,--a Reforming Pope. A simple pious creature, a good country-priest, invested unexpectedly with the tiara, takes up the New Testament, declares that this henceforth shall be his rule of governing. No more finesse, chicanery, hypocrisy, or false or foul dealing of any kind: God's truth shall be spoken, God's justice shall be done, on the throne called of St. Peter: an honest Pope, Papa, or Father of Christendom, shall preside there. And such a throne of St. Peter; and such a Christendom, for an honest Papa to preside in! The European populations everywhere hailed the omen; with shouting and rejoicing leading articles and tar-barrels; thinking people listened with astonishment,--not with sorrow if they were faithful or wise; with awe rather as at the heralding of death, and with a joy as of victory beyond death! Something pious, grand and as if awful in that joy, revealing once more the Presence of a Divine Justice in this world. For, to such men it was very clear how this poor devoted Pope would prosper, with his New Testament in his hand. An alarming business, that of governing in the throne of St. Peter by the rule of veracity! By the rule of veracity, the so-called throne of St. Peter was openly declared, above three hundred years, ago, to be a falsity, a huge mistake, a pestilent dead carcass, which this Sun was weary of. More than three hundred years ago, the throne of St. Peter received peremptory judicial notice to quit; authentic order, registered in Heaven's chancery and since legible in the hearts of all brave men, to take itself away,--to begone, and let us have no more to do with _it_ and its delusions and impious deliriums;--and it has been sitting every day since, it may depend upon it, at its own peril withal, and will have to pay exact damages yet for every day it has so sat. Law of veracity? What this Popedom had to do by the law of veracity, was to give up its own foul galvanic life, an offence to gods and men; honestly to die, and get itself buried. Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook in regard to it;--and yet, on the whole, it was essentially this too. "Reforming Pope?" said one of our acquaintance, often in those weeks, "Was there ever such a miracle? About to break up that huge imposthume too, by 'curing' it? Turgot and Necker were nothing to this. God is great; and when a scandal is to end, brings some devoted man to take charge of it in hope, not in despair!"--But cannot he reform? asked many simple persons;--to whom our friend in grim banter would reply: "Reform a Popedom,--hardly. A wretched old kettle, ruined from top to bottom, and consisting mainly now of foul _grime_ and _rust_: stop the holes of it, as your antecessors have been doing, with temporary putty, it may hang together yet a while; begin to hammer at it, solder at it, to what you call mend and rectify it,--it will fall to sherds, as sure as rust is rust; go all into nameless dissolution,--and the fat in the fire will be a thing worth looking at, poor Pope!"--So accordingly it has proved. The poor Pope, amid felicitations and tar-barrels of various kinds, went on joyfully for a season: but he had awakened, he as no other man could do, the sleeping elements; mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes. Questions not very soluble at present, were even sages and heroes set to solve them, began everywhere with new emphasis to be asked. Questions which all official men wished, and almost hoped, to postpone till Doomsday. Doomsday itself _had_ come; that was the terrible truth! For, sure enough, if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as the rule for human things, there will not anywhere be want of work for the reformer; in very few places do human things adhere quite closely to that law! Here was the Papa of Christendom proclaiming that such was actually the case;--whereupon all over Christendom such results as we have seen. The Sicilians, I think, were the first notable body that set about applying this new strange rule sanctioned by the general Father; they said to themselves, We do not by the law of veracity belong to Naples and these Neapolitan Officials; we will, by favor of Heaven and the Pope, be free of these. Fighting ensued; insurrection, fiercely maintained in the Sicilian Cities; with much bloodshed, much tumult and loud noise, vociferation extending through all newspapers and countries. The effect of this, carried abroad by newspapers and rumor, was great in all places; greatest perhaps in Paris, which for sixty years past has been the City of Insurrections. The French People had plumed themselves on being, whatever else they were not, at least the chosen "soldiers of liberty," who took the lead of all creatures in that pursuit, at least; and had become, as their orators, editors and litterateurs diligently taught them, a People whose bayonets were sacred, a kind of Messiah People, saving a blind world in its own despite, and earning for themselves a terrestrial and even celestial glory very considerable indeed. And here were the wretched down-trodden populations of Sicily risen to rival them, and threatening to take the trade out of their hand. No doubt of it, this hearing continually of the very Pope's glory as a Reformer, of the very Sicilians fighting divinely for liberty behind barricades,--must have bitterly aggravated the feeling of every Frenchman, as he looked around him, at home, on a Louis-Philippism which had become the scorn of all the world. "_Ichabod_; is the glory departing from us? Under the sun is nothing baser, by all accounts and evidences, than the system of repression and corruption, of shameless dishonesty and unbelief in anything but human baseness, that we now live under. The Italians, the very Pope, have become apostles of liberty, and France is--what is France!"--We know what France suddenly became in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we can trace a considerable share in that event to the good simple Pope with the New Testament in his hand. An outbreak, or at least a radical change and even inversion of affairs hardly to be achieved without an outbreak, everybody felt was inevitable in France: but it had been universally expected that France would as usual take the initiative in that matter; and had there been no reforming Pope, no insurrectionary Sicily, France had certainly not broken out then and so, but only afterwards and otherwise. The French explosion, not anticipated by the cunningest men there on the spot scrutinizing it, burst up unlimited, complete, defying computation or control. Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:--Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We _are_ poor histrios, we sure enough;--did you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors. The miserable mortals, enacting their High Life Below Stairs, with faith only that this Universe may perhaps be all a phantasm and hypocrisis,--the truculent Constable of the Destinies suddenly enters: "Scandalous Phantasms, what do _you_ here? Are 'solemnly constituted Impostors' the proper Kings of men? Did you think the Life of Man was a grimacing dance of apes? To be led always by the squeak of your paltry fiddle? Ye miserable, this Universe is not an upholstery Puppet-play, but a terrible God's Fact; and you, I think,--had not you better begone!" They fled precipitately, some of them with what we may call an exquisite ignominy,--in terror of the treadmill or worse. And everywhere the people, or the populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open "kinglessness," what we call _anarchy_,--how happy if it be anarchy _plus_ a street-constable!--is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I have known nothing similar. And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except the Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading article; or getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament to harangue. And for about four months all France, and to a great degree all Europe, rough-ridden by every species of delirium, except happily the murderous for most part, was a weltering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine, at the Hotel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary gentleman, whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest and heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine discerned to be properly "the first stump-orator in the world, standing too on the highest stump,--for the time." A sorrowful spectacle to men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and _soft sawder_, which he and others took for something divine and not diabolic! Sad enough; the eloquent latest impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up their gas in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a sufficiently wretched manner before long. And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions--students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame,--might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs. A changed time since the word _Senior_ (Seigneur, or _Elder_) was first devised to signify "lord," or superior;--as in all languages of men we find it to have been! Not an honorable document this either, as to the spiritual condition of our epoch. In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble: in times that love something else than wisdom, and indeed have little or no wisdom, and see little or none to love, the old man will cease to be venerated; and looking more closely, also, you will find that in fact he has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy without the graces, generosities and opulent strength of young boys. In these days, what of _lordship_ or leadership is still to be done, the youth must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature man, hardened into sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own frigid cautious, avarices, mean timidities; and can lead no-whither towards an object that even seems noble. But to return. This mad state of matters will of course before long allay itself, as it has everywhere begun to do; the ordinary necessities of men's daily existence cannot comport with it, and these, whatever else is cast aside, will have their way. Some remounting--very temporary remounting--of the old machine, under new colors and altered forms, will probably ensue soon in most countries: the old histrionic Kings will be admitted back under conditions, under "Constitutions," with national Parliaments, or the like fashionable adjuncts; and everywhere the old daily life will try to begin again. But there is now no hope that such arrangements can be permanent; that they can be other than poor temporary makeshifts, which, if they try to fancy and make themselves permanent, will be displaced by new explosions recurring more speedily than last time. In such baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European Society continue swaying, now disastrously tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals,--till once the _new_ rock-basis does come to light, and the weltering deluges of mutiny, and of need to mutiny, abate again! For universal _Democracy_, whatever we may think of it, has declared itself as an inevitable fact of the days in which we live; and he who has any chance to instruct, or lead, in his days, must begin by admitting that: new street-barricades, and new anarchies, still more scandalous if still less sanguinary, must return and again return, till governing persons everywhere know and admit that. Democracy, it may be said everywhere, is here:--for sixty years now, ever since the grand or _First_ French Revolution, that fact has been terribly announced to all the world; in message after message, some of them very terrible indeed; and now at last all the world ought really to believe it. That the world does believe it; that even Kings now as good as believe it, and know, or with just terror surmise, that they are but temporary phantasm Play-actors, and that Democracy is the grand, alarming, imminent and indisputable Reality: this, among the scandalous phases we witnessed in the last two years, is a phasis full of hope: a sign that we are advancing closer and closer to the very Problem itself, which it will behoove us to solve or die; that all fighting and campaigning and coalitioning in regard to the _existence_ of the Problem, is hopeless and superfluous henceforth. The gods have appointed it so; no Pitt, nor body of Pitts or mortal creatures can appoint it otherwise. Democracy, sure enough, is here; one knows not how long it will keep hidden underground even in Russia;--and here in England, though we object to it resolutely in the form of street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes, and decidedly will not open doors to it on those terms, the tramp of its million feet is on all streets and thoroughfares, the sound of its bewildered thousand-fold voice is in all writings and speakings, in all thinkings and modes and activities of men: the soul that does not now, with hope or terror, discern it, is not the one we address on this occasion. What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it? A meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be possible!--The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of the European Populations, which calls itself Democracy, and decides to continue permanent, may be. Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men, simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose announcement, more than plentiful, that _now_ the New Era, and long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come. Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty--O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody, from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same. The front wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way:--but is it cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind? My dear household, cease singing and psalmodying; lay aside your fiddles, take out your work-implements, if you have any; for I can say with confidence the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails, worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry, are not the best basis for a household!--In the lanes of Irish cities, I have heard say, the wretched people are sometimes found living, and perilously boiling their potatoes, on such swing-floors and inclined planes hanging on by the joist-ends; but I did not hear that they sang very much in celebration of such lodging. No, they slid gently about, sat near the back wall, and perilously boiled their potatoes, in silence for most part!-- High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of speech and writing, rise from far and near over this last avatar of Democracy in 1848: and yet, to wise minds, the first aspect it presents seems rather to be one of boundless misery and sorrow. What can be more miserable than this universal hunting out of the high dignitaries, solemn functionaries, and potent, grave and reverend signiors of the world; this stormful rising-up of the inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against those who pretended to be speaking for them and guiding them? These guides, then, were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane;--and what were the people withal that took them for real? It is probably the hugest disclosure of _falsity_ in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,--a falsity of falsities, which at last _ceases_ to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,--a kind of _inverse_ cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal _Bankruptcy of Imposture_; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther:--fallen insolvent; unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its pot boil any more for the present! A more scandalous phenomenon, wide as Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy everywhere; foul ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in all high places: odious to look upon, as the carnage of a battle-field on the morrow morning;--a massacre not of the innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the innocents; but a universal tumbling of Impostors and of Impostures into the street!-- Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow,--like the vision of immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then,--known it must and shall be,--is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable one. Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here,--for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may _cease_. Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,--what you in your iconoclast humor call shams, all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honorable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue salable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis? "The greatest sham, I have always thought, is he that would destroy shams." Even so. To such depth have _I_, the poor knowing person of this epoch, got;--almost below the level of lowest humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and oxhood! For never till in quite recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy quietly set forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature called man believe generally in his heart that lies were the rule in this Earth; that in deliberate long-established lying could there be help or salvation for him, could there be at length other than hindrance and destruction for him. O Heavyside, my solid friend, this is the sorrow of sorrows: what on earth can become of us till this accursed enchantment, the general summary and consecration of delusions, be cast forth from the heart and life of one and all! Cast forth it will be; it must, or we are tending, at all moments, whitherward I do not like to name. Alas, and the casting of it out, to what heights and what depths will it lead us, in the sad universe mostly of lies and shams and hollow phantasms (grown very ghastly now), in which, as in a safe home, we have lived this century or two! To heights and depths of social and individual _divorce_ from delusions,--of "reform" in right sacred earnest, of indispensable amendment, and stern sorrowful abrogation and order to depart,--such as cannot well be spoken at present; as dare scarcely be thought at present; which nevertheless are very inevitable, and perhaps rather imminent several of them! Truly we have a heavy task of work before us; and there is a pressing call that we should seriously begin upon it, before it tumble into an inextricable mass, in which there will be no working, but only suffering and hopelessly perishing! Or perhaps Democracy, which we announce as now come, will itself manage it? Democracy, once modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes and such like, will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by?--To the great mass of men, I am aware, the matter presents itself quite on this hopeful side. Democracy they consider to _be_ a kind of "Government." The old model, formed long since, and brought to perfection in England now two hundred years ago, has proclaimed itself to all Nations as the new healing for every woe: "Set up a Parliament," the Nations everywhere say, when the old King is detected to be a Sham-King, and hunted out or not; "set up a Parliament; let us have suffrages, universal suffrages; and all either at once or by due degrees will be right, and a real Millennium come!" Such is their way of construing the matter. Such, alas, is by no means my way of construing the matter; if it were, I should have had the happiness of remaining silent, and been without call to speak here. It is because the contrary of all this is deeply manifest to me, and appears to be forgotten by multitudes of my contemporaries, that I have had to undertake addressing a word to them. The contrary of all this;--and the farther I look into the roots of all this, the more hateful, ruinous and dismal does the state of mind all this could have originated in appear to me. To examine this recipe of a Parliament, how fit it is for governing Nations, nay how fit it may now be, in these new times, for governing England itself where we are used to it so long: this, too, is an alarming inquiry, to which all thinking men, and good citizens of their country, who have an ear for the small still voices and eternal intimations, across the temporary clamors and loud blaring proclamations, are now solemnly invited. Invited by the rigorous fact itself; which will one day, and that perhaps soon, demand practical decision or redecision of it from us,--with enormous penalty if we decide it wrong! I think we shall all have to consider this question, one day; better perhaps now than later, when the leisure may be less. If a Parliament, with suffrages and universal or any conceivable kind of suffrages, is the method, then certainly let us set about discovering the kind of suffrages, and rest no moment till we have got them. But it is possible a Parliament may not be the method! Possible the inveterate notions of the English People may have settled it as the method, and the Everlasting Laws of Nature may have settled it as not the method! Not the whole method; nor the method at all, if taken as the whole? If a Parliament with never such suffrages is not the method settled by this latter authority, then it will urgently behoove us to become aware of that fact, and to quit such method;--we may depend upon it, however unanimous we be, every step taken in that direction will, by the Eternal Law of things, be a step _from_ improvement, not towards it. Not towards it, I say, if so! Unanimity of voting,--that will do nothing for us if so. Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic "admonition;" you will be flung half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship;--yes indeed, the ship's crew may be very unanimous, which doubtless, for the time being, will be very comfortable to the ship's crew, and to their Phantasm Captain if they have one: but if the tack they unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the belly of the Abyss, it will not profit them much!--Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species of Captains: one wishes much some other Entities--since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws--could be brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of Nature. Phantasm Captains with unanimous votings: this is considered to be all the law and all the prophets, at present. If a man could shake out of his mind the universal noise of political doctors in this generation and in the last generation or two, and consider the matter face to face, with his own sincere intelligence looking at it, I venture to say he would find this a very extraordinary method of navigating, whether in the Straits of Magellan or the undiscovered Sea of Time. To prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement, either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can faithfully and steadfastly follow these. These will lead him to victory; whoever it may be that sets him in the way of these,--were it Russian Autocrat, Chartist Parliament, Grand Lama, Force of Public Opinion, Archbishop of Canterbury, M'Croudy the Seraphic Doctor with his Last-evangel of Political Economy,--sets him in the sure way to please the Author of this Universe, and is his friend of friends. And again, whoever does the contrary is, for a like reason, his enemy of enemies. This may be taken as fixed. And now by what method ascertain the monition of the gods in regard to our affairs? How decipher, with best fidelity, the eternal regulation of the Universe; and read, from amid such confused embroilments of human clamor and folly, what the real Divine Message to us is? A divine message, or eternal regulation of the Universe, there verily is, in regard to every conceivable procedure and affair of man: faithfully following this, said procedure or affair will prosper, and have the whole Universe to second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating contradictions, towards a victorious goal; not following this, mistaking this, disregarding this, destruction and wreck are certain for every affair. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count heads; ask Universal Suffrage, by the ballot-boxes, and that will tell." Universal Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well,--I perceive we have got into strange spiritual latitudes indeed. Within the last half-century or so, either the Universe or else the heads of men must have altered very much. Half a century ago, and down from Father Adam's time till then, the Universe, wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of somewhat abstruse nature; by no means carrying its secret written on its face, legible to every passer-by; on the contrary, obstinately hiding its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere persons, and partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was not the majority in my time! Or perhaps the chief end of man being now, in these improved epochs, to make money and spend it, his interests in the Universe have become amazingly simplified of late; capable of being voted on with effect by almost anybody? "To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest:" truly if that is the summary of his social duties, and the final divine message he has to follow, we may trust him extensively to vote upon that. But if it is not, and never was, or can be? If the Universe will not carry on its divine bosom any commonwealth of mortals that have no higher aim,--being still "a Temple and Hall of Doom," not a mere Weaving-shop and Cattle-pen? If the unfathomable Universe has decided to _reject_ Human Beavers pretending to be Men; and will abolish, pretty rapidly perhaps, in hideous mud-deluges, their "markets" and them, unless they think of it?--In that case it were better to think of it: and the Democracies and Universal Suffrages, I can observe, will require to modify themselves a good deal! Historically speaking, I believe there was no Nation that could subsist upon Democracy. Of ancient Republics, and _Demoi_ and _Populi_, we have heard much; but it is now pretty well admitted to be nothing to our purpose;--a universal-suffrage republic, or a general-suffrage one, or any but a most-limited-suffrage one, never came to light, or dreamed of doing so, in ancient times. When the mass of the population were slaves, and the voters intrinsically a kind of _kings_, or men born to rule others; when the voters were real "aristocrats" and manageable dependents of such,--then doubtless voting, and confused jumbling of talk and intrigue, might, without immediate destruction, or the need of a Cavaignac to intervene with cannon and sweep the streets clear of it, go on; and beautiful developments of manhood might be possible beside it, for a season. Beside it; or even, if you will, by means of it, and in virtue of it, though that is by no means so certain as is often supposed. Alas, no: the reflective constitutional mind has misgivings as to the origin of old Greek and Roman nobleness; and indeed knows not how this or any other human nobleness could well be "originated," or brought to pass, by voting or without voting, in this world, except by the grace of God very mainly;--and remembers, with a sigh, that of the Seven Sages themselves no fewer than three were bits of Despotic Kings, [Gr.] _Turannoi_, "Tyrants" so called (such being greatly wanted there); and that the other four were very far from Red Republicans, if of any political faith whatever! We may quit the Ancient Classical concern, and leave it to College-clubs and speculative debating-societies, in these late days. Of the various French Republics that have been tried, or that are still on trial,--of these also it is not needful to say any word. But there is one modern instance of Democracy nearly perfect, the Republic of the United States, which has actually subsisted for threescore years or more, with immense success as is affirmed; to which many still appeal, as to a sign of hope for all nations, and a "Model Republic." Is not America an instance in point? Why should not all Nations subsist and flourish on Democracy, as America does? Of America it would ill beseem any Englishman, and me perhaps as little as another, to speak unkindly, to speak unpatriotically, if any of us even felt so. Sure enough, America is a great, and in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon. Sure enough, these hardy millions of Anglo-Saxon men prove themselves worthy of their genealogy; and, with the axe and plough and hammer, if not yet with any much finer kind of implements, are triumphantly clearing out wide spaces, seedfields for the sustenance and refuge of mankind, arenas for the future history of the world; doing, in their day and generation, a creditable and cheering feat under the sun. But as to a Model Republic, or a model anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is nothing to be said. Nay the title hitherto to be a Commonwealth or Nation at all, among the [Gr.] _ethne_ of the world, is, strictly considered, still a thing they are but striving for, and indeed have not yet done much towards attaining. Their Constitution, such as it may be, was made here, not there; went over with them from the Old-Puritan English workshop ready-made. Deduct what they carried with them from England ready-made,--their common English Language, and that same Constitution, or rather elixir of constitutions, their inveterate and now, as it were, inborn reverence for the Constable's Staff; two quite immense attainments, which England had to spend much blood, and valiant sweat of brow and brain, for centuries long, in achieving;--and what new elements of polity or nationhood, what noble new phasis of human arrangement, or social device worthy of Prometheus or of Epimetheus, yet comes to light in America? Cotton crops and Indian corn and dollars come to light; and half a world of untilled land, where populations that respect the constable can live, for the present _without_ Government: this comes to light; and the profound sorrow of all nobler hearts, here uttering itself as silent patient unspeakable ennui, there coming out as vague elegiac wailings, that there is still next to nothing more. "Anarchy _plus_ a street-constable:" that also is anarchic to me, and other than quite lovely! I foresee, too, that, long before the waste lands are full, the very street-constable, on these poor terms, will have become impossible: without the waste lands, as here in our Europe, I do not see how he could continue possible many weeks. Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. To men in their sleep there is nothing granted in this world: nothing, or as good as nothing, to men that sit idly caucusing and ballot-boxing on the graves of their heroic ancestors, saying, "It is well, it is well!" Corn and bacon are granted: not a very sublime boon, on such conditions; a boon moreover which, on such conditions, cannot last!--No: America too will have to strain its energies, in quite other fashion than this; to crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons and mud-demons, before it can become a habitation for the gods. America's battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it. New Spiritual Pythons, plenty of them; enormous Megatherions, as ugly as were ever born of mud, loom huge and hideous out of the twilight Future on America; and she will have her own agony, and her own victory, but on other terms than she is yet quite aware of. Hitherto she but ploughs and hammers, in a very successful manner; hitherto, in spite of her "roast-goose with apple-sauce," she is not much. "Roast-goose with apple-sauce for the poorest workingman:" well, surely that is something, thanks to your respect for the street-constable, and to your continents of fertile waste land;--but that, even if it could continue, is by no means enough; that is not even an instalment towards what will be required of you. My friend, brag not yet of our American cousins! Their quantity of cotton, dollars, industry and resources, I believe to be almost unspeakable; but I can by no means worship the like of these. What great human soul, what great thought, what great noble thing that one could worship, or loyally admire, has yet been produced there? None: the American cousins have yet done none of these things. "What they have done?" growls Smelfungus, tired of the subject: "They have doubled their population every twenty years. They have begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, Eighteen Millions of the greatest _bores_ ever seen in this world before,--that hitherto is their feat in History!"--And so we leave them, for the present; and cannot predict the success of Democracy, on this side of the Atlantic, from their example. Alas, on this side of the Atlantic and on that, Democracy, we apprehend, is forever impossible! So much, with certainty of loud astonished contradiction from all manner of men at present, but with sure appeal to the Law of Nature and the ever-abiding Fact, may be suggested and asserted once more. The Universe itself is a Monarchy and Hierarchy; large liberty of "voting" there, all manner of choice, utmost free-will, but with conditions inexorable and immeasurable annexed to every exercise of the same. A most free commonwealth of "voters;" but with Eternal Justice to preside over it, Eternal Justice enforced by Almighty Power! This is the model of "constitutions;" this: nor in any Nation where there has not yet (in some supportable and withal some constantly increasing degree) been confided to the _Noblest_, with his select series of _Nobler_, the divine everlasting duty of directing and controlling the Ignoble, has the "Kingdom of God," which we all pray for, "come," nor can "His will" even _tend_ to be "done on Earth as it is in Heaven" till then. My Christian friends, and indeed my Sham-Christian and Anti-Christian, and all manner of men, are invited to reflect on this. They will find it to be the truth of the case. The Noble in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law. To raise the Sham-Noblest, and solemnly consecrate him by whatever method, new-devised, or slavishly adhered to from old wont, this, little as we may regard it, is, in all times and countries, a practical blasphemy, and Nature will in nowise forget it. Alas, there lies the origin, the fatal necessity, of modern Democracy everywhere. It is the Noblest, not the Sham-Noblest; it is God-Almighty's Noble, not the Court-Tailor's Noble, nor the Able-Editor's Noble, that must, in some approximate degree, be raised to the supreme place; he and not a counterfeit,--under penalties! Penalties deep as death, and at length terrible as hell-on-earth, my constitutional friend!--Will the ballot-box raise the Noblest to the chief place; does any sane man deliberately believe such a thing? That nevertheless is the indispensable result, attain it how we may: if that is attained, all is attained; if not that, nothing. He that cannot believe the ballot-box to be attaining it, will be comparatively indifferent to the ballot-box. Excellent for keeping the ship's crew at peace under their Phantasm Captain; but unserviceable, under such, for getting round Cape Horn. Alas, that there should be human beings requiring to have these things argued of, at this late time of day! I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;" compared with which all other rights are as nothing,--mere superfluities, corollaries which will follow of their own accord out of this; if they be not contradictions to this, and less than nothing! To the wise it is not a privilege; far other indeed. Doubtless, as bringing preservation to their country, it implies preservation of themselves withal; but intrinsically it is the harshest duty a wise man, if he be indeed wise, has laid to his hand. A duty which he would fain enough shirk; which accordingly, in these sad times of doubt and cowardly sloth, he has long everywhere been endeavoring to reduce to its minimum, and has in fact in most cases nearly escaped altogether. It is an ungoverned world; a world which we flatter ourselves will henceforth need no governing. On the dust of our heroic ancestors we too sit ballot-boxing, saying to one another, It is well, it is well! By inheritance of their noble struggles, we have been permitted to sit slothful so long. By noble toil, not by shallow laughter and vain talk, they made this English Existence from a savage forest into an arable inhabitable field for us; and we, idly dreaming it would grow spontaneous crops forever,--find it now in a too questionable state; peremptorily requiring real labor and agriculture again. Real "agriculture" is not pleasant; much pleasanter to reap and winnow (with ballot-box or otherwise) than to plough! Who would govern that can get along without governing? He that is fittest for it, is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained. By multifarious devices we have been endeavoring to dispense with governing; and by very superficial speculations, of _laissez-faire_, supply-and-demand, &c. &c. to persuade ourselves that it is best so. The Real Captain, unless it be some Captain of mechanical Industry hired by Mammon, where is he in these days? Most likely, in silence, in sad isolation somewhere, in remote obscurity; trying if, in an evil ungoverned time, he cannot at least govern himself. The Real Captain undiscoverable; the Phantasm Captain everywhere very conspicuous:--it is thought Phantasm Captains, aided by ballot-boxes, are the true method, after all. They are much the pleasantest for the time being! And so no _Dux_ or Duke of any sort, in any province of our affairs, now _leads_: the Duke's Bailiff _leads_, what little leading is required for getting in the rents; and the Duke merely rides in the state-coach. It is everywhere so: and now at last we see a world all rushing towards strange consummations, because it is and has long been so! I do not suppose any reader of mine, or many persons in England at all, have much faith in Fraternity, Equality and the Revolutionary Millenniums preached by the French Prophets in this age: but there are many movements here too which tend inevitably in the like direction; and good men, who would stand aghast at Red Republic and its adjuncts, seem to me travelling at full speed towards that or a similar goal! Certainly the notion everywhere prevails among us too, and preaches itself abroad in every dialect, uncontradicted anywhere so far as I can hear, That the grand panacea for social woes is what we call "enfranchisement," "emancipation;" or, translated into practical language, the cutting asunder of human relations, wherever they are found grievous, as is like to be pretty universally the case at the rate we have been going for some generations past. Let us all be "free" of one another; we shall then be happy. Free, without bond or connection except that of cash-payment; fair day's wages for the fair day's work; bargained for by voluntary contract, and law of supply-and-demand: this is thought to be the true solution of all difficulties and injustices that have occurred between man and man. To rectify the relation that exists between two men, is there no method, then, but that of ending it? The old relation has become unsuitable, obsolete, perhaps unjust; it imperatively requires to be amended; and the remedy is, Abolish it, let there henceforth be no relation at all. From the "Sacrament of Marriage" downwards, human beings used to be manifoldly related, one to another, and each to all; and there was no relation among human beings, just or unjust, that had not its grievances and difficulties, its necessities on both sides to bear and forbear. But henceforth, be it known, we have changed all that, by favor of Heaven: "the voluntary principle" has come up, which will itself do the business for us; and now let a new Sacrament, that of Divorce, which we call emancipation, and spout of on our platforms, be universally the order of the day!--Have men considered whither all this is tending, and what it certainly enough betokens? Cut every human relation which has anywhere grown uneasy sheer asunder; reduce whatsoever was compulsory to voluntary, whatsoever was permanent among us to the condition of nomadic:--in other words, loosen by assiduous wedges in every joint, the whole fabric of social existence, stone from stone: till at last, all now being loose enough, it can, as we already see in most countries, be overset by sudden outburst of revolutionary rage; and, lying as mere mountains of anarchic rubbish, solicit you to sing Fraternity, &c., over it, and to rejoice in the new remarkable era of human progress we have arrived at. Certainly Emancipation proceeds with rapid strides among us, this good while; and has got to such a length as might give rise to reflections in men of a serious turn. West-Indian Blacks are emancipated, and it appears refuse to work: Irish Whites have long been entirely emancipated; and nobody asks them to work, or on condition of finding them potatoes (which, of course, is indispensable), permits them to work.--Among speculative persons, a question has sometimes risen: In the progress of Emancipation, are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle? Horses too have "motives;" are acted on by hunger, fear, hope, love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay they have vanity, ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude outline of all our human spiritualities,--a rude resemblance to us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame. The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage; no human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either, or recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed:--I am sure if I could make him "happy," I should be willing to grant a small vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that object! Him too you occasionally tyrannize over; and with bad result to yourselves, among others; using the leather in a tyrannous unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing, the oats and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged horse-subduers, one fears they are a little tyrannous at times. "Am I not a horse, and half-brother?"--To remedy which, so far as remediable, fancy--the horses all "emancipated;" restored to their primeval right of property in the grass of this Globe: turned out to graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner! So long as grass lasts, I dare say they are very happy, or think themselves so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning, with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this day, Black Dobbin: oats in full measure if thou wilt. "Hlunh, No--thank!" snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? "Hlunh!"--Gray Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,--O Heaven, she too answers Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops are _ended_ in this world!--For the sake, if not of Hodge, then of Hodge's horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now cease, and a new and better one try to begin. Small kindness to Hodge's horses to emancipate them! The fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later, inevitable. To have in this habitable Earth no grass to eat,--in Black Jamaica gradually none, as in White Connemara already none;--to roam aimless, wasting the seedfields of the world; and be hunted home to Chaos, by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this hour. Between our Black West Indies and our White Ireland, between these two extremes of lazy refusal to work, and of famishing inability to find any work, what a world have we made of it, with our fierce Mammon-worships, and our benevolent philanderings, and idle godless nonsenses of one kind and another! Supply-and-demand, Leave-it-alone, Voluntary Principle, Time will mend it:--till British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a hideous _living_ Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such a Curtius' gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun never saw till now. These scenes, which the _Morning Chronicle_ is bringing home to all minds of men,--thanks to it for a service such as Newspapers have seldom done,--ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind. Thirty thousand outcast Needlewomen working themselves swiftly to death; three million Paupers rotting in forced idleness, _helping_ said Needlewomen to die: these are but items in the sad ledger of despair. Thirty thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the _well_ of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous effort, to redress that individual horror; as I and all men hope it may. But, alas, what next? This general well and cesspool once baled clean out to-day, will begin before night to fill itself anew. The universal Stygian quagmire is still there; opulent in women ready to be ruined, and in men ready. Towards the same sad cesspool will these waste currents of human ruin ooze and gravitate as heretofore; except in draining the universal quagmire itself there is no remedy. "And for that, what is the method?" cry many in an angry manner. To whom, for the present, I answer only, "Not 'emancipation,' it would seem, my friends; not the cutting loose of human ties, something far the reverse of that!" Many things have been written about shirtmaking; but here perhaps is the saddest thing of all, not written anywhere till now, that I know of. Shirts by the thirty thousand are made at twopence-halfpenny each; and in the mean while no needlewoman, distressed or other, can be procured in London by any housewife to give, for fair wages, fair help in sewing. Ask any thrifty house-mother, high or low, and she will answer. In high houses and in low, there is the same answer: no _real_ needlewoman, "distressed" or other, has been found attainable in any of the houses I frequent. Imaginary needlewomen, who demand considerable wages, and have a deepish appetite for beer and viands, I hear of everywhere; but their sewing proves too often a distracted puckering and botching; not sewing, only the fallacious hope of it, a fond imagination of the mind. Good sempstresses are to be hired in every village; and in London, with its famishing thirty thousand, not at all, or hardly,--Is not No-government beautiful in human business? To such length has the Leave-alone principle carried it, by way of organizing labor, in this affair of shirtmaking. Let us hope the Leave-alone principle has now got its apotheosis; and taken wing towards higher regions than ours, to deal henceforth with a class of affairs more appropriate for it! Reader, did you ever hear of "Constituted Anarchy"? Anarchy; the choking, sweltering, deadly and killing rule of No-rule; the consecration of cupidity, and braying folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men? Slop-shirts attainable three halfpence cheaper, by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls? Solemn Bishops and high Dignitaries, _our_ divine "Pillars of Fire by night," debating meanwhile, with their largest wigs and gravest look, upon something they call "prevenient grace"? Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven's _real_ messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the wasteful time;--preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously trained by all their pedagogues and monitors, to "rise in Parliament," to compose orations, write books, or in short speak words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work to be approved of by the gods! Our "Government," a highly "responsible" one; responsible to no God that I can hear of, but to the twenty-seven million _gods_ of the shilling gallery. A Government tumbling and drifting on the whirlpools and mud-deluges, floating atop in a conspicuous manner, no-whither,--like the carcass of a drowned ass. Authentic _Chaos_ come up into this sunny Cosmos again; and all men singing Gloria in _excelsis_ to it. In spirituals and temporals, in field and workshop, from Manchester to Dorsetshire, from Lambeth Palace to the Lanes of Whitechapel, wherever men meet and toil and traffic together,--Anarchy, Anarchy; and only the street-constable (though with ever-increasing difficulty) still maintaining himself in the middle of it; that so, for one thing, this blessed exchange of slop-shirts for the souls of women may transact itself in a peaceable manner!--I, for my part, do profess myself in eternal opposition to this, and discern well that universal Ruin has us in the wind, unless we can get out of this. My friend Crabbe, in a late number of his _Intermittent Radiator_, pertinently enough exclaims:-- "When shall we have done with all this of British Liberty, Voluntary Principle, Dangers of Centralization, and the like? It is really getting too bad. For British Liberty, it seems, the people cannot be taught to read. British Liberty, shuddering to interfere with the rights of capital, takes six or eight millions of money annually to feed the idle laborer whom it dare not employ. For British Liberty we live over poisonous cesspools, gully-drains, and detestable abominations; and omnipotent London cannot sweep the dirt out of itself. British Liberty produces--what? Floods of Hansard Debates every year, and apparently little else at present. If these are the results of British Liberty, I, for one, move we should lay it on the shelf a little, and look out for something other and farther. We have achieved British Liberty hundreds of years ago; and are fast growing, on the strength of it, one of the most absurd populations the Sun, among his great Museum of Absurdities, looks down upon at present." Curious enough: the model of the world just now is England and her Constitution; all Nations striving towards it: poor France swimming these last sixty years in seas of horrid dissolution and confusion, resolute to attain this blessedness of free voting, or to die in chase of it. Prussia too, solid Germany itself, has all broken out into crackling of musketry, loud pamphleteering and Frankfort parliamenting and palavering; Germany too will scale the sacred mountains, how steep soever, and, by talisman of ballot-box, inhabit a political Elysium henceforth. All the Nations have that one hope. Very notable, and rather sad to the humane on-looker. For it is sadly conjectured, all the Nations labor somewhat under a mistake as to England, and the causes of her freedom and her prosperous cotton-spinning; and have much misread the nature of her Parliament, and the effect of ballot-boxes and universal suffrages there. What if it were because the English Parliament was from the first, and is only just now ceasing to be, a Council of actual Rulers, real Governing Persons (called Peers, Mitred Abbots, Lords, Knights of the Shire, or howsoever called), actually _ruling_ each his section of the country,--and possessing (it must be said) in the lump, or when assembled as a Council, uncommon patience, devoutness, probity, discretion and good fortune,--that the said Parliament ever came to be good for much? In that case it will not be easy to "imitate" the English Parliament; and the ballot-box and suffrage will be the mere bow of Robin Hood, which it is given to very few to bend, or shoot with to any perfection. And if the Peers become mere big Capitalists, Railway Directors, gigantic Hucksters, Kings of Scrip, _without_ lordly quality, or other virtue except cash; and the Mitred Abbots change to mere Able-Editors, masters of Parliamentary Eloquence, Doctors of Political Economy, and such like; and all _have_ to be elected by a universal-suffrage ballot-box,--I do not see how the English Parliament itself will long continue sea-worthy! Nay, I find England in her own big dumb heart, wherever you come upon her in a silent meditative hour, begins to have dreadful misgivings about it. The model of the world, then, is at once unattainable by the world, and not much worth attaining? England, as I read the omens, is now called a second time to "show the Nations how to live;" for by her Parliament, as chief governing entity, I fear she is not long for this world! Poor England must herself again, in these new strange times, the old methods being quite worn out, "learn how to live." That now is the terrible problem for England, as for all the Nations; and she alone of all, not _yet_ sunk into open Anarchy, but left with time for repentance and amendment; she, wealthiest of all in material resource, in spiritual energy, in ancient loyalty to law, and in the qualities that yield such loyalty,--she perhaps alone of all may be able, with huge travail, and the strain of all her faculties, to accomplish some solution. She will have to try it, she has now to try it; she must accomplish it, or perish from her place in the world! England, as I persuade myself, still contains in it many _kings_; possesses, as old Rome did, many men not needing "election" to command, but eternally elected for it by the Maker Himself. England's one hope is in these, just now. They are among the silent, I believe; mostly far away from platforms and public palaverings; not speaking forth the image of their nobleness in transitory words, but imprinting it, each on his own little section of the world, in silent facts, in modest valiant actions, that will endure forevermore. They must sit silent no longer. They are summoned to assert themselves; to act forth, and articulately vindicate, in the teeth of howling multitudes, of a world too justly _maddened_ into all manner of delirious clamors, what of wisdom they derive from God. England, and the Eternal Voices, summon them; poor England never so needed them as now. Up, be doing everywhere: the hour of crisis has verily come! In all sections of English life, the god-made _king_ is needed; is pressingly demanded in most; in some, cannot longer, without peril as of conflagration, be dispensed with. He, wheresoever he finds himself, can say, "Here too am I wanted; here is the kingdom I have to subjugate, and introduce God's Laws into,--God's Laws, instead of Mammon's and M'Croudy's and the Old Anarch's! Here is my work, here or nowhere."--Are there many such, who will answer to the call, in England? It turns on that, whether England, rapidly crumbling in these very years and months, shall go down to the Abyss as her neighbors have all done, or survive to new grander destinies _without_ solution of continuity! Probably the chief question of the world at present. The true "commander" and king; he who knows for himself the divine Appointments of this Universe, the Eternal Laws ordained by God the Maker, in conforming to which lies victory and felicity, in departing from which lies, and forever must lie, sorrow and defeat, for each and all of the Posterity of Adam in every time and every place; he who has sworn fealty to these, and dare alone against the world assert these, and dare not with the whole world at his back deflect from these;--he, I know too well, is a rare man. Difficult to discover; not quite discoverable, I apprehend, by manoeuvring of ballot-boxes, and riddling of the popular clamor according to the most approved methods. He is not sold at any shop I know of,--though sometimes, as at the sign of the Ballot-box, he is advertised for sale. Difficult indeed to discover: and not very much assisted, or encouraged in late times, to discover _himself_;--which, I think, might be a kind of help? Encouraged rather, and commanded in all ways, if he be wise, to _hide_ himself, and give place to the windy Counterfeit of himself; such as the universal suffrages can recognize, such as loves the most sweet voices of the universal suffrages!--O Peter, what becomes of such a People; what can become? Did you never hear, with the mind's ear as well, that fateful Hebrew Prophecy, I think the fatefulest of all, which sounds daily through the streets, "Ou' clo! Ou' clo!"--A certain People, once upon a time, clamorously voted by overwhelming majority, "Not _he_; Barabbas, not he! _Him_, and what he is, and what he deserves, we know well enough: a reviler of the Chief Priests and sacred Chancery wigs; a seditious Heretic, physical-force Chartist, and enemy of his country and mankind: To the gallows and the cross with him! Barabbas is our man; Barabbas, we are for Barabbas!" They got Barabbas:--have you well considered what a fund of purblind obduracy, of opaque _flunkyism_ grown truculent and transcendent; what an eye for the phylacteries, and want of eye for the eternal noblenesses; sordid loyalty to the prosperous Semblances, and high-treason against the Supreme Fact, such a vote betokens in these natures? For it was the consummation of a long series of such; they and their fathers had long kept voting so. A singular People; who could both produce such divine men, and then could so stone and crucify them; a People terrible from the beginning!--Well, they got Barabbas; and they got, of course, such guidance as Barabbas and the like of him could give them; and, of course, they stumbled ever downwards and devilwards, in their truculent stiffnecked way; and--and, at this hour, after eighteen centuries of sad fortune, they prophetically sing "Ou' clo!" in all the cities of the world. Might the world, at this late hour, but take note of them, and understand their song a little! Yes, there are some things the universal suffrage can decide,--and about these it will be exceedingly useful to consult the universal suffrage: but in regard to most things of importance, and in regard to the choice of men especially, there is (astonishing as it may seem) next to no capability on the part of universal suffrage.--I request all candid persons, who have never so little originality of mind, and every man has a little, to consider this. If true, it involves such a change in our now fashionable modes of procedure as fills me with astonishment and alarm. _If_ popular suffrage is not the way of ascertaining what the Laws of the Universe are, and who it is that will best guide us in the way of these,--then woe is to us if we do not take another method. Delolme on the British Constitution will not save us; deaf will the Parcae be to votes of the House, to leading articles, constitutional philosophies. The other method--alas, it involves a stopping short, or vital change of direction, in the glorious career which all Europe, with shouts heaven-high, is now galloping along: and that, happen when it may, will, to many of us, be probably a rather surprising business! One thing I do know, and can again assert with great confidence, supported by the whole Universe, and by some two hundred generations of men, who have left us some record of themselves there, That the few Wise will have, by one method or another, to take command of the innumerable Foolish; that they must be got to take it;--and that, in fact, since Wisdom, which means also Valor and heroic Nobleness, is alone strong in this world, and one wise man is stronger than all men unwise, they can be got. That they must take it; and having taken, must keep it, and do their God's Message in it, and defend the same, at their life's peril, against all men and devils. This I do clearly believe to be the backbone of all Future Society, as it has been of all Past; and that without it, there is no Society possible in the world. And what a business _this_ will be, before it end in some degree of victory again, and whether the time for shouts of triumph and tremendous cheers upon it is yet come, or not yet by a great way, I perceive too well! A business to make us all very serious indeed. A business not to be accomplished but by noble manhood, and devout all-daring, all-enduring loyalty to Heaven, such as fatally _sleeps_ at present,--such as is not _dead_ at present either, unless the gods have doomed this world of theirs to die! A business which long centuries of faithful travail and heroic agony, on the part of all the noble that are born to us, will not end; and which to us, of this "tremendous cheering" century, it were blessedness very great to see successfully begun. Begun, tried by all manner of methods, if there is one wise Statesman or man left among us, it verily must be;--begun, successfully or unsuccessfully, we do hope to see it! In all European countries, especially in England, one class of Captains and commanders of men, recognizable as the beginning of a new real and not imaginary "Aristocracy," has already in some measure developed itself: the Captains of Industry;--happily the class who above all, or at least first of all, are wanted in this time. In the doing of material work, we have already men among us that can command bodies of men. And surely, on the other hand, there is no lack of men needing to be commanded: the sad class of brother-men whom we had to describe as "Hodge's emancipated horses," reduced to roving famine,--this too has in all countries developed itself; and, in fatal geometrical progression, is ever more developing itself, with a rapidity which alarms every one. On this ground, if not on all manner of other grounds, it may be truly said, the "Organization of Labor" (_not_ organizable by the mad methods tried hitherto) is the universal vital Problem of the world. To bring these hordes of outcast captainless soldiers under due captaincy? This is really the question of questions; on the answer to which turns, among other things, the fate of all Governments, constitutional and other,--the possibility of their continuing to exist, or the impossibility. Captainless, uncommanded, these wretched outcast "soldiers," since they cannot starve, must needs become banditti, street-barricaders,--destroyers of every Government that _cannot_ put them under captains, and send them upon enterprises, and in short render life human to them. Our English plan of Poor Laws, which we once piqued ourselves upon as sovereign, is evidently fast breaking down. Ireland, now admitted into the Idle Workhouse, is rapidly bursting it in pieces. That never was a "human" destiny for any honest son of Adam; nowhere but in England could it have lasted at all; and now, with Ireland sharer in it, and the fulness of time come, it is as good as ended. Alas, yes. Here in Connemara, your crazy Ship of the State, otherwise dreadfully rotten in many of its timbers I believe, has sprung a leak: spite of all hands at the pump, the water is rising; the Ship, I perceive, will founder, if you cannot stop this leak! To bring these Captainless under due captaincy? The anxious thoughts of all men that do think are turned upon that question; and their efforts, though as yet blindly and to no purpose, under the multifarious impediments and obscurations, all point thitherward. Isolated men, and their vague efforts, cannot do it. Government everywhere is called upon,--in England as loudly as elsewhere,--to give the initiative. A new strange task of these new epochs; which no Government, never so "constitutional," can escape from undertaking. For it is vitally necessary to the existence of Society itself; it must be undertaken, and succeeded in too, or worse will follow,--and, as we already see in Irish Connaught and some other places, will follow soon. To whatever thing still calls itself by the name of Government, were it never so constitutional and impeded by official impossibilities, all men will naturally look for help, and direction what to do, in this extremity. If help or direction is not given; if the thing called Government merely drift and tumble to and fro, no-whither, on the popular vortexes, like some carcass of a drowned ass, constitutionally put "at the top of affairs," popular indignation will infallibly accumulate upon it; one day, the popular lightning, descending forked and horrible from the black air, will annihilate said supreme carcass, and smite it home to its native ooze again!--Your Lordship, this is too true, though irreverently spoken: indeed one knows not how to speak of it; and to me it is infinitely sad and miserable, spoken or not!--Unless perhaps the Voluntary Principle will still help us through? Perhaps this Irish leak, in such a rotten distressed condition of the Ship, with all the crew so anxious about it, will be kind enough to stop of itself?-- Dismiss that hope, your Lordship! Let all real and imaginary Governors of England, at the pass we have arrived at, dismiss forever that fallacious fatal solace to their do-nothingism: of itself, too clearly, the leak will never stop; by human skill and energy it must be stopped, or there is nothing but the sea-bottom for us all! A Chief Governor of England really ought to recognize his situation; to discern that, doing nothing, and merely drifting to and fro, in however constitutional a manner, he is a squanderer of precious moments, moments that perhaps are priceless; a truly alarming Chief Governor. Surely, to a Chief Governor of England, worthy of that high name,--surely to him, as to every living man, in every conceivable situation short of the Kingdom of the Dead--there is _something_ possible; some plan of action other than that of standing mildly, with crossed arms, till he and we--sink? Complex as his situation is, he, of all Governors now extant among these distracted Nations, has, as I compute, by far the greatest possibilities. The Captains, actual or potential, are there, and the million Captainless: and such resources for bringing them together as no other has. To these outcast soldiers of his, unregimented roving banditti for the present, or unworking workhouse prisoners who are almost uglier than banditti; to these floods of Irish Beggars, Able-bodied Paupers, and nomadic Lackalls, now stagnating or roaming everywhere, drowning the face of the world (too truly) into an untenantable swamp and Stygian quagmire, has the Chief Governor of this country no word whatever to say? Nothing but "Rate in aid," "Time will mend it," "Necessary business of the Session;" and "After me the Deluge"? A Chief Governor that can front his Irish difficulty, and steadily contemplate the horoscope of Irish and British Pauperism, and whitherward it is leading him and us, in this humor, must be a--What shall we call such a Chief Governor? Alas, in spite of old use and wont,--little other than a tolerated Solecism, growing daily more intolerable! He decidedly ought to have some word to say on this matter,--to be incessantly occupied in getting something which he could practically say!--Perhaps to the following, or a much finer effect? _Speech of the British Prime-Minister to the floods of Irish and other Beggars, the able-bodied Lackalls, nomadic or stationary, and the general assembly, outdoor and indoor, of the Pauper Populations of these Realms_. "Vagrant Lackalls, foolish most of you, criminal many of you, miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. What to do with you I know not; long have I been meditating, and it is hard to tell. Here are some three millions of you, as I count: so many of you fallen sheer over into the abysses of open Beggary; and, fearful to think, every new unit that falls is _loading_ so much more the chain that drags the others over. On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1200 a day. They hang there on the giddy edge, poor souls, cramping themselves down, holding on with all their strength; but falling, falling one after another; and the chain is getting _heavy_, so that ever more fall; and who at last will stand? What to do with you? The question, What to do with you? especially since the potato died, is like to break my heart! "One thing, after much meditating, I have at last discovered, and now know for some time back: That you cannot be left to roam abroad in this unguided manner, stumbling over the precipices, and loading ever heavier the fatal _chain_ upon those who might be able to stand; that this of locking you up in temporary Idle Workhouses, when you stumble, and subsisting you on Indian meal, till you can sally forth again on fresh roamings, and fresh stumblings, and ultimate descent to the devil;--that this is _not_ the plan; and that it never was, or could out of England have been supposed to be, much as I have prided myself upon it! "Vagrant Lackalls, I at last perceive, all this that has been sung and spoken, for a long while, about enfranchisement, emancipation, freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over the world, is little other than sad temporary jargon, brought upon us by a stern necessity,--but now ordered by a sterner to take itself away again a little. Sad temporary jargon, I say: made up of sense and nonsense,--sense in small quantities, and nonsense in very large;--and, if taken for the whole or permanent truth of human things, it is no better than fatal infinite nonsense eternally _untrue_. All men, I think, will soon have to quit this, to consider this as a thing pretty well achieved; and to look out towards another thing much more needing achievement at the time that now is. "All men will have to quit it, I believe. But to you, my indigent friends, the time for quitting it has palpably arrived! To talk of glorious self-government, of suffrages and hustings, and the fight of freedom and such like, is a vain thing in your case. By all human definitions and conceptions of the said fight of freedom, you for your part have lost it, and can fight no more. Glorious self-government is a glory not for you, not for Hodge's emancipated horses, nor you. No; I say, No. You, for your part, have tried it, and _failed_. Left to walk your own road, the will-o'-wisps beguiled you, your short sight could not descry the pitfalls; the deadly tumult and press has whirled you hither and thither, regardless of your struggles and your shrieks; and here at last you lie; fallen flat into the ditch, drowning there and dying, unless the others that are still standing please to pick you up. The others that still stand have their own difficulties, I can tell you!--But you, by imperfect energy and redundant appetite, by doing too little work and drinking too much beer, you (I bid you observe) have proved that you cannot do it! You lie there plainly in the ditch. And I am to pick you up again, on these mad terms; help you ever again, as with our best heart's-blood, to do what, once for all, the gods have made impossible? To load the fatal _chain_ with your perpetual staggerings and sprawlings; and ever again load it, till we all lie sprawling? My indigent incompetent friends, I will not! Know that, whoever may be 'sons of freedom,' you for your part are not and cannot be such. Not 'free' you, I think, whoever may be free. You palpably are fallen captive,--_caitiff_, as they once named it:--you do, silently but eloquently, demand, in the name of mercy itself, that some genuine command be taken of you. "Yes, my indigent incompetent friends; some genuine practical command. Such,--if I rightly interpret those mad Chartisms, Repeal Agitations, Red Republics, and other delirious inarticulate howlings and bellowings which all the populations of the world now utter, evidently cries of pain on their and your part,--is the demand which you, Captives, make of all men that are not Captive, but are still Free. Free men,--alas, had you ever any notion who the free men were, who the not-free, the incapable of freedom! The free men, if you could have understood it, they are the wise men; the patient, self-denying, valiant; the Nobles of the World; who can discern the Law of this Universe, what it is, and piously _obey_ it; these, in late sad times, having cast you loose, you are fallen captive to greedy sons of profit-and-loss; to bad and ever to worse; and at length to Beer and the Devil. Algiers, Brazil or Dahomey hold nothing in them so authentically _slave_ as you are, my indigent incompetent friends! "Good Heavens, and I have to raise some eight or nine millions annually, six for England itself, and to wreck the morals of my working population beyond all money's worth, to keep the life from going out of you: a small service to you, as I many times bitterly repeat! Alas, yes; before high Heaven I must declare it such. I think the old Spartans, who would have killed you instead, had shown more 'humanity,' more of manhood, than I thus do! More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for what the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of us all. We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names, this brutish Workhouse Scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish heartlessness, and insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul. Not 'humanity' or manhood, I think; perhaps _ape_hood rather,--paltry imitancy, from the teeth outward, of what our heart never felt nor our understanding ever saw; dim indolent adherence to extraneous and extinct traditions; traditions now really about extinct; not living now to almost any of us, and still haunting with their spectralities and gibbering _ghosts_ (in a truly baleful manner) almost all of us! Making this our struggling 'Twelfth Hour of the Night' inexpressibly hideous!-- "But as for you, my indigent incompetent friends, I have to repeat with sorrow, but with perfect clearness, what is plainly undeniable, and is even clamorous to get itself admitted, that you are of the nature of slaves,--or if you prefer the word, of _nomadic, and now even vagrant and vagabond, servants that can find no master on those terms_; which seems to me a much uglier word. Emancipation? You have been 'emancipated' with a vengeance! Foolish souls, I say the whole world cannot emancipate you. Fealty to ignorant Unruliness, to gluttonous sluggish Improvidence, to the Beer-pot and the Devil, who is there that can emancipate a man in that predicament? Not a whole Reform Bill, a whole French Revolution executed for his behoof alone: nothing but God the Maker can emancipate him, by making him anew. "To forward which glorious consummation, will it not be well, O indigent friends, that you, fallen flat there, shall henceforth learn to take advice of others as to the methods of standing? Plainly I let you know, and all the world and the worlds know, that I for my part mean it so. Not as glorious unfortunate sons of freedom, but as recognized captives, as unfortunate fallen brothers requiring that I should command you, and if need were, control and compel you, can there henceforth be a relation between us. Ask me not for Indian meal; you shall be compelled to earn it first; know that on other terms I will not give you any. Before Heaven and Earth, and God the Maker of us all, I declare it is a scandal to see _such_ a life kept in you, by the sweat and heart's-blood of your brothers; and that, if we cannot mend it, death were preferable! Go to, we must get out of this--unutterable coil of nonsenses, constitutional, philanthropical, &c., in which (surely without mutual hatred, if with less of 'love' than is supposed) we are all strangling one another! Your want of wants, I say, is that you be _commanded_ in this world, not being able to command yourselves. Know therefore that it shall be so with you. Nomadism, I give you notice, has ended; needful permanency, soldier-like obedience, and the opportunity and the necessity of hard steady labor for your living, have begun. Know that the Idle Workhouse is shut against you henceforth; you cannot enter there at will, nor leave at will; you shall enter a quite other Refuge, under conditions strict as soldiering, and not leave till I have done with you. He that prefers the glorious (or perhaps even the rebellious _in_glorious) 'career of freedom,' let him prove that he can travel there, and be the master of himself; and right good speed to him. He who has proved that he cannot travel there or be the master of himself,--let him, in the name of all the gods, become a servant, and accept the just rules of servitude! "Arise, enlist in my Irish, my Scotch and English 'Regiments of the New Era,'--which I have been concocting, day and night, during these three Grouse-seasons (taking earnest incessant counsel, with all manner of Industrial Notabilities and men of insight, on the matter), and have now brought to a kind of preparation for incipiency, thank Heaven! Enlist there, ye poor wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, abstain, as all of us have had to do: so shall you be useful in God's creation, so shall you be helped to gain a manful living for yourselves; not otherwise than so. Industrial Regiments [_Here numerous persons, with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated vehement manner: but the Premier resolutely beckons them down again_]--Regiments not to fight the French or others, who are peaceable enough towards us; but to fight the Bogs and Wildernesses at home and abroad, and to chain the Devils of the Pit which are walking too openly among us. "Work, for you? Work, surely, is not quite undiscoverable in an Earth so wide as ours, if we will take the right methods for it! Indigent friends, we will adopt this new relation (which is _old_ as the world); this will lead us towards such. Rigorous conditions, not to be violated on either side, lie in this relation; conditions planted there by God Himself; which woe will betide us if we do not discover, gradually more and more discover, and conform to! Industrial Colonels, Workmasters, Task-masters, Life-commanders, equitable as Rhadamanthus and inflexible as he: such, I perceive, you do need; and such, you being once put under law as soldiers are, will be discoverable for you. I perceive, with boundless alarm, that I shall have to set about discovering such,--I, since I am at the top of affairs, with all men looking to me. Alas, it is my new task in this New Era; and God knows, I too, little other than a red-tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence hitherto, am far behind with it! But street-barricades rise everywhere: the hour of Fate has come. In Connemara there has sprung a leak, since the potato died; Connaught, if it were not for Treasury-grants and rates-in-aid, would have to recur to Cannibalism even now, and Human Society would cease to pretend that it existed there. Done this thing must be. Alas, I perceive that if I cannot do it, then surely I shall die, and perhaps shall not have Christian burial! But I already raise near upon Ten Millions for feeding you in idleness, my nomadic friends; work, under due regulations, I really might try to get of--[_Here arises indescribable uproar, no longer repressible, from all manner of Economists, Emancipationists, Constitutionalists, and miscellaneous Professors of the Dismal Science, pretty numerously scattered about; and cries of "Private enterprise," "Rights of Capital," "Voluntary Principle," "Doctrines of the British Constitution," swollen by the general assenting hum of all the world, quite drown the Chief Minister for a while. He, with invincible resolution, persists; obtains hearing again_:] "Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science, soft you a little. Alas, I know what you would say. For my sins, I have read much in those inimitable volumes of yours,--really I should think, some barrowfuls of them in my time,--and, in these last forty years of theory and practice, have pretty well seized what of Divine Message you were sent with to me. Perhaps as small a message, give me leave to say, as ever there was such a noise made about before. Trust me, I have not forgotten it, shall never forget it. Those Laws of the Shop-till are indisputable to me; and practically useful in certain departments of the Universe, as the multiplication-table itself. Once I even tried to sail through the Immensities with them, and to front the big coming Eternities with them; but I found it would not do. As the Supreme Rule of Statesmanship, or Government of Men,--since this Universe is not wholly a Shop,--no. You rejoice in my improved tariffs, free-trade movements and the like, on every hand; for which be thankful, and even sing litanies if you choose. But here at last, in the Idle-Workhouse movement,--unexampled yet on Earth or in the waters under the Earth,--I am fairly brought to a stand; and have had to make reflections, of the most alarming, and indeed awful, and as it were religious nature! Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive that the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and that I must request you to talk a little lower in future. By the side of the shop-till,--see, your small 'Law of God' is hung up, along with the multiplication-table itself. But beyond and above the shop-till, allow me to say, you shall as good as hold your peace. Respectable Professors, I perceive it is not now the Gigantic Hucksters, but it is the Immortal Gods, yes they, in their terror and their beauty, in their wrath and their beneficence, that are coming into play in the affairs of this world! Soft you a little. Do not you interrupt me, but try to understand and help me!-- --"Work, was I saying? My indigent unguided friends, I should think some work might be discoverable for you. Enlist, stand drill; become, from a nomadic Banditti of Idleness, Soldiers of Industry! I will lead you to the Irish Bogs, to the vacant desolations of Connaught now falling into Cannibalism, to mistilled Connaught, to ditto Munster, Leinster, Ulster, I will lead you: to the English fox-covers, furze-grown Commons, New Forests, Salisbury Plains: likewise to the Scotch Hill-sides, and bare rushy slopes, which as yet feed only sheep,--moist uplands, thousands of square miles in extent, which are destined yet to grow green crops, and fresh butter and milk and beef without limit (wherein no 'Foreigner can compete with us'), were the Glasgow sewers once opened on them, and you with your Colonels carried thither. In the Three Kingdoms, or in the Forty Colonies, depend upon it, you shall be led to your work! "To each of you I will then say: Here is work for you; strike into it with manlike, soldier-like obedience and heartiness, according to the methods here prescribed,--wages follow for you without difficulty; all manner of just remuneration, and at length emancipation itself follows. Refuse to strike into it; shirk the heavy labor, disobey the rules,--I will admonish and endeavor to incite you; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you,--and make God's Earth, and the forlorn-hope in God's Battle, free of you. Understand it, I advise you! The Organization of Labor"--[_Left speaking_, says our reporter.] "Left speaking:" alas, that he should have to "speak" so much! There are things that should be done, not spoken; that till the doing of them is begun, cannot well be spoken. He may have to "speak" seven years yet, before a spade be struck into the Bog of Allen; and then perhaps it will be too late!-- You perceive, my friends, we have actually got into the "New Era" there has been such prophesying of: here we all are, arrived at last;--and it is by no means the land flowing with milk and honey we were led to expect! Very much the reverse. A terrible _new_ country this: no neighbors in it yet, that I can see, but irrational flabby monsters (philanthropic and other) of the giant species; hyenas, laughing hyenas, predatory wolves; probably _devils_, blue (or perhaps blue-and-yellow) devils, as St. Guthlac found in Croyland long ago. A huge untrodden haggard country, the "chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;" a country of savage glaciers, granite mountains, of foul jungles, unhewed forests, quaking bogs;--which we shall have our own ados to make arable and habitable, I think! We must stick by it, however;--of all enterprises the impossiblest is that of getting out of it, and shifting into another. To work, then, one and all; hands to work! No. II. MODEL PRISONS. [March 1, 1850.] The deranged condition of our affairs is a universal topic among men at present; and the heavy miseries pressing, in their rudest shape, on the great dumb inarticulate class, and from this, by a sure law, spreading upwards, in a less palpable but not less certain and perhaps still more fatal shape on all classes to the very highest, are admitted everywhere to be great, increasing and now almost unendurable. How to diminish them,--this is every man's question. For in fact they do imperatively need diminution; and unless they can be diminished, there are many other things that cannot very long continue to exist beside them. A serious question indeed, How to diminish them! Among the articulate classes, as they may be called, there are two ways of proceeding in regard to this. One large body of the intelligent and influential, busied mainly in personal affairs, accepts the social iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and the miseries consequent thereupon; accepts them, admits them to be extremely miserable, pronounces them entirely inevitable, incurable except by Heaven, and eats its pudding with as little thought of them as possible. Not a very noble class of citizens these; not a very hopeful or salutary method of dealing with social iniquities this of theirs, however it may answer in respect to themselves and their personal affairs! But now there is the select small minority, in whom some sentiment of public spirit and human pity still survives, among whom, or not anywhere, the Good Cause may expect to find soldiers and servants: their method of proceeding, in these times, is also very strange. They embark in the "philanthropic movement;" they calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by bringing the philanthropic movement to bear on them. To universal public misery, and universal neglect of the clearest public duties, let private charity superadd itself: there will thus be some balance restored, and maintained again; thus,--or by what conceivable method? On these terms they, for their part, embark in the sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water; desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method. It seems not to have struck these good men that no world, or thing here below, ever fell into misery, without having first fallen into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one; and that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there is not the smallest hope of its misery going,--that not for all the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go till then! This is a sad error; all the sadder as it is the error chiefly of the more humane and noble-minded of our generation; among whom, as we said, or elsewhere not at all, the cause of real Reform must expect its servants. At present, and for a long while past, whatsoever young soul awoke in England with some disposition towards generosity and social heroism, or at lowest with some intimation of the beauty of such a disposition,--he, in whom the poor world might have looked for a Reformer, and valiant mender of its foul ways, was almost sure to become a Philanthropist, reforming merely by this rose-water method. To admit that the world's ways are foul, and not the ways of God the Maker, but of Satan the Destroyer, many of them, and that they must be mended or we all die; that if huge misery prevails, huge cowardice, falsity, disloyalty, universal Injustice high and low, have still longer prevailed, and must straightway try to cease prevailing: this is what no visible reformer has yet thought of doing: All so-called "reforms" hitherto are grounded either on openly admitted egoism (cheap bread to the cotton-spinner, voting to those that have no vote, and the like), which does not point towards very celestial developments of the Reform movement; or else upon this of remedying social injustices by indiscriminate contributions of philanthropy, a method surely still more unpromising. Such contributions, being indiscriminate, are but a new injustice; these will never lead to reform, or abolition of injustice, whatever else they lead to! Not by that method shall we "get round Cape Horn," by never such unanimity of voting, under the most approved Phantasm Captains! It is miserable to see. Having, as it were, quite lost our way round Cape Horn, and being sorely "admonished" by the Iceberg and other dumb councillors, the pilots,--instead of taking to their sextants, and asking with a seriousness unknown for a long while, What the Laws of wind and water, and of Earth and of Heaven are,--decide that now, in these new circumstances, they will, to the worthy and unworthy, serve out a double allowance of grog. In this way they hope to do it,--by steering on the old wrong tack, and serving out more and more, copiously what little _aqua vitae_ may be still on board! Philanthropy, emancipation, and pity for human calamity is very beautiful; but the deep oblivion of the Law of Right and Wrong; this "indiscriminate mashing up of Right and Wrong into a patent treacle" of the Philanthropic movement, is by no means beautiful; this, on the contrary, is altogether ugly and alarming. Truly if there be not something inarticulate among us, not yet uttered but pressing towards utterance, which is much wiser than anything we have lately articulated or brought into word or action, our outlooks are rather lamentable. The great majority of the powerful and active-minded, sunk in egoistic scepticisms, busied in chase of lucre, pleasure, and mere vulgar objects, looking with indifference on the world's woes, and passing carelessly by on the other side; and the select minority, of whom better might have been expected, bending all their strength to cure them by methods which can only make bad worse, and in the end render cure hopeless. A blind loquacious pruriency of indiscriminate Philanthropism substituting itself, with much self-laudation, for the silent divinely awful sense of Right and Wrong;--testifying too clearly that here is no longer a divine sense of Right and Wrong; that, in the smoke of this universal, and alas inevitable and indispensable revolutionary fire, and burning up of worn-out rags of which the world is full, our life-atmosphere has (for the time) become one vile London fog, and the eternal loadstars are gone out for us! Gone out;--yet very visible if you can get above the fog; still there in their place, and quite the same as they always were! To whoever does still know of loadstars, the proceedings, which expand themselves daily, of these sublime philanthropic associations, and "universal sluggard-and-scoundrel protection-societies," are a perpetual affliction. With their emancipations and abolition principles, and reigns of brotherhood and new methods of love, they have done great things in the White and in the Black World, during late years; and are preparing for greater. In the interest of human reform, if there is ever to be any reform, and return to prosperity or to the possibility of prospering, it is urgent that the nonsense of all this (and it is mostly nonsense, but not quite) should be sent about its business straightway, and forbidden to deceive the well-meaning souls among us any more. Reform, if we will understand that divine word, cannot begin till then. One day, I do know, this, as is the doom of all nonsense, will be drummed out of the world, with due placard stuck on its back, and the populace flinging dead cats at it: but whether soon or not, is by no means so certain. I rather guess, _not_ at present, not quite soon. Fraternity, in other countries, has gone on, till it found itself unexpectedly manipulating guillotines by its chosen Robespierres, and become a fraternity like Cain's. Much to its amazement! For in fact it is not all nonsense; there is an infinitesimal fraction of sense in it withal; which is so difficult to disengage;--which must be disengaged, and laid hold of, before Fraternity can vanish. But to our subject,--the Model Prison, and the strange theory of life now in action there. That, for the present, is my share in the wide adventure of Philanthropism; the world's share, and how and when it is to be liquidated and ended, rests with the Supreme Destinies. Several months ago, some friends took me with them to see one of the London Prisons; a Prison of the exemplary or model kind. An immense circuit of buildings; cut out, girt with a high ring-wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a fortified place; then a spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases, passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all round. It lodges some thousand or twelve hundred prisoners, besides the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the most perfect buildings, within the compass of London. We looked at the apartments, sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms, general courts or special and private: excellent all, the ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness. The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food, in their respective cooking-places, we tasted: found them of excellence superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work, picking oakum, and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs, of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at least conversing only by secret signs: others were out, taking their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts: methodic composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome comfort reigned everywhere supreme. The women in other apartments, some notable murderesses among them, all in the like state of methodic composure and substantial wholesome comfort, sat sewing: in long ranges of wash-houses, drying-houses and whatever pertains to the getting-up of clean linen, were certain others, with all conceivable mechanical furtherances, not too arduously working. The notable murderesses were, though with great precautions of privacy, pointed out to us; and we were requested not to look openly at them, or seem to notice them at all, as it was found to "cherish their vanity" when visitors looked at them. Schools too were there; intelligent teachers of both sexes, studiously instructing the still ignorant of these thieves. From an inner upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range of private courts, where certain Chartist Notabilities were undergoing their term. Chartist Notability First struck me very much; I had seen him about a year before, by involuntary accident and much to my disgust, magnetizing a silly young person; and had noted well the unlovely voracious look of him, his thick oily skin, his heavy dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth, the dusky potent insatiable animalism that looked out of every feature of him: a fellow adequate to animal-magnetize most things, I did suppose;--and here was the post I now found him arrived at. Next neighbor to him was Notability Second, a philosophic or literary Chartist; walking rapidly to and fro in his private court, a clean, high-walled place; the world and its cares quite excluded, for some months to come: master of his own time and spiritual resources to, as I supposed, a really enviable extent. What "literary man" to an equal extent! I fancied I, for my own part, so left with paper and ink, and all taxes and botherations shut out from me, could have written such a Book as no reader will here ever get of me. Never, O reader, never here in a mere house with taxes and botherations. Here, alas, one has to snatch one's poor Book, bit by bit, as from a conflagration; and to think and live, comparatively, as if the house were not one's own, but mainly the world's and the devil's. Notability Second might have filled one with envy. The Captain of the place, a gentleman of ancient Military or Royal-Navy habits, was one of the most perfect governors; professionally and by nature zealous for cleanliness, punctuality, good order of every kind; a humane heart and yet a strong one; soft of speech and manner, yet with an inflexible rigor of command, so far as his limits went: "iron hand in a velvet glove," as Napoleon defined it. A man of real worth, challenging at once love and respect: the light of those mild bright eyes seemed to permeate the place as with an all-pervading vigilance, and kindly yet victorious illumination; in the soft definite voice it was as if Nature herself were promulgating her orders, gentlest mildest orders, which however, in the end, there would be no disobeying, which in the end there would be no living without fulfilment of. A true "aristos," and commander of men. A man worthy to have commanded and guided forward, in good ways, twelve hundred of the best common-people in London or the world: he was here, for many years past, giving all his care and faculty to command, and guide forward in such ways as there were, twelve hundred of the worst. I looked with considerable admiration on this gentleman; and with considerable astonishment, the reverse of admiration, on the work he had here been set upon. This excellent Captain was too old a Commander to complain of anything; indeed he struggled visibly the other way, to find in his own mind that all here was best; but I could sufficiently discern that, in his natural instincts, if not mounting up to the region of his thoughts, there was a continual protest going on against much of it; that nature and all his inarticulate persuasion (however much forbidden to articulate itself) taught him the futility and unfeasibility of the system followed here. The Visiting Magistrates, he gently regretted rather than complained, had lately taken his tread-wheel from him, men were just now pulling it down; and how he was henceforth to enforce discipline on these bad subjects, was much a difficulty with him. "They cared for nothing but the tread-wheel, and for having their rations cut short:" of the two sole penalties, hard work and occasional hunger, there remained now only one, and that by no means the better one, as he thought. The "sympathy" of visitors, too, their "pity" for his interesting scoundrel-subjects, though he tried to like it, was evidently no joy to this practical mind. Pity, yes: but pity for the scoundrel-species? For those who will not have pity on themselves, and will force the Universe and the Laws of Nature to have no "pity on" them? Meseems I could discover fitter objects of pity! In fact it was too clear, this excellent man had got a field for his faculties which, in several respects, was by no means the suitable one. To drill twelve hundred scoundrels by "the method of kindness," and of abolishing your very tread-wheel,--how could any commander rejoice to have such a work cut out for him? You had but to look in the faces of these twelve hundred, and despair, for most part, of ever "commanding" them at all. Miserable distorted blockheads, the generality; ape-faces, imp-faces, angry dog-faces, heavy sullen ox-faces; degraded underfoot perverse creatures, sons of _in_docility, greedy mutinous darkness, and in one word, of STUPIDITY, which is the general mother of such. Stupidity intellectual and stupidity moral (for the one always means the other, as you will, with surprise or not, discover if you look) had borne this progeny: base-natured beings, on whom in the course of a maleficent subterranean life of London Scoundrelism, the Genius of Darkness (called Satan, Devil, and other names) had now visibly impressed his seal, and had marked them out as soldiers of Chaos and of him,--appointed to serve in _his_ Regiments, First of the line, Second ditto, and so on in their order. Him, you could perceive, they would serve; but not easily another than him. These were the subjects whom our brave Captain and Prison-Governor was appointed to command, and reclaim to _other_ service, by "the method of love," with a tread-wheel abolished. Hopeless forevermore such a project. These abject, ape, wolf, ox, imp and other diabolic-animal specimens of humanity, who of the very gods could ever have commanded them by love? A collar round the neck, and a cart-whip flourished over the back; these, in a just and steady human hand, were what the gods would have appointed them; and now when, by long misconduct and neglect, they had sworn themselves into the Devil's regiments of the line, and got the seal of Chaos impressed on their visage, it was very doubtful whether even these would be of avail for the unfortunate commander of twelve hundred men! By "love," without hope except of peaceably teasing oakum, or fear except of a temporary loss of dinner, he was to guide these men, and wisely constrain them,--whitherward? No-whither: that was his goal, if you will think well of it; that was a second fundamental falsity in his problem. False in the warp and false in the woof, thought one of us; about as false a problem as any I have seen a good man set upon lately! To guide scoundrels by "love;" that is a false woof, I take it, a method that will not hold together; hardly for the flower of men will love alone do; and for the sediment and scoundrelism of men it has not even a chance to do. And then to guide any class of men, scoundrel or other, _No-whither_, which was this poor Captain's problem, in this Prison with oakum for its one element of hope or outlook, how can that prosper by "love" or by any conceivable method? That is a warp wholly false. Out of which false warp, or originally false condition to start from, combined and daily woven into by your false woof, or methods of "love" and such like, there arises for our poor Captain the falsest of problems, and for a man of his faculty the unfairest of situations. His problem was, not to command good men to do something, but bad men to do (with superficial disguises) nothing. On the whole, what a beautiful Establishment here fitted up for the accommodation of the scoundrel-world, male and female! As I said, no Duke in England is, for all rational purposes which a human being can or ought to aim at, lodged, fed, tended, taken care of, with such perfection. Of poor craftsmen that pay rates and taxes from their day's wages, of the dim millions that toil and moil continually under the sun, we know what is the lodging and the tending. Of the Johnsons, Goldsmiths, lodged in their squalid garrets; working often enough amid famine, darkness, tumult, dust and desolation, what work _they_ have to do:--of these as of "spiritual backwoodsmen," understood to be preappointed to such a life, and like the pigs to killing, "quite used to it," I say nothing. But of Dukes, which Duke, I could ask, has cocoa, soup, meat, and food in general made ready, so fit for keeping him in health, in ability to do and to enjoy? Which Duke has a house so thoroughly clean, pure and airy; lives in an element so wholesome, and perfectly adapted to the uses of soul and body as this same, which is provided here for the Devil's regiments of the line? No Duke that I have ever known. Dukes are waited on by deleterious French cooks, by perfunctory grooms of the chambers, and expensive crowds of eye-servants, more imaginary than real: while here, Science, Human Intellect and Beneficence have searched and sat studious, eager to do their very best; they have chosen a real Artist in Governing to see their best, in all details of it, done. Happy regiments of the line, what soldier to any earthly or celestial Power has such a lodging and attendance as you here? No soldier or servant direct or indirect of God or of man, in this England at present. Joy to you, regiments of the line. Your Master, I am told, has his Elect, and professes to be "Prince of the Kingdoms of this World;" and truly I see he has power to do a good turn to those he loves, in England at least. Shall we say, May _he_, may the Devil give you good of it, ye Elect of Scoundrelism? I will rather pass by, uttering no prayer at all; musing rather in silence on the singular "worship of God," or practical "reverence done to Human Worth" (which is the outcome and essence of all real "worship" whatsoever) among the Posterity of Adam at this day. For all round this beautiful Establishment, or Oasis of Purity, intended for the Devil's regiments of the line, lay continents of dingy poor and dirty dwellings, where the unfortunate not _yet_ enlisted into that Force were struggling manifoldly,--in their workshops, in their marble-yards and timber-yards and tan-yards, in their close cellars, cobbler-stalls, hungry garrets, and poor dark trade-shops with red-herrings and tobacco-pipes crossed in the window,--to keep the Devil out-of-doors, and not enlist with him. And it was by a tax on these that the Barracks for the regiments of the line were kept up. Visiting Magistrates, impelled by Exeter Hall, by Able-Editors, and the Philanthropic Movement of the Age, had given orders to that effect. Rates on the poor servant of God and of her Majesty, who still serves both in his way, painfully selling red-herrings; rates on him and his red-herrings to boil right soup for the Devil's declared Elect! Never in my travels, in any age or clime, had I fallen in with such Visiting Magistrates before. Reserved they, I should suppose, for these ultimate or penultimate ages of the world, rich in all prodigies, political, spiritual,--ages surely with such a length of ears as was never paralleled before. If I had a commonwealth to reform or to govern, certainly it should not be the Devil's regiments of the line that I would first of all concentrate my attention on! With them I should be apt so make rather brief work; to them one would apply the besom, try to sweep _them_, with some rapidity into the dust-bin, and well out of one's road, I should rather say. Fill your thrashing-floor with docks, ragweeds, mugworths, and ply your flail upon them,--that is not the method to obtain sacks of wheat. Away, you; begone swiftly, _ye_ regiments of the line: in the name of God and of His poor struggling servants, sore put to it to live in these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with some degree of brevity. To feed you in palaces, to hire captains and schoolmasters and the choicest spiritual and material artificers to expend their industries on you, No, by the Eternal! I have quite other work for that class of artists; Seven-and-twenty Millions of neglected mortals who have not yet quite declared for the Devil. Mark it, my diabolic friends, I mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks of you; and will teach you, after the example of the gods, that this world is _not_ your inheritance, or glad to see you in it. You, ye diabolic canaille, what has a Governor much to do with you? You, I think, he will rather swiftly dismiss from his thoughts,--which have the whole celestial and terrestrial for their scope, and not the subterranean of scoundreldom alone. You, I consider, he will sweep pretty rapidly into some Norfolk Island, into some special Convict Colony or remote domestic Moorland, into some stone-walled Silent-System, under hard drill-sergeants, just as Rhadamanthus, and inflexible as he, and there leave you to reap what you have sown; he meanwhile turning his endeavors to the thousand-fold immeasurable interests of men and gods,--dismissing the one extremely contemptible interest of scoundrels; sweeping that into the cesspool, tumbling that over London Bridge, in a very brief manner, if needful! Who are you, ye thriftless sweepings of Creation, that we should forever be pestered with you? Have we no work to do but drilling Devil's regiments of the line? If I had schoolmasters, my benevolent friend, do you imagine I would set them on teaching a set of unteachables, who as you perceive have already made up their mind that black is white,--that the Devil namely is the advantageous Master to serve in this world? My esteemed Benefactor of Humanity, it shall be far from me. Minds open to that particular conviction are not the material I like to work upon. When once my schoolmasters have gone over all the other classes of society from top to bottom; and have no other soul to try with teaching, all being thoroughly taught,--I will then send them to operate on _these_ regiments of the line: then, and, assure yourself, never till then. The truth is, I am sick of scoundreldom, my esteemed Benefactor; it always was detestable to me; and here where I find it lodged in palaces and waited on by the benevolent of the world, it is more detestable, not to say insufferable to me than ever. Of Beneficence, Benevolence, and the people that come together to talk on platforms and subscribe five pounds, I will say nothing here; indeed there is not room here for the twentieth part of what were to be said of them. The beneficence, benevolence, and sublime virtue which issues in eloquent talk reported in the Newspapers, with the subscription of five pounds, and the feeling that one is a good citizen and ornament to society,--concerning this, there were a great many unexpected remarks to be made; but let this one, for the present occasion, suffice:-- My sublime benevolent friends, don't you perceive, for one thing, that here is a shockingly unfruitful investment for your capital of Benevolence; precisely the worst, indeed, which human ingenuity could select for you? "Laws are unjust, temptations great," &c. &c.: alas, I know it, and mourn for it, and passionately call on all men to help in altering it. But according to every hypothesis as to the law, and the temptations and pressures towards vice, here are the individuals who, of all the society, have yielded to said pressure. These are of the worst substance for enduring pressure! The others yet stand and make resistance to temptation, to the law's injustice; under all the perversities and strangling impediments there are, the rest of the society still keep their feet, and struggle forward, marching under the banner of Cosmos, of God and Human Virtue; these select Few, as I explain to you, are they who have fallen to Chaos, and are sworn into certain regiments of the line. A superior proclivity to Chaos is declared in these, by the very fact of their being here! Of all the generation we live in, these are the worst stuff. These, I say, are the Elixir of the Infatuated among living mortals: if you want the worst investment for your Benevolence, here you accurately have it. O my surprising friends! Nowhere so as here can you be certain that a given quantity of wise teaching bestowed, of benevolent trouble taken, will yield zero, or the net _Minimum_ of return. It is sowing of your wheat upon Irish quagmires; laboriously harrowing it in upon the sand of the seashore. O my astonishing benevolent friends! Yonder, in those dingy habitations, and shops of red herring and tobacco-pipes, where men have not yet quite declared for the Devil; there, I say, is land: here is mere sea-beach. Thither go with your benevolence, thither to those dingy caverns of the poor; and there instruct and drill and manage, there where some fruit may come from it. And, above all and inclusive of all, cannot you go to those Solemn human Shams, Phantasm Captains, and Supreme Quacks that ride prosperously in every thoroughfare; and with severe benevolence, ask them, What they are doing here? They are the men whom it would behoove you to drill a little, and tie to the halberts in a benevolent manner, if you could! "We cannot," say you? Yes, my friends, to a certain extent you can. By many well-known active methods, and by all manner of passive methods, you can. Strive thitherward, I advise you; thither, with whatever social effort there may lie in you! The well-head and "consecrated" thrice-accursed chief fountain of all those waters of bitterness,--it is they, those Solemn Shams and Supreme Quacks of yours, little as they or you imagine it! Them, with severe benevolence, put a stop to; them send to their Father, far from the sight of the true and just,--if you would ever see a just world here! What sort of reformers and workers are you, that work only on the rotten material? That never think of meddling with the material while it continues sound; that stress it and strain it with new rates and assessments, till once it has given way and declared itself rotten; whereupon you snatch greedily at it, and say, Now let us try to do some good upon it! You mistake in every way, my friends: the fact is, you fancy yourselves men of virtue, benevolence, what not; and you are not even men of sincerity and honest sense. I grieve to say it; but it is true. Good from you, and your operations, is not to be expected. You may go down! Howard is a beautiful Philanthropist, eulogized by Burke, and in most men's minds a sort of beatified individual. How glorious, having finished off one's affairs in Bedfordshire, or in fact finding them very dull, inane, and worthy of being quitted and got away from, to set out on a cruise, over the Jails first of Britain; then, finding that answer, over the Jails of the habitable Globe! "A voyage of discovery, a circum-navigation of charity; to collate distresses, to gauge wretchedness, to take the dimensions of human misery:" really it is very fine. Captain Cook's voyage for the Terra Australis, Ross's, Franklin's for the ditto Borealis: men make various cruises and voyages in this world,--for want of money, want of work, and one or the other want,--which are attended with their difficulties too, and do not make the cruiser a demigod. On the whole, I have myself nothing but respect, comparatively speaking, for the dull solid Howard, and his "benevolence," and other impulses that set him cruising; Heaven had grown weary of Jail-fevers, and other the like unjust penalties inflicted upon scoundrels,--for scoundrels too, and even the very Devil, should not have _more_ than their due;--and Heaven, in its opulence, created a man to make an end of that. Created him; disgusted him with the grocer business; tried him with Calvinism, rural ennui, and sore bereavement in his Bedfordshire retreat;--and, in short, at last got him set to his work, and in a condition to achieve it. For which I am thankful to Heaven; and do also,--with doffed hat, humbly salute John Howard. A practical solid man, if a dull and even dreary; "carries his weighing-scales in his pocket:" when your jailer answers, "The prisoner's allowance of food is so and so; and we observe it sacredly; here, for example, is a ration."--"Hey! A ration this?" and solid John suddenly produces his weighing-scales; weighs it, marks down in his tablets what the actual quantity of it is. That is the art and manner of the man. A man full of English accuracy; English veracity, solidity, simplicity; by whom this universal Jail-commission, not to be paid for in money but far otherwise, is set about, with all the slow energy, the patience, practicality, sedulity and sagacity common to the best English commissioners paid in money and not expressly otherwise. For it is the glory of England that she has a turn for fidelity in practical work; that sham-workers, though very numerous, are rarer than elsewhere; that a man who undertakes work for you will still, in various provinces of our affairs, do it, instead of merely seeming to do it. John Howard, without pay in money, _did_ this of the Jail-fever, as other Englishmen do work, in a truly workmanlike manner: his distinction was that he did it without money. He had not 500 pounds or 5,000 pounds a year of salary for it; but lived merely on his Bedfordshire estates, and as Snigsby irreverently expresses it, "by chewing his own cud." And, sure enough, if any man might chew the cud of placid reflections, solid Howard, a mournful man otherwise, might at intervals indulge a little in that luxury.--No money-salary had he for his work; he had merely the income of his properties, and what he could derive from within. Is this such a sublime distinction, then? Well, let it pass at its value. There have been benefactors of mankind who had more need of money than he, and got none too. Milton, it is known, did his _Paradise Lost_ at the easy rate of five pounds. Kepler worked out the secret of the Heavenly Motions in a dreadfully painful manner; "going over the calculations sixty times;" and having not only no public money, but no private either; and, in fact, writing almanacs for his bread-and-water, while he did this of the Heavenly Motions; having no Bedfordshire estates; nothing but a pension of 18 pounds (which they would not pay him), the valuable faculty of writing almanacs, and at length the invaluable one of dying, when the Heavenly bodies were vanquished, and battle's conflagration had collapsed into cold dark ashes, and the starvation reached too high a pitch for the poor man. Howard is not the only benefactor that has worked without money for us; there have been some more,--and will be, I hope! For the Destinies are opulent; and send here and there a man into the world to do work, for which they do not mean to pay him in money. And they smite him beneficently with sore afflictions, and blight his world all into grim frozen ruins round him,--and can make a wandering Exile of their Dante, and not a soft-bedded Podesta of Florence, if they wish to get a _Divine Comedy_ out of him. Nay that rather is their way, when they have worthy work for such a man; they scourge him manifoldly to the due pitch, sometimes nearly of despair, that he may search desperately for his work, and find it; they urge him on still with beneficent stripes when needful, as is constantly the case between whiles; and, in fact, have privately decided to reward him with beneficent death by and by, and not with money at all. O my benevolent friend, I honor Howard very much; but it is on this side idolatry a long way, not to an infinite, but to a decidedly finite extent! And you,--put not the modest noble Howard, a truly modest man, to the blush, by forcing these reflections on us! Cholera Doctors, hired to dive into black dens of infection and despair, they, rushing about all day from lane to lane, with their life in their hand, are found to do their function; which is a much more rugged one than Howard's. Or what say we, Cholera Doctors? Ragged losels gathered by beat of drum from the overcrowded streets of cities, and drilled a little and dressed in red, do not they stand fire in an uncensurable manner; and handsomely give their life, if needful, at the rate of a shilling per day? Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,--O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue! A Mrs. Manning "dying game,"--alas, is not that the foiled potentiality of a kind of heroine too? Not a heroic Judith, not a mother of the Gracchi now, but a hideous murderess, fit to be the mother of hyenas! To such extent can potentialities be foiled. Education, kingship, command,--where is it, whither has it fled? Woe a thousand times, that this, which is the task of all kings, captains, priests, public speakers, land-owners, book-writers, mill-owners, and persons possessing or pretending to possess authority among mankind,--is left neglected among them all; and instead of it so little done but protocolling, black-or-white surplicing, partridge-shooting, parliamentary eloquence and popular twaddle-literature; with such results as we see!-- Howard abated the Jail-fever; but it seems to me he has been the innocent cause of a far more distressing fever which rages high just now; what we may call the Benevolent-Platform Fever. Howard is to be regarded as the unlucky fountain of that tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality, "abolition of punishment," all-absorbing "prison-discipline," and general morbid sympathy, instead of hearty hatred, for scoundrels; which is threatening to drown human society as in deluges, and leave, instead of an "edifice of society" fit for the habitation of men, a continent of fetid ooze inhabitable only by mud-gods and creatures that walk upon their belly. Few things more distress a thinking soul at this time. Most sick am I, O friends, of this sugary disastrous jargon of philanthropy, the reign of love, new era of universal brotherhood, and not Paradise to the Well-deserving but Paradise to All-and-sundry, which possesses the benighted minds of men and women in our day. My friends, I think you are much mistaken about Paradise! "No Paradise for anybody: he that cannot do without Paradise, go his ways:" suppose you tried that for a while! I reckon that the safer version. Unhappy sugary brethren, this is all untrue, this other; contrary to the fact; not a tatter of it will hang together in the wind and weather of fact. In brotherhood with the base and foolish I, for one, do not mean to live. Not in brotherhood with them was life hitherto worth much to me; in pity, in hope not yet quite swallowed of disgust,--otherwise in enmity that must last through eternity, in unappeasable aversion shall I have to live with these! Brotherhood? No, be the thought far from me. They are Adam's children,--alas yes, I well remember that, and never shall forget it; hence this rage and sorrow. But they have gone over to the dragons; they have quitted the Father's house, and set up with the Old Serpent: till they return, how can they be brothers? They are enemies, deadly to themselves and to me and to you, till then; till then, while hope yet lasts, I will treat them as brothers fallen insane;--when hope has ended, with tears grown sacred and wrath grown sacred, I will cut them off in the name of God! It is at my peril if I do not. With the servant of Satan I dare not continue in partnership. Him I must put away, resolutely and forever; "lest," as it is written, "I become partaker of his plagues." Beautiful Black Peasantry, who have fallen idle and have got the Devil at your elbow; interesting White Felonry, who are not idle, but have enlisted into the Devil's regiments of the line,--know that my benevolence for you is comparatively trifling! What I have of that divine feeling is due to others, not to you. A "universal Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Society" is not the one I mean to institute in these times, where so much wants protection, and is sinking to sad issues for want of it! The scoundrel needs no protection. The scoundrel that will hasten to the gallows, why not rather clear the way for him! Better he reach _his_ goal and outgate by the natural proclivity, than be so expensively dammed up and detained, poisoning everything as he stagnates and meanders along, to arrive at last a hundred times fouler, and swollen a hundred times bigger! Benevolent men should reflect on this.--And you Quashee, my pumpkin,--(not a bad fellow either, this poor Quashee, when tolerably guided!)--idle Quashee, I say you must get the Devil _sent away_ from your elbow, my poor dark friend! In this world there will be no existence for you otherwise. No, not as the brother of your folly will I live beside you. Please to withdraw out of my way, if I am not to contradict your folly, and amend it, and put it in the stocks if it will not amend. By the Eternal Maker, it is on that footing alone that you and I can live together! And if you had respectable traditions dated from beyond Magna Charta, or from beyond the Deluge, to the contrary, and written sheepskins that would thatch the face of the world,--behold I, for one individual, do not believe said respectable traditions, nor regard said written sheepskins except as things which _you_, till you grow wiser, will believe. Adieu, Quashee; I will wish you better guidance than you have had of late. On the whole, what a reflection is it that we cannot bestow on an unworthy man any particle of our benevolence, our patronage, or whatever resource is ours,--without withdrawing it, it and all that will grow of it, from one worthy, to whom it of right belongs! We cannot, I say; impossible; it is the eternal law of things. Incompetent Duncan M'Pastehorn, the hapless incompetent mortal to whom I give the cobbling of my boots,--and cannot find in my heart to refuse it, the poor drunken wretch having a wife and ten children; he _withdraws_ the job from sober, plainly competent, and meritorious Mr. Sparrowbill, generally short of work too; discourages Sparrowbill; teaches him that he too may as well drink and loiter and bungle; that this is not a scene for merit and demerit at all, but for dupery, and whining flattery, and incompetent cobbling of every description;--clearly tending to the ruin of poor Sparrowbill! What harm had Sparrowbill done me that I should so help to ruin him? And I couldn't save the insalvable M'Pastehorn; I merely yielded him, for insufficient work, here and there a half-crown,--which he oftenest drank. And now Sparrowbill also is drinking! Justice, Justice: woe betides us everywhere when, for this reason or for that, we fail to do justice! No beneficence, benevolence, or other virtuous contribution will make good the want. And in what a rate of terrible geometrical progression, far beyond our poor computation, any act of Injustice once done by us grows; rooting itself ever anew, spreading ever anew, like a banyan-tree,--blasting all life under it, for it is a poison-tree! There is but one thing needed for the world; but that one is indispensable. Justice, Justice, in the name of Heaven; give us Justice, and we live; give us only counterfeits of it, or succedanea for it, and we die! Oh, this universal syllabub of philanthropic twaddle! My friend, it is very sad, now when Christianity is as good as extinct in all hearts, to meet this ghastly-Phantasm of Christianity parading through almost all. "I will clean your foul thoroughfares, and make your Devil's-cloaca of a world into a garden of Heaven," jabbers this Phantasm, itself a phosphorescence and unclean! The worst, it is written, comes from corruption of the best:--Semitic forms now lying putrescent, dead and still unburied, this phosphorescence rises. I say sometimes, such a blockhead Idol, and miserable _White_ Mumbo-jumbo, fashioned out of deciduous sticks and cast clothes, out of extinct cants and modern sentimentalisms, as that which they sing litanies to at Exeter Hall and extensively elsewhere, was perhaps never set up by human folly before. Unhappy creatures, that is not the Maker of the Universe, not that, look one moment at the Universe, and see! That is a paltry Phantasm, engendered in your own sick brain; whoever follows that as a Reality will fall into the ditch. Reform, reform, all men see and feel, is imperatively needed. Reform must either be got, and speedily, or else we die: and nearly all the men that speak, instruct us, saying, "Have you quite done your interesting Negroes in the Sugar Islands? Rush to the Jails, then, O ye reformers; snatch up the interesting scoundrel-population there, to them be nursing-fathers and nursing-mothers. And oh, wash, and dress, and teach, and recover to the service of Heaven these poor lost souls: so, we assure you, will society attain the needful reform, and life be still possible in this world." Thus sing the oracles everywhere; nearly all the men that speak, though we doubt not, there are, as usual, immense majorities consciously or unconsciously wiser who hold their tongue. But except this of whitewashing the scoundrel-population, one sees little "reform" going on. There is perhaps some endeavor to do a little scavengering; and, as the all-including point, to cheapen the terrible cost of Government: but neither of these enterprises makes progress, owing to impediments. "Whitewash your scoundrel-population; sweep out your abominable gutters (if not in the name of God, ye brutish slatterns, then in the name of Cholera and the Royal College of Surgeons): do these two things;--and observe, much cheaper if you please!"--Well, here surely is an Evangel of Freedom, and real Program of a new Era. What surliest misanthrope would not find this world lovely, were these things done: scoundrels whitewashed; some degree of scavengering upon the gutters; and at a cheap rate, thirdly? That surely is an occasion on which, if ever on any, the Genius of Reform may pipe all hands!--Poor old Genius of Reform; bedrid this good while; with little but broken ballot-boxes, and tattered stripes of Benthamee Constitutions lying round him; and on the walls mere shadows of clothing-colonels, rates-in-aid, poor-law unions, defunct potato and the Irish difficulty,--he does not seem long for this world, piping to that effect? Not the least disgusting feature of this Gospel according to the Platform is its reference to religion, and even to the Christian Religion, as an authority and mandate for what it does. Christian Religion? Does the Christian or any religion prescribe love of scoundrels, then? I hope it prescribes a healthy hatred of scoundrels;--otherwise what am I, in Heaven's name, to make of it? Me, for one, it will not serve as a religion on those strange terms. Just hatred of scoundrels, I say; fixed, irreconcilable, inexorable enmity to the enemies of God: this, and not love for them, and incessant whitewashing, and dressing and cockering of them, must, if you look into it, be the backbone of any human religion whatsoever. Christian Religion! In what words can I address you, ye unfortunates, sunk in the slushy ooze till the worship of mud-serpents, and unutterable Pythons and poisonous slimy monstrosities, seems to you the worship of God? This is the rotten carcass of Christianity; this mal-odorous phosphorescence of post-mortem sentimentalism. O Heavens, from the Christianity of Oliver Cromwell, wrestling in grim fight with Satan and his incarnate Blackguardisms, Hypocrisies, Injustices, and legion of human and infernal angels, to that of eloquent Mr. Hesperus Fiddlestring denouncing capital punishments, and inculcating the benevolence on platforms, what a road have we travelled! A foolish stump-orator, perorating on his platform mere benevolences, seems a pleasant object to many persons; a harmless or insignificant one to almost all. Look at him, however; scan him till you discern the nature of him, he is not pleasant, but ugly and perilous. That beautiful speech of his takes captive every long ear, and kindles into quasi-sacred enthusiasm the minds of not a few; but it is quite in the teeth of the everlasting facts of this Universe, and will come only to mischief for every party concerned. Consider that little spouting wretch. Within the paltry skin of him, it is too probable, he holds few human virtues, beyond those essential for digesting victual: envious, cowardly, vain, splenetic hungry soul; what heroism, in word or thought or action, will you ever get from the like of him? He, in his necessity, has taken into the benevolent line; warms the cold vacuity of his inner man to some extent, in a comfortable manner, not by silently doing some virtue of his own, but by fiercely recommending hearsay pseudo-virtues and respectable benevolences to other people. Do you call that a good trade? Long-eared fellow-creatures, more or less resembling himself, answer, "Hear, hear! Live Fiddlestring forever!" Wherefrom follow Abolition Congresses, Odes to the Gallows;--perhaps some dirty little Bill, getting itself debated next Session in Parliament, to waste certain nights of our legislative Year, and cause skipping in our Morning Newspaper, till the abortion can be emptied out again and sent fairly floating down the gutters. Not with entire approbation do I, for one, look on that eloquent individual. Wise benevolence, if it had authority, would order that individual, I believe, to find some other trade: "Eloquent individual, pleading here against the Laws of Nature,--for many reasons, I bid thee close that mouth of thine. Enough of balderdash these long-eared have now drunk. Depart thou; _do_ some benevolent work; at lowest, be silent. Disappear, I say; away, and jargon no more in that manner, lest a worst thing befall thee." _Exeat_ Fiddlestring!--Beneficent men are not they who appear on platforms, pleading against the Almighty Maker's Laws; these are the maleficent men, whose lips it is pity that some authority cannot straightway shut. Pandora's Box is not more baleful than the gifts these eloquent benefactors are pressing on us. Close your pedler's pack, my friend; swift, away with it! Pernicious, fraught with mere woe and sugary poison is that kind of benevolence and beneficence. Truly, one of the saddest sights in these times is that of poor creatures, on platforms, in parliaments and other situations, making and unmaking "Laws;" in whose soul, full of mere vacant hearsay and windy babble, is and was no image of Heaven's Law; whom it never struck that Heaven had a Law, or that the Earth--could not have what kind of Law you pleased! Human Statute-books, accordingly, are growing horrible to think of. An impiety and poisonous futility every Law of them that is so made; all Nature is against it; it will and can do nothing but mischief wheresoever it shows itself in Nature: and such Laws lie now like an incubus over this Earth, so innumerable are they. How long, O Lord, how long!--O ye Eternities, Divine Silences, do you dwell no more, then, in the hearts of the noble and the true; and is there no inspiration of the Almighty any more vouchsafed us? The inspiration of the Morning Newspapers--alas, we have had enough of that, and are arrived at the gates of death by means of that! "Really, one of the most difficult questions this we have in these times, What to do with our criminals?" blandly observed a certain Law-dignitary, in my hearing once, taking the cigar from his mouth, and pensively smiling over a group of us under the summer beech-tree, as Favonius carried off the tobacco-smoke; and the group said nothing, only smiled and nodded, answering by new tobacco-clouds. "What to do with our criminals?" asked the official Law-dignitary again, as if entirely at a loss.--"I suppose," said one ancient figure not engaged in smoking, "the plan would be to treat them according to the real law of the case; to make the Law of England, in respect of them, correspond to the Law of the Universe. Criminals, I suppose, would prove manageable in that way: if we could do approximately as God Almighty does towards them; in a word, if we could try to do Justice towards them."--"I'll thank you for a definition of Justice?" sneered the official person in a cheerily scornful and triumphant manner, backed by a slight laugh from the honorable company; which irritated the other speaker.--"Well, I have no pocket definition of Justice," said he, "to give your Lordship. It has not quite been my trade to look for such a definition; I could rather fancy it had been your Lordship's trade, sitting on your high place this long while. But one thing I can tell you: Justice always is, whether we define it or not. Everything done, suffered or proposed, in Parliament or out of it, is either just or else unjust; either is accepted by the gods and eternal facts, or is rejected by them. Your Lordship and I, with or without definition, do a little know Justice, I will hope; if we don't both know it and do it, we are hourly travelling down towards--Heavens, must I name such a place! That is the place we are bound to, with all our trading-pack, and the small or extensive budgets of human business laid on us; and there, if we _don't know_ Justice, we, and all our budgets and Acts of Parliament, shall find lodging when the day is done!"--The official person, a polite man otherwise, grinned as he best could some semblance of a laugh, mirthful as that of the ass eating thistles, and ended in "Hah, oh, ah!"-- Indeed, it is wonderful to hear what account we at present give ourselves of the punishment of criminals. No "revenge"--O Heavens, no; all preachers on Sunday strictly forbid that; and even (at least on Sundays) prescribe the contrary of that. It is for the sake of "example," that you punish; to "protect society" and its purse and skin; to deter the innocent from falling into crime; and especially withal, for the purpose of improving the poor criminal himself,--or at lowest, of hanging and ending him, that he may not grow worse. For the poor criminal is, to be "improved" if possible: against him no "revenge" even on week-days; nothing but love for him, and pity and help; poor fellow, is he not miserable enough? Very miserable,--though much less so than the Master of him, called Satan, is understood (on Sundays) to have long deservedly been! My friends, will you permit me to say that all this, to one poor judgment among your number, is the mournfulest twaddle that human tongues could shake from them; that it has no solid foundation in the nature of things; and to a healthy human heart no credibility whatever. Permit me to say, only to hearts long drowned in dead Tradition, and for themselves neither believing nor disbelieving, could this seem credible. Think, and ask yourselves, in spite of all this preaching and perorating from the teeth outward! Hearts that are quite strangers to eternal Fact, and acquainted only at all hours with temporary Semblances parading about in a prosperous and persuasive condition; hearts that from their first appearance in this world have breathed since birth, in all spiritual matters, which means in all matters not pecuniary, the poisonous atmosphere of universal Cant, could believe such a thing. Cant moral, Cant religious, Cant political; an atmosphere which envelops all things for us unfortunates, and has long done; which goes beyond the Zenith and below the Nadir for us, and has as good as choked the spiritual life out of all of us,--God pity such wretches, with little or nothing _real_ about them but their purse and their abdominal department! Hearts, alas, which everywhere except in the metallurgic and cotton-spinning provinces, have communed with no Reality, or awful Presence of a Fact, godlike or diabolic, in this Universe or this unfathomable Life at all. Hunger-stricken asphyxied hearts, which have nourished themselves on what they call religions, Christian religions. Good Heaven, once more fancy the Christian religion of Oliver Cromwell; or of some noble Christian man, whom you yourself may have been blessed enough, once, long since, in your life, to know! These are not _untrue_ religions; they are the putrescences and foul residues of religions that are extinct, that have plainly to every honest nostril been dead some time, and the remains of which--O ye eternal Heavens, will the nostril never be delivered from them!--Such hearts, when they get upon platforms, and into questions not involving money, can "believe" many things!-- I take the liberty of asserting that there is one valid reason, and only one, for either punishing a man or rewarding him in this world; one reason, which ancient piety could well define: That you may do the will and commandment of God with regard to him; that you may do justice to him. This is your one true aim in respect of him; aim thitherward, with all your heart and all your strength and all your soul, thitherward, and not elsewhither at all! This aim is true, and will carry you to all earthly heights and benefits, and beyond the stars and Heavens. All other aims are purblind, illegitimate, untrue; and will never carry you beyond the shop-counter, nay very soon will prove themselves incapable of maintaining you even there. Find out what the Law of God is with regard to a man; make that your human law, or I say it will be ill with you, and not well! If you love your thief or murderer, if Nature and eternal Fact love him, then do as you are now doing. But if Nature and Fact do _not_ love him? If they have set inexorable penalties upon him, and planted natural wrath against him in every god-created human heart,--then I advise you, cease, and change your hand. Reward and punishment? Alas, alas, I must say you reward and punish pretty much alike! Your dignities, peerages, promotions, your kingships, your brazen statues erected in capital and county towns to our select demigods of your selecting, testify loudly enough what kind of heroes and hero-worshippers you are. Woe to the People that no longer venerates, as the emblem of God himself, the aspect of Human Worth; that no longer knows what human worth and unworth is! Sure as the Decrees of the Eternal, that People cannot come to good. By a course too clear, by a necessity too evident, that People will come into the hands of the unworthy; and either turn on its bad career, or stagger downwards to ruin and abolition. Does the Hebrew People prophetically sing "Ou' clo'!" in all thoroughfares, these eighteen hundred years in vain? To reward men according to their worth: alas, the perfection of this, we know, amounts to the millennium! Neither is perfect punishment, according to the like rule, to be attained,--nor even, by a legislator of these chaotic days, to be too zealously attempted. But when he does attempt it,--yes, when he summons out the Society to sit deliberative on this matter, and consult the oracles upon it, and solemnly settle it in the name of God; then, if never before, he should try to be a little in the right in settling it!--In regard to reward of merit, I do not bethink me of any attempt whatever, worth calling an attempt, on the part of modern Governments; which surely is an immense oversight on their part, and will one day be seen to have been an altogether fatal one. But as to the punishment of crime, happily this cannot be quite neglected. When men have a purse and a skin, they seek salvation at least for these; and the Four Pleas of the Crown are a thing that must and will be attended to. By punishment, capital or other, by treadmilling and blind rigor, or by whitewashing and blind laxity, the extremely disagreeable offences of theft and murder must be kept down within limits. And so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and hang them on gibbets "for an example to deter others." Whereupon arise friends of humanity, and object. With very great reason, as I consider, if your hypothesis be correct. What right have you to hang any poor creature "for an example"? He can turn round upon you and say, "Why make an 'example' of me, a merely ill-situated, pitiable man? Have you no more respect for misfortune? Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred. And yet you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me, for your own convenience alone?"--All "revenge" being out of the question, it seems to me the caitiff is unanswerable; and he and the philanthropic platforms have the logic all on their side. The one answer to him is: "Caitiff, we hate thee; and discern for some six thousand years now, that we are called upon by the whole Universe to do it. Not with a diabolic but with a divine hatred. God himself, we have always understood, 'hates sin,' with a most authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred. A hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and disappearance from the sum of things. The path of it as the path of a flaming sword: he that has eyes may see it, walking inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the true and life-worthy; making all Human History, and the Biography of every man, a God's Cosmos in place of a Devil's Chaos. So is it, in the end; even so, to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous beast, and has eyes to see. To thee, caitiff, these things were and are, quite incredible; to us they are too awfully certain,--the Eternal Law of this Universe, whether thou and others will believe it or disbelieve. We, not to be partakers in thy destructive adventure of defying God and all the Universe, dare not allow thee to continue longer among us. As a palpable deserter from the ranks where all men, at their eternal peril, are bound to be: palpable deserter, taken with the red hand fighting thus against the whole Universe and its Laws, we--send thee back into the whole Universe, solemnly expel thee from our community; and will, in the name of God, not with joy and exultation, but with sorrow stern as thy own, hang thee on Wednesday next, and so end." Other ground on which to deliberately slay a disarmed fellow-man I can see none. Example, effects upon the public mind, effects upon this and upon that: all this is mere appendage and accident; of all this I make no attempt to keep account,--sensible that no arithmetic will or can keep account of it; that its "effects," on this hand and on that, transcend all calculation. One thing, if I can calculate it, will include all, and produce beneficial effects beyond calculation, and no ill effect at all, anywhere or at any time: What the Law of the Universe, or Law of God, is with regard to this caitiff? That, by all sacred research and consideration, I will try to find out; to that I will come as near as human means admit; that shall be my exemplar and "example;" all men shall through me see that, and be profited _beyond_ calculation by seeing it. What this Law of the Universe, or Law made by God, is? Men at one time read it in their Bible. In many Bibles, Books, and authentic symbols and monitions of Nature and the World (of Fact, that is, and of Human Speech, or Wise Interpretation of Fact), there are still clear indications towards it. Most important it is, for this and for some other reasons, that men do, in some way, get to see it a little! And if no man could now see it by any Bible, there is written in the heart of every man an authentic copy of it direct from Heaven itself: there, if he have learnt to decipher Heaven's writing, and can read the sacred oracles (a sad case for him if he altogether cannot), every born man may still find some copy of it. "Revenge," my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to _revancher_ oneself upon them, and pay them what they have merited: this is forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man. Only the excess of it is diabolic; the essence I say is manlike, and even godlike,--a monition sent to poor man by the Maker himself. Thou, poor reader, in spite of all this melancholy twaddle, and blotting out of Heaven's sunlight by mountains of horsehair and officiality, hast still a human heart. If, in returning to thy poor peaceable dwelling-place, after an honest hard day's work, thou wert to find, for example, a brutal scoundrel who for lucre or other object of his, had slaughtered the life that was dearest to thee; thy true wife, for example, thy true old mother, swimming in her blood; the human scoundrel, or two-legged wolf, standing over such a tragedy: I hope a man would have so much divine rage in his heart as to snatch the nearest weapon, and put a conclusion upon said human wolf, for one! A palpable messenger of Satan, that one; accredited by all the Devils, to be put an end to by all the children of God. The soul of every god-created man flames wholly into one divine blaze of sacred wrath at sight of such a Devil's-messenger; authentic firsthand monition from the Eternal Maker himself as to what is next to be done. Do it, or be thyself an ally of Devil's-messengers; a sheep for two-legged human wolves, well deserving to be eaten, as thou soon wilt be! My humane friends, I perceive this same sacred glow of divine wrath, or authentic monition at first hand from God himself, to be the foundation for all Criminal Law, and Official horsehair-and-bombazine procedure against Scoundrels in this world. This first-hand gospel from the Eternities, imparted to every mortal, this is still, and will forever be, your sanction and commission for the punishment of human scoundrels. See well how you will translate this message from Heaven and the Eternities into a form suitable to this World and its Times. Let not violence, haste, blind impetuous impulse, preside in executing it; the injured man, invincibly liable to fall into these, shall not himself execute it: the whole world, in person of a Minister appointed for that end, and surrounded with the due solemnities and caveats, with bailiffs, apparitors, advocates, and the hushed expectation of all men, shall do it, as under the eye of God who made all men. How it shall be done? this is ever a vast question, involving immense considerations. Thus Edmund Burke saw, in the Two Houses of Parliament, with King, Constitution, and all manner of Civil-Lists, and Chancellors' wigs and Exchequer budgets, only the "method of getting twelve just men put into a jury-box:" that, in Burke's view, was the summary of what they were all meant for. How the judge will do it? Yes, indeed:--but let him see well that he does do it: for it is a thing that must by no means be left undone! A sacred gospel from the Highest: not to be smothered under horsehair and bombazine, or drowned in platform froth, or in any wise omitted or neglected, without the most alarming penalties to all concerned! Neglect to treat the hero as hero, the penalties--which are inevitable too, and terrible to think of, as your Hebrew friends can tell you--may be some time in coming; they will only gradually come. Not all at once will your thirty thousand Needlewomen, your three million Paupers, your Connaught fallen into potential Cannibalism, and other fine consequences of the practice, come to light;--though come to light they will; and "Ou' clo'!" itself may be in store for you, if you persist steadily enough. But neglect to treat even your declared scoundrel as scoundrel, this is the last consummation of the process, the drop by which the cup runs over; the penalties of this, most alarming, extensive, and such as you little dream of, will straightway very rapidly come. Dim oblivion of Right and Wrong, among the masses of your population, will come; doubts as to Right and Wrong, indistinct notion that Right and Wrong are not eternal, but accidental, and settled by uncertain votings and talkings, will come. Prurient influenza of Platform Benevolence, and "Paradise to All-and-sundry," will come. In the general putrescence of your "religions," as you call them, a strange new religion, named of Universal Love, with Sacraments mainly of--_Divorce_, with Balzac, Sue and Company for Evangelists, and Madame Sand for Virgin, will come,--and results fast following therefrom which will astonish you very much! "The terrible anarchies of these years," says Crabbe, in his _Radiator_, "are brought upon us by a necessity too visible. By the crime of Kings,--alas, yes; but by that of Peoples too. Not by the crime of one class, but by the fatal obscuration, and all but obliteration of the sense of Right and Wrong in the minds and practices of every class. What a scene in the drama of Universal History, this of ours! A world-wide loud bellow and bray of universal Misery; _lowing_, with crushed maddened heart, its inarticulate prayer to Heaven:--very pardonable to me, and in some of its transcendent developments, as in the grand French Revolution, most respectable and ever-memorable. For Injustice reigns everywhere; and this murderous struggle for what they call 'Fraternity,' and so forth has a spice of eternal sense in it, though so terribly disfigured! Amalgam of sense and nonsense; eternal sense by the grain, and temporary nonsense by the square mile: as is the habit with poor sons of men. Which pardonable amalgam, however, if it be taken as the pure final sense, I must warn you and all creatures, is unpardonable, criminal, and fatal nonsense;--with which I, for one, will take care not to concern myself! "_Dogs should not be taught to eat leather_, says the old adage: no;--and where, by general fault and error, and the inevitable nemesis of things, the universal kennel is set to diet upon _leather_; and from its keepers, its 'Liberal Premiers,' or whatever their title is, will accept or expect nothing else, and calls it by the pleasant name of progress, reform, emancipation, abolition-principles, and the like,--I consider the fate of said kennel and of said keepers to be a thing settled. Red republic in Phrygian nightcap, organization of labor _a la_ Louis Blanc; street-barricades, and then murderous cannon-volleys _a la_ Cavaignac and Windischgratz, follow out of one another, as grapes, must, new wine, and sour all-splitting vinegar do: vinegar is but _vin-aigre_, or the self-same 'wine' grown _sharp_! If, moreover, I find the Worship of Human Nobleness abolished in any country, and a _new_ astonishing Phallus-Worship, with universal Balzac-Sand melodies and litanies in treble and in bass, established in its stead, what can I compute but that Nature, in horrible throes, will repugn against such substitution,--that, in short, the astonishing new Phallus-Worship, with its finer sensibilities of the heart, and 'great satisfying loves,' with its sacred kiss of peace for scoundrel and hero alike, with its all-embracing Brotherhood, and universal Sacrament of Divorce, will have to take itself away again!" The Ancient Germans, it appears, had no scruple about public executions; on the contrary, they thought the just gods themselves might fitly preside over these; that these were a solemn and highest act of worship, if justly done. When a German man had done a crime deserving death, they, in solemn general assembly of the tribe, doomed him, and considered that Fate and all Nature had from the beginning doomed him, to die with ignominy. Certain crimes there were of a supreme nature; him that had perpetrated one of these, they believed to have declared himself a prince of scoundrels. Him once convicted they laid hold of, nothing doubting; bore him, after judgment, to the deepest convenient Peat-bog; plunged him in there, drove an oaken frame down over him, solemnly in the name of gods and men: "There, prince of scoundrels, that is what we have had to think of thee, on clear acquaintance; our grim good-night to thee is that! In the name of all the gods lie there, and be our partnership with thee dissolved henceforth. It will be better for us, we imagine!" My friends, after all this beautiful whitewash and humanity and prison-discipline; and such blubbering and whimpering, and soft Litany to divine and also to quite other sorts of Pity, as we have had for a century now,--give me leave to admonish you that that of the Ancient Germans too was a thing inexpressibly necessary to keep in mind. If that is not kept in mind, the universal Litany to Pity is a mere universal nuisance, and torpid blasphemy against the gods. I do not much respect it, that purblind blubbering and litanying, as it is seen at present; and the litanying over scoundrels I go the length of disrespecting, and in some cases even of detesting. Yes, my friends, scoundrel is scoundrel: that remains forever a fact; and there exists not in the earth whitewash that can make the scoundrel a friend of this Universe; he remains an enemy if you spent your life in whitewashing him. He won't whitewash; this one won't. The one method clearly is, That, after fair trial, you dissolve partnership with him; send him, in the name of Heaven, whither _he_ is striving all this while and have done with him. And, in a time like this, I would advise you, see likewise that you be speedy about it! For there is immense work, and of a far hopefuler sort, to be done _elsewhere_. Alas, alas, to see once the "prince of scoundrels," the Supreme Scoundrel, him whom of all men the gods liked worst, solemnly laid hold of, and hung upon the gallows in sight of the people; what a lesson to all the people! Sermons might be preached; the Son of Thunder and the Mouth of Gold might turn their periods now with some hope; for here, in the most impressive way, is a divine sermon acted. Didactic as no spoken sermon could be. Didactic, devotional too;--in awed solemnity, a recognition that Eternal Justice rules the world; that at the call of this, human pity shall fall silent, and man be stern as his Master and Mandatory is!--Understand too that except upon a basis of even such rigor, sorrowful, silent, inexorable as that of Destiny and Doom, there is no true pity possible. The pity that proves so possible and plentiful without that basis, is mere _ignavia_ and cowardly effeminacy; maudlin laxity of heart, grounded on blinkard dimness of head--contemptible as a drunkard's tears. To see our Supreme Scoundrel hung upon the gallows, alas, that is far from us just now! There is a worst man in England, too,--curious to think of,--whom it would be inexpressibly advantageous to lay hold of, and hang, the first of all. But we do not know him with the least certainty, the least approach even to a guess,--such buzzards and dullards and poor children of the Dusk are we, in spite of our Statistics, Unshackled Presses, and Torches of Knowledge;--not eagles soaring sunward, not brothers of the lightnings and the radiances we; a dim horn-eyed, owl-population, intent mainly on the catching of mice! Alas, the supreme scoundrel, alike with the supreme hero, is very far from being known. Nor have we the smallest apparatus for dealing with either of them, if he were known. Our supreme scoundrel sits, I conjecture, well-cushioned, in high places, at this time; rolls softly through the world, and lives a prosperous gentleman; instead of sinking him in peat-bogs, we mount the brazen image of him on high columns: such is the world's temporary judgment about its supreme scoundrels; a mad world, my masters. To get the supreme scoundrel always accurately the first hanged, this, which presupposes that the supreme hero were always the first promoted, this were precisely the millennium itself, clear evidence that the millennium had come: alas, we must forbear hope of this. Much water will run by before we see this. And yet to quit all aim towards it; to go blindly floundering along, wrapt up in clouds of horsehair, bombazine, and sheepskin officiality, oblivious that there exists such an aim; this is indeed fatal. In every human law there must either exist such an aim, or else the law is not a human but a diabolic one. Diabolic, I say: no quantity of bombazine, or lawyers' wigs, three-readings, and solemn trumpeting and bow-wowing in high places or in low, can hide from me its frightful infernal tendency;--bound, and sinking at all moments gradually to Gehenna, this "law;" and dragging down much with it! "To decree _injustice_ by a _law_:" inspired Prophets have long since seen, what every clear soul may still see, that of all Anarchies and Devil-worships there is none like this; that this is the "Throne of Iniquity" set up in the name of the Highest, the human Apotheosis of Anarchy itself. "_Quiet_ Anarchy," you exultingly say? Yes; quiet Anarchy, which the longer it sits "quiet" will have the frightfuler account to settle at last. For every doit of the account, as I often say, will have to be settled one day, as sure as God lives. Principal, and compound interest rigorously computed; and the interest is at a terrible rate per cent in these cases! Alas, the aspect of certain beatified Anarchies, sitting "quiet;" and of others in a state of infernal explosion for sixty years back: this, the one view our Europe offers at present, makes these days very sad.-- My unfortunate philanthropic friends, it is this long-continued oblivion of the soul of law that has reduced the Criminal Question to such a pass among us. Many other things have come, and are coming, for the same sad reason, to a pass! Not the supreme scoundrel have our laws aimed at; but, in an uncertain fitful manner, at the inferior or lowest scoundrel, who robs shop-tills and puts the skin of mankind in danger. How can Parliament get through the Criminal Question? Parliament, oblivious of Heavenly Law, will find itself in hopeless _reductio ad absurdum_ in regard to innumerable other questions,--in regard to all questions whatsoever by and by. There will be no existence possible for Parliament on these current terms. Parliament, in its law-makings, must really try to attain some vision again of what Heaven's Laws are. A thing not easy to do; a thing requiring sad sincerity of heart, reverence, pious earnestness, valiant manful wisdom;--qualities not overabundant in Parliament just now, nor out of it, I fear. Adieu, my friends. My anger against you is gone; my sad reflections on you, and on the depths to which you and I and all of us are sunk in these strange times, are not to be uttered at present. You would have saved the Sarawak Pirates, then? The Almighty Maker is wroth that the Sarawak cut-throats, with their poisoned spears, are away? What must his wrath be that the thirty thousand Needlewomen are still here, and the question of "prevenient grace" not yet settled! O my friends, in sad earnest, sad and deadly earnest, there much needs that God would mend all this, and that we should help him to mend it!--And don't you think, for one thing, "Farmer Hodge's horses" in the Sugar Islands are pretty well "emancipated" now? My clear opinion farther is, we had better quit the Scoundrel-province of Reform; better close that under hatches, in some rapid summary manner, and go elsewhither with our Reform efforts. A whole world, for want of Reform, is drowning and sinking; threatening to swamp itself into a Stygian quagmire, uninhabitable by any noble-minded man. Let us to the well-heads, I say; to the chief fountains of these waters of bitterness; and there strike home and dig! To puddle in the embouchures and drowned outskirts, and ulterior and ultimate issues and cloacas of the affair: what profit can there be in that? Nothing to be saved there; nothing to be fished up there, except, with endless peril and spread of pestilence, a miscellany of broken waifs and dead dogs! In the name of Heaven, quit that! No. III. DOWNING STREET. [April 1, 1850.] From all corners of the wide British Dominion there rises one complaint against the ineffectuality of what are nicknamed our "red-tape" establishments, our Government Offices, Colonial Office, Foreign Office and the others, in Downing Street and the neighborhood. To me individually these branches of human business are little known; but every British citizen and reflective passer-by has occasion to wonder much, and inquire earnestly, concerning them. To all men it is evident that the social interests of one hundred and fifty Millions of us depend on the mysterious industry there carried on; and likewise that the dissatisfaction with it is great, universal, and continually increasing in intensity,--in fact, mounting, we might say, to the pitch of settled despair. Every colony, every agent for a matter colonial, has his tragic tale to tell you of his sad experiences in the Colonial Office; what blind obstructions, fatal indolences, pedantries, stupidities, on the right and on the left, he had to do battle with; what a world-wide jungle of red-tape, inhabited by doleful creatures, deaf or nearly so to human reason or entreaty, he had entered on; and how he paused in amazement, almost in despair; passionately appealed now to this doleful creature, now to that, and to the dead red-tape jungle, and to the living Universe itself, and to the Voices and to the Silences;--and, on the whole, found that it was an adventure, in sorrowful fact, equal to the fabulous ones by old knights-errant against dragons and wizards in enchanted wildernesses and waste howling solitudes; not achievable except by nearly superhuman exercise of all the four cardinal virtues, and unexpected favor of the special blessing of Heaven. His adventure achieved or found unachievable, he has returned with experiences new to him in the affairs of men. What this Colonial Office, inhabiting the head of Downing Street, really was, and had to do, or try doing, in God's practical Earth, he could not by any means precisely get to know; believes that it does not itself in the least precisely know. Believes that nobody knows;--that it is a mystery, a kind of Heathen myth; and stranger than any piece of the old mythological Pantheon; for it practically presides over the destinies of many millions of living men. Such is his report of the Colonial Office: and if we oftener hear such a report of that than we do of the Home Office, Foreign Office or the rest,--the reason probably is, that Colonies excite more attention at present than any of our other interests. The Forty Colonies, it appears, are all pretty like rebelling just now; and are to be pacified with constitutions; luckier Constitutions, let us hope, than some late ones have been. Loyal Canada, for instance, had to quench a rebellion the other year; and this year, in virtue of its constitution, it is called upon to pay the rebels their damages; which surely is a rather surprising result, however constitutional!--Men have rents and moneys dependent in the Colonies; Emigration schemes, Black Emancipations, New-Zealand and other schemes; and feel and publish more emphatically what their Downing-Street woes in these respects have been. Were the state of poor sallow English ploughers and weavers, what we may call the Sallow or Yellow Emancipation interest, as much in object with Exeter-Hall Philanthropists as that of the Black blockheads now all emancipated, and going at large without work, or need of working, in West-India clover (and fattening very much in it, one delights to hear), then perhaps the Home Office, its huge virtual task better understood, and its small actual performance better seen into, might be found still more deficient, and behind the wants of the age, than the Colonial itself is. How it stands with the Foreign Office, again, one still less knows. Seizures of Sapienza, and the like sudden appearances of Britain in the character of Hercules-Harlequin, waving, with big bully-voice, her huge sword-of-sharpness over field-mice, and in the air making horrid circles (horrid catherine-wheels and death-disks of metallic terror from said huge sword), to see how they will like it,--do from time to time astonish the world, in a not pleasant manner. Hercules-Harlequin, the Attorney Triumphant, the World's Busybody: none of these are parts this Nation has a turn for; she, if you consulted her, would rather not play these parts, but another! Seizures of Sapienza, correspondences with Sotomayor, remonstrances to Otho King of Athens, fleets hanging by their anchor in behalf of the Majesty of Portugal; and in short the whole, or at present very nearly the whole, of that industry of protocolling, diplomatizing, remonstrating, admonishing, and "having the honor to be,"--has sunk justly in public estimation to a very low figure. For in fact, it is reasonably asked, What vital interest has England in any cause now deciding itself in foreign parts? Once there was a Papistry and Protestantism, important as life eternal and death eternal; more lately there was an interest of Civil Order and Horrors of the French Revolution, important at least as rent-roll and preservation of the game; but now what is there? No cause in which any god or man of this British Nation can be thought to be concerned. Sham-kingship, now recognized and even self-recognized everywhere to be sham, wrestles and struggles with mere ballot-box Anarchy: not a pleasant spectacle to British minds. Both parties in the wrestle professing earnest wishes of peace to us, what have we to do with it except answer earnestly, "Peace, yes certainly," and mind our affairs elsewhere. The British Nation has no concern with that indispensable sorrowful and shameful wrestle now going on everywhere in foreign parts. The British Nation already, by self-experience centuries old, understands all that; was lucky enough to transact the greater part of that, in noble ancient ages, while the wrestle had not yet become a shameful one, but on both sides of it there was wisdom, virtue, heroic nobleness fruitful to all time,--thrice-lucky British Nation! The British Nation, I say, has nothing to learn there; has now quite another set of lessons to learn, far ahead of what is going on there. Sad example there, of what the issue is, and how inevitable and how imminent, might admonish the British Nation to be speedy with its new lessons; to bestir itself, as men in peril of conflagration do, with the neighboring houses all on fire! To obtain, for its own very pressing behoof, if by possibility it could, some real Captaincy instead of an imaginary one: to remove resolutely, and replace by a better sort, its own peculiar species of teaching and guiding histrios of various name, who here too are numerous exceedingly, and much in need of gentle removal, while the play is still good, and the comedy has not yet become _tragic_; and to be a little swift about it withal; and so to escape the otherwise inevitable evil day! This Britain might learn: but she does not need a protocolling establishment, with much "having the honor to be," to teach it her. No:--she has in fact certain cottons, hardwares and such like to sell in foreign parts, and certain wines, Portugal oranges, Baltic tar and other products to buy; and does need, I suppose, some kind of Consul, or accredited agent, accessible to British voyagers, here and there, in the chief cities of the Continent: through which functionary, or through the penny-post, if she had any specific message to foreign courts, it would be easy and proper to transmit the same. Special message-carriers, to be still called Ambassadors, if the name gratified them, could be sent when occasion great enough demanded; not sent when it did not. But for all purposes of a resident ambassador, I hear persons extensively and well acquainted among our foreign embassies at this date declare, That a well-selected _Times_ reporter or "own correspondent" ordered to reside in foreign capitals, and keep his eyes open, and (though sparingly) his pen going, would in reality be much more effective;--and surely we see well, he would come a good deal cheaper! Considerably cheaper in expense of money; and in expense of falsity and grimacing hypocrisy (of which no human arithmetic can count the ultimate cost) incalculably cheaper! If this is the fact, why not treat it as such? If this is so in any measure, we had better in that measure admit it to be so! The time, I believe, has come for asking with considerable severity, How far is it so? Nay there are men now current in political society, men of weight though also of wit, who have been heard to say, "That there was but one reform for the Foreign Office,--to set a live coal under it," and with, of course, a fire-brigade which could prevent the undue spread of the devouring element into neighboring houses, let that reform it! In such odor is the Foreign Office too, if it were not that the Public, oppressed and nearly stifled with a mere infinitude of bad odors, neglects this one,--in fact, being able nearly always to avoid the street where it is, _escapes_ this one, and (except a passing curse, once in the quarter or so) as good as forgets the existence of it. Such, from sad personal experience and credited prevailing rumor, is the exoteric public conviction about these sublime establishments in Downing Street and the neighborhood, the esoteric mysteries of which are indeed still held sacred by the initiated, but believed by the world to be mere Dalai-Lama pills, manufactured let not refined lips hint how, and quite _un_salvatory to mankind. Every one may remark what a hope animates the eyes of any circle, when it is reported or even confidently asserted, that Sir Robert Peel has in his mind privately resolved to go, one day, into that stable of King Augeas, which appalls human hearts, so rich is it, high-piled with the droppings of two hundred years; and Hercules-like to load a thousand night-wagons from it, and turn running water into it, and swash and shovel at it, and never leave it till the antique pavement, and real basis of the matter, show itself clean again! In any intelligent circle such a rumor, like the first break of day to men in darkness, enlightens all eyes; and each says devoutly, "_Faxitis_, O ye righteous Powers that have pity on us! All England grateful, with kindling looks, will rise in the rear of him, and from its deepest heart bid him good speed!" For it is universally felt that some _esoteric_ man, well acquainted with the mysteries and properties good and evil of the administrative stable, is the fittest to reform it, nay can alone reform it otherwise than by sheer violence and destruction, which is a way we would avoid; that in fact Sir Robert Peel is, at present, the one likely or possible man to reform it. And secondly it is felt that "reform" in that Downing-Street department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth all others; that those administrative establishments in Downing Street are really the Government of this huge ungoverned Empire; that to clean out the dead pedantries, unveracities, indolent somnolent impotences, and accumulated dung-mountains there, is the beginning of all practical good whatsoever. Yes, get down once again to the actual _pavement_ of that; ascertain what the thing is, and was before dung accumulated in it; and what it should and may, and must, for the life's sake of this Empire, henceforth become: here clearly lies the heart of the whole matter. Political reform, if this be not reformed, is naught and a mere mockery. What England wants, and will require to have, or sink in nameless anarchies, is not a Reformed Parliament, meaning thereby a Parliament elected according to the six or the four or any other number of "points" and cunningly devised improvements in hustings mechanism, but a Reformed Executive or Sovereign Body of Rulers and Administrators,--some improved method, innumerable improvements in our poor blind methods, of getting hold of these. Not a better Talking-Apparatus, the best conceivable Talking-Apparatus would do very little for us at present;--but an infinitely better Acting-Apparatus, the benefits of which would be invaluable now and henceforth. The practical question puts itself with ever-increasing stringency to all English minds: Can we, by no industry, energy, utmost expenditure of human ingenuity, and passionate invocation of the Heavens and Earth, get to attain some twelve or ten or six men to manage the affairs of this nation in Downing Street and the chief posts elsewhere, who are abler for the work than those we have been used to, this long while? For it is really a heroic work, and cannot be done by histrios, and dexterous talkers having the honor to be: it is a heavy and appalling work; and, at the starting of it especially, will require Herculean men; such mountains of pedant exuviae and obscene owl-droppings have accumulated in those regions, long the habitation of doleful creatures; the old _pavements_, the natural facts and real essential functions of those establishments, have not been seen by eyes for these two hundred years last past! Herculean men acquainted with the virtues of running water, and with the divine necessity of getting down to the clear pavements and old veracities; who tremble before no amount of pedant exuviae, no loudest shrieking of doleful creatures; who tremble only to live, themselves, like inane phantasms, and to leave their life as a paltry _contribution_ to the guano mountains, and not as a divine eternal protest against them! These are the kind of men we want; these, the nearest possible approximation to these, are the men we must find and have, or go bankrupt altogether; for the concern as it is will evidently not hold long together. How true is this of Crabbe: "Men sit in Parliament eighty-three hours per week, debating about many things. Men sit in Downing Street, doing protocols, Syrian treaties, Greek questions, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Egyptian and AEthiopian questions; dexterously writing despatches, and having the honor to be. Not a question of them is at all pressing in comparison with the English question. Pacifico the miraculous Gibraltar Jew has been hustled by some populace in Greece:--upon him let the British Lion drop, very rapidly indeed, a constitutional tear. Radetzky is said to be advancing upon Milan;--I am sorry to hear it, and perhaps it does deserve a despatch, or friendly letter, once and away: but the Irish Giant, named of Despair, is advancing upon London itself, laying waste all English cities, towns and villages; that is the interesting Government despatch of the day! I notice him in Piccadilly, blue-visaged, thatched in rags, a blue child on each arm; hunger-driven, wide-mouthed, seeking whom he may devour: he, missioned by the just Heavens, too truly and too sadly their 'divine missionary' come at last in this authoritative manner, will throw us all into Doubting Castle, I perceive! That is the phenomenon worth protocolling about, and writing despatches upon, and thinking of with all one's faculty day and night, if one wishes to have the honor to be--anything but a Phantasm Governor of England just now! I entreat your Lordship's all but undivided attention to that Domestic Irish Giant, named of Despair, for a great many years to come. Prophecy of him there has long been; but now by the rot of the potato (blessed be the just gods, who send us either swift death or some beginning of cure at last!), he is here in person, and there is no denying him, or disregarding him any more; and woe to the public watchman that ignores him, and sees Pacifico the Gibraltar Jew instead!" What these strange Entities in Downing Street intrinsically are; who made them, why they were made; how they do their function; and what their function, so huge in appearance, may in net-result amount to,--is probably known to no mortal. The unofficial mind passes by in dark wonder; not pretending to know. The official mind must not blab;--the official mind, restricted to its own square foot of territory in the vast labyrinth, is probably itself dark, and unable to blab. We see the outcome; the mechanism we do not see. How the tailors clip and sew, in that sublime sweating establishment of theirs, we know not: that the coat they bring us out is the sorrowfulest fantastic mockery of a coat, a mere intricate artistic network of traditions and formalities, an embroiled reticulation made of web-listings and superannuated thrums and tatters, endurable to no grown Nation as a coat, is mournfully clear!-- Two kinds of fundamental error are supposable in such a set of Offices; these two, acting and reacting, are the vice of all inefficient Offices whatever.--_First_, that the work, such as it may be, is ill done in these establishments. That it is delayed, neglected, slurred over, committed to hands that cannot do it well; that, in a word, the questions sent thither are not wisely handled, but unwisely; not decided truly and rapidly, but with delays and wrong at last: which is the principal character, and the infallible result, of an insufficient Intellect being set to decide them. Or _second_, what is still fataler, the work done there may itself be quite the wrong kind of work. Not the kind of supervision and direction which Colonies, and other such interests, Home or Foreign, do by the nature of them require from the Central Government; not that, but a quite other kind! The Sotomayor correspondence, for example, is considered by many persons not to be mismanaged merely, but to be a thing which should never have been managed at all; a quite superfluous concern, which and the like of which the British Government has almost no call to get into, at this new epoch of time. And not Sotomayor only, nor Sapienza only, in regard to that Foreign Office, but innumerable other things, if our witty friend of the "live coal" have reason in him! Of the Colonial Office, too, it is urged that the questions they decide and operate upon are, in very great part, questions which they never should have meddled with, but almost all of which should have been decided in the Colonies themselves,--Mother Country or Colonial Office reserving its energy for a quite other class of objects, which are terribly neglected just now. These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of them originating in insufficient Intellect,--that sad insufficiency from which, directly or indirectly, all evil whatsoever springs! And these two vices act and react, so that where the one is, the other is sure to be; and each encouraging the growth of the other, both (if some cleaning of the Augeas stable have not intervened for a long while) will be found in frightful development. You cannot have your work well done, if the work be not of a right kind, if it be not work prescribed by the law of Nature as well as by the rules of the office. Laziness, which lies in wait round all human labor-offices, will in that case infallibly leak in, and vitiate the doing of the work. The work is but idle; if the doing of it will but pass, what need of more? The essential problem, as the rules of office prescribe it for you, if Nature and Fact say nothing, is that your work be got to pass; if the work itself is worth nothing, or little or an uncertain quantity, what more can gods or men require of it, or, above all, can I who am the doer of it require, but that it be got to pass? And now enters another fatal effect, the mother of ever-new mischiefs, which renders well-doing or improvement impossible, and drives bad everywhere continually into worse. The work being what we see, a stupid subaltern will do as well as a gifted one; the essential point is, that he be a quiet one, and do not bother me who have the driving of him. Nay, for this latter object, is not a certain height of intelligence even dangerous? I want no mettled Arab horse, with his flashing glances, arched, neck and elastic step, to draw my wretched sand-cart through the streets; a broken, grass-fed galloway, Irish garron, or painful ass with nothing in the belly of him but patience and furze, will do it safelier for me, if more slowly. Nay I myself, am I the worse for being of a feeble order of intelligence; what the irreverent speculative, world calls barren, red-tapish, limited, and even intrinsically dark and small, and if it must be said, stupid?--To such a climax does it come in all Government and other Offices, where Human Stupidity has once introduced itself (as it will everywhere do), and no Scavenger God intervenes. The work, at first of some worth, is ill done, and becomes of less worth and of ever less, and finally of none: the worthless work can now _afford_ to be ill done; and Human Stupidity, at a double geometrical ratio, with frightful expansion grows and accumulates,--towards the unendurable. The reforming Hercules, Sir Robert Peel or whoever he is to be, that enters Downing Street, will ask himself this question first of all, What work is now necessary, not in form and by traditionary use and wont, but in very fact, for the vital interests of the British Nation, to be done here? The second question, How to get it well done, and to keep the best hands doing it well, will be greatly simplified by a good answer to that. Oh for an eye that could see in those hideous mazes, and a heart that could dare and do! Strenuous faithful scrutiny, not of what is _thought_ to be what in the red-tape regions, but of what really is what in the realms of Fact and Nature herself; deep-seeing, wise and courageous eyes, that could look through innumerable cobweb veils, and detect what fact or no-fact lies at heart of them,--how invaluable these! For, alas, it is long since such eyes were much in the habit of looking steadfastly at any department of our affairs; and poor commonplace creatures, helping themselves along, in the way of makeshift, from year to year, in such an element, do wonderful works indeed. Such creatures, like moles, are safe only underground, and their engineerings there become very daedalean. In fact, such unfortunate persons have no resource but to become what we call Pedants; to ensconce themselves in a safe world of habitudes, of applicable or inapplicable traditions; not coveting, rather avoiding the general daylight of common-sense, as very extraneous to them and their procedure; by long persistence in which course they become Completed Pedants, hidebound, impenetrable, able to _defy_ the hostile extraneous element; an alarming kind of men, Such men, left to themselves for a century or two, in any Colonial, Foreign, or other Office, will make a terrible affair of it! For the one enemy we have in this Universe is Stupidity, Darkness of Mind; of which darkness, again, there are many sources, every _sin_ a source, and probably self-conceit the chief source. Darkness of mind, in every kind and variety, does to a really tragic extent abound: but of all the kinds of darkness, surely the Pedant darkness, which asserts and believes itself to be light, is the most formidable to mankind! For empires or for individuals there is but one class of men to be trembled at; and that is the Stupid Class, the class that cannot see, who alas are they mainly that will not see. A class of mortals under which as administrators, kings, priests, diplomatists, &c., the interests of mankind in every European country have sunk overloaded, as under universal nightmare, near to extinction; and indeed are at this moment convulsively writhing, decided either to throw off the unblessed superincumbent nightmare, or roll themselves and it to the Abyss. Vain to reform Parliament, to invent ballot-boxes, to reform this or that; the real Administration, practical Management of the Commonwealth, goes all awry; choked up with long-accumulated pedantries, so that your appointed workers have been reduced to work as moles; and it is one vast boring and counter-boring, on the part of eyeless persons irreverently called stupid; and a daedalean bewilderment, writing "impossible" on all efforts or proposals, supervenes. The State itself, not in Downing Street alone but in every department of it, has altered much from what it was in past times; and it will again have to alter very much, to alter I think from top to bottom, if it means to continue existing in the times that are now coming and come! The State, left to shape itself by dim pedantries and traditions, without distinctness of conviction, or purpose beyond that of helping itself over the difficulty of the hour, has become, instead of a luminous vitality permeating with its light all provinces of our affairs, a most monstrous agglomerate of inanities, as little adapted for the actual wants of a modern community as the worst citizen need wish. The thing it is doing is by no means the thing we want to have done. What we want! Let the dullest British man endeavor to raise in his mind this question, and ask himself in sincerity what the British Nation wants at this time. Is it to have, with endless jargoning, debating, motioning and counter-motioning, a settlement effected between the Honorable Mr. This and the Honorable Mr. That, as to their respective pretensions to ride the high horse? Really it is unimportant which of them ride it. Going upon past experience long continued now, I should say with brevity, "Either of them--Neither of them." If our Government is to be a No-Government, what is the matter who administers it? Fling an orange-skin into St. James's Street; let the man it hits be your man. He, if you breed him a little to it, and tie the due official bladders to his ankles, will do as well as another this sublime problem of balancing himself upon the vortexes, with the long loaded-pole in his hands; and will, with straddling painful gestures, float hither and thither, walking the waters in that singular manner for a little while, as well as his foregoers did, till he also capsize, and be left floating feet uppermost; after which you choose another. What an immense pother, by parliamenting and palavering in all corners of your empire, to decide such a question as that! I say, if that is the function, almost any human creature can learn to discharge it: fling out your orange-skin again; and save an incalculable labor, and an emission of nonsense and falsity, and electioneering beer and bribery and balderdash, which is terrible to think of, in deciding. Your National Parliament, in so far as it has only that question to decide, may be considered as an enormous National Palaver existing mainly for imaginary purposes; and certain, in these days of abbreviated labor, to get itself sent home again to its partridge-shootings, fox-huntings, and above all, to its rat-catchings, if it could but understand the time of day, and know (as our indignant Crabbe remarks) that "the real Nimrod of this era, who alone does any good to the era, is the rat-catcher!" The notion that any Government is or can be a No-Government, without the deadliest peril to all noble interests of the Commonwealth, and by degrees slower or swifter to all ignoble ones also, and to the very gully-drains, and thief lodging-houses, and Mosaic sweating establishments, and at last without destruction to such No-Government itself,--was never my notion; and I hope it will soon cease altogether to be the world's or to be anybody's. But if it be the correct notion, as the world seems at present to flatter itself, I point out improvements and abbreviations. Dismiss your National Palaver; make the _Times_ Newspaper your National Palaver, which needs no beer-barrels or hustings, and is _cheaper_ in expense of money and of falsity a thousand and a million fold; have an economical red-tape drilling establishment (it were easier to devise such a thing than a right _Modern University_);--and fling out your orange-skin among the graduates, when you want a new Premier. A mighty question indeed! Who shall be Premier, and take in hand the "rudder of government," otherwise called the "spigot of taxation;" shall it be the Honorable Felix Parvulus, or the Right Honorable Felicissimus Zero? By our electioneerings and Hansard Debatings, and ever-enduring tempest of jargon that goes on everywhere, we manage to settle that; to have it declared, with no bloodshed except insignificant blood from the nose in hustings-time, but with immense beershed and inkshed and explosion of nonsense, which darkens all the air, that the Right Honorable Zero is to be the man. That we firmly settle; Zero, all shivering with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high saddle; cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and the horse gallops--whither it lists. That the Right Honorable Zero should attempt controlling the horse--Alas, alas, he, sticking on with beak and claws, is too happy if the horse will only gallop any-whither, and not throw him. Measure, polity, plan or scheme of public good or evil, is not in the head of Felicissimus; except, if he could but devise it, some measure that would please his horse for the moment, and encourage him to go with softer paces, godward or devilward as it might be, and save Felicissimus's leather, which is fast wearing. This is what we call a Government in England, for nearly two centuries now. I wish Felicissimus were saddle-sick forever and a day! He is a dreadful object, however much we are used to him. If the horse had not been bred and broken in, for a thousand years, by real riders and horse-subduers, perhaps the best and bravest the world ever saw, what would have become of Felicissimus and him long since? This horse, by second-nature, religiously respects all fences; gallops, if never so madly, on the highways alone;--seems to me, of late, like a desperate Sleswick thunder-horse who had lost his way, galloping in the labyrinthic lanes of a woody flat country; passionate to reach his goal; unable to reach it, because in the flat leafy lanes there is no outlook whatever, and in the bridle there is no guidance whatever. So he gallops stormfully along, thinking it is forward and forward; and alas, it is only round and round, out of one old lane into the other;--nay (according to some) "he mistakes _his own footprints_, which of course grow ever more numerous, for the sign of a more and more frequented road;" and his despair is hourly increasing. My impression is, he is certain soon, such is the growth of his necessity and his despair, to--plunge _across_ the fence, into an opener survey of the country; and to sweep Felicissimus off his back, and comb him away very tragically in the process! Poor Sleswicker, I wish you were better ridden. I perceive it lies in the Fates you must now either be better ridden, or else not long at all. This plunging in the heavy labyrinth of over-shaded lanes, with one's stomach getting empty, one's Ireland falling into cannibalism, and no vestige of a goal either visible or possible, cannot last. Colonial Offices, Foreign, Home and other Offices, got together under these strange circumstances, cannot well be expected to be the best that human ingenuity could devise; the wonder rather is to see them so good as they are. Who made them, ask me not. Made they clearly were; for we see them here in a concrete condition, writing despatches, and drawing salary with a view to buy pudding. But how those Offices in Downing Street were made; who made them, or for what kind of objects they were made, would be hard to say at present. Dim visions and phantasmagories gathered from the Books of Horace Walpole, Memoirs of Bubb Doddington, Memoirs of my Lady Sundon, Lord Fanny Hervey, and innumerable others, rise on us, beckoning fantastically towards, not an answer, but some conceivable intimations of an answer, and proclaiming very legibly the old text, "_Quam parva sapientia_," in respect of this hard-working much-subduing British Nation; giving rise to endless reflections in a thinking Englishman of this day. Alas, it is ever so: each generation has its task, and does it better or worse; greatly neglecting what is not immediately its task. Our poor grandfathers, so busy conquering Indias, founding Colonies, inventing spinning-jennies, kindling Lancashires and Bromwichams, took no thought about the government of all that; left it all to be governed by Lord Fanny and the Hanover Succession, or how the gods pleased. And now we the poor grandchildren find that it will not stick together on these terms any longer; that our sad, dangerous and sore task is to discover some government for this big world which has been conquered to us; that the red-tape Offices in Downing Street are near the end of their rope; that if we can get nothing better, in the way of government, it is all over with our world and us. How the Downing-Street Offices originated, and what the meaning of them was or is, let Dryasdust, when in some lucid moment the whim takes him, instruct us. Enough for us to know and see clearly, with urgent practical inference derived from such insight, That they were not made for us or for our objects at all; that the devouring Irish Giant is here, and that he cannot be fed with red-tape, and will eat us if we cannot feed him. On the whole, let us say Felicissimus made them;--or rather it was the predecessors of Felicissimus, who were not so dreadfully hunted, sticking to the wild and ever more desperate Sleswicker in the leafy labyrinth of lanes, as he now is. He, I think, will never make anything; but be combed off by the elm-boughs, and left sprawling in the ditch. But in past time, this and the other heavy-laden red-tape soul had withal a glow of patriotism in him; now and then, in his whirling element, a gleam of human ingenuity, some eye towards business that must be done. At all events, for him and every one, Parliament needed to be persuaded that business was done. By the contributions of many such heavy-laden souls, driven on by necessity outward and inward, these singular Establishments are here. Contributions--who knows how far back they go, far beyond the reign of George the Second, or perhaps the reign of William Conqueror. Noble and genuine some of them were, many of them were, I need not doubt: for there is no human edifice that stands long but has got itself planted, here and there, upon the basis of fact; and being built, in many respects, according to the laws of statics: no standing edifice, especially no edifice of State, but has had the wise and brave at work in it, contributing their lives to it; and is "cemented," whether it know the fact or not, "by the blood of heroes!" None; not even the Foreign Office, Home Office, still less the National Palaver itself. William Conqueror, I find, must have had a first-rate Home Office, for his share. The _Domesday Book_, done in four years, and done as it is, with such an admirable brevity, explicitness and completeness, testifies emphatically what kind of under-secretaries and officials William had. Silent officials and secretaries, I suppose; not wasting themselves in parliamentary talk; reserving all their intelligence for silent survey of the huge dumb fact, silent consideration how they might compass the mastery of that. Happy secretaries, happy William! But indeed nobody knows what inarticulate traditions, remnants of old wisdom, priceless though quite anonymous, survive in many modern things that still have life in them. Ben Brace, with his taciturnities, and rugged stoical ways, with his tarry breeches, stiff as plank-breeches, I perceive is still a kind of _Lod-brog_ (Loaded-breeks) in more senses than one; and derives, little conscious of it, many of his excellences from the old Sea-kings and Saxon Pirates themselves; and how many Blakes and Nelsons since have contributed to Ben! "Things are not so false always as they seem," said a certain Professor to me once: "of this you will find instances in every country, and in your England more than any--and I hope will draw lessons from them. An English Seventy-four, if you look merely at the articulate law and methods of it, is one of the impossiblest entities. The captain is appointed not by preeminent merit in sailorship, but by parliamentary connection; the men [this was spoken some years ago] are got by impressment; a press-gang goes out, knocks men down on the streets of sea-towns, and drags them on board,--if the ship were to be stranded, I have heard they would nearly all run ashore and desert. Can anything be more unreasonable than a Seventy-four? Articulately almost nothing. But it has inarticulate traditions, ancient methods and habitudes in it, stoicisms, noblenesses, _true_ rules both of sailing and of conduct; enough to keep it afloat on Nature's veridical bosom, after all. See; if you bid it sail to the end of the world, it will lift anchor, go, and arrive. The raging oceans do not beat it back; it too, as well as the raging oceans, has a relationship to Nature, and it does not sink, but under the due conditions is borne along. If it meet with hurricanes, it rides them out; if it meet an Enemy's ship, it shivers it to powder; and in short, it holds on its way, and to a wonderful extent _does_ what it means and pretends to do. Assure yourself, my friend, there is an immense fund of truth somewhere or other stowed in that Seventy-four." More important than the past history of these Offices in Downing Street, is the question of their future history; the question, How they are to be got mended! Truly an immense problem, inclusive of all others whatsoever; which demands to be attacked, and incessantly persisted in, by all good citizens, as the grand problem of Society, and the one thing needful for the Commonwealth! A problem in which all men, with all their wisdoms and all their virtues, faithfully and continually co-operating at it, will never have done _enough_, and will still only be struggling _towards_ perfection in it. In which some men can do much;--in which every man can do something. Every man, and thou my present Reader canst do this: _Be_ thyself a man abler to be governed; more reverencing the divine faculty of governing, more sacredly detesting the diabolical semblance of said faculty in self and others; so shalt thou, if not govern, yet actually according to thy strength assist in real governing. And know always, and even lay to heart with a quite unusual solemnity, with a seriousness altogether of a religious nature, that as "Human Stupidity" is verily the accursed parent of all this mischief, so Human Intelligence alone, to which and to which only is victory and blessedness appointed here below, will or can cure it. If we knew this as devoutly as we ought to do, the evil, and all other evils were curable;--alas, if we had from of old known this, as all men made in God's image ought to do, the evil never would have been! Perhaps few Nations have ever known it less than we, for a good while back, have done. Hence these sorrows. What a People are the poor Thibet idolaters, compared with us and our "religions," which issue in the worship of King Hudson as our Dalai-Lama! They, across such hulls of abject ignorance, have seen into the heart of the matter; we, with our torches of knowledge everywhere brandishing themselves, and such a human enlightenment as never was before, have quite missed it. Reverence for Human Worth, earnest devout search for it and encouragement of it, loyal furtherance and obedience to it: this, I say, is the outcome and essence of all true "religions," and was and ever will be. We have not known this. No; loud as our tongues sometimes go in that direction, we have no true reverence for Human Intelligence, for Human Worth and Wisdom: none, or too little,--and I pray for a restoration of such reverence, as for the change from Stygian darkness to Heavenly light, as for the return of life to poor sick moribund Society and all its interests. Human Intelligence means little for most of us but Beaver Contrivance, which produces spinning-mules, cheap cotton, and large fortunes. Wisdom, unless it give us railway scrip, is not wise. True nevertheless it forever remains that Intellect is the real object of reverence, and of devout prayer, and zealous wish and pursuit, among the sons of men; and even, well understood, the one object. It is the Inspiration of the Almighty that giveth men understanding. For it must be repeated, and ever again repeated till poor mortals get to discern it, and awake from their baleful paralysis, and degradation under foul enchantments, That a man of Intellect, of real and not sham Intellect, is by the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness, a man of courage, rectitude, pious strength; who, even _because_ he is and has been loyal to the Laws of this Universe, is initiated into _discernment_ of the same; to this hour a Missioned of Heaven; whom if men follow, it will be well with them; whom if men do not follow, it will not be well. Human Intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of Human _Worth_; and the essence of all worth-ships and worships is reverence for that same. This much surprises you, friend Peter; but I assure you it is the fact;--and I would advise you to consider it, and to try if you too do not gradually find it so. With me it has long been an article, not of "faith" only, but of settled insight, of conviction as to what the ordainments of the Maker in this Universe are. Ah, could you and the rest of us but get to know it, and everywhere religiously act upon it,--as our _Fortieth_ Article, which includes all the other Thirty-nine, and without which the Thirty-nine are good for almost nothing,--there might then be some hope for us! In this world there is but one appalling creature: the Stupid man _considered_ to be the Missioned of Heaven, and followed by men. He is our King, men say, he;--and they follow him, through straight or winding courses, I for one know well whitherward. Abler men in Downing Street, abler men to govern us: yes, that, sure enough, would gradually remove the dung-mountains, however high they are; that would be the way, nor is there any other way, to remedy whatsoever has gone wrong in Downing Street and in the wide regions, spiritual and temporal, which Downing Street presides over! For the Able Man, meet him where you may, is definable as the born enemy of Falsity and Anarchy, and the born soldier of Truth and Order: into what absurdest element soever you put him, he is there to make it a little less absurd, to fight continually with it till it become a little sane and human again. Peace on other terms he, for his part, cannot make with it; not he, while he continues _able_, or possessed of real intellect and not imaginary. There is but one man fraught with blessings for this world, fated to diminish and successively abolish the curses of the world; and it is he. For him make search, him reverence and follow; know that to find him or miss him, means victory or defeat for you, in all Downing Streets, and establishments and enterprises here below.--I leave your Lordship to judge whether this has been our practice hitherto; and would humbly inquire what your Lordship thinks is likely to be the consequence of continuing to neglect this. It ought to have been our practice; ought, in all places and all times, to be the practice in this world; so says the fixed law of things forevermore:--and it must cease to be _not_ the practice, your Lordship; and cannot too speedily do so I think!-- Much has been done in the way of reforming Parliament in late years; but that of itself seems to avail nothing, or almost less. The men that sit in Downing Street, governing us, are not abler men since the Reform Bill than were those before it. Precisely the same kind of men; obedient formerly to Tory traditions, obedient now to Whig ditto and popular clamors. Respectable men of office: respectably commonplace in facility,--while the situation is becoming terribly original! Rendering their outlooks, and ours, more ominous every day. Indisputably enough the meaning of all reform-movement, electing and electioneering, of popular agitation, parliamentary eloquence, and all political effort whatsoever, is that you may get the ten Ablest Men in England put to preside over your ten principal departments of affairs. To sift and riddle the Nation, so that you might extricate and sift out the true ten gold grains, or ablest men, and of these make your Governors or Public Officers; leaving the dross and common sandy or silty material safely aside, as the thing to be governed, not to govern; certainly all ballot-boxes, caucuses, Kennington-Common meetings, Parliamentary debatings, Red Republics, Russian Despotisms, and constitutional or unconstitutional methods of society among mankind, are intended to achieve this one end; and some of them, it will be owned, achieve it very ill!--If you have got your gold grains, if the men you have got are actually the ablest, then rejoice; with whatever astonishment, accept your Ten, and thank the gods; under this Ten your destruction will at least be milder than under another. But if you have _not_ got them, if you are very far from having got them, then do not rejoice at all, then _lament_ very much; then admit that your sublime political constitutions and contrivances do not prove themselves sublime, but ridiculous and contemptible; that your world's wonder of a political mill, the envy of surrounding nations, does not yield you real meal; yields you only powder of millstones (called Hansard Debatings), and a detestable brown substance not unlike the grindings of dried horse-dung or prepared street-mud, which though sold under royal patent, and much recommended by the trade, is quite unfit for culinary purposes!-- But the disease at least is not mysterious, whatever the remedy be. Our disease,--alas, is it not clear as the sun, that we suffer under what is the disease of all the miserable in this world, _want of wisdom_; that in the Head there is no vision, and that thereby all the members are dark and in bonds? No vision in the head; heroism, faith, devout insight to discern what is needful, noble courage to do it, greatly defective there: not seeing eyes there, but spectacles constitutionally ground, which, to the unwary, _seem_ to see. A quite fatal circumstance, had you never so many Parliaments! How is your ship to be steered by a Pilot with no _eyes_ but a pair of glass ones got from the constitutional optician? He must steer by the _ear_, I think, rather than by the eye; by the shoutings he catches from the shore, or from the Parliamentary benches nearer hand:--one of the frightfulest objects to see steering in a difficult sea! Reformed Parliaments in that case, reform-leagues, outer agitations and excitements in never such abundance, cannot profit: all this is but the writhing, and painful blind convulsion of the limbs that are in bonds, that are all in dark misery till the head be delivered, till the pressure on the brain be removed. Or perhaps there is now no heroic wisdom left in England; England, once the land of heroes, is itself sunk now to a dim owlery, and habitation of doleful creatures, intent only on money-making and other forms of catching mice, for whom the proper gospel is the gospel of M'Croudy, and all nobler impulses and insights are forbidden henceforth? Perhaps these present agreeable Occupants of Downing Street, such as the parliamentary mill has yielded them, are the _best_ the miserable soil had grown? The most Herculean Ten Men that could be found among the English Twenty-seven Millions, are these? There _are_ not, in any place, under any figure, ten diviner men among us? Well; in that case, the riddling and searching of the twenty-seven millions has been _successful_. Here are our ten divinest men; with these, unhappily not divine enough, we must even content ourselves and die in peace; what help is there? No help, no hope, in that case. But, again, if these are _not_ our divinest men, then evidently there always is hope, there always is possibility of help; and ruin never is quite inevitable, till we _have_ sifted out our actually divinest ten, and set these to try their hand at governing!--That this has been achieved; that these ten men are the most Herculean souls the English population held within it, is a proposition credible to no mortal. No, thank God; low as we are sunk in many ways, this is not yet credible! Evidently the reverse of this proposition is the fact. Ten much diviner men do certainly exist. By some conceivable, not forever impossible, method and methods, ten very much diviner men could be sifted out!--Courage; let us fix our eyes on that important fact, and strive all thitherward as towards a door of hope! Parliaments, I think, have proved too well, in late years, that they are not the remedy. It is not Parliaments, reformed or other, that will ever send Herculean men to Downing Street, to reform Downing Street for us; to diffuse therefrom a light of Heavenly Order, instead of the murk of Stygian Anarchy, over this sad world of ours. That function does not lie in the capacities of Parliment. That is the function of a _King_,--if we could get such a priceless entity, which we cannot just now! Failing which, Statesmen, or Temporary Kings, and at the very lowest one real Statesman, to shape the dim tendencies of Parliament, and guide them wisely to the goal: he, I perceive, will be a primary condition, indispensable for any progress whatsoever. One such, perhaps, might be attained; one such might prove discoverable among our Parliamentary populations? That one, in such an enterprise as this of Downing Street, might be invaluable! One noble man, at once of natural wisdom and practical experience; one Intellect still really human, and not red-tapish, owlish and pedantical, appearing there in that dim chaos, with word of command; to brandish Hercules-like the divine broom and shovel, and turn running water in upon the place, and say as with a fiat, "Here shall be truth, and real work, and talent to do it henceforth; I will seek for able men to work here, as for the elixir of life to this poor place and me:"--what might not one such man effect there! Nay one such is not to be dispensed with anywhere in the affairs of men. In every ship, I say, there must be a _seeing_ pilot, not a mere hearing one! It is evident you can never get your ship steered through the difficult straits by persons standing ashore, on this bank and that, and shouting _their_ confused directions to you: "'Ware that Colonial Sandbank!--Starboard now, the Nigger Question!--Larboard, _larboard_, the Suffrage Movement! Financial Reform, your Clothing-Colonels overboard! The Qualification Movement, 'Ware-re-re!--Helm-a-lee! Bear a hand there, will you! Hr-r-r, lubbers, imbeciles, fitter for a tailor's shopboard than a helm of Government, Hr-r-r!"--And so the ship wriggles and tumbles, and, on the whole, goes as wind and current drive. No ship was ever steered except to destruction in that manner. I deliberately say so: no ship of a State either. If you cannot get a real pilot on board, and put the helm into his hands, your ship is as good as a wreck. One real pilot on board may save you; all the bellowing from the banks that ever was, will not, and by the nature of things cannot. Nay your pilot will have to succeed, if he do succeed, very much in spite of said bellowing; he will hear all that, and regard very little of it,--in a patient mild-spoken wise manner, will regard all of it as what it is. And I never doubt but there is in Parliament itself, in spite of its vague palaverings which fill us with despair in these times, a dumb instinct of inarticulate sense and stubborn practical English insight and veracity, that would manfully support a Statesman who could take command with really manful notions of Reform, and as one deserving to be obeyed. Oh for one such; even one! More precious to us than all the bullion in the Bank, or perhaps that ever was in it, just now! For it is Wisdom alone that can recognize wisdom: Folly or Imbecility never can; and that is the fatalest ban it labors under, dooming it to perpetual failure in all things. Failure which, in Downing Street and places of _command_ is especially accursed; cursing not one but hundreds of millions! Who is there that can recognize real intellect, and do reverence to it; and discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is so much more abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence? He that himself has it!--One really human Intellect, invested with command, and charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually attract real intellect to those regions, and with a divine magnetism search it out from the modest corners where it lies hid. And every new accession of intellect to Downing Street would bring to it benefit only, and would increase such divine attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there and elsewhere! "What method, then; by what method?" ask many. Method, alas! To secure an increased supply of Human Intellect to Downing Street, there will evidently be no quite effectual "method" but that of increasing the supply of Human Intellect, otherwise definable as Human Worth, in Society generally; increasing the supply of sacred reverence for it, of loyalty to it, and of life-and-death desire and pursuit of it, among all classes,--if we but knew such a "method"! Alas, that were simply the method of making all classes Servants of Heaven; and except it be devout prayer to Heaven, I have never heard of any method! To increase the reverence for Human Intellect or God's Light, and the detestation of Human Stupidity or the Devil's Darkness, what method is there? No method,--except even this, that we should each of us "pray" for it, instead of praying for mere scrip and the like; that Heaven would please to vouchsafe us each a little of it, one by one! As perhaps Heaven, in its infinite bounty, by stern methods, gradually will? Perhaps Heaven has mercy too in these sore plagues that are oppressing us; and means to teach us reverence for Heroism and Human Intellect, by such baleful experience of what issue Imbecility and Parliamentary Eloquence lead to? Such reverence, I do hope, and even discover and observe, is silently yet extensively going on among us even in these sad years. In which small salutary fact there burns for us, in this black coil of universal baseness fast becoming universal wretchedness, an inextinguishable hope; far-off but sure, a divine "pillar of fire by night." Courage, courage!-- Meanwhile, that our one reforming Statesman may have free command of what Intellect there is among us, and room to try all means for awakening and inviting ever more of it, there has one small Project of Improvement been suggested; which finds a certain degree of favor wherever I hear it talked of, and which seems to merit much more consideration than it has yet received. Practical men themselves approve of it hitherto, so far as it goes; the one objection being that the world is not yet prepared to insist on it,--which of course the world can never be, till once the world consider it, and in the first place hear tell of it! I have, for my own part, a good opinion of this project. The old unreformed Parliament of rotten boroughs _had_ one advantage; but that is hereby, in a far more fruitful and effectual manner, secured to the new. The Proposal is, That Secretaries under and upper, that all manner of changeable or permanent servants in the Government Offices shall be selected without reference to their power of getting into Parliament;--that, in short, the Queen shall have power of nominating the half-dozen or half-score Officers of the Administration, whose presence is thought necessary in Parliament, to official seats there, without reference to any constituency but her own only, which of course will mean her Prime Minister's. A very small encroachment on the present constitution of Parliament; offering the minimum of change in present methods, and I almost think a maximum in results to be derived therefrom.--The Queen nominates John Thomas (the fittest man she, much inquiring, can hear tell of in her three kingdoms) President of the Poor-Law Board, Under Secretary of the Colonies, Under, or perhaps even Upper Secretary of what she and her Premier find suitablest for a working head so eminent, a talent so precious; and grants him, by her direct authority, seat and vote in Parliament so long as he holds that office. Upper Secretaries, having more to do in Parliament, and being so bound to be in favor there, would, I suppose, at least till new times and habits come, be expected to be chosen from among the _People's_ Members as at present. But whether the Prime Minister himself is, in all times, bound to be first a People's Member; and which, or how many, of his Secretaries and subordinates he might be allowed to take as _Queen's_ Members, my authority does not say,--perhaps has not himself settled; the project being yet in mere outline or foreshadow, the practical embodiment in all details to be fixed by authorities much more competent than he. The soul of his project is, That the Crown also have power to elect a few members to Parliament. From which project, however wisely it were embodied, there could probably, at first or all at once, no great "accession of intellect" to the Government Offices ensue; though a little might, even at first, and a little is always precious: but in its ulterior operation, were that faithfully developed, and wisely presided over, I fancy an immense accession of intellect might ensue;--nay a natural ingress might thereby be opened to all manner of accessions, and the actual flower of whatever intellect the British Nation had might be attracted towards Downing Street, and continue flowing steadily thither! For, let us see a little what effects this simple change carries in it the possibilities of. Here are beneficent germs, which the presence of one truly wise man as Chief Minister, steadily fostering them for even a few years, with the sacred fidelity and vigilance that would beseem him, might ripen into living practices and habitual facts, invaluable to us all. What it is that Secretaries of State, Managers of Colonial Establishments, of Home and Foreign Government interests, have really and truly to do in Parliament, might admit of various estimate in these times. An apt debater in Parliament is by no means certain to be an able administrator of Colonies, of Home or Foreign Affairs; nay, rather quite the contrary is to be presumed of him; for in order to become a "brilliant speaker," if that is his character, considerable portions of his natural internal endowment must have gone to the surface, in order to make a shining figure there, and precisely so much the less (few men in these days know how much less!) must remain available in the internal silent state, or as faculty for thinking, for devising and acting, which latter and which alone is the function essential for him in his Secretaryship. Not to tell a good story for himself "in Parliament and to the twenty-seven millions, many of them fools;" not that, but to do good administration, to know with sure eye, and decide with just and resolute heart, what is what in the _things_ committed to his charge: this and not that is the service which poor England, whatever it may think and maunder, does require and want of the Official Man in Downing Street. Given a good Official Man or Secretary, he really ought, as far as it is possible, to be left working in the silent state. No mortal can both work, and do good talking in Parliament, or out of it: the feat is impossible as that of serving two hostile masters. Nor would I, if it could be helped, much trouble my good Secretary with addressing Parliament: needful explanations; yes, in a free country, surely;--but not to every frivolous and vexatious person, in or out of Parliament, who chooses to apply for them. There should be demands for explanation too which were reckoned frivolous and vexatious, and censured as such. These, I should say, are the not needful explanations: and if my poor Secretary is to be called out from his workshop to answer every one of these,--his workshop will become (what we at present see it, deservedly or not) little other than a pillory; the poor Secretary a kind of talking-machine, exposed to dead cats and rotten eggs; and the "work" got out of him or of it will, as heretofore, be very inconsiderable indeed!--Alas, on this side also, important improvements are conceivable; and will even, I imagine, get them whence we may, be found indispensable one day. The honorable gentleman whom you interrupt here, he, in his official capacity, is not an individual now, but the embodiment of a Nation; he is the "People of England" engaged in the work of Secretaryship, this one; and cannot forever afford to let the three Tailors of Tooley Street break in upon him at all hours!-- But leaving this, let us remark one thing which is very plain: That whatever be the uses and duties, real or supposed, of a Secretary in Parliament, his faculty to accomplish these is a point entirely unconnected with his ability to get elected into Parliament, and has no relation or proportion to it, and no concern with it whatever. Lord Tommy and the Honorable John are not a whit better qualified for Parliamentary duties, to say nothing of Secretary duties, than plain Tom and Jack; they are merely better qualified, as matters stand, for getting admitted to try them. Which state of matters a reforming Premier, much in want of abler men to help him, now proposes altering. Tom and Jack, once admitted by the Queen's writ, there is every reason to suppose will do quite as well there as Lord Tommy and the Honorable John. In Parliament quite as well: and elsewhere, in the other infinitely more important duties of a Government Office, which indeed are and remain the essential, vital and intrinsic duties of such a personage, is there the faintest reason to surmise that Tom and Jack, if well chosen, will fall short of Lord Tommy and the Honorable John? No shadow of a reason. Were the intrinsic genius of the men exactly equal, there is no shadow of a reason: but rather there is quite the reverse; for Tom and Jack have been at least workers all their days, not idlers, game-preservers and mere human clothes-horses, at any period of their lives; and have gained a schooling _thereby_, of which Lord Tommy and the Honorable John, unhappily strangers to it for most part, can form no conception! Tom and Jack have already, on this most narrow hypothesis, a decided _superiority_ of likelihood over Lord Tommy and the Honorable John. But the hypothesis is very narrow, and the fact is very wide; the hypothesis counts by units, the fact by millions. Consider how many Toms and Jacks there are to choose from, well or ill! The aristocratic class from whom Members of Parliament can be elected extends only to certain thousands; from these you are to choose your Secretary, if a seat in Parliament is the primary condition. But the general population is of Twenty-seven Millions; from all sections of which you can choose, if the seat in Parliament is not to be primary. Make it ultimate instead of primary, a last investiture instead of a first indispensable condition, and the whole British Nation, learned, unlearned, professional, practical, speculative and miscellaneous, is at your disposal! In the lowest broad strata of the population, equally as in the highest and narrowest, are produced men of every kind of genius; man for man, your chance of genius is as good among the millions as among the units;--and class for class, what must it be! From all classes, not from certain hundreds now but from several millions, whatsoever man the gods had gifted with intellect and nobleness, and power to help his country, could be chosen: O Heavens, could,--if not by Tenpound Constituencies and the force of beer, then by a Reforming Premier with eyes in his head, who I think might do it quite infinitely better. Infinitely better. For ignobleness cannot, by the nature of it, choose the noble: no, there needs a seeing man who is himself noble, cognizant by internal experience of the symptoms of nobleness. Shall we never think of this; shall we never more remember this, then? It is forever true; and Nature and Fact, however we may rattle our ballot-boxes, do at no time forget it. From the lowest and broadest stratum of Society, where the births are by the million, there was born, almost in our own memory, a Robert Burns; son of one who "had not capital for his poor moor-farm of Twenty Pounds a year." Robert Burns never had the smallest chance to got into Parliament, much as Robert Burns deserved, for all our sakes, to have been found there. For the man--it was not known to men purblind, sunk in their poor dim vulgar element, but might have been known to men of insight who had any loyalty or any royalty of their own--was a born king of men: full of valor, of intelligence and heroic nobleness; fit for far other work than to break his heart among poor mean mortals, gauging beer! Him no Tenpound Constituency chose, nor did any Reforming Premier: in the deep-sunk British Nation, overwhelmed in foggy stupor, with the loadstars all gone out for it, there was no whisper of a notion that it could be desirable to choose him,--except to come and dine with you, and in the interim to gauge. And yet heaven-born Mr. Pitt, at that period, was by no means without need of Heroic Intellect, for other purposes than gauging! But sorrowful strangulation by red-tape, much _tighter_ then than it now is when so many revolutionary earthquakes have tussled it, quite tied up the meagre Pitt; and he said, on hearing of this Burns and his sad hampered case, "Literature will take care of itself."--"Yes, and of you too, if you don't mind it!" answers one. And so, like Apollo taken for a Neat-herd, and perhaps for none of the best on the Admetus establishment, this new Norse Thor had to put up with what was going; to gauge ale, and be thankful; pouring his celestial sunlight through Scottish Song-writing,--the narrowest chink ever offered to a Thunder-god before! And the meagre Pitt, and his Dundasses and red-tape Phantasms (growing very ghastly now to think of), did not in the least know or understand, the impious, god-forgetting mortals, that Heroic Intellects, if Heaven were pleased to send such, were the one salvation for the world and for them and all of us. No; they "had done very well without" such; did not see the use of such; went along "very well" without such; well presided over by a singular Heroic Intellect called George the Third: and the Thunder-god, as was rather fit of him, departed early, still in the noon of life, somewhat weary of gauging ale!--O Peter, what a scandalous torpid element of yellow London fog, favorable to owls only and their mousing operations, has blotted out the stars of Heaven for us these several generations back,--which, I rejoice to see, is now visibly about to take itself away again, or perhaps to be _dispelled_ in a very tremendous manner! For the sake of my Democratic friends, one other observation. Is not this Proposal the very essence of whatever truth there is in "Democracy;" this, that the able man be chosen, in whatever rank be is found? That he be searched for as hidden treasure is; be trained, supervised, set to the work which he alone is fit for. All Democracy lies in this; this, I think, is worth all the ballot-boxes and suffrage-movements now going. Not that the noble soul, born poor, should be set to spout in Parliament, but that he should be set to assist in governing men: this is our grand Democratic interest. With this we can be saved; without this, were there a Parliament spouting in every parish, and Hansard Debates to stem the Thames, we perish,--die constitutionally drowned, in mere oceans of palaver. All reformers, constitutional persons, and men capable of reflection, are invited to reflect on these things. Let us brush the cobwebs from our eyes; let us bid the inane traditions be silent for a moment; and ask ourselves, like men dreadfully intent on having it _done_, "By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;--and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!" It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the _Best_. Reformed Parliaments have lamentably failed to attain it for us; and I believe will and must forever fail. One true Reforming Statesman, one noble worshipper and knower of human intellect, with the quality of an experienced Politician too; he, backed by such a Parliament as England, once recognizing him, would loyally send, and at liberty to choose his working subalterns from all the Englishmen alive; he surely might do something? Something, by one means or another, is becoming fearfully necessary to be done! He, I think, might accomplish more for us in ten years, than the best conceivable Reformed Parliament, and utmost extension of the suffrage, in twice or ten times ten. What is extremely important too, you could try this method with safety; extension of the suffrage you cannot so try. With even an approximately heroic Prime Minister, you could get nothing but good from prescribing to him thus, to choose the fittest man, under penalties; to choose, not the fittest of the four or the three men that were in Parliament, but the fittest from the whole Twenty-seven Millions that he could hear of,--at his peril. Nothing but good from this. From extension of the suffrage, some think, you might get quite other than good. From extension of the suffrage, till it became a universal counting of heads, one sees not in the least what wisdom could be extracted. A Parliament of the Paris pattern, such as we see just now, might be extracted: and from that? Solution into universal slush; drownage of all interests divine and human, in a Noah's-Deluge of Parliamentary eloquence,--such as we hope our sins, heavy and manifold though they are, have not yet quite deserved! Who, then, is to be the Reforming Statesman, and begin the noble work for us? He is the preliminary; one such; with him we may prosecute the enterprise to length after length; without him we cannot stir in it at all. A true _king_, temporary king, that dare undertake the government of Britain, on condition of beginning in sacred earnest to "reform" it, not at this or that extremity, but at the heart and centre. That will expurgate Downing Street, and the practical Administration of our Affairs; clear out its accumulated mountains of pendantries and cobwebs; bid the Pedants and the Dullards depart, bid the Gifted and the Seeing enter and inhabit. So that henceforth there be Heavenly light there, instead of Stygian dusk; that God's vivifying light instead of Satan's deadening and killing dusk, may radiate therefrom, and visit with healing all regions of this British Empire,--which now writhes through every limb of it, in dire agony as if of death! The enterprise is great, the enterprise may be called formidable and even awful; but there is none nobler among the sublunary affairs of mankind just now. Nay tacitly it is the enterprise of every man who undertakes to be British Premier in these times;--and I cannot esteem him an enviable Premier who, because the engagement is _tacit_, flatters himself that it does not exist! "Show it me in the bond," he says. Your Lordship, it actually exists: and I think you will see it yet, in another kind of "bond" than that sheepskin one! But truly, in any time, what a strange feeling, enough to alarm a very big Lordship, this: that he, of the size he is, has got to the apex of English affairs! Smallest wrens, we know, by training and the aid of machinery, are capable of many things. For this world abounds in miraculous combinations, far transcending anything they do at Drury Lane in the melodramatic way. A world which, as solid as it looks, is made all of aerial and even of spiritual stuff; permeated all by incalculable sleeping forces and electricities; and liable to go off, at any time, into the hugest developments, upon a scratch thoughtfully or thoughtlessly given on the right point:--Nay, for every one of us, could not the sputter of a poor pistol-shot shrivel the Immensities together like a burnt scroll, and make the Heavens and the Earth pass away with a great noise? Smallest wrens, and canary-birds of some dexterity, can be trained to handle lucifer-matches; and have, before now, fired off whole powder-magazines and parks of artillery. Perhaps without much astonishment to the canary-bird. The canary-bird can hold only its own quantity of astonishment; and may possibly enough retain its presence of mind, were even Doomsday to come. It is on this principle that I explain to myself the equanimity of some men and Premiers whom we have known. This and the other Premier seems to take it with perfect coolness. And yet, I say, what a strange feeling, to find himself Chief Governor of England; girding on, upon his moderately sized new soul, the old battle-harness of an Oliver Cromwell, an Edward Longshanks, a William Conqueror. "I, then, am the Ablest of English attainable Men? This English People, which has spread itself over all lands and seas, and achieved such works in the ages,--which has done America, India, the Lancashire Cotton-trade, Bromwicham Iron-trade, Newton's Principia, Shakspeare's Dramas, and the British Constitution,--the apex of all its intelligences and mighty instincts and dumb longings: it is I? William Conqueror's big gifts, and Edward's and Elizabeth's; Oliver's lightning soul, noble as Sinai and the thunders of the Lord: these are mine, I begin to perceive,--to a certain extent. These heroisms have I,--though rather shy of exhibiting them. These; and something withal of the huge beaver-faculty of our Arkwrights, Brindleys; touches too of the phoenix-melodies and _sunny_ heroisms of our Shakspeares, of our Singers, Sages and inspired Thinkers all this is in me, I will hope,--though rather shy of exhibiting it on common occasions. The Pattern Englishman, raised by solemn acclamation upon the bucklers of the English People, and saluted with universal 'God save THEE!'--has now the honor to announce himself. After fifteen hundred years of constitutional study as to methods of raising on the bucklers, which is the operation of operations, the English People, surely pretty well skilled in it by this time, has raised--the remarkable individual now addressing you. The best-combined sample of whatsoever divine qualities are in this big People, the consummate flower of all that they have done and been, the ultimate product of the Destinies, and English man of men, arrived at last in the fulness of time, is--who think you? Ye worlds, the Ithuriel javelin by which, with all these heroisms and accumulated energies old and new, the English People means to smite and pierce, is this poor tailor's-bodkin, hardly adequate to bore an eylet-hole, who now has the honor to"--Good Heavens, if it were not that men generally are very much of the canary-bird, here, are reflections sufficient to annihilate any man, almost before starting! But to us also it ought to be a very strange reflection! This, then, is the length we have brought it to, with our constitutioning, and ballot-boxing, and incessant talk and effort in every kind for so many centuries back; this? The golden flower of our grand alchemical projection, which has set the world in astonishment so long, and been the envy of surrounding nations, is--what we here see. To be governed by his Lordship, and guided through the undiscovered paths of Time by this respectable degree of human faculty. With our utmost soul's travail we could discover, by the sublimest methods eulogized by all the world, no abler Englishman than this? Really it should make us pause upon the said sublime methods, and ask ourselves very seriously, whether, notwithstanding the eulogy of all the world, they can be other than extremely astonishing methods, that require revisal and reconsideration very much indeed! For the kind of "man" we get to govern us, all conclusions whatsoever centre there, and likewise all manner of issues flow infallibly therefrom. "Ask well, who is your Chief Governor," says one: "for around him men like to him will infallibly gather, and by degrees all the world will be made in his image." "He who is himself a noble man, has a chance to know the nobleness of men; he who is not, has none. And as for the poor Public,--alas, is not the kind of 'man' you set upon it the liveliest symbol of its and your veracity and victory and blessedness, or unveracity and misery and cursedness; the general summation and practical outcome of all else whatsoever in the Public and in you?" Time was when an incompetent Governor could not be permitted among men. He was, and had to be, by one method or the other, clutched up from his place at the helm of affairs, and hurled down into the hold, perhaps even overboard, if he could not really steer. And we call those ages barbarous, because they shuddered to see a Phantasm at the helm of their affairs; an eyeless Pilot with constitutional spectacles, steering by the ear mainly? And we have changed all that; no-government is now the best; and a tailor's foreman, who gives no trouble, is preferable to any other for governing? My friends, such truly is the current idea; but you dreadfully mistake yourselves, and the fact is not such. The fact, now beginning to disclose itself again in distressed Needlewomen, famishing Connaughts, revolting Colonies, and a general rapid advance towards Social Ruin, remains really what it always was, and will so remain! Men have very much forgotten it at present; and only here a man and there a man begins again to bethink himself of it: but all men will gradually get reminded of it, perhaps terribly to their cost; and the sooner they all lay it to heart again, I think it will be the better. For in spite of our oblivion of it, the thing remains forever true; nor is there any Constitution or body of Constitutions, were they clothed with never such venerabilities and general acceptabilities, that avails to deliver a Nation from the consequences of forgetting it. Nature, I assure you, does forevermore remember it; and a hundred British Constitutions are but as a hundred cobwebs between her and the penalty she levies for forgetting it. Tell me what kind of man governs a People, you tell me, with much exactness, what the net sum-total of social worth in that People has for some time been. Whether _they_ have loved the phylacteries or the eternal noblenesses; whether they have been struggling heavenward like eagles, brothers of the radiances, or groping owl-like with horn-eyed diligence, catching mice and balances at their banker's,--poor devils, you will see it all in that one fact. A fact long prepared beforehand; which, if it is a peaceably received one, must have been acquiesced in, judged to be "best," by the poor mousing owls, intent only to have a large balance at their banker's and keep a whole skin. Such sordid populations, which were long blind to Heaven's light, are getting themselves burnt up rapidly, in these days, by street-insurrection and Hell-fire;--as is indeed inevitable, my esteemed M'Croudy! Light, accept the blessed light, if you will have it when Heaven vouchsafes. You refuse? You prefer Delolme on the British Constitution, the Gospel according to M'Croudy, and a good balance at your banker's? Very well: the "light" is more and more withdrawn; and for some time you have a general dusk, very favorable for catching mice; and the opulent owlery is very "happy," and well-off at its banker's;--and furthermore, by due sequence, infallible as the foundations of the Universe and Nature's oldest law, the light _returns_ on you, condensed, this time, into _lightning_, which there is not any skin whatever too thick for taking in! No. IV. THE NEW DOWNING STREET. [April 15, 1850.] In looking at this wreck of Governments in all European countries, there is one consideration that suggests itself, sadly elucidative of our modern epoch. These Governments, we may be well assured, have gone to anarchy for this one reason inclusive of every other whatsoever, That they were not wise enough; that the spiritual talent embarked in them, the virtue, heroism, intellect, or by whatever other synonyms we designate it, was not adequate,--probably had long been inadequate, and so in its dim helplessness had suffered, or perhaps invited falsity to introduce itself; had suffered injustices, and solecisms, and contradictions of the Divine Fact, to accumulate in more than tolerable measure; whereupon said Governments were overset, and declared before all creatures to be too false. This is a reflection sad but important to the modern Governments now fallen anarchic, That they had not spiritual talent enough. And if this is so, then surely the question, How these Governments came to sink for _want_ of intellect? is a rather interesting one. Intellect, in some measure, is born into every Century; and the Nineteenth flatters itself that it is rather distinguished that way! What had become of this celebrated Nineteenth Century's intellect? Surely some of it existed, and was "developed" withal;--nay in the "undeveloped," unconscious, or inarticulate state, it is not dead; but alive and at work, if mutely not less beneficently, some think even more so! And yet Governments, it would appear, could by no means get enough of it; almost none of it came their way: what had become of it? Truly there must be something very questionable, either in the intellect of this celebrated Century, or in the methods Governments now have of supplying their wants from the same. One or other of two grand fundamental shortcomings, in regard to intellect or human enlightenment, is very visible in this enlightened Century of ours; for it has now become the most anarchic of Centuries; that is to say, has fallen practically into such Egyptian darkness that it cannot grope its way at all! Nay I rather think both of these shortcomings, fatal deficits both, are chargeable upon us; and it is the joint harvest of both that we are now reaping with such havoc to our affairs. I rather guess, the intellect of the Nineteenth Century, so full of miracle to Heavyside and others, is itself a mechanical or _beaver_ intellect rather than a high or eminently human one. A dim and mean though authentic kind of intellect, this; venerable only in defect of better. This kind will avail but little in the higher enterprises of human intellect, especially in that highest enterprise of guiding men Heavenward, which, after all, is the one real "governing" of them on this God's-Earth:--an enterprise not to be achieved by beaver intellect, but by other higher and highest kinds. This is deficit _first_. And then _secondly_, Governments have, really to a fatal and extraordinary extent, neglected in late ages to supply themselves with what intellect was going; having, as was too natural in the dim time, taken up a notion that human intellect, or even beaver intellect, was not necessary to them at all, but that a little of the _vulpine_ sort (if attainable), supported by routine, red-tape traditions, and tolerable parliamentary eloquence on occasion, would very well suffice. A most false and impious notion; leading to fatal lethargy on the part of Governments, while Nature and Fact were preparing strange phenomena in contradiction to it. These are two very fatal deficits;--the remedy of either of which would be the remedy of both, could we but find it! For indeed they are vitally connected: one of them is sure to produce the other; and both once in action together, the advent of darkness, certain enough to issue in anarchy by and by, goes on with frightful acceleration. If Governments neglect to invite what noble intellect there is, then too surely all intellect, not omnipotent to resist bad influences, will tend to become beaverish ignoble intellect; and quitting high aims, which seem shut up from it, will help itself forward in the way of making money and such like; or will even sink to be sham intellect, helping itself by methods which are not only beaverish but vulpine, and so "ignoble" as not to have common honesty. The Government, taking no thought to choose intellect for itself, will gradually find that there is less and less of a good quality to choose from: thus, as in all impieties it does, bad grows worse at a frightful _double_ rate of progression; and your impiety is twice cursed. If you are impious enough to tolerate darkness, you will get ever more darkness to tolerate; and at that inevitable stage of the account (inevitable in all such accounts) when actual light or else destruction is the alternative, you will call to the Heavens and the Earth for light, and none will come! Certainly this evil, for one, has _not_ "wrought its own cure;" but has wrought precisely the reverse, and has been hourly eating away what possibilities of cure there were. And so, I fear, in spite of rumors to the contrary, it always is with evils, with solecisms against Nature, and contradictions to the divine fact of things: not an evil of them has ever wrought its own cure in my experience;--but has continually grown worse and wider and uglier, till some _good_ (generally a good _man_) not able to endure the abomination longer, rose upon it and cured or else extinguished it. Evil Governments, divested of God's light because they have loved darkness rather, are not likelier than other evils to work their own cure out of that bad plight. It is urgent upon all Governments to pause in this fatal course; persisted in, the goal is fearfully evident; every hour's persistence in it is making return more difficult. Intellect exists in all countries; and the function appointed it by Heaven,--Governments had better not attempt to contradict that, for they cannot! Intellect _has_ to govern in this world and will do it, if not in alliance with so-called "Governments" of red-tape and routine, then in divine hostility to such, and sometimes alas in diabolic hostility to such; and in the end, as sure as Heaven is higher than Downing Street, and the Laws of Nature are tougher than red-tape, with entire victory over them and entire ruin to them. If there is one thinking man among the Politicians of England, I consider these things extremely well worth his attention just now. Who are available to your Offices in Downing Street? All the gifted souls, of every rank, who are born to you in this generation. These are appointed, by the true eternal "divine right" which will never become obsolete, to be your governors and administrators; and precisely as you employ them, or neglect to employ them, will your State be favored of Heaven or disfavored. This noble young soul, you can have him on either of two conditions; and on one of them, since he is here in the world, you must have him. As your ally and coadjutor; or failing that, as your natural enemy: which shall it be? I consider that every Government convicts itself of infatuation and futility, or absolves and justifies itself before God and man, according as it answers this question. With all sublunary entities, this is the question of questions. What talent is born to you? How do you employ that? The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you, of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or wine or herrings or whale-oil, which the Newspapers record with such anxiety every season. This is not quite counted by seasons, therefore the Newspapers are silent: but by generations and centuries, I assure you it becomes amazingly sensible; and surpasses, as Heaven does Earth, all the corn and wine, and whale-oil and California bullion, or any other crop you grow. If that crop cease, the other crops--please to take them also, if you are anxious about them. That once ceasing, we may shut shop; for no other crop whatever will stay with us, nor is worth having if it would. To promote men of talent, to search and sift the whole society in every class for men of talent, and joyfully promote them, has not always been found impossible. In many forms of polity they have done it, and still do it, to a certain degree. The degree to which they succeed in doing it marks, as I have said, with very great accuracy the degree of divine and human worth that is in them, the degree of success or real ultimate victory they can expect to have in this world.--Think, for example, of the old Catholic Church, in its merely terrestrial relations to the State; and see if your reflections, and contrasts with what now is, are of an exulting character. Progress of the species has gone on as with seven-league boots, and in various directions has shot ahead amazingly, with three cheers from all the world; but in this direction, the most vital and indispensable, it has lagged terribly, and has even moved backward, till now it is quite gone out of sight in clouds of cotton-fuzz and railway-scrip, and has fallen fairly over the horizon to rearward! In those most benighted Feudal societies, full of mere tyrannous steel Barons, and totally destitute of Tenpound Franchises and Ballot-boxes, there did nevertheless authentically preach itself everywhere this grandest of gospels, without which no other gospel can avail us much, to all souls of men, "Awake ye noble souls; here is a noble career for you!" I say, everywhere a road towards promotion, for human nobleness, lay wide open to all men. The pious soul,--which, if you reflect, will mean the ingenuous and ingenious, the gifted, intelligent and nobly-aspiring soul,--such a soul, in whatever rank of life it were born, had one path inviting it; a generous career, whereon, by human worth and valor, all earthly heights and Heaven itself were attainable. In the lowest stratum of social thraldom, nowhere was the noble soul doomed quite to choke, and die ignobly. The Church, poor old benighted creature, had at least taken care of that: the noble aspiring soul, not doomed to choke ignobly in its penuries, could at least run into the neighboring Convent, and there take refuge. Education awaited it there; strict training not only to whatever useful knowledge could be had from writing and reading, but to obedience, to pious reverence, self-restraint, annihilation of self,--really to human nobleness in many most essential respects. No questions asked about your birth, genealogy, quantity of money-capital or the like; the one question was, "Is there some human nobleness in you, or is there not?" The poor neat-herd's son, if he were a Noble of Nature, might rise to Priesthood, to High-priesthood, to the top of this world,--and best of all, he had still high Heaven lying high enough above him, to keep his head steady, on whatever height or in whatever depth his way might lie! A thrice-glorious arrangement, when I reflect on it; most salutary to all high and low interests; a truly human arrangement. You made the born noble yours, welcoming him as what he was, the Sent of Heaven: you did not force him either to die or become your enemy; idly neglecting or suppressing him as what he was not, a thing of no worth. You accepted the blessed _light_; and in the shape of infernal _lightning_ it needed not to visit you. How, like an immense mine-shaft through the dim oppressed strata of society, this Institution of the Priesthood ran; opening, from the lowest depths towards all heights and towards Heaven itself, a free road of egress and emergence towards virtuous nobleness, heroism and well-doing, for every born man. This we may call the living lungs and blood-circulation of those old Feudalisms. When I think of that immeasurable all-pervading lungs; present in every corner of human society, every meanest hut a _cell_ of said lungs; inviting whatsoever noble pious soul was born there to the path that was noble for him; and leading thereby sometimes, if he were worthy, to be the Papa of Christendom, and Commander of all Kings,--I perceive how the old Christian society continued healthy, vital, and was strong and heroic. When I contrast this with the noble aims now held out to noble souls born in remote huts, or beyond the verge of Palace-Yard; and think of what your Lordship has done in the way of making priests and papas,--I see a society without lungs, fast wheezing itself to death, in horrid convulsions; and deserving to die. Over Europe generally in these years, I consider that the State has died, has fairly coughed its last in street musketry, and fallen down dead, incapable of any but _galvanic_ life henceforth,--owing to this same fatal want of _lungs_, which includes all other wants for a State. And furthermore that it will never come alive again, till it contrive to get such indispensable vital apparatus; the outlook toward which consummation is very distant in most communities of Europe. If you let it come to death or suspended animation in States, the case is very bad! Vain to call in universal-suffrage parliaments at that stage: the universal-suffrage parliaments cannot give you any breath of life, cannot find any _wisdom_ for you; by long impiety, you have let the supply of noble human wisdom die out; and the wisdom that now courts your universal suffrages is beggarly human _attorneyism_ or sham-wisdom, which is _not_ an insight into the Laws of God's Universe, but into the laws of hungry Egoism and the Devil's Chicane, and can in the end profit no community or man. No; the kind of heroes that come mounted on the shoulders of the universal suffrage, and install themselves as Prime Ministers and healing Statesmen by force of able editorship, do not bid very fair to bring Nations back to the ways of God. Eloquent high-lacquered _pinchbeck_ specimens these, expert in the arts of Belial mainly;--fitter to be markers at some exceedingly expensive billiard-table than sacred chief-priests of men! "Greeks of the Lower Empire;" with a varnish of parliamentary rhetoric; and, I suppose, this other great gift, toughness of character,--proof that they have _persevered_ in their Master's service. Poor wretches, their industry is mob-worship, place-worship, parliamentary intrigue, and the multiplex art of tongue-fence: flung into that bad element, there they swim for decades long, throttling and wrestling one another according to their strength,--and the toughest or luckiest gets to land, and becomes Premier. A more entirely unbeautiful class of Premiers was never raked out of the ooze, and set on high places, by any ingenuity of man. Dame Dubarry's petticoat was a better seine-net for fishing out Premiers than that. Let all Nations whom necessity is driving towards that method, take warning in time! Alas, there is, in a manner, but one Nation that can still take warning! In England alone of European Countries the State yet survives; and might help itself by better methods. In England heroic wisdom is not yet dead, and quite replaced by attorneyism: the honest beaver faculty yet abounds with us, the heroic manful faculty shows itself also to the observant eye, not dead but dangerously sleeping. I said there were many _kings_ in England: if these can yet be rallied into strenuous activity, and set to govern England in Downing Street and elsewhere, which their function always is,--then England can be saved from anarchies and universal suffrages; and that Apotheosis of Attorneyism, blackest of terrestrial curses, may be spared us. If these cannot, the other issue, in such forms as may be appropriate to us, is inevitable. What escape is there? England must conform to the eternal laws of life, or England too must die! England with the largest mass of real living interests ever intrusted to a Nation; and with a mass of extinct imaginary and quite dead interests piled upon it to the very Heavens, and encumbering it from shore to shore,--does reel and stagger ominously in these years; urged by the Divine Silences and the Eternal Laws to take practical hold of its living interests and manage them: and clutching blindly into its venerable extinct and imaginary interests, as if that were still the way to do it. England must contrive to manage its living interests, and quit its dead ones and their methods, or else depart from its place in this world. Surely England is called as no Nation ever was, to summon out its _kings_, and set them to that high work!--Huge inorganic England, nigh choked under the exuviae of a thousand years, and blindly sprawling amid chartisms, ballot-boxes, prevenient graces, and bishops' nightmares, must, as the preliminary and commencement of organization, learn to _breathe_ again,--get "lungs" for herself again, as we defined it. That is imperative upon her: she too will die, otherwise, and cough her last upon the streets some day;--how can she continue living? To enfranchise whatsoever of Wisdom is born in England, and set that to the sacred task of coercing and amending what of Folly is born in England: Heaven's blessing is purchasable by that; by not that, only Heaven's curse is purchasable. The reform contemplated, my liberal friends perceive, is a truly radical one; no ballot-box ever went so deep into the roots: a radical, most painful, slow and difficult, but most indispensable reform of reforms! How short and feeble an approximation to these high ulterior results, the best Reform of Downing Street, presided over by the fittest Statesman one can imagine to exist at present, would be, is too apparent to me. A long time yet till we get our living interests put under due administration, till we get our dead interests handsomely dismissed. A long time yet till, by extensive change of habit and ways of thinking and acting, _we_ get living "lungs" for ourselves! Nevertheless, by Reform of Downing Street, we do begin to breathe: we do start in the way towards that and all high results. Nor is there visible to me any other way. Blessed enough were the way once entered on; could we, in our evil days, but see the noble enterprise begun, and fairly in progress! What the "_New_ Downing Street" can grow to, and will and must if England is to have a Downing Street beyond a few years longer, it is far from me, in my remote watch-tower, to say with precision. A Downing Street inhabited by the gifted of the intellects of England; directing all its energies upon the real and living interests of England, and silently but incessantly, in the alembics of the place, burning up the extinct imaginary interests of England, that we may see God's sky a little plainer overhead, and have all of us a great accession of "heroic wisdom" to dispose of: such a Downing Street--to draw the plan of it, will require architects; many successive architects and builders will be needed there. Let not editors, and remote unprofessional persons, interfere too much!--Change in the present edifice, however, radical change, all men can discern to be inevitable; and even, if there shall not worse swiftly follow, to be imminent. Outlines of the future edifice paint themselves against the sky (to men that still have a sky, and are above the miserable London fogs of the hour); noble elements of new State Architecture, foreshadows of a new Downing Street for the New Era that is come. These with pious hope all men can see; and it is good that all men, with whatever faculty they have, were earnestly looking thitherward;--trying to get above the fogs, that they might look thitherward! Among practical men the idea prevails that Government can do nothing but "keep the peace." They say all higher tasks are unsafe for it, impossible for it,--and in fine not necessary for it or for us. On this footing a very feeble Downing Street might serve the turn!--I am well aware that Government, for a long time past, has taken in hand no other public task, and has professed to have no other, but that of keeping the peace. This public task, and the private one of ascertaining whether Dick or Jack was to do it, have amply filled the capabilities of Government for several generations now. Hard tasks both, it would appear. In accomplishing the first, for example, have not heaven-born Chancellors of the Exchequer had to shear us very bare; and to leave an overplus of Debt, or of fleeces shorn _before_ they are grown, justly esteemed among the wonders of the world? Not a first-rate keeping of the peace, this, we begin to surmise! At least it seems strange to us. For we, and the overwhelming majority of all our acquaintances, in this Parish and Nation and the adjacent Parishes and Nations, are profoundly conscious to ourselves of being by nature peaceable persons; following our necessary industries; without wish, interest or faintest intention to cut the skin of any mortal, to break feloniously into his industrial premises, or do any injustice to him at all. Because indeed, independent of Government, there is a thing called conscience, and we dare not. So that it cannot but appear to us, "the peace," under dexterous management, might be very much more easily kept, your Lordship; nay, we almost think, if well let alone, it would in a measure keep _itself_ among such a set of persons! And how it happens that when a poor hardworking creature of us has laboriously earned sixpence, the Government comes in, and (as some compute) says, "I will thank you for threepence of that, as per account, for getting you peace to spend the other threepence," our amazement begins to be considerable,--and I think results will follow from it by and by. Not the most dexterous keeping of the peace, your Lordship, unless it be more difficult to do than appears! Our domestic peace, we cannot but perceive, as good as keeps itself. Here and there a select Equitable Person, appointed by the Public for that end, clad in ermine, and backed by certain companies of blue Police, is amply adequate, without immoderate outlay in money or otherwise, to keep down the few exceptional individuals of the scoundrel kind; who, we observe, by the nature of them, are always weak and inconsiderable. And as to foreign peace, really all Europe, now especially with so many railroads, public journals, printed books, penny-post, bills of exchange, and continual intercourse and mutual dependence, is more and more becoming (so to speak) one Parish; the Parishioners of which being, as we ourselves are, in immense majority peaceable hard-working people, could, if they were moderately well guided, have almost no disposition to quarrel. Their economic interests are one, "To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest;" their faith, any _religious_ faith they have, is one, "To annihilate shams--by all methods, street-barricades included." Why should they quarrel? The Czar of Russia, in the Eastern parts of the Parish, may have other notions; but he knows too well he must keep them to himself. He, if he meddled with the Western parts, and attempted anywhere to crush or disturb that sacred Democratic Faith of theirs, is aware there would rise from a hundred and fifty million human throats such a _Hymn of the Marseillaise_ as was never heard before; and England, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Nine Kingdoms, hurling themselves upon him in never-imagined fire of vengeance, would swiftly reduce his Russia and him to a strange situation! Wherefore he forbears,--and being a person of some sense, will long forbear. In spite of editorial prophecy, the Czar of Russia does not disturb our night's rest. And with the other parts of the Parish our dreams and our thoughts are of anything but of fighting, or of the smallest need to fight. For keeping of the peace, a thing highly desirable to us, we strive to be grateful to your Lordship. Intelligible to us, also, your Lordship's reluctance to get out of the old routine. But we beg to say farther, that peace by itself has no feet to stand upon, and would not suit us even if it had. Keeping of the peace is the function of a policeman, and but a small fraction of that of any Government, King or Chief of men. Are not all men bound, and the Chief of men in the name of all, to do properly this: To see, so far as human effort under pain of eternal reprobation can, God's Kingdom incessantly advancing here below, and His will done on Earth as it is in Heaven? On Sundays your Lordship knows this well; forgot it not on week-days. I assure you it is forevermore a fact. That is the immense divine and never-ending task which is laid on every man, and with unspeakable increase of emphasis on every Government or Commonwealth of men. Your Lordship, that is the basis upon which peace and all else depends! That basis once well lost, there is no peace capable of being kept,--the only peace that could then be kept is that of the churchyard. Your Lordship may depend on it, whatever thing takes upon it the name of Sovereign or Government in an English Nation such as this will have to get out of that old routine; and set about keeping something very different from the peace, in these days! Truly it is high time that same beautiful notion of No-Government should take itself away. The world is daily rushing towards wreck, while that lasts. If your Government is to be a Constituted Anarchy, what issue can it have? Our one interest in such Government is, that it would be kind enough to cease and go its ways, _before_ the inevitable arrive. The question, Who is to float atop no-whither upon the popular vertexes, and act that sorry character, "carcass of the drowned ass upon the mud-deluge"? is by no means an important one for almost anybody,--hardly even for the drowned ass himself. Such drowned ass ought to ask himself, If the function is a sublime one? For him too, though he looks sublime to the vulgar and floats atop, a private situation, down out of sight in his natural ooze, would be a luckier one. Crabbe, speaking of constitutional philosophies, faith in the ballot-box and such like, has this indignant passage: "If any voice of deliverance or resuscitation reach us, in this our low and all but lost estate, sunk almost beyond plummet's sounding in the mud of Lethe, and oblivious of all noble objects, it will be an intimation that we must put away all this abominable nonsense, and understand, once more, that Constituted Anarchy, with however many ballot-boxes, caucuses, and hustings beer-barrels, is a continual offence to gods and men. That to be governed by small men is not only a misfortune, but it is a curse and a sin; the effect, and alas the cause also, of all manner of curses and sins. That to profess subjection to phantasms, and pretend to accept guidance from fractional parts of tailors, is what Smelfungus in his rude dialect calls it, 'a damned _lie_,' and nothing other. A lie which, by long use and wont, we have grown accustomed to, and do not the least feel to be a lie, having spoken and done it continually everywhere for such a long time past;--but has Nature grown to accept it as a veracity, think you, my friend? Have the Parcae fallen asleep, because you wanted to make money in the City? Nature at all moments knows well that it is a lie; and that, like all lies, it is cursed and damned from the beginning. "Even so, ye indigent millionnaires, and miserable bankrupt populations rolling in gold,--whose note-of-hand will go to any length in Threadneedle Street, and to whom in Heaven's Bank the stern answer is, 'No effects!' Bankrupt, I say; and Californias and Eldorados will not save us. And every time we speak such lie, or do it or look it, as we have been incessantly doing, and many of us with clear consciousness, for about a hundred and fifty years now, Nature marks down the exact penalty against us. 'Debtor to so much lying: forfeiture of existing stock of worth to such extent;--approach to general damnation by so much.' Till now, as we look round us over a convulsed anarchic Europe, and at home over an anarchy not yet convulsed, but only heaving towards convulsion, and to judge by the Mosaic sweating-establishments, cannibal Connaughts and other symptoms, not far from convulsion now, we seem to have pretty much _exhausted_ our accumulated stock of worth; and unless money's 'worth' and bullion at the Bank will save us, to be rubbing very close upon that ulterior bourn which I do not like to name again! "On behalf of nearly twenty-seven millions of my fellow-countrymen, sunk deep in Lethean sleep, with mere owl-dreams of Political Economy and mice-catching, in this pacific thrice-infernal slush-element; and also of certain select thousands, and hundreds and units, awakened or beginning to awaken from it, and with horror in their hearts perceiving where they are, I beg to protest, and in the name of God to say, with poor human ink, desirous much that I had divine thunder to say it with, Awake, arise,--before you sink to death eternal! Unnamable destruction, and banishment to Houndsditch and Gehenna, lies in store for all Nations that, in angry perversity or brutal torpor and owlish blindness, neglect the eternal message of the gods, and vote for the Worse while the Better is there. Like owls they say, 'Barabbas will do; any orthodox Hebrew of the Hebrews, and peaceable believer in M'Croudy and the Faith of Leave-alone will do: the Right Honorable Minimus is well enough; he shall be our Maximus, under him it will be handy to catch mice, and Owldom shall continue a flourishing empire.'" One thing is undeniable, and must be continually repeated till it get to be understood again: Of all constitutions, forms of government, and political methods among men, the question to be asked is even this, What kind of man do you set over us? All questions are answered in the answer to this. Another thing is worth attending to: No people or populace, with never such ballot-boxes, can select such man for you; only the man of worth can recognize worth in men;--to the commonplace man of no or of little worth, you, unless you wish to be _mis_led, need not apply on such an occasion. Those poor Tenpound Franchisers of yours, they are not even in earnest; the poor sniffing sniggering Honorable Gentlemen they send to Parliament are as little so. Tenpound Franchisers full of mere beer and balderdash; Honorable Gentlemen come to Parliament as to an Almack's series of evening parties, or big cockmain (battle of all the cocks) very amusing to witness and bet upon: what can or could men in that predicament ever do for you? Nay, if they were in life-and-death earnest, what could it avail you in such a case? I tell you, a million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of what you call genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but nonsense out of him and his qualities, and his virtues and defects, if they look till the end of time. He understands them, sees what they are; but that they should understand him, and see with rounded outline what his limits are,--this, which would mean that they are bigger than he, is forever denied them. Their one good understanding of him is that they at last should loyally say, "We do not quite understand thee; we perceive thee to be nobler and wiser and bigger than we, and will loyally follow thee." The question therefore arises, Whether, since reform of parliament and such like have done so little in that respect, the problem might not be with some hope attacked in the direct manner? Suppose all our Institutions, and Public Methods of Procedure, to continue for the present as they are; and suppose farther a Reform Premier, and the English Nation once awakening under him to a due sense of the infinite importance, nay the vital necessity there is of getting able and abler men:--might not some heroic wisdom, and actual "ability" to do what must be done, prove discoverable to said Premier; and so the indispensable Heaven's-blessing descend to us from _above_, since none has yet sprung from below? From above we shall have to try it; the other is exhausted,--a hopeless method that! The utmost passion of the house-inmates, ignorant of masonry and architecture, cannot avail to cure the house of smoke: not if _they_ vote and agitate forever, and bestir themselves to the length even of street-barricades, will the _smoke_ in the least abate: how can it? Their passion exercised in such ways, till Doomsday, will avail them nothing. Let their passion rage steadily against the existing major-domos to this effect, "_Find_ us men skilled in house-building, acquainted with the laws of atmospheric suction, and capable to cure smoke;" something might come of it! In the lucky circumstance of having one man of real intellect and courage to put at the head of the movement, much would come of it;--a New Downing Street, fit for the British Nation and its bitter necessities in this Now Era, would come; and from that, in answer to continuous sacred fidelity and valiant toil, all good whatsoever would gradually come. Of the Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy,"--if this should alarm any reader,--I can see no risk or possibility in England. Democracy is hot enough here, fierce enough; it is perennial, universal, clearly invincible among us henceforth. No danger it should let itself be flung in chains by sham secretaries of the Pedant species, and accept their vile Age of Pinchbeck for its Golden Age! Democracy clamors, with its Newspapers, its Parliaments, and all its twenty-seven million throats, continually in this Nation forevermore. I remark, too, that, the unconscious purport of all its clamors is even this, "Find us men skilled,"--_make_ a New Downing Street, fit for the New Era! Of the Foreign Office, in its reformed state, we have not much to say. Abolition of imaginary work, and replacement of it by real, is on all hands understood to be very urgent there. Large needless expenditures of money, immeasurable ditto of hypocrisy and grimace; embassies, protocols, worlds of extinct traditions, empty pedantries, foul cobwebs:--but we will by no means apply the "live coal" of our witty friend; the Foreign Office will repent, and not be driven to suicide! A truer time will come for the Continental Nations too: Authorities based on truth, and on the silent or spoken Worship of Human Nobleness, will again get themselves established there; all Sham-Authorities, and consequent Real-Anarchies based on universal suffrage and the Gospel according to George Sand, being put away; and noble action, heroic new-developments of human faculty and industry, and blessed fruit as of Paradise getting itself conquered from the waste battle-field of the chaotic elements, will once more, there as here, begin to show themselves. When the Continental Nations have once got to the bottom of _their_ Augean Stable, and begun to have real enterprises based on the eternal facts again, our Foreign Office may again have extensive concerns with them. And at all times, and even now, there will remain the question to be sincerely put and wisely answered, What essential concern _has_ the British Nation with them and their enterprises? Any concern at all, except that of handsomely keeping apart from them? If so, what are the methods of best managing it?--At present, as was said, while Red Republic but clashes with foul Bureaucracy; and Nations, sunk in blind ignavia, demand a universal-suffrage Parliament to heal their wretchedness; and wild Anarchy and Phallus-Worship struggle with Sham-Kingship and extinct or galvanized Catholicism; and in the Cave of the Winds all manner of rotten waifs and wrecks are hurled against each other,--our English interest in the controversy, however huge said controversy grow, is quite trifling; we have only in a handsome manner to say to it: "Tumble and rage along, ye rotten waifs and wrecks; clash and collide as seems fittest to you; and smite each other into annihilation at your own good pleasure. In that huge conflict, dismal but unavoidable, we, thanks to our heroic ancestors, having got so far ahead of you, have now no interest at all. Our decided notion is, the dead ought to bury their dead in such a case: and so we have the honor to be, with distinguished consideration, your entirely devoted,--FLIMNAP, SEC. FOREIGN DEPARTMENT."--I really think Flimnap, till truer times come, ought to treat much of his work in this way: cautious to give offence to his neighbors; resolute not to concern himself in any of their self-annihilating operations whatsoever. Foreign wars are sometimes unavoidable. We ourselves, in the course of natural merchandising and laudable business, have now and then got into ambiguous situations; into quarrels which needed to be settled, and without fighting would not settle. Sugar Islands, Spice Islands, Indias, Canadas, these, by the real decree of Heaven, were ours; and nobody would or could believe it, till it was tried by cannon law, and so proved. Such cases happen. In former times especially, owing very much to want of intercourse and to the consequent mutual ignorance, there did occur misunderstandings: and therefrom many foreign wars, some of them by no means unnecessary. With China, or some distant country, too unintelligent of us and too unintelligible to us, there still sometimes rises necessary occasion for a war. Nevertheless wars--misunderstandings that get to the length of arguing themselves out by sword and cannon--have, in these late generations of improved intercourse, been palpably becoming less and less necessary; have in a manner become superfluous, if we had a little wisdom, and our Foreign Office on a good footing. Of European wars I really hardly remember any, since Oliver Cromwell's last Protestant or Liberation war with Popish antichristian Spain some two hundred years ago, to which I for my own part could have contributed my life with any heartiness, or in fact would have subscribed money itself to any considerable amount. Dutch William, a man of some heroism, did indeed get into troubles with Louis Fourteenth; and there rested still some shadow of Protestant Interest, and question of National and individual Independence, over those wide controversies; a little money and human enthusiasm was still due to Dutch William. Illustrious Chatham also, not to speak of his Manilla ransoms and the like, did one thing: assisted Fritz of Prussia, a brave man and king (almost the only sovereign King I have known since Cromwell's time) like to be borne down by ignoble men and sham-kings; for this let illustrious Chatham too have a little money and human enthusiasm,--a little, by no means much. But what am I to say of heaven-born Pitt the son of Chatham? England sent forth her fleets and armies; her money into every country; money as if the heaven-born Chancellor had got a Fortunatus' purse; as if this Island had become a volcanic fountain of gold, or new terrestrial sun capable of radiating mere guineas. The result of all which, what was it? Elderly men can remember the tar-barrels burnt for success and thrice-immortal victory in the business; and yet what result had we? The French Revolution, a Fact decreed in the Eternal Councils, could not be put down: the result was, that heaven-born Pitt had actually been fighting (as the old Hebrews would have said) against the Lord,--that the Laws of Nature were stronger than Pitt. Of whom therefore there remains chiefly his unaccountable radiation of guineas, for the gratitude of posterity. Thank you for nothing,--for eight hundred millions _less_ than nothing! Our War Offices, Admiralties, and other Fighting Establishments, are forcing themselves on everybody's attention at this time. Bull grumbles audibly: "The money you have cost me these five-and-thirty years, during which you have stood elaborately ready to fight at any moment, without at any moment being called to fight, is surely an astonishing sum. The National Debt itself might have been half paid by that money, which has all gone in pipe-clay and blank cartridges! "Yes, Mr. Bull, the money can be counted in hundreds of millions; which certainly is something:--but the "strenuously organized idleness," and what mischief that amounts to,--have you computed it? A perpetual solecism, and blasphemy (of its sort), set to march openly among us, dressed in scarlet! Bull, with a more and more sulky tone, demands that such solecism be abated; that these Fighting Establishments be as it were disbanded, and set to do some work in the Creation, since fighting there is now none for them. This demand is irrefragably just, is growing urgent too; and yet this demand cannot be complied with,--not yet while the State grounds itself on unrealities, and Downing Street continues what it is. The old Romans made their soldiers work during intervals of war. The New Downing Street too, we may predict, will have less and less tolerance for idleness on the part of soldiers or others. Nay the New Downing Street, I foresee, when once it has got its "_Industrial_ Regiments" organized, will make these mainly do its fighting, what fighting there is; and so save immense sums. Or indeed, all citizens of the Commonwealth, as is the right and the interest of every free man in this world, will have themselves trained to arms; each citizen ready to defend his country with his own body and soul,--he is not worthy to have a country otherwise. In a State grounded on veracities, that would be the rule. Downing Street, if it cannot bethink itself of returning to the veracities, will have to vanish altogether! To fight with its neighbors never was, and is now less than ever, the real trade of England. For far other objects was the English People created into this world; sent down from the Eternities, to mark with its history certain spaces in the current of sublunary Time! Essential, too, that the English People should discover what its real objects are; and resolutely follow these, resolutely refusing to follow other than these. The State will have victory so far as it can do that; so far as it cannot, defeat. In the New Downing Street, discerning what its real functions are, and with sacred abhorrence putting away from it what its functions are not, we can fancy changes enough in Foreign Office, War Office, Colonial Office, Home Office! Our War-soldiers _Industrial_, first of all; doing nobler than Roman works, when fighting is not wanted of them. Seventy-fours not hanging idly by their anchors in the Tagus, or off Sapienza (one of the saddest sights under the sun), but busy, every Seventy-four of them, carrying over streams of British Industrials to the immeasurable Britain that lies beyond the sea in every zone of the world. A State grounding itself on the veracities, not on the semblances and the injustices: every citizen a soldier for it. Here would be new _real_ Secretaryships and Ministries, not for foreign war and diplomacy, but for domestic peace and utility. Minister of Works; Minister of Justice,--clearing his Model Prisons of their scoundrelism; shipping his scoundrels wholly abroad, under hard and just drill-sergeants (hundreds of such stand wistfully ready for you, these thirty years, in the Rag-and-Famish Club and elsewhere!) into fertile desert countries; to make railways,--one big railway (says the Major [Footnote: Major Carmichael Smith; see his Pamphlets on this subject]) quite across America; fit to employ all the able-bodied Scoundrels and efficient Half-pay Officers in Nature! Lastly,--or rather firstly, and as the preliminary of all, would there not be a Minister of Education? Minister charged to get this English People taught a little, at his and our peril! Minister of Education; no longer dolefully embayed amid the wreck of moribund "religions," but clear ahead of all that; steering, free and piously fearless, towards his divine goal under the eternal stars!--O heaven, and are these things forever impossible, then? Not a whit. To-morrow morning they might all begin to be, and go on through blessed centuries realizing themselves, if it were not that--alas, if it were not that we are most of us insincere persons, sham talking-machines and hollow windy fools! Which it is not "impossible" that we should cease to be, I hope? Constitutions for the Colonies are now on the anvil; the discontented Colonies are all to be cured of their miseries by Constitutions. Whether that will cure their miseries, or only operate as a Godfrey's-cordial to stop their whimpering, and in the end worsen all their miseries, may be a sad doubt to us. One thing strikes a remote spectator in these Colonial questions: the singular placidity with which the British Statesman at this time, backed by M'Croudy and the British moneyed classes, is prepared to surrender whatsoever interest Britain, as foundress of those establishments, might pretend to have in the decision. "If you want to go from us, go; we by no means want you to stay: you cost us money yearly, which is scarce; desperate quantities of trouble too: why not go, if you wish it?" Such is the humor of the British Statesman, at this time.--Men clear for rebellion, "annexation" as they call it, walk openly abroad in our American Colonies; found newspapers, hold platform palaverings. From Canada there comes duly by each mail a regular statistic of Annexationism: increasing fast in this quarter, diminishing in that;--Majesty's Chief Governor seeming to take it as a perfectly open question; Majesty's Chief Governor in fact seldom appearing on the scene at all, except to receive the impact of a few rotten eggs on occasion, and then duck in again to his private contemplations. And yet one would think the Majesty's Chief Governor ought to have a kind of interest in the thing? Public liberty is carried to a great length in some portions of her Majesty's dominions. But the question, "Are we to continue subjects of her Majesty, or start rebelling against her? So many as are for rebelling, hold up your hands!" Here is a public discussion of a very extraordinary nature to be going on under the nose of a Governor of Canada. How the Governor of Canada, being a British piece of flesh and blood, and not a Canadian lumber-log of mere pine and rosin, can stand it, is not very conceivable at first view. He does it, seemingly, with the stoicism of a Zeno. It is a constitutional sight like few. And yet an instinct deeper than the Gospel of M'Croudy teaches all men that Colonies are worth something to a country! That if, under the present Colonial Office, they are a vexation to us and themselves, some other Colonial Office can and must be contrived which shall render them a blessing; and that the remedy will be to contrive such a Colonial Office or method of administration, and by no means to cut the Colonies loose. Colonies are not to be picked off the street every day; not a Colony of them but has been bought dear, well purchased by the toil and blood of those we have the honor to be sons of; and we cannot just afford to cut them away because M'Croudy finds the present management of them cost money. The present management will indeed require to be cut away;--but as for the Colonies, we purpose through Heaven's blessing to retain them a while yet! Shame on us for unworthy sons of brave fathers if we do not. Brave fathers, by valiant blood and sweat, purchased for us, from the bounty of Heaven, rich possessions in all zones; and we, wretched imbeciles, cannot do the function of administering them? And because the accounts do not stand well in the ledger, our remedy is, not to take shame to ourselves, and repent in sackcloth and ashes, and amend our beggarly imbecilities and insincerities in that as in other departments of our business, but to fling the business overboard, and declare the business itself to be bad? We are a hopeful set of heirs to a big fortune! It does not suit our Manton gunneries, grouse-shootings, mousings in the City; and like spirited young gentlemen we will give it up, and let the attorneys take it? Is there no value, then, in human things, but what can write itself down in the cash-ledger? All men know, and even M'Croudy in his inarticulate heart knows, that to men and Nations there are invaluable values which cannot be sold for money at all. George Robins is great; but he is not onmipotent. George Robins cannot quite sell Heaven and Earth by auction, excellent though he be at the business. Nay, if M'Croudy offered his own life for _sale_ in Threadneedle Street, would anybody buy it? Not I, for one. "Nobody bids: pass on to the next lot," answers Robins. And yet to M'Croudy this unsalable lot is worth all the Universe:--nay, I believe, to us also it is worth something; good monitions, as to several things, do lie in this Professor of the dismal science; and considerable sums even of money, not to speak of other benefit, will yet come out of his life and him, for which nobody bids! Robins has his own field where he reigns triumphant; but to that we will restrict him with iron limits; and neither Colonies nor the lives of Professors, nor other such invaluable objects shall come under his hammer. Bad state of the ledger will demonstrate that your way of dealing with your Colonies is absurd, and urgently in want of reform; but to demonstrate that the Empire itself must be dismembered to bring the ledger straight? Oh never. Something else than the ledger must intervene to do that. Why does not England repudiate Ireland, and insist on the "Repeal," instead of prohibiting it under death-penalties? Ireland has never been a paying speculation yet, nor is it like soon to be! Why does not Middlesex repudiate Surrey, and Chelsea Kensington, and each county and each parish, and in the end each individual set up for himself and his cash-box, repudiating the other and his, because their mutual interests have got into an irritating course? They must change the course, seek till they discover a soothing one; that is the remedy, when limbs of the same body come to irritate one another. Because the paltry tatter of a garment, reticulated for you out of thrums and listings in Downing Street, ties foot and hand together in an intolerable manner, will you relieve yourself by cutting off the hand or the foot? You will cut off the paltry tatter of a pretended body-coat, I think, and fling that to the nettles; and imperatively require one that fits your size better. Miserabler theory than that of money on the ledger being the primary rule for Empires, or for any higher entity than City owls and their mice-catching, cannot well be propounded. And I would by no means advise Felicissimus, ill at ease on his high-trotting and now justly impatient Sleswicker, to let the poor horse in its desperation go in that direction for a momentary solace. If by lumber-log Governors, by Godfrey's cordial Constitutions or otherwise, be contrived to cut off the Colonies or any real right the big British Empire has in her Colonies, both he and the British Empire will bitterly repent it one day! The Sleswicker, relieved in ledger for a moment, will find that it is wounded in heart and honor forever; and the turning of its wild forehoofs upon Felicissimus as he lies in the ditch combed off, is not a thing I like to think of! Britain, whether it be known to Felicissimus or not, has other tasks appointed her in God's Universe than the making of money; and woe will betide her if she forget those other withal. Tasks, colonial and domestic, which are of an eternally _divine_ nature, and compared with which all money, and all that is procurable by money, are in strict arithmetic an imponderable quantity, have been assigned this Nation; and they also at last are coming upon her again, clamorous, abstruse, inevitable, much to her bewilderment just now! This poor Nation, painfully dark about said tasks and the way of doing them, means to keep its Colonies nevertheless, as things which somehow or other must have a value, were it better seen into. They are portions of the general Earth, where the children of Britain now dwell; where the gods have so far sanctioned their endeavor, as to say that they have a right to dwell. England will not readily admit that her own children are worth nothing but to be flung out of doors! England looking on her Colonies can say: "Here are lands and seas, spice-lands, corn-lands, timber-lands, overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas; wide spaces of the Maker's building, fit for the cradle yet of mighty Nations and their Sciences and Heroisms. Fertile continents still inhabited by wild beasts are mine, into which all the distressed populations of Europe might pour themselves, and make at once an Old World and a New World human. By the eternal fiat of the gods, this must yet one day be; this, by all the Divine Silences that rule this Universe, silent to fools, eloquent and awful to the hearts of the wise, is incessantly at this moment, and at all moments, commanded to begin to be. Unspeakable deliverance, and new destiny of thousand-fold expanded manfulness for all men, dawns out of the Future here. To me has fallen the godlike task of initiating all that: of me and of my Colonies, the abstruse Future asks, Are you wise enough for so sublime a destiny? Are you too foolish?" That you ask advice of whatever wisdom is to be had in the Colony, and even take note of what _un_wisdom is in it, and record that too as an existing fact, will certainly be very advantageous. But I suspect the kind of Parliament that will suit a Colony is much of a secret just now! Mr. Wakefield, a democratic man in all fibres of him, and acquainted with Colonial Socialities as few are, judges that the franchise for your Colonial Parliament should be decidedly select, and advises a high money-qualification; as there is in all Colonies a fluctuating migratory mass, not destitute of money, but very much so of loyalty, permanency, or civic availability; whom it is extremely advantageous not to consult on what you are about attempting for the Colony or Mother Country. This I can well believe;--and also that a "high money-qualification," in the present sad state of human affairs, might be some help to you in selecting; though whether even that would quite certainly bring "wisdom," the one thing indispensable, is much a question with me. It might help, it might help! And if by any means you could (which you cannot) exclude the Fourth Estate, and indicate decisively that Wise Advice was the thing wanted here, and Parliamentary Eloquence was not the thing wanted anywhere just now,--there might really some light of experience and human foresight, and a truly valuable benefit, be found for you in such assemblies. And there is one thing, too apt to be forgotten, which it much behooves us to remember: In the Colonies, as everywhere else in this world, the vital point is not who decides, but what is decided on! That measures tending really to the best advantage temporal and spiritual of the Colony be adopted, and strenuously put in execution; there lies the grand interest of every good citizen British and Colonial. Such measures, whosoever have originated and prescribed them, will gradually be sanctioned by all men and gods; and clamors of every kind in reference to them may safely to a great extent be neglected, as clamorous merely, and sure to be transient. Colonial Governor, Colonial Parliament, whoever or whatever does an injustice, or resolves on an _un_wisdom, he is the pernicious object, however parliamentary he be! I have known things done, in this or the other Colony, in the most parliamentary way before now, which carried written on the brow of them sad symptoms of eternal reprobation; not to be mistaken, had you painted an inch thick. In Montreal, for example, at this moment, standing amid the ruins of the "Elgin Marbles" (as they call the burnt walls of the Parliament House there), what rational British soul but is forced to institute the mournfulest constitutional reflection? Some years ago the Canadas, probably not without materials for discontent, and blown upon by skilful artists, blazed up into crackling of musketry, open flame of rebellion; a thing smacking of the gallows in all countries that pretend to have any "Government." Which flame of rebellion, had there been no loyal population to fling themselves upon it at peril of their life, might have ended we know not how. It ended speedily, in the good way; Canada got a Godfrey's-cordial Constitution; and for the moment all was varnished into some kind of feasibility again. A most poor feasibility; momentary, not lasting, nor like to be of profit to Canada! For this year, the Canadian most constitutional Parliament, such a congeries of persons as one can imagine, decides that the aforesaid flame of rebellion shall not only be forgotten as per bargain, but that--the loyal population, who flung their lives upon it and quenched it in the nick of time, shall pay the rebels their damages! Of this, I believe, on sadly conclusive evidence, there is no doubt whatever. Such, when you wash off the constitutional pigments, is the Death's-head that discloses itself. I can only say, if all the Parliaments in the world were to vote that such a thing was just, I should feel painfully constrained to answer, at my peril, "No, by the Eternal, never!" And I would recommend any British Governor who might come across that Business, there or here, to overhaul it again. What the meaning of a Governor, if he is not to overhaul and control such things, may be, I cannot conjecture. A Canadian Lumber-log may as well be made Governor. _He_ might have some cast-metal hand or shoulder-crank (a thing easily contrivable in Birmingham) for signing his name to Acts of the Colonial Parliament; he would be a "native of the country" too, with popularity on that score if on no other;--he is your man, if you really want a Log Governor!-- I perceive therefore that, besides choosing Parliaments never so well, the New Colonial Office will have another thing to do: Contrive to send out a new kind of Governors to the Colonies. This will be the mainspring of the business; without this the business will not go at all. An experienced, wise and valiant British man, to represent the Imperial Interest; he, with such a speaking or silent Collective Wisdom as he can gather round him in the Colony, will evidently be the condition of all good between the Mother Country and it. If you can find such a man, your point is gained; if you cannot, lost. By him and his Collective Wisdom all manner of _true_ relations, mutual interests and duties such as they do exist in fact between Mother Country and Colony, can be gradually developed into practical methods and results; and all manner of true and noble successes, and veracities in the way of governing, be won. Choose well your Governor;--not from this or that poor section of the Aristocracy, military, naval, or red-tapist; wherever there are born kings of men, you had better seek them out, and breed them to this work. All sections of the British Population will be open to you: and, on the whole, you must succeed in finding a man _fit_. And having found him, I would farther recommend you to keep him some time! It would be a great improvement to end this present nomadism of Colonial Governors. Give your Governor due power; and let him know withal that he is wedded to his enterprise, and having once well learned it, shall continue with it; that it is not a Canadian Lumber-log you want there, to tumble upon the vertexes and sign its name by a Birmingham shoulder-crank, but a Governor of Men; who, you mean, shall fairly gird himself to his enterprise, and fail with it and conquer with it, and as it were live and die with it: he will have much to learn; and having once learned it, will stay, and turn his knowledge to account. From this kind of Governor, were you once in the way of finding him with moderate certainty, from him and his Collective Wisdom, all good whatsoever might be anticipated. And surely, were the Colonies once enfranchised from red-tape, and the poor Mother Country once enfranchised from it; were our idle Seventy-fours all busy carrying out streams of British Industrials, and those Scoundrel Regiments all working, under divine drill-sergeants, at the grand Atlantic and Pacific Junction Railway,--poor Britain and her poor Colonies might find that they _had_ true relations to each other: that the Imperial _Mother_ and her constitutionally obedient Daughters were not a red-tape fiction, provoking bitter mockery as at present, but a blessed God's-Fact destined to fill half the world with its fruits one day! But undoubtedly our grand primary concern is the Home Office, and its Irish Giant named of Despair. When the Home Office begins dealing with this Irish Giant, which it is vitally urgent for us the Home Office should straightway do, it will find its duties enlarged to a most unexpected extent, and, as it were, altered from top to bottom. A changed time now when the question is, What to do with three millions of paupers (come upon you for food, since you have no work for them) increasing at a frightful rate per day? Home Office, Parliament, King, Constitution will find that they have now, if they will continue in this world long, got a quite immense new question and continually recurring set of questions. That huge question of the Irish Giant with his Scotch and English Giant-Progeny advancing open-mouthed upon us, will, as I calculate, change from top to bottom not the Home Office only but all manner of Offices and Institutions whatsoever, and gradually the structure of Society itself. I perceive, it will make us a new Society, if we are to continue a Society at all. For the alternative is not, Stay where we are, or change? But Change, with new wise effort fit for the new time, to true and wider nobler National Life; or Change, by indolent folding of the arms, as we are now doing, in horrible anarchies and convulsions to Dissolution, to National Death, or Suspended-animation? Suspended-animation itself is a frightful possibility for Britain: this Anarchy whither all Europe has preceded us, where all Europe is now weltering, would suit us as ill as any! The question for the British Nation is: Can we work our course pacifically, on firm land, into the New Era; or must it be, for us too, as for all the others, through black abysses of Anarchy, hardly escaping, if we do with all our struggles escape, the jaws of eternal Death? For Pauperism, though it now absorbs its high figure of millions annually, is by no means a question of money only, but of infinitely higher and greater than all conceivable money. If our Chancellor of the Exchequer had a Fortunatus' purse, and miraculous sacks of Indian meal that would stand scooping from forever,--I say, even on these terms Pauperism could not be endured; and it would vitally concern all British Citizens to abate Pauperism, and never rest till they had ended it again. Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship that it is rotten. Were all men doing their duty, or even seriously trying to do it, there would be no Pauper. Were the pretended Captains of the world at all in the habit of commanding; were the pretended Teachers of the world at all in the habit of teaching,--of admonishing said Captains among others, and with sacred zeal apprising them to what place such neglect was leading,--how could Pauperism exist? Pauperism would lie far over the horizon; we should be lamenting and denouncing quite inferior sins of men, which were only tending afar off towards Pauperism. A true Captaincy; a true Teachership, either making all men and Captains know and devoutly recognize the eternal law of things, or else breaking its own heart, and going about with sackcloth round its loins, in testimony of continual sorrow and protest, and prophecy of God's vengeance upon such a course of things: either of these divine equipments would have saved us; and it is because we have neither of them that we are come to such a pass! We may depend upon it, where there is a Pauper, there is a sin; to make one Pauper there go many sins. Pauperism is our Social Sin grown manifest; developed from the state of a spiritual ignobleness, a practical impropriety and base oblivion of duty, to an affair of the ledger. Here is not now an unheeded sin against God; here is a concrete ugly bulk of Beggary demanding that you should buy Indian meal for it. Men of reflection have long looked with a horror for which there was no response in the idle public, upon Pauperism; but the quantity of meal it demands has now awakened men of no reflection to consider it. Pauperism is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid unveracities and god-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving cants and jesuitisms, that exist among us. Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other. His sham-work oozes down; finds at last its issue as human Pauperism,--in a human being that by those false pretences cannot live. The Idle Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian quagmire of our affairs? Workhouse Paupers; immortal sons of Adam rotted into that scandalous condition, subter-slavish, demanding that you would make slaves of them as an unattainable blessing! My friends, I perceive the quagmire must be drained, or we cannot live. And farther, I perceive, this of Pauperism is the corner where we must _begin_,--the levels all pointing thitherward, the possibilities lying all clearly there. On that Problem we shall find that innumerable things, that all things whatsoever hang. By courageous steadfast persistence in that, I can foresee Society itself regenerated. In the course of long strenuous centuries, I can see the State become what it is actually bound to be, the keystone of a most real "Organization of Labor,"--and on this Earth a world of some veracity, and some heroism, once more worth living in! The State in all European countries, and in England first of all, as I hope, will discover that its functions are now, and have long been, very wide of what the State in old pedant Downing Streets has aimed at; that the State is, for the present, not a reality but in great part a dramatic speciosity, expending its strength in practices and objects fallen many of them quite obsolete; that it must come a little nearer the true aim again, or it cannot continue in this world. The "Champion of England" eased in iron or tin, and "able to mount his horse with little assistance,"--this Champion and the thousand-fold cousinry of Phantasms he has, nearly all dead now but still walking as ghosts, must positively take himself away: who can endure him, and his solemn trumpetings and obsolete gesticulations, in a Time that is full of deadly realities, coming open-mouthed upon us? At Drury Lane, let him play his part, him and his thousand-fold cousinry; and welcome, so long as any public will pay a shilling to see him: but on the solid earth, under the extremely earnest stars, we dare not palter with him, or accept his tomfooleries any more. Ridiculous they seem to some; horrible they seem to me: all lies, if one look whence they come and whither they go, are horrible. Alas, it will be found, I doubt, that in England more than in any country, our Public Life and our Private, our State and our Religion, and all that we do and speak (and the most even of what we _think_), is a tissue of half-truths and whole-lies; of hypocrisies, conventionalisms, worn-out traditionary rags and cobwebs; such a life-garment of beggarly incredible and uncredited falsities as no honest souls of Adam's Posterity were ever enveloped in before. And we walk about in it with a stately gesture, as if it were some priestly stole or imperial mantle; not the foulest beggar's gabardine that ever was. "No Englishman dare believe the truth," says one: "he stands, for these two hundred years, enveloped in lies of every kind; from nadir to zenith an ocean of traditionary cant surrounds him as his life-element. He really thinks the truth dangerous. Poor wretch, you see him everywhere endeavoring to temper the truth by taking the falsity along with it, and welding them together; this he calls 'safe course,' 'moderate course,' and other fine names; there, balanced between God and the Devil, he thinks he _can_ serve two masters, and that things will go well with him." In the cotton-spinning and similar departments our English friend knows well that truth or God will have nothing to do with the Devil or falsehood, but will ravel all the web to pieces if you introduce the Devil or Non-veracity in any form into it: in this department, therefore, our English friend avoids falsehood. But in the religious, political, social, moral, and all other spiritual departments he freely introduces falsehood, nothing doubting; and has long done so, with a profuseness not elsewhere met with in the world. The unhappy creature, does he not know, then, that every lie is accursed, and the parent of mere curses? That he must _think_ the truth; much more speak it? That, above all things, by the oldest law of Heaven and Earth which no man violates with impunity, he must not and shall not wag the tongue of him except to utter his thought? That there is not a grin or beautiful acceptable grimace he can execute upon his poor countenance, but is either an express veracity, the image of what passes within him; or else is a bit of Devil-worship which he and the rest of us will have to pay for yet? Alas, the grins he executes upon his poor _mind_ (which is all tortured into St. Vitus dances, and ghastly merry-andrewisms, by the practice) are the most extraordinary this sun ever saw. We have Puseyisms, black-and-white surplice controversies:--do not, officially and otherwise, the select of the longest heads in England sit with intense application and iron gravity, in open forum, judging of "prevenient grace"? Not a head of them suspects that it can be improper so to sit, or of the nature of treason against the Power who gave an Intellect to man;--that it can be other than the duty of a good citizen to use his god-given intellect in investigating prevenient grace, supervenient moonshine, or the color of the Bishop's nightmare, if that happened to turn up. I consider them far ahead of Cicero's Roman Augurs with their chicken-bowels: "Behold these divine chicken-bowels, O Senate and Roman People; the midriff has fallen eastward!" solemnly intimates one Augur. "By Proserpina and the triple Hecate!" exclaims the other, "I say the midriff has fallen to the west!" And they look at one another with the seriousness of men prepared to die in their opinion,--the authentic seriousness of men betting at Tattersall's, or about to receive judgment in Chancery. There is in the Englishman something great, beyond all Roman greatness, in whatever line you meet him; even as a Latter-Day Augur he seeks his fellow!--Poor devil, I believe it is his intense love of peace, and hatred of breeding discussions which lead no-whither, that has led him into this sad practice of amalgamating true and false. He has been at it these two hundred years; and has now carried it to a terrible length. He couldn't follow Oliver Cromwell in the Puritan path heavenward, so steep was it, and beset with thorns,--and becoming uncertain withal. He much preferred, at that juncture, to go heavenward with his Charles Second and merry Nell Gwynns, and old decent formularies and good respectable aristocratic company, for escort; sore he tried, by glorious restorations, glorious revolutions and so forth, to perfect this desirable amalgam; hoped always it might be possible;--is only just now, if even now, beginning to give up the hope; and to see with wide-eyed horror that it is not at Heaven he is arriving, but at the Stygian marshes, with their thirty thousand Needlewomen, cannibal Connaughts, rivers of lamentation, continual wail of infants, and the yellow-burning gleam of a Hell-on-Earth!--Bull, my friend, you must strip that astonishing pontiff-stole, imperial mantle, or whatever you imagine it to be, which I discern to be a garment of curses, and poisoned Nessus'-shirt now at last about to take fire upon you; you must strip that off your poor body, my friend; and, were it only in a soul's suit of Utilitarian buff, and such belief as that a big loaf is better than a small one, come forth into contact with your world, under _true_ professions again, and not false. You wretched man, you ought to weep for half a century on discovering what lies you have believed, and what every lie leads to and proceeds from. O my friend, no honest fellow in this Planet was ever so served by his cooks before; or has eaten such quantities and qualities of dirt as you have been made to do, for these two centuries past. Arise, my horribly maltreated yet still beloved Bull; steep yourself in running water for a long while, my friend; and begin forthwith in every conceivable direction, physical and spiritual, the long-expected _Scavenger Age_. Many doctors have you had, my poor friend; but I perceive it is the Water-Cure alone that will help you: a complete course of _scavengerism_ is the thing you need! A new and veritable heart-divorce of England from the Babylonish woman, who is Jesuitism and Unveracity, and dwells not at Rome now, but under your own nose and everywhere; whom, and her foul worship of Phantasms and Devils, poor England _had_ once divorced, with a divine heroism not forgotten yet, and well worth remembering now: a Phantasms which have too long nestled thick there, under those astonishing "Defenders of the Faith,"--Defenders of the Hypocrisies, the spiritual Vampires and obscene Nightmares, under which England lies in syncope;--this is what you need; and if you cannot get it, you must die, my poor friend! Like people, like priest. Priest, King, Home Office, all manner of establishments and offices among a people bear a striking resemblance to the people itself. It is because Bull has been eating so much dirt that his Home Offices have got into such a shockingly dirty condition,--the old pavements of them quite gone out of sight and out of memory, and nothing but mountains of long-accumulated dung in which the poor cattle are sprawling and tumbling. Had his own life been pure, had his own daily conduct been grounding itself on the clear pavements or actual beliefs and veracities, would he have let his Home Offices come to such a pass? Not in Downing Street only, but in all other thoroughfares and arenas and spiritual or physical departments of his existence, running water and Herculean scavengerism have become indispensable, unless the poor man is to choke in his own exuviae, and die the sorrowfulest death. If the State could once get back to the real sight of its essential function, and with religious resolution begin doing that, and putting away its multifarious imaginary functions, and indignantly casting out these as mere dung and insalubrious horror and abomination (which they are), what a promise of reform were there! The British Home Office, surely this and its kindred Offices exist, if they will think of it, that life and work may continue possible, and may not become impossible, for British men. If honorable existence, or existence on human terms at all, have become impossible for millions of British men, how can the Home Office or any other Office long exist? With thirty thousand Needlewomen, a Connaught fallen into potential cannibalism, and the Idle Workhouse everywhere bursting, and declaring itself an inhumanity and stupid ruinous brutality not much longer to be tolerated among rational human creatures, it is time the State were bethinking itself. So soon as the State attacks that tremendous cloaca of Pauperism, which will choke the world if it be not attacked, the State will find its real functions very different indeed from what it had long supposed them! The State is a reality, and not a dramaturgy; it exists here to render existence possible, existence desirable and noble, for the State's subjects. The State, as it gets into the track of its real work, will find that same expand into whole continents of new unexpected, most blessed activity; as its dramatic functions, declared superfluous, more and more fall inert, and go rushing like huge torrents of extinct exuviae, dung and rubbish, down to the Abyss forever. O Heaven, to see a State that knew a little why it was there, and on what ground, in this Year 1850, it could pretend to exist, in so extremely earnest a world as ours is growing! The British State, if it will be the crown and keystone of our British Social Existence, must get to recognize, with a veracity very long unknown to it, what the real objects and indispensable necessities of our Social Existence are. Good Heavens, it is not prevenient grace, or the color of the Bishop's nightmare, that is pinching us; it is the impossibility to get along any farther for mountains of accumulated dung and falsity and horror; the total closing-up of noble aims from every man,--of any aim at all, from many men, except that of rotting out in Idle Workhouses an existence below that of beasts! Suppose the State to have fairly started its "Industrial Regiments of the New Era," which alas, are yet only beginning to be talked of,--what continents of new real work opened out, for the Home and all other Public Offices among us! Suppose the Home Office looking out, as for life and salvation, for proper men to command these "Regiments." Suppose the announcement were practically made to all British souls that the want of wants, more indispensable than any jewel in the crown, was that of men _able to command men_ in ways of industrial and moral well-doing; that the State would give its very life for such men; that such men _were_ the State; that the quantity of them to be found in England lamentably small at present, was the exact measure of England's worth,--what a new dawn of everlasting day for all British souls! Noble British soul, to whom the gods have given faculty and heroism, what men call genius, here at last is a career for thee. It will not be needful now to swear fealty to the Incredible, and traitorously cramp thyself into a cowardly canting play-actor in God's Universe; or, solemnly forswearing that, into a mutinous rebel and waste bandit in thy generation: here is an aim that is clear and credible, a course fit for a man. No need to become a tormenting and self-tormenting mutineer, banded with rebellious souls, if thou wouldst live; no need to rot in suicidal idleness; or take to platform preaching, and writing in Radical Newspapers, to pull asunder the great Falsity in which thou and all of us are choking. The great Falsity, behold it has become, in the very heart of it, a great Truth of Truths; and invites thee and all brave men to cooperate with it in transforming all the body and the joints into the noble likeness of that heart! Thrice-blessed change. The State aims, once more, with a true aim; and has loadstars in the eternal Heaven. Struggle faithfully for it; noble is _this_ struggle; thou too, according to thy faculty, shalt reap in due time, if thou faint not. Thou shalt have a wise command of men, thou shalt be wisely commanded by men,--the summary of all blessedness for a social creature here below. The sore struggle, never to be relaxed, and not forgiven to any son of man, is once more a noble one; glory to the Highest, it is now once more a true and noble one, wherein a man can afford to die! Our path is now again Heavenward. Forward, with steady pace, with drawn weapons, and unconquerable hearts, in the name of God that made us all!-- Wise obedience and wise command, I foresee that the regimenting of Pauper Banditti into Soldiers of Industry is but the beginning of this blessed process, which will extend to the topmost heights of our Society; and, in the course of generations, make us all once more a Governed Commonwealth, and _Civitas Dei_, if it please God! Waste-land Industrials succeeding, other kinds of Industry, as cloth-making, shoe-making, plough-making, spade-making, house-building,--in the end, all kinds of Industry whatsoever, will be found capable of regimenting. Mill-operatives, all manner of free operatives, as yet unregimented, nomadic under private masters, they, seeing such example and its blessedness, will say: "Masters, you must regiment us a little; make our interests with you permanent a little, instead of temporary and nomadic; we will enlist with the State otherwise!" This will go on, on the one hand, while the State-operation goes on, on the other: thus will all Masters of Workmen, private Captains of Industry, be forced to incessantly co-operate with the State and its public Captains; they regimenting in their way, the State in its way, with ever-widening field; till their fields _meet_ (so to speak) and coalesce, and there be no unregimented worker, or such only as are fit to remain unregimented, any more.--O my friends, I clearly perceive this horrible cloaca of Pauperism, wearing nearly bottomless now, is the point where we must begin. Here, in this plainly unendurable portion of the general quagmire, the lowest point of all, and hateful even to M'Croudy, must our main drain begin: steadily prosecuting that, tearing that along with Herculean labor and divine fidelity, we shall gradually drain the entire Stygian swamp, and make it all once more a fruitful field! For the State, I perceive, looking out with right sacred earnestness for persons able to command, will straightway also come upon the question: "What kind of schools and seminaries, and teaching and also preaching establishments have I, for the training of young souls to take command and to yield obedience? Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil, wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these. He is a good man that can command and obey; he that cannot is a bad. If my teachers and my preachers, with their seminaries, high schools and cathedrals, do train men to these gifts, the thing they are teaching and preaching must be true; if they do not, not true!" The State, once brought to its veracities by the thumb-screw in this manner, what will it think of these same seminaries and cathedrals! I foresee that our Etons and Oxfords with their nonsense-verses, college-logics, and broken crumbs of mere _speech_,--which is not even English or Teutonic speech, but old Grecian and Italian speech, dead and buried and much lying out of our way these two thousand years last past,--will be found a most astonishing seminary for the training of young English souls to take command in human Industries, and act a valiant part under the sun! The State does not want vocables, but manly wisdoms and virtues: the State, does it want parliamentary orators, first of all, and men capable of writing books? What a rag-fair of extinct monkeries, high-piled here in the very shrine of our existence, fit to smite the generations with atrophy and beggarly paralysis,--as we see it do! The Minister of Education will not want for work, I think, in the New Downing Street! How it will go with Souls'-Overseers, and what the _new_ kind will be, we do not prophesy just now. Clear it is, however, that the last finish of the State's efforts, in this operation of regimenting, will be to get the _true_ Souls'-Overseers set over men's souls, to regiment, as the consummate flower of all, and constitute into some Sacred Corporation, bearing authority and dignity in their generation, the Chosen of the Wise, of the Spiritual and Devout-minded, the Reverent who deserve reverence, who are as the Salt of the Earth;--that not till this is done can the State consider its edifice to have reached the first story, to be safe for a moment, to be other than an arch without the keystones, and supported hitherto on mere wood. How will this be done? Ask not; let the second or the third generation after this begin to ask!--Alas, wise men do exist, born duly into the world in every current generation; but the getting of _them_ regimented is the highest pitch of human Polity, and the feat of all feats in political engineering:--impossible for us, in this poor age, as the building of St. Paul's would be for Canadian Beavers, acquainted only with the architecture of fish-dams, and with no trowel but their tail. Literature, the strange entity so called,--that indeed is here. If Literature continue to be the haven of expatriated spiritualisms, and have its Johnsons, Goethes and _true_ Archbishops of the World, to show for itself as heretofore, there may be hope in Literature. If Literature dwindle, as is probable, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of spiritual legerdemain, analogous to rope-dancing, opera-dancing, and street-fiddling with a hat carried round for halfpence, or for guineas, there will be no hope in Literature. What if our next set of Souls'-Overseers were to be _silent_ ones very mainly?--Alas, alas, why gaze into the blessed continents and delectable mountains of a Future based on _truth_, while as yet we struggle far down, nigh suffocated in a slough of lies, uncertain whether or how we shall be able to climb at all! Who will begin the long steep journey with us; who of living statesmen will snatch the standard, and say, like a hero on the forlorn-hope for his country, Forward! Or is there none; no one that can and dare? And our lot too, then, is Anarchy by barricade or ballot-box, and Social Death?--We will not think so. Whether Sir Robert Peel will undertake the Reform of Downing Street for us, or any Ministry or Reform farther, is not known. He, they say, is getting old, does himself recoil from it, and shudder at it; which is possible enough. The clubs and coteries appear to have settled that he surely will not; that this melancholy wriggling seesaw of red-tape Trojans and Protectionist Greeks must continue its course till--what _can_ happen, my friends, if this go on continuing? And yet, perhaps, England has by no means so settled it. Quit the clubs and coteries, you do not hear two rational men speak long together upon politics, without pointing their inquiries towards this man. A Minister that will attack the Augeas Stable of Downing Street, and begin producing a real Management, no longer an imaginary one, of our affairs; _he_, or else in few years Chartist Parliament and the Deluge come: that seems the alternative. As I read the omens, there was no man in my time more authentically called to a post of difficulty, of danger, and of honor than this man. The enterprise is ready for him, if he is ready for it. He has but to lift his finger in this enterprise, and whatsoever is wise and manful in England will rally round him. If the faculty and heart for it be in him, he, strangely and almost tragically if we look upon his history, is to have leave to try it; he now, at the eleventh hour, has the opportunity for such a feat in reform as has not, in these late generations, been attempted by all our reformers put together. As for Protectionist jargon, who in these earnest days would occupy many moments of his time with that? "A Costermonger in this street," says Crabbe, "finding lately that his rope of onions, which he hoped would have brought a shilling, was to go for only sevenpence henceforth, burst forth into lamentation, execration and the most pathetic tears. Throwing up the window, I perceived the other costermongers preparing impatiently to pack this one out of their company as a disgrace to it, if he would not hold his peace and take the market-rate for his onions. I looked better at this Costermonger. To my astonished imagination, a star-and-garter dawned upon the dim figure of the man; and I perceived that here was no Costermonger to be expelled with ignominy, but a sublime goddess-born Ducal Individual, whom I forbear to name at this moment! What an omen;--nay to my astonished imagination, there dawned still fataler omens. Surely, of all human trades ever heard of, the trade of Owning Land in England ought _not_ to bully us for drink--money just now!" "Hansard's Debates," continues Crabbe farther on, "present many inconsistencies of speech; lamentable unveracities uttered in Parliament, by one and indeed by all; in which sad list Sir Robert Peel stands for his share among others. Unveracities not a few were spoken in Parliament: in fact, to one with a sense of what is called God's truth, it seemed all one unveracity, a talking from the teeth outward, not as the convictions but as the expediencies and inward astucities directed; and, in the sense of God's _truth_, I have heard no true word uttered in Parliament at all. Most lamentable unveracities continually _spoken_ in Parliament, by almost every one that had to open his mouth there. But the largest veracity ever _done_ in Parliament in our time, as we all know, was of this man's doing;--and that, you will find, is a very considerable item in the calculation!" Yes, and I believe England in her dumb way remembers that too. And "the Traitor Peel" can very well afford to let innumerable Ducal Costermongers, parliamentary Adventurers, and lineal representatives of the Impenitent Thief, say all their say about him, and do all their do. With a virtual England at his back, and an actual eternal sky above him, there is not much in the total net-amount of that. When the master of the horse rides abroad, many dogs in the village bark; but he pursues his journey all the same. No. V. STUMP-ORATOR. [May 1, 1850.] It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,--this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us. Preceptor or professor, looking over his miraculous seedplot, seminary as he well calls it, or crop of young human souls, watches with attentive view one organ of his delightful little seedlings growing to be men,--the tongue. He hopes we shall all get to speak yet, if it please Heaven. "Some of you shall be book-writers, eloquent review-writers, and astonish mankind, my young friends: others in white neckcloths shall do sermons by Blair and Lindley Murray, nay by Jeremy Taylor and judicious Hooker, and be priests to guide men heavenward by skilfully brandished handkerchief and the torch of rhetoric. For others there is Parliament and the election beer-barrel, and a course that leads men very high indeed; these shall shake the senate-house, the Morning Newspapers, shake the very spheres, and by dexterous wagging of the tongue disenthrall mankind, and lead our afflicted country and us on the way we are to go. The way if not where noble deeds are done, yet where noble words are spoken,--leading us if not to the real Home of the Gods, at least to something which shall more or less deceptively resemble it!" So fares it with the son of Adam, in these bewildered epochs; so, from the first opening of his eyes in this world, to his last closing of them, and departure hence. Speak, speak, oh speak;--if thou have any faculty, speak it, or thou diest and it is no faculty! So in universities, and all manner of dames' and other schools, of the very highest class as of the very lowest; and Society at large, when we enter there, confirms with all its brilliant review-articles, successful publications, intellectual tea-circles, literary gazettes, parliamentary eloquences, the grand lesson we had. Other lesson in fact we have none, in these times. If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue, and make melody with that organ. The talent that can say nothing for itself, what is it? Nothing; or a thing that can do mere drudgeries, and at best make money by railways. All this is deep-rooted in our habits, in our social, educational and other arrangements; and all this, when we look at it impartially, is astonishing. Directly in the teeth of all this it may be asserted that speaking is by no means the chief faculty a human being can attain to; that his excellence therein is by no means the best test of his general human excellence, or availability in this world; nay that, unless we look well, it is liable to become the very worst test ever devised for said availability. The matter extends very far, down to the very roots of the world, whither the British reader cannot conveniently follow me just now; but I will venture to assert the three following things, and invite him to consider well what truth he can gradually find in them:-- First, that excellent speech, even speech _really_ excellent, is not, and never was, the chief test of human faculty, or the measure of a man's ability, for any true function whatsoever; on the contrary, that excellent _silence_ needed always to accompany excellent speech, and was and is a much rarer and more difficult gift. _Secondly_, that really excellent speech--which I, being possessed of the Hebrew Bible or Book, as well as of other books in my own and foreign languages, and having occasionally heard a wise man's word among the crowd of unwise, do almost unspeakably esteem, as a human gift--is terribly apt to get confounded with its counterfeit, sham-excellent speech! And furthermore, that if really excellent human speech is among the best of human things, then sham-excellent ditto deserves to be ranked with the very worst. False speech,--capable of becoming, as some one has said, the falsest and basest of all human things:--put the case, one were listening to _that_ as to the truest and noblest! Which, little as we are conscious of it, I take to be the sad lot of many excellent souls among us just now. So many as admire parliamentary eloquence, divine popular literature, and such like, are dreadfully liable to it just now: and whole nations and generations seem as if getting themselves _asphyxiaed_, constitutionally into their last sleep, by means of it just now! For alas, much as we worship speech on all hands, here is a _third_ assertion which a man may venture to make, and invite considerate men to reflect upon: That in these times, and for several generations back, there has been, strictly considered, no really excellent speech at all, but sham-excellent merely; that is to say, false or quasi-false speech getting itself admired and worshipped, instead of detested and suppressed. A truly alarming predicament; and not the less so if we find it a quite pleasant one for the time being, and welcome the advent of asphyxia, as we would that of comfortable natural sleep;--as, in so many senses, we are doing! Surly judges there have been who did not much admire the "Bible of Modern Literature," or anything you could distil from it, in contrast with the ancient Bibles; and found that in the matter of speaking, our far best excellence, where that could be obtained, was excellent silence, which means endurance and exertion, and good work with lips closed; and that our tolerablest speech was of the nature of honest commonplace introduced where indispensable, which only set up for being brief and true, and could not be mistaken for excellent. These are hard sayings for many a British reader, unconscious of any damage, nay joyfully conscious to himself of much profit, from that side of his possessions. Surely on this side, if on no other, matters stood not ill with him? The ingenuous arts had softened his manners; the parliamentary eloquences supplied him with a succedaneum for government, the popular literatures with the finer sensibilities of the heart: surely on this _wind_ward side of things the British reader was not ill off?--Unhappy British reader! In fact, the spiritual detriment we unconsciously suffer, in every province of our affairs, from this our prostrate respect to power of speech is incalculable. For indeed it is the natural consummation of an epoch such as ours. Given a general insincerity of mind for several generations, you will certainly find the Talker established in the place of honor; and the Doer, hidden in the obscure crowd, with activity lamed, or working sorrowfully forward on paths unworthy of him. All men are devoutly prostrate, worshipping the eloquent talker; and no man knows what a scandalous idol he is. Out of whom in the mildest manner, like comfortable natural rest, comes mere asphyxia and death everlasting! Probably there is not in Nature a more distracted phantasm than your commonplace eloquent speaker, as he is found on platforms, in parliaments, on Kentucky stumps, at tavern-dinners, in windy, empty, insincere times like ours. The "excellent Stump-orator," as our admiring Yankee friends define him, he who in any occurrent set of circumstances can start forth, mount upon his "stump," his rostrum, tribune, place in parliament, or other ready elevation, and pour forth from him his appropriate "excellent speech," his interpretation of the said circumstances, in such manner as poor windy mortals round him shall cry bravo to,--he is not an artist I can much admire, as matters go! Alas, he is in general merely the windiest mortal of them all; and is admired for being so, into the bargain. Not a windy blockhead there who kept silent but is better off than this excellent stump-orator. Better off, for a great many reasons; for this reason, were there no other: the silent one is not admired; the silent suspects, perhaps partly admits, that he is a kind of blockhead, from which salutary self-knowledge the excellent stump-orator is debarred. A mouthpiece of Chaos to poor benighted mortals that lend ear to him as to a voice from Cosmos, this excellent stump-orator fills me with amazement. Not empty these musical wind-utterances of his; they are big with prophecy; they announce, too audibly to me, that the end of many things is drawing nigh! Let the British reader consider it a little; he too is not a little interested in it. Nay he, and the European reader in general, but he chiefly in these days, will require to consider it a great deal,--and to take important steps in consequence by and by, if I mistake not. And in the mean while, sunk as he himself is in that bad element, and like a jaundiced man struggling to discriminate yellow colors,--he will have to meditate long before he in any measure get the immense meanings of the thing brought home to him; and discern, with astonishment, alarm, and almost terror and despair, towards what fatal issues, in our Collective Wisdom and elsewhere, this notion of talent meaning eloquent speech, so obstinately entertained this long while, has been leading us! Whosoever shall look well into origins and issues, will find this of eloquence and the part it now plays in our affairs, to be one of the gravest phenomena; and the excellent stump-orator of these days to be not only a ridiculous but still more a highly tragical personage. While the many listen to him, the few are used to pass rapidly, with some gust of scornful laughter, some growl of impatient malediction; but he deserves from this latter class a much more serious attention. In the old Ages, when Universities and Schools were first instituted, this function of the schoolmaster, to teach mere speaking, was the natural one. In those healthy times, guided by silent instincts and the monition of Nature, men had from of old been used to teach themselves what it was essential to learn, by the one sure method of learning anything, practical apprenticeship to it. This was the rule for all classes; as it now is the rule, unluckily, for only one class. The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,--among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;--not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak! And for that latter requisite the Priest also trained himself by apprenticeship, by actual attempt to practise, by manifold long-continued trial, of a devout and painful nature, such as his superiors prescribed to him. This, when once judged satisfactory, procured him ordination; and his grammar-learning, in the good times of priesthood, was very much of a parergon with him, as indeed in all times it is intrinsically quite insignificant in comparison. The young Noble again, for whom grammar schoolmasters were first hired and high seminaries founded, he too without these, or above and over these, had from immemorial time been used to learn his business by apprenticeship. The young Noble, before the schoolmaster as after him, went apprentice to some elder noble; entered himself as page with some distinguished earl or duke; and here, serving upwards from step to step, under wise monition, learned his chivalries, his practice of arms and of courtesies, his baronial duties and manners, and what it would beseem him to do and to be in the world,--by practical attempt of his own, and example of one whose life was a daily concrete pattern for him. To such a one, already filled with intellectual substance, and possessing what we may call the practical gold-bullion of human culture, it was an obvious improvement that he should be taught to speak it out of him on occasion; that he should carry a spiritual banknote producible on demand for what of "gold-bullion" he had, not so negotiable otherwise, stored in the cellars of his mind. A man, with wisdom, insight and heroic worth already acquired for him, naturally demanded of the schoolmaster this one new faculty, the faculty of uttering in fit words what he had. A valuable superaddition of faculty:--and yet we are to remember it was scarcely a new faculty; it was but the tangible sign of what other faculties the man had in the silent state: and many a rugged inarticulate chief of men, I can believe, was most enviably "educated," who had not a Book on his premises; whose signature, a true sign-_manual_, was the stamp of his iron hand duly inked and clapt upon the parchment; and whose speech in Parliament, like the growl of lions, did indeed convey his meaning, but would have torn Lindley Murray's nerves to pieces! To such a one the schoolmaster adjusted himself very naturally in that manner; as a man wanted for teaching grammatical utterance; the thing to utter being already there. The thing to utter, here was the grand point! And perhaps this is the reason why among earnest nations, as among the Romans for example, the craft of the schoolmaster was held in little regard; for indeed as mere teacher of grammar, of ciphering on the abacus and such like, how did he differ much from the dancing-master or fencing-master, or deserve much regard?--Such was the rule in the ancient healthy times. Can it be doubtful that this is still the rule of human education; that the human creature needs first of all to be educated not that he may speak, but that he may have something weighty and valuable to say! If speech is the bank-note of an inward capital of culture, of insight and noble human worth, then speech is precious, and the art of speech shall be honored. But if there is no inward capital; if speech represent no real culture of the mind, but an imaginary culture; no bullion, but the fatal and now almost hopeless deficit of such? Alas, alas, said bank-note is then a _forged_ one; passing freely current in the market; but bringing damages to the receiver, to the payer, and to all the world, which are in sad truth infallible, and of amount incalculable. Few think of it at present; but the truth remains forever so. In parliaments and other loud assemblages, your eloquent talk, disunited from Nature and her facts, is taken as wisdom and the correct image of said facts: but Nature well knows what it is, Nature will not have it as such, and will reject your forged note one day, with huge costs. The foolish traders in the market pass freely, nothing doubting, and rejoice in the dexterous execution of the piece: and so it circulates from hand to hand, and from class to class; gravitating ever downwards towards the practical class; till at last it reaches some poor _working_ hand, who can pass it no farther, but must take it to the bank to get bread with it, and there the answer is, "Unhappy caitiff, this note is forged. It does not mean performance and reality, in parliaments and elsewhere, for thy behoof; it means fallacious semblance of performance; and thou, poor dupe, art thrown into the stocks on offering it here!" Alas, alas, looking abroad over Irish difficulties, Mosaic sweating-establishments, French barricades, and an anarchic Europe, is it not as if all the populations of the world were rising or had risen into incendiary madness;--unable longer to endure such an avalanche of forgeries, and of penalties in consequence, as had accumulated upon them? The speaker is "excellent;" the notes he does are beautiful? Beautifully fit for the market, yes; _he_ is an excellent artist in his business;--and the more excellent he is, the more is my desire to lay him by the heels, and fling _him_ into the treadmill, that I might save the poor sweating tailors, French Sansculottes, and Irish Sanspotatoes from bearing the smart! For the smart must be borne; some one must bear it, as sure as God lives. Every word of man is either a note or a forged note:--have these eternal skies forgotten to be in earnest, think you, because men go grinning like enchanted apes? Foolish souls, this now as of old is the unalterable law of your existence. If you know the truth and do it, the Universe itself seconds you, bears you on to sure victory everywhere:--and, observe, to sure defeat everywhere if you do not do the truth. And alas, if you _know_ only the eloquent fallacious semblance of the truth, what chance is there of your ever doing it? You will do something very different from it, I think!--He who well considers, will find this same "art of speech," as we moderns have it, to be a truly astonishing product of the Ages; and the longer he considers it, the more astonishing and alarming. I reckon it the saddest of all the curses that now lie heavy on us. With horror and amazement, one perceives that this much-celebrated "art," so diligently practised in all corners of the world just now, is the chief destroyer of whatever good is born to us (softly, swiftly shutting up all nascent good, as if under exhausted glass receivers, there to choke and die); and the grand parent manufactory of evil to us,--as it were, the last finishing and varnishing workshop of all the Devil's ware that circulates under the sun. No Devil's sham is fit for the market till it have been polished and enamelled here; this is the general assaying-house for such, where the artists examine and answer, "Fit for the market; not fit!" Words will not express what mischiefs the misuse of words has done, and is doing, in these heavy-laden generations. Do you want a man _not_ to practise what he believes, then encourage him to keep often speaking it in words. Every time he speaks it, the tendency to do it will grow less. His empty speech of what he believes, will be a weariness and an affliction to the wise man. But do you wish his empty speech of what he believes, to become farther an insincere speech of what he does not believe? Celebrate to him his gift of speech; assure him that he shall rise in Parliament by means of it, and achieve great things without any performance; that eloquent speech, whether performed or not, is admirable. My friends, eloquent unperformed speech, in Parliament or elsewhere, is horrible! The eloquent man that delivers, in Parliament or elsewhere, a beautiful speech, and will perform nothing of it, but leaves it as if already performed,--what can you make of that man? He has enrolled himself among the _Ignes Fatui_ and Children of the Wind; means to serve, as beautifully illuminated Chinese Lantern, in that corps henceforth. I think, the serviceable thing you could do to that man, if permissible, would be a severe one: To clip off a bit of his eloquent tongue by way of penance and warning; another bit, if he again spoke without performing; and so again, till you had clipt the whole tongue away from him,--and were delivered, you and he, from at least one miserable mockery: "There, eloquent friend, see now in silence if there be any redeeming deed in thee; of blasphemous wind-eloquence, at least, we shall have no more!" How many pretty men have gone this road, escorted by the beautifulest marching music from all the "public organs;" and have found at last that it ended--where? It is the _broad_ road, that leads direct to Limbo and the Kingdom of the Inane. Gifted men, and once valiant nations, and as it were the whole world with one accord, are marching thither, in melodious triumph, all the drums and hautboys giving out their cheerfulest _Ca-ira_. It is the universal humor of the world just now. My friends, I am very sure you will _arrive_, unless you halt!-- Considered as the last finish of education, or of human culture, worth and acquirement, the art of speech is noble, and even divine; it is like the kindling of a Heaven's light to show us what a glorious world exists, and has perfected itself, in a man. But if no world exist in the man; if nothing but continents of empty vapor, of greedy self-conceits, common-place hearsays, and indistinct loomings of a sordid _chaos_ exist in him, what will be the use of "light" to show us that? Better a thousand times that such a man do not speak; but keep his empty vapor and his sordid chaos to himself, hidden to the utmost from all beholders. To look on that, can be good for no human beholder; to look away from that, must be good. And if, by delusive semblances of rhetoric, logic, first-class degrees, and the aid of elocution-masters and parliamentary reporters, the poor proprietor of said chaos should be led to persuade himself, and get others persuaded,--which it is the nature of his sad task to do, and which, in certain eras of the world, it is fatally possible to do,--that this is a cosmos which he owns; that _he_, being so perfect in tongue-exercise and full of college-honors, is an "educated" man, and pearl of great price in his generation; that round him, and his parliament emulously listening to him, as round some divine apple of gold set in a picture of silver, all the world should gather to adore: what is likely to become of him and the gathering world? An apple of Sodom set in the clusters of Gomorrah: that, little as he suspects it, is the definition of the poor chaotically eloquent man, with his emulous parliament and miserable adoring world!--Considered as the whole of education, or human culture, which it now is in our modern manners; all apprenticeship except to mere handicraft having fallen obsolete, and the "educated man" being with us emphatically and exclusively the man that can speak well with tongue or pen, and astonish men by the quantities of speech he has _heard_ ("tremendous _reader_," "walking encyclopaedia," and such like),--the Art of Speech is probably definable in that case as the short summary of all the Black Arts put together. But the Schoolmaster is secondary, an effect rather than a cause in this matter: what the Schoolmaster with his universities shall manage or attempt to teach will be ruled by what the Society with its practical industries is continually demanding that men should learn. We spoke once of vital lungs for Society: and in fact this question always rises as the alpha and omega of social questions, What methods the Society has of summoning aloft into the high places, for its help and governance, the wisdom that is born to it in all places, and of course is born chiefly in the more populous or lower places? For this, if you will consider it, expresses the ultimate available result, and net sum-total, of all the efforts, struggles and confused activities that go on in the Society; and determines whether they are true and wise efforts, certain to be victorious, or false and foolish, certain to be futile, and to fall captive and caitiff. How do men rise in your Society? In all Societies, Turkey included, and I suppose Dahomey included, men do rise; but the question of questions always is, What kind of men? Men of noble gifts, or men of ignoble? It is the one or the other; and a life-and-death inquiry which! For in all places and all times, little as you may heed it, Nature most silently but most inexorably demands that it be the one and not the other. And you need not try to palm an ignoble sham upon her, and call it noble; for she is a judge. And her penalties, as quiet as she looks, are terrible: amounting to world-earthquakes, to anarchy and death everlasting; and admit of no appeal!-- Surely England still flatters herself that she has lungs; that she can still breathe a little? Or is it that the poor creature, driven into mere blind industrialisms; and as it were, gone pearl-diving this long while many fathoms deep, and tearing up the oyster-beds so as never creature did before, hardly knows,--so busy in the belly of the oyster chaos, where is no thought of "breathing,"--whether she has lungs or not? Nations of a robust habit, and fine deep chest, can sometimes take in a deal of breath _before_ diving; and live long, in the muddy deeps, without new breath: but they too come to need it at last, and will die if they cannot get it! To the gifted soul that is born in England, what is the career, then, that will carry him, amid noble Olympic dust, up to the immortal gods? For his country's sake, that it may not lose the service he was born capable of doing it; for his own sake, that his life be not choked and perverted, and his light from Heaven be not changed into lightning from the Other Place,--it is essential that there be such a career. The country that can offer no career in that case, is a doomed country; nay it is already a dead country: it has secured the ban of Heaven upon it; will not have Heaven's light, will have the Other Place's lightning; and may consider itself as appointed to expire, in frightful coughings of street musketry or otherwise, on a set day, and to be in the eye of law dead. In no country is there not some career, inviting to it either the noble Hero, or the tough Greek of the Lower Empire: which of the two do your careers invite? There is no question more important. The kind of careers you offer in countries still living, determines with perfect exactness the kind of the life that is in them,--whether it is natural blessed life, or galvanic accursed ditto, and likewise what degree of strength is in the same. Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all deep talent, is a talent to _do_, and is intrinsically of silent nature; inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it is an incarnated fraction. All real talent, I fancy, would much rather, if it listened only to Nature's monitions, express itself in rhythmic facts than in melodious words, which latter at best, where they are good for anything, are only a feeble echo and shadow or foreshadow of the former. But talents differ much in this of power to be silent; and circumstances, of position, opportunity and such like, modify them still more;--and Nature's monitions, oftenest quite drowned in foreign hearsays, are by no means the only ones listened to in deciding!--The Industrialisms are all of silent nature; and some of them are heroic and eminently human; others, again, we may call unheroic, not eminently human: _beaverish_ rather, but still honest; some are even _vulpine_, altogether inhuman and dishonest. Your born genius must make his choice. If a soul is born with divine intelligence, and has its lips touched with hallowed fire, in consecration for high enterprises under the sun, this young soul will find the question asked of him by England every hour and moment: "Canst thou turn thy human intelligence into the beaver sort, and make honest contrivance, and accumulation of capital by it? If so, do it; and avoid the vulpine kind, which I don't recommend. Honest triumphs in engineering and machinery await thee; scrip awaits thee, commercial successes, kingship in the counting-room, on the stock-exchange;--thou shalt be the envy of surrounding flunkies, and collect into a heap more gold than a dray-horse can draw."--"Gold, so much gold?" answers the ingenuous soul, with visions of the envy of surrounding flunkies dawning on him; and in very many cases decides that he will contract himself into beaverism, and with such a horse-draught of gold, emblem of a never-imagined success in beaver heroism, strike the surrounding flunkies yellow. This is our common course; this is in some sort open to every creature, what we call the beaver career; perhaps more open in England, taking in America too, than it ever was in any country before. And, truly, good consequences follow out of it: who can be blind to them? Half of a most excellent and opulent result is realized to us in this way; baleful only when it sets up (as too often now) for being the whole result. A half-result which will be blessed and heavenly so soon as the other half is had,--namely wisdom to guide the first half. Let us honor all honest human power of contrivance in its degree. The beaver intellect, so long as it steadfastly refuses to be vulpine, and answers the tempter pointing out short routes to it with an honest "No, no," is truly respectable to me; and many a highflying speaker and singer whom I have known, has appeared to me much less of a developed man than certain of my mill-owning, agricultural, commercial, mechanical, or otherwise industrial friends, who have held their peace all their days and gone on in the silent state. If a man can keep his intellect silent, and make it even into honest beaverism, several very manful moralities, in danger of wreck on other courses, may comport well with that, and give it a genuine and partly human character; and I will tell him, in these days he may do far worse with himself and his intellect than change it into beaverism, and make honest money with it. If indeed he could become a _heroic_ industrial, and have a life "eminently human"! But that is not easy at present. Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls, who have to seek a career for themselves, go this beaver road. Whereby the first half-result, national wealth namely, is plentifully realized; and only the second half, or wisdom to guide it, is dreadfully behindhand. But now if the gifted soul be not of taciturn nature, be of vivid, impatient, rapidly productive nature, and aspire much to give itself sensible utterance,--I find that, in this case, the field it has in England is narrow to an extreme; is perhaps narrower than ever offered itself, for the like object, in this world before. Parliament, Church, Law: let the young vivid soul turn whither he will for a career, he finds among variable conditions one condition invariable, and extremely surprising, That the proof of excellence is to be done by the tongue. For heroism that will not speak, but only act, there is no account kept:--The English Nation does not need that silent kind, then, but only the talking kind? Most astonishing. Of all the organs a man has, there is none held in account, it would appear, but the tongue he uses for talking. Premiership, woolsack, mitre, and quasi-crown: all is attainable if you can talk with due ability. Everywhere your proof-shot is to be a well-fired volley of talk. Contrive to talk well, you will get to Heaven, the modern Heaven of the English. Do not talk well, only work well, and heroically hold your peace, you have no chance whatever to get thither; with your utmost industry you may get to Threadneedle Street, and accumulate more gold than a dray-horse can draw. Is not this a very wonderful arrangement? I have heard of races done by mortals tied in sacks; of human competitors, high aspirants, climbing heavenward on the soaped pole; seizing the soaped pig; and clutching with cleft fist, at full gallop, the fated goose tied aloft by its foot;--which feats do prove agility, toughness and other useful faculties in man: but this of dexterous talk is probably as strange a competition as any. And the question rises, Whether certain of these other feats, or perhaps an alternation of all of them, relieved now and then by a bout of grinning through the collar, might not be profitably substituted for the solitary proof-feat of talk, now getting rather monotonous by its long continuance? Alas, Mr. Bull, I do find it is all little other than a proof of toughness, which is a quality I respect, with more or less expenditure of falsity and astucity superadded, which I entirely condemn. Toughness _plus_ astucity:--perhaps a simple wooden mast set up in Palace-Yard, well soaped and duly presided over, might be the honester method? Such a method as this by trial of talk, for filling your chief offices in Church and State, was perhaps never heard of in the solar system before. You are quite used to it, my poor friend; and nearly dead by the consequences of it: but in the other Planets, as in other epochs of your own Planet it would have done had you proposed it, the thing awakens incredulous amazement, world-wide Olympic laughter, which ends in tempestuous hootings, in tears and horror! My friend, if you can, as heretofore this good while, find nobody to take care of your affairs but the expertest talker, it is all over with your affairs and you. Talk never yet could guide any man's or nation's affairs; nor will it yours, except towards the _Limbus Patrum_, where all talk, except a very select kind of it, lodges at last. Medicine, guarded too by preliminary impediments, and frightful medusa-heads of quackery, which deter many generous souls from entering, is of the _half_-articulate professions, and does not much invite the ardent kinds of ambition. The intellect required for medicine might be wholly human, and indeed should by all rules be,--the profession of the Human Healer being radically a sacred one and connected with the highest priesthoods, or rather being itself the outcome and acme of all priesthoods, and divinest conquests of intellect here below. As will appear one day, when men take off their old monastic and ecclesiastic spectacles, and look with eyes again! In essence the Physician's task is always heroic, eminently human: but in practice most unluckily at present we find it too become in good part _beaverish_; yielding a money-result alone. And what of it is not beaverish,--does not that too go mainly to ingenious talking, publishing of yourself, ingratiating of yourself; a partly human exercise or waste of intellect, and alas a partly vulpine ditto;--making the once sacred [Gr.] _'Iatros_, or Human Healer, more impossible for us than ever! Angry basilisks watch at the gates of Law and Church just now; and strike a sad damp into the nobler of the young aspirants. Hard bonds are offered you to sign; as it were, a solemn engagement to constitute yourself an impostor, before ever entering; to declare your belief in incredibilities,--your determination, in short, to take Chaos for Cosmos, and Satan for the Lord of things, if he come with money in his pockets, and horsehair and bombazine decently wrapt about him. Fatal preliminaries, which deter many an ingenuous young soul, and send him back from the threshold, and I hope will deter ever more. But if you do enter, the condition is well known: "Talk; who can talk best here? His shall be the mouth of gold, and the purse of gold; and with my [Gr.] _mitra_ (once the head-dress of unfortunate females, I am told) shall his sacred temples be begirt." Ingenuous souls, unless forced to it, do now much shudder at the threshold of both these careers, and not a few desperately turn back into the wilderness rather, to front a very rude fortune, and be devoured by wild beasts as is likeliest. But as to Parliament, again, and its eligibility if attainable, there is yet no question anywhere; the ingenuous soul, if possessed of money-capital enough, is predestined by the parental and all manner of monitors to that career of talk; and accepts it with alacrity and clearness of heart, doubtful only whether he shall be _able_ to make a speech. Courage, my brave young fellow. If you can climb a soaped pole of any kind, you will certainly be able to make a speech. All mortals have a tongue; and carry on some jumble, if not of thought, yet of stuff which they could talk. The weakest of animals has got a cry in it, and can give voice before dying. If you are tough enough, bent upon it desperately enough, I engage you shall make a speech;--but whether that will be the way to Heaven for you, I do not engage. These, then, are our two careers for genius: mute Industrialism, which can seldom become very human, but remains beaverish mainly: and the three Professions named learned,--that is to say, able to talk. For the heroic or higher kinds of human intellect, in the silent state, there is not the smallest inquiry anywhere; apparently a thing not wanted in this country at present. What the supply may be, I cannot inform M'Croudy; but the market-demand, he may himself see, is _nil_. These are our three professions that require human intellect in part or whole, not able to do with mere beaverish; and such a part does the gift of talk play in one and all of them. Whatsoever is not beaverish seems to go forth in the shape of talk. To such length is human intellect wasted or suppressed in this world! If the young aspirant is not rich enough for Parliament, and is deterred by the basilisks or otherwise from entering on Law or Church, and cannot altogether reduce his human intellect to the beaverish condition, or satisfy himself with the prospect of making money,--what becomes of him in such case, which is naturally the case of very many, and ever of more? In such case there remains but one outlet for him, and notably enough that too is a talking one: the outlet of Literature, of trying to write Books. Since, owing to preliminary basilisks, want of cash, or superiority to cash, he cannot mount aloft by eloquent talking, let him try it by dexterous eloquent writing. Here happily, having three fingers, and capital to buy a quire of paper, he can try it to all lengths and in spite of all mortals: in this career there is happily no public impediment that can turn him back; nothing but private starvation--which is itself a _finis_ or kind of goal--can pretend to hinder a British man from prosecuting Literature to the very utmost, and wringing the final secret from her: "A talent is in thee; No talent is in thee." To the British subject who fancies genius may be lodged in him, this liberty remains; and truly it is, if well computed, almost the only one he has. A crowded portal this of Literature, accordingly! The haven of expatriated spiritualisms, and alas also of expatriated vanities and prurient imbecilities: here do the windy aspirations, foiled activities, foolish ambitions, and frustrate human energies reduced to the vocable condition, fly as to the one refuge left; and the Republic of Letters increases in population at a faster rate than even the Republic of America. The strangest regiment in her Majesty's service, this of the Soldiers of Literature:--would your Lordship much like to march through Coventry with them? The immortal gods are there (quite irrecognizable under these disguises), and also the lowest broken valets;--an extremely miscellaneous regiment. In fact the regiment, superficially viewed, looks like an immeasurable motley flood of discharged play-actors, funambulists, false prophets, drunken ballad-singers; and marches not as a regiment, but as a boundless canaille,--without drill, uniform, captaincy or billet; with huge over-proportion of drummers; you would say, a regiment gone wholly to the drum, with hardly a good musket to be seen in it,--more a canaille than a regiment. Canaille of all the loud-sounding levities, and general winnowings of Chaos, marching through the world in a most ominous manner; proclaiming, audibly if you have ears: "Twelfth hour of the Night; ancient graves yawning; pale clammy Puseyisms screeching in their winding-sheets; owls busy in the City regions; many goblins abroad! Awake ye living; dream no more; arise to judgment! Chaos and Gehenna are broken loose; the Devil with his Bedlams must be flung in chains again, and the Last of the Days is about to dawn!" Such is Literature to the reflective soul at this moment. But what now concerns us most is the circumstance that here too the demand is, Vocables, still vocables. In all appointed courses of activity and paved careers for human genius, and in this unpaved, unappointed, broadest career of Literature, broad way that leadeth to destruction for so many, the one duty laid upon you is still, Talk, talk. Talk well with pen or tongue, and it shall be well with you; do not talk well, it shall be ill with you. To wag the tongue with dexterous acceptability, there is for human worth and faculty, in our England of the Nineteenth Century, that one method of emergence and no other. Silence, you would say, means annihilation for the Englishman of the Nineteenth Century. The worth that has not spoken itself, is not; or is potentially only, and as if it were not. Vox is the God of this Universe. If you have human intellect, it avails nothing unless you either make it into beaverism, or talk with it. Make it into beaverism, and gather money; or else make talk with it, and gather what you can. Such is everywhere the demand for talk among us: to which, of course, the supply is proportionate. From dinners up to woolsacks and divine mitres, here in England, much may be gathered by talk; without talk, of the human sort nothing. Is Society become wholly a bag of wind, then, ballasted by guineas? Are our interests in it as a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal?--In Army or Navy, when unhappily we have war on hand, there is, almost against our will, some kind of demand for certain of the silent talents. But in peace, that too passes into mere demand of the ostentations, of the pipeclays and the blank cartridges; and,--except that Naval men are occasionally, on long voyages, forced to hold their tongue, and converse with the dumb elements, and illimitable oceans, that moan and rave there without you and within you, which is a great advantage to the Naval man,--our poor United Services have to make conversational windbags and ostentational paper-lanterns of themselves, or do worse, even as the others. My friends, must I assert, then, what surely all men know, though all men seem to have forgotten it, That in the learned professions as in the unlearned, and in human things throughout, in every place and in every time, the true function of intellect is not that of talking, but of understanding and discerning with a view to performing! An intellect may easily talk too much, and perform too little. Gradually, if it get into the noxious habit of talk, there will less and less performance come of it, talk being so delightfully handy in comparison with work; and at last there will no work, or thought of work, be got from it at all. Talk, except as the preparation for work, is worth almost nothing;--sometimes it is worth infinitely less than nothing; and becomes, little conscious of playing such a fatal part, the general summary of pretentious nothingnesses, and the chief of all the curses the Posterity of Adam are liable to in this sublunary world! Would you discover the Atropos of Human Virtue; the sure Destroyer, "by painless extinction," of Human Veracities, Performances, and Capabilities to perform or to be veracious,--it is this, you have it here. Unwise talk is matchless in unwisdom. Unwise work, if it but persist, is everywhere struggling towards correction, and restoration to health; for it is still in contact with Nature, and all Nature incessantly contradicts it, and will heal it or annihilate it: not so with unwise talk, which addresses itself, regardless of veridical Nature, to the universal suffrages; and can if it be dexterous, find harbor there till all the suffrages are bankrupt and gone to Houndsditch, Nature not interfering with her protest till then. False speech, definable as the acme of unwise speech, is capable, as we already said, of becoming the falsest of all things. Falsest of all things:--and whither will the general deluge of that, in Parliament and Synagogue, in Book and Broadside, carry you and your affairs, my friend, when once they are embarked on it as now? Parliament, _Parliamentum_, is by express appointment the Talking Apparatus; yet not in Parliament either is the essential function, by any means, talk. Not to speak your opinion well, but to have a good and just opinion worth speaking,--for every Parliament, as for every man, this latter is the point. Contrive to have a true opinion, you will get it told in some way, better or worse; and it will be a blessing to all creatures. Have a false opinion, and tell it with the tongue of Angels, what can that profit? The better you tell it, the worse it will be! In Parliament and out of Parliament, and everywhere in this Universe, your one salvation is, That you can discern with just insight, and follow with noble valor, what the law of the case before you is, what the appointment of the Maker in regard to it has been. Get this out of one man, you are saved; fail to get this out of the most August Parliament wrapt in the sheepskins of a thousand years, you are lost,--your Parliament, and you, and all your sheepskins are lost. Beautiful talk is by no means the most pressing want in Parliament! We have had some reasonable modicum of talk in Parliament! What talk has done for us in Parliament, and is now doing, the dullest of us at length begins to see! Much has been said of Parliament's breeding men to business; of the training an Official Man gets in this school of argument and talk. He is here inured to patience, tolerance; sees what is what in the Nation and in the Nation's Government attains official knowledge, official courtesy and manners--in short, is polished at all points into official articulation, and here better than elsewhere qualifies himself to be a Governor of men. So it is said.--Doubtless, I think, he will see and suffer much in Parliament, and inure himself to several things;--he will, with what eyes he has, gradually _see_ Parliament itself, for one thing; what a high-soaring, helplessly floundering, ever-babbling yet inarticulate dark dumb Entity it is (certainly one of the strangest under the sun just now): which doubtless, if he have in view to get measures voted there one day, will be an important acquisition for him. But as to breeding himself for a Doer of Work, much more for a King, or Chief of Doers, here in this element of talk; as to that I confess the fatalest doubts, or rather, alas, I have no doubt! Alas, it is our fatalest misery just now, not easily alterable, and yet urgently requiring to be altered, That no British man can attain to be a Statesman, or Chief of _Workers_, till he has first proved himself a Chief of _Talkers_: which mode of trial for a Worker, is it not precisely, of all the trials you could set him upon, the falsest and unfairest? Nay, I doubt much you are not likely ever to meet the fittest material for a Statesman, or Chief of Workers, in such an element as that. Your Potential Chief of Workers, will he come there at all, to try whether he can talk? Your poor tenpound franchisers and electoral world generally, in love with eloquent talk, are they the likeliest to discern what man it is that has worlds of silent work in him? No. Or is such a man, even if born in the due rank for it, the likeliest to present himself, and court their most sweet voices? Again, no. The Age that admires talk so much can have little discernment for inarticulate work, or for anything that is deep and genuine. Nobody, or hardly anybody, having in himself an earnest sense for truth, how can anybody recognize an inarticulate Veracity, or Nature-fact of any kind; a Human _Doer_ especially, who is the most complex, profound, and inarticulate of all Nature's Facts? Nobody can recognize him: till once he is patented, get some public stamp of authenticity, and has been articulately proclaimed, and asserted to be a Doer. To the worshipper of talk, such a one is a sealed book. An excellent human soul, direct from Heaven,--how shall any excellence of man become recognizable to this unfortunate? Not except by announcing and placarding itself as excellent,--which, I reckon, it above other things will probably be in no great haste to do. Wisdom, the divine message which every soul of man brings into this world; the divine prophecy of what the new man has got the new and peculiar capability to do, is intrinsically of silent nature. It cannot at once, or completely at all, be read off in words; for it is written in abstruse facts, of endowment, position, desire, opportunity, granted to the man;--interprets itself in presentiments, vague struggles, passionate endeavors and is only legible in whole when his work is _done_. Not by the noble monitions of Nature, but by the ignoble, is a man much tempted to publish the secret of his soul in words. Words, if he have a secret, will be forever inadequate to it. Words do but disturb the real answer of fact which could be given to it; disturb, obstruct, and will in the end abolish, and render impossible, said answer. No grand Doer in this world can be a copious speaker about his doings. William the Silent spoke himself best in a country liberated; Oliver Cromwell did not shine in rhetoric; Goethe, when he had but a book in view, found that he must say nothing even of that, if it was to succeed with him. Then as to politeness, and breeding to business. An official man must be bred to business; of course he must: and not for essence only, but even for the manners of office he requires breeding. Besides his intrinsic faculty, whatever that may be, he must be cautious, vigilant, discreet,--above all things, he must be reticent, patient, polite. Certain of these qualities are by nature imposed upon men of station; and they are trained from birth to some exercise of them: this constitutes their one intrinsic qualification for office;--this is their one advantage in the New Downing Street projected for this New Era; and it will not go for much in that Institution. One advantage, or temporary advantage; against which there are so many counterbalances. It is the indispensable preliminary for office, but by no means the complete outfit,--a miserable outfit where there is nothing farther. Will your Lordship give me leave to say that, practically, the intrinsic qualities will presuppose these preliminaries too, but by no means _vice versa_. That, on the whole, if you have got the intrinsic qualities, you have got everything, and the preliminaries will prove attainable; but that if you have got only the preliminaries, you have yet got nothing. A man of real dignity will not find it impossible to bear himself in a dignified manner; a man of real understanding and insight will get to know, as the fruit of his very first study, what the laws of his situation are, and will conform to these. Rough old Samuel Johnson, blustering Boreas and rugged Arctic Bear as he often was, defined himself, justly withal, as a polite man: a noble manful attitude of soul is his; a clear, true and loyal sense of what others are, and what he himself is, shines through the rugged coating of him; comes out as grave deep rhythmus when his King honors him, and he will not "bandy compliments with his King;"--is traceable too in his indignant trampling down of the Chesterfield patronages, tailor-made insolences, and contradictions of sinners; which may be called his _revolutionary_ movements, hard and peremptory by the law of them; these could not be soft like his _constitutional_ ones, when men and kings took him for somewhat like the thing he was. Given a noble man, I think your Lordship may expect by and by a polite man. No "politer" man was to be found in Britain than the rustic Robert Burns: high duchesses were captivated with the chivalrous ways of the man; recognized that here was the true chivalry, and divine nobleness of bearing,--as indeed they well might, now when the Peasant God and Norse Thor had come down among them again! Chivalry this, if not as they do chivalry in Drury Lane or West-End drawing-rooms, yet as they do it in Valhalla and the General Assembly of the Gods. For indeed, who _invented_ chivalry, politeness, or anything that is noble and melodious and beautiful among us, except precisely the like of Johnson and of Burns? The select few who in the generations of this world were wise and valiant, they, in spite of all the tremendous majority of blockheads and slothful belly-worshippers, and noisy ugly persons, have devised whatsoever is noble in the manners of man to man. I expect they will learn to be polite, your Lordship, when you give them a chance!--Nor is it as a school of human culture, for this or for any other grace or gift, that Parliament will be found first-rate or indispensable. As experience in the river is indispensable to the ferryman, so is knowledge of his Parliament to the British Peel or Chatham;--so was knowledge of the OEil-de-Boeuf to the French Choiseul. Where and how said river, whether Parliament with Wilkeses, or OEil-de-Boeuf with Pompadours, can be waded, boated, swum; how the miscellaneous cargoes, "measures" so called, can be got across it, according to their kinds, and landed alive on the hither side as facts:--we have all of us our _ferries_ in this world; and must know the river and its ways, or get drowned some day! In that sense, practice in Parliament is indispensable to the British Statesman; but not in any other sense. A school, too, of manners and of several other things, the Parliament will doubtless be to the aspirant Statesman; a school better or worse;--as the OEil-de-Boeuf likewise was, and as all scenes where men work or live are sure to be. Especially where many men work together, the very rubbing against one another will grind and polish off their angularities into roundness, into "politeness" after a sort; and the official man, place him how you may, will never want for schooling, of extremely various kinds. A first-rate school one cannot call this Parliament for him;--I fear to say what rate at present! In so far as it teaches him vigilance, patience, courage, toughness of lungs or of soul, and skill in any kind of swimming, it is a good school. In so far as it forces him to speak where Nature orders silence; and even, lest all the world should learn his secret (which often enough would kill his secret, and little profit the world), forces him to speak falsities, vague ambiguities, and the froth-dialect usual in Parliaments in these times, it may be considered one of the worst schools ever devised by man; and, I think, may almost challenge the OEil-de-Boeuf to match it in badness. Parliament will train your men to the manners required of a statesman; but in a much less degree to the intrinsic functions of one. To these latter, it is capable of mistraining as nothing else can. Parliament will train you to talk; and above all things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish talk. To tell a good story for yourself, and to make it _appear_ that you have done your work: this, especially in constitutional countries, is something;--and yet in all countries, constitutional ones too, it is intrinsically nothing, probably even less. For it is not the function of any mortal, in Downing Street or elsewhere here below, to wag the tongue of him, and make it appear that he has done work; but to wag some quite other organs of him, and to do work; there is no danger of his work's appearing by and by. Such an accomplishment, even in constitutional countries, I grieve to say, may become much less than nothing. Have you at all computed how much less? The human creature who has once given way to satisfying himself with "appearances," to seeking his salvation in "appearances," the moral life of such human creature is rapidly bleeding out of him. Depend upon it, Beelzebub, Satan, or however you may name the too authentic Genius of Eternal Death, has got that human creature in his claws. By and by you will have a dead parliamentary bagpipe, and your living man fled away without return! Such parliamentary bagpipes I myself have heard play tunes, much to the satisfaction of the people. Every tune lies within their compass; and their mind (for they still call it _mind_) is ready as a hurdy-gurdy on turning of the handle: "My Lords, this question now before the House"--Ye Heavens, O ye divine Silences, was there in the womb of Chaos, then, such a product, liable to be evoked by human art, as that same? While the galleries were all applausive of heart, and the Fourth Estate looked with eyes enlightened, as if you had touched its lips with a staff dipped in honey,--I have sat with reflections too ghastly to be uttered. A poor human creature and learned friend, once possessed of many fine gifts, possessed of intellect, veracity, and manful conviction on a variety of objects, has he now lost all that;--converted all that into a glistering phosphorescence which can show itself on the outside; while within, all is dead, chaotic, dark; a painted sepulchre full of dead-men's bones! Discernment, knowledge, intellect, in the human sense of the words, this man has now none. His opinion you do not ask on any matter: on the _matter_ he has no opinion, judgment, or insight; only on what may be said about the matter, how it may be argued of, what tune may be played upon it to enlighten the eyes of the Fourth Estate. Such a soul, though to the eye he still keeps tumbling about in the Parliamentary element, and makes "motions," and passes bills, for aught I know,--are we to define him as a _living_ one, or as a dead? Partridge the Almanac-Maker, whose "Publications" still regularly appear, is known to be dead! The dog that was drowned last summer, and that floats up and down the Thames with ebb and flood ever since,--is it not dead? Alas, in the hot months, you meet here and there such a floating dog; and at length, if you often use the river steamers, get to know him by sight. "There he is again, still astir there in his quasi-stygian element!" you dejectedly exclaim (perhaps reading your Morning Newspaper at the moment); and reflect, with a painful oppression of nose and imagination, on certain completed professors of parliamentary eloquence in modern times. Dead long since, but _not_ resting; daily doing motions in that Westminster region still,--daily from Vauxhall to Blackfriars, and back again; and cannot get away at all! Daily (from Newspaper or river steamer) you may see him at some point of his fated course, hovering in the eddies, stranded in the ooze, or rapidly progressing with flood or ebb; and daily the odor of him is getting more intolerable: daily the condition of him appeals more tragically to gods and men. Nature admits no lie; most men profess to be aware of this, but few in any measure lay it to heart. Except in the departments of mere material manipulation, it seems to be taken practically as if this grand truth were merely a polite flourish of rhetoric. What is a lie? The question is worth asking, once and away, by the practical English mind. A voluntary spoken divergence from the fact as it stands, as it has occurred and will proceed to develop itself: this clearly, if adopted by any man, will so far forth mislead him in all practical dealing with the fact; till he cast that statement out of him, and reject it as an unclean poisonous thing, he can have no success in dealing with the fact. If such spoken divergence from the truth be involuntary, we lament it as a misfortune; and are entitled, at least the speaker of it is, to lament it extremely as the most palpable of all misfortunes, as the indubitablest losing of his way, and turning aside from the goal instead of pressing towards it, in the race set before him. If the divergence is voluntary,--there superadds itself to our sorrow a just indignation: we call the voluntary spoken divergence a lie, and justly abhor it as the essence of human treason and baseness, the desertion of a man to the Enemy of men against himself and his brethren. A lost deserter; who has gone over to the Enemy, called Satan; and cannot _but_ be lost in the adventure! Such is every liar with the tongue; and such in all nations is he, at all epochs, considered. Men pull his nose, and kick him out of doors; and by peremptory expressive methods signify that they can and will have no trade with him. Such is spoken divergence from the fact; so fares it with the practiser of that sad art. But have we well considered a divergence _in thought_ from what is the fact? Have we considered the man whose very thought is a lie to him and to us! He too is a frightful man; repeating about this Universe on every hand what is not, and driven to repeat it; the sure herald of ruin to all that follow him, that know with _his_ knowledge! And would you learn how to get a mendacious thought, there is no surer recipe than carrying a loose tongue. The lying thought, you already either have it, or will soon get it by that method. He who lies with his very tongue, _he_ clearly enough has long ceased to think truly in his mind. Does he, in any sense, "think"? All his thoughts and imaginations, if they extend beyond mere beaverisms, astucities and sensualisms, are false, incomplete, perverse, untrue even to himself. He has become a false mirror of this Universe; not a small mirror only, but a crooked, bedimmed and utterly deranged one. But all loose tongues too are akin to lying ones; are insincere at the best, and go rattling with little meaning; the thought lying languid at a great distance behind them, if thought there be behind them at all. Gradually there will be none or little! How can the thought of such a man, what he calls thought, be other than false? Alas, the palpable liar with his tongue does at least know that he is lying, and has or might have some faint vestige of remorse and chance of amendment; but the impalpable liar, whose tongue articulates mere accepted commonplaces, cants and babblement, which means only, "Admire me, call me an excellent stump-orator!"--of him what hope is there? His thought, what thought he had, lies dormant, inspired only to invent vocables and plausibilities; while the tongue goes so glib, the thought is absent, gone a wool-gathering; getting itself drugged with the applausive "Hear, hear!"--what will become of such a man? His idle thought has run all to seed, and grown false and the giver of falsities; the inner light of his mind is gone out; all his light is mere putridity and phosphorescence henceforth. Whosoever is in quest of ruin, let him with assurance follow that man; he or no one is on the right road to it. Good Heavens, from the wisest Thought of a man to the actual truth of a Thing as it lies in Nature, there is, one would suppose, a sufficient interval! Consider it,--and what other intervals we introduce! The faithfulest, most glowing word of a man is but an imperfect image of the thought, such as it is, that dwells within him; his best word will never but with error convey his thought to other minds: and then between his poor thought and Nature's Fact, which is the Thought of the Eternal, there may be supposed to lie some discrepancies, some shortcomings! Speak your sincerest, think your wisest, there is still a great gulf between you and the fact. And now, do not speak your sincerest, and what will inevitably follow out of that, do not think your wisest, but think only your plausiblest, your showiest for parliamentary purposes, where will you land with that guidance?--I invite the British Parliament, and all the Parliamentary and other Electors of Great Britain, to reflect on this till they have well understood it; and then to ask, each of himself, What probably the horoscopes of the British Parliament, at this epoch of World-History, may be?-- Fail, by any sin or any misfortune, to discover what the truth of the fact is, you are lost so far as that fact goes! If your thought do not image truly but do image falsely the fact, you will vainly try to work upon the fact. The fact will not obey you, the fact will silently resist you; and ever, with silent invincibility, will go on resisting you, till you do get to image it truly instead of falsely. No help for you whatever, except in attaining to a true image of the fact. Needless to vote a false image true; vote it, revote it by overwhelming majorities, by jubilant unanimities and universalities; read it thrice or three hundred times, pass acts of parliament upon it till the Statute-book can hold no more,--it helps not a whit: the thing is not so, the thing is otherwise than so; and Adam's whole Posterity, voting daily on it till the world finish, will not alter it a jot. Can the sublimest sanhedrim, constitutional parliament, or other Collective Wisdom of the world, persuade fire not to burn, sulphuric acid to be sweet milk, or the Moon to become green cheese? The fact is much the reverse:--and even the Constitutional British Parliament abstains from such arduous attempts as these latter in the voting line; and leaves the multiplication-table, the chemical, mechanical and other qualities of material substances to take their own course; being aware that voting and perorating, and reporting in Hansard, will not in the least alter any of these. Which is indisputably wise of the British Parliament. Unfortunately the British Parliament does not, at present, quite know that all manner of things and relations of things, spiritual equally with material, all manner of qualities, entities, existences whatsoever, in this strange visible and invisible Universe, are equally inflexible of nature; that, they will, one and all, with precisely the same obstinacy, continue to obey their own law, not our law; deaf as the adder to all charm of parliamentary eloquence, and of voting never so often repeated; silently, but inflexibly and forevermore, declining to change themselves, even as sulphuric acid declines to become sweet milk, though you vote so to the end of the world. This, it sometimes seems to me, is not quite sufficiently laid hold of by the British and other Parliaments just at present. Which surely is a great misfortune to said Parliaments! For, it would appear, the grand point, after all constitutional improvements, and such wagging of wigs in Westminster as there has been, is precisely what it was before any constitution was yet heard of, or the first official wig had budded out of nothing: namely, to ascertain what the truth of your question, in Nature, really is! Verily so. In this time and place, as in all past and in all future times and places. To-day in St. Stephen's, where constitutional, philanthropical, and other great things lie in the mortar-kit; even as on the Plain of Shinar long ago, where a certain Tower, likewise of a very philanthropic nature, indeed one of the desirablest towers I ever heard of, was to be built,--but couldn't! My friends, I do not laugh; truly I am more inclined to weep. Get, by six hundred and fifty-eight votes, or by no vote at all, by the silent intimation of your own eyesight and understanding given you direct out of Heaven, and more sacred to you than anything earthly, and than all things earthly,--a correct image of the fact in question, as God and Nature have made it: that is the one thing needful; with that it shall be well with you in whatsoever you have to do with said fact. Get, by the sublimest constitutional methods, belauded by all the world, an incorrect image of the fact: so shall it be other than well with you; so shall you have laud from able editors and vociferous masses of mistaken human creatures; and from the Nature's Fact, continuing quite silently the same as it was, contradiction, and that only. What else? Will Nature change, or sulphuric acid become sweet milk, for the noise of vociferous blockheads? Surely not. Nature, I assure you, has not the smallest intention of doing so. On the contrary, Nature keeps silently a most exact Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most evanescent item, Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism; Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in consequence of that,--Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously as Fate (for this is Fate that is writing); and at the end of the account you will have it all to pay, my friend; there is the rub! Not the infinitesimalest fraction of a farthing but will be found marked there, for you and against you; and with the due rate of interest you will have to pay it, neatly, completely, as sure as you are alive. You will have to pay it even in money if you live:--and, poor slave, do you think there is no payment but in money? There is a payment which Nature rigorously exacts of men, and also of Nations, and this I think when her wrath is sternest, in the shape of dooming you to possess money. To possess it; to have your bloated vanities fostered into monstrosity by it, your foul passions blown into explosion by it, your heart and perhaps your very stomach ruined with intoxication by it; your poor life and all its manful activities stunned into frenzy and comatose sleep by it,--in one word, as the old Prophets said, your soul forever lost by it. Your soul; so that, through the Eternities, you shall have no soul, or manful trace of ever having had a soul; but only, for certain fleeting moments, shall have had a money-bag, and have given soul and heart and (frightfuler still) stomach itself in fatal exchange for the same. You wretched mortal, stumbling about in a God's Temple, and thinking it a brutal Cookery-shop! Nature, when her scorn of a slave is divinest, and blazes like the blinding lightning against his slavehood, often enough flings him a bag of money, silently saying: "That! Away; thy doom is that!"-- For no man, and for no body or biggest multitude of men, has Nature favor, if they part company with her facts and her. Excellent stump-orator; eloquent parliamentary dead-dog, making motions, passing bills; reported in the Morning Newspapers, and reputed the "best speaker going"? From the Universe of Fact he has turned himself away; he is gone into partnership with the Universe of Phantasm; finds it profitablest to deal in forged notes, while the foolish shopkeepers will accept them. Nature for such a man, and for Nations that follow such, has her patibulary forks, and prisons of death everlasting:--dost thou doubt it? Unhappy mortal, Nature otherwise were herself a Chaos and no Cosmos. Nature was not made by an Impostor; not she, I think, rife as they are!--In fact, by money or otherwise, to the uttermost fraction of a calculable and incalculable value, we have, each one of us, to settle the exact balance in the above-said Savings-bank, or official register kept by Nature: Creditor by the quantity of veracities we have done, Debtor by the quantity of falsities and errors; there is not, by any conceivable device, the faintest hope of escape from that issue for one of us, nor for all of us. This used to be a well-known fact; and daily still, in certain edifices, steeple-houses, joss-houses, temples sacred or other, everywhere spread over the world, we hear some dim mumblement of an assertion that such is still, what it was always and will forever be, the fact: but meseems it has terribly fallen out of memory nevertheless; and, from Dan to Beersheba, one in vain looks out for a man that really in his heart believes it. In his heart he believes, as we perceive, that scrip will yield dividends: but that Heaven too has an office of account, and unerringly marks down, against us or for us, whatsoever thing we do or say or think, and treasures up the same in regard to every creature,--this I do not so well perceive that he believes. Poor blockhead, no: he reckons that all payment is in money, or approximately representable by money; finds money go a strange course; disbelieves the parson and his Day of Judgment; discerns not that there is any judgment except in the small or big debt court; and lives (for the present) on that strange footing in this Universe. The unhappy mortal, what is the use of his "civilizations" and his "useful knowledges," if he have forgotten that beginning of human knowledge; the earliest perception of the awakened human soul in this world; the first dictate of Heaven's inspiration to all men? I cannot account him a man any more; but only a kind of human beaver, who has acquired the art of ciphering. He lives without rushing hourly towards suicide, because his soul, with all its noble aspirations and imaginations, is sunk at the bottom of his stomach, and lies torpid there, unaspiring, unimagining, unconsidering, as if it were the vital principle of a mere _four_-footed beaver. A soul of a man, appointed for spinning cotton and making money, or, alas, for merely shooting grouse and gathering rent; to whom Eternity and Immortality, and all human Noblenesses and divine Facts that did not tell upon the stock-exchange, were meaningless fables, empty as the inarticulate wind. He will recover out of that persuasion one day, or be ground to powder, I believe!-- To such a pass, by our beaverisms and our mammonisms; by canting of "prevenient grace" everywhere, and so boarding and lodging our poor souls upon supervenient moonshine everywhere, for centuries long; by our sordid stupidities and our idle babblings; through faith in the divine Stump-orator, and Constitutional Palaver, or august Sanhedrim of Orators,--have men and Nations been reduced, in this sad epoch! I cannot call them happy Nations; I must call them Nations like to perish; Nations that will either begin to recover, or else soon die. Recovery is to be hoped;--yes, since there is in Nature an Almighty Beneficence, and His voice, divinely terrible, can be heard in the world-whirlwind now, even as from of old and forevermore. Recovery, or else destruction and annihilation, is very certain; and the crisis, too, comes rapidly on: but by Stump-Orator and Constitutional Palaver, however perfected, my hopes of _recovery_ have long vanished. Not by them, I should imagine, but by something far the reverse of them, shall we return to truth and God!-- I tell you, the ignoble intellect cannot think the _truth_, even within its own limits, and when it seriously tries! And of the ignoble intellect that does not seriously try, and has even reached the "ignobleness" of seriously trying the reverse, and of lying with its very tongue, what are we to expect? It is frightful to consider. Sincere wise speech is but an imperfect corollary, and insignificant outer manifestation, of sincere wise thought. He whose very tongue utters falsities, what has his heart long been doing? The thought of his heart is not its wisest, not even _its_ wisest; it is its foolishest;--and even of that we have a false and foolish copy. And it is Nature's Fact, or the Thought of the Eternal, which we want to arrive at in regard to the matter,--which if we do _not_ arrive at, we shall not save the matter, we shall drive the matter into shipwreck! The practice of modern Parliaments, with reporters sitting among them, and twenty-seven millions mostly fools listening to them, fills me with amazement. In regard to no _thing_, or fact as God and Nature have made it, can you get so much as the real thought of any honorable head,--even so far as _it_, the said honorable head, still has capacity of thought. What the honorable gentleman's wisest thought is or would have been, had he led from birth a life of piety and earnest veracity and heroic virtue, you, and he himself poor deep-sunk creature, vainly conjecture as from immense dim distances far in the rear of what he is led to _say_. And again, far in the rear of what his thought is,--surely long infinitudes beyond all _he_ could ever think,--lies the Thought of God Almighty, the Image itself of the Fact, the thing you are in quest of, and must find or do worse! Even his, the honorable gentleman's, actual bewildered, falsified, vague surmise or quasi-thought, even this is not given you; but only some falsified copy of this, such as he fancies may suit the reporters and twenty-seven millions mostly fools. And upon that latter you are to act;--with what success, do you expect? That is the thought you are to take for the Thought of the Eternal Mind,--that double-distilled falsity of a blockheadism from one who is false even as a blockhead! Do I make myself plain to Mr. Peter's understanding? Perhaps it will surprise him less that parliamentary eloquence excites more wonder than admiration in me; that the fate of countries governed by that sublime alchemy does not appear the hopefulest just now. Not by that method, I should apprehend, will the Heavens be scaled and the Earth vanquished; not by that, but by another. A benevolent man once proposed to me, but without pointing out the methods how, this plan of reform for our benighted world: To cut from one generation, whether the current one or the next, all the tongues away, prohibiting Literature too; and appoint at least one generation to pass its life in silence. "There, thou one blessed generation, from the vain jargon of babble thou art beneficently freed. Whatsoever of truth, traditionary or original, thy own god-given intellect shall point out to thee as true, that thou wilt go and do. In doing of it there will be a verdict for thee; if a verdict of True, thou wilt hold by it, and ever again do it; if of Untrue, thou wilt never try it more, but be eternally delivered from it. To do aught because the vain hearsays order thee, and the big clamors of the sanhedrim of fools, is not thy lot,--what worlds of misery are spared thee! Nature's voice heard in thy own inner being, and the sacred Commandment of thy Maker: these shall be thy guidances, thou happy tongueless generation. What is good and beautiful thou shalt know; not merely what is said to be so. Not to talk of thy doings, and become the envy of surrounding flunkies, but to taste of the fruit of thy doings themselves, is thine. What the Eternal Laws will sanction for thee, do; what the Froth Gospels and multitudinous long-eared Hearsays never so loudly bid, all this is already chaff for thee,--drifting rapidly along, thou knowest whitherward, on the eternal winds." Good Heavens, if such a plan were practicable, how the chaff might be winnowed out of every man, and out of all human things; and ninety-nine hundredths of our whole big Universe, spiritual and practical, might blow itself away, as mere torrents of chaff whole trade-winds of chaff, many miles deep, rushing continually with the voice of whirlwinds towards a certain FIRE, which knows how to deal with it! Ninety-nine hundredths blown away; all the lies blown away, and some skeleton of a spiritual and practical Universe left standing for us which were true: O Heavens, is it forever impossible, then? By a generation that had no tongue it really might be done; but not so easily by one that had. Tongues, platforms, parliaments, and fourth-estates; unfettered presses, periodical and stationary literatures: we are nearly all gone to tongue, I think; and our fate is very questionable. Truly, it is little known at present, and ought forthwith to become better known, what ruin to all nobleness and fruitfulness and blessedness in the genius of a poor mortal you generally bring about, by ordering him to speak, to do all things with a view to their being seen! Few good and fruitful things ever were done, or could be done, on those terms. Silence, silence; and be distant ye profane, with your jargonings and superficial babblements, when a man has anything to do! Eye-service,--dost thou know what that is, poor England?--eye-service is all the man can do in these sad circumstances; grows to be all he has the idea of doing, of his or any other man's ever doing, or ever having done, in any circumstances. Sad, enough. Alas, it is our saddest woe of all;--too sad for being spoken of at present, while all or nearly all men consider it an imaginary sorrow on my part! Let the young English soul, in whatever logic-shop and nonsense-verse establishment of an Eton, Oxford, Edinburgh, Halle, Salamanca, or other High Finishing-School, he may be getting his young idea taught how to speak and spout, and print sermons and review-articles, and thereby show himself and fond patrons that it _is_ an idea,--lay this solemnly to heart; this is my deepest counsel to him! The idea you have once spoken, if it even were an idea, is no longer yours; it is gone from you, so much life and virtue is gone, and the vital circulations of your self and your destiny and activity are henceforth deprived of it. If you could not get it spoken, if you could still constrain it into silence, so much the richer are you. Better keep your idea while you can: let it still circulate in your blood, and there fructify; inarticulately inciting you to good activities; giving to your whole spiritual life a ruddier health. When the time does come for speaking it, you will speak it all the more concisely, the more expressively, appropriately; and if such a time should never come, have you not already acted it, and uttered it as no words can? Think of this, my young friend; for there is nothing truer, nothing more forgotten in these shabby gold-laced days. Incontinence is half of all the sins of man. And among the many kinds of that base vice, I know none baser, or at present half so fell and fatal, as that same Incontinence of Tongue. "Public speaking," "parliamentary eloquence:" it is a Moloch, before whom young souls are made to pass through the fire. They enter, weeping or rejoicing, fond parents consecrating them to the red-hot Idol, as to the Highest God: and they come out spiritually _dead_. Dead enough; to live thenceforth a galvanic life of mere Stump-Oratory; screeching and gibbering, words without wisdom, without veracity, without conviction more than skin-deep. A divine gift, that? It is a thing admired by the vulgar, and rewarded with seats in the Cabinet and other preciosities; but to the wise, it is a thing not admirable, not adorable; unmelodious rather, and ghastly and bodeful, as the speech of sheeted spectres in the streets at midnight! Be not a Public Orator, thou brave young British man, thou that art now growing to be something: not a Stump-Orator, if thou canst help it. Appeal not to the vulgar, with its long ears and its seats in the Cabinet; not by spoken words to the vulgar; _hate_ the profane vulgar, and bid it begone. Appeal by silent work, by silent suffering if there be no work, to the gods, who have nobler than seats in the Cabinet for thee! Talent for Literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to believe it! To speak, or to write, Nature did not peremptorily order thee; but to work she did. And know this: there never was a talent even for real Literature, not to speak of talents lost and damned in doing sham Literature, but was primarily a talent for something infinitely better of the silent kind. Of Literature, in all ways, be shy rather than otherwise, at present! There where thou art, work, work; whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it,--with the hand of a man, not of a phantasm; be that thy unnoticed blessedness and exceeding great reward. Thy words, let them be few, and well-ordered. Love silence rather than speech in these tragic days, when, for very speaking, the voice of man has fallen inarticulate to man; and hearts, in this loud babbling, sit dark and dumb towards one another. Witty,--above all, oh be not witty: none of us is bound to be witty, under penalties; to be wise and true we all are, under the terriblest penalties! Brave young friend, dear to me, and _known_ too in a sense, though never seen, nor to be seen by me,--you are, what I am not, in the happy case to learn to _be_ something and to _do_ something, instead of eloquently talking about what has been and was done and may be! The old are what they are, and will not alter; our hope is in you. England's hope, and the world's, is that there may once more be millions such, instead of units as now. _Macte; i fausto pede_. And may future generations, acquainted again with the silences, and once more cognizant of what is noble and faithful and divine, look back on us with pity and incredulous astonishment! Italicized text is represented in the etext with underscores _thusly_. Greek text has been transliterated into English, with notation "[Gr.]" appended to it. Otherwise the etext has been left as it was in the printed text. Footnotes have been embedded directly into the text, with the notation [Footnote: ...]. 
32405	----	Transcriber's note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. Text that has been changed to correct an obvious error is noted at the end of this e-book. The British Library shows second edition published 1729 and reprinted by D. A. Talboys, Oxford, 1841. AUGUSTA TRIUMPHANS: OR, THE WAY TO MAKE LONDON THE MOST FLOURISHING CITY IN THE UNIVERSE. FIRST, By establishing an University where Gentlemen may have Academical Education under the Eye of their Friends. II. By an Hospital for Foundlings. III. By forming an Academy of Sciences at Christ's Hospital. IV. By suppressing pretended Madhouses, where many of the Fair Sex are unjustly confined, while their Husbands keep Mistresses, &c., and many Widows are locked up for the sake of their Jointure. V. To save our Youth from Destruction, by clearing the Streets of impudent Strumpets, suppressing Gaming Tables, and Sunday Debauches. VI. To save our lower Class of People from utter Ruin, and render them useful, by preventing the immoderate use of Geneva: with a frank Explosion of many other common Abuses, and incontestible Rules for Amendment. CONCLUDING WITH An effectual Method to prevent _Street Robberies_. AND A Letter to Coll. Robinson, on account of the Orphans' Tax. By ANDREW MORETON, Esq. THE SECOND EDITION. _LONDON_: Printed for J. ROBERTS, in _Warwick Lane_, and sold by E. NUTT, at the _Royal Exchange_; A. DODD, without _Temple Bar_; N. BLANDFORD, at _Charing Cross_; and J. STAGG, in _Westminster-Hall_. [_Price One Shilling._] AUGUSTA TRIUMPHANS: OR, THE WAY TO MAKE LONDON THE MOST FLOURISHING CITY IN THE UNIVERSE. A man who has the public good in view, ought not in the least to be alarmed at the tribute of ridicule which scoffers constantly pay to projecting heads. It is the business of a writer, who means well, to go directly forward, without regard to criticism, but to offer his thoughts as they occur; and if in twenty schemes he hits but on one to the purpose, he ought to be excused failing in the nineteen for the twentieth sake. It is a kind of good action to mean well, and the intention ought to palliate the failure; but the English, of all people in the world, show least mercy to schemists, for they treat them in the vilest manner; whereas other nations give them fair play for their lives, which is the reason why we are esteemed so bad at invention. I have but a short time to live, nor would I waste my remaining thread of life in vain, but having often lamented sundry public abuses, and many schemes having occurred to my fancy, which to me carried an air of benefit, I was resolved to commit them to paper before my departure, and leave, at least, a testimony of my good will to my fellow-creatures. But of all my reflections, none was more constantly my companion than a deep sorrow for the present decay of learning among us, and the manifest corruption of education; we have been a brave and learned people, and are insensibly dwindling into an effeminate, superficial race. Our young gentlemen are sent to the universities, it is true, but not under restraint or correction as formerly; not to study, but to drink; not for furniture for the head, but a feather for the cap, merely to say they have been at Oxford or Cambridge, as if the air of those places inspired knowledge without application. It is true we ought to have those places in reverence for the many learned men they have sent us; but why must we go so far for knowledge? Why should a young gentleman be sent raw from the nursery to live on his own hands, to be liable to a thousand temptations, and run the risk of being snapped up by sharping jilts, with which both universities abound, who make our youth of fortune their prey, and have brought misery into too many good families? Not only the hazard of their healths from debauches of both kinds, but the waste of their precious time renders the sending them so far off very hazardous. Why should such a metropolis as London be without an university? Would it not save considerably the expense we are at in sending our young gentlemen so far from London? Would it not add to the lustre of our state, and cultivate politeness among us? What benefits may we not in time expect from so glorious a design? Will not London become the scene of science? And what reason have we but to hope we may vie with any neighbouring nations? Not that I would have Oxford or Cambridge neglected, for the good they have done. Besides, there are too many fine endowments to be sunk; we may have universities at those places and at London too, without prejudice. Knowledge will never hurt us, and whoever lives to see an university here, will find it give quite another turn to the genius and spirit of our youth in general. How many gentlemen pass their lives in a shameful indolence, who might employ themselves to the purpose, were such a design set on foot? Learning would flourish, art revive, and not only those who studied would benefit by it, but the blessing would be conveyed to others by conversation. And in order to this so laudable design, small expense is required; the sole charge being the hire of a convenient hall or house, which, if they please, they may call a college. But I see no necessity the pupils have to lie or diet there; that may be done more reasonably and conveniently at home, under the eye of their friends; their only necessary business at college being to attend their tutors at stated hours; and, bed and board excepted, to conform themselves to college laws, and perform the same exercises as if they were actually at Oxford or Cambridge. Let the best of tutors be provided, and professors in all faculties encouraged; this will do a double good, not only to the instructed, but to the instructors. What a fine provision may here be made for numbers of ingenious gentlemen now unpreferred? And to what a height may even a small beginning grow in time? As London is so extensive, so its university may be composed of many colleges, quartered at convenient distances: for example, one at Westminster, one at St. James's, one near Ormond-street, that part of the town abounding in gentry; one in the centre of the Inns of Court, another near the Royal Exchange, and more if occasion and encouragement permit. The same offices and regulations may be constituted, cooks, butlers, bed-makers, &c., excepted, as at other universities. As for endowment, there is no need, the whole may be done by subscription, and that an easy one, considering that nothing but instructions are paid for. In a word, an academical education is so much wanted in London, that everybody of ability and figure will readily come into it; and I dare engage, the place need but be chosen, and tutors approved of, to complete the design at once. It may be objected, that there is a kind of university at Gresham college, where professors in all sciences are maintained, and obliged to read lectures every day, or at least as often as demanded. The design is most laudable, but it smells too much of the _sine cure_; they only read in term time, and then their lectures are so hurried over, the audience is little the better. They cannot be turned out, it is a good settlement for life, and they are very easy in their studies when once fixed. Whereas were the professorship during good behaviour, there would be a study to maintain their posts, and their pupils would reap the benefit. Upon second thought, I think colleges for university education might be formed at Westminster, Eton, the Charter-house, St. Paul's, Merchant Tailors, and other public schools, where youth might begin and end their studies; but this may be further considered of. I had almost forgot the most material point, which is, that his majesty's sanction must first be obtained, and the university proposed have power to confer degrees, &c., and other academical privileges. As I am quick to conceive, I am eager to have done, unwilling to overwork a subject; I had rather leave part to the conception of the readers, than to tire them or myself with protracting a theme, as if, like a chancery man or a hackney author, I wrote by the sheet for hire. So let us have done with this topic, and proceed to another, which is:-- _A proposal to prevent murder, dishonour, and other abuses, by erecting an hospital for foundlings._ It is needless to run into a declamation on this head, since not a sessions passes but we see one or more merciless mothers tried for the murder of their bastard children; and, to the shame of good government, generally escape the vengeance due to shedders of innocent blood. For it is a common practice now among them to hire a set of old beldams, or pretended midwives, who make it their trade to bring them off for three or four guineas, having got the ready rote of swearing the child was not at its full growth, for which they have a hidden reserve; that is to say, the child was not at man's or woman's growth. Thus do these impious wretches cheat the world, and damn their own souls by a double meaning, which too often imposes on a cautious, merciful, and credulous jury, and gives wicked murderers means to escape and commit fresh sins, to which their acquitters, no doubt, are accessory. I wonder so many men of sense as have been on the jury have been so often imposed upon by the stale pretence of a scrap or two of child-bed linen being found in the murderer's box, &c.; when, alas! perhaps, it was never put there till after the murder was committed; or if it was, but with a view of saving themselves by that devilish precaution; for so many have been acquitted on that pretence, that it is but too common a thing to provide child-bed linen beforehand for a poor innocent babe they are determined to murder. But, alas! what are the exploded murders to those which escape the eye of the magistrate, and die in silence? Add to this, procured abortions and other indirect means which wicked wretches make use of to screen themselves from the censure of the world, which they dread more than the displeasure of their Maker. Those who cannot be so hardhearted to murder their own offspring themselves, take a slower, though as sure, a way, and get it done by others, by dropping their children, and leaving them to be starved by parish nurses. Thus is God robbed of a creature, in whom he had breathed the breath of life, and on whom he had stamped his image; the world of an inhabitant, who might have been of use; the king of a subject; and future generations of an issue not to be accounted for, had this infant lived to have been a parent. It is therefore the height of charity and humanity to provide against this barbarity, to prevent this crying sin, and extract good, even out of evil, by saving these innocent babes from slaughter, and bringing them up in the nurture and fear of the Lord; to be of benefit to themselves and mankind in general. And what nearer, what better way can we have, than to erect and to endow a proper hospital or house to receive them, where we may see them tenderly brought up, as so many living monuments of our charity; every one of them being a convincing proof of a Christian saved, and a murder prevented? Nor will this be attended with so much charge as is imagined, for we find in many parishes, that parents have redemanded their children, on increase of circumstances, and paid all costs, with a handsome present in the bargain; and many times when a clandestine marriage is cleared up and openly avowed, they would purchase the first-fruits of their loves at any rate. Oftentimes a couple may have no more children, and an infant thus saved may arrive to inherit a good estate, and become a benefactor where it was once an object of charity. But let us suppose the worst, and imagine the infant begot in sin and without the sanction of wedlock; is it therefore to be murdered, starved, or neglected, because its parents were wicked? Hard fate of innocent children to suffer for their parents' faults! Where God has thought fit to give his image and life, there is nourishment demanded; that calls aloud for our Christian and human assistance, and best shows our nobleness of soul, when we generously assist those who cannot help themselves. If the fault devolved on the children, our church would deny them baptism, burial, and other Christian rites; but our religion carries more charity with it, they are not denied even to partake of our blessed sacraments, and are excluded no one branch or benefit accruing from Christianity; if so, how unjust are those who arraign them for their parents' faults, and how barbarous are those parents, who, though able, make no provision for them, because they are not legitimate. My child, is my child, let it be begot in sin or wedlock, and all the duties of a parent are incumbent on me so long as it lives; if it survives me, I ought to make a provision for it, according to my ability; and though I do not set it on a footing with my legitimate children, I ought in conscience to provide against want and shame, or I am answerable for every sin or extravagance my child is forced or led into, for want of my giving an allowance to prevent it. We have an instance very fresh in every one's memory, of an ingenious, nay a sober young nobleman, for such I must call him, whose either father was a peer, and his mother a peeress. This unhappy gentleman, tossed from father to father, at last found none, and himself a vagabond forced to every shift; he in a manner starved for many years, yet was guilty of no capital crime, till that unhappy accident occurred, which God has given him grace and sense enough to repent. However, I cannot but think his hard-hearted mother will bear her portion of the guilt, till washed away by a severe repentance. What a figure might this man have made in life, had due care been taken? If his peerage had not been adjusted, he might at least have been a fine gentleman; nay, probably have filled some handsome post in the government with applause, and called as much for respect as he does now for pity. Nor is this gentleman the only person begot and neglected by noble, or rather ignoble parents; we have but too many now living, who owe their birth to the best of our peerage, and yet know not where to eat. Hard fate, when the child would be glad of the scraps which the servants throw away! But Heaven generally rewards them accordingly, for many noble families are become extinct, and large estates alienated into other houses, while their own issue want bread. And now, methinks, I hear some over-squeamish ladies cry, What would this fellow be at? would not he set up a nursery for lewdness, and encourage fornication? who would be afraid of sinning, if they can so easily get rid of their bastards? we shall soon be overrun with foundlings when there is such encouragement given to whoredom. To which I answer, that I am as much against bastards being begot, as I am for their being murdered; but when a child is once begot, it cannot be unbegotten; and when once born, it must be kept; the fault, as I said before, is in the parents, not the child; and we ought to show our charity towards it as a fellow-creature and Christian, without any regard to its legitimacy or otherwise. The only way to put a stop to this growing evil, would be to oblige all housekeepers not to admit a man and woman as lodgers till they were certified of their being lawfully married; for now-a-days nothing is more common than for a whoremonger and a strumpet to pretend marriage, till they have left a child or two on the parish, and then shift to another part of the town. If there were no receivers, there would be no thieves; if there were no bawdyhouses, there would be no whores; and though persons letting lodgings be not actual procurers, yet, if they connive at the embraces of a couple, whose marriage is doubtful, they are no better than bawds, and their houses no more than brothels. Now should anybody ask how shall this hospital be built? how endowed? to which I answer, follow the steps of the Venetians, the Hamburghers, and other foreign states, &c., who have for ages past prosecuted this glorious design, and found their account therein. As for building a house, I am utterly against it, especially in the infancy of the affair: let a place convenient be hired. Why should such a considerable sum be sunk in building as has in late public structures, which have swallowed up part of the profits and dividend, if not the capital, of unwary stockmongers? To my great joy I find my project already anticipated, and a noble subscription carrying on for this purpose; to promote which I exhort all persons of compassion and generosity, and I shall think myself happy, if what I have said on this head may anyways contribute to further the same. Having said all I think material on this subject, I beg pardon for leaving my reader so abruptly, and crave leave to proceed to another article, viz.:-- _A proposal to prevent the expensive importation of foreign musicians, &c., by forming an academy of our own._ It will no doubt be asked what have I to do with music? to which I answer, I have been a lover of the science from my infancy, and in my younger days was accounted no despicable performer on the viol and lute, then much in vogue. I esteem it the most innocent amusement in life; it generally relaxes, after too great a hurry of spirits, and composes the mind into a sedateness prone to everything that is generous and good; and when the more necessary parts of education are finished, it is a most genteel and commendable accomplishment; it saves a great deal of drinking and debauchery in our sex, and helps the ladies off with many an idle hour, which sometimes might probably be worse employed otherwise. Our quality, gentry, and better sort of traders must have diversions; and if those that are commendable be denied, they will take to worse; now what can be more commendable than music, one of the seven liberal sciences, and no mean branch of the mathematics? Were it for no other reason I should esteem it, because it was the favourite diversion of his late majesty, of glorious memory; who was as wise a prince as ever filled the British throne. Nor is it less esteemed by their present majesties, whose souls are formed for harmony, and who have not disdained to make it a part in the education of their sacred race. Our nobility and gentry have shown their love to the science, by supporting at such prodigious expense the Italian opera, improperly called an academy; but they have at the same time shown no small partiality in discouraging anything English, and overloading the town with such heaps of foreign musicians. An academy, rightly understood, is a place for the propagation of science, by training up persons thereto from younger to riper years, under the instruction and inspection of proper artists; how can the Italian opera properly be called an academy, when none are admitted but such as are, at least are thought, or ought to be, adepts in music? If that be an academy, so are the theatres of Drury-lane, and Lincolns-inn Fields; nay, Punch's opera may pass for a lower kind of academy. Would it not be a glorious thing to have an opera of our own, in our own most noble tongue, in which the composer, singers, and orchestra, should be of our own growth? Not that we ought to disclaim all obligations to Italy, the mother of music, the nurse of Corelli, Handel, Bononcini, Geminiani; but then we ought not to be so stupidly partial to imagine ourselves too brutal a part of mankind to make any progress in the science? By the same reason that we love it, we may excel in it; love begets application, and application perfection. We have already had a Purcel, and no doubt there are now many latent geniuses, who only want proper instruction, application, and encouragement, to become great ornaments of the science, and make England emulate even Rome itself. What a number of excellent performers on all instruments have sprung up in England within these few years? That this is owing to the opera I will not deny, and so far the opera is an academy, as it refines the taste and inspires emulation. But though we are happy in instrumental performers, we frequently send to Italy for singers, and that at no small expense; to remedy which I humbly propose that the governors of Christ's Hospital will show their public spirit, by forming an academy of music on their foundation, after this or the like manner. That out of their great number of children, thirty boys be selected of good ears and propensity to music. That these boys be divided into three classes, viz., six for wind instruments, such as the hautboy, bassoon, and German flute. That sixteen others be selected for string instruments, or at least the most useful, viz., the violin and bass-violin. That the remaining eight be particularly chosen for voice, and organ, or harpsichord. That all in due time be taught composition. The boys thus chosen, three masters should be elected, each most excellent in his way; that is to say, one for the wind instrument, another for the stringed, and a third for the voice and organ, &c. Handsome salaries should be allowed these masters, to engage their constant attendance every day from eight till twelve in the morning; and I think 100_l._ per annum for each would be sufficient, which will be a trifle to so wealthy a body. The multiplicity of holidays should be abridged, and only a few kept; there cannot be too few, considering what a hinderance they are to juvenile studies. It is a vulgar error that has too long prevailed all over England to the great detriment of learning, and many boys have been made blockheads in complaisance to kings and saints dead for many ages past. The morning employed in music, the boys should go in the afternoon, or so many hours, to the reading and writing school, and in the evening should practice, at least two hours before bed-time, and two before the master comes in the morning. This course held for seven or eight years, will make them fine proficients; but that they should not go too raw or young out of the academy, it is proper, that at the stated age of apprenticeship, they be bound to the hospital, to engage their greater application, and make them thorough masters, before they launch out into the world; for one great hinderance to many performers is, that they begin to teach too soon, and obstruct their genius. What will not such a design produce in a few years? Will they not be able to perform a concert, choir, or opera, or all three, among themselves, and overpay the charge, as shall hereafter be specified? For example, we will suppose such a design to be continued for ten years, we shall find an orchestra of forty hands, and a choir or opera of twenty voices, or admitting that of those twenty only five prove capital singers, it will answer the intent. For the greater variety they may, if they think fit, take in two or more of their girls, where they find a promising genius, but this may be further considered of. Now, when they are enabled to exhibit an opera, will they not gain considerably when their voices and hands cost them only a college subsistence? and it is but reasonable the profits accruing from operas, concerts, or otherwise, should go to the hospital, to make good all former and future expenses, and enable them to extend the design to a greater length and grandeur; so that instead of 1,500_l._ per annum, the price of one Italian singer, we shall for 300_l._ once in ten years, have sixty English musicians regularly educated, and enabled to live by their science. There ought, moreover, to be annual probations, and proper prizes or premiums allotted, to excite emulation in the youths, and give life to their studies. They have already a music school, as they call it, but the allowance is too poor for this design, and the attendance too small, it must be every day, or not at all. This will be an academy indeed, and in process of time they will have even their masters among themselves; and what is the charge, compared with the profits, or their abilities? One thing I had like to have forgot, which is, that with permission of the right reverend the lords spiritual, some performance in music, suitable to the solemnity of the day, be exhibited every Sunday after divine service. Sacred poesy, and rhetoric may be likewise introduced to make it an entertainment suitable to a Christian and polite audience; and indeed we seem to want some such commendable employment for the better sort; for we see the public walks and taverns crowded, and rather than be idle, they will go to Newport market. That such an entertainment would be much preferable to drinking, gaming, or profane discourse, none can deny; and till it is proved to be prejudicial, I shall always imagine it necessary. The hall at the hospital will contain few less than seven hundred people, conveniently seated, which at so small a price as one shilling per head, will amount to 35_l._ per week; and if the performance deserve it, as no doubt it will in time, they may make it half a crown, or more, which must considerably increase the income of the hospital. When they are able to make an opera, the profits will be yet more considerable, nor will they reap much less from what the youths bring in during their apprenticeship, when employed at concerts, theatres, or other public entertainments. Having advanced what I think proper on this head, or at least enough for a hint, I proceed to offer, _That many youths and servants may be saved from destruction were the streets cleared of shameless and impudent strumpets, gaming tables totally suppressed, and a stop put to sabbath debauches._ The corruption of our children and servants is of importance sufficient to require our utmost precaution; and moreover, women servants (commonly called maid-servants) are such necessary creatures, that it is by no means below us to make them beneficial rather than prejudicial to us. I shall not run into a description of their abuses; we know enough of those already. Our business now is to make them useful, first by ascertaining their wages at a proper standard. Secondly, by obliging them to continue longer in service, not to stroll about from place to place, and throw themselves on the town on every dislike. Thirdly, to prevent their being harboured by wicked persons, when out of place; or living too long on their own hands. As for their wages, they have topped upon us already, and doubled them in spite of our teeth; but as they have had wit enough to get them, so will they, I doubt not, have the same sense to keep them, and much good may it do those indolent over-secure persons, who have given them this advantage. However, if they are honest and diligent, I would have them encouraged, and handsome wages allowed them; because, by this means, we provide for the children of the inferior class of people, who otherwise could not maintain themselves; nay, sometimes tradesmen, &c., reduced, are glad when their children cease to hang upon them, by getting into service, and by that means not only maintaining themselves, but being of use in other families. But then there ought to be some medium, some limitation to their wages, or they may extort more than can well be afforded. Nothing calls for more redress than their quitting service for every idle disgust, leaving a master or mistress at a nonplus, and all under plea of a foolish old custom, called warning, nowhere practised but in London; for in other places they are hired by the year, or by the statute as they call it, which settles them in a place, at least for some time; whereas, when they are not limited, it encourages a roving temper, and makes them never easy. If you turn them away without warning, they will make you pay a month's wages, be the provocation or offence never so great; but if they leave you, though never so abruptly, or unprovided, help yourselves how you can, there is no redress; though I think there ought, in all conscience, to be as much law for the master as for the servant. No servant should quit a place where they are well fed and paid, without assigning a good reason before a magistrate. On the other hand, they should receive no abuse which should not be redressed; for we ought to treat them as servants, not slaves; and a medium ought to be observed on both sides. But if they are not restrained from quitting service on every vagary, they will throw themselves on the town, and not only ruin themselves, but others; for example, a girl quits a place and turns whore; if there is not a bastard to be murdered, or left to the parish, there is one or more unwary youths drawn in to support her in lewdness and idleness; in order to which, they rob their parents and masters, nay, sometimes, anybody else, to support their strumpets; so that many thieves owe their ruin and shameful deaths to harlots; not to mention the communication of loathsome distempers, and innumerable other evils, to which they give birth. How many youths, of all ranks, are daily ruined? and how justly may be dreaded the loss of as many more, if a speedy stop be not put to this growing evil? Generations to come will curse the neglect of the present, and every sin committed for the future may be passed to our account, if we do not use our endeavours to the contrary. And unless we prevent our maid-servants from being harboured by wicked persons when out of place, or living too long on their own hands, our streets will swarm with impudent shameless strumpets; the good will be molested; those prone to evil will be made yet more wicked, by having temptations thrown in their way; and, to crown all, we shall have scarce a servant left, but our wives, &c., must do the household-work themselves. If this be not worthy the consideration of a legislature, I would fain know what is. Is it not time to limit their wages, when they are grown so wanton they know not what to ask? Is it not time to fix them, when they stroll from place to place, and we are hardly sure of a servant a month together? Is it not time to prevent the increase of harlots, by making it penal for servants to be harboured in idleness, and tempted to theft, whoredom, murder, &c., by living too long out of place? and I am sure it is high time to begin the work, by clearing the public streets of night-walkers, who are grown to such a pitch of impudence that peace and common decency are manifestly broken in our public streets. I wonder this has so long escaped the eye of the magistrate, especially when there are already in force laws sufficient to restrain this tide of uncleanness, which will one day overflow us. The lewdest people upon earth, ourselves excepted, are not guilty of such open violations of the laws of decency. Go all the world over, and you will see no such impudence as in the streets of London, which makes many foreigners give our women in general a bad character, from the vile specimens they meet with from one end of the town to the other. Our sessions' papers are full of the trials of impudent sluts, who first decoy men and then rob them; a meanness the courtesans of Rome and Venice abhor. How many honest women, those of the inferior sort especially, get loathsome distempers from their husband's commerce with these creatures, which distempers are often entailed on posterity; nor have we an hospital separated for that purpose, which does not contain too many instances of honest poor wretches made miserable by villains of husbands. And now I have mentioned the villany of some husbands in the lower state of life, give me leave to propose, or at least to wish, that they were restrained from abusing their wives at that barbarous rate, which is now practised by butchers, carmen, and such inferior sort of fellows, who are public nuisances to civil neighbourhoods, and yet nobody cares to interpose, because the riot is between a man and his wife. I see no reason why every profligate fellow shall have the liberty to disturb a whole neighbourhood, and abuse a poor honest creature at a most inhuman rate, and is not to be called to account because it is his wife; this sort of barbarity was never so notorious and so much encouraged as at present, for every vagabond thinks he may cripple his wife at pleasure; and it is enough to pierce a heart of stone to see how barbarously some poor creatures are beaten and abused by merciless dogs of husbands. It gives an ill example to the growing generation, and this evil will gain ground on us if not prevented; it may be answered, the law has already provided redress, and a woman abused may swear the peace against her husband, but what woman cares to do that? It is revenging herself on herself, and not without considerable charge and trouble. There ought to be a shorter way, and when a man has beaten his wife, which by the by is a most unmanly action, and great sign of cowardice, it behoves every neighbour who has the least humanity or compassion, to complain to the next justice of the peace, who should be empowered to set him in the stocks for the first offence; to have him well scourged at the whipping-post for the second; and if he persisted in his barbarous abuse of the holy marriage state, to send him to the house of correction till he should learn to use more mercy to his yoke-fellow. How hard is it for a poor industrious woman to be up early and late, to sit in a cold shop, stall, or market, all weathers, to carry heavy loads from one end of the town to the other, or to work from morning till night, and even then dread going home for fear of being murdered? Some may think this too low a topic for me to expatiate upon, to which I answer, that it is a charitable and Christian one, and therefore not in the least beneath the consideration of any man who had a woman for his mother. The mention of this leads me to exclaim against the vile practice now so much in vogue among the better sort as they are called, but the worst sort in fact; namely, the sending their wives to madhouses, at every whim or dislike, that they may be more secure and undisturbed in their debaucheries; which wicked custom is got to such a head, that the number of private madhouses in and about London are considerably increased within these few years. This is the height of barbarity and injustice in a Christian country, it is a clandestine inquisition, nay worse. How many ladies and gentlewomen are hurried away to these houses, which ought to be suppressed, or at least subject to daily examination, as hereafter shall be proposed? How many, I say, of beauty, virtue, and fortune, are suddenly torn from their dear innocent babes, from the arms of an unworthy man, whom they love, perhaps, but too well, and who in return for that love, nay probably an ample fortune and a lovely offspring besides, grows weary of the pure streams of chaste love, and thirsting after the puddles of lawless lust, buries his virtuous wife alive, that he may have the greater freedom with his mistresses? If they are not mad when they go into these cursed houses, they are soon made so by the barbarous usage they there suffer; and any woman of spirit, who has the least love for her husband, or concern for her family, cannot sit down tamely under a confinement and separation the most unaccountable and unreasonable. Is it not enough to make any one mad to be suddenly clapped up, stripped, whipped, ill-fed, and worse used? To have no reason assigned for such treatment, no crime alleged, or accusers to confront? And what is worse, no soul to appeal to but merciless creatures, who answer but in laughter, surliness, contradiction, and too often stripes? All conveniences for writing are denied, no messenger to be had to carry a letter to any relation or friend; and if this tyrannical inquisition, joined with the reasonable reflections a woman of any common understanding must necessarily make, be not sufficient to drive any soul stark staring mad, though before they were never so much in their right senses, I have no more to say. When by this means a wicked husband has driven a poor creature mad, and robbed an injured wife of her reason, for it is much easier to create than to cure madness, then has the villain a handle for his roguery; then, perhaps, he will admit her distressed relations to see her, when it is too late to cure the madness he so artfully and barbarously has procured. But this is not all: sometimes more dismal effects attend this inquisition, for death is but too often the cure of their madness and end of their sorrows; some with ill usage, some with grief, and many with both, are barbarously cut off in the prime of their years and flower of their health, who otherwise might have been mothers of a numerous issue, and survived many years. This is murder in the deepest sense, and much more cruel than dagger or poison, because more lingering; they die by piecemeal, and in all the agonies and terrors of a distracted mind. Nay, it is murder upon murder, for the issue that might have been begot is to be accounted for to God and the public. Now, if this kind of murder is connived at, we shall no doubt have enough, nay, too much of it; for if a man is weary of his wife, has spent her fortune, and wants another, it is but sending her to a madhouse and the business is done at once. How many have already been murdered after this manner is best known to just Heaven, and those unjust husbands and their damned accomplices, who, though now secure in their guilt, will one day find it is murder of the blackest dye, has the least claim to mercy, and calls aloud for the severest vengeance. How many are yet to be sacrificed, unless a speedy stop be put to this most accursed practice, I tremble to think; our legislature cannot take this cause too soon in hand. This surely cannot be below their notice, and it will be an easy matter at once to suppress all these pretended madhouses. Indulge, gentle reader, for once the doting of an old man, and give him leave to lay down his little system without arraigning him of arrogance or ambition to be a lawgiver. In my humble opinion, all private madhouses should be suppressed at once, and it should be no less than felony to confine any person under pretence of madness without due authority. For the cure of those who are really lunatic, licensed madhouses should be constituted in convenient parts of the town, which houses should be subject to proper visitation and inspection, nor should any person be sent to a madhouse without due reason, inquiry, and authority. It may be objected, by persons determined to contradict every thing and approve nothing, that the abuses complained of are not so numerous or heinous as I would insinuate. Why are not facts advanced, they will be apt to say, to give a face of truth to these assertions? But I have two reasons to the contrary; the first is, the more you convince them, the more angry you make them, for they are never better pleased than when they have an opportunity of finding fault; therefore, to curry favour with the fault-finders, I have left them a loophole: the second and real is, because I do not care to bring an old house over my head by mentioning particular names or special cases, thereby drawing myself into vexatious prosecutions and suits at law from litigious wretches, who would be galled to find their villanies made public, and stick at no expense or foul play to revenge themselves. Not but I could bring many instances, particularly of an unhappy widow, put in by a villain of a husband, and now continued in for the sake of her jointure by her unnatural son, far from common honesty or humanity. Of another, whose husband keeps his mistress in black velvet, and is seen with her every night at the opera or play, while his poor wife (by much the finer woman, and of an understanding far superior to her thick-skulled tyrant,) is kept mean in diet and apparel; nay, ill-used into the bargain, notwithstanding her fortune supplies all the villain's extravagances, and he has not a shilling but what came from her: but a beggar when once set on horseback proves always the most unmerciful rider. I cannot leave this subject without inserting one particular case. A lady of known beauty, virtue, and fortune, nay more, of wisdom, not flashy wit, was, in the prime of her youth and beauty, and when her senses were perfectly sound, carried by her husband in his coach as to the opera; but the coachman had other instructions, and drove directly to a madhouse, where the poor innocent lady was no sooner introduced, under pretence of calling by the way to see some pictures he had a mind to buy, but the key was turned upon her, and she left a prisoner by her faithless husband, who while his injured wife was confined and used with the utmost barbarity, he, like a profligate wretch, ran through her fortune with strumpets, and then basely, under pretence of giving her liberty, extorted her to make over her jointure, which she had no sooner done but he laughed in her face, and left her to be as ill-used as ever. This he soon ran through, and (happily for the lady) died by the justice of heaven in a salivation his debauches had obliged him to undergo. During her confinement, the villain of the madhouse frequently attempted her chastity; and the more she repulsed him the worse he treated her, till at last he drove her mad in good earnest. Her distressed brother, who is fond of her to the last degree, now confines her in part of his own house, treating her with great tenderness, but has the mortification to be assured by the ablest physicians that his poor sister is irrecoverably distracted. Numberless are the instances I could produce, but they would be accounted fictitious, because I do not name the particular persons, for the reasons before assigned; but the sufferings of these poor ladies are not fictitious, nor are the villany of the madhouses, or the unnatural, though fashionable barbarity of husbands, chimeras, but too solid grievances, and manifest violations of the laws of God and man. Most gracious and august queen Caroline! ornament of your sex, and pride of the British nation! the best of mothers, the best of wives, the best of women! Begin this auspicious reign with an action worthy your illustrious self, rescue your injured sex from this tyranny, nor let it be in the power of every brutal husband to cage and confine his wife at pleasure, a practice scarce heard of till of late years. Nip it in the bud, most gracious queen, and draw on yourself the blessings of numberless of the fair sex, now groaning under the severest and most unjust bondage. Restore them to their families; let them, by your means, enjoy light and liberty; that while they fondly embrace, and with tears of joy weep over their dear children, so long withheld from them, they may invoke accumulated blessings from heaven upon your royal head! And you, ye fair illustrious circle! who adorn the British court! and every day surround our gracious queen: let generous pity inspire your souls, and move you to intercede with your noble consorts for redress in this injurious affair. Who can deny when you become suitors? and who knows but at your request a bill may be brought into the house to regulate these abuses? The cause is a noble and a common one, and ought to be espoused by every lady who would claim the least title to virtue or compassion. I am sure no honest member in either honourable house will be against so reasonable a bill; the business is for some public-spirited patriot to break the ice by bringing it into the house, and I dare lay my life it passes. I must beg my reader's indulgence, being the most immethodical writer imaginable. It is true I lay down a scheme, but fancy is so fertile I often start fresh hints, and cannot but pursue them; pardon therefore, kind reader, my digressive way of writing, and let the subject, not the style or method, engage thy attention. Return we, therefore, to complain of destructive gaming-houses, the bane of our youth, and ruin of our children and servants. This is the most unprofitable evil upon earth, for it only tends to alienate the proper current of specie, to maintain a pack of idle sharping rascals, and beggar unwary gentlemen and traders. I take the itch of gaming to be the most pernicious of vices, it is a kind of avaricious madness; and if people have not sense to command themselves by reason, they ought to be restrained by law; nor suffered to ruin themselves and families, to enrich a crew of sharpers. There is no playing on the square with these villains; they are sure to cheat you, either by sleight of hand, confederacy, or false dice, &c.; they have so much the odds of their infatuated bubbles, that they might safely play a guinea to a shilling, and yet be sure of winning. This is but genteel pocket picking, or felony with another name, and yet, so fond are we of it, that from the footboy to the lord, all must have a touch of gaming; and there are sharpers of different stations and denominations, from Southwark-fair to the groom porters. Shame, that gentlemen should suffer every scoundrel to mix with them for gaming sake! And equal shame, that honest laborious tradesmen should be obstructed in crossing the public streets, by the gilt chariots of vagabond gamesters; who now infest the land, and brave even our nobility and gentry with their own money. But the most barbarous part of this hellish trade is what they call setting of young gentlemen, apprentices, and others; this ought to be deemed felony without benefit of clergy; for it is the worst of thievery. Under pretence of taking a bottle, or spending an evening gaily, they draw their cull to the tavern, where they sit not long before the devil's bones or books are found accidentally on purpose, by the help of which they strip my gentleman in an instant, and then generously lend him his own money, to lose afresh, and create a debt which is but too often more justly paid than those more justly due. If we look into some late bankruptcies we shall find some noted gamesters the principal creditors; I think, in such cases it would be but justice to make void the gamester's debt, and subject his estate to make good the deficiencies of the bankrupt's effects. If traders have no more wit, the public should have pity on them; and make it as penal to lose as to win; and, in truth, if cards, dice, &c., were totally suppressed, industry and arts would increase the more; gaming may make a man crafty, but not polite; one may understand cards and dice perfectly well, and be a blockhead in everything else. I am sorry to see it so prevalent in the city among the trading part of mankind, who have introduced it into their clubs, and play so high of late that many bankrupts have been made by this pernicious practice. It is the bane of all conversation; and those who can't sit an hour without gaming, should never go into a club to spoil company. In a word, it is mere madness, and a most stupid thing to hazard one's fortune, and perplex one's mind; nay, to sit up whole nights, poring over toys of pipped ivory and painted pasteboard, making ourselves worse than little children, whose innocent sports we so much ridicule. To sum up all, I think it would be a noble retribution, to subject gamesters' estates to the use and support of the poor widows and orphans of their unfortunate bubbles. Sunday debauches are abuses that call loud for amendment; it is in this pernicious soil the seeds of ruin are first sown. Instead of a day of rest, we make it a day of labour, by toiling in the devil's vineyard; and but too many surfeit themselves with the fruits of gluttony, drunkenness, and uncleanness. Not that I am so superciliously strict, to have the sabbath kept as rigidly here as in Scotland, but then there ought to be a medium between the severity of a fast, and the riot of Saturnalia. Instead of a decent and cheerful solemnity, our taverns and publichouses have more business that day than all the week beside. Our apprentices plume themselves; nay, some scruple not to put on their swords and tie wigs, or toupees, and the loose end of the town is their rendezvous, Sunday being market-day all round the hundreds of Drury. While we want servants to do our work, those hundreds, as they call them, are crowded with numbers of idle impudent sluts, who love sporting more than spinning, and inveigle our youth to their ruin; nay, many old lechers, beasts as they are! steal from their families, and seek these harlots' lurking holes, to practise their unaccountable schemes of new invented lewdnesses; some half hang themselves, others are whipped, some lie under a table and gnaw the bones that are thrown them, while others stand slaving among a parcel of drabs at a washing tub. Strange that the inclination should not die with the power, but that old fools should make themselves the prey and ridicule of a pack of strumpets! Some heedless youths are wheedled into marriage, which makes them and their unhappy parents miserable all their lives; others are drawn into extravagancies, and but too often run into their master's cash, and for fear of a discovery, make away with themselves, or at least run away and leave their distracted parents in a thousand tears; not to mention the frustration of their fortune, and the miseries that attend a vagabond life. Thus honest parents lose their children, and traders their apprentices, and all from a liberty we have of late given our youth of rambling abroad on Sundays; for many, nowadays will lie out all night, or stay out so late to give no small disturbance in sober families. It therefore behoves every master of a family to have his servants under his eye; and if the going to church, meeting, or whatever place of worship suited their religion, were more enforced, it would be so much the better. In short, the luxury of the age will be the ruin of the nation, if not prevented. We leave trade to game in stocks; we live above ourselves, and barter our ready money for trifles; tea and wine are all we seem anxious for, and God has given the blessings of life to an ungrateful people, who despise their own productions. Our very plough-fellows drink wine nowadays; our farmers, graziers, and butchers, are above malt liquors; and the wholesome breakfast of water-gruel and milk potage is changed for coffee and tea. This is the reason provisions and corn, &c., are so dear; we all work for vintners, and raise our prices one upon another to such a degree, it will be an impossibility to live, and we shall, of course, become our own devourers. We strain at a gnat and swallow a camel; and, in this instance, the publichouses are kept open to furnish our luxury, while we deny ourselves other necessaries of life, out of a scruple of conscience. For example; in extreme hot weather, when meat will not keep from Saturday to Sunday, we throw, or cause to be thrown away, vast quantities of tainted meat, and have generally stinking dinners, because the butchers dare not sell a joint of meat on a Sunday morning. Now, though I would not have the Sabbath so far violated as to have it a market-day, yet, rather than abuse God's mercies by throwing away creatures given for our use, nay, for our own healths and cleanliness sake, I would have the same indulgence in extreme hot weather, as there is for milk and mackerel; that is to say, that meat might be killed in the cool of the morning, viz., one or two of the clock, and sold till nine, and no longer; nor should villanous informers have power to molest them in this innocent and reasonable amendment of a ridiculous vulgar error. I cannot forbear taking notice of the extravagant use, or rather abuse, of that nauseous liquor called Geneva, among our lower sort. Those who deny that an inferior class of people are most necessary in a body politic, contradict reason and experience itself, since they are most useful when industrious, and as pernicious when lazy. By their industry our manufactures, trade, and commerce are carried on; the merchant in his counting-house, and the captain in his cabin, would find but little employment were it not that many hands carried on the different branches of the concern they superintended. But now, so far are our common people infatuated with Geneva, that half the work is not done now as formerly. It debilitates and enervates them, and they are not near so strong and healthy as formerly. This accursed liquor is in itself so diuretic, it overstrains the parts of generation, and makes our common people incapable of getting such lusty children as they used to do. Add to this, that the women, by drinking it, spoil their milk, and by giving it to young children, as they foolishly do, spoil the stomach, and hinder digestion; so that in less than an age, we may expect a fine spindle-shanked generation. There is not in nature so unhealthy a liquor as Geneva, especially as commonly sold; it curdles the blood, it stupefies the senses, it weakens the nerves, it spoils the eyesight, and entirely ruins the stomach; nay, some stomachs have been rendered so cold by the use of Geneva, that lamp spirits have not been a dram warm enough for them. Surely they will come to drink aquafortis at last! On the contrary, our own malt liquors, especially common draught beer, is most wholesome and nourishing, and has brought up better generations than the present: it is strengthening, cooling, and balsamic; it helps digestion, and carries nourishment with it; and, in spite of the whims of some physicians, is most pertinent to a human, especially a good wholesome English, constitution. Nay, the honest part of the faculty deny not the use of small beer, well brewed, even in fevers. I, myself, have found great benefit by it; and if it be good in its kind, it is the finest jalap upon earth. If this abuse of Geneva be not stopped, we may go whoop for husbandmen, labourers, &c. Trade must consequently stand still, and the credit of the nation sink; nor is the abatement of the excise, though very considerable, and most worthy notice, any ways comparable to the corruption of manners, the destruction of health, and all the train of evils we are threatened with from pernicious Geneva. _An effectual method to prevent street robberies._ The principal encouragements and opportunity given to street robbers is, that our streets are so poorly watched; the watchmen, for the most part, being decrepit, superannuated wretches, with one foot in the grave and the other ready to follow; so feeble that a puff of breath can blow them down. Poor crazy mortals! much fitter for an almshouse than a watchhouse. A city watched and guarded by such animals is wretchedly watched indeed. Nay, so little terror do our watchmen carry with them, that hardy thieves make a mere jest of them, and sometimes oblige even the very watchman who should apprehend them to light them in their roguery. And what can a poor creature do, in terror of his life, surrounded by a pack of ruffians, and no assistance near? Add to this, that our rogues are grown more wicked than ever, and vice in all kinds is so much winked at, that robbery is accounted a petty crime. We take pains to puff them up in their villany, and thieves are set out in so amiable a light in the Beggar's Opera, that it has taught them to value themselves on their profession rather than be ashamed of it. There was some cessation of street robberies, from the time of Bunworth and Blewitt's execution, until the introduction of this pious opera. Now we find the Cartouchian villanies revived, and London, that used to be the most safe and peaceful city in the universe, is now a scene of rapine and danger. If some of Cartouch's gang be not come over to instruct our thieves, and propagate their schemes, we have, doubtless, a Cartouch of our own, and a gang which, if not suppressed, may be full as pernicious as ever Cartouch's was, and London will be as dangerous as Paris, if due care be not taken. We ought to begin our endeavours to suppress these villanies, first by heavenly, and then by earthly means. By heavenly means, in enforcing and encouraging a reformation of manners, by suppressing of vice and immorality, and punishing profaneness and licentiousness. Our youth are corrupted by filthy, lewd ballads, sung and sold publicly in our streets; nay, unlicensed and unstamped, notwithstanding acts of parliament to the contrary. Coachmen, carmen, &c, are indulged in swearing after the most blasphemous, shocking, and unaccountable rate that ever was known. New oaths and blasphemies are daily uttered and invented; and rather than not exercise this hellish talent, they will vent their curses on their very horses; and, oh stupid! damn the blood of a post, rather than want something to curse. Our common women, too, have learned this vice; and not only strumpets, but labouring women, who keep our markets, and vend things about street, swear and curse at a most hideous rate. Their children learn it from their parents, and those of the middle, or even the better sort of people, if they pass through the streets to school, or to play, catch the infection, and carry home such words as must consequently be very shocking to sober parents. Our youth, in general, have too much liberty; the Sabbath is not kept with due solemnity; masters and mistresses of families are too remiss in the care of the souls committed to their charge. Family prayer is neglected; and, to the shame of scoffers be it spoken, too much ridiculed. All ages and sexes, if in health, should be obliged to attend public worship, according to their respective opinions. Were it only to keep youth out of harm's way it would do well. But it is to be hoped, if their parents, masters, or mistresses, should oblige their attendance at public devotion, they would edify by what they should hear, and many wicked acts would be stifled in their infancy, and checked even in the intention, by good and useful doctrine. Our common people make it a day of debauch, and get so drunk on a Sunday they cannot work for a day or two following. Nay, since the use of Geneva has become so common, many get so often drunk they cannot work at all, but run from one irregularity to another, till at last they become arrant rogues. And this is the foundation of all our present complaints. We will suppose a man able to maintain himself and family by his trade, and at the same time to be a Geneva drinker. This fellow first makes himself incapable of working by being continually drunk; this runs him behindhand, and he either pawns or neglects his work, for which reason nobody will employ him. At last, fear of arrests, his own hunger, the cries of his family for bread, his natural desire to support an irregular life, and a propense hatred to labour, turn but too many an honest tradesman into an arrant desperate rogue. And these are commonly the means that furnish us with thieves and villains in general. Thus is a man, that might be useful in a body politic, rendered obnoxious to the same: and if this trade of wickedness goes on, they will grow and increase upon us, insomuch that we shall not dare to stir out of our habitations; nay, it will be well if they arrive not to the impudence of plundering our houses at noonday. Where is the courage of the English nation, that a gentleman, with six or seven servants, shall be robbed by one single highwayman? Yet we have lately had instances of this; and for this we may thank our effeminacy, our toupee wigs, and powdered pates, our tea, and other scandalous fopperies; and, above all, the disuse of noble and manly sports, so necessary to a brave people, once in vogue, but now totally lost among us. Let not the reader think I run from my subject if I search the bottom of the distemper before I propose a cure, which having done, though indeed but slightly, for this is an argument could be carried to a much greater length, I proceed next to propose earthly means in the manner following. Let the watch be composed of stout able-bodied men, and of those at least treble the number now subsisting, that is to say, a watchman to every forty houses, twenty on one side of the way, and twenty on the other; for it is observable that a man cannot well see distinctly beyond the extent of twenty houses in a row; if it is a single row, and no opposite houses, the charge must be greater and their safety less. This man should be elected and paid by the housekeepers themselves, to prevent misapplication and abuse, so much complained of in the distribution of public money. He should be allowed ten shillings per annum by each housekeeper, which at forty houses, as above specified, amounts to 20_l._ per annum, almost treble to what is at present allowed; and yet most housekeepers are charged at least 2s. 6d. a quarter to the watch, whose beat is, generally speaking, little less than the compass of half a mile. This salary is something of encouragement, and a pretty settlement to a poor man, who with frugality may live decently thereon, and by due rest be enabled to give vigilant attendance. If a housekeeper break, or a house is empty, the poor watchman ought not to suffer, the deficiency should be made up by the housekeepers remaining. Or, indeed, all housekeepers might be excused, if a tax of only one shilling per annum were levied on every bachelor within the bills of mortality, and above the age of one-and-twenty, who is not a housekeeper: for these young sparks are a kind of unprofitable gentry to the state; they claim public safety and advantages, and yet pay nothing to the public; nay, indeed, they in a manner live upon the public, for (on a Sunday especially) at least a million of these gentlemen quarter themselves upon the married men, and rob many families of part of a week's provision, more particularly when they play a good knife and fork, and are of the family of the Tuckers. I beg pardon for this whimsical proposal, which, ludicrous as it seems, has something in it; and may be improved. Return we, in the mean time, to our subject. The watch thus stationed, strengthened, and encouraged, let every watchman be armed with firearms and sword; and let no watchman stand above twenty doors distant from his fellow. Let each watchman be provided with a bugle-horn, to sound an alarm, or in time of danger; and let it be made penal, if not felony, for any but a watchman to sound a horn in and about the city, from the time of their going on, to that of their going off. An objection will be here made on account of the postboys, to obviate which, I had thoughts of a bell, but that would be too ponderous and troublesome for a watchman to carry, besides his arms and lantern. As to a fixed bell, if the watchman is at another part of his walk, how can he give notice? Besides, rogues may play tricks with the bell; whereas a horn is portable, always ready, and most alarming. Let the postboys therefore use some other signal, since this is most convenient to this more material purpose. They may carry a bell in a holster with ease, and give notice by that, as well as those who collect the letters. That the watchmen may see from one end of their walks to the other, let a convenient number of lamps be set up, and those not of the convex kind, which blind the eyes, and are of no manner of use; they dazzle, but give no distinct light: and further, rather than prevent robberies, many, deceived and blinded by these _ignes fatui_, have been run over by coaches, carts, &c. People stumble more upon one another, even under these very lamps, than in the dark. In short, they are most unprofitable lights, and in my opinion, rather abuses than benefits. Besides, I see no reason why every ten housekeepers cannot find a lamp among themselves, and let their watchman dress it, rather than fatten a crew of directors; but we are so fond of companies, it is a wonder we have not our shoes blacked by one, and a set of directors made rich at the expense of our very black-guards. Convenient turnpikes and stoppages may be made to prevent escapes, and it will be proper for a watchman to be placed at one of these, fixed at the end of a lane, court, alley, or other thoroughfare, which may happen in any part of his beat, and so as not to obstruct his view to both ends thereof, or being able to give notice, as aforesaid; for the watch ought to be in view, as well as in the hearing of each other, or they may be overpowered, and much danger may happen. The streets thus guarded and illuminated, what remains but that the money allotted by the government be instantly paid on conviction of every offender; for delays in this case are of dangerous consequence, and nobody will venture their lives in hopes of a reward, if it be not duly and timely paid. If there is reason of complaint on this head, it ought to be looked into by those at the helm; for nothing can be more vile than for underlings to abuse the benevolence of the public, or their superiors, by sinking, abridging, or delaying public or private benefits. And it is by no means below the dignity or care, even of the greatest, to see the disposal of their own bounty and charity; for it loses but too often by the carriage: and where a nobleman or other generous person has ordered five guineas to be given, it is well if the proper object has had even one. Something allowed by the Chamber of London to every person apprehending a robber, would have a good effect, especially if it be not told over a gridiron, but paid without delay or abatement. And what if the fewer custards are eat, so it augment the public safety. Some of our common soldiery are, and I hope unjustly, suspected. This may be easily confuted, if strict orders are enforced, that none but commission or warrant officers shall be out of their quarters after ten at night. But if we consider, that neither Blewit, Bunworth, or their gangs, were soldiers, and that of those who have been executed for ten years past, not one in ten were soldiers, but, on the contrary, seamen discharged and thrown on the public without present subsistence, which makes them desperate; but I hope the act now depending for the encouragement of seamen, &c., will sufficiently remove that obstacle also. This, I hope, will stop the mouths of censorious persons, who unjustly arraign our soldiery for the vices of others. However, to make all easy, I believe the generality of them will gladly submit to the restraint proposed, merely to show their innocence. Mean time, would his most sacred majesty let them partake of his bounty, as the officers, &c., have done, and raise their pay, were it but one penny _per diem_, it would be a most royal bounty, would considerably contribute to their support, and put them above any sordid views: and there was never more occasion than now, when provisions of all kinds are so excessive dear. Having offered my little mite to the public, I beg they will excuse the deficiency of my style, and multitude of my errors, for my intention's sake. I write without prospect of gain; if I am censured, it is what I can but expect; but if among all my schemes one proves of service, my desires and labours are amply answered. _Omissions._ In my scheme for an university in London I proposed only a hall or public room; on recollection I find it should be a large house or inn, in the nature of a college, with store of convenient rooms for gentlemen, not only to study separately, but wherein to lodge their books, for it would be most inconvenient to lug them backwards and forwards. They may indeed breakfast, sup, and sleep at home, but it will be highly necessary they should dine in commons, or at least near the college; not that I would have cooks, butlers, caterers, manciples, and the whole train of college cannibals retained; but for fear they should stay too long at home, or be hindered from returning to study in due time, some proper place or person might be pitched upon to keep an ordinary, at a prefixed price and hour, and for the students only. My reasons are these:-- First, A young gentleman may live too far from college. Second, The college hours for dinner may not agree with those of the family. Third, Company may drop in and detain him. These being, I think, the only material objections could be offered, I hope I have amply provided against them, and rendered my project more perfect and unexceptionable. * * * * * One omission I made in the discourse on madhouses, &c., is, that maiden ladies as well as widows and wives are liable to the inquisition there complained of, and I am informed a good estate is lately come to a worthless family by the death, or rather murder, of an innocent young creature, who being left very rich, chose to live with her friends; but well had it been for her had she taken up her abode among strangers, for they staved off all proposals for marriage a considerable time, and when at last they found the lady would not be hindered from altering her condition, she was hurried away to a madhouse, where she miserably ended her days, while they rioted in the pillage of her fortune. Thus neither maid, wife, or widow, are safe while these accursed madhouses are suffered; nay, I see no reason, if the age improves in wickedness, as in all probability it may, but the men, _per contra_, may take their turns. Younger brothers, &c., may clap up their elders, and jump into their estates, for there are no questions asked at these madhouses, but who is the paymaster, and how much; give them but their price, mad or not mad, it is no matter whom they confine; so that if any person lives longer than his relations think convenient, they know their remedy; it is but sending them to a madhouse and the estate is their own. Having answered all that I think liable to objection, and recollected what I had omitted, I desire to stand or fall by the judgment of the serious part of mankind; wherein they shall correct me I will kiss the rod and suffer with patience; but if a pack of hackney scribblers shall attack me only by way of a get-penny, I shall not be provoked to answer them, be they never so scurrilous, lest I be accounted as one of them. TO LIEUTENANT-COLONEL SAMUEL ROBINSON. SIR, I shall congratulate you on your election into the chamberlainship of the city of London, or otherwise, as you shall acquit yourself in answering candidly and impartially to the following queries. I. whether there is not money sufficient in the chamber of London to pay off the orphan's fund? Or if not a sufficient sum, what sum it is, and what is the deficiency? How long it has lain there, and what interest has been made upon it? II. If there are not considerable arrears due from many wards, and what those arrears are? III. Who are these poor orphans we pay so much money to? and whether they are not some of the richest men in the city of London, who have got the stock into their own hands, and find it so snug a fund they do not care to get out of it. IV. If it would not be much better to gather in the arrears, join them to the money in the office, and collect the overplus at once, rather than suffer the tax to become eternal, and to pay so much interest. This is but a reasonable request; and if colonel Robinson is the honest gentleman fame reports him to be, he will make no scruple to give a ready answer. And indeed it will be but a handsome return made to his fellow citizens for their choice of him, to begin his office with such an act of justice, honesty, and public satisfaction, for many people do not know what is meant by the orphan's tax; they pay it with remorse, and think themselves aggrieved. Even those who know the reason of the fund think it has been continued long enough, wish it were once paid off, suspect some secret in the affair, and give their tongues the liberty all losers claim; Our fathers, say they, have eaten sour grapes, and our teeth are set on edge, we are visited for their transgressions, and may be to the world's end, unless we shall find an honest chamberlain who will unveil this cloudy affair, and gives us a prospect of relief. Thus, sir, it lies at your door to gain the applause of the whole city, a few misers excepted, by a generous and gentlemanlike discovery of this affair. And you are thus publicly called upon, that your discovery may be as public and beneficial to all. If you comply, I shall think you an honest man, above a fellow feeling, or being biassed, and most worthy your office; if not, give me leave to think, the citizens of London have made but an indifferent choice. I am, Sir, Yours, as you prove yourself, ANDREW MORETON. _Sept. 23, 1728._ * * * * * Transcriber's note: The transcriber made these changes to the text to correct obvious errors: p. 16, Christain --> Christian p. 26, coachmam --> coachman p. 35, nothwithstanding --> notwithstanding p. 38, sound on alarm --> sound an alarm p. 38, cary --> carry 
15487	----	The Citizen's Library of Economics, Politics, and Sociology UNDER THE GENERAL EDITORSHIP OF RICHARD T. ELY, Ph.D, LL.D. _Director of the School of Economics and Political Science; Professor of Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin_ 12mo. Half Leather. $1.25, net, each * * * * * *Monopolies and Trusts*. By RICHARD T. ELY, Ph.D., LL.D. "It is admirable. It is the soundest contribution on the subject that has appeared."--Professor JOHN R. COMMONS. "By all odds the best written of Professor Ely's work."--Professor SIMON N. PATTEN, _University of Pennsylvania_. *Outlines of Economics*. By RICHARD T. ELY, Ph.D., LL.D., author of "Monopolies and Trusts," etc. *The Economics of Distribution*. By JOHN A. HOBSON, author of "The Evolution of Modern Capitalism," etc. *World Politics*. By PAUL S. REINSCH, Ph.D., LL.B., Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin. *Economic Crises*. By EDWARD D. JONES, Ph.D., Instructor in Economics and Statistics, University of Wisconsin. *Government in Switzerland*. By JOHN MARTIN VINCENT, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University. *Political Parties in the United States, 1846-1861*. By JESSE MACY, LL.D., Professor of Political Science in Iowa College. *Essays on the Monetary History of the United States*. By CHARLES J. BULLOCK, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Economics, Williams College. *Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order*. By EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, Ph.D. *Municipal Engineering and Sanitation*. By W.N. BAKER, Ph.B., Associate Editor of _Engineering News_. * * * * * THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK *In Preparation for Early Issue* *DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS* By JANE ADDAMS, Head of "Hull House," Chicago; joint author of "Philanthropy and Social Progress." (_Now ready._) Miss Addams' Settlement Work is known to all who are interested in social amelioration and municipal conditions. As the title of her book shows, it will be occupied with the reciprocal relations of ethical progress and the growth of democratic thought, sentiment, and institutions. *CUSTOM AND COMPETITION* By RICHARD T. ELY, LL.D., Professor of Political Economy and Director of the School of Economics and Political Science in the University of Wisconsin; President of the American Economic Association; author of "Monopolies and Trusts," etc. Topics treated under Custom include the Rent of Land and Custom; Interest and Custom; The Remuneration of Personal Services and Custom; Custom and Commerce. Competition is first discussed with reference to the biological aspects of the question, and the significance of subhuman competition is confined and a careful classification of its various kinds is presented. One of the main topics of the book is Competition as a Principle of Distribution, and its treatment of the subject of price admirably supplements the theoretical discussion in "Monopolies and Trusts." *AMERICAN MUNICIPAL PROGRESS* By CHARLES ZUEBLIN, B.D., Associate Professor of Sociology in the University of Chicago. This work takes up the problem of the so-called public utilities, public schools, libraries, children's playgrounds, public baths, public gymnasiums, etc. The discussion is from the standpoint of public welfare and is based on repeated personal investigations in leading cities of Europe, especially England and the United States. *COLONIAL GOVERNMENT* By PAUL S. REINSCH, Ph.D., LL.B., Professor of Political Science in the University of Wisconsin; Author of "World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century as Influenced by the Oriental Situation." By the author of the "World Politics," which met so cordial a reception from students of modern political history. The main divisions of the book are: Motives and Methods of Colonization; Forms of Colonial Government; Relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies; Internal Government of the Colonies; The Special Colonial Problems of the United States. * * * * * THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY OF ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND SOCIOLOGY EDITED BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D. DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN * * * * * DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS *THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY OF ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND SOCIOLOGY.* 12mo. Half leather. $1.25 _net_ each. * * * * * *MONOPOLIES AND TRUSTS.* BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D. *THE ECONOMICS OF DISTRIBUTION.* BY JOHN A. HOBSON. *WORLD POLITICS.* BY PAUL S. REINSCH, PH.D., LL.B. *ECONOMIC CRISES.* BY EDWARD D. JONES, PH.D. *OUTLINE OF ECONOMICS.* BY RICHARD T. ELY. *GOVERNMENT IN SWITZERLAND.* BY JOHN MARTIN VINCENT, PH.D. *ESSAYS IN THE MONETARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.* BY CHARLES J. BULLOCK, PH.D. *SOCIAL CONTROL.* BY EDWARD A. ROSS, PH.D. *HISTORY OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES.* BY JESSE MACY, LL.D. *MUNICIPAL ENGINEERING AND SANITATION.* BY M.N. BAKER, PH.B. *DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS.* BY JANE ADDAMS. *COLONIAL GOVERNMENT.* BY PAUL S. REINSCH, PH.D., LL.B. * * * * * _IN PREPARATION._ *CUSTOM AND COMPETITION.* BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D. *MUNICIPAL SOCIOLOGY.* BY CHARLES ZUEBLIN. * * * * * THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE. _THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY_ * * * * * DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS BY JANE ADDAMS HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO _New York_ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1902 Set up and electrotyped March, 1902. Reprinted June, September, 1902. Norwood Press J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. To: M.R.S. PREFATORY NOTE The following pages present the substance of a course of twelve lectures on "Democracy and Social Ethics" which have been delivered at various colleges and university extension centres. In putting them into the form of a book, no attempt has been made to change the somewhat informal style used in speaking. The "we" and "us" which originally referred to the speaker and her audience are merely extended to possible readers. Acknowledgment for permission to reprint is extended to _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The International Journal of Ethics_, _The American Journal of Sociology_, and to _The Commons_. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER II CHARITABLE EFFORT 13 CHAPTER III FILIAL RELATIONS 71 CHAPTER IV HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT 102 CHAPTER V INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION 137 CHAPTER VI EDUCATIONAL METHODS 178 CHAPTER VII POLITICAL REFORM 221 INDEX 279 DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community almost automatic. It is as easy for most of us to keep from stealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much voluntary morality involved in one process as in the other. To steal would be for us to fall sadly below the standard of habit and expectation which makes virtue easy. In the same way we have been carefully reared to a sense of family obligation, to be kindly and considerate to the members of our own households, and to feel responsible for their well-being. As the rules of conduct have become established in regard to our self-development and our families, so they have been in regard to limited circles of friends. If the fulfilment of these claims were all that a righteous life required, the hunger and thirst would be stilled for many good men and women, and the clew of right living would lie easily in their hands. But we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have "arrived" when in reality we have not yet started. To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. It is perhaps significant that a German critic has of late reminded us that the one test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal of the Day of Judgment offers, is the social test. The stern questions are not in regard to personal and family relations, but did ye visit the poor, the criminal, the sick, and did ye feed the hungry? All about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard to their attitude toward the social order itself; toward the dreary round of uninteresting work, the pleasures narrowed down to those of appetite, the declining consciousness of brain power, and the lack of mental food which characterizes the lot of the large proportion of their fellow-citizens. These men and women have caught a moral challenge raised by the exigencies of contemporaneous life; some are bewildered, others who are denied the relief which sturdy action brings are even seeking an escape, but all are increasingly anxious concerning their actual relations to the basic organization of society. The test which they would apply to their conduct is a social test. They fail to be content with the fulfilment of their family and personal obligations, and find themselves striving to respond to a new demand involving a social obligation; they have become conscious of another requirement, and the contribution they would make is toward a code of social ethics. The conception of life which they hold has not yet expressed itself in social changes or legal enactment, but rather in a mental attitude of maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence between their consciences and their conduct. They desire both a clearer definition of the code of morality adapted to present day demands and a part in its fulfilment, both a creed and a practice of social morality. In the perplexity of this intricate situation at least one thing is becoming clear: if the latter day moral ideal is in reality that of a social morality, it is inevitable that those who desire it must be brought in contact with the moral experiences of the many in order to procure an adequate social motive. These men and women have realized this and have disclosed the fact in their eagerness for a wider acquaintance with and participation in the life about them. They believe that experience gives the easy and trustworthy impulse toward right action in the broad as well as in the narrow relations. We may indeed imagine many of them saying: "Cast our experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by the larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, not because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously, because of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligation naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepare ourselves for the larger social duties." Such a demand is reasonable, for by our daily experience we have discovered that we cannot mechanically hold up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare moments of exhilaration when we have the strength for it, but that even as the ideal itself must be a rational development of life, so the strength to attain it must be secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith. We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens. To follow the path of social morality results perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, for it implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy. There are many indications that this conception of Democracy is growing among us. We have come to have an enormous interest in human life as such, accompanied by confidence in its essential soundness. We do not believe that genuine experience can lead us astray any more than scientific data can. We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is a consciousness of the illuminating and dynamic value of this wider and more thorough human experience which explains in no small degree that new curiosity regarding human life which has more of a moral basis than an intellectual one. The newspapers, in a frank reflection of popular demand, exhibit an omniverous curiosity equally insistent upon the trivial and the important. They are perhaps the most obvious manifestations of that desire to know, that "What is this?" and "Why do you do that?" of the child. The first dawn of the social consciousness takes this form, as the dawning intelligence of the child takes the form of constant question and insatiate curiosity. Literature, too, portrays an equally absorbing though better adjusted desire to know all kinds of life. The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment--for the remedying of social ills. Doubtless one under the conviction of sin in regard to social ills finds a vague consolation in reading about the lives of the poor, and derives a sense of complicity in doing good. He likes to feel that he knows about social wrongs even if he does not remedy them, and in a very genuine sense there is a foundation for this belief. Partly through this wide reading of human life, we find in ourselves a new affinity for all men, which probably never existed in the world before. Evil itself does not shock us as it once did, and we count only that man merciful in whom we recognize an understanding of the criminal. We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people. Already there is a conviction that we are under a moral obligation in choosing our experiences, since the result of those experiences must ultimately determine our understanding of life. We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics. We can recall among the selfish people of our acquaintance at least one common characteristic,--the conviction that they are different from other men and women, that they need peculiar consideration because they are more sensitive or more refined. Such people "refuse to be bound by any relation save the personally luxurious ones of love and admiration, or the identity of political opinion, or religious creed." We have learned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for the will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest which deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we say that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow and unprogressive issues. We know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational and democratic interest in life, and to give truth complete social expression is the endeavor upon which we are entering. Thus the identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is as though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and jostle of the crowd. The six following chapters are studies of various types and groups who are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct. No attempt is made to reach a conclusion, nor to offer advice beyond the assumption that the cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy, but the quite unlooked-for result of the studies would seem to indicate that while the strain and perplexity of the situation is felt most keenly by the educated and self-conscious members of the community, the tentative and actual attempts at adjustment are largely coming through those who are simpler and less analytical. CHAPTER II CHARITABLE EFFORT All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to act upon them. Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another. Probably there is no relation in life which our democracy is changing more rapidly than the charitable relation--that relation which obtains between benefactor and beneficiary; at the same time there is no point of contact in our modern experience which reveals so clearly the lack of that equality which democracy implies. We have reached the moment when democracy has made such inroads upon this relationship, that the complacency of the old-fashioned charitable man is gone forever; while, at the same time, the very need and existence of charity, denies us the consolation and freedom which democracy will at last give. It is quite obvious that the ethics of none of us are clearly defined, and we are continually obliged to act in circles of habit, based upon convictions which we no longer hold. Thus our estimate of the effect of environment and social conditions has doubtless shifted faster than our methods of administrating charity have changed. Formerly when it was believed that poverty was synonymous with vice and laziness, and that the prosperous man was the righteous man, charity was administered harshly with a good conscience; for the charitable agent really blamed the individual for his poverty, and the very fact of his own superior prosperity gave him a certain consciousness of superior morality. We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect; while it is still rewarded out of all proportion to any other, its possession is by no means assumed to imply the possession of the highest moral qualities. We have learned to judge men by their social virtues as well as by their business capacity, by their devotion to intellectual and disinterested aims, and by their public spirit, and we naturally resent being obliged to judge poor people so solely upon the industrial side. Our democratic instinct instantly takes alarm. It is largely in this modern tendency to judge all men by one democratic standard, while the old charitable attitude commonly allowed the use of two standards, that much of the difficulty adheres. We know that unceasing bodily toil becomes wearing and brutalizing, and our position is totally untenable if we judge large numbers of our fellows solely upon their success in maintaining it. The daintily clad charitable visitor who steps into the little house made untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, is no longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that her hostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as over against her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attained only through status. The only families who apply for aid to the charitable agencies are those who have come to grief on the industrial side; it may be through sickness, through loss of work, or for other guiltless and inevitable reasons; but the fact remains that they are industrially ailing, and must be bolstered and helped into industrial health. The charity visitor, let us assume, is a young college woman, well-bred and open-minded; when she visits the family assigned to her, she is often embarrassed to find herself obliged to lay all the stress of her teaching and advice upon the industrial virtues, and to treat the members of the family almost exclusively as factors in the industrial system. She insists that they must work and be self-supporting, that the most dangerous of all situations is idleness, that seeking one's own pleasure, while ignoring claims and responsibilities, is the most ignoble of actions. The members of her assigned family may have other charms and virtues--they may possibly be kind and considerate of each other, generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to the industrial side. As she daily holds up these standards, it often occurs to the mind of the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has been made tender by much talk of brotherhood and equality, that she has no right to say these things; that her untrained hands are no more fitted to cope with actual conditions than those of her broken-down family. The grandmother of the charity visitor could have done the industrial preaching very well, because she did have the industrial virtues and housewifely training. In a generation our experiences have changed, and our views with them; but we still keep on in the old methods, which could be applied when our consciences were in line with them, but which are daily becoming more difficult as we divide up into people who work with their hands and those who do not. The charity visitor belonging to the latter class is perplexed by recognitions and suggestions which the situation forces upon her. Our democracy has taught us to apply our moral teaching all around, and the moralist is rapidly becoming so sensitive that when his life does not exemplify his ethical convictions, he finds it difficult to preach. Added to this is a consciousness, in the mind of the visitor, of a genuine misunderstanding of her motives by the recipients of her charity, and by their neighbors. Let us take a neighborhood of poor people, and test their ethical standards by those of the charity visitor, who comes with the best desire in the world to help them out of their distress. A most striking incongruity, at once apparent, is the difference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given by one poor neighbor to another poor neighbor, and the guarded care with which relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient. The neighborhood mind is at once confronted not only by the difference of method, but by an absolute clashing of two ethical standards. A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations. There is the greatest willingness to lend or borrow anything, and all the residents of the given tenement know the most intimate family affairs of all the others. The fact that the economic condition of all alike is on a most precarious level makes the ready outflow of sympathy and material assistance the most natural thing in the world. There are numberless instances of self-sacrifice quite unknown in the circles where greater economic advantages make that kind of intimate knowledge of one's neighbors impossible. An Irish family in which the man has lost his place, and the woman is struggling to eke out the scanty savings by day's work, will take in the widow and her five children who have been turned into the street, without a moment's reflection upon the physical discomforts involved. The most maligned landlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready to lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or to share her supper. A woman for whom the writer had long tried in vain to find work failed to appear at the appointed time when employment was secured at last. Upon investigation it transpired that a neighbor further down the street was taken ill, that the children ran for the family friend, who went of course, saying simply when reasons for her non-appearance were demanded, "It broke me heart to leave the place, but what could I do?" A woman whose husband was sent up to the city prison for the maximum term, just three months, before the birth of her child found herself penniless at the end of that time, having gradually sold her supply of household furniture. She took refuge with a friend whom she supposed to be living in three rooms in another part of town. When she arrived, however, she discovered that her friend's husband had been out of work so long that they had been reduced to living in one room. The friend, however, took her in, and the friend's husband was obliged to sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week, which he did uncomplainingly if not cheerfully. Fortunately it was summer, "and it only rained one night." The writer could not discover from the young mother that she had any special claim upon the "friend" beyond the fact that they had formerly worked together in the same factory. The husband she had never seen until the night of her arrival, when he at once went forth in search of a midwife who would consent to come upon his promise of future payment. The evolutionists tell us that the instinct to pity, the impulse to aid his fellows, served man at a very early period, as a rude rule of right and wrong. There is no doubt that this rude rule still holds among many people with whom charitable agencies are brought into contact, and that their ideas of right and wrong are quite honestly outraged by the methods of these agencies. When they see the delay and caution with which relief is given, it does not appear to them a conscientious scruple, but as the cold and calculating action of a selfish man. It is not the aid that they are accustomed to receive from their neighbors, and they do not understand why the impulse which drives people to "be good to the poor" should be so severely supervised. They feel, remotely, that the charity visitor is moved by motives that are alien and unreal. They may be superior motives, but they are different, and they are "agin nature." They cannot comprehend why a person whose intellectual perceptions are stronger than his natural impulses, should go into charity work at all. The only man they are accustomed to see whose intellectual perceptions are stronger than his tenderness of heart, is the selfish and avaricious man who is frankly "on the make." If the charity visitor is such a person, why does she pretend to like the poor? Why does she not go into business at once? We may say, of course, that it is a primitive view of life, which thus confuses intellectuality and business ability; but it is a view quite honestly held by many poor people who are obliged to receive charity from time to time. In moments of indignation the poor have been known to say: "What do you want, anyway? If you have nothing to give us, why not let us alone and stop your questionings and investigations?" "They investigated me for three weeks, and in the end gave me nothing but a black character," a little woman has been heard to assert. This indignation, which is for the most part taciturn, and a certain kindly contempt for her abilities, often puzzles the charity visitor. The latter may be explained by the standard of worldly success which the visited families hold. Success does not ordinarily go, in the minds of the poor, with charity and kind-heartedness, but rather with the opposite qualities. The rich landlord is he who collects with sternness, who accepts no excuse, and will have his own. There are moments of irritation and of real bitterness against him, but there is still admiration, because he is rich and successful. The good-natured landlord, he who pities and spares his poverty-pressed tenants, is seldom rich. He often lives in the back of his house, which he has owned for a long time, perhaps has inherited; but he has been able to accumulate little. He commands the genuine love and devotion of many a poor soul, but he is treated with a certain lack of respect. In one sense he is a failure. The charity visitor, just because she is a person who concerns herself with the poor, receives a certain amount of this good-natured and kindly contempt, sometimes real affection, but little genuine respect. The poor are accustomed to help each other and to respond according to their kindliness; but when it comes to worldly judgment, they use industrial success as the sole standard. In the case of the charity visitor who has neither natural kindness nor dazzling riches, they are deprived of both standards, and they find it of course utterly impossible to judge of the motive of organized charity. Even those of us who feel most sorely the need of more order in altruistic effort and see the end to be desired, find something distasteful in the juxtaposition of the words "organized" and "charity." We say in defence that we are striving to turn this emotion into a motive, that pity is capricious, and not to be depended on; that we mean to give it the dignity of conscious duty. But at bottom we distrust a little a scheme which substitutes a theory of social conduct for the natural promptings of the heart, even although we appreciate the complexity of the situation. The poor man who has fallen into distress, when he first asks aid, instinctively expects tenderness, consideration, and forgiveness. If it is the first time, it has taken him long to make up his mind to take the step. He comes somewhat bruised and battered, and instead of being met with warmth of heart and sympathy, he is at once chilled by an investigation and an intimation that he ought to work. He does not recognize the disciplinary aspect of the situation. The only really popular charity is that of the visiting nurses, who by virtue of their professional training render services which may easily be interpreted into sympathy and kindness, ministering as they do to obvious needs which do not require investigation. The state of mind which an investigation arouses on both sides is most unfortunate; but the perplexity and clashing of different standards, with the consequent misunderstandings, are not so bad as the moral deterioration which is almost sure to follow. When the agent or visitor appears among the poor, and they discover that under certain conditions food and rent and medical aid are dispensed from some unknown source, every man, woman, and child is quick to learn what the conditions may be, and to follow them. Though in their eyes a glass of beer is quite right and proper when taken as any self-respecting man should take it; though they know that cleanliness is an expensive virtue which can be required of few; though they realize that saving is well-nigh impossible when but a few cents can be laid by at a time; though their feeling for the church may be something quite elusive of definition and quite apart from daily living: to the visitor they gravely laud temperance and cleanliness and thrift and religious observance. The deception in the first instances arises from a wondering inability to understand the ethical ideals which can require such impossible virtues, and from an innocent desire to please. It is easy to trace the development of the mental suggestions thus received. When A discovers that B, who is very little worse off than he, receives good things from an inexhaustible supply intended for the poor at large, he feels that he too has a claim for his share, and step by step there is developed the competitive spirit which so horrifies charity visitors when it shows itself in a tendency to "work" the relief-giving agencies. The most serious effect upon the poor comes when dependence upon the charitable society is substituted for the natural outgoing of human love and sympathy, which, happily, we all possess in some degree. The spontaneous impulse to sit up all night with the neighbor's sick child is turned into righteous indignation against the district nurse, because she goes home at six o'clock, and doesn't do it herself. Or the kindness which would have prompted the quick purchase of much needed medicine is transformed into a voluble scoring of the dispensary, because it gives prescriptions and not drugs; and "who can get well on a piece of paper?" If a poor woman knows that her neighbor next door has no shoes, she is quite willing to lend her own, that her neighbor may go decently to mass, or to work; for she knows the smallest item about the scanty wardrobe, and cheerfully helps out. When the charity visitor comes in, all the neighbors are baffled as to what her circumstances may be. They know she does not need a new pair of shoes, and rather suspect that she has a dozen pairs at home; which, indeed, she sometimes has. They imagine untold stores which they may call upon, and her most generous gift is considered niggardly, compared with what she might do. She ought to get new shoes for the family all round, "she sees well enough that they need them." It is no more than the neighbor herself would do, has practically done, when she lent her own shoes. The charity visitor has broken through the natural rule of giving, which, in a primitive society, is bounded only by the need of the recipient and the resources of the giver; and she gets herself into untold trouble when she is judged by the ethics of that primitive society. The neighborhood understands the selfish rich people who stay in their own part of town, where all their associates have shoes and other things. Such people don't bother themselves about the poor; they are like the rich landlords of the neighborhood experience. But this lady visitor, who pretends to be good to the poor, and certainly does talk as though she were kind-hearted, what does she come for, if she does not intend to give them things which are so plainly needed? The visitor says, sometimes, that in holding her poor family so hard to a standard of thrift she is really breaking down a rule of higher living which they formerly possessed; that saving, which seems quite commendable in a comfortable part of town, appears almost criminal in a poorer quarter where the next-door neighbor needs food, even if the children of the family do not. She feels the sordidness of constantly being obliged to urge the industrial view of life. The benevolent individual of fifty years ago honestly believed that industry and self-denial in youth would result in comfortable possessions for old age. It was, indeed, the method he had practised in his own youth, and by which he had probably obtained whatever fortune he possessed. He therefore reproved the poor family for indulging their children, urged them to work long hours, and was utterly untouched by many scruples which afflict the contemporary charity visitor. She says sometimes, "Why must I talk always of getting work and saving money, the things I know nothing about? If it were anything else I had to urge, I could do it; anything like Latin prose, which I had worried through myself, it would not be so hard." But she finds it difficult to connect the experiences of her youth with the experiences of the visited family. Because of this diversity in experience, the visitor is continually surprised to find that the safest platitude may be challenged. She refers quite naturally to the "horrors of the saloon," and discovers that the head of her visited family does not connect them with "horrors" at all. He remembers all the kindnesses he has received there, the free lunch and treating which goes on, even when a man is out of work and not able to pay up; the loan of five dollars he got there when the charity visitor was miles away and he was threatened with eviction. He may listen politely to her reference to "horrors," but considers it only "temperance talk." The charity visitor may blame the women for lack of gentleness toward their children, for being hasty and rude to them, until she learns that the standard of breeding is not that of gentleness toward the children so much as the observance of certain conventions, such as the punctilious wearing of mourning garments after the death of a child. The standard of gentleness each mother has to work out largely by herself, assisted only by the occasional shame-faced remark of a neighbor, "That they do better when you are not too hard on them"; but the wearing of mourning garments is sustained by the definitely expressed sentiment of every woman in the street. The mother would have to bear social blame, a certain social ostracism, if she failed to comply with that requirement. It is not comfortable to outrage the conventions of those among whom we live, and, if our social life be a narrow one, it is still more difficult. The visitor may choke a little when she sees the lessened supply of food and the scanty clothing provided for the remaining children in order that one may be conventionally mourned, but she doesn't talk so strongly against it as she would have done during her first month of experience with the family since bereaved. The subject of clothes indeed perplexes the visitor constantly, and the result of her reflections may be summed up somewhat in this wise: The girl who has a definite social standing, who has been to a fashionable school or to a college, whose family live in a house seen and known by all her friends and associates, may afford to be very simple, or even shabby as to her clothes, if she likes. But the working girl, whose family lives in a tenement, or moves from one small apartment to another, who has little social standing and has to make her own place, knows full well how much habit and style of dress has to do with her position. Her income goes into her clothing, out of all proportion to the amount which she spends upon other things. But, if social advancement is her aim, it is the most sensible thing she can do. She is judged largely by her clothes. Her house furnishing, with its pitiful little decorations, her scanty supply of books, are never seen by the people whose social opinions she most values. Her clothes are her background, and from them she is largely judged. It is due to this fact that girls' clubs succeed best in the business part of town, where "working girls" and "young ladies" meet upon an equal footing, and where the clothes superficially look very much alike. Bright and ambitious girls will come to these down-town clubs to eat lunch and rest at noon, to study all sorts of subjects and listen to lectures, when they might hesitate a long time before joining a club identified with their own neighborhood, where they would be judged not solely on their own merits and the unconscious social standing afforded by good clothes, but by other surroundings which are not nearly up to these. For the same reason, girls' clubs are infinitely more difficult to organize in little towns and villages, where every one knows every one else, just how the front parlor is furnished, and the amount of mortgage there is upon the house. These facts get in the way of a clear and unbiassed judgment; they impede the democratic relationship and add to the self-consciousness of all concerned. Every one who has had to do with down-town girls' clubs has had the experience of going into the home of some bright, well-dressed girl, to discover it uncomfortable and perhaps wretched, and to find the girl afterward carefully avoiding her, although the working girl may not have been at home when the call was made, and the visitor may have carried herself with the utmost courtesy throughout. In some very successful down-town clubs the home address is not given at all, and only the "business address" is required. Have we worked out our democracy further in regard to clothes than anything else? The charity visitor has been rightly brought up to consider it vulgar to spend much money upon clothes, to care so much for "appearances." She realizes dimly that the care for personal decoration over that for one's home or habitat is in some way primitive and undeveloped; but she is silenced by its obvious need. She also catches a glimpse of the fact that the disproportionate expenditure of the poor in the matter of clothes is largely due to the exclusiveness of the rich who hide from them the interior of their houses, and their more subtle pleasures, while of necessity exhibiting their street clothes and their street manners. Every one who goes shopping at the same time may see the clothes of the richest women in town, but only those invited to her receptions see the Corot on her walls or the bindings in her library. The poor naturally try to bridge the difference by reproducing the street clothes which they have seen. They are striving to conform to a common standard which their democratic training presupposes belongs to all of us. The charity visitor may regret that the Italian peasant woman has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and substituted a cheap street hat. But it is easy to recognize the first attempt toward democratic expression. The charity visitor finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to consider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor; for she cannot deal with them according to economic theories, or according to the conventions which have regulated her own life. She finds both of these fairly upset by her intimate knowledge of the situation, and her sympathy for those into whose lives she has gained a curious insight. She discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fit the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people. The charity visitor holds well-grounded views upon the imprudence of early marriages, quite naturally because she comes from a family and circle of professional and business people. A professional man is scarcely equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A business man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman. In many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and thirty. If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he will probably establish habits of personal comfort, which he cannot keep up when he has to divide with a family--habits which he can, perhaps, never overcome. The sense of prudence, the necessity for saving, can never come to a primitive, emotional man with the force of a conviction; but the necessity of providing for his children is a powerful incentive. He naturally regards his children as his savings-bank; he expects them to care for him when he gets old, and in some trades old age comes very early. A Jewish tailor was quite lately sent to the Cook County poorhouse, paralyzed beyond recovery at the age of thirty-five. Had his little boy of nine been but a few years older, he might have been spared this sorrow of public charity. He was, in fact, better able to well support a family when he was twenty than when he was thirty-five, for his wages had steadily grown less as the years went on. Another tailor whom I know, who is also a Socialist, always speaks of saving as a bourgeois virtue, one quite impossible to the genuine workingman. He supports a family consisting of himself, a wife and three children, and his two parents on eight dollars a week. He insists it would be criminal not to expend every penny of this amount upon food and shelter, and he expects his children later to care for him. This economic pressure also accounts for the tendency to put children to work overyoung and thus cripple their chances for individual development and usefulness, and with the avaricious parent also leads to exploitation. "I have fed her for fourteen years, now she can help me pay my mortgage" is not an unusual reply when a hardworking father is expostulated with because he would take his bright daughter out of school and put her into a factory. It has long been a common error for the charity visitor, who is strongly urging her "family" toward self-support, to suggest, or at least connive, that the children be put to work early, although she has not the excuse that the parents have. It is so easy, after one has been taking the industrial view for a long time, to forget the larger and more social claim; to urge that the boy go to work and support his parents, who are receiving charitable aid. She does not realize what a cruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she gives advice. The manager in a huge mercantile establishment employing many children was able to show during a child-labor investigation, that the only children under fourteen years of age in his employ were protégés who had been urged upon him by philanthropic ladies, not only acquaintances of his, but valued patrons of the establishment. It is not that the charity visitor is less wise than other people, but she has fixed her mind so long upon the industrial lameness of her family that she is eager to seize any crutch, however weak, which may enable them to get on. She has failed to see that the boy who attempts to prematurely support his widowed mother may lower wages, add an illiterate member to the community, and arrest the development of a capable workingman. As she has failed to see that the rules which obtain in regard to the age of marriage in her own family may not apply to the workingman, so also she fails to understand that the present conditions of employment surrounding a factory child are totally unlike those which obtained during the energetic youth of her father. The child who is prematurely put to work is constantly oppressed by this never ending question of the means of subsistence, and even little children are sometimes almost crushed with the cares of life through their affectionate sympathy. The writer knows a little Italian lad of six to whom the problems of food, clothing, and shelter have become so immediate and pressing that, although an imaginative child, he is unable to see life from any other standpoint. The goblin or bugaboo, feared by the more fortunate child, in his mind, has come to be the need of coal which caused his father hysterical and demonstrative grief when it carried off his mother's inherited linen, the mosaic of St. Joseph, and, worst of all, his own rubber boots. He once came to a party at Hull-House, and was interested in nothing save a gas stove which he saw in the kitchen. He became excited over the discovery that fire could be produced without fuel. "I will tell my father of this stove. You buy no coal, you need only a match. Anybody will give you a match." He was taken to visit at a country-house and at once inquired how much rent was paid for it. On being told carelessly by his hostess that they paid no rent for that house, he came back quite wild with interest that the problem was solved. "Me and my father will go to the country. You get a big house, all warm, without rent." Nothing else in the country interested him but the subject of rent, and he talked of that with an exclusiveness worthy of a single taxer. The struggle for existence, which is so much harsher among people near the edge of pauperism, sometimes leaves ugly marks on character, and the charity visitor finds these indirect results most mystifying. Parents who work hard and anticipate an old age when they can no longer earn, take care that their children shall expect to divide their wages with them from the very first. Such a parent, when successful, impresses the immature nervous system of the child thus tyrannically establishing habits of obedience, so that the nerves and will may not depart from this control when the child is older. The charity visitor, whose family relation is lifted quite out of this, does not in the least understand the industrial foundation for this family tyranny. The head of a kindergarten training-class once addressed a club of working women, and spoke of the despotism which is often established over little children. She said that the so-called determination to break a child's will many times arose from a lust of dominion, and she urged the ideal relationship founded upon love and confidence. But many of the women were puzzled. One of them remarked to the writer as she came out of the club room, "If you did not keep control over them from the time they were little, you would never get their wages when they are grown up." Another one said, "Ah, of course she (meaning the speaker) doesn't have to depend upon her children's wages. She can afford to be lax with them, because even if they don't give money to her, she can get along without it." There are an impressive number of children who uncomplainingly and constantly hand over their weekly wages to their parents, sometimes receiving back ten cents or a quarter for spending-money, but quite as often nothing at all; and the writer knows one girl of twenty-five who for six years has received two cents a week from the constantly falling wages which she earns in a large factory. Is it habit or virtue which holds her steady in this course? If love and tenderness had been substituted for parental despotism, would the mother have had enough affection, enough power of expression to hold her daughter's sense of money obligation through all these years? This girl who spends her paltry two cents on chewing-gum and goes plainly clad in clothes of her mother's choosing, while many of her friends spend their entire wages on those clothes which factory girls love so well, must be held by some powerful force. The charity visitor finds these subtle and elusive problems most harrowing. The head of a family she is visiting is a man who has become black-listed in a strike. He is not a very good workman, and this, added to his agitator's reputation, keeps him out of work for a long time. The fatal result of being long out of work follows: he becomes less and less eager for it, and gets a "job" less and less frequently. In order to keep up his self-respect, and still more to keep his wife's respect for him, he yields to the little self-deception that this prolonged idleness follows because he was once blacklisted, and he gradually becomes a martyr. Deep down in his heart perhaps--but who knows what may be deep down in his heart? Whatever may be in his wife's, she does not show for an instant that she thinks he has grown lazy, and accustomed to see her earn, by sewing and cleaning, most of the scanty income for the family. The charity visitor, however, does see this, and she also sees that the other men who were in the strike have gone back to work. She further knows by inquiry and a little experience that the man is not skilful. She cannot, however, call him lazy and good-for-nothing, and denounce him as worthless as her grandmother might have done, because of certain intellectual conceptions at which she has arrived. She sees other workmen come to him for shrewd advice; she knows that he spends many more hours in the public library reading good books than the average workman has time to do. He has formed no bad habits and has yielded only to those subtle temptations toward a life of leisure which come to the intellectual man. He lacks the qualifications which would induce his union to engage him as a secretary or organizer, but he is a constant speaker at workingmen's meetings, and takes a high moral attitude on the questions discussed there. He contributes a certain intellectuality to his friends, and he has undoubted social value. The neighboring women confide to the charity visitor their sympathy with his wife, because she has to work so hard, and because her husband does not "provide." Their remarks are sharpened by a certain resentment toward the superiority of the husband's education and gentle manners. The charity visitor is ashamed to take this point of view, for she knows that it is not altogether fair. She is reminded of a college friend of hers, who told her that she was not going to allow her literary husband to write unworthy potboilers for the sake of earning a living. "I insist that we shall live within my own income; that he shall not publish until he is ready, and can give his genuine message." The charity visitor recalls what she has heard of another acquaintance, who urged her husband to decline a lucrative position as a railroad attorney, because she wished him to be free to take municipal positions, and handle public questions without the inevitable suspicion which unaccountably attaches itself in a corrupt city to a corporation attorney. The action of these two women seemed noble to her, but in their cases they merely lived on a lesser income. In the case of the workingman's wife, she faced living on no income at all, or on the precarious one which she might be able to get together. She sees that this third woman has made the greatest sacrifice, and she is utterly unwilling to condemn her while praising the friends of her own social position. She realizes, of course, that the situation is changed by the fact that the third family needs charity, while the other two do not; but, after all, they have not asked for it, and their plight was only discovered through an accident to one of the children. The charity visitor has been taught that her mission is to preserve the finest traits to be found in her visited family, and she shrinks from the thought of convincing the wife that her husband is worthless and she suspects that she might turn all this beautiful devotion into complaining drudgery. To be sure, she could give up visiting the family altogether, but she has become much interested in the progress of the crippled child who eagerly anticipates her visits, and she also suspects that she will never know many finer women than the mother. She is unwilling, therefore, to give up the friendship, and goes on bearing her perplexities as best she may. The first impulse of our charity visitor is to be somewhat severe with her shiftless family for spending money on pleasures and indulging their children out of all proportion to their means. The poor family which receives beans and coal from the county, and pays for a bicycle on the instalment plan, is not unknown to any of us. But as the growth of juvenile crime becomes gradually understood, and as the danger of giving no legitimate and organized pleasure to the child becomes clearer, we remember that primitive man had games long before he cared for a house or regular meals. There are certain boys in many city neighborhoods who form themselves into little gangs with a leader who is somewhat more intrepid than the rest. Their favorite performance is to break into an untenanted house, to knock off the faucets, and cut the lead pipe, which they sell to the nearest junk dealer. With the money thus procured they buy beer and drink it in little free-booter's groups sitting in the alley. From beginning to end they have the excitement of knowing that they may be seen and caught by the "coppers," and are at times quite breathless with suspense. It is not the least unlike, in motive and execution, the practice of country boys who go forth in squads to set traps for rabbits or to round up a coon. It is characterized by a pure spirit for adventure, and the vicious training really begins when they are arrested, or when an older boy undertakes to guide them into further excitements. From the very beginning the most enticing and exciting experiences which they have seen have been connected with crime. The policeman embodies all the majesty of successful law and established government in his brass buttons and dazzlingly equipped patrol wagon. The boy who has been arrested comes back more or less a hero with a tale to tell of the interior recesses of the mysterious police station. The earliest public excitement the child remembers is divided between the rattling fire engines, "the time there was a fire in the next block," and all the tense interest of the patrol wagon "the time the drunkest lady in our street was arrested." In the first year of their settlement the Hull-House residents took fifty kindergarten children to Lincoln Park, only to be grieved by their apathetic interest in trees and flowers. As they came back with an omnibus full of tired and sleepy children, they were surprised to find them galvanized into sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled by. Their eager little heads popped out of the windows full of questioning: "Was it a man or a woman?" "How many policemen inside?" and eager little tongues began to tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes had witnessed. The excitement of a chase, the chances of competition, and the love of a fight are all centred in the outward display of crime. The parent who receives charitable aid and yet provides pleasure for his child, and is willing to indulge him in his play, is blindly doing one of the wisest things possible; and no one is more eager for playgrounds and vacation schools than the conscientious charity visitor. This very imaginative impulse and attempt to live in a pictured world of their own, which seems the simplest prerogative of childhood, often leads the boys into difficulty. Three boys aged seven, nine, and ten were once brought into a neighboring police station under the charge of pilfering and destroying property. They had dug a cave under a railroad viaduct in which they had spent many days and nights of the summer vacation. They had "swiped" potatoes and other vegetables from hucksters' carts, which they had cooked and eaten in true brigand fashion; they had decorated the interior of the excavation with stolen junk, representing swords and firearms, to their romantic imaginations. The father of the ringleader was a janitor living in a building five miles away in a prosperous portion of the city. The landlord did not want an active boy in the building, and his mother was dead; the janitor paid for the boy's board and lodging to a needy woman living near the viaduct. She conscientiously gave him his breakfast and supper, and left something in the house for his dinner every morning when she went to work in a neighboring factory; but was too tired by night to challenge his statement that he "would rather sleep outdoors in the summer," or to investigate what he did during the day. In the meantime the three boys lived in a world of their own, made up from the reading of adventurous stories and their vivid imaginations, steadily pilfering more and more as the days went by, and actually imperilling the safety of the traffic passing over the street on the top of the viaduct. In spite of vigorous exertions on their behalf, one of the boys was sent to the Reform School, comforting himself with the conclusive remark, "Well, we had fun anyway, and maybe they will let us dig a cave at the School; it is in the country, where we can't hurt anything." In addition to books of adventure, or even reading of any sort, the scenes and ideals of the theatre largely form the manners and morals of the young people. "Going to the theatre" is indeed the most common and satisfactory form of recreation. Many boys who conscientiously give all their wages to their mothers have returned each week ten cents to pay for a seat in the gallery of a theatre on Sunday afternoon. It is their one satisfactory glimpse of life--the moment when they "issue forth from themselves" and are stirred and thoroughly interested. They quite simply adopt as their own, and imitate as best they can, all that they see there. In moments of genuine grief and excitement the words and the gestures they employ are those copied from the stage, and the tawdry expression often conflicts hideously with the fine and genuine emotion of which it is the inadequate and vulgar vehicle. As in the matter of dress, more refined and simpler manners and mode of expressions are unseen by them, and they must perforce copy what they know. If we agree with a recent definition of Art, as that which causes the spectator to lose his sense of isolation, there is no doubt that the popular theatre, with all its faults, more nearly fulfils the function of art for the multitude of working people than all the "free galleries" and picture exhibits combined. The greatest difficulty is experienced when the two standards come sharply together, and when both sides make an attempt at understanding and explanation. The difficulty of making clear one's own ethical standpoint is at times insurmountable. A woman who had bought and sold school books stolen from the school fund,--books which are all plainly marked with a red stamp,--came to Hull House one morning in great distress because she had been arrested, and begged a resident "to speak to the judge." She gave as a reason the fact that the House had known her for six years, and had once been very good to her when her little girl was buried. The resident more than suspected that her visitor knew the school books were stolen when buying them, and any attempt to talk upon that subject was evidently considered very rude. The visitor wished to get out of her trial, and evidently saw no reason why the House should not help her. The alderman was out of town, so she could not go to him. After a long conversation the visitor entirely failed to get another point of view and went away grieved and disappointed at a refusal, thinking the resident simply disobliging; wondering, no doubt, why such a mean woman had once been good to her; leaving the resident, on the other hand, utterly baffled and in the state of mind she would have been in, had she brutally insisted that a little child should lift weights too heavy for its undeveloped muscles. Such a situation brings out the impossibility of substituting a higher ethical standard for a lower one without similarity of experience, but it is not as painful as that illustrated by the following example, in which the highest ethical standard yet attained by the charity recipient is broken down, and the substituted one not in the least understood:-- A certain charity visitor is peculiarly appealed to by the weakness and pathos of forlorn old age. She is responsible for the well-being of perhaps a dozen old women to whom she sustains a sincerely affectionate and almost filial relation. Some of them learn to take her benefactions quite as if they came from their own relatives, grumbling at all she does, and scolding her with a family freedom. One of these poor old women was injured in a fire years ago. She has but the fragment of a hand left, and is grievously crippled in her feet. Through years of pain she had become addicted to opium, and when she first came under the visitor's care, was only held from the poorhouse by the awful thought that she would there perish without her drug. Five years of tender care have done wonders for her. She lives in two neat little rooms, where with her thumb and two fingers she makes innumerable quilts, which she sells and gives away with the greatest delight. Her opium is regulated to a set amount taken each day, and she has been drawn away from much drinking. She is a voracious reader, and has her head full of strange tales made up from books and her own imagination. At one time it seemed impossible to do anything for her in Chicago, and she was kept for two years in a suburb, where the family of the charity visitor lived, and where she was nursed through several hazardous illnesses. She now lives a better life than she did, but she is still far from being a model old woman. The neighbors are constantly shocked by the fact that she is supported and comforted by a "charity lady," while at the same time she occasionally "rushes the growler," scolding at the boys lest they jar her in her tottering walk. The care of her has broken through even that second standard, which the neighborhood had learned to recognize as the standard of charitable societies, that only the "worthy poor" are to be helped; that temperance and thrift are the virtues which receive the plums of benevolence. The old lady herself is conscious of this criticism. Indeed, irate neighbors tell her to her face that she doesn't in the least deserve what she gets. In order to disarm them, and at the same time to explain what would otherwise seem loving-kindness so colossal as to be abnormal, she tells them that during her sojourn in the suburb she discovered an awful family secret,--a horrible scandal connected with the long-suffering charity visitor; that it is in order to prevent the divulgence of this that she constantly receives her ministrations. Some of her perplexed neighbors accept this explanation as simple and offering a solution of this vexed problem. Doubtless many of them have a glimpse of the real state of affairs, of the love and patience which ministers to need irrespective of worth. But the standard is too high for most of them, and it sometimes seems unfortunate to break down the second standard, which holds that people who "rush the growler" are not worthy of charity, and that there is a certain justice attained when they go to the poorhouse. It is certainly dangerous to break down the lower, unless the higher is made clear. Just when our affection becomes large enough to care for the unworthy among the poor as we would care for the unworthy among our own kin, is certainly a perplexing question. To say that it should never be so, is a comment upon our democratic relations to them which few of us would be willing to make. Of what use is all this striving and perplexity? Has the experience any value? It is certainly genuine, for it induces an occasional charity visitor to live in a tenement house as simply as the other tenants do. It drives others to give up visiting the poor altogether, because, they claim, it is quite impossible unless the individual becomes a member of a sisterhood, which requires, as some of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods do, that the member first take the vows of obedience and poverty, so that she can have nothing to give save as it is first given to her, and thus she is not harassed by a constant attempt at adjustment. Both the tenement-house resident and the sister assume to have put themselves upon the industrial level of their neighbors, although they have left out the most awful element of poverty, that of imminent fear of starvation and a neglected old age. The young charity visitor who goes from a family living upon a most precarious industrial level to her own home in a prosperous part of the city, if she is sensitive at all, is never free from perplexities which our growing democracy forces upon her. We sometimes say that our charity is too scientific, but we would doubtless be much more correct in our estimate if we said that it is not scientific enough. We dislike the entire arrangement of cards alphabetically classified according to streets and names of families, with the unrelated and meaningless details attached to them. Our feeling of revolt is probably not unlike that which afflicted the students of botany and geology in the middle of the last century, when flowers were tabulated in alphabetical order, when geology was taught by colored charts and thin books. No doubt the students, wearied to death, many times said that it was all too scientific, and were much perplexed and worried when they found traces of structure and physiology which their so-called scientific principles were totally unable to account for. But all this happened before science had become evolutionary and scientific at all, before it had a principle of life from within. The very indications and discoveries which formerly perplexed, later illumined and made the study absorbing and vital. We are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle to human affairs in general, although it is fast being applied to the education of children. We are at last learning to follow the development of the child; to expect certain traits under certain conditions; to adapt methods and matter to his growing mind. No "advanced educator" can allow himself to be so absorbed in the question of what a child ought to be as to exclude the discovery of what he is. But in our charitable efforts we think much more of what a man ought to be than of what he is or of what he may become; and we ruthlessly force our conventions and standards upon him, with a sternness which we would consider stupid indeed did an educator use it in forcing his mature intellectual convictions upon an undeveloped mind. Let us take the example of a timid child, who cries when he is put to bed because he is afraid of the dark. The "soft-hearted" parent stays with him, simply because he is sorry for him and wants to comfort him. The scientifically trained parent stays with him, because he realizes that the child is in a stage of development in which his imagination has the best of him, and in which it is impossible to reason him out of a belief in ghosts. These two parents, wide apart in point of view, after all act much alike, and both very differently from the pseudo-scientific parent, who acts from dogmatic conviction and is sure he is right. He talks of developing his child's self-respect and good sense, and leaves him to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and development which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that our development of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific and stilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulated kind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as the stern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing the child, who is hysterically crying upstairs and laying the foundation for future nervous disorders. The pseudo-scientific spirit, or rather, the undeveloped stage of our philanthropy, is perhaps most clearly revealed in our tendency to lay constant stress on negative action. "Don't give;" "don't break down self-respect," we are constantly told. We distrust the human impulse as well as the teachings of our own experience, and in their stead substitute dogmatic rules for conduct. We forget that the accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to life itself; that the necessity for activity and a pull upon the sympathies is so severe, that all the knowledge in the possession of the visitor is constantly applied, and she has a reasonable chance for an ultimate intellectual comprehension. Indeed, part of the perplexity in the administration of charity comes from the fact that the type of person drawn to it is the one who insists that her convictions shall not be unrelated to action. Her moral concepts constantly tend to float away from her, unless they have a basis in the concrete relation of life. She is confronted with the task of reducing her scruples to action, and of converging many wills, so as to unite the strength of all of them into one accomplishment, the value of which no one can foresee. On the other hand, the young woman who has succeeded in expressing her social compunction through charitable effort finds that the wider social activity, and the contact with the larger experience, not only increases her sense of social obligation but at the same time recasts her social ideals. She is chagrined to discover that in the actual task of reducing her social scruples to action, her humble beneficiaries are far in advance of her, not in charity or singleness of purpose, but in self-sacrificing action. She reaches the old-time virtue of humility by a social process, not in the old way, as the man who sits by the side of the road and puts dust upon his head, calling himself a contrite sinner, but she gets the dust upon her head because she has stumbled and fallen in the road through her efforts to push forward the mass, to march with her fellows. She has socialized her virtues not only through a social aim but by a social process. The Hebrew prophet made three requirements from those who would join the great forward-moving procession led by Jehovah. "To love mercy" and at the same time "to do justly" is the difficult task; to fulfil the first requirement alone is to fall into the error of indiscriminate giving with all its disastrous results; to fulfil the second solely is to obtain the stern policy of withholding, and it results in such a dreary lack of sympathy and understanding that the establishment of justice is impossible. It may be that the combination of the two can never be attained save as we fulfil still the third requirement--"to walk humbly with God," which may mean to walk for many dreary miles beside the lowliest of His creatures, not even in that peace of mind which the company of the humble is popularly supposed to afford, but rather with the pangs and throes to which the poor human understanding is subjected whenever it attempts to comprehend the meaning of life. CHAPTER III FILIAL RELATIONS There are many people in every community who have not felt the "social compunction," who do not share the effort toward a higher social morality, who are even unable to sympathetically interpret it. Some of these have been shielded from the inevitable and salutary failures which the trial of new powers involve, because they are content to attain standards of virtue demanded by an easy public opinion, and others of them have exhausted their moral energy in attaining to the current standard of individual and family righteousness. Such people, who form the bulk of contented society, demand that the radical, the reformer, shall be without stain or question in his personal and family relations, and judge most harshly any deviation from the established standards. There is a certain justice in this: it expresses the inherent conservatism of the mass of men, that none of the established virtues which have been so slowly and hardly acquired shall be sacrificed for the sake of making problematic advance; that the individual, in his attempt to develop and use the new and exalted virtue, shall not fall into the easy temptation of letting the ordinary ones slip through his fingers. This instinct to conserve the old standards, combined with a distrust of the new standard, is a constant difficulty in the way of those experiments and advances depending upon the initiative of women, both because women are the more sensitive to the individual and family claims, and because their training has tended to make them content with the response to these claims alone. There is no doubt that, in the effort to sustain the moral energy necessary to work out a more satisfactory social relation, the individual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately go into the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he considers the higher claim. In considering the changes which our increasing democracy is constantly making upon various relationships, it is impossible to ignore the filial relation. This chapter deals with the relation between parents and their grown-up daughters, as affording an explicit illustration of the perplexity and mal-adjustment brought about by the various attempts of young women to secure a more active share in the community life. We constantly see parents very much disconcerted and perplexed in regard to their daughters when these daughters undertake work lying quite outside of traditional and family interests. These parents insist that the girl is carried away by a foolish enthusiasm, that she is in search of a career, that she is restless and does not know what she wants. They will give any reason, almost, rather than the recognition of a genuine and dignified claim. Possibly all this is due to the fact that for so many hundreds of years women have had no larger interests, no participation in the affairs lying quite outside personal and family claims. Any attempt that the individual woman formerly made to subordinate or renounce the family claim was inevitably construed to mean that she was setting up her own will against that of her family's for selfish ends. It was concluded that she could have no motive larger than a desire to serve her family, and her attempt to break away must therefore be wilful and self-indulgent. The family logically consented to give her up at her marriage, when she was enlarging the family tie by founding another family. It was easy to understand that they permitted and even promoted her going to college, travelling in Europe, or any other means of self-improvement, because these merely meant the development and cultivation of one of its own members. When, however, she responded to her impulse to fulfil the social or democratic claim, she violated every tradition. The mind of each one of us reaches back to our first struggles as we emerged from self-willed childhood into a recognition of family obligations. We have all gradually learned to respond to them, and yet most of us have had at least fleeting glimpses of what it might be to disregard them and the elemental claim they make upon us. We have yielded at times to the temptation of ignoring them for selfish aims, of considering the individual and not the family convenience, and we remember with shame the self-pity which inevitably followed. But just as we have learned to adjust the personal and family claims, and to find an orderly development impossible without recognition of both, so perhaps we are called upon now to make a second adjustment between the family and the social claim, in which neither shall lose and both be ennobled. The attempt to bring about a healing compromise in which the two shall be adjusted in proper relation is not an easy one. It is difficult to distinguish between the outward act of him who in following one legitimate claim has been led into the temporary violation of another, and the outward act of him who deliberately renounces a just claim and throws aside all obligation for the sake of his own selfish and individual development. The man, for instance, who deserts his family that he may cultivate an artistic sensibility, or acquire what he considers more fulness of life for himself, must always arouse our contempt. Breaking the marriage tie as Ibsen's "Nora" did, to obtain a larger self-development, or holding to it as George Eliot's "Romola" did, because of the larger claim of the state and society, must always remain two distinct paths. The collision of interests, each of which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destruction of either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life. Curiously enough, it is almost exactly this contradiction which is the tragedy set forth by the Greek dramatist, who asserted that the gods who watch over the sanctity of the family bond must yield to the higher claims of the gods of the state. The failure to recognize the social claim as legitimate causes the trouble; the suspicion constantly remains that woman's public efforts are merely selfish and captious, and are not directed to the general good. This suspicion will never be dissipated until parents, as well as daughters, feel the democratic impulse and recognize the social claim. Our democracy is making inroads upon the family, the oldest of human institutions, and a claim is being advanced which in a certain sense is larger than the family claim. The claim of the state in time of war has long been recognized, so that in its name the family has given up sons and husbands and even the fathers of little children. If we can once see the claims of society in any such light, if its misery and need can be made clear and urged as an explicit claim, as the state urges its claims in the time of danger, then for the first time the daughter who desires to minister to that need will be recognized as acting conscientiously. This recognition may easily come first through the emotions, and may be admitted as a response to pity and mercy long before it is formulated and perceived by the intellect. The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain as the highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguard and protection. But merely to preserve these institutions is not enough. There come periods of reconstruction, during which the task is laid upon a passing generation, to enlarge the function and carry forward the ideal of a long-established institution. There is no doubt that many women, consciously and unconsciously, are struggling with this task. The family, like every other element of human life, is susceptible of progress, and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspirations are enlarged, although its duties can never be abrogated and its obligations can never be cancelled. It is impossible to bring about the higher development by any self-assertion or breaking away of the individual will. The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress. The family in its entirety must be carried out into the larger life. Its various members together must recognize and acknowledge the validity of the social obligation. When this does not occur we have a most flagrant example of the ill-adjustment and misery arising when an ethical code is applied too rigorously and too conscientiously to conditions which are no longer the same as when the code was instituted, and for which it was never designed. We have all seen parental control and the family claim assert their authority in fields of effort which belong to the adult judgment of the child and pertain to activity quite outside the family life. Probably the distinctively family tragedy of which we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of this authority through all the entanglements of wounded affection and misunderstanding. We see parents and children acting from conscientious motives and with the tenderest affection, yet bringing about a misery which can scarcely be hidden. Such glimpses remind us of that tragedy enacted centuries ago in Assisi, when the eager young noble cast his very clothing at his father's feet, dramatically renouncing his filial allegiance, and formally subjecting the narrow family claim to the wider and more universal duty. All the conflict of tragedy ensued which might have been averted, had the father recognized the higher claim, and had he been willing to subordinate and adjust his own claim to it. The father considered his son disrespectful and hard-hearted, yet we know St. Francis to have been the most tender and loving of men, responsive to all possible ties, even to those of inanimate nature. We know that by his affections he freed the frozen life of his time. The elements of tragedy lay in the narrowness of the father's mind; in his lack of comprehension and his lack of sympathy with the power which was moving his son, and which was but part of the religious revival which swept Europe from end to end in the early part of the thirteenth century; the same power which built the cathedrals of the North, and produced the saints and sages of the South. But the father's situation was nevertheless genuine; he felt his heart sore and angry, and his dignity covered with disrespect. He could not, indeed, have felt otherwise, unless he had been touched by the fire of the same revival, and lifted out of and away from the contemplation of himself and his narrower claim. It is another proof that the notion of a larger obligation can only come through the response to an enlarged interest in life and in the social movements around us. The grown-up son has so long been considered a citizen with well-defined duties and a need of "making his way in the world," that the family claim is urged much less strenuously in his case, and as a matter of authority, it ceases gradually to be made at all. In the case of the grown-up daughter, however, who is under no necessity of earning a living, and who has no strong artistic bent, taking her to Paris to study painting or to Germany to study music, the years immediately following her graduation from college are too often filled with a restlessness and unhappiness which might be avoided by a little clear thinking, and by an adaptation of our code of family ethics to modern conditions. It is always difficult for the family to regard the daughter otherwise than as a family possession. From her babyhood she has been the charm and grace of the household, and it is hard to think of her as an integral part of the social order, hard to believe that she has duties outside of the family, to the state and to society in the larger sense. This assumption that the daughter is solely an inspiration and refinement to the family itself and its own immediate circle, that her delicacy and polish are but outward symbols of her father's protection and prosperity, worked very smoothly for the most part so long as her education was in line with it. When there was absolutely no recognition of the entity of woman's life beyond the family, when the outside claims upon her were still wholly unrecognized, the situation was simple, and the finishing school harmoniously and elegantly answered all requirements. She was fitted to grace the fireside and to add lustre to that social circle which her parents selected for her. But this family assumption has been notably broken into, and educational ideas no longer fit it. Modern education recognizes woman quite apart from family or society claims, and gives her the training which for many years has been deemed successful for highly developing a man's individuality and freeing his powers for independent action. Perplexities often occur when the daughter returns from college and finds that this recognition has been but partially accomplished. When she attempts to act upon the assumption of its accomplishment, she finds herself jarring upon ideals which are so entwined with filial piety, so rooted in the tenderest affections of which the human heart is capable, that both daughter and parents are shocked and startled when they discover what is happening, and they scarcely venture to analyze the situation. The ideal for the education of woman has changed under the pressure of a new claim. The family has responded to the extent of granting the education, but they are jealous of the new claim and assert the family claim as over against it. The modern woman finds herself educated to recognize a stress of social obligation which her family did not in the least anticipate when they sent her to college. She finds herself, in addition, under an impulse to act her part as a citizen of the world. She accepts her family inheritance with loyalty and affection, but she has entered into a wider inheritance as well, which, for lack of a better phrase, we call the social claim. This claim has been recognized for four years in her training, but after her return from college the family claim is again exclusively and strenuously asserted. The situation has all the discomfort of transition and compromise. The daughter finds a constant and totally unnecessary conflict between the social and the family claims. In most cases the former is repressed and gives way to the family claim, because the latter is concrete and definitely asserted, while the social demand is vague and unformulated. In such instances the girl quietly submits, but she feels wronged whenever she allows her mind to dwell upon the situation. She either hides her hurt, and splendid reserves of enthusiasm and capacity go to waste, or her zeal and emotions are turned inward, and the result is an unhappy woman, whose heart is consumed by vain regrets and desires. If the college woman is not thus quietly reabsorbed, she is even reproached for her discontent. She is told to be devoted to her family, inspiring and responsive to her social circle, and to give the rest of her time to further self-improvement and enjoyment. She expects to do this, and responds to these claims to the best of her ability, even heroically sometimes. But where is the larger life of which she has dreamed so long? That life which surrounds and completes the individual and family life? She has been taught that it is her duty to share this life, and her highest privilege to extend it. This divergence between her self-centred existence and her best convictions becomes constantly more apparent. But the situation is not even so simple as a conflict between her affections and her intellectual convictions, although even that is tumultuous enough, also the emotional nature is divided against itself. The social claim is a demand upon the emotions as well as upon the intellect, and in ignoring it she represses not only her convictions but lowers her springs of vitality. Her life is full of contradictions. She looks out into the world, longing that some demand be made upon her powers, for they are too untrained to furnish an initiative. When her health gives way under this strain, as it often does, her physician invariably advises a rest. But to be put to bed and fed on milk is not what she requires. What she needs is simple, health-giving activity, which, involving the use of all her faculties, shall be a response to all the claims which she so keenly feels. It is quite true that the family often resents her first attempts to be part of a life quite outside their own, because the college woman frequently makes these first attempts most awkwardly; her faculties have not been trained in the line of action. She lacks the ability to apply her knowledge and theories to life itself and to its complicated situations. This is largely the fault of her training and of the one-sidedness of educational methods. The colleges have long been full of the best ethical teaching, insisting that the good of the whole must ultimately be the measure of effort, and that the individual can only secure his own rights as he labors to secure those of others. But while the teaching has included an ever-broadening range of obligation and has insisted upon the recognition of the claims of human brotherhood, the training has been singularly individualistic; it has fostered ambitions for personal distinction, and has trained the faculties almost exclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation. Doubtless, woman's education is at fault, in that it has failed to recognize certain needs, and has failed to cultivate and guide the larger desires of which all generous young hearts are full. During the most formative years of life, it gives the young girl no contact with the feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suffering, or the needs of old age. It gathers together crude youth in contact only with each other and with mature men and women who are there for the purpose of their mental direction. The tenderest promptings are bidden to bide their time. This could only be justifiable if a definite outlet were provided when they leave college. Doubtless the need does not differ widely in men and women, but women not absorbed in professional or business life, in the years immediately following college, are baldly brought face to face with the deficiencies of their training. Apparently every obstacle is removed, and the college woman is at last free to begin the active life, for which, during so many years, she has been preparing. But during this so-called preparation, her faculties have been trained solely for accumulation, and she has learned to utterly distrust the finer impulses of her nature, which would naturally have connected her with human interests outside of her family and her own immediate social circle. All through school and college the young soul dreamed of self-sacrifice, of succor to the helpless and of tenderness to the unfortunate. We persistently distrust these desires, and, unless they follow well-defined lines, we repress them with every device of convention and caution. One summer the writer went from a two weeks' residence in East London, where she had become sick and bewildered by the sights and sounds encountered there, directly to Switzerland. She found the beaten routes of travel filled with young English men and women who could walk many miles a day, and who could climb peaks so inaccessible that the feats received honorable mention in Alpine journals,--a result which filled their families with joy and pride. These young people knew to a nicety the proper diet and clothing which would best contribute toward endurance. Everything was very fine about them save their motive power. The writer does not refer to the hard-worked men and women who were taking a vacation, but to the leisured young people, to whom this period was the most serious of the year, and filled with the most strenuous exertion. They did not, of course, thoroughly enjoy it, for we are too complicated to be content with mere exercise. Civilization has bound us too closely with our brethren for any one of us to be long happy in the cultivation of mere individual force or in the accumulation of mere muscular energy. With Whitechapel constantly in mind, it was difficult not to advise these young people to use some of this muscular energy of which they were so proud, in cleaning neglected alleys and paving soggy streets. Their stores of enthusiasm might stir to energy the listless men and women of East London and utilize latent social forces. The exercise would be quite as good, the need of endurance as great, the care for proper dress and food as important; but the motives for action would be turned from selfish ones into social ones. Such an appeal would doubtless be met with a certain response from the young people, but would never be countenanced by their families for an instant. Fortunately a beginning has been made in another direction, and a few parents have already begun to consider even their little children in relation to society as well as to the family. The young mothers who attend "Child Study" classes have a larger notion of parenthood and expect given characteristics from their children, at certain ages and under certain conditions. They quite calmly watch the various attempts of a child to assert his individuality, which so often takes the form of opposition to the wishes of the family and to the rule of the household. They recognize as acting under the same law of development the little child of three who persistently runs away and pretends not to hear his mother's voice, the boy of ten who violently, although temporarily, resents control of any sort, and the grown-up son who, by an individualized and trained personality, is drawn into pursuits and interests quite alien to those of his family. This attempt to take the parental relation somewhat away from mere personal experience, as well as the increasing tendency of parents to share their children's pursuits and interests, will doubtless finally result in a better understanding of the social obligation. The understanding, which results from identity of interests, would seem to confirm the conviction that in the complicated life of to-day there is no education so admirable as that education which comes from participation in the constant trend of events. There is no doubt that most of the misunderstandings of life are due to partial intelligence, because our experiences have been so unlike that we cannot comprehend each other. The old difficulties incident to the clash of two codes of morals must drop away, as the experiences of various members of the family become larger and more identical. At the present moment, however, many of those difficulties still exist and may be seen all about us. In order to illustrate the situation baldly, and at the same time to put it dramatically, it may be well to take an instance concerning which we have no personal feeling. The tragedy of King Lear has been selected, although we have been accustomed so long to give him our sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude of his two older daughters, and of the apparent coldness of Cordelia, that we have not sufficiently considered the weakness of his fatherhood, revealed by the fact that he should get himself into so entangled and unhappy a relation to all of his children. In our pity for Lear, we fail to analyze his character. The King on his throne exhibits utter lack of self-control. The King in the storm gives way to the same emotion, in repining over the wickedness of his children, which he formerly exhibited in his indulgent treatment of them. It might be illuminating to discover wherein he had failed, and why his old age found him roofless in spite of the fact that he strenuously urged the family claim with his whole conscience. At the opening of the drama he sat upon his throne, ready for the enjoyment which an indulgent parent expects when he has given gifts to his children. From the two elder, the responses for the division of his lands were graceful and fitting, but he longed to hear what Cordelia, his youngest and best beloved child, would say. He looked toward her expectantly, but instead of delight and gratitude there was the first dawn of character. Cordelia made the awkward attempt of an untrained soul to be honest and scrupulously to express her inmost feeling. The king was baffled and distressed by this attempt at self-expression. It was new to him that his daughter should be moved by a principle obtained outside himself, which even his imagination could not follow; that she had caught the notion of an existence in which her relation as a daughter played but a part. She was transformed by a dignity which recast her speech and made it self-contained. She found herself in the sweep of a feeling so large that the immediate loss of a kingdom seemed of little consequence to her. Even an act which might be construed as disrespect to her father was justified in her eyes, because she was vainly striving to fill out this larger conception of duty. The test which comes sooner or later to many parents had come to Lear, to maintain the tenderness of the relation between father and child, after that relation had become one between adults, to be content with the responses made by the adult child to the family claim, while at the same time she responded to the claims of the rest of life. The mind of Lear was not big enough for this test; he failed to see anything but the personal slight involved, and the ingratitude alone reached him. It was impossible for him to calmly watch his child developing beyond the stretch of his own mind and sympathy. That a man should be so absorbed in his own indignation as to fail to apprehend his child's thought, that he should lose his affection in his anger, simply reveals the fact that his own emotions are dearer to him than his sense of paternal obligation. Lear apparently also ignored the common ancestry of Cordelia and himself, and forgot her royal inheritance of magnanimity. He had thought of himself so long as a noble and indulgent father that he had lost the faculty by which he might perceive himself in the wrong. Even in the midst of the storm he declared himself more sinned against than sinning. He could believe any amount of kindness and goodness of himself, but could imagine no fidelity on the part of Cordelia unless she gave him the sign he demanded. At length he suffered many hardships; his spirit was buffeted and broken; he lost his reason as well as his kingdom; but for the first time his experience was identical with the experience of the men around him, and he came to a larger conception of life. He put himself in the place of "the poor naked wretches," and unexpectedly found healing and comfort. He took poor Tim in his arms from a sheer desire for human contact and animal warmth, a primitive and genuine need, through which he suddenly had a view of the world which he had never had from his throne, and from this moment his heart began to turn toward Cordelia. In reading the tragedy of King Lear, Cordelia receives a full share of our censure. Her first words are cold, and we are shocked by her lack of tenderness. Why should she ignore her father's need for indulgence, and be unwilling to give him what he so obviously craved? We see in the old king "the over-mastering desire of being beloved, selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone." His eagerness produces in us a strange pity for him, and we are impatient that his youngest and best-beloved child cannot feel this, even in the midst of her search for truth and her newly acquired sense of a higher duty. It seems to us a narrow conception that would break thus abruptly with the past and would assume that her father had no part in the new life. We want to remind her "that pity, memory, and faithfulness are natural ties," and surely as much to be prized as is the development of her own soul. We do not admire the Cordelia who through her self-absorption deserts her father, as we later admire the same woman who comes back from France that she may include her father in her happiness and freer life. The first had selfishly taken her salvation for herself alone, and it was not until her conscience had developed in her new life that she was driven back to her father, where she perished, drawn into the cruelty and wrath which had now become objective and tragic. Historically considered, the relation of Lear to his children was archaic and barbaric, indicating merely the beginning of a family life since developed. His paternal expression was one of domination and indulgence, without the perception of the needs of his children, without any anticipation of their entrance into a wider life, or any belief that they could have a worthy life apart from him. If that rudimentary conception of family life ended in such violent disaster, the fact that we have learned to be more decorous in our conduct does not demonstrate that by following the same line of theory we may not reach a like misery. Wounded affection there is sure to be, but this could be reduced to a modicum if we could preserve a sense of the relation of the individual to the family, and of the latter to society, and if we had been given a code of ethics dealing with these larger relationships, instead of a code designed to apply so exclusively to relationships obtaining only between individuals. Doubtless the clashes and jars which we all feel most keenly are those which occur when two standards of morals, both honestly held and believed in, are brought sharply together. The awkwardness and constraint we experience when two standards of conventions and manners clash but feebly prefigure this deeper difference. CHAPTER IV HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT If we could only be judged or judge other people by purity of motive, life would be much simplified, but that would be to abandon the contention made in the first chapter, that the processes of life are as important as its aims. We can all recall acquaintances of whose integrity of purpose we can have no doubt, but who cause much confusion as they proceed to the accomplishment of that purpose, who indeed are often insensible to their own mistakes and harsh in their judgments of other people because they are so confident of their own inner integrity. This tendency to be so sure of integrity of purpose as to be unsympathetic and hardened to the means by which it is accomplished, is perhaps nowhere so obvious as in the household itself. It nowhere operates as so constant a force as in the minds of the women who in all the perplexity of industrial transition are striving to administer domestic affairs. The ethics held by them are for the most part the individual and family codes, untouched by the larger social conceptions. These women, rightly confident of their household and family integrity and holding to their own code of morals, fail to see the household in its social aspect. Possibly no relation has been so slow to respond to the social ethics which we are now considering, as that between the household employer and the household employee, or, as it is still sometimes called, that between mistress and servant. This persistence of the individual code in relation to the household may be partly accounted for by the fact that orderly life and, in a sense, civilization itself, grew from the concentration of interest in one place, and that moral feeling first became centred in a limited number of persons. From the familiar proposition that the home began because the mother was obliged to stay in one spot in order to cherish the child, we can see a foundation for the belief that if women are much away from home, the home itself will be destroyed and all ethical progress endangered. We have further been told that the earliest dances and social gatherings were most questionable in their purposes, and that it was, therefore, the good and virtuous women who first stayed at home, until gradually the two--the woman who stayed at home and the woman who guarded her virtue--became synonymous. A code of ethics was thus developed in regard to woman's conduct, and her duties were logically and carefully limited to her own family circle. When it became impossible to adequately minister to the needs of this circle without the help of many people who did not strictly belong to the family, although they were part of the household, they were added as aids merely for supplying these needs. When women were the brewers and bakers, the fullers, dyers, spinners, and weavers, the soap and candle makers, they administered large industries, but solely from the family point of view. Only a few hundred years ago, woman had complete control of the manufacturing of many commodities which now figure so largely in commerce, and it is evident that she let the manufacturing of these commodities go into the hands of men, as soon as organization and a larger conception of their production were required. She felt no responsibility for their management when they were taken from the home to the factory, for deeper than her instinct to manufacture food and clothing for her family was her instinct to stay with them, and by isolation and care to guard them from evil. She had become convinced that a woman's duty extended only to her own family, and that the world outside had no claim upon her. The British matron ordered her maidens aright, when they were spinning under her own roof, but she felt no compunction of conscience when the morals and health of young girls were endangered in the overcrowded and insanitary factories. The code of family ethics was established in her mind so firmly that it excluded any notion of social effort. It is quite possible to accept this explanation of the origin of morals, and to believe that the preservation of the home is at the foundation of all that is best in civilization, without at the same time insisting that the separate preparation and serving of food is an inherent part of the structure and sanctity of the home, or that those who minister to one household shall minister to that exclusively. But to make this distinction seems difficult, and almost invariably the sense of obligation to the family becomes confused with a certain sort of domestic management. The moral issue involved in one has become inextricably combined with the industrial difficulty involved in the other, and it is at this point that so many perplexed housekeepers, through the confusion of the two problems, take a difficult and untenable position. There are economic as well as ethical reasons for this survival of a simpler code. The wife of a workingman still has a distinct economic value to her husband. She cooks, cleans, washes, and mends--services for which, before his marriage, he paid ready money. The wife of the successful business or professional man does not do this. He continues to pay for his cooking, house service, and washing. The mending, however, is still largely performed by his wife; indeed, the stockings are pathetically retained and their darning given an exaggerated importance, as if women instinctively felt that these mended stockings were the last remnant of the entire household industry, of which they were formerly mistresses. But one industry, the cooking and serving of foods to her own family, woman has never relinquished. It has, therefore, never been organized, either by men or women, and is in an undeveloped state. Each employer of household labor views it solely from the family standpoint. The ethics prevailing in regard to it are distinctly personal and unsocial, and result in the unique isolation of the household employee. As industrial conditions have changed, the household has simplified, from the mediæval affair of journeymen, apprentices, and maidens who spun and brewed to the family proper; to those who love each other and live together in ties of affection and consanguinity. Were this process complete, we should have no problem of household employment. But, even in households comparatively humble, there is still one alien, one who is neither loved nor loving. The modern family has dropped the man who made its shoes, the woman who spun its clothes, and, to a large extent, the woman who washes them, but it stoutly refuses to drop the woman who cooks its food and ministers directly to its individual comfort; it strangely insists that to do that would be to destroy the family life itself. The cook is uncomfortable, the family is uncomfortable; but it will not drop her as all her fellow-workers have been dropped, although the cook herself insists upon it. So far has this insistence gone that every possible concession is made to retain her. The writer knows an employer in one of the suburbs who built a bay at the back of her house so that her cook might have a pleasant room in which to sleep, and another in which to receive her friends. This employer naturally felt aggrieved when the cook refused to stay in her bay. Viewed in an historic light, this employer might quite as well have added a bay to her house for her shoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live in it. A listener, attentive to a conversation between two employers of household labor,--and we certainly all have opportunity to hear such conversations,--would often discover a tone implying that the employer was abused and put upon; that she was struggling with the problem solely because she was thus serving her family and performing her social duties; that otherwise it would be a great relief to her to abandon the entire situation, and "never have a servant in her house again." Did she follow this impulse, she would simply yield to the trend of her times and accept the present system of production. She would be in line with the industrial organization of her age. Were she in line ethically, she would have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life do not consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but in sharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the family the unit of that life. The selfishness of a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics, insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family shall minister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall be cut off, more or less, from their natural social ties, excludes the best working-people from her service. A man of dignity and ability is quite willing to come into a house to tune a piano. Another man of mechanical skill will come to put up window shades. Another of less skill, but of perfect independence, will come to clean and relay a carpet. These men would all resent the situation and consider it quite impossible if it implied the giving up of their family and social ties, and living under the roof of the household requiring their services. The isolation of the household employee is perhaps inevitable so long as the employer holds her belated ethics; but the situation is made even more difficult by the character and capacity of the girls who enter this industry. In any great industrial change the workmen who are permanently displaced are those who are too dull to seize upon changed conditions. The workmen who have knowledge and insight, who are in touch with their time, quickly reorganize. The general statement may be made that the enterprising girls of the community go into factories, and the less enterprising go into households, although there are many exceptions. It is not a question of skill, of energy, of conscientious work, which will make a girl rise industrially while she is in the household; she is not in the rising movement. She is belated in a class composed of the unprogressive elements of the community, which is recruited constantly by those from the ranks of the incompetent, by girls who are learning the language, girls who are timid and slow, or girls who look at life solely from the savings-bank point of view. The distracted housekeeper struggles with these unprogressive girls, holding to them not even the well-defined and independent relation of employer and employed, but the hazy and constantly changing one of mistress to servant. The latter relation is changing under pressure from various directions. In our increasing democracy the notion of personal service is constantly becoming more distasteful, conflicting, as it does, with the more modern notion of personal dignity. Personal ministration to the needs of childhood, illness, and old age seem to us reasonable, and the democratic adjustment in regard to them is being made. The first two are constantly raised nearer to the level of a profession, and there is little doubt that the third will soon follow. But personal ministrations to a normal, healthy adult, consuming the time and energy of another adult, we find more difficult to reconcile to our theories of democracy. A factory employer parts with his men at the factory gates at the end of a day's work; they go to their homes as he goes to his, in the assumption that they both do what they want and spend their money as they please; but this solace of equality outside of working hours is denied the bewildered employer of household labor. She is obliged to live constantly in the same house with her employee, and because of certain equalities in food and shelter she is brought more sharply face to face with the mental and social inequalities. The difficulty becomes more apparent as the character of the work performed by the so-called servant is less absolutely useful and may be merely time consuming. A kind-hearted woman who will complacently take an afternoon drive, leaving her cook to prepare the five courses of a "little dinner for only ten guests," will not be nearly so comfortable the next evening when she speeds her daughter to a dance, conscious that her waitress must spend the evening in dull solitude on the chance that a caller or two may ring the door-bell. A conscientious employer once remarked to the writer: "In England it must be much easier; the maid does not look and dress so like your daughter, and you can at least pretend that she doesn't like the same things. But really, my new waitress is quite as pretty and stylish as my daughter is, and her wistful look sometimes when Mary goes off to a frolic quite breaks my heart." Too many employers of domestic service have always been exempt from manual labor, and therefore constantly impose exacting duties upon employees, the nature of which they do not understand by experience; there is thus no curb of rationality imposed upon the employer's requirements and demands. She is totally unlike the foreman in a shop, who has only risen to his position by way of having actually performed with his own hands all the work of the men he directs. There is also another class of employers of domestic labor, who grow capricious and over-exacting through sheer lack of larger interests to occupy their minds; it is equally bad for them and the employee that the duties of the latter are not clearly defined. Tolstoy contends that an exaggerated notion of cleanliness has developed among such employers, which could never have been evolved among usefully employed people. He points to the fact that a serving man, in order that his hands may be immaculately clean, is kept from performing the heavier work of the household, and then is supplied with a tray, upon which to place a card, in order that even his clean hands may not touch it; later, even his clean hands are covered with a pair of clean white gloves, which hold the tray upon which the card is placed. If it were not for the undemocratic ethics used by the employers of domestics, much work now performed in the household would be done outside, as is true of many products formerly manufactured in the feudal household. The worker in all other trades has complete control of his own time after the performance of definitely limited services, his wages are paid altogether in money which he may spend in the maintenance of a separate home life, and he has full opportunity to organize with the other workers in his trade. The domestic employee is retained in the household largely because her "mistress" fatuously believes that she is thus maintaining the sanctity of family life. The household employee has no regular opportunity for meeting other workers of her trade, and of attaining with them the dignity of a corporate body. The industrial isolation of the household employee results, as isolation in a trade must always result, in a lack of progress in the methods and products of that trade, and a lack of aspiration and education in the workman. Whether we recognize this isolation as a cause or not, we are all ready to acknowledge that household labor has been in some way belated; that the improvements there have not kept up with the improvement in other occupations. It is said that the last revolution in the processes of cooking was brought about by Count Rumford, who died a hundred years ago. This is largely due to the lack of _esprit de corps_ among the employees, which keeps them collectively from fresh achievements, as the absence of education in the individual keeps her from improving her implements. Under this isolation, not only must one set of utensils serve divers purposes, and, as a consequence, tend to a lessened volume and lower quality of work, but, inasmuch as the appliances are not made to perform the fullest work, there is an amount of capital invested disproportionate to the product when measured by the achievement in other branches of industry. More important than this is the result of the isolation upon the worker herself. There is nothing more devastating to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship which makes our public opinion. If an angry foreman reprimands a girl for breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and the culprit knows perfectly well their opinion as to the justice or injustice of her situation. In either case she bears it better for knowing that, and not thinking it over in solitude. If a household employee breaks a utensil or a piece of porcelain and is reprimanded by her employer, too often the invisible jury is the family of the latter, who naturally uphold her censorious position and intensify the feeling of loneliness in the employee. The household employee, in addition to her industrial isolation, is also isolated socially. It is well to remember that the household employees for the better quarters of the city and suburbs are largely drawn from the poorer quarters, which are nothing if not gregarious. The girl is born and reared in a tenement house full of children. She goes to school with them, and there she learns to march, to read, and write in companionship with forty others. When she is old enough to go to parties, those she attends are usually held in a public hall and are crowded with dancers. If she works in a factory, she walks home with many other girls, in much the same spirit as she formerly walked to school with them. She mingles with the young men she knows, in frank, economic, and social equality. Until she marries she remains at home with no special break or change in her family and social life. If she is employed in a household, this is not true. Suddenly all the conditions of her life are altered. This change may be wholesome for her, but it is not easy, and thought of the savings-bank does not cheer one much, when one is twenty. She is isolated from the people with whom she has been reared, with whom she has gone to school, and among whom she expects to live when she marries. She is naturally lonely and constrained away from them, and the "new maid" often seems "queer" to her employer's family. She does not care to mingle socially with the people in whose house she is employed, as the girl from the country often does, but she surfers horribly from loneliness. This wholesome, instinctive dread of social isolation is so strong that, as every city intelligence-office can testify, the filling of situations is easier, or more difficult, in proportion as the place offers more or less companionship. Thus, the easy situation to fill is always the city house, with five or six employees, shading off into the more difficult suburban home, with two, and the utterly impossible lonely country house. There are suburban employers of household labor who make heroic efforts to supply domestic and social life to their employees; who take the domestic employee to drive, arrange to have her invited out occasionally; who supply her with books and papers and companionship. Nothing could be more praiseworthy in motive, but it is seldom successful in actual operation, resulting as it does in a simulacrum of companionship. The employee may have a genuine friendship for her employer, and a pleasure in her companionship, or she may not have, and the unnaturalness of the situation comes from the insistence that she has, merely because of the propinquity. The unnaturalness of the situation is intensified by the fact that the employee is practically debarred by distance and lack of leisure from her natural associates, and that her employer sympathetically insists upon filling the vacancy in interests and affections by her own tastes and friendship. She may or may not succeed, but the employee should not be thus dependent upon the good will of her employer. That in itself is undemocratic. The difficulty is increasing by a sense of social discrimination which the household employee keenly feels is against her and in favor of the factory girls, in the minds of the young men of her acquaintance. Women seeking employment, understand perfectly well this feeling among mechanics, doubtless quite unjustifiable, but it acts as a strong inducement toward factory labor. The writer has long ceased to apologize for the views and opinions of working people, being quite sure that on the whole they are quite as wise and quite as foolish as the views and opinions of other people, but that this particularly foolish opinion of young mechanics is widely shared by the employing class can be easily demonstrated. The contrast is further accentuated by the better social position of the factory girl, and the advantages provided for her in the way of lunch clubs, social clubs, and vacation homes, from which girls performing household labor are practically excluded by their hours of work, their geographical situation, and a curious feeling that they are not as interesting as factory girls. This separation from her natural social ties affects, of course, her opportunity for family life. It is well to remember that women, as a rule, are devoted to their families; that they want to live with their parents, their brothers and sisters, and kinsfolk, and will sacrifice much to accomplish this. This devotion is so universal that it is impossible to ignore it when we consider women as employees. Young unmarried women are not detached from family claims and requirements as young men are, and are more ready and steady in their response to the needs of aged parents and the helpless members of the family. But women performing labor in households have peculiar difficulties in responding to their family claims, and are practically dependent upon their employers for opportunities of even seeing their relatives and friends. Curiously enough the same devotion to family life and quick response to its claims, on the part of the employer, operates against the girl employed in household labor, and still further contributes to her isolation. The employer of household labor, in her zeal to preserve her own family life intact and free from intrusion, acts inconsistently and grants to her cook, for instance, but once or twice a week, such opportunity for untrammelled association with her relatives as the employer's family claims constantly. This in itself is undemocratic, in that it makes a distinction between the value of family life for one set of people as over against another; or, rather, claims that one set of people are of so much less importance than another, that a valuable side of life pertaining to them should be sacrificed for the other. This cannot be defended theoretically, and no doubt much of the talk among the employers of household labor, that their employees are carefully shielded and cared for, and that it is so much better for a girl's health and morals to work in a household than to work in a factory, comes from a certain uneasiness of conscience, and from a desire to make up by individual scruple what would be done much more freely and naturally by public opinion if it had an untrammelled chance to assert itself. One person, or a number of isolated persons, however conscientious, cannot perform this office of public opinion. Certain hospitals in London have contributed statistics showing that seventy-eight per cent of illegitimate children born there are the children of girls working in households. These girls are certainly not less virtuous than factory girls, for they come from the same families and have had the same training, but the girls who remain at home and work in factories meet their lovers naturally and easily, their fathers and brothers know the men, and unconsciously exercise a certain supervision and a certain direction in their choice of companionship. The household employees living in another part of the city, away from their natural family and social ties, depend upon chance for the lovers whom they meet. The lover may be the young man who delivers for the butcher or grocer, or the solitary friend, who follows the girl from her own part of town and pursues unfairly the advantage which her social loneliness and isolation afford him. There is no available public opinion nor any standard of convention which the girl can apply to her own situation. It would be easy to point out many inconveniences arising from the fact that the old economic forms are retained when moral conditions which befitted them have entirely disappeared, but until employers of domestic labor become conscious of their narrow code of ethics, and make a distinct effort to break through the status of mistress and servant, because it shocks their moral sense, there is no chance of even beginning a reform. A fuller social and domestic life among household employees would be steps toward securing their entrance into the larger industrial organizations by which the needs of a community are most successfully administered. Many a girl who complains of loneliness, and who relinquishes her situation with that as her sole excuse, feebly tries to formulate her sense of restraint and social mal-adjustment. She sometimes says that she "feels so unnatural all the time." The writer has known the voice of a girl to change so much during three weeks of "service" that she could not recognize it when the girl returned to her home. It alternated between the high falsetto in which a shy child "speaks a piece" and the husky gulp with which the _globus hystericus_ is swallowed. The alertness and _bonhomie_ of the voice of the tenement-house child had totally disappeared. When such a girl leaves her employer, her reasons are often incoherent and totally incomprehensible to that good lady, who naturally concludes that she wishes to get away from the work and back to her dances and giddy life, content, if she has these, to stand many hours in an insanitary factory. The charge of the employer is only half a truth. These dances may be the only organized form of social life which the disheartened employee is able to mention, but the girl herself, in her discontent and her moving from place to place, is blindly striving to respond to a larger social life. Her employer thinks that she should be able to consider only the interests and conveniences of her employer's family, because the employer herself is holding to a family outlook, and refuses to allow her mind to take in the larger aspects of the situation. Although this household industry survives in the midst of the factory system, it must, of course, constantly compete with it. Women with little children, or those with invalids depending upon them, cannot enter either occupation, and they are practically confined to the sewing trades; but to all other untrained women seeking employment a choice is open between these two forms of labor. There are few women so dull that they cannot paste labels on a box, or do some form of factory work; few so dull that some perplexed housekeeper will not receive them, at least for a trial, in her household. Household labor, then, has to compete with factory labor, and women seeking employment, more or less consciously compare these two forms of labor in point of hours, in point of permanency of employment, in point of wages, and in point of the advantage they afford for family and social life. Three points are easily disposed of. First, in regard to hours, there is no doubt that the factory has the advantage. The average factory hours are from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with the chance of working overtime in busy seasons. This leaves most of the evenings and Sundays entirely free. The average hours of household labor are from six in the morning until eight at night, with little difference in seasons. There is one afternoon a week, with an occasional evening, but Sunday is seldom wholly free. Even these evenings and afternoons take the form of a concession from the employer. They are called "evenings out," as if the time really belonged to her, but that she was graciously permitting her employee to use it. This attitude, of course, is in marked contrast to that maintained by the factory operative, who, when she works evenings is paid for "over-time." Second, in regard to permanency of position, the advantage is found clearly on the side of the household employee, if she proves in any measure satisfactory to her employer, for she encounters much less competition. Third, in point of wages, the household is again fairly ahead, if we consider not the money received, but the opportunity offered for saving money. This is greater among household employees, because they do not pay board, the clothing required is simpler, and the temptation to spend money in recreation is less frequent. The minimum wages paid an adult in household labor may be fairly put at two dollars and a half a week; the maximum at six dollars, this excluding the comparatively rare opportunities for women to cook at forty dollars a month, and the housekeeper's position at fifty dollars a month. The factory wages, viewed from the savings-bank point of view, may be smaller in the average, but this is doubtless counterbalanced in the minds of the employees by the greater chance which the factory offers for increased wages. A girl over sixteen seldom works in a factory for less than four dollars a week, and always cherishes the hope of at last being a forewoman with a permanent salary of from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week. Whether she attains this or not, she runs a fair chance of earning ten dollars a week as a skilled worker. A girl finds it easier to be content with three dollars a week, when she pays for board, in a scale of wages rising toward ten dollars, than to be content with four dollars a week and pay no board, in a scale of wages rising toward six dollars; and the girl well knows that there are scores of forewomen at sixty dollars a month for one forty-dollar cook or fifty-dollar housekeeper. In many cases this position is well taken economically, for, although the opportunity for saving may be better for the employees in the household than in the factory, her family saves more when she works in a factory and lives with them. The rent is no more when she is at home. The two dollars and a half a week which she pays into the family fund more than covers the cost of her actual food, and at night she can often contribute toward the family labor by helping her mother wash and sew. The fourth point has already been considered, and if the premise in regard to the isolation of the household employee is well taken, and if the position can be sustained that this isolation proves the determining factor in the situation, then certainly an effort should be made to remedy this, at least in its domestic and social aspects. To allow household employees to live with their own families and among their own friends, as factory employees now do, would be to relegate more production to industrial centres administered on the factory system, and to secure shorter hours for that which remains to be done in the household. In those cases in which the household employees have no family ties, doubtless a remedy against social isolation would be the formation of residence clubs, at least in the suburbs, where the isolation is most keenly felt. Indeed, the beginnings of these clubs are already seen in the servants' quarters at the summer hotels. In these residence clubs, the household employee could have the independent life which only one's own abiding place can afford. This, of course, presupposes a higher grade of ability than household employees at present possess; on the other hand, it is only by offering such possibilities that the higher grades of intelligence can be secured for household employment. As the plan of separate clubs for household employees will probably come first in the suburbs, where the difficulty of securing and holding "servants" under the present system is most keenly felt, so the plan of buying cooked food from an outside kitchen, and of having more and more of the household product relegated to the factory, will probably come from the comparatively poor people in the city, who feel most keenly the pressure of the present system. They already consume a much larger proportion of canned goods and bakers' wares and "prepared meats" than the more prosperous people do, because they cannot command the skill nor the time for the more tedious preparation of the raw material. The writer has seen a tenement-house mother pass by a basket of green peas at the door of a local grocery store, to purchase a tin of canned peas, because they could be easily prepared for supper and "the children liked the tinny taste." It is comparatively easy for an employer to manage her household industry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress. The difficulties really begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or, worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set of utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly insupportable on rainy washing-days in winter. Such a woman, rather than the prosperous housekeeper, uses factory products, and thus no high standard of quality is established. The problem of domestic service, which has long been discussed in the United States and England, is now coming to prominence in France. As a well-known economist has recently pointed out, the large defection in the ranks of domestics is there regarded as a sign of revolt against an "unconscious slavery," while English and American writers appeal to the statistics which point to the absorption of an enormous number of the class from which servants were formerly recruited into factory employments, and urge, as the natural solution, that more of the products used in households be manufactured in factories, and that personal service, at least for healthy adults, be eliminated altogether. Both of these lines of discussion certainly indicate that domestic service is yielding to the influence of a democratic movement, and is emerging from the narrower code of family ethics into the larger code governing social relations. It still remains to express the ethical advance through changed economic conditions by which the actual needs of the family may be supplied not only more effectively but more in line with associated effort. To fail to apprehend the tendency of one's age, and to fail to adapt the conditions of an industry to it, is to leave that industry ill-adjusted and belated on the economic side, and out of line ethically. CHAPTER V INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION There is no doubt that the great difficulty we experience in reducing to action our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that we have not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even to fuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement. We have all been at times entertained by the futile efforts of half a dozen highly individualized people gathered together as a committee. Their aimless attempts to find a common method of action have recalled the wavering motion of a baby's arm before he has learned to coördinate his muscles. If, as is many times stated, we are passing from an age of individualism to one of association, there is no doubt that for decisive and effective action the individual still has the best of it. He will secure efficient results while committees are still deliberating upon the best method of making a beginning. And yet, if the need of the times demand associated effort, it may easily be true that the action which appears ineffective, and yet is carried out upon the more highly developed line of associated effort, may represent a finer social quality and have a greater social value than the more effective individual action. It is possible that an individual may be successful, largely because he conserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put any of his energy into the training which will give him the ability to act with others. The individual acts promptly, and we are dazzled by his success while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in industrial relations, as existing between the owner of a large factory and his employees. A growing conflict may be detected between the democratic ideal, which urges the workmen to demand representation in the administration of industry, and the accepted position, that the man who owns the capital and takes the risks has the exclusive right of management. It is in reality a clash between individual or aristocratic management, and corporate or democratic management. A large and highly developed factory presents a sharp contrast between its socialized form and individualistic ends. It is possible to illustrate this difference by a series of events which occurred in Chicago during the summer of 1894. These events epitomized and exaggerated, but at the same time challenged, the code of ethics which regulates much of our daily conduct, and clearly showed that so-called social relations are often resting upon the will of an individual, and are in reality regulated by a code of individual ethics. As this situation illustrates a point of great difficulty to which we have arrived in our development of social ethics, it may be justifiable to discuss it at some length. Let us recall the facts, not as they have been investigated and printed, but as they remain in our memories. A large manufacturing company had provided commodious workshops, and, at the instigation of its president, had built a model town for the use of its employees. After a series of years it was deemed necessary, during a financial depression, to reduce the wages of these employees by giving each workman less than full-time work "in order to keep the shops open." This reduction was not accepted by the men, who had become discontented with the factory management and the town regulations, and a strike ensued, followed by a complete shut-down of the works. Although these shops were non-union shops, the strikers were hastily organized and appealed for help to the American Railway Union, which at that moment was holding its biennial meeting in Chicago. After some days' discussion and some futile attempts at arbitration, a sympathetic strike was declared, which gradually involved railway men in all parts of the country, and orderly transportation was brought to a complete standstill. In the excitement which followed, cars were burned and tracks torn up. The police of Chicago did not cope with the disorder, and the railway companies, apparently distrusting the Governor of the State, and in order to protect the United States mails, called upon the President of the United States for the federal troops, the federal courts further enjoined all persons against any form of interference with the property or operation of the railroads, and the situation gradually assumed the proportions of internecine warfare. During all of these events the president of the manufacturing company first involved, steadfastly refused to have the situation submitted to arbitration, and this attitude naturally provoked much discussion. The discussion was broadly divided between those who held that the long kindness of the president of the company had been most ungratefully received, and those who maintained that the situation was the inevitable outcome of the social consciousness developing among working people. The first defended the president of the company in his persistent refusal to arbitrate, maintaining that arbitration was impossible after the matter had been taken up by other than his own employees, and they declared that a man must be allowed to run his own business. They considered the firm stand of the president a service to the manufacturing interests of the entire country. The others claimed that a large manufacturing concern has ceased to be a private matter; that not only a number of workmen and stockholders are concerned in its management, but that the interests of the public are so involved that the officers of the company are in a real sense administering a public trust. This prolonged strike clearly puts in a concrete form the ethics of an individual, in this case a benevolent employer, and the ethics of a mass of men, his employees, claiming what they believed to be their moral rights. These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which has become organized into a vast social operation, not with the coöperation of the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of the individual owning the capital. There is a sharp divergence between the social form and the individual aim, which becomes greater as the employees are more highly socialized and dependent. The president of the company under discussion went further than the usual employer does. He socialized not only the factory, but the form in which his workmen were living. He built, and in a great measure regulated, an entire town, without calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or self-government. He honestly believed that he knew better than they what was for their good, as he certainly knew better than they how to conduct his business. As his factory developed and increased, making money each year under his direction, he naturally expected the town to prosper in the same way. He did not realize that the men submitted to the undemocratic conditions of the factory organization because the economic pressure in our industrial affairs is so great that they could not do otherwise. Under this pressure they could be successfully discouraged from organization, and systematically treated on the individual basis. Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer than industrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrial control to domestic and social arrangements. They felt the lack of democracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in these matters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence. The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directing the social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find out their desires, and without any organization through which to give them social expression. The president of the company was, moreover, so confident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test the righteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of the men. He doubtless built the town from a sincere desire to give his employees the best surroundings. As it developed, he gradually took toward it the artist attitude toward his own creation, which has no thought for the creation itself but is absorbed in the idea it stands for, and he ceased to measure the usefulness of the town by the standard of the men's needs. This process slowly darkened his glints of memory, which might have connected his experience with that of his men. It is possible to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor until the power of attaining a simple human relationship with the beneficiaries, that of frank equality with them, is gone, and there is left no mutual interest in a common cause. To perform too many good deeds may be to lose the power of recognizing good in others; to be too absorbed in carrying out a personal plan of improvement may be to fail to catch the great moral lesson which our times offer. The president of this company fostered his employees for many years; he gave them sanitary houses and beautiful parks; but in their extreme need, when they were struggling with the most difficult situation which the times could present to them, he lost his touch and had nothing wherewith to help them. The employer's conception of goodness for his men had been cleanliness, decency of living, and, above all, thrift and temperance. Means had been provided for all this, and opportunities had also been given for recreation and improvement. But this employer suddenly found his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral impulse. A movement had been going on about him and among his working men, of which he had been unconscious, or concerning which he had heard only by rumor. Outside the ken of philanthropists the proletariat had learned to say in many languages, that "the injury of one is the concern of all." Their watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual and trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they were moved by a determination to free that class from the untoward conditions under which they were laboring. Compared to these watchwords, the old ones which this philanthropic employer had given his town were negative and inadequate. He had believed strongly in temperance and steadiness of individual effort, but had failed to apprehend the greater movement of combined abstinence and concerted action. With all his fostering, the president had not attained to a conception of social morality for his men and had imagined that virtue for them largely meant absence of vice. When the labor movement finally stirred his town, or, to speak more fairly, when, in their distress and perplexity, his own employees appealed to an organized manifestation of this movement, they were quite sure that simply because they were workmen in distress they would not be deserted by it. This loyalty on the part of a widely ramified and well-organized union toward the workmen in a "non-union shop," who had contributed nothing to its cause, was certainly a manifestation of moral power. In none of his utterances or correspondence did the president for an instant recognize this touch of nobility, although one would imagine that he would gladly point out this bit of virtue, in what he must have considered the moral ruin about him. He stood throughout for the individual virtues, those which had distinguished the model workmen of his youth; those which had enabled him and so many of his contemporaries to rise in life, when "rising in life" was urged upon every promising boy as the goal of his efforts. Of the code of social ethics he had caught absolutely nothing. The morals he had advocated in selecting and training his men did not fail them in the hour of confusion. They were self-controlled, and they themselves destroyed no property. They were sober and exhibited no drunkenness, even although obliged to hold their meetings in the saloon hall of a neighboring town. They repaid their employer in kind, but he had given them no rule for the life of association into which they were plunged. The president of the company desired that his employees should possess the individual and family virtues, but did nothing to cherish in them the social virtues which express themselves in associated effort. Day after day, during that horrible time of suspense, when the wires constantly reported the same message, "the President of the Company holds that there is nothing to arbitrate," one was forced to feel that the ideal of one-man rule was being sustained in its baldest form. A demand from many parts of the country and from many people was being made for social adjustment, against which the commercial training and the individualistic point of view held its own successfully. The majority of the stockholders, not only of this company but of similar companies, and many other citizens, who had had the same commercial experience, shared and sustained this position. It was quite impossible for them to catch the other point of view. They not only felt themselves right from the commercial standpoint, but had gradually accustomed themselves also to the philanthropic standpoint, until they had come to consider their motives beyond reproach. Habit held them persistent in this view of the case through all changing conditions. A wise man has said that "the consent of men and your own conscience are two wings given you whereby you may rise to God." It is so easy for the good and powerful to think that they can rise by following the dictates of conscience, by pursuing their own ideals, that they are prone to leave those ideals unconnected with the consent of their fellow-men. The president of the company thought out within his own mind a beautiful town. He had power with which to build this town, but he did not appeal to nor obtain the consent of the men who were living in it. The most unambitious reform, recognizing the necessity for this consent, makes for slow but sane and strenuous progress, while the most ambitious of social plans and experiments, ignoring this, is prone to failure. The man who insists upon consent, who moves with the people, is bound to consult the "feasible right" as well as the absolute right. He is often obliged to attain only Mr. Lincoln's "best possible," and then has the sickening sense of compromise with his best convictions. He has to move along with those whom he leads toward a goal that neither he nor they see very clearly till they come to it. He has to discover what people really want, and then "provide the channels in which the growing moral force of their lives shall flow." What he does attain, however, is not the result of his individual striving, as a solitary mountain-climber beyond that of the valley multitude but it is sustained and upheld by the sentiments and aspirations of many others. Progress has been slower perpendicularly, but incomparably greater because lateral. He has not taught his contemporaries to climb mountains, but he has persuaded the villagers to move up a few feet higher; added to this, he has made secure his progress. A few months after the death of the promoter of this model town, a court decision made it obligatory upon the company to divest itself of the management of the town as involving a function beyond its corporate powers. The parks, flowers, and fountains of this far-famed industrial centre were dismantled, with scarcely a protest from the inhabitants themselves. The man who disassociates his ambition, however disinterested, from the coöperation of his fellows, always takes this risk of ultimate failure. He does not take advantage of the great conserver and guarantee of his own permanent success which associated efforts afford. Genuine experiments toward higher social conditions must have a more democratic faith and practice than those which underlie private venture. Public parks and improvements, intended for the common use, are after all only safe in the hands of the public itself; and associated effort toward social progress, although much more awkward and stumbling than that same effort managed by a capable individual, does yet enlist deeper forces and evoke higher social capacities. The successful business man who is also the philanthropist is in more than the usual danger of getting widely separated from his employees. The men already have the American veneration for wealth and successful business capacity, and, added to this, they are dazzled by his good works. The workmen have the same kindly impulses as he, but while they organize their charity into mutual benefit associations and distribute their money in small amounts in relief for the widows and insurance for the injured, the employer may build model towns, erect college buildings, which are tangible and enduring, and thereby display his goodness in concentrated form. By the very exigencies of business demands, the employer is too often cut off from the social ethics developing in regard to our larger social relationships, and from the great moral life springing from our common experiences. This is sure to happen when he is good "to" people rather than "with" them, when he allows himself to decide what is best for them instead of consulting them. He thus misses the rectifying influence of that fellowship which is so big that it leaves no room for sensitiveness or gratitude. Without this fellowship we may never know how great the divergence between ourselves and others may become, nor how cruel the misunderstandings. During a recent strike of the employees of a large factory in Ohio, the president of the company expressed himself as bitterly disappointed by the results of his many kindnesses, and evidently considered the employees utterly unappreciative. His state of mind was the result of the fallacy of ministering to social needs from an individual impulse and expecting a socialized return of gratitude and loyalty. If the lunch-room was necessary, it was a necessity in order that the employees might have better food, and, when they had received the better food, the legitimate aim of the lunch-room was met. If baths were desirable, and the fifteen minutes of calisthenic exercise given the women in the middle of each half day brought a needed rest and change to their muscles, then the increased cleanliness and the increased bodily comfort of so many people should of themselves have justified the experiment. To demand, as a further result, that there should be no strikes in the factory, no revolt against the will of the employer because the employees were filled with loyalty as the result of the kindness, was of course to take the experiment from an individual basis to a social one. Large mining companies and manufacturing concerns are constantly appealing to their stockholders for funds, or for permission to take a percentage of the profits, in order that the money may be used for educational and social schemes designed for the benefit of the employees. The promoters of these schemes use as an argument and as an appeal, that better relations will be thus established, that strikes will be prevented, and that in the end the money returned to the stockholders will be increased. However praiseworthy this appeal may be in motive, it involves a distinct confusion of issues, and in theory deserves the failure it so often meets with in practice. In the clash which follows a strike, the employees are accused of an ingratitude, when there was no legitimate reason to expect gratitude; and useless bitterness, which has really a factitious basis, may be developed on both sides. Indeed, unless the relation becomes a democratic one, the chances of misunderstanding are increased, when to the relation of employer and employees is added the relation of benefactor to beneficiaries, in so far as there is still another opportunity for acting upon the individual code of ethics. There is no doubt that these efforts are to be commended, not only from the standpoint of their social value but because they have a marked industrial significance. Failing, as they do, however, to touch the question of wages and hours, which are almost invariably the points of trades-union effort, the employers confuse the mind of the public when they urge the amelioration of conditions and the kindly relation existing between them and their men as a reason for the discontinuance of strikes and other trades-union tactics. The men have individually accepted the kindness of the employers as it was individually offered, but quite as the latter urges his inability to increase wages unless he has the coöperation of his competitors, so the men state that they are bound to the trades-union struggle for an increase in wages because it can only be undertaken by combinations of labor. Even the much more democratic effort to divide a proportion of the profits at the end of the year among the employees, upon the basis of their wages and efficiency, is also exposed to a weakness, from the fact that the employing side has the power of determining to whom the benefit shall accrue. Both individual acts of self-defence on the part of the wage earner and individual acts of benevolence on the part of the employer are most useful as they establish standards to which the average worker and employer may in time be legally compelled to conform. Progress must always come through the individual who varies from the type and has sufficient energy to express this variation. He first holds a higher conception than that held by the mass of his fellows of what is righteous under given conditions, and expresses this conviction in conduct, in many instances formulating a certain scruple which the others share, but have not yet defined even to themselves. Progress, however, is not secure until the mass has conformed to this new righteousness. This is equally true in regard to any advance made in the standard of living on the part of the trades-unionists or in the improved conditions of industry on the part of reforming employers. The mistake lies, not in overpraising the advance thus inaugurated by individual initiative, but in regarding the achievement as complete in a social sense when it is still in the realm of individual action. No sane manufacturer regards his factory as the centre of the industrial system. He knows very well that the cost of material, wages, and selling prices are determined by industrial conditions completely beyond his control. Yet the same man may quite calmly regard himself and his own private principles as merely self-regarding, and expect results from casual philanthropy which can only be accomplished through those common rules of life and labor established by the community for the common good. Outside of and surrounding these smaller and most significant efforts are the larger and irresistible movements operating toward combination. This movement must tend to decide upon social matters from the social standpoint. Until then it is difficult to keep our minds free from a confusion of issues. Such a confusion occurs when the gift of a large sum to the community for a public and philanthropic purpose, throws a certain glamour over all the earlier acts of a man, and makes it difficult for the community to see possible wrongs committed against it, in the accumulation of wealth so beneficently used. It is possible also that the resolve to be thus generous unconsciously influences the man himself in his methods of accumulation. He keeps to a certain individual rectitude, meaning to make an individual restitution by the old paths of generosity and kindness, whereas if he had in view social restitution on the newer lines of justice and opportunity, he would throughout his course doubtless be watchful of his industrial relationships and his social virtues. The danger of professionally attaining to the power of the righteous man, of yielding to the ambition "for doing good" on a large scale, compared to which the ambition for politics, learning, or wealth, are vulgar and commonplace, ramifies through our modern life; and those most easily beset by this temptation are precisely the men best situated to experiment on the larger social lines, because they so easily dramatize their acts and lead public opinion. Very often, too, they have in their hands the preservation and advancement of large vested interests, and often see clearly and truly that they are better able to administer the affairs of the community than the community itself: sometimes they see that if they do not administer them sharply and quickly, as only an individual can, certain interests of theirs dependent upon the community will go to ruin. The model employer first considered, provided a large sum in his will with which to build and equip a polytechnic school, which will doubtless be of great public value. This again shows the advantage of individual management, in the spending as well as in the accumulating of wealth, but this school will attain its highest good, in so far as it incites the ambition to provide other schools from public funds. The town of Zurich possesses a magnificent polytechnic institute, secured by the vote of the entire people and supported from public taxes. Every man who voted for it is interested that his child should enjoy its benefits, and, of course, the voluntary attendance must be larger than in a school accepted as a gift to the community. In the educational efforts of model employers, as in other attempts toward social amelioration, one man with the best of intentions is trying to do what the entire body of employees should have undertaken to do for themselves. The result of his efforts will only attain its highest value as it serves as an incentive to procure other results by the community as well as for the community. There are doubtless many things which the public would never demand unless they were first supplied by individual initiative, both because the public lacks the imagination, and also the power of formulating their wants. Thus philanthropic effort supplies kindergartens, until they become so established in the popular affections that they are incorporated in the public school system. Churches and missions establish reading rooms, until at last the public library system dots the city with branch reading rooms and libraries. For this willingness to take risks for the sake of an ideal, for those experiments which must be undertaken with vigor and boldness in order to secure didactic value in failure as well as in success, society must depend upon the individual possessed with money, and also distinguished by earnest and unselfish purpose. Such experiments enable the nation to use the Referendum method in its public affairs. Each social experiment is thus tested by a few people, given wide publicity, that it may be observed and discussed by the bulk of the citizens before the public prudently makes up its mind whether or not it is wise to incorporate it into the functions of government. If the decision is in its favor and it is so incorporated, it can then be carried on with confidence and enthusiasm. But experience has shown that we can only depend upon successful men for a certain type of experiment in the line of industrial amelioration and social advancement. The list of those who found churches, educational institutions, libraries, and art galleries, is very long, as is again the list of those contributing to model dwellings, recreation halls, and athletic fields. At the present moment factory employers are doing much to promote "industrial betterment" in the way of sanitary surroundings, opportunities for bathing, lunch rooms provided with cheap and wholesome food, club rooms, and guild halls. But there is a line of social experiment involving social righteousness in its most advanced form, in which the number of employers and the "favored class" are so few that it is plain society cannot count upon them for continuous and valuable help. This lack is in the line of factory legislation and that sort of social advance implied in shorter hours and the regulation of wages; in short, all that organization and activity that is involved in such a maintenance and increase of wages as would prevent the lowering of the standard of life. A large body of people feel keenly that the present industrial system is in a state of profound disorder, and that there is no guarantee that the pursuit of individual ethics will ever right it. They claim that relief can only come through deliberate corporate effort inspired by social ideas and guided by the study of economic laws, and that the present industrial system thwarts our ethical demands, not only for social righteousness but for social order. Because they believe that each advance in ethics must be made fast by a corresponding advance in politics and legal enactment, they insist upon the right of state regulation and control. While many people representing all classes in a community would assent to this as to a general proposition, and would even admit it as a certain moral obligation, legislative enactments designed to control industrial conditions have largely been secured through the efforts of a few citizens, mostly those who constantly see the harsh conditions of labor and who are incited to activity by their sympathies as well as their convictions. This may be illustrated by the series of legal enactments regulating the occupations in which children may be allowed to work, also the laws in regard to the hours of labor permitted in those occupations, and the minimum age below which children may not be employed. The first child labor laws were enacted in England through the efforts of those members of parliament whose hearts were wrung by the condition of the little parish apprentices bound out to the early textile manufacturers of the north; and through the long years required to build up the code of child labor legislation which England now possesses, knowledge of the conditions has always preceded effective legislation. The efforts of that small number in every community who believe in legislative control have always been reënforced by the efforts of trades-unionists rather than by the efforts of employers. Partly because the employment of workingmen in the factories brings them in contact with the children who tend to lower wages and demoralize their trades, and partly because workingmen have no money nor time to spend in alleviating philanthropy, and must perforce seize upon agitation and legal enactment as the only channel of redress which is open to them. We may illustrate by imagining a row of people seated in a moving street-car, into which darts a boy of eight, calling out the details of the last murder, in the hope of selling an evening newspaper. A comfortable looking man buys a paper from him with no sense of moral shock; he may even be a trifle complacent that he has helped along the little fellow, who is making his way in the world. The philanthropic lady sitting next to him may perhaps reflect that it is a pity that such a bright boy is not in school. She may make up her mind in a moment of compunction to redouble her efforts for various newsboys' schools and homes, that this poor child may have better teaching, and perhaps a chance at manual training. She probably is convinced that he alone, by his unaided efforts, is supporting a widowed mother, and her heart is moved to do all she can for him. Next to her sits a workingman trained in trades-union methods. He knows that the boy's natural development is arrested, and that the abnormal activity of his body and mind uses up the force which should go into growth; moreover, that this premature use of his powers has but a momentary and specious value. He is forced to these conclusions because he has seen many a man, entering the factory at eighteen and twenty, so worn out by premature work that he was "laid on the shelf" within ten or fifteen years. He knows very well that he can do nothing in the way of ameliorating the lot of this particular boy; that his only possible chance is to agitate for proper child-labor laws; to regulate, and if possible prohibit, street-vending by children, in order that the child of the poorest may have his school time secured to him, and may have at least his short chance for growth. These three people, sitting in the street car, are all honest and upright, and recognize a certain duty toward the forlorn children of the community. The self-made man is encouraging one boy's own efforts; the philanthropic lady is helping on a few boys; the workingman alone is obliged to include all the boys of his class. Workingmen, because of their feebleness in all but numbers, have been forced to appeal to the state, in order to secure protection for themselves and for their children. They cannot all rise out of their class, as the occasionally successful man has done; some of them must be left to do the work in the factories and mines, and they have no money to spend in philanthropy. Both public agitation and a social appeal to the conscience of the community is necessary in order to secure help from the state, and, curiously enough, child-labor laws once enacted and enforced are a matter of great pride, and even come to be regarded as a register of the community's humanity and enlightenment. If the method of public agitation could find quiet and orderly expression in legislative enactment, and if labor measures could be submitted to the examination and judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, we should have the ideal development of the democratic state. But we judge labor organizations as we do other living institutions, not by their declaration of principles, which we seldom read, but by their blundering efforts to apply their principles to actual conditions, and by the oft-time failure of their representatives, when the individual finds himself too weak to become the organ of corporate action. The very blunders and lack of organization too often characterizing a union, in marked contrast to the orderly management of a factory, often confuse us as to the real issues involved, and we find it hard to trust uncouth and unruly manifestations of social effort. The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that those who are formulating a code of associated action so often break through the established code of law and order. As society has a right to demand of the reforming individual that he be sternly held to his personal and domestic claims, so it has a right to insist that labor organizations shall keep to the hardly won standards of public law and order; and the community performs but its plain duty when it registers its protest every time law and order are subverted, even in the interest of the so-called social effort. Yet in moments of industrial stress and strain the community is confronted by a moral perplexity which may arise from the mere fact that the good of yesterday is opposed to the good of today, and that which may appear as a choice between virtue and vice is really but a choice between virtue and virtue. In the disorder and confusion sometimes incident to growth and progress, the community may be unable to see anything but the unlovely struggle itself. The writer recalls a conversation between two workingmen who were leaving a lecture on "Organic Evolution." The first was much puzzled, and anxiously inquired of the second "if evolution could mean that one animal turned into another." The challenged workman stopped in the rear of the hall, put his foot upon a chair, and expounded what he thought evolution did mean; and this, so nearly as the conversation can be recalled, is what he said: "You see a lot of fishes are living in a stream, which overflows in the spring and strands some of them upon the bank. The weak ones die up there, but others make a big effort to get back into the water. They dig their fins into the sand, breathe as much air as they can with their gills, and have a terrible time. But after a while their fins turn into legs and their gills into lungs, and they have become frogs. Of course they are further along than the sleek, comfortable fishes who sail up and down the stream waving their tails and despising the poor damaged things thrashing around on the bank. He--the lecturer--did not say anything about men, but it is easy enough to think of us poor devils on the dry bank, struggling without enough to live on, while the comfortable fellows sail along in the water with all they want and despise us because we thrash about." His listener did not reply, and was evidently dissatisfied both with the explanation and the application. Doubtless the illustration was bungling in more than its setting forth, but the story is suggestive. At times of social disturbance the law-abiding citizen is naturally so anxious for peace and order, his sympathies are so justly and inevitably on the side making for the restoration of law, that it is difficult for him to see the situation fairly. He becomes insensible to the unselfish impulse which may prompt a sympathetic strike in behalf of the workers in a non-union shop, because he allows his mind to dwell exclusively on the disorder which has become associated with the strike. He is completely side-tracked by the ugly phases of a great moral movement. It is always a temptation to assume that the side which has respectability, authority, and superior intelligence, has therefore righteousness as well, especially when the same side presents concrete results of individual effort as over against the less tangible results of associated effort. It is as yet most difficult for us to free ourselves from the individualistic point of view sufficiently to group events in their social relations and to judge fairly those who are endeavoring to produce a social result through all the difficulties of associated action. The philanthropist still finds his path much easier than do those who are attempting a social morality. In the first place, the public, anxious to praise what it recognizes as an undoubted moral effort often attended with real personal sacrifice, joyfully seizes upon this manifestation and overpraises it, recognizing the philanthropist as an old friend in the paths of righteousness, whereas the others are strangers and possibly to be distrusted as aliens. It is easy to confuse the response to an abnormal number of individual claims with the response to the social claim. An exaggerated personal morality is often mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a social situation its total inadequacy is not discovered. To attempt to attain a social morality without a basis of democratic experience results in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide, and ends in an exaggerated individual morality but not in social morality at all. We see this from time to time in the care-worn and overworked philanthropist, who has taxed his individual will beyond the normal limits and has lost his clew to the situation among a bewildering number of cases. A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and end must also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constant correction of his process. He must not only test and guide his achievement by human experience, but he must succeed or fail in proportion as he has incorporated that experience with his own. Otherwise his own achievements become his stumbling-block, and he comes to believe in his own goodness as something outside of himself. He makes an exception of himself, and thinks that he is different from the rank and file of his fellows. He forgets that it is necessary to know of the lives of our contemporaries, not only in order to believe in their integrity, which is after all but the first beginnings of social morality, but in order to attain to any mental or moral integrity for ourselves or any such hope for society. CHAPTER VI EDUCATIONAL METHODS As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be. We have come to believe that the most "brutish man" has a value in our common life, a function to perform which can be fulfilled by no one else. We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We ask this not merely because it is the man's right to be thus connected, but because we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford to get along without his special contribution. Just as we have come to resent all hindrances which keep us from untrammelled comradeship with our fellows, and as we throw down unnatural divisions, not in the spirit of the eighteenth-century reformers, but in the spirit of those to whom social equality has become a necessity for further social development, so we are impatient to use the dynamic power residing in the mass of men, and demand that the educator free that power. We believe that man's moral idealism is the constructive force of progress, as it has always been; but because every human being is a creative agent and a possible generator of fine enthusiasm, we are sceptical of the moral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, that there may be greater freedom, strength, and subtilty of intercourse and hence an increase of dynamic power. We are not content to include all men in our hopes, but have become conscious that all men are hoping and are part of the same movement of which we are a part. Many people impelled by these ideas have become impatient with the slow recognition on the part of the educators of their manifest obligation to prepare and nourish the child and the citizen for social relations. The educators should certainly conserve the learning and training necessary for the successful individual and family life, but should add to that a preparation for the enlarged social efforts which our increasing democracy requires. The democratic ideal demands of the school that it shall give the child's own experience a social value; that it shall teach him to direct his own activities and adjust them to those of other people. We are not willing that thousands of industrial workers shall put all of their activity and toil into services from which the community as a whole reaps the benefit, while their mental conceptions and code of morals are narrow and untouched by any uplift which the consciousness of social value might give them. We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and writing, suspecting them to rest upon the assumption that the ordinary experience of life is worth little, and that all knowledge and interest must be brought to the children through the medium of books. Such an assumption fails to give the child any clew to the life about him, or any power to usefully or intelligently connect himself with it. This may be illustrated by observations made in a large Italian colony situated in Chicago, the children from which are, for the most part, sent to the public schools. The members of the Italian colony are largely from South Italy,--Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the workingmen's quarters of that city. They have come to America with the distinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies of themselves and their children. In almost all cases they mean to go back again, simply because their imaginations cannot picture a continuous life away from the old surroundings. Their experiences in Italy have been those of simple outdoor activity, and their ideas have come directly to them from their struggle with Nature,--such a hand-to-hand struggle as takes place when each man gets his living largely through his own cultivation of the soil, or with tools simply fashioned by his own hands. The women, as in all primitive life, have had more diversified activities than the men. They have cooked, spun, and knitted, in addition to their almost equal work in the fields. Very few of the peasant men or women can either read or write. They are devoted to their children, strong in their family feeling, even to remote relationships, and clannish in their community life. The entire family has been upheaved, and is striving to adjust itself to its new surroundings. The men, for the most part, work on railroad extensions through the summer, under the direction of a _padrone_, who finds the work for them, regulates the amount of their wages, and supplies them with food. The first effect of immigration upon the women is that of idleness. They no longer work in the fields, nor milk the goats, nor pick up faggots. The mother of the family buys all the clothing, not only already spun and woven but made up into garments, of a cut and fashion beyond her powers. It is, indeed, the most economical thing for her to do. Her house-cleaning and cooking are of the simplest; the bread is usually baked outside of the house, and the macaroni bought prepared for boiling. All of those outdoor and domestic activities, which she would naturally have handed on to her daughters, have slipped away from her. The domestic arts are gone, with their absorbing interests for the children, their educational value, and incentive to activity. A household in a tenement receives almost no raw material. For the hundreds of children who have never seen wheat grow, there are dozens who have never seen bread baked. The occasional washings and scrubbings are associated only with discomfort. The child of such a family receives constant stimulus of most exciting sort from his city street life, but he has little or no opportunity to use his energies in domestic manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in any direction. No activity is supplied to take the place of that which, in Italy, he would naturally have found in his own surroundings, and no new union with wholesome life is made for him. Italian parents count upon the fact that their children learn the English language and American customs before they do themselves, and the children act not only as interpreters of the language, but as buffers between them and Chicago, resulting in a certain almost pathetic dependence of the family upon the child. When a child of the family, therefore, first goes to school, the event is fraught with much significance to all the others. The family has no social life in any structural form and can supply none to the child. He ought to get it in the school and give it to his family, the school thus becoming the connector with the organized society about them. It is the children aged six, eight, and ten, who go to school, entering, of course, the primary grades. If a boy is twelve or thirteen on his arrival in America, his parents see in him a wage-earning factor, and the girl of the same age is already looking toward her marriage. Let us take one of these boys, who has learned in his six or eight years to speak his native language, and to feel himself strongly identified with the fortunes of his family. Whatever interest has come to the minds of his ancestors has come through the use of their hands in the open air; and open air and activity of body have been the inevitable accompaniments of all their experiences. Yet the first thing that the boy must do when he reaches school is to sit still, at least part of the time, and he must learn to listen to what is said to him, with all the perplexity of listening to a foreign tongue. He does not find this very stimulating, and is slow to respond to the more subtle incentives of the schoolroom. The peasant child is perfectly indifferent to showing off and making a good recitation. He leaves all that to his schoolfellows, who are more sophisticated and equipped with better English. His parents are not deeply interested in keeping him in school, and will not hold him there against his inclination. Their experience does not point to the good American tradition that it is the educated man who finally succeeds. The richest man in the Italian colony can neither read nor write--even Italian. His cunning and acquisitiveness, combined with the credulity and ignorance of his countrymen, have slowly brought about his large fortune. The child himself may feel the stirring of a vague ambition to go on until he is as the other children are; but he is not popular with his schoolfellows, and he sadly feels the lack of dramatic interest. Even the pictures and objects presented to him, as well as the language, are strange. If we admit that in education it is necessary to begin with the experiences which the child already has and to use his spontaneous and social activity, then the city streets begin this education for him in a more natural way than does the school. The South Italian peasant comes from a life of picking olives and oranges, and he easily sends his children out to pick up coal from railroad tracks, or wood from buildings which have been burned down. Unfortunately, this process leads by easy transition to petty thieving. It is easy to go from the coal on the railroad track to the coal and wood which stand before a dealer's shop; from the potatoes which have rolled from a rumbling wagon to the vegetables displayed by the grocer. This is apt to be the record of the boy who responds constantly to the stimulus and temptations of the street, although in the beginning his search for bits of food and fuel was prompted by the best of motives. The school has to compete with a great deal from the outside in addition to the distractions of the neighborhood. Nothing is more fascinating than that mysterious "down town," whither the boy longs to go to sell papers and black boots, to attend theatres, and, if possible, to stay all night on the pretence of waiting for the early edition of the great dailies. If a boy is once thoroughly caught in these excitements, nothing can save him from over-stimulation and consequent debility and worthlessness; he arrives at maturity with no habits of regular work and with a distaste for its dulness. On the other hand, there are hundreds of boys of various nationalities who conscientiously remain in school and fulfil all the requirements of the early grades, and at the age of fourteen are found in factories, painstakingly performing their work year after year. These later are the men who form the mass of the population in every industrial neighborhood of every large city; but they carry on the industrial processes year after year without in the least knowing what it is all about. The one fixed habit which the boy carries away with him from the school to the factory is the feeling that his work is merely provisional. In school the next grade was continually held before him as an object of attainment, and it resulted in the conviction that the sole object of present effort is to get ready for something else. This tentative attitude takes the last bit of social stimulus out of his factory work; he pursues it merely as a necessity, and his very mental attitude destroys his chance for a realization of its social value. As the boy in school contracted the habit of doing his work in certain hours and taking his pleasure in certain other hours, so in the factory he earns his money by ten hours of dull work and spends it in three hours of lurid and unprofitable pleasure in the evening. Both in the school and in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes more apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to the industrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to a time when work shall cease to be senseless drudgery with no self-expression on the part of the worker. It sometimes seems that the public schools should contribute much more than they do to the consummation of this time. If the army of school children who enter the factories every year possessed thoroughly vitalized faculties, they might do much to lighten this incubus of dull factory work which presses so heavily upon so large a number of our fellow-citizens. Has our commercialism been so strong that our schools have become insensibly commercialized, whereas we supposed that our industrial life was receiving the broadening and illuminating effects of the schools? The training of these children, so far as it has been vocational at all, has been in the direction of clerical work. It is possible that the business men, whom we in America so tremendously admire, have really been dictating the curriculum of our public schools, in spite of the conventions of educators and the suggestions of university professors. The business man, of course, has not said, "I will have the public schools train office boys and clerks so that I may have them easily and cheaply," but he has sometimes said, "Teach the children to write legibly and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits of punctuality and order; to be prompt to obey; and you will fit them to make their way in the world as I have made mine." Has the workingman been silent as to what he desires for his children, and allowed the business man to decide for him there, as he has allowed the politician to manage his municipal affairs, or has the workingman so far shared our universal optimism that he has really believed that his children would never need to go into industrial life at all, but that all of his sons would become bankers and merchants? Certain it is that no sufficient study has been made of the child who enters into industrial life early and stays there permanently, to give him some offset to its monotony and dulness, some historic significance of the part he is taking in the life of the community. It is at last on behalf of the average workingmen that our increasing democracy impels us to make a new demand upon the educator. As the political expression of democracy has claimed for the workingman the free right of citizenship, so a code of social ethics is now insisting that he shall be a conscious member of society, having some notion of his social and industrial value. The early ideal of a city that it was a market-place in which to exchange produce, and a mere trading-post for merchants, apparently still survives in our minds and is constantly reflected in our schools. We have either failed to realize that cities have become great centres of production and manufacture in which a huge population is engaged, or we have lacked sufficient presence of mind to adjust ourselves to the change. We admire much more the men who accumulate riches, and who gather to themselves the results of industry, than the men who actually carry forward industrial processes; and, as has been pointed out, our schools still prepare children almost exclusively for commercial and professional life. Quite as the country boy dreams of leaving the farm for life in town and begins early to imitate the travelling salesman in dress and manner, so the school boy within the town hopes to be an office boy, and later a clerk or salesman, and looks upon work in the factory as the occupation of ignorant and unsuccessful men. The schools do so little really to interest the child in the life of production, or to excite his ambition in the line of industrial occupation, that the ideal of life, almost from the very beginning, becomes not an absorbing interest in one's work and a consciousness of its value and social relation, but a desire for money with which unmeaning purchases may be made and an unmeaning social standing obtained. The son of a workingman who is successful in commercial life, impresses his family and neighbors quite as does the prominent city man when he comes back to dazzle his native town. The children of the working people learn many useful things in the public schools, but the commercial arithmetic, and many other studies, are founded on the tacit assumption that a boy rises in life by getting away from manual labor,--that every promising boy goes into business or a profession. The children destined for factory life are furnished with what would be most useful under other conditions, quite as the prosperous farmer's wife buys a folding-bed for her huge four-cornered "spare room," because her sister, who has married a city man, is obliged to have a folding-bed in the cramped limits of her flat Partly because so little is done for him educationally, and partly because he must live narrowly and dress meanly, the life of the average laborer tends to become flat and monotonous, with nothing in his work to feed his mind or hold his interest. Theoretically, we would all admit that the man at the bottom, who performs the meanest and humblest work, so long as the work is necessary, performs a useful function; but we do not live up to our theories, and in addition to his hard and uninteresting work he is covered with a sort of contempt, and unless he falls into illness or trouble, he receives little sympathy or attention. Certainly no serious effort is made to give him a participation in the social and industrial life with which he comes in contact, nor any insight and inspiration regarding it. Apparently we have not yet recovered manual labor from the deep distrust which centuries of slavery and the feudal system have cast upon it. To get away from menial work, to do obviously little with one's hands, is still the desirable status. This may readily be seen all along the line. A workingman's family will make every effort and sacrifice that the brightest daughter be sent to the high school and through the normal school, quite as much because a teacher in the family raises the general social standing and sense of family consequence, as that the returns are superior to factory or even office work. "Teacher" in the vocabulary of many children is a synonym for women-folk gentry, and the name is indiscriminately applied to women of certain dress and manner. The same desire for social advancement is expressed by the purchasing of a piano, or the fact that the son is an office boy, and not a factory hand. The overcrowding of the professions by poorly equipped men arises from much the same source, and from the conviction that "an education" is wasted if a boy goes into a factory or shop. A Chicago manufacturer tells a story of twin boys, whom he befriended and meant to give a start in life. He sent them both to the Athenæum for several winters as a preparatory business training, and then took them into his office, where they speedily became known as the bright one and the stupid one. The stupid one was finally dismissed after repeated trials, when to the surprise of the entire establishment, he quickly betook himself into the shops, where he became a wide-awake and valuable workman. His chagrined benefactor, in telling the story, admits that he himself had fallen a victim to his own business training and his early notion of rising in life. In reality he had merely followed the lead of most benevolent people who help poor boys. They test the success of their efforts by the number whom they have taken out of factory work into some other and "higher occupation." Quite in line with this commercial ideal are the night schools and institutions of learning most accessible to working people. First among them is the business college which teaches largely the mechanism of type-writing and book-keeping, and lays all stress upon commerce and methods of distribution. Commodities are treated as exports and imports, or solely in regard to their commercial value, and not, of course, in relation to their historic development or the manufacturing processes to which they have been subjected. These schools do not in the least minister to the needs of the actual factory employee, who is in the shop and not in the office. We assume that all men are searching for "puddings and power," to use Carlyle's phrase, and furnish only the schools which help them to those ends. The business college man, or even the man who goes through an academic course in order to prepare for a profession, comes to look on learning too much as an investment from which he will later reap the benefits in earning money. He does not connect learning with industrial pursuits, nor does he in the least lighten or illuminate those pursuits for those of his friends who have not risen in life. "It is as though nets were laid at the entrance to education, in which those who by some means or other escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught and held from substantial service to their fellows." The academic teaching which is accessible to workingmen through University Extension lectures and classes at settlements, is usually bookish and remote, and concerning subjects completely divorced from their actual experiences. The men come to think of learning as something to be added to the end of a hard day's work, and to be gained at the cost of toilsome mental exertion. There are, of course, exceptions, but many men who persist in attending classes and lectures year after year find themselves possessed of a mass of inert knowledge which nothing in their experience fuses into availability or realization. Among the many disappointments which the settlement experiment has brought to its promoters, perhaps none is keener than the fact that they have as yet failed to work out methods of education, specialized and adapted to the needs of adult working people in contra-distinction to those employed in schools and colleges, or those used in teaching children. There are many excellent reasons and explanations for this failure. In the first place, the residents themselves are for the most part imbued with academic methods and ideals, which it is most difficult to modify. To quote from a late settlement report, "The most vaunted educational work in settlements amounts often to the stimulation mentally of a select few who are, in a sense, of the academic type of mind, and who easily and quickly respond to the academic methods employed." These classes may be valuable, but they leave quite untouched the great mass of the factory population, the ordinary workingman of the ordinary workingman's street, whose attitude is best described as that of "acquiescence," who lives through the aimless passage of the years without incentive "to imagine, to design, or to aspire." These men are totally untouched by all the educational and philanthropic machinery which is designed for the young and the helpless who live on the same streets with them. They do not often drink to excess, they regularly give all their wages to their wives, they have a vague pride in their superior children; but they grow prematurely old and stiff in all their muscles, and become more and more taciturn, their entire energies consumed in "holding a job." Various attempts have been made to break through the inadequate educational facilities supplied by commercialism and scholarship, both of which have followed their own ideals and have failed to look at the situation as it actually presents itself. The most noteworthy attempt has been the movement toward industrial education, the agitation for which has been ably seconded by manufacturers of a practical type, who have from time to time founded and endowed technical schools, designed for workingmen's sons. The early schools of this type inevitably reflected the ideal of the self-made man. They succeeded in transferring a few skilled workers into the upper class of trained engineers, and a few less skilled workers into the class of trained mechanics, but did not aim to educate the many who are doomed to the unskilled work which the permanent specialization of the division of labor demands. The Peter Coopers and other good men honestly believed that if intelligence could be added to industry, each workingman who faithfully attended these schools could walk into increased skill and wages, and in time even become an employer himself. Such schools are useful beyond doubt; but so far as educating workingmen is concerned or in any measure satisfying the democratic ideal, they plainly beg the question. Almost every large city has two or three polytechnic institutions founded by rich men, anxious to help "poor boys." These have been captured by conventional educators for the purpose of fitting young men for the colleges and universities. They have compromised by merely adding to the usual academic course manual work, applied mathematics, mechanical drawing and engineering. Two schools in Chicago, plainly founded for the sons of workingmen, afford an illustration of this tendency and result. On the other hand, so far as schools of this type have been captured by commercialism, they turn out trained engineers, professional chemists, and electricians. They are polytechnics of a high order, but do not even pretend to admit the workingman with his meagre intellectual equipment. They graduate machine builders, but not educated machine tenders. Even the textile schools are largely seized by young men who expect to be superintendents of factories, designers, or manufacturers themselves, and the textile worker who actually "holds the thread" is seldom seen in them; indeed, in one of the largest schools women are not allowed, in spite of the fact that spinning and weaving have traditionally been woman's work, and that thousands of women are at present employed in the textile mills. It is much easier to go over the old paths of education with "manual training" thrown in, as it were; it is much simpler to appeal to the old ambitions of "getting on in life," or of "preparing for a profession," or "for a commercial career," than to work out new methods on democratic lines. These schools gradually drop back into the conventional courses, modified in some slight degree, while the adaptation to workingmen's needs is never made, nor, indeed, vigorously attempted. In the meantime, the manufacturers continually protest that engineers, especially trained for devising machines, are not satisfactory. Three generations of workers have invented, but we are told that invention no longer goes on in the workshop, even when it is artificially stimulated by the offer of prizes, and that the inventions of the last quarter of the nineteenth century have by no means fulfilled the promise of the earlier three-quarters. Every foreman in a large factory has had experience with two classes of men: first with those who become rigid and tolerate no change in their work, partly because they make more money "working by the piece," when they stick to that work which they have learned to do rapidly, and partly because the entire muscular and nervous system has become by daily use adapted to particular motions and resents change. Secondly, there are the men who float in and out of the factory, in a constantly changing stream. They "quit work" for the slightest reason or none at all, and never become skilled at anything. Some of them are men of low intelligence, but many of them are merely too nervous and restless, too impatient, too easily "driven to drink," to be of any use in a modern factory. They are the men for whom the demanded adaptation is impossible. The individual from whom the industrial order demands ever larger drafts of time and energy, should be nourished and enriched from social sources, in proportion as he is drained. He, more than other men, needs the conception of historic continuity in order to reveal to him the purpose and utility of his work, and he can only be stimulated and dignified as he obtains a conception of his proper relation to society. Scholarship is evidently unable to do this for him; for, unfortunately, the same tendency to division of labor has also produced over-specialization in scholarship, with the sad result that when the scholar attempts to minister to a worker, he gives him the result of more specialization rather than an offset from it. He cannot bring healing and solace because he himself is suffering from the same disease. There is indeed a deplorable lack of perception and adaptation on the part of educators all along the line. It will certainly be embarrassing to have our age written down triumphant in the matter of inventions, in that our factories were filled with intricate machines, the result of advancing mathematical and mechanical knowledge in relation to manufacturing processes, but defeated in that it lost its head over the achievement and forgot the men. The accusation would stand, that the age failed to perform a like service in the extension of history and art to the factory employees who ran the machines; that the machine tenders, heavy and almost dehumanized by monotonous toil, walked about in the same streets with us, and sat in the same cars; but that we were absolutely indifferent and made no genuine effort to supply to them the artist's perception or student's insight, which alone could fuse them into social consciousness. It would further stand that the scholars among us continued with yet more research, that the educators were concerned only with the young and the promising, and the philanthropists with the criminals and helpless. There is a pitiful failure to recognize the situation in which the majority of working people are placed, a tendency to ignore their real experiences and needs, and, most stupid of all, we leave quite untouched affections and memories which would afford a tremendous dynamic if they were utilized. We constantly hear it said in educational circles, that a child learns only by "doing," and that education must proceed "through the eyes and hands to the brain"; and yet for the vast number of people all around us who do not need to have activities artificially provided, and who use their hands and eyes all the time, we do not seem able to reverse the process. We quote the dictum, "What is learned in the schoolroom must be applied in the workshop," and yet the skill and handicraft constantly used in the workshop have no relevance or meaning given to them by the school; and when we do try to help the workingman in an educational way, we completely ignore his everyday occupation. Yet the task is merely one of adaptation. It is to take actual conditions and to make them the basis for a large and generous method of education, to perform a difficult idealization doubtless, but not an impossible one. We apparently believe that the workingman has no chance to realize life through his vocation. We easily recognize the historic association in regard to ancient buildings. We say that "generation after generation have stamped their mark upon them, have recorded their thoughts in them, until they have become the property of all." And yet this is even more true of the instruments of labor, which have constantly been held in human hands. A machine really represents the "seasoned life of man" preserved and treasured up within itself, quite as much as an ancient building does. At present, workmen are brought in contact with the machinery with which they work as abruptly as if the present set of industrial implements had been newly created. They handle the machinery day by day, without any notion of its gradual evolution and growth. Few of the men who perform the mechanical work in the great factories have any comprehension of the fact that the inventions upon which the factory depends, the instruments which they use, have been slowly worked out, each generation using the gifts of the last and transmitting the inheritance until it has become a social possession. This can only be understood by a man who has obtained some idea of social progress. We are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, and one brings stones, and another breaks them, they are quite inevitably united by their interest in the road. But this naturally presupposes that they know where the road is going to, that they have some curiosity and interest about it, and perhaps a chance to travel upon it." If the division of labor robs them of interest in any part of it, the mere mechanical fact of interdependence amounts to nothing. The man in the factory, as well as the man with the hoe, has a grievance beyond being overworked and disinherited, in that he does not know what it is all about. We may well regret the passing of the time when the variety of work performed in the unspecialized workshop naturally stimulated the intelligence of the workingmen and brought them into contact both with the raw material and the finished product. But the problem of education, as any advanced educator will tell us, is to supply the essentials of experience by a short cut, as it were. If the shop constantly tends to make the workman a specialist, then the problem of the educator in regard to him is quite clear: it is to give him what may be an offset from the over-specialization of his daily work, to supply him with general information and to insist that he shall be a cultivated member of society with a consciousness of his industrial and social value. As sad a sight as an old hand-loom worker in a factory attempting to make his clumsy machine compete with the flying shuttles about him, is a workingman equipped with knowledge so meagre that he can get no meaning into his life nor sequence between his acts and the far-off results. Manufacturers, as a whole, however, when they attempt educational institutions in connection with their factories, are prone to follow conventional lines, and to exhibit the weakness of imitation. We find, indeed, that the middle-class educator constantly makes the mistakes of the middle-class moralist when he attempts to aid working people. The latter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman the specialized virtues of thrift, industry, and sobriety--all virtues pertaining to the individual. When each man had his own shop, it was perhaps wise to lay almost exclusive stress upon the industrial virtues of diligence and thrift; but as industry has become more highly organized, life becomes incredibly complex and interdependent. If a workingman is to have a conception of his value at all, he must see industry in its unity and entirety; he must have a conception that will include not only himself and his immediate family and community, but the industrial organization as a whole. It is doubtless true that dexterity of hand becomes less and less imperative as the invention of machinery and subdivision of labor proceeds; but it becomes all the more necessary, if the workman is to save his life at all, that he should get a sense of his individual relation to the system. Feeding a machine with a material of which he has no knowledge, producing a product, totally unrelated to the rest of his life, without in the least knowing what becomes of it, or its connection with the community, is, of course, unquestionably deadening to his intellectual and moral life. To make the moral connection it would be necessary to give him a social consciousness of the value of his work, and at least a sense of participation and a certain joy in its ultimate use; to make the intellectual connection it would be essential to create in him some historic conception of the development of industry and the relation of his individual work to it. Workingmen themselves have made attempts in both directions, which it would be well for moralists and educators to study. It is a striking fact that when workingmen formulate their own moral code, and try to inspire and encourage each other, it is always a large and general doctrine which they preach. They were the first class of men to organize an international association, and the constant talk at a modern labor meeting is of solidarity and of the identity of the interests of workingmen the world over. It is difficult to secure a successful organization of men into the simplest trades organization without an appeal to the most abstract principles of justice and brotherhood. As they have formulated their own morals by laying the greatest stress upon the largest morality, so if they could found their own schools, it is doubtful whether they would be of the mechanic institute type. Courses of study arranged by a group of workingmen are most naïve in their breadth and generality. They will select the history of the world in preference to that of any period or nation. The "wonders of science" or "the story of evolution" will attract workingmen to a lecture when zoölogy or chemistry will drive them away. The "outlines of literature" or "the best in literature" will draw an audience when a lecturer in English poetry will be solitary. This results partly from a wholesome desire to have general knowledge before special knowledge, and is partly a rebound from the specialization of labor to which the workingman is subjected. When he is free from work and can direct his own mind, he tends to roam, to dwell upon large themes. Much the same tendency is found in programmes of study arranged by Woman's Clubs in country places. The untrained mind, wearied with meaningless detail, when it gets an opportunity to make its demand heard, asks for general philosophy and background. In a certain sense commercialism itself, at least in its larger aspect, tends to educate the workingman better than organized education does. Its interests are certainly world-wide and democratic, while it is absolutely undiscriminating as to country and creed, coming into contact with all climes and races. If this aspect of commercialism were utilized, it would in a measure counterbalance the tendency which results from the subdivision of labor. The most noteworthy attempt to utilize this democracy of commerce in relation to manufacturing is found at Dayton, Ohio, in the yearly gatherings held in a large factory there. Once a year the entire force is gathered together to hear the returns of the business, not so much in respect to the profits, as in regard to its extension. At these meetings, the travelling salesmen from various parts of the world--from Constantinople, from Berlin, from Rome, from Hong Kong--report upon the sales they have made, and the methods of advertisement and promotion adapted to the various countries. Stereopticon lectures are given upon each new country as soon as it has been successfully invaded by the product of the factory. The foremen in the various departments of the factory give accounts of the increased efficiency and the larger output over former years. Any man who has made an invention in connection with the machinery of the factory, at this time publicly receives a prize, and suggestions are approved that tend to increase the comfort and social facilities of the employees. At least for the moment there is a complete esprit de corps, and the youngest and least skilled employee sees himself in connection with the interests of the firm, and the spread of an invention. It is a crude example of what might be done in the way of giving a large framework of meaning to factory labor, and of putting it into a sentient background, at least on the commercial side. It is easy to indict the educator, to say that he has gotten entangled in his own material, and has fallen a victim to his own methods; but granting this, what has the artist done about it--he who is supposed to have a more intimate insight into the needs of his contemporaries, and to minister to them as none other can? It is quite true that a few writers are insisting that the growing desire for labor, on the part of many people of leisure, has its counterpart in the increasing desire for general knowledge on the part of many laborers. They point to the fact that the same duality of conscience which seems to stifle the noblest effort in the individual because his intellectual conception and his achievement are so difficult to bring together, is found on a large scale in society itself, when we have the separation of the people who think from those who work. And yet, since Ruskin ceased, no one has really formulated this in a convincing form. And even Ruskin's famous dictum, that labor without art brutalizes, has always been interpreted as if art could only be a sense of beauty or joy in one's own work, and not a sense of companionship with all other workers. The situation demands the consciousness of participation and well-being which comes to the individual when he is able to see himself "in connection and cooperation with the whole"; it needs the solace of collective art inherent in collective labor. As the poet bathes the outer world for us in the hues of human feeling, so the workman needs some one to bathe his surroundings with a human significance--some one who shall teach him to find that which will give a potency to his life. His education, however simple, should tend to make him widely at home in the world, and to give him a sense of simplicity and peace in the midst of the triviality and noise to which he is constantly subjected. He, like other men, can learn to be content to see but a part, although it must be a part of something. It is because of a lack of democracy that we do not really incorporate him in the hopes and advantages of society, and give him the place which is his by simple right. We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class; but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having. In spite of many attempts we do not really act upon either statement. CHAPTER VII POLITICAL REFORM Throughout this volume we have assumed that much of our ethical maladjustment in social affairs arises from the fact that we are acting upon a code of ethics adapted to individual relationships, but not to the larger social relationships to which it is bunglingly applied. In addition, however, to the consequent strain and difficulty, there is often an honest lack of perception as to what the situation demands. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our political life as it manifests itself in certain quarters of every great city. It is most difficult to hold to our political democracy and to make it in any sense a social expression and not a mere governmental contrivance, unless we take pains to keep on common ground in our human experiences. Otherwise there is in various parts of the community an inevitable difference of ethical standards which becomes responsible for much misunderstanding. It is difficult both to interpret sympathetically the motives and ideals of those who have acquired rules of conduct in experience widely different from our own, and also to take enough care in guarding the gains already made, and in valuing highly enough the imperfect good so painfully acquired and, at the best, so mixed with evil. This wide difference in daily experience exhibits itself in two distinct attitudes toward politics. The well-to-do men of the community think of politics as something off by itself; they may conscientiously recognize political duty as part of good citizenship, but political effort is not the expression of their moral or social life. As a result of this detachment, "reform movements," started by business men and the better element, are almost wholly occupied in the correction of political machinery and with a concern for the better method of administration, rather than with the ultimate purpose of securing the welfare of the people. They fix their attention so exclusively on methods that they fail to consider the final aims of city government. This accounts for the growing tendency to put more and more responsibility upon executive officers and appointed commissions at the expense of curtailing the power of the direct representatives of the voters. Reform movements tend to become negative and to lose their educational value for the mass of the people. The reformers take the rôle of the opposition. They give themselves largely to criticisms of the present state of affairs, to writing and talking of what the future must be and of certain results which should be obtained. In trying to better matters, however, they have in mind only political achievements which they detach in a curious way from the rest of life, and they speak and write of the purification of politics as of a thing set apart from daily life. On the other hand, the real leaders of the people are part of the entire life of the community which they control, and so far as they are representative at all, are giving a social expression to democracy. They are often politically corrupt, but in spite of this they are proceeding upon a sounder theory. Although they would be totally unable to give it abstract expression, they are really acting upon a formulation made by a shrewd English observer; namely, that, "after the enfranchisement of the masses, social ideals enter into political programmes, and they enter not as something which at best can be indirectly promoted by government, but as something which it is the chief business of government to advance directly." Men living near to the masses of voters, and knowing them intimately, recognize this and act upon it; they minister directly to life and to social needs. They realize that the people as a whole are clamoring for social results, and they hold their power because they respond to that demand. They are corrupt and often do their work badly; but they at least avoid the mistake of a certain type of business men who are frightened by democracy, and have lost their faith in the people. The two standards are similar to those seen at a popular exhibition of pictures where the cultivated people care most for the technique of a given painting, the moving mass for a subject that shall be domestic and human. This difference may be illustrated by the writer's experience in a certain ward of Chicago, during three campaigns, when efforts were made to dislodge an alderman who had represented the ward for many years. In this ward there are gathered together fifty thousand people, representing a score of nationalities; the newly emigrated Latin, Teuton, Celt, Greek, and Slav who live there have little in common save the basic experiences which come to men in all countries and under all conditions. In order to make fifty thousand people, so heterogeneous in nationality, religion, and customs, agree upon any demand, it must be founded upon universal experiences which are perforce individual and not social. An instinctive recognition of this on the part of the alderman makes it possible to understand the individualistic basis of his political success, but it remains extremely difficult to ascertain the reasons for the extreme leniency of judgment concerning the political corruption of which he is constantly guilty. This leniency is only to be explained on the ground that his constituents greatly admire individual virtues, and that they are at the same time unable to perceive social outrages which the alderman may be committing. They thus free the alderman from blame because his corruption is social, and they honestly admire him as a great man and hero, because his individual acts are on the whole kindly and generous. In certain stages of moral evolution, a man is incapable of action unless the results will benefit himself or some one of his acquaintances, and it is a long step in moral progress to set the good of the many before the interest of the few, and to be concerned for the welfare of a community without hope of an individual return. How far the selfish politician befools his constituents into believing that their interests are identical with his own; how far he presumes upon their inability to distinguish between the individual and social virtues, an inability which he himself shares with them; and how far he dazzles them by the sense of his greatness, and a conviction that they participate therein, it is difficult to determine. Morality certainly develops far earlier in the form of moral fact than in the form of moral ideas, and it is obvious that ideas only operate upon the popular mind through will and character, and must be dramatized before they reach the mass of men, even as the biography of the saints have been after all "the main guide to the stumbling feet of thousands of Christians to whom the Credo has been but mysterious words." Ethics as well as political opinions may be discussed and disseminated among the sophisticated by lectures and printed pages, but to the common people they can only come through example--through a personality which seizes the popular imagination. The advantage of an unsophisticated neighborhood is, that the inhabitants do not keep their ideas as treasures--they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they have. The personal example promptly rouses to emulation. In a neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the political morality of his constituents. Nothing is more certain than that the quality which a heterogeneous population, living in one of the less sophisticated wards, most admires is the quality of simple goodness; that the man who attracts them is the one whom they believe to be a good man. We all know that children long "to be good" with an intensity which they give to no other ambition. We can all remember that the earliest strivings of our childhood were in this direction, and that we venerated grown people because they had attained perfection. Primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants, are still in this stage. They want to be good, and deep down in their hearts they admire nothing so much as the good man. Abstract virtues are too difficult for their untrained minds to apprehend, and many of them are still simple enough to believe that power and wealth come only to good people. The successful candidate, then, must be a good man according to the morality of his constituents. He must not attempt to hold up too high a standard, nor must he attempt to reform or change their standards. His safety lies in doing on a large scale the good deeds which his constituents are able to do only on a small scale. If he believes what they believe and does what they are all cherishing a secret ambition to do, he will dazzle them by his success and win their confidence. There is a certain wisdom in this course. There is a common sense in the mass of men which cannot be neglected with impunity, just as there is sure to be an eccentricity in the differing and reforming individual which it is perhaps well to challenge. The constant kindness of the poor to each other was pointed out in a previous chapter, and that they unfailingly respond to the need and distresses of their poorer neighbors even when in danger of bankruptcy themselves. The kindness which a poor man shows his distressed neighbor is doubtless heightened by the consciousness that he himself may be in distress next week; he therefore stands by his friend when he gets too drunk to take care of himself, when he loses his wife or child, when he is evicted for non-payment of rent, when he is arrested for a petty crime. It seems to such a man entirely fitting that his alderman should do the same thing on a larger scale--that he should help a constituent out of trouble, merely because he is in trouble, irrespective of the justice involved. The alderman therefore bails out his constituents when they are arrested, or says a good word to the police justice when they appear before him for trial, uses his pull with the magistrate when they are likely to be fined for a civil misdemeanor, or sees what he can do to "fix up matters" with the state's attorney when the charge is really a serious one, and in doing this he follows the ethics held and practised by his constituents. All this conveys the impression to the simple-minded that law is not enforced, if the lawbreaker have a powerful friend. One may instance the alderman's action in standing by an Italian padrone of the ward when he was indicted for violating the civil service regulations. The commissioners had sent out notices to certain Italian day-laborers who were upon the eligible list that they were to report for work at a given day and hour. One of the padrones intercepted these notifications and sold them to the men for five dollars apiece, making also the usual bargain for a share of their wages. The padrone's entire arrangement followed the custom which had prevailed for years before the establishment of civil service laws. Ten of the laborers swore out warrants against the padrone, who was convicted and fined seventy-five dollars. This sum was promptly paid by the alderman, and the padrone, assured that he would be protected from any further trouble, returned uninjured to the colony. The simple Italians were much bewildered by this show of a power stronger than that of the civil service, which they had trusted as they did the one in Italy. The first violation of its authority was made, and various sinister acts have followed, until no Italian who is digging a sewer or sweeping a street for the city feels quite secure in holding his job unless he is backed by the friendship of the alderman. According to the civil service law, a laborer has no right to a trial; many are discharged by the foreman, and find that they can be reinstated only upon the aldermanic recommendation. He thus practically holds his old power over the laborers working for the city. The popular mind is convinced that an honest administration of civil service is impossible, and that it is but one more instrument in the hands of the powerful. It will be difficult to establish genuine civil service among these men, who learn only by experience, since their experiences have been of such a nature that their unanimous vote would certainly be that "civil service" is "no good." As many of his constituents in this case are impressed with the fact that the aldermanic power is superior to that of government, so instances of actual lawbreaking might easily be cited. A young man may enter a saloon long after midnight, the legal closing hour, and seat himself at a gambling table, perfectly secure from interruption or arrest, because the place belongs to an alderman; but in order to secure this immunity the policeman on the beat must pretend not to see into the windows each time that he passes, and he knows, and the young man knows that he knows, that nothing would embarrass "Headquarters" more than to have an arrest made on those premises. A certain contempt for the whole machinery of law and order is thus easily fostered. Because of simple friendliness the alderman is expected to pay rent for the hard-pressed tenant when no rent is forthcoming, to find "jobs" when work is hard to get, to procure and divide among his constituents all the places which he can seize from the city hall. The alderman of the ward we are considering at one time could make the proud boast that he had twenty-six hundred people in his ward upon the public pay-roll. This, of course, included day laborers, but each one felt under distinct obligations to him for getting a position. When we reflect that this is one-third of the entire vote of the ward, we realize that it is very important to vote for the right man, since there is, at the least, one chance out of three for securing work. If we recollect further that the franchise-seeking companies pay respectful heed to the applicants backed by the alderman, the question of voting for the successful man becomes as much an industrial one as a political one. An Italian laborer wants a "job" more than anything else, and quite simply votes for the man who promises him one. It is not so different from his relation to the padrone, and, indeed, the two strengthen each other. The alderman may himself be quite sincere in his acts of kindness, for an office seeker may begin with the simple desire to alleviate suffering, and this may gradually change into the desire to put his constituents under obligations to him; but the action of such an individual becomes a demoralizing element in the community when kindly impulse is made a cloak for the satisfaction of personal ambition, and when the plastic morals of his constituents gradually conform to his own undeveloped standards. The alderman gives presents at weddings and christenings. He seizes these days of family festivities for making friends. It is easiest to reach them in the holiday mood of expansive good-will, but on their side it seems natural and kindly that he should do it. The alderman procures passes from the railroads when his constituents wish to visit friends or attend the funerals of distant relatives; he buys tickets galore for benefit entertainments given for a widow or a consumptive in peculiar distress; he contributes to prizes which are awarded to the handsomest lady or the most popular man. At a church bazaar, for instance, the alderman finds the stage all set for his dramatic performance. When others are spending pennies, he is spending dollars. When anxious relatives are canvassing to secure votes for the two most beautiful children who are being voted upon, he recklessly buys votes from both sides, and laughingly declines to say which one he likes best, buying off the young lady who is persistently determined to find out, with five dollars for the flower bazaar, the posies, of course, to be sent to the sick of the parish. The moral atmosphere of a bazaar suits him exactly. He murmurs many times, "Never mind, the money all goes to the poor; it is all straight enough if the church gets it, the poor won't ask too many questions." The oftener he can put such sentiments into the minds of his constituents, the better he is pleased. Nothing so rapidly prepares them to take his view of money getting and money spending. We see again the process disregarded, because the end itself is considered so praiseworthy. There is something archaic in a community of simple people in their attitude toward death and burial. There is nothing so easy to collect money for as a funeral, and one involuntarily remembers that the early religious tithes were paid to ward off death and ghosts. At times one encounters almost the Greek feeling in regard to burial. If the alderman seizes upon times of festivities for expressions of his good-will, much more does he seize upon periods of sorrow. At a funeral he has the double advantage of ministering to a genuine craving for comfort and solace, and at the same time of assisting a bereaved constituent to express that curious feeling of remorse, which is ever an accompaniment of quick sorrow, that desire to "make up" for past delinquencies, to show the world how much he loved the person who has just died, which is as natural as it is universal. In addition to this, there is, among the poor, who have few social occasions, a great desire for a well-arranged funeral, the grade of which almost determines their social standing in the neighborhood. The alderman saves the very poorest of his constituents from that awful horror of burial by the county; he provides carriages for the poor, who otherwise could not have them. It may be too much to say that all the relatives and friends who ride in the carriages provided by the alderman's bounty vote for him, but they are certainly influenced by his kindness, and talk of his virtues during the long hours of the ride back and forth from the suburban cemetery. A man who would ask at such a time where all the money thus spent comes from would be considered sinister. The tendency to speak lightly of the faults of the dead and to judge them gently is transferred to the living, and many a man at such a time has formulated a lenient judgment of political corruption, and has heard kindly speeches which he has remembered on election day. "Ah, well, he has a big Irish heart. He is good to the widow and the fatherless." "He knows the poor better than the big guns who are always talking about civil service and reform." Indeed, what headway can the notion of civic purity, of honesty of administration make against this big manifestation of human friendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness? The notions of the civic reformer are negative and impotent before it. Such an alderman will keep a standing account with an undertaker, and telephone every week, and sometimes more than once, the kind of funeral he wishes provided for a bereaved constituent, until the sum may roll up into "hundreds a year." He understands what the people want, and ministers just as truly to a great human need as the musician or the artist. An attempt to substitute what we might call a later standard was made at one time when a delicate little child was deserted in the Hull-House nursery. An investigation showed that it had been born ten days previously in the Cook County hospital, but no trace could be found of the unfortunate mother. The little child lived for several weeks, and then, in spite of every care, died. It was decided to have it buried by the county authorities, and the wagon was to arrive at eleven o'clock; about nine o'clock in the morning the rumor of this awful deed reached the neighbors. A half dozen of them came, in a very excited state of mind, to protest. They took up a collection out of their poverty with which to defray a funeral. The residents of Hull-House were then comparatively new in the neighborhood and did not realize that they were really shocking a genuine moral sentiment of the community. In their crudeness they instanced the care and tenderness which had been expended upon the little creature while it was alive; that it had had every attention from a skilled physician and a trained nurse, and even intimated that the excited members of the group had not taken part in this, and that it now lay with the nursery to decide that it should be buried as it had been born, at the county's expense. It is doubtful if Hull-House has ever done anything which injured it so deeply in the minds of some of its neighbors. It was only forgiven by the most indulgent on the ground that the residents were spinsters, and could not know a mother's heart. No one born and reared in the community could possibly have made a mistake like that. No one who had studied the ethical standards with any care could have bungled so completely. We are constantly underestimating the amount of sentiment among simple people. The songs which are most popular among them are those of a reminiscent old age, in which the ripened soul calmly recounts and regrets the sins of his youth, songs in which the wayward daughter is forgiven by her loving parents, in which the lovers are magnanimous and faithful through all vicissitudes. The tendency is to condone and forgive, and not hold too rigidly to a standard. In the theatres it is the magnanimous man, the kindly reckless villain who is always applauded. So shrewd an observer as Samuel Johnson once remarked that it was surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society contained. On the same basis the alderman manages several saloons, one down town within easy access of the city hall, where he can catch the more important of his friends. Here again he has seized upon an old tradition and primitive custom, the good fellowship which has long been best expressed when men drink together. The saloons offer a common meeting ground, with stimulus enough to free the wits and tongues of the men who meet there. He distributes each Christmas many tons of turkeys not only to voters, but to families who are represented by no vote. By a judicious management some families get three or four turkeys apiece; but what of that, the alderman has none of the nagging rules of the charitable societies, nor does he declare that because a man wants two turkeys for Christmas, he is a scoundrel who shall never be allowed to eat turkey again. As he does not distribute his Christmas favors from any hardly acquired philanthropic motive, there is no disposition to apply the carefully evolved rules of the charitable societies to his beneficiaries. Of course, there are those who suspect that the benevolence rests upon self-seeking motives, and feel themselves quite freed from any sense of gratitude; others go further and glory in the fact that they can thus "soak the alderman." An example of this is the young man who fills his pockets with a handful of cigars, giving a sly wink at the others. But this freedom from any sense of obligation is often the first step downward to the position where he is willing to sell his vote to both parties, and then scratch his ticket as he pleases. The writer recalls a conversation with a man in which he complained quite openly, and with no sense of shame, that his vote had "sold for only two dollars this year," and that he was "awfully disappointed." The writer happened to know that his income during the nine months previous had been but twenty-eight dollars, and that he was in debt thirty-two dollars, and she could well imagine the eagerness with which he had counted upon this source of revenue. After some years the selling of votes becomes a commonplace, and but little attempt is made upon the part of the buyer or seller to conceal the fact, if the transaction runs smoothly. A certain lodging-house keeper at one time sold the votes of his entire house to a political party and was "well paid for it too"; but being of a grasping turn, he also sold the house for the same election to the rival party. Such an outrage could not be borne. The man was treated to a modern version of tar and feathers, and as a result of being held under a street hydrant in November, contracted pneumonia which resulted in his death. No official investigation took place, since the doctor's certificate of pneumonia was sufficient for legal burial, and public sentiment sustained the action. In various conversations which the writer had concerning the entire transaction, she discovered great indignation concerning his duplicity and treachery, but none whatever for his original offence of selling out the votes of his house. A club will be started for the express purpose of gaining a reputation for political power which may later be sold out. The president and executive committee of such a club, who will naturally receive the funds, promise to divide with "the boys" who swell the size of the membership. A reform movement is at first filled with recruits who are active and loud in their assertions of the number of votes they can "deliver." The reformers are delighted with this display of zeal, and only gradually find out that many of the recruits are there for the express purpose of being bought by the other side; that they are most active in order to seem valuable, and thus raise the price of their allegiance when they are ready to sell. Reformers seeing them drop away one by one, talk of desertion from the ranks of reform, and of the power of money over well-meaning men, who are too weak to withstand temptation; but in reality the men are not deserters because they have never actually been enrolled in the ranks. The money they take is neither a bribe nor the price of their loyalty, it is simply the consummation of a long-cherished plan and a well-earned reward. They came into the new movement for the purpose of being bought out of it, and have successfully accomplished that purpose. Hull-House assisted in carrying on two unsuccessful campaigns against the same alderman. In the two years following the end of the first one, nearly every man who had been prominent in it had received an office from the reëlected alderman. A printer had been appointed to a clerkship in the city hall; a driver received a large salary for services in the police barns; the candidate himself, a bricklayer, held a position in the city construction department. At the beginning of the next campaign, the greatest difficulty was experienced in finding a candidate, and each one proposed, demanded time to consider the proposition. During this period he invariably became the recipient of the alderman's bounty. The first one, who was foreman of a large factory, was reported to have been bought off by the promise that the city institutions would use the product of his firm. The second one, a keeper of a grocery and family saloon, with large popularity, was promised the aldermanic nomination on the regular ticket at the expiration of the term of office held by the alderman's colleague, and it may be well to state in passing that he was thus nominated and successfully elected. The third proposed candidate received a place for his son in the office of the city attorney. Not only are offices in his gift, but all smaller favors as well. Any requests to the council, or special licenses, must be presented by the alderman of the ward in which the person desiring the favor resides. There is thus constant opportunity for the alderman to put his constituents under obligations to him, to make it difficult for a constituent to withstand him, or for one with large interests to enter into political action at all. From the Italian pedler who wants a license to peddle fruit in the street, to the large manufacturing company who desires to tunnel an alley for the sake of conveying pipes from one building to another, everybody is under obligations to his alderman, and is constantly made to feel it. In short, these very regulations for presenting requests to the council have been made, by the aldermen themselves, for the express purpose of increasing the dependence of their constituents, and thereby augmenting aldermanic power and prestige. The alderman has also a very singular hold upon the property owners of his ward. The paving, both of the streets and sidewalks throughout his district, is disgraceful; and in the election speeches the reform side holds him responsible for this condition, and promises better paving under another régime. But the paving could not be made better without a special assessment upon the property owners of the vicinity, and paying more taxes is exactly what his constituents do not want to do. In reality, "getting them off," or at the worst postponing the time of the improvement, is one of the genuine favors which he performs. A movement to have the paving done from a general fund would doubtless be opposed by the property owners in other parts of the city who have already paid for the asphalt bordering their own possessions, but they have no conception of the struggle and possible bankruptcy which repaving may mean to the small property owner, nor how his chief concern may be to elect an alderman who cares more for the feelings and pocket-books of his constituents than he does for the repute and cleanliness of his city. The alderman exhibited great wisdom in procuring from certain of his down-town friends the sum of three thousand dollars with which to uniform and equip a boys' temperance brigade which had been formed in one of the ward churches a few months before his campaign. Is it strange that the good leader, whose heart was filled with innocent pride as he looked upon these promising young scions of virtue, should decline to enter into a reform campaign? Of what use to suggest that uniforms and bayonets for the purpose of promoting temperance, bought with money contributed by a man who was proprietor of a saloon and a gambling house, might perhaps confuse the ethics of the young soldiers? Why take the pains to urge that it was vain to lecture and march abstract virtues into them, so long as the "champion boodler" of the town was the man whom the boys recognized as a loyal and kindhearted friend, the public-spirited citizen, whom their fathers enthusiastically voted for, and their mothers called "the friend of the poor." As long as the actual and tangible success is thus embodied, marching whether in kindergartens or brigades, talking whether in clubs or classes, does little to change the code of ethics. The question of where does the money come from which is spent so successfully, does of course occur to many minds. The more primitive people accept the truthful statement of its sources without any shock to their moral sense. To their simple minds he gets it "from the rich" and, so long as he again gives it out to the poor as a true Robin Hood, with open hand, they have no objections to offer. Their ethics are quite honestly those of the merry-making foresters. The next less primitive people of the vicinage are quite willing to admit that he leads the "gang" in the city council, and sells out the city franchises; that he makes deals with the franchise-seeking companies; that he guarantees to steer dubious measures through the council, for which he demands liberal pay; that he is, in short, a successful "boodler." When, however, there is intellect enough to get this point of view, there is also enough to make the contention that this is universally done, that all the aldermen do it more or less successfully, but that the alderman of this particular ward is unique in being so generous; that such a state of affairs is to be deplored, of course; but that that is the way business is run, and we are fortunate when a kind-hearted man who is close to the people gets a large share of the spoils; that he serves franchised companies who employ men in the building and construction of their enterprises, and that they are bound in return to give work to his constituents. It is again the justification of stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Even when they are intelligent enough to complete the circle, and to see that the money comes, not from the pockets of the companies' agents, but from the street-car fares of people like themselves, it almost seems as if they would rather pay two cents more each time they ride than to give up the consciousness that they have a big, warm-hearted friend at court who will stand by them in an emergency. The sense of just dealing comes apparently much later than the desire for protection and indulgence. On the whole, the gifts and favors are taken quite simply as an evidence of genuine loving-kindness. The alderman is really elected because he is a good friend and neighbor. He is corrupt, of course, but he is not elected because he is corrupt, but rather in spite of it. His standard suits his constituents. He exemplifies and exaggerates the popular type of a good man. He has attained what his constituents secretly long for. At one end of the ward there is a street of good houses, familiarly called "Con Row." The term is perhaps quite unjustly used, but it is nevertheless universally applied, because many of these houses are occupied by professional office holders. This row is supposed to form a happy hunting-ground of the successful politician, where he can live in prosperity, and still maintain his vote and influence in the ward. It would be difficult to justly estimate the influence which this group of successful, prominent men, including the alderman who lives there, have had upon the ideals of the youth in the vicinity. The path which leads to riches and success, to civic prominence and honor, is the path of political corruption. We might compare this to the path laid out by Benjamin Franklin, who also secured all of these things, but told young men that they could be obtained only by strenuous effort and frugal living, by the cultivation of the mind, and the holding fast to righteousness; or, again, we might compare it to the ideals which were held up to the American youth fifty years ago, lower, to be sure, than the revolutionary ideal, but still fine and aspiring toward honorable dealing and careful living. They were told that the career of the self-made man was open to every American boy, if he worked hard and saved his money, improved his mind, and followed a steady ambition. The writer remembers that when she was ten years old, the village schoolmaster told his little flock, without any mitigating clauses, that Jay Gould had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by always saving bits of string, and that, as a result, every child in the village assiduously collected party-colored balls of twine. A bright Chicago boy might well draw the inference that the path of the corrupt politician not only leads to civic honors, but to the glories of benevolence and philanthropy. This lowering of standards, this setting of an ideal, is perhaps the worst of the situation, for, as we said in the first chapter, we determine ideals by our daily actions and decisions not only for ourselves, but largely for each other. We are all involved in this political corruption, and as members of the community stand indicted. This is the penalty of a democracy,--that we are bound to move forward or retrograde together. None of us can stand aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air. That the alderman has much to do with setting the standard of life and desirable prosperity may be illustrated by the following incident: During one of the campaigns a clever cartoonist drew a poster representing the successful alderman in portraiture drinking champagne at a table loaded with pretentious dishes and surrounded by other revellers. In contradistinction was his opponent, a bricklayer, who sat upon a half-finished wall, eating a meagre dinner from a workingman's dinner-pail, and the passer-by was asked which type of representative he preferred, the presumption being that at least in a workingman's district the bricklayer would come out ahead. To the chagrin of the reformers, however, it was gradually discovered that, in the popular mind, a man who laid bricks and wore overalls was not nearly so desirable for an alderman as the man who drank champagne and wore a diamond in his shirt front. The district wished its representative "to stand up with the best of them," and certainly some of the constituents would have been ashamed to have been represented by a bricklayer. It is part of that general desire to appear well, the optimistic and thoroughly American belief, that even if a man is working with his hands to-day, he and his children will quite likely be in a better position in the swift coming to-morrow, and there is no need of being too closely associated with common working people. There is an honest absence of class consciousness, and a naïve belief that the kind of occupation quite largely determines social position. This is doubtless exaggerated in a neighborhood of foreign people by the fact that as each nationality becomes more adapted to American conditions, the scale of its occupation rises. Fifty years ago in America "a Dutchman" was used as a term of reproach, meaning a man whose language was not understood, and who performed menial tasks, digging sewers and building railroad embankments. Later the Irish did the same work in the community, but as quickly as possible handed it on to the Italians, to whom the name "dago" is said to cling as a result of the digging which the Irishman resigned to him. The Italian himself is at last waking up to this fact. In a political speech recently made by an Italian padrone, he bitterly reproached the alderman for giving the-four-dollars-a-day "jobs" of sitting in an office to Irishmen and the-dollar-and-a-half-a-day "jobs" of sweeping the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to rise in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as to occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just weight to the opinion of neighbors, is but feebly developed. A form of constraint, gentle, but powerful, is afforded by the simple desire to do what others do, in order to share with them the approval of the community. Of course, the larger the number of people among whom an habitual mode of conduct obtains, the greater the constraint it puts upon the individual will. Thus it is that the political corruption of the city presses most heavily where it can be least resisted, and is most likely to be imitated. According to the same law, the positive evils of corrupt government are bound to fall heaviest upon the poorest and least capable. When the water of Chicago is foul, the prosperous buy water bottled at distant springs; the poor have no alternative but the typhoid fever which comes from using the city's supply. When the garbage contracts are not enforced, the well-to-do pay for private service; the poor suffer the discomfort and illness which are inevitable from a foul atmosphere. The prosperous business man has a certain choice as to whether he will treat with the "boss" politician or preserve his independence on a smaller income; but to an Italian day laborer it is a choice between obeying the commands of a political "boss" or practical starvation. Again, a more intelligent man may philosophize a little upon the present state of corruption, and reflect that it is but a phase of our commercialism, from which we are bound to emerge; at any rate, he may give himself the solace of literature and ideals in other directions, but the more ignorant man who lives only in the narrow present has no such resource; slowly the conviction enters his mind that politics is a matter of favors and positions, that self-government means pleasing the "boss" and standing in with the "gang." This slowly acquired knowledge he hands on to his family. During the month of February his boy may come home from school with rather incoherent tales about Washington and Lincoln, and the father may for the moment be fired to tell of Garibaldi, but such talk is only periodic, and the long year round the fortunes of the entire family, down to the opportunity to earn food and shelter, depend upon the "boss." In a certain measure also, the opportunities for pleasure and recreation depend upon him. To use a former illustration, if a man happens to have a taste for gambling, if the slot machine affords him diversion, he goes to those houses which are protected by political influence. If he and his friends like to drop into a saloon after midnight, or even want to hear a little music while they drink together early in the evening, he is breaking the law when he indulges in either of them, and can only be exempt from arrest or fine because the great political machine is friendly to him and expects his allegiance in return. During the campaign, when it was found hard to secure enough local speakers of the moral tone which was desired, orators were imported from other parts of the town, from the so-called "better element." Suddenly it was rumored on all sides that, while the money and speakers for the reform candidate were coming from the swells, the money which was backing the corrupt alderman also came from a swell source; that the president of a street-car combination, for whom he performed constant offices in the city council, was ready to back him to the extent of fifty thousand dollars; that this president, too, was a good man, and sat in high places; that he had recently given a large sum of money to an educational institution and was therefore as philanthropic, not to say good and upright, as any man in town; that the corrupt alderman had the sanction of the highest authorities, and that the lecturers who were talking against corruption, and the selling and buying of franchises, were only the cranks, and not the solid business men who had developed and built up Chicago. All parts of the community are bound together in ethical development. If the so-called more enlightened members accept corporate gifts from the man who buys up the council, and the so-called less enlightened members accept individual gifts from the man who sells out the council, we surely must take our punishment together. There is the difference, of course, that in the first case we act collectively, and in the second case individually; but is the punishment which follows the first any lighter or less far-reaching in its consequences than the more obvious one which follows the second? Have our morals been so captured by commercialism, to use Mr. Chapman's generalization, that we do not see a moral dereliction when business or educational interests are served thereby, although we are still shocked when the saloon interest is thus served? The street-car company which declares that it is impossible to do business without managing the city council, is on exactly the same moral level with the man who cannot retain political power unless he has a saloon, a large acquaintance with the semi-criminal class, and questionable money with which to debauch his constituents. Both sets of men assume that the only appeal possible is along the line of self-interest. They frankly acknowledge money getting as their own motive power, and they believe in the cupidity of all the men whom they encounter. No attempt in either case is made to put forward the claims of the public, or to find a moral basis for action. As the corrupt politician assumes that public morality is impossible, so many business men become convinced that to pay tribute to the corrupt aldermen is on the whole cheaper than to have taxes too high; that it is better to pay exorbitant rates for franchises, than to be made unwilling partners in transportation experiments. Such men come to regard political reformers as a sort of monomaniac, who are not reasonable enough to see the necessity of the present arrangement which has slowly been evolved and developed, and upon which business is safely conducted. A reformer who really knew the people and their great human needs, who believed that it was the business of government to serve them, and who further recognized the educative power of a sense of responsibility, would possess a clew by which he might analyze the situation. He would find out what needs, which the alderman supplies, are legitimate ones which the city itself could undertake, in counter-distinction to those which pander to the lower instincts of the constituency. A mother who eats her Christmas turkey in a reverent spirit of thankfulness to the alderman who gave it to her, might be gradually brought to a genuine sense of appreciation and gratitude to the city which supplies her little children with a Kindergarten, or, to the Board of Health which properly placarded a case of scarlet-fever next door and spared her sleepless nights and wearing anxiety, as well as the money paid with such difficulty to the doctor and the druggist. The man who in his emotional gratitude almost kneels before his political friend who gets his boy out of jail, might be made to see the kindness and good sense of the city authorities who provided the boy with a playground and reading room, where he might spend his hours of idleness and restlessness, and through which his temptations to petty crime might be averted. A man who is grateful to the alderman who sees that his gambling and racing are not interfered with, might learn to feel loyal and responsible to the city which supplied him with a gymnasium and swimming tank where manly and well-conducted sports are possible. The voter who is eager to serve the alderman at all times, because the tenure of his job is dependent upon aldermanic favor, might find great relief and pleasure in working for the city in which his place was secured by a well-administered civil service law. After all, what the corrupt alderman demands from his followers and largely depends upon is a sense of loyalty, a standing-by the man who is good to you, who understands you, and who gets you out of trouble. All the social life of the voter from the time he was a little boy and played "craps" with his "own push," and not with some other "push," has been founded on this sense of loyalty and of standing in with his friends. Now that he is a man, he likes the sense of being inside a political organization, of being trusted with political gossip, of belonging to a set of fellows who understand things, and whose interests are being cared for by a strong friend in the city council itself. All this is perfectly legitimate, and all in the line of the development of a strong civic loyalty, if it were merely socialized and enlarged. Such a voter has already proceeded in the forward direction in so far as he has lost the sense of isolation, and has abandoned the conviction that city government does not touch his individual affairs. Even Mill claims that the social feelings of man, his desire to be at unity with his fellow-creatures, are the natural basis for morality, and he defines a man of high moral culture as one who thinks of himself, not as an isolated individual, but as a part in a social organism. Upon this foundation it ought not to be difficult to build a structure of civic virtue. It is only necessary to make it clear to the voter that his individual needs are common needs, that is, public needs, and that they can only be legitimately supplied for him when they are supplied for all. If we believe that the individual struggle for life may widen into a struggle for the lives of all, surely the demand of an individual for decency and comfort, for a chance to work and obtain the fulness of life may be widened until it gradually embraces all the members of the community, and rises into a sense of the common weal. In order, however, to give him a sense of conviction that his individual needs must be merged into the needs of the many, and are only important as they are thus merged, the appeal cannot be made along the line of self-interest. The demand should be universalized; in this process it would also become clarified, and the basis of our political organization become perforce social and ethical. Would it be dangerous to conclude that the corrupt politician himself, because he is democratic in method, is on a more ethical line of social development than the reformer, who believes that the people must be made over by "good citizens" and governed by "experts"? The former at least are engaged in that great moral effort of getting the mass to express itself, and of adding this mass energy and wisdom to the community as a whole. The wide divergence of experience makes it difficult for the good citizen to understand this point of view, and many things conspire to make it hard for him to act upon it. He is more or less a victim to that curious feeling so often possessed by the good man, that the righteous do not need to be agreeable, that their goodness alone is sufficient, and that they can leave the arts and wiles of securing popular favor to the self-seeking. This results in a certain repellent manner, commonly regarded as the apparel of righteousness, and is further responsible for the fatal mistake of making the surroundings of "good influences" singularly unattractive; a mistake which really deserves a reprimand quite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making the surroundings of "evil influences" so beguiling. Both are akin to that state of mind which narrows the entrance into a wider morality to the eye of a needle, and accounts for the fact that new moral movements have ever and again been inaugurated by those who have found themselves in revolt against the conventionalized good. The success of the reforming politician who insists upon mere purity of administration and upon the control and suppression of the unruly elements in the community, may be the easy result of a narrowing and selfish process. For the painful condition of endeavoring to minister to genuine social needs, through the political machinery, and at the same time to remodel that machinery so that it shall be adequate to its new task, is to encounter the inevitable discomfort of a transition into a new type of democratic relation. The perplexing experiences of the actual administration, however, have a genuine value of their own. The economist who treats the individual cases as mere data, and the social reformer who labors to make such cases impossible, solely because of the appeal to his reason, may have to share these perplexities before they feel themselves within the grasp of a principle of growth, working outward from within; before they can gain the exhilaration and uplift which comes when the individual sympathy and intelligence is caught into the forward intuitive movement of the mass. This general movement is not without its intellectual aspects, but it has to be transferred from the region of perception to that of emotion before it is really apprehended. The mass of men seldom move together without an emotional incentive. The man who chooses to stand aside, avoids much of the perplexity, but at the same time he loses contact with a great source of vitality. Perhaps the last and greatest difficulty in the paths of those who are attempting to define and attain a social morality, is that which arises from the fact that they cannot adequately test the value of their efforts, cannot indeed be sure of their motives until their efforts are reduced to action and are presented in some workable form of social conduct or control. For action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics. We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory. A stirring appeal has lately been made by a recognized ethical lecturer who has declared that "It is insanity to expect to receive the data of wisdom by looking on. We arrive at moral knowledge only by tentative and observant practice. We learn how to apply the new insight by having attempted to apply the old and having found it to fail." This necessity of reducing the experiment to action throws out of the undertaking all timid and irresolute persons, more than that, all those who shrink before the need of striving forward shoulder to shoulder with the cruder men, whose sole virtue may be social effort, and even that not untainted by self-seeking, who are indeed pushing forward social morality, but who are doing it irrationally and emotionally, and often at the expense of the well-settled standards of morality. The power to distinguish between the genuine effort and the adventitious mistakes is perhaps the most difficult test which comes to our fallible intelligence. In the range of individual morals, we have learned to distrust him who would reach spirituality by simply renouncing the world, or by merely speculating upon its evils. The result, as well as the process of virtues attained by repression, has become distasteful to us. When the entire moral energy of an individual goes into the cultivation of personal integrity, we all know how unlovely the result may become; the character is upright, of course, but too coated over with the result of its own endeavor to be attractive. In this effort toward a higher morality in our social relations, we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many. The cry of "Back to the people" is always heard at the same time, when we have the prophet's demand for repentance or the religious cry of "Back to Christ," as though we would seek refuge with our fellows and believe in our common experiences as a preparation for a new moral struggle. As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so it has its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is the curious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to the whole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune. Tolstoy has portrayed the experience in "Master and Man." The former saves his servant from freezing, by protecting him with the heat of his body, and his dying hours are filled with an ineffable sense of healing and well-being. Such experiences, of which we have all had glimpses, anticipate in our relation to the living that peace of mind which envelopes us when we meditate upon the great multitude of the dead. It is akin to the assurance that the dead understand, because they have entered into the Great Experience, and therefore must comprehend all lesser ones; that all the misunderstandings we have in life are due to partial experience, and all life's fretting comes of our limited intelligence; when the last and Great Experience comes, it is, perforce, attended by mercy and forgiveness. Consciously to accept Democracy and its manifold experiences is to anticipate that peace and freedom. INDEX[1] Alderman, basis of his political success, 226, 228, 240, 243, 248, 267; his influence on morals of the American boy, 251, 255, 256; on standard of life, 257; his power, 232, 233, 235, 246, 260; his social duties, 234, 236, 243, 250. Art and the workingman, 219, 225. "Boss," the, ignorant man's dependence on, 260, 266. Business college, the, 197. Charity, administration of, 14, 22; neighborly relations in, 29, 230; organized, 25; standards in, 15, 27, 32, 38, 49, 58; scientific _vs._ human relations in, 64. Child labor, premature work, 41, 188; first laws concerning, 167, 170. City, responsibilities of, 266. Civil service law, its enforcement, 231, 233. Commercial and industrial life, social position of, compared, 193. Commercialism and education, 190-199, 216; morals captured by, 264; polytechnic schools taken by, 202. Coöperation, 153, 158. Cooper, Peter, 202. Dayton, Ohio, factory at, 216. Death and burials among simple people, 238. Domestic service, problem of, in France, England, and America, 135; industrial difficulty of, 106; moral issues of, 106. Education, attempts at industrial, 201; commercialism in, 196, 201; in commercialism, 216; in technical schools, 201; lack of adaptation in, 199, 208, 212; of industrial workers, 180, 193, 199, 219; offset to overspecialization, 211; public school and, 190, 192; relation of, to the child, 180, 185, 193; relation of, to the immigrant, 181-186; university extension lectures and settlements, 199; workingmen's lecture courses, 214. Educators, mistakes of, 212; new demands on, 178, 192, 201, 211. Family claim, the, 4, 74, 78; daughter's college education, 82; employer's _vs._ domestic's, 123, 124; on the daughter, 82; on the son, _ibid._ Family life, misconception of, 116. Filial relations, clash of moral codes, 94. Funerals, attitude of simple people toward, 238. Household employee, the, 108, 109; character of, 112; domestic _vs._ factory, 116, 118, 119, 122; isolation of, 109, 111, 117, 120, 132; morals of, 125; unnatural relation of, 113, 120, 121, 126, 127; unreasonable demands on, 113, 115; residence clubs for, 133; social position of, 114, 119, 122. Household employer, the, undemocratic ethics of, 116; reform of, in relation to employee, 126. Household, the, advantages and disadvantages of factory work over, 129; competition of factory work with, 128; difficulties of the small, 135; industrial isolation of, 117; industry of, transferred to factory, 104, 105; lack of progress in, 117; origin of, 104; social _vs._ individual aspects of, 103; suburban difficulties of, 134; wages in, 131. Hull-house experiences, 43, 53, 58, 59, 240, 247. Human life, value of, 7, 178. Individual action _vs._ associated, 137, 153, 158; advantages of, 158, 162; limitations of, 165; moral evolution involved in, 226. Individual _vs._ social needs, 155, 269. Individual _vs._ social virtues, 224, 227, 265. Italian immigrant, the, conception of abstract virtue among, 229; dependence of, on their children, 184; education of, 185; new conditions of life of, 181. Juvenile criminal, the, evolution of, 53-56, 187. Labor, division of, 210, 213; reaction from, 215. Law and order, 172, 174, 234. Moral fact and moral idea, 227, 229, 273. Morality, natural basis of, 268; personal and social, 6, 176, 103. Philanthropic standpoint, the, its dangers, 150, 155-157. Philanthropist, the, 154, 175-176. Political corruption, ethical development in, 270; formation of reform clubs, 246; greatest pressure of, 260; individual and social aspect of, 264; leniency in regard to, 239; responsibility for, 256, 263; selling of votes, 244-246; street railway and saloon interest, 262. Political leaders, causes of success of, 224. Political standards, 228, 229, 251-253, 261; compared with Benjamin Franklin's, 255. Referendum method, the, 164. Reformer, the, ethics of, 270. Reform movements in politics, causes of failure in, 222, 240, 262, 272, 274; business men's attitude toward, 265. Rumford, Count, 117. Ruskin, 219. Saloon, the, 243, 264. Social claim, the, 4, 77; child study and, 92, 180; misplaced energy and, 90. Social virtues, code of employer, 143, 148; code of laboring man, _ibid._ Technical schools, 201; adaptation of, to workingmen, 204; compromises in, 203; polytechnic institutions, 202; textile schools, 203; women in, _ibid._ Thrift, individualism of, 31, 40, 212. Trades unions, 148, 158, 167, 169, 171; sympathetic strikes, 174. Workingman, the, ambition of, for his children, 191, 258; art in relation to, 218; charity of, 154; evening classes and social entertainment for, 189; grievance of, 211; historical perspective in the work of, _ibid._; organizations of, 214; standards for political candidate, 257. [Footnote 1: This index is not intended to be exhaustive.] 
20125	----	A PREFACE TO POLITICS by WALTER LIPPMANN "A God wilt thou create for thyself out of thy seven devils." Mitchell Kennerley New York and London 1914 Copyright, 1913, by Mitchell Kennerley _Contents_ CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION I. Routineer and Inventor 1 II. The Taboo 34 III. The Changing Focus 53 IV. The Golden Rule and After 86 V. Well Meaning but Unmeaning: the Chicago Vice Report 122 VI. Some Necessary Iconoclasm 159 VII. The Making of Creeds 204 VIII. The Red Herring 247 IX. Revolution and Culture 273 INTRODUCTION The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid, inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private person." The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity if he can believe such a fiction of a people that crowds about tickers and demands the news of the day before it happens, that trembles on the verge of a panic over the unguarded utterance of a financier, and founds a new religion every month or so. But after a while self-deception ceases to be a comfort. This is when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs is felt to be a somewhat shallow performance, and the reformer is patronized as a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This is the criticism of men engaged in some genuinely creative labor. Often it is unexpressed, often as not the artist or scientist will join in a political movement. But in the depths of his soul there is, I suspect, some feeling which says to the politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?" Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the painful way in which many people cultivate a knowledge of public affairs because they have a conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having read a number of articles on the tariff and ploughed through the metaphysics of the currency question, what do they do? They turn with all the more zest to some spontaneous human interest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through the emotions of a great battle. But for the affairs of statecraft, for the very policies that a Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely perfunctory, maintained out of a sense of duty and dropped with a sigh of relief. That reaction may not be as deplorable as it seems. Pick up your newspaper, read the Congressional Record, run over in your mind the "issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself whether the average man is entirely to blame because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses to take the politician at his own rhetorical valuation. If men find statecraft uninteresting, may it not be that statecraft _is_ uninteresting? I have a more or less professional interest in public affairs; that is to say, I have had opportunity to look at politics from the point of view of the man who is trying to get the attention of people in order to carry through some reform. At first it was a hard confession to make, but the more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I respected the indifference of the public. There was something monotonously trivial and irrelevant about our reformist enthusiasm, and an appalling justice in that half-conscious criticism which refuses to place politics among the genuine, creative activities of men. Science was valid, art was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory was engaged in a real labor, anyone who had found expression in some beautiful object was truly centered. But politics was a personal drama without meaning or a vague abstraction without substance. Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable as ever, that public affairs do have an enormous and intimate effect upon our lives. They make or unmake us. They are the foundation of that national vigor through which civilizations mature. City and countryside, factories and play, schools and the family are powerful influences in every life, and politics is directly concerned with them. If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly not because its subject matter is unimportant. Public affairs govern our thinking and doing with subtlety and persistence. The trouble, I figured, must be in the way politics is concerned with the nation's interests. If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its results are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence. In statecraft the penalties and rewards are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted. Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have obscured the real uses of politics. Perhaps an attitude can be worked out which will engage a fresher attention. For there are, I believe, blunders in our political thinking which confuse fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and make it difficult for men to know where they should enlist. Perhaps if we can see politics in a different light, it will rivet our creative interests. These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch an attitude towards statecraft. I have tried to suggest an approach, to illustrate it concretely, to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title "A Preface to Politics," I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own sense that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to emphasize that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a legislative proposal and presented to the legislature the day after to-morrow. It was not written with the notion that these pages would contain an adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was it written to further a concrete program. There are, I hope, no assumptions put forward as dogmas. It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to thinking. Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a grapple with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For though a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the language of particular men. W. L. 46 East 80th Street, NEW YORK CITY, January 1913. A PREFACE TO POLITICS CHAPTER I ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior righteousness of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment. In fact, before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is one of the great American superstitions. More than any other fetish it has ruined our sense of political values by glorifying the pharisee with his vain cruelty to individuals and his unfounded approval of himself. You have only to look at the Senate of the United States, to see how that body is capable of turning itself into a court of preliminary hearings for the Last Judgment, wasting its time and our time and absorbing public enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For a hundred needs of the nation it has no thought, but about the precise morality of an historical transaction eight years old there is a meticulous interest. Whether in the Presidential Campaign of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had not been followed, and the exact and ultimate measure of the guilt that knowledge would have implied--this in the year 1912 is enough to start the Senate on a protracted man-hunt. Now if one half of the people is bent upon proving how wicked a man is and the other half is determined to show how good he is, neither half will think very much about the nation. An innocent paragraph in the New York Evening Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole performance away. It shows as clearly as words could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man theory is to political thinking: "Provided the first hearing takes place on September 30, it is expected that the developments will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel on the defensive. After the beginning of October, it is pointed out, the evidence before the Committee should keep him so busy explaining and denying that the country will not hear much Bull Moose doctrine." Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or not, there can be no two opinions about such an abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss, another attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried, and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even though we desired it there would be no way of establishing any clear-cut difference in politics between the angels and the imps. The angels are largely self-appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to other people's tar than their own. But if the issue is not between honesty and dishonesty, where is it? If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it as black on red, or red on black, as series of horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede or protrude. The longer you look the more patterns you can trace, and the more certain it becomes that there is no single way of looking at the board. So with political issues. There is no obvious cleavage which everyone recognizes. Many patterns appear in the national life. The "progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege" and the "People"; the Socialists, that it is between the "working class" and the "master class." An apologist for dynamite told me once that society was divided into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line between Philistia and Bohemia. When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and that, you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict and a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is between those who regard government as a routine to be administered and those who regard it as a problem to be solved. The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof. He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who feel, as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it. If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth century contrivance by which for a time it was served. To reverence Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do honor to Lincoln by cultivating awkward hands and ungainly feet. It is fascinating to watch this kind of conservative in action. From Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much gazing at bad statues of dead statesmen. Yet just because a man is in opposition to Senator Lodge there is no guarantee that he has freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind. A prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike of pretensions may merely cloak some other kind of routine. Take the "good government" attitude. No fresh insight is behind that. It does not promise anything; it does not offer to contribute new values to human life. The machine which exists is accepted in all its essentials: the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat smoother rotation. Often as not the very effort to make the existing machine run more perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers. Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever any corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties but by a panic and a cry of Go Back." I am tempted to go further and put into the same class all those radicals who wish simply to substitute some other kind of machine for the one we have. Though not all of them would accept the name, these reformers are simply utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are more critical than the ordinary conservatives'. They do see that humanity is badly squeezed in the existing mould. They have enough imagination to conceive a different one. But they have an infinite faith in moulds. This routine they don't believe in, but they believe in their own: if you could put the country under a new "system," then human affairs would run automatically for the welfare of all. Some improvement there might be, but as almost all men are held in an iron devotion to their own creations, the routine reformers are simply working for another conservatism, and not for any continuing liberation. The type of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery in its place. He has no faith whatever in automatic governments. While the routineers see machinery and precedents revolving with mankind as puppets, he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing individual at the center of his philosophy. This reversal is pregnant with a new outlook for statecraft. I hope to show that it alone can keep step with life; it alone is humanly relevant; and it alone achieves valuable results. Call this man a political creator or a political inventor. The essential quality of him is that he makes that part of existence which has experience the master of it. He serves the ideals of human feelings, not the tendencies of mechanical things. The difference between a phonograph and the human voice is that the phonograph must sing the song which is stamped upon it. Now there are days--I suspect the vast majority of them in most of our lives--when we grind out the thing that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing of a city, or teaching school, or running a business. We do not get out of bed in the morning because we are eager for the day; something external--we often call it our duty--throws off the bed-clothes, complains that the shaving water isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at our office in season for punching the time-check. We revolve with the business for three or four hours, signing letters, answering telephones, checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve o'clock the prospect of lunch puts a touch of romance upon life. Then because our days are so unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers, we go to the magazines and read only the "stuff with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You can go through contemporary life," writes Wells, "fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elementary necessities the sweat of your death-bed." The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel. That sense of an impersonal machine going on with endless reiteration is an experience that imaginative politicians face. Often as not they disguise it under heroic phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty, conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from public life every now and then in order to give him a chance to learn something new. Every statesman like every professor should have his sabbatical year. The revolt against the service of our own mechanical habits is well known to anyone who has followed modern thought. As a sharp example one might point to Thomas Davidson, whom William James called "individualist à outrance".... "Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my own on 'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no regular habits. When he found himself in danger of settling into even a good one, he made a point of interrupting it." Such men are the sparkling streams that flow through the dusty stretches of a nation. They invigorate and emphasize those times in your own life when each day is new. Then you are alive, then you drive the world before you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself to your effort; you seem to manage detail with an inferior part of yourself, while the real soul of you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame." Eager with sympathy, you and your work are reflected from many angles. You have become luminous. Some people are predominantly eager and wilful. The world does not huddle and bend them to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures of environment, but creators of it. Of other people's environment they become the most active part--the part which sets the fashion. What they initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of intrinsic prestige. These are the natural leaders of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as founder of a religion. It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively active towards the world which gives man a miraculous assurance that the world is something he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon "some secret spring of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the chance is denied by which we can lie back upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance. Yet in the light of it government becomes alert to a process of continual creation, an unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly changing needs. This philosophy is not only difficult to practice: it is elusive when you come to state it. For our political language was made to express a routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the "evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test is made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our theories assume, and our language is fitted to thinking of government as a frame--Massachusetts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental law the Frame of Government. We picture political institutions as mechanically constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is contained and compelled to approximate some abstract idea of justice or liberty. These frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an historical commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to burst the frame apart. Then a new one is constructed. Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example of this machine conception of government. It is probably the most important instance we have of the deliberate application of a mechanical philosophy to human affairs. Leaving out all question of the Fathers' ideals, looking simply at the bias which directed their thinking, is there in all the world a more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor--a machine which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature into account? What other explanation is there for the naïve faith of the Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to have illuminated those historic deliberations. The Fathers had a rather pale god, they had only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so they put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been part of our national piety to pretend that they succeeded. They worked with the philosophy of their age. Living in the Eighteenth Century, they thought in the images of Newton and Montesquieu. "The Government of the United States," writes Woodrow Wilson, "was constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe.... As Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way, they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which Newton might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism of the heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of government suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to have been a dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the conservatives of their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the usual way of opportunist radicals. But had they written the Constitution in the fire of their youth, they might have made it more democratic,--I doubt whether they would have made it less mechanical. The rebellious spirit of Tom Paine expressed itself in logical formulæ as inflexible to the pace of life as did the more contented Hamilton's. This is a determinant which burrows beneath our ordinary classification of progressive and reactionary to the spiritual habits of a period. If you look into the early utopias of Fourier and Saint-Simon, or better still into the early trade unions, this same faith that a government can be made to work mechanically is predominant everywhere. All the devices of rotation in office, short terms, undelegated authority are simply attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that power will not long stay diffused. It is characteristic of these primitive democracies that they worship Man and distrust men. They cling to some arrangement, hoping against experience that a government freed from human nature will automatically produce human benefits. To-day within the Socialist Party there is perhaps the greatest surviving example of the desire to offset natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is an article of faith among orthodox socialists that personalities do not count, and I sincerely believe I am not exaggerating the case when I say that their ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater--the acting is to be done by a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth among socialists to which all are expected to subscribe, that initiative springs anonymously out of the mass of the people,--that there are no "leaders," that the conspicuous figures are no more influential than the figurehead on the prow of a ship. This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement--that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it--that the religion of humanity should have had no faith in human beings. Jealous of all individuals, democracies have turned to machines. They have tried to blot out human prestige, to minimize the influence of personality. That there is historical justification for this fear is plain enough. To put it briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant. That explains, but does not justify. Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent sovereign. Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic contrivances. Because it left personality out of its speculation, it rested in the empty faith that it had excluded it from reality. But in the actual stress of life these frictions do not survive ten minutes. Public officials do not become political marionettes, though people pretend that they are. When theory runs against the grain of living forces, the result is a deceptive theory of politics. If the real government of the United States "had, in fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been a machine governed by mechanically automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it was not, and its history has been rich with the influence and personalities of the men who have conducted it and made it a living reality." Only by violating the very spirit of the constitution have we been able to preserve the letter of it. For behind that balanced plan there grew up what Senator Beveridge has called so brilliantly the "invisible government," an empire of natural groups about natural leaders. Parties are such groups: they have had a power out of all proportion to the intentions of the Fathers. Behind the parties has grown up the "political machine"--falsely called a machine, the very opposite of one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe, typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated wherever there is a social group to be governed--in trade unions, in clubs, in boys' gangs, in the Four Hundred, in the Socialist Party. It is an accretion of power around a center of influence, cemented by patronage, graft, favors, friendship, loyalties, habits,--a human grouping, a natural pyramid. Only recently have we begun to see that the "political ring" is not something confined to public life. It was Lincoln Steffens, I believe, who first perceived that fact. For a time it was my privilege to work under him on an investigation of the "Money Power." The leading idea was different from customary "muckraking." We were looking not for the evils of Big Business, but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the subject with a first-hand knowledge of politics. He knew the "invisible government" of cities, states, and the nation. He knew how the boss worked, how he organized his power. When Mr. Steffens approached the vast confusion and complication of big business, he needed some hypothesis to guide him through that maze of facts. He made a bold and brilliant guess, an hypothesis. To govern a life insurance company, Mr. Steffens argued, was just as much "government" as to run a city. What if political methods existed in the realm of business? The investigation was never carried through completely, but we did study the methods by which several life and fire insurance companies, banks, two or three railroads, and several industrials are controlled. We found that the anatomy of Big Business was strikingly like that of Tammany Hall: the same pyramiding of influence, the same tendency of power to center on individuals who did not necessarily sit in the official seats, the same effort of human organization to grow independently of legal arrangements. Thus in the life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation supports this, the real power was held not by the president, not by the voters or policy-holders, but by men who were not even directors. After a while we took it as a matter of course that the head of a company was an administrative dummy, with a dependence on unofficial power similar to that of Governor Dix on Boss Murphy. That seems to be typical of the whole economic life of this country. It is controlled by groups of men whose influence extends like a web to smaller, tributary groups, cutting across all official boundaries and designations, making short work of all legal formulæ, and exercising sovereignty regardless of the little fences we erect to keep it in bounds. A glimpse into the labor world revealed very much the same condition. The boss, and the bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all are there exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it squarely--to see that that is what sovereignty is--that if we are to use human power for human purposes we must turn to the realities of it, then we shall have gone far towards leaving behind us the futile hopes of mechanical perfection so constantly blasted by natural facts. The invisible government is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution. What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to it. The nature of political power we shall not change. If that is the way human societies organize sovereignty, the sooner we face that fact the better. For the object of democracy is not to imitate the rhythm of the stars but to harness political power to the nation's need. If corporations and governments have indeed gone on a joy ride the business of reform is not to set up fences, Sherman Acts and injunctions into which they can bump, but to take the wheel and to steer. The corruption of which we hear so much is certainly not accounted for when you have called it dishonesty. It is too widespread for any such glib explanation. When you see how business controls politics, it certainly is not very illuminating to call the successful business men of a nation criminals. Yet I suppose that all of them violate the law. May not this constant dodging or hurdling of statutes be a sign that there is something the matter with the statutes? Is it not possible that graft is the cracking and bursting of the receptacles in which we have tried to constrain the business of this country? It seems possible that business has had to control politics because its laws were so stupidly obstructive. In the trust agitation this is especially plausible. For there is every reason to believe that concentration is a world-wide tendency, made possible at first by mechanical inventions, fostered by the disastrous experiences of competition, and accepted by business men through contagion and imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a profound impetus in the business world--an impetus which certainly cannot be obliterated, even if anyone were foolish enough to wish it. I venture to suggest that much of what is called "corruption" is the odor of a decaying political system done to death by an economic growth. It is our desperate adherence to an old method that has produced the confusion of political life. Because we have insisted upon looking at government as a frame and governing as a routine, because in short we have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to actual conditions. Feckless--that is what our politics is. It is literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and leadership, when life was crying that its inventive abilities should be freed. Roosevelt in his term did much to center government truly. For a time natural leadership and nominal position coincided, and the administration became in a measure a real sovereignty. The routine conception dwindled, and the Roosevelt appointees went at issues as problems to be solved. They may have been mistaken: Roosevelt may be uncritical in his judgments. But the fact remains that the Roosevelt régime gave a new prestige to the Presidency by effecting through it the greatest release of political invention in a generation. Contrast it with the Taft administration, and the quality is set in relief. Taft was the perfect routineer trying to run government as automatically as possible. His sincerity consisted in utter respect for form: he denied himself whatever leadership he was capable of, and outwardly at least he tried to "balance" the government. His greatest passions seem to be purely administrative and legal. The people did not like it. They said it was dead. They were right. They had grown accustomed to a humanly liberating atmosphere in which formality was an instrument instead of an idol. They had seen the Roosevelt influence adding to the resources of life--irrigation, and waterways, conservation, the Panama Canal, the "country life" movement. They knew these things were achieved through initiative that burst through formal restrictions, and they applauded wildly. It was only a taste, but it was a taste, a taste of what government might be like. The opposition was instructive. Apart from those who feared Roosevelt for selfish reasons, his enemies were men who loved an orderly adherence to traditional methods. They shivered in the emotional gale; they obstructed and the gale became destructive. They felt that, along with obviously good things, this sudden national fertility might breed a monster--that a leadership like Roosevelt's might indeed prove dangerous, as giving birth may lead to death. What the methodically-minded do not see is that the sterility of a routine is far more appalling. Not everyone may feel that to push out into the untried, and take risks for big prizes, is worth while. Men will tell you that government has no business to undertake an adventure, to make experiments. They think that safety lies in repetition, that if you do nothing, nothing will be done to you. It's a mistake due to poverty of imagination and inability to learn from experience. Even the timidest soul dare not "stand pat." The indictment against mere routine in government is a staggering one. For while statesmen are pottering along doing the same thing year in, year out, putting up the tariff one year and down the next, passing appropriation bills and recodifying laws, the real forces in the country do not stand still. Vast changes, economic and psychological, take place, and these changes demand new guidance. But the routineers are always unprepared. It has become one of the grim trade jokes of innovators that the one thing you can count upon is that the rulers will come to think that they are the apex of human development. For a queer effect of responsibility on men is that it makes them try to be as much like machines as possible. Tammany itself becomes rigid when it is too successful, and only defeat seems to give it new life. Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. But conditions change whether statesmen wish them to or not; society must have new institutions to fit new wants, and all that rigid conservatism can do is to make the transitions difficult. Violent revolutions may be charged up to the unreadiness of statesmen. It is because they will not see, or cannot see, that feudalism is dead, that chattel slavery is antiquated; it is because they have not the wisdom and the audacity to anticipate these great social changes; it is because they insist upon standing pat that we have French Revolutions and Civil Wars. But statesmen who had decided that at last men were to be the masters of their own history, instead of its victims, would face politics in a truly revolutionary manner. It would give a new outlook to statesmanship, turning it from the mere preservation of order, the administration of political machinery and the guarding of ancient privilege to the invention of new political forms, the prevision of social wants, and the preparation for new economic growths. Such a statesmanship would in the '80's have prepared for the trust movement. There would have been nothing miraculous in such foresight. Standard Oil was dominant by the beginning of the '80's, and concentration had begun in sugar, steel and other basic industries. Here was an economic tendency of revolutionary significance--the organization of business in a way that was bound to change the outlook of a whole nation. It had vast potentialities for good and evil--all it wanted was harnessing and directing. But the new thing did not fit into the little outlines and verbosities which served as a philosophy for our political hacks. So they gaped at it and let it run wild, called it names, and threw stones at it. And by that time the force was too big for them. An alert statesmanship would have facilitated the process of concentration; would have made provision for those who were cast aside; would have been an ally of trust building, and by that very fact it would have had an internal grip on the trust--it would have kept the trust's inner workings public; it could have bent the trust to social uses. This is not mere wisdom after the event. In the '80's there were hundreds of thousands of people in the world who understood that the trust was a natural economic growth. Karl Marx had proclaimed it some thirty years before, and it was a widely circulated idea. Is it asking too much of a statesman if we expect him to know political theory and to balance it with the facts he sees? By the '90's surely, the egregious folly of a Sherman Anti-Trust Law should have been evident to any man who pretended to political leadership. Yet here it is the year 1912 and that monument of economic ignorance and superstition is still worshiped with the lips by two out of the three big national parties. Another movement--like that of the trust--is gathering strength to-day. It is the unification of wage-workers. We stand in relation to it as the men of the '80's did to the trusts. It is the complement of that problem. It also has vast potentialities for good and evil. It, too, demands understanding and direction. It, too, will not be stopped by hard names or injunctions. What we loosely call "syndicalism" is a tendency that no statesman can overlook to-day without earning the jeers of his children. This labor movement has a destructive and constructive energy within it. On its beneficent side it promises a new professional interest in work, self-education, and the co-operative management of industry. But this creative power is constantly choked off because the unions are compelled to fight for their lives--the more opposition they meet the more you are likely to see of sabotage, direct action, the grève perlée--the less chance there is for the educative forces to show themselves. Then, the more violent syndicalism proves itself to be, the more hysterically we bait it in the usual vicious circle of ignorance. But who amongst us is optimistic enough to hope that the men who sit in the mighty positions are going to make a better show of themselves than their predecessors did over the trust problem? It strains hope a little too much. Those men in Washington, most of them lawyers, are so educated that they are practically incapable of meeting a new condition. All their training plus all their natural ossification of mind is hostile to invention. You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers. The thought-processes in Washington are too lumbering for the needs of this nation. Against that evil muckraking ought to be directed. Those senators and representatives are largely irrelevant; they are not concerned with realities. Their dishonesties are comparatively insignificant. The scorn of the public should be turned upon the emptiness of political thought, upon the fact that those men seem without even a conception of the nation's needs. And while they maunder along they stifle the forces of life which are trying to break through. It was nothing but the insolence of the routineer that forced Gifford Pinchot out of the Forest Service. Pinchot in respect to his subject was a fine political inventor. But routine forced him out--into what?--into the moil and toil of fighting for offices, and there he has cut a poor figure indeed. You may say that he has had to spend his energy trying to find a chance to use his power. What a wanton waste of talent is that for a civilized nation! Wiley is another case of the creative mind harassed by the routineers. Judge Lindsey is another--a fine, constructive children's judge compelled to be a politician. And of our misuse of the Rockefellers and Carnegies--the retrospect is appalling. Here was industrial genius unquestionably beyond the ordinary. What did this nation do with it? It found no public use for talent. It left that to operate in darkness--then opinion rose in an empty fury, made an outlaw of one and a platitudinous philanthropist of the other. It could lynch one as a moral monster, when as a matter of fact his ideals were commonplace; it could proclaim one a great benefactor when in truth he was a rather dull old gentleman. Abused out of all reason or praised irrelevantly--the one thing this nation has not been able to do with these men is to use their genius. It is this life-sapping quality of our politics that should be fought--its wanton waste of the initiatives we have--its stupid indifference. We need a new sense of political values. These times require a different order of thinking. We cannot expect to meet our problems with a few inherited ideas, uncriticised assumptions, a foggy vocabulary, and a machine philosophy. Our political thinking needs the infusion of contemporary insights. The enormous vitality that is regenerating other interests can be brought into the service of politics. Our primary care must be to keep the habits of the mind flexible and adapted to the movement of real life. The only way to control our destiny is to work with it. In politics, at least, we stoop to conquer. There is no use, no heroism, in butting against the inevitable, yet nothing is entirely inevitable. There is always some choice, some opportunity for human direction. It is not easy. It is far easier to treat life as if it were dead, men as if they were dolls. It is everlastingly difficult to keep the mind flexible and alert. The rule of thumb is not here. To follow the pace of living requires enormous vigilance and sympathy. No one can write conclusively about it. Compared with this creative statesmanship, the administering of a routine or the battle for a platitude is a very simple affair. But genuine politics is not an inhuman task. Part of the genuineness is its unpretentious humanity. I am not creating the figure of an ideal statesman out of some inner fancy. That is just the deepest error of our political thinking--to talk of politics without reference to human beings. The creative men appear in public life in spite of the cold blanket the politicians throw over them. Really statesmanlike things are done, inventions are made. But this real achievement comes to us confused, mixed with much that is contradictory. Political inventors are to-day largely unconscious of their purpose, and, so, defenceless against the distraction of their routineer enemies. Lacking a philosophy they are defenceless against their own inner tendency to sink into repetition. As a witty Frenchman remarked, many geniuses become their own disciples. This is true when the attention is slack, and effort has lost its direction. We have elaborate governmental mechanisms--like the tariff, for example, which we go on making more "scientific" year in, year out--having long since lost sight of their human purpose. They may be defeating the very ends they were meant to serve. We cling to constitutions out of "loyalty." We trudge in the treadmill and call it love of our ancient institutions. We emulate the mule, that greatest of all routineers. CHAPTER II THE TABOO Our government has certainly not measured up to expectations. Even chronic admirers of the "balance" and "symmetry" of the Constitution admit either by word or deed that it did not foresee the whole history of the American people. Poor bewildered statesmen, unused to any notion of change, have seen the national life grow to a monstrous confusion and sprout monstrous evils by the way. Men and women clamored for remedies, vowed, shouted and insisted that their "official servants" do something--something statesmanlike--to abate so much evident wrong. But their representatives had very little more than a frock coat and a slogan as equipment for the task. Trained to interpret a constitution instead of life, these statesmen faced with historic helplessness the vociferations of ministers, muckrakers, labor leaders, women's clubs, granges and reformers' leagues. Out of a tumultuous medley appeared the common theme of public opinion--that the leaders should lead, that the governors should govern. The trusts had appeared, labor was restless, vice seemed to be corrupting the vitality of the nation. Statesmen had to do something. Their training was legal and therefore utterly inadequate, but it was all they had. They became panicky and reverted to an ancient superstition. They forbade the existence of evil by law. They made it anathema. They pronounced it damnable. They threatened to club it. They issued a legislative curse, and called upon the district attorney to do the rest. They started out to abolish human instincts, check economic tendencies and repress social changes by laws prohibiting them. They turned to this sanctified ignorance which is rampant in almost any nursery, which presides at family councils, flourishes among "reformers"; which from time immemorial has haunted legislatures and courts. Under the spell of it men try to stop drunkenness by closing the saloons; when poolrooms shock them they call a policeman; if Haywood becomes annoying, they procure an injunction. They meet the evils of dance halls by barricading them; they go forth to battle against vice by raiding brothels and fining prostitutes. For trusts there is a Sherman Act. In spite of all experience they cling desperately to these superstitions. It is the method of the taboo, as naïve as barbarism, as ancient as human failure. There is a law against suicide. It is illegal for a man to kill himself. What it means in practice, of course, is that there is punishment waiting for a man who doesn't succeed in killing himself. We say to the man who is tired of life that if he bungles we propose to make this world still less attractive by clapping him into jail. I know an economist who has a scheme for keeping down the population by refusing very poor people a marriage license. He used to teach Sunday school and deplore promiscuity. In the annual report of the president of a distilling company I once saw the statement that business had increased in the "dry" states. In a prohibition town where I lived you could drink all you wanted by belonging to a "club" or winking at the druggist. And in another city where Sunday closing was strictly enforced, a minister told me with painful surprise that the Monday police blotter showed less drunks and more wife-beaters. We pass a law against race-track gambling and add to the profits from faro. We raid the faro joints, and drive gambling into the home, where poker and bridge whist are taught to children who follow their parents' example. We deprive anarchists of free speech by the heavy hand of a police magistrate, and furnish them with a practical instead of a theoretical argument against government. We answer strikes with bayonets, and make treason one of the rights of man. Everybody knows that when you close the dance halls you fill the parks. Men who in their youth took part in "crusades" against the Tenderloin now admit in a crestfallen way that they succeeded merely in sprinkling the Tenderloin through the whole city. Over twenty years ago we formulated a sweeping taboo against trusts. Those same twenty years mark the centralization of industry. The routineer in a panic turns to the taboo. Whatever does not fit into his rigid little scheme of things must have its head chopped off. Now human nature and the changing social forces it generates are the very material which fit least well into most little schemes of things. A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless. We employ our instruments and abandon them. But nothing so simply true as that prevails in politics. When a government routine conflicts with the nation's purposes--the statesman actually makes a virtue of his loyalty to the routine. His practice is to ignore human character and pay no attention to social forces. The shallow presumption is that undomesticated impulses can be obliterated; that world-wide economic inventions can be stamped out by jailing millionaires--and acting in the spirit of Mr. Chesterton's man Fipps "who went mad and ran about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not the same number on both sides." The routineer is, of course, the first to decry every radical proposal as "against human nature." But the stand-pat mind has forfeited all right to speak for human nature. It has devoted the centuries to torturing men's instincts, stamping on them, passing laws against them, lifting its eyebrows at the thought of them--doing everything but trying to understand them. The same people who with daily insistence say that innovators ignore facts are in the absurd predicament of trying to still human wants with petty taboos. Social systems like ours, which do not even feed and house men and women, which deny pleasure, cramp play, ban adventure, propose celibacy and grind out monotony, are a clear confession of sterility in statesmanship. And politics, however pretentiously rhetorical about ideals, is irrelevant if the only method it knows is to ostracize the desires it cannot manage. Suppose that statesmen transferred their reverence from the precedents and mistakes of their ancestors to the human material which they have set out to govern. Suppose they looked mankind in the face and asked themselves what was the result of answering evil with a prohibition. Such an exercise would, I fear, involve a considerable strain on what reformers call their moral sensibilities. For human nature is a rather shocking affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic optimism. Certainly the human nature that figures in most political thinking is a wraith that never was--not even in the souls of politicians. "Idealism" creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a politician. He is too constantly tempted to call a policeman when he disapproves. We must study our failures. Gambling and drink, for example, produce much misery. But what reformers have to learn is that men don't gamble just for the sake of violating the law. They do so because something within them is satisfied by betting or drinking. To erect a ban doesn't stop the want. It merely prevents its satisfaction. And since this desire for stimulants or taking a chance at a prize is older and far more deeply rooted in the nature of men than love of the Prohibition Party or reverence for laws made at Albany, people will contrive to drink and gamble in spite of the acts of a legislature. A man may take liquor for a variety of reasons: he may be thirsty; or depressed; or unusually happy; he may want the companionship of a saloon, or he may hope to forget a scolding wife. Perhaps he needs a "bracer" in a weary hunt for a job. Perhaps he has a terrible craving for alcohol. He does not take a drink so that he may become an habitual drunkard, or be locked up in jail, or get into a brawl, or lose his job, or go insane. These are what he might call the unfortunate by-products of his desire. If once he could find something which would do for him what liquor does, without hurting him as liquor does, there would be no problem of drink. Bernard Shaw says he has found that substitute in going to church when there's no service. Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order to get rid of his own. Many an unhappy lover has found peace by expressing his misery in sonnet form. The problem is to find something for the common man who is not interested in contemporary churches and who can't write sonnets. When the socialists in Milwaukee began to experiment with municipal dances they were greeted with indignant protests from the "anti-vice" element and with amused contempt by the newspaper paragraphers. The dances were discontinued, and so the belief in their failure is complete. I think, though, that Mayor Seidel's defense would by itself make this experiment memorable. He admitted freely the worst that can be said against the ordinary dance hall. So far he was with the petty reformers. Then he pointed out with considerable vehemence that dance halls were an urgent social necessity. At that point he had transcended the mind of the petty reformer completely. "We propose," said Seidel, "to go into competition with the devil." Nothing deeper has come from an American mayor in a long, long time. It is the point that Jane Addams makes in the opening pages of that wisely sweet book, "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets." She calls attention to the fact that the modern state has failed to provide for pleasure. "This stupid experiment," she writes, "of organizing work and failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it has turned into all sorts of malignant and vicious appetites, then we, the middle-aged, grow quite distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures." For human nature seems to have wants that must be filled. If nobody else supplies them, the devil will. The demand for pleasure, adventure, romance has been left to the devil's catering for so long a time that most people think he inspires the demand. He doesn't. Our neglect is the devil's opportunity. What we should use, we let him abuse, and the corruption of the best things, as Hume remarked, produces the worst. Pleasure in our cities has become tied to lobster palaces, adventure to exalted murderers, romance to silly, mooning novels. Like the flower girl in Galsworthy's play, we have made a very considerable confusion of the life of joy and the joy of life. The first impulse is to abolish all lobster palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers, and sentimentally erotic novels. Why not abolish all the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The answer is in history. It can't be done that way. It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men. It is dangerous, explosively dangerous, to thwart them for any length of time. The Puritans tried to choke the craving for pleasure in early New England. They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals. They burned witches instead. We rail a good deal against Tammany Hall. Reform tickets make periodic sallies against it, crying economy, efficiency, and a business administration. And we all pretend to be enormously surprised when the "ignorant foreign vote" prefers a corrupt political ring to a party of well-dressed, grammatical, and high-minded gentlemen. Some of us are even rather downcast about democracy because the Bowery doesn't take to heart the admonitions of the Evening Post. We forget completely the important wants supplied by Tammany Hall. We forget that this is a lonely country for an immigrant and that the Statue of Liberty doesn't shed her light with too much warmth. Possessing nothing but a statistical, inhuman conception of government, the average municipal reformer looks down contemptuously upon a man like Tim Sullivan with his clambakes and his dances; his warm and friendly saloons, his handshaking and funeral-going and baby-christening; his readiness to get coal for the family, and a job for the husband. But a Tim Sullivan is closer to the heart of statesmanship than five City Clubs full of people who want low taxes and orderly bookkeeping. He does things which have to be done. He humanizes a strange country; he is a friend at court; he represents the legitimate kindliness of government, standing between the poor and the impersonal, uninviting majesty of the law. Let no man wonder that Lorimer's people do not prefer an efficiency expert, that a Tim Sullivan has power, or that men are loyal to Hinky Dink. The cry raised against these men by the average reformer is a piece of cold, unreal, preposterous idealism compared to the solid warm facts of kindliness, clothes, food and fun. You cannot beat the bosses with the reformer's taboo. You will not get far on the Bowery with the cost unit system and low taxes. And I don't blame the Bowery. You can beat Tammany Hall permanently in one way--by making the government of a city as human, as kindly, as jolly as Tammany Hall. I am aware of the contract-grafts, the franchise-steals, the dirty streets, the bribing and the blackmail, the vice-and-crime partnerships, the Big Business alliances of Tammany Hall. And yet it seems to me that Tammany has a better perception of human need, and comes nearer to being what a government should be, than any scheme yet proposed by a group of "uptown good government" enthusiasts. Tammany is not a satanic instrument of deception, cleverly devised to thwart "the will of the people." It is a crude and largely unconscious answer to certain immediate needs, and without those needs its power would crumble. That is why I ventured in the preceding chapter to describe it as a natural sovereignty which had grown up behind a mechanical form of government. It is a poor weed compared to what government might be. But it is a real government that has power and serves a want, and not a frame imposed upon men from on top. The taboo--the merely negative law--is the emptiest of all the impositions from on top. In its long record of failure, in the comparative success of Tammany, those who are aiming at social changes can see a profound lesson; the impulses, cravings and wants of men must be employed. You can employ them well or ill, but you must employ them. A group of reformers lounging at a club cannot, dare not, decide to close up another man's club because it is called a saloon. Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail. He will fail because human nature abhors the vacuum created by the taboo. An incident in the international peace propaganda illuminates this point. Not long ago a meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward peace among nations broke up in great disorder. Thousands of people who hate the waste and futility of war as much as any of the orators of that evening were filled with an unholy glee. They chuckled with delight at the idea of a riot in a peace meeting. Though it would have seemed perverse to the ordinary pacificist, this sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It had the same ground as the instinctive feeling of nine men in ten that Roosevelt has more right to talk about peace than William Howard Taft. James made it articulate in his essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War." James was a great advocate of peace, but he understood Theodore Roosevelt and he spoke for the military man when he wrote of war that: "Its 'horrors' are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of 'consumers' leagues' and 'associated charities,' of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!" And he added: "So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which everyone feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority." So William James proposed not the abolition of war, but a moral equivalent for it. He dreamed of "a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against _Nature_.... The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life." Now we are not concerned here over the question of this particular proposal. The telling point in my opinion is this: that when a wise man, a student of human nature, and a reformer met in the same person, the taboo was abandoned. James has given us a lasting phrase when he speaks of the "moral equivalent" of evil. We can use it, I believe, as a guide post to statesmanship. Rightly understood, the idea behind the words contains all that is valuable in conservatism, and, for the first time, gives a reputable meaning to that tortured epithet "constructive." "The military feelings," says James, "are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered ... such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.... So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war." To find for evil its moral equivalent is to be conservative about values and radical about forms, to turn to the establishment of positively good things instead of trying simply to check bad ones, to emphasize the additions to life, instead of the restrictions upon it, to substitute, if you like, the love of heaven for the fear of hell. Such a program means the dignified utilization of the whole nature of man. It will recognize as the first test of all political systems and moral codes whether or not they are "against human nature." It will insist that they be cut to fit the whole man, not merely a part of him. For there are utopian proposals made every day which cover about as much of a human being as a beautiful hat does. Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them. Instead of trying to crush badness we must turn the power behind it to good account. The assumption is that every lust is capable of some civilized expression. We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which desire expresses itself. The older moralists, the taboo philosophers believed that the desires themselves were inherently evil. To us they are the energies of the soul, neither good nor bad in themselves. Like dynamite, they are capable of all sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization, through the family and the school, religion, art, science, and all institutions, to transmute these energies into fine values. Behind evil there is power, and it is folly,--wasting and disappointing folly,--to ignore this power because it has found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human character is in these rooted lusts. The great error of the taboo has been just this: that it believed each desire had only one expression, that if that expression was evil the desire itself was evil. We know a little better to-day. We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it. This supplies us with a standard for judging reforms, and so makes clear what "constructive" action really is. When it was discovered recently that the boys' gang was not an unmitigated nuisance to be chased by a policeman, but a force that could be made valuable to civilization through the Boy Scouts, a really constructive reform was given to the world. The effervescence of boys on the street, wasted and perverted through neglect or persecution, was drained and applied to fine uses. When Percy MacKaye pleads for pageants in which the people themselves participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing some of the lusts of the city in the form of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists calls this "sublimation." They have brought forward a wealth of material which gives us every reason to believe that the theory of "moral equivalents" is soundly based, that much the same energies produce crime and civilization, art, vice, insanity, love, lust, and religion. In each individual the original differences are small. Training and opportunity decide in the main how men's lust shall emerge. Left to themselves, or ignorantly tabooed, they break forth in some barbaric or morbid form. Only by supplying our passions with civilized interests can we escape their destructive force. I have put it negatively, as a counsel of prudence. But he who has the courage of existence will put it triumphantly, crying "yea" as Nietzsche did, and recognizing that all the passions of men are the motive powers of a fine life. For the roads that lead to heaven and hell are one until they part. CHAPTER III THE CHANGING FOCUS The taboo, however useless, is at least concrete. Although it achieves little besides mischief, it has all the appearance of practical action, and consequently enlists the enthusiasm of those people whom Wells describes as rushing about the country shouting: "For Gawd's sake let's _do_ something _now_." There are weight and solidity in a policeman's club, while a "moral equivalent" happens to be pale like the stuff of which dreams are made. To the politician whose daily life consists in dodging the thousand and one conflicting prejudices of his constituents, in bickering with committees, intriguing and playing for the vote; to the business man harassed on four sides by the trust, the union, the law, and public opinion,--distrustful of any wide scheme because the stupidity of his shipping clerk is the most vivid item in his mind, all this discussion about politics and the inner life will sound like so much fine-spun nonsense. I, for one, am not disposed to blame the politicians and the business men. They govern the nation, it is true, but they do it in a rather absentminded fashion. Those revolutionists who see the misery of the country as a deliberate and fiendish plot overestimate the bad will, the intelligence and the singleness of purpose in the ruling classes. Business and political leaders don't mean badly; the trouble with them is that most of the time they don't mean anything. They picture themselves as very "practical," which in practice amounts to saying that nothing makes them feel so spiritually homeless as the discussion of values and an invitation to examine first principles. Ideas, most of the time, cause them genuine distress, and are as disconcerting as an idle office boy, or a squeaky telephone. I do not underestimate the troubles of the man of affairs. I have lived with politicians,--with socialist politicians whose good-will was abundant and intentions constructive. The petty vexations pile up into mountains; the distracting details scatter the attention and break up thinking, while the mere problem of exercising power crowds out speculation about what to do with it. Personal jealousies interrupt co-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient little store of platitudes--misunderstanding and distortion dry up the imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of publicity requires a mask which soon becomes the reality. Politicians tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism which describes him. You cannot blame politicians if their perceptions are few and their thinking crude. Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign. Woodrow Wilson brought to public life an exceedingly flexible mind,--many of us when he first emerged rejoiced at the clean and athletic quality of his thinking. But even he under the stress of a campaign slackened into commonplace reiteration, accepting a futile and intellectually dishonest platform, closing his eyes to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning, in short, the very qualities which distinguished him. It is understandable. When a National Committee puts a megaphone to a man's mouth and tells him to yell, it is difficult for him to hear anything. If a nation's destiny were really bound up with the politics reported in newspapers, the impasse would be discouraging. If the important sovereignty of a country were in what is called its parliamentary life, then the day of Plato's philosopher-kings would be far off indeed. Certainly nobody expects our politicians to become philosophers. When they do they hide the fact. And when philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers. But the truth is that we overestimate enormously the importance of nominations, campaigns, and office-holding. If we are discouraged it is because we tend to identify statecraft with that official government which is merely one of its instruments. Vastly over-advertised, we have mistaken an inflated fragment for the real political life of the country. For if you think of men and their welfare, government appears at once as nothing but an agent among many others. The task of civilizing our impulses by creating fine opportunities for their expression cannot be accomplished through the City Hall alone. All the influences of social life are needed. The eggs do not lie in one basket. Thus the issues in the trade unions may be far more directly important to statecraft than the destiny of the Republican Party. The power that workingmen generate when they unite--the demands they will make and the tactics they will pursue--how they are educating themselves and the nation--these are genuine issues which bear upon the future. So with the policies of business men. Whether financiers are to be sullen and stupid like Archbold, defiant like Morgan, or well-intentioned like Perkins is a question that enters deeply into the industrial issues. The whole business problem takes on a new complexion if the representatives of capital are to be men with the temper of Louis Brandeis or William C. Redfield. For when business careers are made professional, new motives enter into the situation; it will make a world of difference if the leadership of industry is in the hands of men interested in production as a creative art instead of as a brute exploitation. The economic conflicts are at once raised to a plane of research, experiment and honest deliberation. For on the level of hate and mean-seeking no solution is possible. That subtle fact,--the change of business motives, the demonstration that industry can be conducted as medicine is,--may civilize the whole class conflict. Obviously statecraft is concerned with such a change, extra-political though it is. And wherever the politician through his prestige or the government through its universities can stimulate a revolution in business motives, it should do so. That is genuinely constructive work, and will do more to a humane solution of the class struggle than all the jails and state constabularies that ever betrayed the barbarism of the Twentieth Century. It is no wonder that business is such a sordid affair. We have done our best to exclude from it every passionate interest that is capable of lighting up activity with eagerness and joy. "Unbusinesslike" we have called the devotion of craftsmen and scientists. We have actually pretended that the work of extracting a living from nature could be done most successfully by short-sighted money-makers encouraged by their money-spending wives. We are learning better to-day. We are beginning to know that this nation for all its boasts has not touched the real possibilities of business success, that nature and good luck have done most of our work, that our achievements come in spite of our ignorance. And so no man can gauge the civilizing possibilities of a new set of motives in business. That it will add to the dignity and value of millions of careers is only one of its blessings. Given a nation of men trained to think scientifically about their work and feel about it as craftsmen, and you have a people released from a stupid fixation upon the silly little ideals of accumulating dollars and filling their neighbor's eye. We preach against commercialism but without great result. And the reason for our failure is: that we merely say "you ought not" instead of offering a new interest. Instead of telling business men not to be greedy, we should tell them to be industrial statesmen, applied scientists, and members of a craft. Politics can aid that revolution in a hundred Ways: by advocating it, by furnishing schools that teach, laboratories that demonstrate, by putting business on the same plane of interest as the Health Service. The indictment against politics to-day is not its corruption, but its lack of insight. I believe it is a fact which experience will sustain that men steal because they haven't anything better to do. You don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. Let a human being throw the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty. The writers who have nothing to say are the ones that you can buy: the others have too high a price. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product: the reason isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the issue of honesty and dishonesty was a futile one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They hate shams and the watering of goods on a more trustworthy basis than the mere routine moralist. To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their own lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for being true. Creation is an emotional ascent, which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns all that is valuable in virtue to the service of desire. When politics revolves mechanically it ceases to use the real energies of a nation. Government is then at once irrelevant and mischievous--a mere obstructive nuisance. Not long ago a prominent senator remarked that he didn't know much about the country, because he had spent the last few months in Washington. It was a profound utterance as anyone can testify who reads, let us say, the Congressional Record. For that document, though replete with language, is singularly unacquainted with the forces that agitate the nation. Politics, as the contributors to the Congressional Record seem to understand it, is a very limited selection of well-worn debates on a few arbitrarily chosen "problems." Those questions have developed a technique and an interest in them for their own sake. They are handled with a dull solemnity quite out of proportion to their real interest. Labor receives only a perfunctory and largely disingenuous attention; even commerce is handled in a way that expresses neither its direction nor its public use. Congress has been ready enough to grant favors to corporations, but where in its wrangling from the Sherman Act to the Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic understanding of the constructive purposes in the trust movement? It has either presented the business man with money or harassed him with bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of the consumer. The one thing Congress has not done is to use the talents of business men for the nation's advantage. If "politics" has been indifferent to forces like the union and the trust, it is no exaggeration to say that it has displayed a modest ignorance of women's problems, of educational conflicts and racial aspirations; of the control of newspapers and magazines, the book publishing world, socialist conventions and unofficial political groups like the single-taxers. Such genuine powers do not absorb our political interest because we are fooled by the regalia of office. But statesmanship, if it is to be relevant, would obtain a new perspective on these dynamic currents, would find out the wants they express and the energies they contain, would shape and direct and guide them. For unions and trusts, sects, clubs and voluntary associations stand for actual needs. The size of their following, the intensity of their demands are a fair index of what the statesman must think about. No lawyer created a trust though he drew up its charter; no logician made the labor movement or the feminist agitation. If you ask what for political purposes a nation is, a practical answer would be: it is its "movements." They are the social _life_. So far as the future is man-made it is made of them. They show their real vitality by a relentless growth in spite of all the little fences and obstacles that foolish politicians devise. There is, of course, much that is dead within the movements. Each one carries along a quantity of inert and outworn ideas,--not infrequently there is an internally contradictory current. Thus the very workingmen who agitate for a better diffusion of wealth display a marked hostility to improvements in the production of it. The feminists too have their atavisms: not a few who object to the patriarchal family seem inclined to cure it by going back still more--to the matriarchal. Constructive business has no end of reactionary moments----the most striking, perhaps, is when it buys up patents in order to suppress them. Yet these inversions, though discouraging, are not essential in the life of movements. They need to be expurgated by an unceasing criticism; yet in bulk the forces I have mentioned, and many others less important, carry with them the creative powers of our times. It is not surprising that so many political inventions have been made within these movements, fostered by them, and brought to a general public notice through their efforts. When some constructive proposal is being agitated before a legislative committee, it is customary to unite the "movements" in support of it. Trade unions and women's clubs have joined hands in many an agitation. There are proposals to-day, like the minimum wage, which seem sure of support from consumers' leagues, women's federations, trade unions and those far-sighted business men who may be called "State Socialists." In fact, unless a political invention is woven into a social movement it has no importance. Only when that is done is it imbued with life. But how among countless suggestions is a "cause" to know the difference between a true invention and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible touchstone by which we can tell offhand. No one need hope for an easy certainty either here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one is absolved from experiment and constant revision. Yet there are some hypotheses that prima facie deserve more attention than others. Those are the suggestions which come out of a recognized human need. If a man proposed that the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from nine to seven because the number seven has mystical power, we could ignore him. But if he suggested that the number be reduced because seven men can deliberate more effectively than nine he ought to be given a hearing. Or let us suppose that the argument is about granting votes to women. The suffragist who bases a claim on the so-called "logic of democracy" is making the poorest possible showing for a good cause. I have heard people maintain that: "it makes no difference whether women want the ballot, or are fit for it, or can do any good with it,--this country is a democracy. Democracy means government by the votes of the people. Women are people. Therefore women should vote." That in a very simple form is the mechanical conception of government. For notice how it ignores human wants and human powers--how it subordinates people to a rigid formula. I use this crude example because it shows that even the most genuine and deeply grounded demands are as yet unable to free themselves entirely from a superficial manner of thinking. We are only partially emancipated from the mechanical and merely logical tradition of the Eighteenth Century. No end of illustrations could be adduced. In the Socialist party it has been the custom to denounce the "short ballot." Why? Because it reduces the number of elective offices. This is regarded as undemocratic for the reason that democracy has come to mean a series of elections. According to a logic, the more elections the more democratic. But experience has shown that a seven-foot ballot with a regiment of names is so bewildering that a real choice is impossible. So it is proposed to cut down the number of elective offices, focus the attention on a few alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter. The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because "logic" requires them to. This incident of the "short ballot" illustrates the cleavage between invention and routine. The socialists oppose it not because their intentions are bad but because on this issue their thinking is mechanical. Instead of applying the test of human need, they apply a verbal and logical consistency. The "short ballot" in itself is a slight affair, but the insight behind it seems to me capable of revolutionary development. It is one symptom of the effort to found institutions on human nature. There are many others. We might point to the first experiments aimed at remedying the helter-skelter of careers by vocational guidance. Carried through successfully, this invention of Prof. Parsons' is one whose significance in happiness can hardly be exaggerated. When you think of the misfits among your acquaintances--the lawyers who should be mechanics, the doctors who should be business men, the teachers who should have been clerks, and the executives who should be doing research in a laboratory--when you think of the talent that would be released by proper use, the imagination takes wing at the possibilities. What could we not make of the world if we employed its genius! Whoever is working to express special energies is part of a constructive revolution. Whoever is removing the stunting environments of our occupations is doing the fundamentals of reform. The studies of Miss Goldmark of industrial fatigue, recuperative power and maximum productivity are contributions toward that distant and desirable period when labor shall be a free and joyous activity. Every suggestion which turns work from a drudgery to a craft is worth our deepest interest. For until then the labor problem will never be solved. The socialist demand for a better distribution of wealth is of great consequence, but without a change in the very nature of labor society will not have achieved the happiness it expects. That is why imaginative socialists have shown so great an interest in "syndicalism." There at least in some of its forms, we can catch sight of a desire to make all labor a self-governing craft. The handling of crime has been touched by the modern impetus. The ancient, abstract and wholesale "justice" is breaking up into detailed and carefully adapted treatment of individual offenders. What this means for the child has become common knowledge in late years. Criminology (to use an awkward word) is finding a human center. So is education. Everyone knows how child study is revolutionizing the school room and the curriculum. Why, it seems that Mme. Montessori has had the audacity to sacrifice the sacred bench to the interests of the pupil! The traditional school seems to be vanishing--that place in which an ill-assorted band of youngsters was for a certain number of hours each day placed in the vicinity of a text-book and a maiden lady. I mention these experiments at random. It is not the specific reforms that I wish to emphasize but the great possibilities they foreshadow. Whether or not we adopt certain special bills, high tariff or low tariff, one banking system or another, this trust control or that, is a slight gain compared to a change of attitude toward all political problems. The reformer bound up in his special propaganda will, of course, object that "to get something done is worth more than any amount of talk about new ways of looking at political problems." What matters the method, he will cry, provided the reform be good? Well, the method matters more than any particular reform. A man who couldn't think straight might get the right answer to one problem, but how much faith would you have in his capacity to solve the next one? If you wanted to educate a child, would you teach him to read one play of Shakespeare, or would you teach him to _read_? If the world were going to remain frigidly set after next year, we might well thank our stars if we blundered into a few decent solutions right away. But as there is no prospect of a time when our life will be immutably fixed, as we shall, therefore, have to go on inventing, it is fair to say that what the world is aching for is not a special reform embodied in a particular statute, but a way of going at all problems. The lasting value of Darwin, for example, is not in any concrete conclusion he reached. His importance to the world lies in the new twist he gave to science. He lent it fruitful direction, a different impetus, and the results are beyond his imagining. In that spiritual autobiography of a searching mind, "The New Machiavelli," Wells describes his progress from a reformer of concrete abuses to a revolutionist in method. "You see," he says, "I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and harbors for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of a contemporary mind...." This same veering of interest may be seen in the career of another Englishman. I refer to Mr. Graham Wallas. Back in the '80's he was working with the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Olivier, Annie Besant and others in socialist propaganda. Readers of the Fabian Essays know Mr. Wallas and appreciate the work of his group. Perhaps more than anyone else, the Fabians are responsible for turning English socialist thought from the verbalism of the Marxian disciples to the actualities of English political life. Their appetite for the concrete was enormous; their knowledge of facts overpowering, as the tomes produced by Mr. and Mrs. Webb can testify. The socialism of the Fabians soon became a definite legislative program which the various political parties were to be bulldozed, cajoled and tricked into enacting. It was effective work, and few can question the value of it. Yet many admirers have been left with a sense of inadequacy. Unlike the orthodox socialists, the Fabians took an active part in immediate politics. "We permeated the party organizations," writes Shaw, "and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands on with our utmost adroitness and energy.... The generalship of this movement was undertaken chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both the Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand aghast at him." Few Americans know how great has been this influence on English political history for the last twenty years. The well-known Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission bears the Webb signature most conspicuously. Fabianism began to achieve a reputation for getting things done--for taking part in "practical affairs." Bernard Shaw has found time to do no end of campaigning and even the parochial politics of a vestryman has not seemed too insignificant for his Fabian enthusiasm. Graham Wallas was a candidate in five municipal elections, and has held an important office as member of the London County Council. But the original Fabian enthusiasm has slackened. One might ascribe it to a growing sense that concrete programs by themselves will not insure any profound regeneration of society. H. G. Wells has been savage and often unfair about the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli" he touched, I believe, the real disillusionment. Remington's history is in a way symbolic. Here was a successful political reformer, coming more and more to a disturbing recognition of his helplessness, perceiving the aimlessness and the unreality of political life, and announcing his contempt for the "crudification" of all issues. What Remington missed was what so many reformers are beginning to miss--an underlying philosophical habit. Mr. Wallas seems to have had much the same experience. In the midst of a bustle of activity, politics appeared to have no center to which its thinking and doing could be referred. The truth was driven home upon him that political science is a science of human relationship with the human beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers of the past, from Plato to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and they made these views the basis of their speculations on government." But to-day "nearly all students of politics analyze institutions and avoid the analysis of man." Whoever has read the typical book on politics by a professor or a reformer will agree, I think, when he adds: "One feels that many of the more systematic books on politics by American University professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men, formed on assumptions of which they were unaware and which they have never tested either by experience or by study." An extreme example could be made of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University. In the space of six months he wrote an impassioned defense of "constitutional government," beginning with the question, "Why is it that in the United States the words politics and politician have associations that are chiefly of evil omen," and then, to make irony complete, proceeded at the New York State Republican Convention to do the jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life? What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naïveté was it that led this educator into asking such a question? President Butler is, I grant, a caricature of the typical professor. Yet what shall we say of the annual harvest of treatises on "labor problems" which make no analysis of the mental condition of laboring men; of the treatises on marriage and prostitution which gloss over the sexual life of the individual? "In the other sciences which deal with human affairs," writes Mr. Wallas, referring to pedagogy and criminology, "this division between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does it is not found." I have in my hands a text-book of six hundred pages which is used in the largest universities as a groundwork of political economy. This remarkable sentence strikes the eye: "The motives to business activity are too familiar to require analysis." But some sense that perhaps the "economic man" is not a self-evident creature seems to have touched our author. So we are treated to these sapient remarks: "To avoid this criticism we will begin with a characterization of the typical business man to be found to-day in the United States and other countries in the same stage of industrial development. _He has four traits which show themselves more or less clearly in all of his acts._" They are first "self-interest," but "this does not mean that he is steeped in selfishness ..."; secondly, "the larger self," the family, union, club, and "in times of emergency his country"; thirdly, "love of independence," for "his ambition is to stand on his own feet"; fourthly, "business ethics" which "are not usually as high as the standards professed in churches, but they are much higher than current criticisms of business would lead one to think." Three-quarters of a page is sufficient for this penetrating analysis of motive and is followed by the remark that "these four characteristics of the economic man are readily explained by reference to the evolutionary process which has brought industrial society to its present stage of development." If those were the generalizations of a tired business man after a heavy dinner and a big cigar, they would still seem rather muddled and useless. But as the basis of an economic treatise in which "laws" are announced, "principles" laid down, reforms criticized as "impracticable," all for the benefit of thousands of college students, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the folly of such an exhibition. I have taken a book written by one eminent professor and evidently approved by others, for they use it as a text-book. It is no queer freak. I myself was supposed to read that book pretty nearly every week for a year. With hundreds of others I was supposed to found my economic understanding upon it. We were actually punished for not reading that book. It was given to us as wisdom, as modern political economy. But what goes by the name to-day is a potpourri in which one can distinguish descriptions of legal forms, charters and institutions; comparative studies of governmental and social machinery; the history of institutions, a few "principles" like the law of rent, some moral admonitions, a good deal of class feeling, not a little timidity--but almost no attempt to cut beneath these manifestations of social life to the creative impulses which produce them. The Economic Man--that lazy abstraction--is still paraded in the lecture room; the study of human nature has not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives. Graham Wallas touched the cause of the trouble when he pointed out that political science to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature of the men who make and live under them. I have heard professors reply that it wasn't their business to discuss human nature but to record and interpret economic and political facts. Yet if you probe those "interpretations" there is no escaping the conclusion that they rest upon some notion of what man is like. "The student of politics," writes Mr. Wallas, "must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely he is to be dominated by it." For politics is an interest of men--a tool which they fabricate and use--and no comment has much value if it tries to get along without mankind. You might as well try to describe food by ignoring the digestion. Mr. Wallas has called a halt. I think we may say that his is the distinction of having turned the study of politics back to the humane tradition of Plato and Machiavelli--of having made man the center of political investigation. The very title of his book--"Human Nature in Politics"--is significant. Now in making that statement, I am aware that it is a sweeping one, and I do not mean to imply that Mr. Wallas is the only modern man who has tried to think about politics psychologically. Here in America alone we have two splendid critics, a man and a woman, whose thought flows from an interpretation of human character. Thorstein Veblen's brilliant descriptions penetrate deeply into our mental life, and Jane Addams has given new hope to many of us by her capacity for making ideals the goal of natural desire. Nor is it just to pass by such a suggestive thinker as Gabriel Tarde, even though we may feel that his psychology is too simple and his conclusions somewhat overdriven by a favorite theory. The work of Gustav Le Bon on "crowds" has, of course, passed into current thought, but I doubt whether anyone could say that he had even prepared a basis for a new political psychology. His own aversion to reform, his fondness for vast epochs and his contempt for current effort have left most of his "psychological laws" in the region of interesting literary comment. There are, too, any number of "social psychologies," such as those of Ross and McDougall. But the trouble with them is that the "psychology" is weak and uninformed, distorted by moral enthusiasms, and put out without any particular reference to the task of statesmanship. When you come to special problems, the literature of the subject picks up. Crime is receiving valuable attention, education is profoundly affected, alcoholism and sex have been handled for a good while on a psychological basis. But it remained for Mr. Wallas to state the philosophy of the matter--to say why the study of human nature must serve politics, and to point out how. He has not produced a political psychology, but he has written the manifesto for it. As a result, fragmentary investigations can be brought together and applied to the work of statecraft. Merely by making these researches self-conscious, he has made clearer their goal, given them direction, and kindled them to practical action. How necessary this work is can be seen in the writing of Miss Addams. Owing to keen insight and fine sympathy her thinking has generally been on a human basis. Yet Miss Addams is a reformer, and sympathy without an explicit philosophy may lead to a distorted enthusiasm. Her book on prostitution seems rather the product of her moral fervor than her human insight. Compare it with "The Spirit of Youth" or "Newer Ideals of Peace" or "Democracy and Social Ethics" and I think you will notice a very considerable willingness to gloss over human need in the interests of an unanalyzed reform. To put it bluntly, Miss Addams let her impatience get the better of her wisdom. She had written brilliantly about sex and its "sublimation," she had suggested notable "moral equivalents" for vice, but when she touched the white slave traffic its horrors were so great that she also put her faith in the policeman and the district attorney. "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" is an hysterical book, just because the real philosophical basis of Miss Addams' thinking was not deliberate enough to withstand the shock of a poignant horror. It is this weakness that Mr. Wallas comes to remedy. He has described what political science must be like, and anyone who has absorbed his insight has an intellectual groundwork for political observation. No one, least of all Mr. Wallas, would claim anything like finality for the essay. These labors are not done in a day. But he has deliberately brought the study of politics to the only focus which has any rational interest for mankind. He has made a plea, and sketched a plan which hundreds of investigators the world over must help to realize. If political science could travel in the direction suggested, its criticism would be relevant, its proposals practical. There would, for the first time, be a concerted effort to build a civilization around mankind, to use its talent and to satisfy its needs. There would be no more empty taboos, no erecting of institutions upon abstract and mechanical analogies. Politics would be like education--an effort to develop, train and nurture men's impulses. As Montessori is building the school around the child, so politics would build all of social life around the human being. That practical issues hang upon these investigations can be shown by an example from Mr. Wallas's book. Take the quarrel over socialism. You hear it said that without the private ownership of capital people will lose ambition and sink into sloth. Many men, just as well aware of present-day evils as the socialists, are unwilling to accept the collectivist remedy. G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc speak of the "magic of property" as the real obstacle to socialism. Now obviously this is a question of first-rate importance. If socialism will destroy initiative then only a doctrinaire would desire it. But how is the question to be solved? You cannot reason it out. Economics, as we know it to-day, is quite incapable of answering such a problem, for it is a matter that depends upon psychological investigation. When a professor says that socialism is impracticable he begs the question, for that amounts to assuming that the point at issue is already settled. If he tells you that socialism is against human nature, we have a perfect right to ask where he proved the possibilities of human nature. But note how Mr. Wallas approaches the debate: "Children quarrel furiously at a very early age over apparently worthless things, and collect and hide them long before they can have any clear notion of the advantages to be derived from individual possession. Those children who in certain charity schools are brought up entirely without personal property, even in their clothes or pocket handkerchiefs, show every sign of the bad effect on health and character which results from complete inability to satisfy a strong inherited instinct.... Some economist ought therefore to give us a treatise in which this property instinct is carefully and quantitatively examined.... How far can it be eliminated or modified by education? Is it satisfied by a leasehold or a life-interest, or by such an arrangement of corporate property as is offered by a collegiate foundation, or by the provision of a public park? Does it require for its satisfaction material and visible things such as land or houses, or is the holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is the absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more strongly in the case of personal chattels (such as furniture and ornaments) than in the case of land or machinery? Does the degree and direction of the instinct markedly differ among different individuals or races, or between the two sexes?" This puts the argument upon a plane where discussion is relevant. This is no trumped-up issue: it is asked by a politician and a socialist seeking for a real solution. We need to know whether the "magic of property" extends from a man's garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists say, and, conversely, we need to know what is happening to that mass of proletarians who own no property and cannot satisfy their instincts even with personal chattels. For if ownership is a human need, we certainly cannot taboo it as the extreme communists so dogmatically urge. "Pending ... an inquiry," writes Mr. Wallas, "my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an avowed pretense; just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk can be kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinct by playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies his instinct of combat and adventure at golf." Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as William James did when he planned a "moral equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the changing focus of political thought. Both try to found statesmanship on human need. Both see that there are good and bad satisfactions of the same impulse. The routineer with his taboo does not see this, so he attempts the impossible task of obliterating the impulse. He differs fundamentally from the creative politician who devotes himself to inventing fine expressions for human needs, who recognizes that the work of statesmanship is in large measure the finding of good substitutes for the bad things we want. This is the heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents of our national life and explains the altering tasks of statesmanship. The old effort was to harness mankind to abstract principles--liberty, justice or equality--and to deduce institutions from these high-sounding words. It did not succeed because human nature was contrary and restive. The new effort proposes to fit creeds and institutions to the wants of men, to satisfy their impulses as fully and beneficially as possible. And yet we do not begin to know our desires or the art of their satisfaction. Mr. Wallas's book and the special literature of the subject leave no doubt that a precise political psychology is far off indeed. The human nature we must put at the center of our statesmanship is only partially understood. True, Mr. Wallas works with a psychology that is fairly well superseded. But not even the advance-guard to-day, what we may call the Freudian school, would claim that it had brought knowledge to a point where politics could use it in any very deep or comprehensive way. The subject is crude and fragmentary, though we are entitled to call it promising. Yet the fact had better be faced: psychology has not gone far enough, its results are still too vague for our purposes. We know very little, and what we know has hardly been applied to political problems. That the last few years have witnessed a revolution in the study of mental life is plain: the effects are felt not only in psychotherapy, but in education, morals, religion, and no end of cultural interests. The impetus of Freud is perhaps the greatest advance ever made towards the understanding and control of human character. But for the complexities of politics it is not yet ready. It will take time and endless labor for a detailed study of social problems in the light of this growing knowledge. What then shall we do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works of the scientists are matured? CHAPTER IV THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance for a nation to sit still and wait for its scientists to report on their labors. The notion is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist who does not correct his logic by a constant reference to the movement of life. It is true that statecraft must make human nature its basis. It is true that its chief task is the invention of forms and institutions which satisfy the inner needs of mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of those needs and the technique of their satisfaction is hazy, unorganized and blundering. But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting for monographs from the research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: a thousand unconscious economic and social forces were compelling the change. Adam Smith expressed the process, named it, idealized it and made it self-conscious. Then because men were clearer about what they were doing, they could in a measure direct their destiny. That is but another way of saying that great revolutionary changes do not spring full-armed from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes the luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see better by the light of him. His bias deflects their actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven men who made the economics of the last century had much to do with the halo which encircled the smutted head of industrialism. They put the stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices, and of course it has been the part of the academic mind to imitate them ever since. The orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a formless resentment by endowing it with intelligence and will. So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,--vastly confused in the tangled strains of the nation's interests. Clogged by the confusion, half-choked by stupid blockades, largely unaware of their own purposes, it is for criticism, organized research, and artistic expression to free and to use these creative energies. They are to be found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened women, in the development of business, the diffusion of art and science, in the racial mixtures, and many lesser interests which cluster about these greater movements. The desire for a human politics is all about us. It rises to the surface in slogans like "human rights above property rights," "the man above the dollar." Some measure of its strength is given by the widespread imitation these expressions have compelled: politicians who haven't the slightest intention of putting men above the dollar, who if they had wouldn't know how, take off their hats to the sentiment because it seems a key to popular enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men brought up, let us say, in the Hanna school of politics. For here is this nation which sixteen years ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word "Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about size induces little but excessive boredom. If you wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell it how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself an echo of the past talk to us young men about the Republican Party's understanding with God in respect to bumper crops. But talk to us about "human rights," and though you talk rubbish, we'll listen. For our desire is bent that way, and anything which has the flavor of this new interest will rivet our attention. We are still uncritical. It is only a few years since we began to center our politics upon human beings. We have no training in that kind of thought. Our schools and colleges have helped us hardly at all. We still talk about "humanity" as if it were some strange and mystical creature which could not possibly be composed of the grocer, the street-car conductor and our aunts. That the opinion-making people of America are more interested in human welfare than in empire or abstract prosperity is an item that no statesman can disregard in his thinking. To-day it is no longer necessary to run against the grain of the deepest movements of our time. There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness. This feeling has not always existed. Historians tell us that the very idea of progress in well-being is not much older than, say, Shakespeare's plays. As a general belief it is still more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps be said to mark its popularization. But as a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone applied quickly to all the acts of statecraft in America it belongs to the Twentieth Century. There were any number of people who long before 1900 saw that dollars and men could clash. But their insight had not won any general acceptance. It is only within the last few years that the human test has ceased to be the property of a small group and become the convention of a large majority. A study of magazines and newspapers would confirm this rather broad generalization. It would show, I believe, how the whole quality of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced by human values. The statesman must look to this largely unorganized drift of desire. He will find it clustering about certain big revolts--the unrest of women, for example, or the increasing demands of industrial workers. Rightly understood, these social currents would, I believe, lead to the central issues of life, the vital points upon which happiness depends. They come out of necessities. They express desire. They are power. Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The vote has become a convenient peg upon which to hang aspirations that are not at all sure of their own meaning. In no insignificant number of cases the vote is a cover by which revolutionary demands can be given a conventional front. The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted conservatives have guessed. Certainly the elimination of "male" from the suffrage qualifications will not end the feminist agitation. From the angle of statecraft the future of the movement may be said to depend upon the wise use of this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend to know in detail how this can be done. But I am certain that the task of leadership is to organize aspiration in the service of the real interests of life. To-day women want--what? They are ready to want something: that describes fairly the condition of most suffragettes. Those who like Ellen Key and Olive Shreiner and Mrs. Gilman give them real problems to think about are drafting that energy into use. By real problems I mean problems of love, work, home, children. They are the real interests of feminism because they have produced it. The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of needs, they point the course of invention, they are the energies which animate a social program. The most ideally conceived plan of the human mind has only a slight interest if it does not harness these instinctive forces. That is the great lesson which the utopias teach by their failure--that schemes, however nicely arranged, cannot be imposed upon human beings who are interested in other things. What ailed Don Quixote was that he and his contemporaries wanted different things; the only ideals that count are those which express the possible development of an existing force. Reformers must never forget that three legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine one. In actual life, yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements," "causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example, could on the surface be more trivial than an interest in baseball scores. Yet during the campaign of 1912 the excitement was so great that Woodrow Wilson said on the stump he felt like apologizing to the American people for daring to be a presidential candidate while the Giants and the Red Sox were playing for the championship. Baseball (not so much for those who play it), is a colossal phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious excitement and an abstract relief from the monotony of their own lives. What a second-hand civilization it is that grows passionate over a scoreboard with little electric lights! What a civilization it is that has learned to enjoy its sport without even seeing it! If ever there was a symptom that this nation needed leisure and direct participation in games, it is that poor scrawny substitute for joy--the baseball extra. It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses need. And statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks very different--the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph. But that is only because we have not accustomed ourselves to thinking of social events as answers to human needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there syndicalists? What are they driving at? What gift to civilization is in the impetus behind them? They are human beings, and they want human things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken about them. They seem to want things badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot deal with them. Anarchism--men die for that, they undergo intolerable insults. They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them entirely in our thinking? We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal of agitations. Our present method is to discuss whether the proposals are right and feasible. We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally we decide that any agitation foreign to our settled habits is wrong. And we bolster up our satisfaction by pointing to some mistake of logic or some puerility of statement. That done, we feel the agitation is deplorable and can be ignored unless it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it in jail. But a genuine statecraft would go deeper. It would know that even God has been defended with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations. I use the word sympathetic literally. For it would try to understand the inner feeling which had generated what looks like a silly demand. To-day it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible food, and we let him go hungry because he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because he asks for the wrong food. So with agitations. Their specific plans may be silly, but their demands are real. The hungers and lusts of mankind have produced some stupendous follies, but the desires themselves are no less real and insistent. The important thing about a social movement is not its stated platform but the source from which it flows. The task of politics is to understand those deeper demands and to find civilized satisfactions for them. The meaning of this is that the statesman must be more than the leader of a party. Thus the socialist statesman is not complete if he is a good socialist. Only the delusion that his truth is the whole truth, his party the human race, and his program a panacea, will produce that singleness of vision. The moment a man takes office he has no right to be the representative of one group alone. He has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular agitations with the general welfare. That is why great agitators should not accept office. Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and the statesman are both needed. But they have different functions, and it is unjust to damn one because he hasn't the virtues of the other. The statesman to-day needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power. Standing upon the prestige which that gives he must guide and purify the social demands he finds at work. He is the translator of agitations. For this task he must be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable of understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order to fuse it into a civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his supreme business to see that the servants of life stay in their place--that government, industry, "causes," science, all the creatures of man do not succeed in their perpetual effort to become the masters. I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political thinking. And indeed, why shouldn't he? What reality could there be in comments upon American politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of Roosevelt? If he is wholly evil, as many say he is, then the American democracy is preponderantly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth Century, Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few presidents have spoken in our history. And that he has spoken well, who in the perspective of time will deny? Sensitive to the original forces of public opinion, no man has had the same power of rounding up the laggards. Government under him was a throbbing human purpose. He succeeded, where Taft failed, in preventing that drought of invention which officialism brings. Many people say he has tried to be all things to all men--that his speeches are an attempt to corral all sorts of votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a truth. A more generous interpretation would be to say that he had tried to be inclusive, to attach a hundred sectional agitations to a national program. Crude: of course he was crude; he had a hemisphere for his canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he tried to be the leader of factions at war with one another. A late convert: he is a statesman and not an agitator--his business was to meet demands when they had grown to national proportions. No end of possibilities have slipped through the large meshes of his net. He has said some silly things. He has not been subtle, and he has been far from perfect. But his success should be judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness of the opposition, by the intellectual qualities of the nation he represented. When we remember that he was trained in the Republican politics of Hanna and Platt, that he was the first President who shared a new social vision, then I believe we need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roosevelt stand as the working model for a possible American statesman at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Critics have often suggested that Roosevelt stole Bryan's clothes. That is perhaps true, and it suggests a comparison which illuminates both men. It would not be unfair to say that it is always the function of the Roosevelts to take from the Bryans. But it is a little silly for an agitator to cry thief when the success of his agitation has led to the adoption of his ideas. It is like the chagrin of the socialists because the National Progressive Party had "stolen twenty-three planks," and it makes a person wonder whether some agitators haven't an overdeveloped sense of private property. I do not see the statesman in Bryan. He has been something of a voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that did not understand its own message. Many people talk of him as a prophet. There is a great deal of literal truth in that remark, for it has been the peculiar work of Bryan to express in politics some of that emotion which has made America the home of new religions. What we know as the scientific habit of mind is entirely lacking in his intellectual equipment. There is a vein of mysticism in American life, and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet. His insights are those of the gifted evangelist, often profound and always narrow. It is absurd to debate his sincerity. Mr. Bryan talks with the intoxication of the man who has had a revelation: to skeptics that always seems theatrical. But far from being the scheming hypocrite his enemies say he is, Mr. Bryan is too simple for the task of statesmanship. No bracing critical atmosphere plays about his mind: there are no cleansing doubts and fruitful alternatives. The work of Bryan has been to express a certain feeling of unrest--to embody it in the traditional language of prophecy. But it is a shrewd turn of the American people that has kept him out of office. I say this not in disrespect of his qualities, but in definition of them. Bryan does not happen to have the naturalistic outlook, the complete humanity, or the deliberative habit which modern statecraft requires. He is the voice of a confused emotion. Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is Bryan's chief defect--the scientific habit of holding facts in solution. His mind is lucid and flexible, and he has the faculty of taking advice quickly, of stating something he has borrowed with more ease and subtlety than the specialist from whom he got it. Woodrow Wilson's is an elegant and highly refined intellect, nicely balanced and capable of fine adjustment. An urbane civilization produced it, leisure has given it spaciousness, ease has made it generous. A mind without tension, its roots are not in the somewhat barbarous under-currents of the nation. Woodrow Wilson understands easily, but he does not incarnate: he has never been a part of the protest he speaks. You think of him as a good counsellor, as an excellent presiding officer. Whether his imagination is fibrous enough to catch the inwardness of the mutterings of our age is something experience alone can show. Wilson has class feeling in the least offensive sense of that term: he likes a world of gentlemen. Occasionally he has exhibited a rather amateurish effort to be grimy and shirt-sleeved. But without much success: his contact with American life is not direct, and so he is capable of purely theoretical affirmations. Like all essentially contemplative men, the world has to be reflected in the medium of his intellect before he can grapple with it. Yet Wilson belongs among the statesmen, and it is fine that he should be in public life. The weakness I have suggested is one that all statesmen share in some degree: an inability to interpret adequately the world they govern. This is a difficulty which is common to conservative and radical, and if I have used three living men to illustrate the problem it is only because they seem to illuminate it. They have faced the task and we can take their measurement. It is no part of my purpose to make any judgment as to the value of particular policies they have advocated. I am attempting to suggest some of the essentials of a statesman's equipment for the work of a humanly centered politics. Roosevelt has seemed to me the most effective, the most nearly complete; Bryan I have ventured to class with the men who though important to politics should never hold high executive office; Wilson, less complete than Roosevelt, is worthy of our deepest interest because his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship. Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been able to see the problem that any finely adapted statecraft must meet. It is a problem that would hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician: "Though he (the statesman) cannot himself keep the life of the nation as a whole in his mind, he can at least make sure that he is taking counsel with those who know...." It is not important that Wilson in stating the difficulty should put it as if he had in a measure solved it. He hasn't, because taking counsel is a means to understanding the nation as a whole, and that understanding remains almost as arduous and requires just as fibrous an imagination, if it is gleaned from advisers. To think of the whole nation: surely the task of statesmanship is more difficult to-day than ever before in history. In the face of a clotted intricacy in the subject-matter of politics, improvements in knowledge seem meager indeed. The distance between what we know and what we need to know appears to be greater than ever. Plato and Aristotle thought in terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before, plumped down on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. We have to deal with all grades of life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men who differ in sense of fact, in ideal, in the very groundwork of morals. And we have to take into account not the simple opposition of two classes, but the hostility of many,--the farmers and the factory workers and all the castes within their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal organization of business. Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people. Nor can we keep to the problem within our borders. Whether we wish it or not we are involved in the world's problems, and all the winds of heaven blow through our land. * * * * * It is a great question whether our intellects can grasp the subject. Are we perhaps like a child whose hand is too small to span an octave on the piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated, but the natural ideals of people are so varied and contradictory that action halts in despair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon the mind, and the results are all about us: everyone has known the neutral thinkers who stand forever undecided before the complications of life, who have, as it were, caught a glimpse of the possibilities of knowledge. The sight has paralyzed them. Unless they can act with certainty, they dare not act at all. That is merely one of the temptations of theory. In the real world, action and thought are so closely related that one cannot wait upon the other. We cannot wait in politics for any completed theoretical discussion of its method: it is a monstrous demand. There is no pausing until political psychology is more certain. We have to act on what we believe, on half-knowledge, illusion and error. Experience itself will reveal our mistakes; research and criticism may convert them into wisdom. But act we must, and act as if we knew the nature of man and proposed to satisfy his needs. In other words, we must put man at the center of politics, even though we are densely ignorant both of man and of politics. This has always been the method of great political thinkers from Plato to Bentham. But one difference we in this age must note: they made their political man a dogma--we must leave him an hypothesis. That is to say that our task is to temper speculation with scientific humility. A paradox there is here, but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured disease before they knew medicine. Art came before æsthetics, and righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other. Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by action, and action is guided by hypothesis. If it is a paradox to ask for a human politics before we understand humanity or politics, it is what Mr. Chesterton describes as one of those paradoxes that sit beside the wells of truth. * * * * * We make our picture of man, knowing that, though it is crude and unjust, we have to work with it. If we are wise we shall become experimental towards life: then every mistake will contribute towards knowledge. Let the exploration of human need and desire become a deliberate purpose of statecraft, and there is no present measure of its possibilities. In this work there are many guides. A vague common tradition is in the air about us--it expresses itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in the uncritical theater. Every merchant has his stock of assumptions about the mental habits of his customers and competitors; the prostitute hers; the newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had a few; the vaudeville stage has a number. We test these notions by their results, and even "practical people" find that there is more variety in human nature than they had supposed. We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world--introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably--that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves. For after all, the only experience we really understand is our own. And that, in the least of us, is so rich that no one has yet exhausted its possibilities. It has been said that every genuine character an artist produces is one of the characters he might have been. By re-creating our own suppressed possibilities we multiply the number of lives that we can really know. That as I understand it is the psychology of the Golden Rule. For note that Jesus did not set up some external fetich: he did not say, make your neighbor righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said do as you would be done by. Assume that you and he are alike, and you can found morals on humanity. But experience has enlarged our knowledge of differences. We realize now that our neighbor is not always like ourselves. Knowing how unjust other people's inferences are when they concern us, we have begun to guess that ours may be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct becomes at once an impossible ideal, and the willingness to live and let live assumes high place among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks that "it takes all sorts of people to make a world," and half-protestingly men accept Bernard Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." We learn perhaps that there is no contradiction in speaking of "human nature" while admitting that men are unique. For all deepening of our knowledge gives a greater sense of common likeness and individual variation. It is folly to ignore either insight. But it is done constantly, with no end of confusion as a result. Some men have got themselves into a state where the only view that interests them is the common humanity of us all. Their world is not populated by men and women, but by a Unity that is Permanent. You might as well refuse to see any differences between steam, water and ice because they have common elements. And I have seen some of these people trying to skate on steam. Their brothers, blind in the other eye, go about the world so sure that each person is entirely unique, that society becomes like a row of packing cases, each painted on the inside, and each containing one ego and its own. Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others. That is not the only use of art, for its function is surely greater and more ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowledge of human nature. Nor is that its only use even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art enters politics as a "moral equivalent" for evil, a medium by which barbarous lusts find civilized expression. It is, too, an ideal for labor. But my purpose here is not to attempt any adequate description of the services of art. It is enough to note that literature in particular elaborates our insight into human life, and, therefore, enables us to center our institutions more truly. Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is absorbed into the common knowledge of the age. Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays and novels have indeed an overwhelming political importance, as the "moderns" have maintained. But it lies not in the preaching of a doctrine or the insistence on some particular change in conduct. That is a shallow and wasteful use of the resources of art. For art can open up the springs from which conduct flows. Its genuine influence is on what Wells calls the "hinterland," in a quickening of the sense of life. Art can really penetrate where most of us can only observe. "I look and I think I see," writes Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.... (But) my senses and my consciousness ... give me no more than a practical simplification of reality ... in short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them." Who has not known this in thinking of politics? We talk of poverty and forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy--we forget the vagrant. Some of our best-intentioned political schemes, like reform colonies and scientific jails, turn out to be inhuman tyrannies just because our imagination does not penetrate the sociological label. "We move amidst generalities and symbols ... we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, external to things, external also to ourselves." This is what works of art help to correct: "Behind the commonplace, conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they attain in its undefiled essence." This directness of vision fertilizes thought. Without a strong artistic tradition, the life and so the politics of a nation sink into a barren routine. A country populated by pure logicians and mathematical scientists would, I believe, produce few inventions. For creation, even of scientific truth, is no automatic product of logical thought or scientific method, and it has been well said that the greatest discoveries in science are brilliant guesses on insufficient evidence. A nation must, so to speak, live close to its own life, be intimate and sympathetic with natural events. That is what gives understanding, and justifies the observation that the intuitions of scientific discovery and the artist's perceptions are closely related. It is perhaps not altogether without significance for us that primitive science and poetry were indistinguishable. Nor is it strange that latter-day research should confirm so many sayings of the poets. In all great ages art and science have enriched each other. It is only eccentric poets and narrow specialists who lock the doors. The human spirit doesn't grow in sections. I shall not press the point for it would lead us far afield. It is enough that we remember the close alliance of art, science and politics in Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith. We in America have divorced them completely: both art and politics exist in a condition of unnatural celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor to the futility and opacity of our political thinking? We have handed over the government of a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a class of men who deal in the most verbal and unreal of all human attainments. A lively artistic tradition is essential to the humanizing of politics. It is the soil in which invention flourishes and the organized knowledge of science attains its greatest reality. Let me illustrate from another field of interests. The religious investigations of William James were a study, not of ecclesiastical institutions or the history of creeds. They were concerned with religious experience, of which churches and rituals are nothing but the external satisfaction. As Graham Wallas is endeavoring to make human nature the center of politics, so James made it the center of religions. It was a work of genius, yet no one would claim that it is a mature psychology of the "Varieties of Religious Experience." It is rather a survey and a description, done with the eye of an artist and the method of a scientist. We know from it more of what religious feeling is like, even though we remain ignorant of its sources. And this intimacy humanizes religious controversy and brings ecclesiasticism back to men. Like most of James's psychology, it opens up investigation instead of concluding it. In the light even of our present knowledge we can see how primitive his treatment was. But James's services cannot be overestimated: if he did not lay even the foundations of a science, he did lay some of the foundations for research. It was an immense illumination and a warming of interest. It threw open the gates to the whole landscape of possibilities. It was a ventilation of thought. Something similar will have to be done for political psychology. We know how far off is the profound and precise knowledge we desire. But we know too that we have a right to hope for an increasing acquaintance with the varieties of political experience. It would, of course, be drawn from biography, from the human aspect of history and daily observation. We should begin to know what it is that we ought to know. Such a work would be stimulating to politician and psychologist. The statesman's imagination would be guided and organized; it would give him a starting-point for his own understanding of human beings in politics. To the scientists it would be a challenge--to bring these facts under the light of their researches, to extend these researches to the borders of those facts. The statesman has another way of strengthening his grip upon the complexity of life. Statistics help. This method is neither so conclusive as the devotees say, nor so bad as the people who are awed by it would like to believe. Voting, as Gabriel Tarde points out, is our most conspicuous use of statistics. Mystical democrats believe that an election expresses the will of the people, and that that will is wise. Mystical democrats are rare. Looked at closely an election shows the quantitative division of the people on several alternatives. That choice is not necessarily wise, but it is wise to heed that choice. For it is a rough estimate of an important part of the community's sentiment, and no statecraft can succeed that violates it. It is often immensely suggestive of what a large number of people are in the future going to wish. Democracy, because it registers popular feeling, is at least trying to build truly, and is for that reason an enlightened form of government. So we who are democrats need not believe that the people are necessarily right in their choice: some of us are always in the minority, and not a little proud of the distinction. Voting does not extract wisdom from multitudes: its real value is to furnish wisdom about multitudes. Our faith in democracy has this very solid foundation: that no leader's wisdom can be applied unless the democracy comes to approve of it. To govern a democracy you have to educate it: that contact with great masses of men reciprocates by educating the leader. "The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well. In a rough way and with many exceptions, democracy compels law to approximate human need. It is a little difficult to see this when you live right in the midst of one. But in perspective there can be little question that of all governments democracy is the most relevant. Only humane laws can be successfully enforced; and they are the only ones really worth enforcing. Voting is a formal method of registering consent. But all statistical devices are open to abuse and require constant correction. Bribery, false counting, disfranchisement are the cruder deceptions; they correspond to those enrolment statistics of a large university which are artificially fed by counting the same student several times if his courses happen to span two or three of the departments. Just as deceptive as plain fraud is the deceptive ballot. We all know how when the political tricksters were compelled to frame a direct primary law in New York they fixed the ballot so that it botched the election. Corporations have been known to do just that to their reports. Did not E. H. Harriman say of a well-known statistician that he could make an annual report tell any story you pleased? Still subtler is the seven-foot ballot of stupid, good intentions--the hyperdemocratic ballot in which you are asked to vote for the State Printer, and succeed only in voting under the party emblem. Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts. You and I are forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes the results. For all the conclusions in the end rest upon their accuracy, honesty, energy and insight. Of course, in an obvious census like that of the number of people personal bias counts for so little that it is lost in the grand total. But the moment you begin inquiries into subjects which people prefer to conceal, the weakness of statistics becomes obvious. All figures which touch upon sexual subjects are nothing but the roughest guesses. No one would take a census of prostitution, illegitimacy, adultery, or venereal disease for a statement of reliable facts. There are religious statistics, but who that has traveled among men would regard the number of professing Christians as any index of the strength of Christianity, or the church attendance as a measure of devotion? In the supremely important subject of literacy, what classification yet devised can weigh the culture of masses of people? We say that such a percentage of the population cannot read or write. But the test of reading and writing is crude and clumsy. It is often administered by men who are themselves half-educated, and it is shot through with racial and class prejudice. The statistical method is of use only to those who have found it out. This is achieved principally by absorbing into your thinking a lively doubt about all classifications and general terms, for they are the basis of statistical measurement. That done you are fairly proof against seduction. No better popular statement of this is to be found than H. G. Wells' little essay: "Skepticism of the Instrument." Wells has, of course, made no new discovery. The history of philosophy is crowded with quarrels as to how seriously we ought to take our classifications: a large part of the battle about Nominalism turns on this, the Empirical and Rational traditions divide on it; in our day the attacks of James, Bergson, and the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation of this old struggle. Wells takes his stand very definitely with those who regard classification "as serviceable for the practical purposes of life" but nevertheless "a departure from the objective truth of things." "Take the word chair," he writes. "When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think of armchairs and reading-chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me." Think then of the glib way in which we speak of "the unemployed," "the unfit," "the criminal," "the unemployable," and how easily we forget that behind these general terms are unique individuals with personal histories and varying needs. Even the most refined statistics are nothing but an abstraction. But if that truth is held clearly before the mind, the polygons and curves of the statisticians can be used as a skeleton to which the imagination and our general sense of life give some flesh and blood reality. Human statistics are illuminating to those who know humanity. I would not trust a hermit's inferences about the statistics of anything. It is then no simple formula which answers our question. The problem of a human politics is not solved by a catch phrase. Criticism, of which these essays are a piece, can give the direction we must travel. But for the rest there is no smooth road built, no swift and sure conveyance at the door. We set out as if we knew; we act on the notions of man that we possess. Literature refines, science deepens, various devices extend it. Those who act on the knowledge at hand are the men of affairs. And all the while, research studies their results, artists express subtler perceptions, critics refine and adapt the general culture of the times. There is no other way but through this vast collaboration. There is no short cut to civilization. We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change. Nor do I see a final state of blessedness. The world's end will surely find us still engaged in answering riddles. This changing focus in politics is a tendency at work all through our lives. There are many experiments. But the effort is half-conscious; only here and there does it rise to a deliberate purpose. To make it an avowed ideal--a thing of will and intelligence--is to hasten its coming, to illumine its blunders, and, by giving it self-criticism, to convert mistakes into wisdom. CHAPTER V WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING: THE CHICAGO VICE REPORT In casting about for a concrete example to illustrate some of the points under discussion I hesitated a long time before the wealth of material. No age has produced such a multitude of elaborate studies, and any selection was, of course, a limiting one. The Minority Report of the English Poor Law Commission has striking merits and defects, but for our purposes it inheres too deeply in British conditions. American tariff and trust investigations are massive enough in all conscience, but they are so partisan in their origin and so pathetically unattached to any recognized ideal of public policy that it seemed better to look elsewhere. Conservation had the virtue of arising out of a provident statesmanship, but its problems were largely technical. The real choice narrowed itself finally to the Pittsburgh Survey and the Chicago Vice Report. Had I been looking for an example of the finest expert inquiry, there would have been little question that the vivid and intensive study of Pittsburgh's industrialism was the example to use. But I was looking for something more representative, and, therefore, more revealing. I did not want a detached study of some specially selected cross-section of what is after all not the typical economic life of America. The case demanded was one in which you could see representative American citizens trying to handle a problem which had touched their imaginations. Vice is such a problem. You can always get a hearing about it; there is no end of interest in the question. Rare indeed is that community which has not been "Lexowed," in which a district attorney or a minister has not led a crusade. Muckraking began with the exposure of vice; men like Heney, Lindsey, Folk founded their reputations on the fight against it. It would be interesting to know how much of the social conscience of our time had as its first insight the prostitute on the city pavement. We do not have to force an interest, as we do about the trusts, or even about the poor. For this problem lies close indeed to the dynamics of our own natures. Research is stimulated, actively aroused, and a passionate zeal suffuses what is perhaps the most spontaneous reform enthusiasm of our time. Looked at externally it is a curious focusing of attention. Nor is it explained by words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social compassion." Magazines that will condone a thousand cruelties to women gladly publish series of articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants who sweat and rack their women employees serve gallantly on these commissions. These men are not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the rest of us they are impelled by forces they are not eager to examine. I do not press the point. It belongs to the analyst of motive. We need only note the vast interest in the subject--that it extends across class lines, and expresses itself as an immense good-will. Perhaps a largely unconscious absorption in a subject is itself a sign of great importance. Surely vice has a thousand implications that touch all of us directly. It is closely related to most of the interests of life--ramifying into industry, into the family, health, play, art, religion. The miseries it entails are genuine miseries--not points of etiquette or infringements of convention. Vice issues in pain. The world suffers for it. To attack it is to attack as far-reaching and real a problem as any that we human beings face. The Chicago Commission had no simple, easily measured problem before it. At the very outset the report confesses that an accurate count of the number of prostitutes in Chicago could not be reached. The police lists are obviously incomplete and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous field of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any census. But even public prostitution is so varied that nobody can do better than estimate it roughly. This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights up the remedies proposed. What the Commission advocates is the constant repression and the ultimate annihilation of a mode of life which refuses discovery and measurement. The report estimates that there are five thousand women in Chicago who devote their whole time to the traffic; that the annual profits in that one city alone are between fifteen and sixteen million dollars a year. These figures are admittedly low for they leave out all consideration of occasional, or seasonal, or hidden prostitution. It is only the nucleus that can be guessed at; the fringe which shades out into various degrees of respectability remains entirely unmeasured. Yet these suburbs of the Tenderloin must always be kept in mind; their population is shifting and very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am inclined to believe that it is the natural refuge of the "suppressed" prostitute. Moreover it defies control. The 1012 women recognized on the police lists are of course the most easily studied. From them we can gather some hint of the enormous bewildering demand that prostitution answers. The Commission informs us that this small group alone receives over fifteen thousand visits a day--five million and a half in the year. Yet these 1012 women are only about one-fifth of the professional prostitutes in Chicago. If the average continues, then the figures mount to something over 27,000,000. The five thousand professionals do not begin to represent the whole illicit traffic of a city like Chicago. Clandestine and occasional vice is beyond all measurement. The figures I have given are taken from the report. They are said to be conservative. For the purposes of this discussion we could well lower the 27,000,000 by half. All I am concerned about is in arriving at a sense of the enormity of the impulse behind the "social evil." For it is this that the Commission proposes to repress, and ultimately to annihilate. Lust has a thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the assignation house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors, Turkish baths, massage parlors, street-walking--the thing has woven itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads, everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city. Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally impossible to follow the myriad expressions it assumes. The Commission gives a very fair picture of these manifestations. A mass of material is offered which does in a way show where and how and to what extent lust finds its illicit expression. Deeper than this the report does not go. The human impulses which create these social conditions, the human needs to which they are a sad and degraded answer--this human center of the problem the commission passes by with a platitude. "So long as there is lust in the hearts of men," we are told, "it will seek out some method of expression. Until the hearts of men are changed we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the Social Evil." But at the head of the report in black-faced type we read: "Constant and persistent repression of prostitution the immediate method; absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal." I am not trying to catch the Commissioners in a verbal inconsistency. The inconsistency is real, out of a deep-seated confusion of mind. Lust will seek an expression, they say, until "the hearts of men are changed." All particular expressions are evil and must be constantly repressed. Yet though you repress one form of lust, it will seek some other. Now, says the Commission, in order to change the hearts of men, religion and education must step in. It is their business to eradicate an impulse which is constantly changing form by being "suppressed." There is only one meaning in this: the Commission realized vaguely that repression is not even the first step to a cure. For reasons worth analyzing later, these representative American citizens desired both the immediate taboo and an ultimate annihilation of vice. So they fell into the confusion of making immediate and detailed proposals that have nothing to do with the attainment of their ideal. What the commission saw and described were the particular forms which a great human impulse had assumed at a specific date in a certain city. The dynamic force which created these conditions, which will continue to create them--lust--they refer to in a few pious sentences. Their thinking, in short, is perfectly static and literally superficial. In outlining a ripple they have forgotten the tides. Had they faced the human sources of their problem, had they tried to think of the social evil as an answer to a human need, their researches would have been different, their remedies fruitful. Suppose they had kept in mind their own statement: "so long as there is lust in the hearts of men it will seek out some method of expression." Had they held fast to that, it would have ceased to be a platitude and have become a fertile idea. For a platitude is generally inert wisdom. In the sentence I quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it, and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow the hints it unfolds. If lust will seek an expression, are all expressions of it necessarily evil? That the kind of expression which the Commission describes is evil no one will deny. But is it the only possible expression? If it is, then the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of "annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical difference there is none. No one can read the report without coming to a definite conviction that the Commission regards lust itself as inherently evil. The members assumed without criticism the traditional dogma of Christianity that sex in any manifestation outside of marriage is sinful. But practical sense told them that sex cannot be confined within marriage. It will find expression--"some method of expression" they say. What never occurred to them was that it might find a good, a positively beneficent method. The utterly uncriticised assumption that all expressions not legalized are sinful shut them off from any constructive answer to their problem. Seeing prostitution or something equally bad as the only way sex can find an expression they really set before religion and education the impossible task of removing lust "from the hearts of men." So when their report puts at its head that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the ultimate ideal, we may well translate it into the real intent of the Commission. What is to be absolutely annihilated is not alone prostitution, not alone all the methods of expression which lust seeks out, but lust itself. That this is what the Commission had in mind is supported by plenty of "internal evidence." For example: one of the most curious recommendations made is about divorce--"The Commission condemns the ease with which divorces may be obtained in certain States, and recommends a stringent, uniform divorce law for all States." What did the Commission have in mind? I transcribe the paragraph which deals with divorce: "The Vice Commission, after exhaustive consideration of the vice question, records itself of the opinion that divorce to a large extent is a contributory factor to sexual vice. No study of this blight upon the social and moral life of the country would be comprehensive without consideration of the causes which lead to the application for divorce. These are too numerous to mention at length in such a report as this, but the Commission does wish to emphasize the great need of more safeguards against the marrying of persons physically, mentally and morally unfit to take up the responsibilities of family life, including the bearing of children." Now to be sure that paragraph leaves much to be desired so far as clearness goes. But I think the meaning can be extracted. Divorce is a contributory factor to sexual vice. One way presumably is that divorced women often become prostitutes. That is an evil contribution, unquestionably. The second sentence says that no study of the social evil is complete which leaves out the _causes_ of divorce. One of those causes is, I suppose, adultery with a prostitute. This evil is totally different from the first: in one case divorce contributes to prostitution, in the other, prostitution leads to divorce. The third sentence urges greater safeguards against undesirable marriages. This prudence would obviously reduce the need of divorce. How does the recommendation of a stringent and uniform law fit in with these three statements? A strict divorce law might be like New York's: it would recognize few grounds for a decree. One of those grounds, perhaps the chief one, would be adultery. I say this unhesitatingly for in another place the Commission informs us that marriage has in it "the elements of vested rights." A strict divorce law would, of course, diminish the number of "divorced women," and perhaps keep them out of prostitution. It does fit the first statement--in a helpless sort of way. But where does the difficulty of divorce affect the causes of it? If you bind a man tightly to a woman he does not love, and, possibly prevent him from marrying one he does love, how do you add to his virtue? And if the only way he can free himself is by adultery, does not your stringent divorce law put a premium upon vice? The third sentence would make it difficult for the unfit to marry. Better marriages would among other blessings require fewer divorces. But what of those who are forbidden to marry? They are unprovided for. And yet who more than they are likely to find desire uncontrollable and seek some other "method of expression"? With marriage prohibited and prostitution tabooed, the Commission has a choice between sterilization and--let us say--other methods of expression. Make marriage difficult, divorce stringent, prostitution impossible--is there any doubt that the leading idea is to confine the sex impulse within the marriage of healthy, intelligent, "moral," and monogamous couples? For all the other seekings of that impulse what has the Commission to offer? Nothing. That can be asserted flatly. The Commission hopes to wipe out prostitution. But it never hints that the success of its plan means vast alterations in our social life. The members give the impression that they think of prostitution as something that can be subtracted from our civilization without changing the essential character of its institutions. Yet who that has read the report itself and put himself into any imaginative understanding of conditions can escape seeing that prostitution to-day is organic to our industrial life, our marriage sanctions, and our social customs? Low wages, fatigue, and the wretched monotony of the factory--these must go before prostitution can go. And behind these stand the facts of woman's entrance into industry--facts that have one source at least in the general poverty of the family. And that poverty is deeply bound up with the economic system under which we live. In the man's problem, the growing impossibility of early marriages is directly related to the business situation. Nor can we speak of the degradation of religion and the arts, of amusement, of the general morale of the people without referring that degradation to industrial conditions. You cannot look at civilization as a row of institutions each external to the other. They interpenetrate and a change in one affects all the others. To abolish prostitution would involve a radical alteration of society. Vice in our cities is a form of the sexual impulse--one of the forms it has taken under prevailing social conditions. It is, if you please, like the crops of a rude and forbidding soil--a coarse, distorted thing though living. The Commission studied a human problem and left humanity out. I do not mean that the members weren't deeply touched by the misery of these thousands of women. You can pity the poor without understanding them; you can have compassion without insight. The Commissioners had a good deal of sympathy for the prostitute's condition, but for that "lust in the hearts of men," and women we may add, for that, they had no sympathetic understanding. They did not place themselves within the impulse. Officially they remained external to human desires. For what might be called the _élan vital_ of the problem they had no patience. Certain sad results of the particular "method of expression" it had sought out in Chicago called forth their pity and their horror. In short, the Commission did not face the sexual impulse squarely. The report is an attempt to deal with a sexual problem by disregarding its source. There are almost a hundred recommendations to various authorities--Federal, State, county, city, police, educational and others. I have attempted to classify these proposals under four headings. There are those which mean forcible repression of particular manifestations--the taboos; there are the recommendations which are purely palliative, which aim to abate some of the horrors of existing conditions; there are a few suggestions for further investigation; and, finally, there are the inventions, the plans which show some desire to find moral equivalents for evil--the really statesmanlike offerings. The palliative measures we may pass by quickly. So long as they do not blind people to the necessity for radical treatment, only a doctrinaire would object to them. Like all intelligent charities they are still a necessary evil. But nothing must be staked upon them, so let us turn at once to the constructive suggestions: The Commission proposes that the county establish a "Permanent Committee on Child Protection." It makes no attempt to say what that protection shall be, but I think it is only fair to let the wish father the thought, and regard this as an effort to give children a better start in life. The separation of delinquent from semi-delinquent girls is a somewhat similar attempt to guard the weak. Another is the recommendation to the city and the nation that it should protect arriving immigrants, and if necessary escort them to their homes. This surely is a constructive plan which might well be enlarged from mere protection to positive hospitality. How great a part the desolating loneliness of a city plays in seductions the individual histories in the report show. Municipal dance halls are a splendid proposal. Freed from a cold and over-chaperoned respectability they compete with the devil. There, at least, is one method of sexual expression which may have positively beneficent results. A municipal lodging house for women is something of a substitute for the wretched rented room. A little suggestion to the police that they send home children found on the streets after nine o'clock has varied possibilities. But there is the seed of an invention in it which might convert the police from mere agents of repression to kindly helpers in the mazes of a city. The educational proposals are all constructive: the teaching of sex hygiene is guardedly recommended for consideration. That is entirely justified, for no one can quarrel with a set of men for leaving a question open. That girls from fourteen to sixteen should receive vocational training in continuation schools; that social centers should be established in the public schools and that the grounds should be open for children--all of these are clearly additions to the positive resource of the community. So is the suggestion that church buildings be used for recreation. The call for greater parental responsibility is, I fear, a rather empty platitude, for it is not re-enforced with anything but an ancient fervor. How much of this really seeks to create a fine expression of the sexual impulse? How many of these recommendations see sex as an instinct which can be transmuted, and turned into one of the values of life? The dance halls, the social centers, the playgrounds, the reception of strangers--these can become instruments for civilizing sexual need. The educational proposals could become ways of directing it. They could, but will they? Without the habit of mind which sees substitution as the essence of statecraft, without a philosophy which makes the invention of moral equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in these recommendations anything more than a haphazard shooting which has accidentally hit the mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that I have tried to read into the proposals more than the Commission intended. Certainly these constructions occupy an insignificant amount of space in the body of the report. On all sides of them is a mass of taboos. No emotional appeal is made for them as there is for the repressions. They stand largely unnoticed, and very much undefined--poor ghosts of the truth among the gibbets. An inadvertent platitude--that lust will seek an expression--and a few diffident proposals for a finer environment--the need and its satisfaction: had the Commission seen the relation of these incipient ideas, animated it, and made it the nerve center of the study, a genuine program might have resulted. But the two ideas never met and fertilized each other. Nothing dynamic holds the recommendations together--the mass of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the marsh. The evils of prostitution are seen as a series of episodes, each of which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and jailed. There is a special whack for each mosquito: the laws about excursion boats should be enforced; the owners should help to enforce them; there should be more officers with police power on these boats; the sale of liquor to minors should be forbidden; gambling devices should be suppressed; the midwives, doctors and maternity hospitals practicing abortions should be investigated; employment agencies should be watched and investigated; publishers should be warned against printing suspicious advertisements; the law against infamous crimes should be made more specific; any citizen should have the right to bring equity proceedings against a brothel as a public nuisance; there should be relentless prosecution of professional procurers; there should be constant prosecution of the keepers, inmates, and owners of bawdy houses; there should be prosecution of druggists who sells drugs and "certain appliances" illegally; there should be an identification system for prostitutes in the state courts; instead of fines, prostitutes should be visited with imprisonment or adult probation; there should be a penalty for sending messenger boys under twenty-one to a disorderly house or an unlicensed saloon; the law against prostitutes in saloons, against wine-rooms and stalls in saloons, against communication between saloons and brothels, against dancing in saloons--should be strictly enforced; the police who enforce these laws should be carefully watched, grafters amongst them should be discharged; complaints should be investigated at once by a man stationed outside the district; the pressure of publicity should be brought against the brewers to prevent them from doing business with saloons that violate the law; the Retail Liquor Association should discipline law-breaking saloon-keepers: licenses should be permanently revoked for violations; no women should be allowed in a saloon without a male escort; no professional or paid escorts should be permitted; no soliciting should be allowed in saloons; no immoral or vulgar dances should be permitted in saloons; no intoxicating liquor should be allowed at any public dance; there should be a municipal detention home for women, with probation officers; police inspectors who fail to report law-violations should be dismissed; assignation houses should be suppressed as soon as they are reported; there should be a "special morals police squad"; recommendation IX "to the Police" says they "should wage a relentless warfare against houses of prostitution, immoral flats, assignation rooms, call houses, and disorderly saloons in all sections of the city"; parks and playgrounds should be more thoroughly policed; dancing pavilions should exclude professional prostitutes; soliciting in parks should be suppressed; parks should be lighted with a search-light; there should be no seats in the shadows.... To perform that staggering list of things that "should" be done you find--what?--the police power, federal, state, municipal. Note how vague and general are the chance constructive suggestions; how precise and definite the taboos. Surely I am not misstating its position when I say that forcible suppression was the creed of this Commission. Nor is there any need of insisting again that the ultimate ideal of annihilating prostitution has nothing to expect from the concrete proposals that were made. The millennial goal was one thing; the immediate method quite another. For ideals, a pious phrase; in practice, the police. Are we not told that "if the citizens cannot depend upon the men appointed to protect their property, and to maintain order, then chaos and disorganization resulting in vice and crime must follow?" Yet of all the reeds that civilization leans upon, surely the police is the frailest. Anyone who has had the smallest experience of municipal politics knows that the corruption of the police is directly proportionate to the severity of the taboos it is asked to enforce. Tom Johnson saw this as Mayor of Cleveland; he knew that strict law enforcement against saloons, brothels, and gambling houses would not stop vice, but would corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spectacle in New York where the most sensational raider of gambling houses has turned out to be in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I suggest as a hint that the Commission's recommendations enforced for one year will lay the foundation of an organized system of blackmail and "protection," secrecy and underground chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet seen. But the Commission need only have read its own report, have studied its own cases. There is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil and the Police." In the summary, the Commission says that "officers on the beat are bold and open in their neglect of duty, drinking in saloons while in uniform, ignoring the solicitations by prostitutes in rear rooms and on the streets, selling tickets at dances frequented by professional and semi-professional prostitutes; protecting 'cadets,' prostitutes and saloon-keepers of disorderly places." Some suspicion that the police could not carry the burden of suppressing the social evil must have dawned on the Commission. It felt the need of re-enforcement. Hence the special morals police squad; hence the investigation of the police of one district by the police from another; and hence, in type as black as that of the ideal itself and directly beneath it, the call for "the appointment of a morals commission" and "the establishment of a morals court." Now this commission consists of the Health Officer, a physician and three citizens who serve without pay. It is appointed by the Mayor and approved by the City Council. Its business is to prosecute vice and to help enforce the law. Just what would happen if the Morals Commission didn't prosecute hard enough I do not know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced to appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions in Cities. But why the men and women who framed the report made this particular recommendation is an interesting question. With federal, state, and municipal authorities in existence, with courts, district attorneys, police all operating, they create another arm of prosecution. Possibly they were somewhat disillusioned about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps they imagined that a new broom would sweep clean. But I suspect an inner reason. The Commission may have imagined that the four appointees--unpaid--would be four men like themselves--who knows, perhaps four men from among themselves? The whole tenor of their thinking is to set somebody watching everybody and somebody else to watching him. What is more natural than that they should be the Ultimate Watchers? Spying, informing, constant investigations of everybody and everything must become the rule where there is a forcible attempt to moralize society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the work very long; nobody's but those fanatical and morbid guardians of morality who make it a life's specialty. The aroused public opinion which the Commission asks for cannot be held if all it has to fix upon is an elaborate series of taboos. Sensational disclosures will often make the public flare up spasmodically; but the mass of men is soon bored by intricate rules and tangles of red tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama of real life--interesting, but easily forgotten. The method proposed ignores the human source: by a kind of poetic justice the great crowd of men will ignore the method. If you want to impose a taboo upon a whole community, you must do it autocratically, you must make it part of the prevailing superstitions. You must never let it reach any public analysis. For it will fail, it will receive only a shallow support from what we call an "enlightened public opinion." That opinion is largely determined by the real impulses of men; and genuine character rejects or at least rebels against foreign, unnatural impositions. This is one of the great virtues of democracy--that it makes alien laws more and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant can use the taboo a thousand times more effectively than the citizens of a republic. When he speaks, it is with a prestige that dumbs questioning and makes obedience a habit. Let that infallibility come to be doubted, as in Russia to-day, and natural impulses reassert themselves, the great impositions begin to weaken. The methods of the Chicago Commission would require a tyranny, a powerful, centralized sovereignty which could command with majesty and silence the rebel. In our shirt-sleeved republic no such power exists. The strongest force we have is that of organized money, and that sovereignty is too closely connected with the social evil, too dependent upon it in a hundred different ways, to undertake the task of suppression. For the purposes of the Commission democracy is an inefficient weapon. Nothing but disappointment is in store for men who expect a people to outrage its own character. A large part of the unfaith in democracy, of the desire to ignore "the mob," limit the franchise, and confine power to the few is the result of an unsuccessful attempt to make republics act like old-fashioned monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves behind it a trail of yearning royalists; many "good-government" clubs are little would-be oligarchies. When the mass of men emerged from slavish obedience and made democracy inevitable, the taboo entered upon its final illness. For the more self-governing a people becomes, the less possible it is to prescribe external restrictions. The gap between want and ought, between nature and ideals cannot be maintained. The only practical ideals in a democracy are a fine expression of natural wants. This happens to be a thoroughly Greek attitude. But I learned it first from the Bowery. Chuck Connors is reported to have said that "a gentleman is a bloke as can do whatever he wants to do." If Chuck said that, he went straight to the heart of that democratic morality on which a new statecraft must ultimately rest. His gentleman is not the battlefield of wants and prohibitions; in him impulses flow freely through beneficent channels. The same notion lies imbedded in the phrase: "government must serve the people." That means a good deal more than that elected officials must rule for the majority. For the majority in these semi-democratic times is often as not a cloak for the ruling oligarchy. Representatives who "serve" some majorities may in reality order the nation about. To serve the people means to provide it with services--with clean streets and water, with education, with opportunity, with beneficent channels for its desires, with moral equivalents for evil. The task is turned from the damming and restricting of wants to the creation of fine environments for them. And the environment of an impulse extends all the way from the human body, through family life and education out into the streets of the city. Had the Commission worked along democratic lines, we should have had recommendations about the hygiene and early training of children, their education, the houses they live in and the streets in which they play; changes would have been suggested in the industrial conditions they face; plans would have been drawn for recreation; hints would have been collected for transmuting the sex impulse into art, into social endeavor, into religion. That is the constructive approach to the problem. I note that the Commission calls upon the churches for help. Its obvious intention was to down sex with religion. What was not realized, it seems, is that this very sex impulse, so largely degraded into vice, is the dynamic force in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony of the psychologists, the students of religion, the æstheticians or even of Plato, who in the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love from the body to the "whole sea of beauty." Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the truth by her own wide experience, and she has written what the Commission might easily have read,--that "in failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the most precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping process. All high school boys and girls know the difference between the concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be hopelessly bewildered by the use of terms. They will declare one of their companions to be 'in love' if his fancy is occupied by the image of a single person about whom all the new-found values gather, and without whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and significance in many things--he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion." It is then not only impossible to confine sex to mere reproduction; it would be a stupid denial of the finest values of civilization. Having seen that the impulse is a necessary part of character, we must not hold to it grudgingly as a necessary evil. It is, on the contrary, the very source of good. Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself the earnest effort Miss Addams has made to treat sex with dignity and joy. For Hull House differs from most settlements in that it is full of pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere is light; you feel none of that moral oppression which hangs over the usual settlement as over a gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a beautiful place; she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects. The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts, games and dances--they are some of those "other methods of expression which lust can seek." It is no accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in America. Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city? A little Athens in a vast barbarism--you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House can civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling houses, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice and its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and Morals Commissions, the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout at the forcible moralizer: "so long as you acquiesce in the degradation of your city, so long as work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery and every instinct of joy is mocked by dirt and cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and prosecute, even though you make Comstock the Czar of Chicago." But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed, and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all utopias, it cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success. If Hull House is unable to civilize Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and America what a civilization might be like. Friendly, where our cities are friendless, beautiful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, where our daily life is furtive; work a craft; art a participation--it is in miniature the goal of statesmanship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we say to ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it would dwindle, what was left would be the Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia could worry over that jolly and redeeming coarseness. What stands between Chicago and civilization? No one can doubt that to abolish prostitution means to abolish the slum and the dirty alley, to stop overwork, underpay, the sweating and the torturing monotony of business, to breathe a new life into education, ventilate society with frankness, and fill life with play and art, with games, with passions which hold and suffuse the imagination. It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions it will not be done in a day or a decade because someone orders it to be done. A change in the whole quality of life is something that neither the policeman's club nor an insurrectionary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution that shall really matter in human life--and what sane man can help desiring it?--you must look to the infinitely complicated results of the dynamic movements in society. These revolutions require a rare combination of personal audacity and social patience. The best agents of such a revolution are men who are bold in their plans because they realize how deep and enormous is the task. Many people have sought an analogy in our Civil War. They have said that as "black slavery" went, so must "white slavery." In the various agitations of vigilance committees and alliances for the suppression of the traffic they profess to see continued a work which the abolitionists began. In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on "Social Forces in American History" much help can be found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished slavery at an early date, and we have it on the authority of John Adams that:--'argument might have had some weight in the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring white people, who would not longer suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury.'" No one to-day doubts that white labor in the North and slavery in the South were not due to the moral superiority of the North. Yet just in the North we find the abolition sentiment strongest. That the Civil War was not a clash of good men and bad men is admitted by every reputable historian. The war did not come when moral fervor had risen to the exploding point; the moral fervor came rather when the economic interests of the South collided with those of the North. That the abolitionists clarified the economic interests of the North and gave them an ideal sanction is true enough. But the fact remains that by 1860 some of the aspirations of Phillips and Garrison had become the economic destiny of this country. You can have a Hull House established by private initiative and maintained by individual genius, just as you had planters who freed their slaves or as you have employers to-day who humanize their factories. But the fine example is not readily imitated when industrial forces fight against it. So even if the Commission had drawn splendid plans for housing, work conditions, education, and play it would have done only part of the task of statesmanship. We should then know what to do, but not how to get it done. An ideal suspended in a vacuum is ineffective: it must point a dynamic current. Only then does it gather power, only then does it enter into life. That forces exist to-day which carry with them solutions is evident to anyone who has watched the labor movement and the woman's awakening. Even the interests of business give power to the cause. The discovery of manufacturers that degradation spoils industrial efficiency must not be cast aside by the radical because the motive is larger profits. The discovery, whatever the motive, will inevitably humanize industry a good deal. For it happens that in this case the interests of capitalism and of humanity coincide. A propaganda like the single-tax will undoubtedly find increasing support among business men. They see in it a relief from the burden of rent imposed by that older tyrant--the landlord. But the taxation of unimproved property happens at the same time to be a splendid weapon against the slum. Only when the abolition of "white slavery" becomes part of the social currents of the time will it bear any interesting analogy to the so-called freeing of the slaves. Even then for many enthusiasts the comparison is misleading. They are likely to regard the Emancipation Proclamation as the end of chattel slavery. It wasn't. That historic document broke a legal bond but not a social one. The process of negro emancipation is infinitely slower and it is not accomplished yet. Likewise no statute can end "white slavery." Only vast and complicated changes in the whole texture of social life will achieve such an end. If by some magic every taboo of the commission could be enforced the abolition of sex slavery would not have come one step nearer to reality. Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters and games, manners and thought will have to be transformed before sex can find a better expression. Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must work that change. The power of emancipation is in the social movements which alone can effect any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has been with the negro. I do not think the Abolitionists saw facts truly when they disbanded their organization a few years after the civil war. They found too much comfort in a change of legal status. Profound economic forces brought about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery. But the reality of freedom was not achieved by proclamation. For that the revolution had to go on: the industrial life of the nation had to change its character, social customs had to be replaced, the whole outlook of men had to be transformed. And whether it is negro slavery or a vicious sexual bondage, the actual advance comes from substitutions injected into society by dynamic social forces. I do not wish to press the analogy or over-emphasize the particular problems. I am not engaged in drawing up the plans for a reconstruction or in telling just what should be done. Only the co-operation of expert minds can do that. The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere. If these essays succeed in suggesting a method of looking at politics, if they draw attention to what is real in social reforms and make somewhat more evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an uncritical approach, they will have done their work. That the report of the Chicago Vice Commission figures so prominently in this chapter is not due to any preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission or with vice. It is a text and nothing else. The report happens to embody what I conceive to be most of the faults of a political method now decadent. Its failure to put human impulses at the center of thought produced remedies valueless to human nature; its false interest in a particular expression of sex--vice--caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability to see that wants require fine satisfactions and not prohibitions drove it into an undemocratic tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of our age shut off the motive power for any reform. The Commission's method was poor, not its intentions. It was an average body of American citizens aroused to action by an obvious evil. But something slipped in to falsify vision. It was, I believe, an array of idols disguised as ideals. They are typical American idols, and they deserve some study. CHAPTER VI SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM The Commission "has kept constantly in mind that to offer a contribution of any value such an offering must be, first, moral; second, reasonable and practical; third, possible under the Constitutional powers of our Courts; fourth, that which will square with the public conscience of the American people."--The Vice Commission of Chicago--Introduction to Report on the Social Evil. Having adjusted such spectacles the Commission proceeded to look at "this curse which is more blasting than any plague or epidemic," at an evil "which spells only ruin to the race." In dealing with what it regards as the greatest calamity in the world, a calamity as old as civilization, the Commission lays it down beforehand that the remedy must be "moral," constitutional, and satisfactory to the public conscience. I wonder in all seriousness what the Commission would have done had it discovered a genuine cure for prostitution which happened, let us say, to conflict with the constitutional powers of our courts. I wonder how the Commission would have acted if a humble following of the facts had led them to a conviction out of tune with the existing public conscience of America. Such a conflict is not only possible; it is highly probable. When you come to think of it, the conflict appears a certainty. For the Constitution is a legal expression of the conditions under which prostitution has flourished; the social evil is rooted in institutions and manners which have promoted it, in property relations and business practice which have gathered about them a halo of reason and practicality, of morality and conscience. Any change so vast as the abolition of vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice, law and conscience. A scientist who began an investigation by saying that his results must be moral or constitutional would be a joke. We have had scientists like that, men who insisted that research must confirm the Biblical theory of creation. We have had economists who set out with the preconceived idea of justifying the factory system. The world has recently begun to see through this kind of intellectual fraud. If a doctor should appear who offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that it was justified by the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we read of the savage way in which a leper was treated out West; his leprosy was not regarded as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I remember correctly, the Bible was quoted in court as an authority on leprosy. The treatment seemed entirely moral and squared very well with the conscience of that community. I have heard reputable physicians condemn a certain method of psychotherapy because it was "immoral." A woman once told me that she had let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life because "a mother should never mention anything 'embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are still blushing for the way America treated Gorki when it found that Russian morals did not square with the public conscience of America. And the time is not yet passed when we punish the offspring of illicit love, and visit vengeance unto the third and fourth generations. One reads in the report of the Vice Commission that many public hospitals in Chicago refuse to care for venereal diseases. The examples are endless. They run from the absurd to the monstrous. But always the source is the same. Idols are set up to which all the living must bow; we decide beforehand that things must fit a few preconceived ideas. And when they don't, which is most of the time, we deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling of our theory to any deeper understanding of the real problem before us. It seems as if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire, "neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional phrases that cloak all sorts of thievery, of the common law precedents that tyrannize over us, history begins to look almost like the struggle of man to emancipate himself from phrase-worship. The devil can quote Scripture, and law, and morality and reason and practicality. The devil can use the public conscience of his time. He does in wars, in racial and religious persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisition; he does in the American lynching. For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral. Conquerors have gone forth with the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and pillage. The ruthless exploitation of India becomes the civilizing fulfilment of the "white man's burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drummer, and prospector are embodied in one man. In the nineteenth century church, press and university devoted no inconsiderable part of their time to proving the high moral and scientific justice of child labor and human sweating. It is a matter of record that chattel slavery in this country was deduced from Biblical injunction, that the universities furnished brains for its defense. Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Englishman alone when he said in "The Man of Destiny" that "... you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles...." Liberty, equality, fraternity--what a grotesque career those words have had. Almost every attempt to mitigate the hardships of industrialism has had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor organization, factory laws, health regulations are still fought as infringements of liberty. And in the name of equality what fantasies of taxation have we not woven? what travesties of justice set up? "The law in its majestic equality," writes Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep in the streets and to steal bread." Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan by which we refuse to enact what is called "class legislation"--a policy which in theory denies the existence of classes, in practice legislates in favor of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged are laws friendly to business; class legislation means working-class legislation. You have to go among lawyers to see this idolatrous process in its most perfect form. When a judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution, what is it that he does? He takes a sentence written by a group of men more than a hundred years ago. That sentence expressed their policy about certain conditions which they had to deal with. In it was summed up what they intended to do about the problems they saw. That is all the sentence means. But in the course of a century new problems arise--problems the Fathers could no more have foreseen than we can foresee the problems of the year two thousand. Yet that sentence which contained their wisdom about particular events has acquired an emotional force which persists long after the events have passed away. Legends gather about the men who wrote it: those legends are absorbed by us almost with our mothers' milk. We never again read that sentence straight. It has a gravity out of all proportion to its use, and we call it a fundamental principle of government. Whatever we want to do is hallowed and justified, if it can be made to appear as a deduction from that sentence. To put new wine in old bottles is one of the aims of legal casuistry. Reformers practice it. You hear it said that the initiative and referendum are a return to the New England town meeting. That is supposed to be an argument for direct legislation. But surely the analogy is superficial; the difference profound. The infinitely greater complexity of legislation to-day, the vast confusion in the aims of the voting population, produce a difference of so great a degree that it amounts to a difference in kind. The naturalist may classify the dog and the fox, the house-cat and the tiger together for certain purposes. The historian of political forms may see in the town meeting a forerunner of direct legislation. But no housewife dare classify the cat and the tiger, the dog and the fox, as the same kind of animal. And no statesman can argue the virtues of the referendum from the successes of the town meeting. But the propagandists do it nevertheless, and their propaganda thrives upon it. The reason is simple. The town meeting is an obviously respectable institution, glorified by all the reverence men give to the dead. It has acquired the seal of an admired past, and any proposal that can borrow that seal can borrow that reverence too. A name trails behind it an army of associations. That army will fight in any cause that bears the name. So the reformers of California, the Lorimerites of Chicago, and the Barnes Republicans of Albany all use the name of Lincoln for their political associations. In the struggle that preceded the Republican Convention of 1912 it was rumored that the Taft reactionaries would put forward Lincoln's son as chairman of the convention in order to counteract Roosevelt's claim that he stood in Lincoln's shoes. Casuistry is nothing but the injection of your own meaning into an old name. At school when the teacher asked us whether we had studied the lesson, the invariable answer was Yes. We had indeed stared at the page for a few minutes, and that could be called studying. Sometimes the head-master would break into the room just in time to see the conclusion of a scuffle. Jimmy's clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you throw chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny, and then under his breath to placate God's penchant for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once in Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel. The waitress brought me a glass of yellowish liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top. No tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition state looked like that. Though it was tea, it might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled or winked in ordering the tea, it would have been beer. The two looked alike in Portland; they were interchangeable. You could drink tea and fool yourself into thinking it was beer. You could drink beer and pass for a tea-toper. It is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial and so deliberate. The openness cleanses it. Advertising, for example, would be nothing but gigantic and systematic lying if almost everybody didn't know that it was. Yet it runs into the sinister all the time. The pure food agitation is largely an effort to make the label and the contents tell the same story. It was noteworthy that, following the discovery of salvarsan or "606" by Dr. Ehrlich, the quack doctors began to call their treatments "606." But the deliberate casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is not so difficult to deal with. The very deliberation makes it easier to detect, for it is generally awkward. What one man can consciously devise, other men can understand. But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No one escapes it entirely. A wealth of evidence could be adduced to support this from the studies of dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian school of psychologists. They have shown how constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a shallow incident--how the superficial is all the time being shoved into the light of consciousness in order to conceal a buried intention; how inveterate is our use of symbols. Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content. For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstractions of all kinds are nothing but the porous vessels into which life flows, is contained for a time, and then passes through. But our reverence clings to the vessels. The old meaning may have disappeared, a new one come in--no matter, we try to believe there has been no change. And when life's expansion demands some new container, nothing is more difficult than the realization that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the present need. It is interesting to notice how in the very act of analyzing it I have fallen into this curious and ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor is taken for the reality: I have used at least six metaphors to state it. Abstractions are not cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and life doesn't flow like water. What they really are you and I know inwardly by using abstractions and living our lives. But once I attempt to give that inwardness expression, I must use the only weapons I have--abstractions, theories, phrases. By an effort of the sympathetic imagination you can revive within yourself something of my inward sense. As I have had to abstract from life in order to communicate, so you are compelled to animate my abstractions, in order to understand. I know of no other method of communication between two people. Language is always grossly inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is merely passive, if he falls into the mistake of the literal-minded who expect words to contain a precise image of reality. They never do. All language can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the imagination enabling the reader to recreate the author's insight. The artist does that: he controls his medium so that we come most readily to the heart of his intention. In the lyric poet the control is often so delicate that the hearer lives over again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign to the thinker. That too is why debating is such a wretched amusement and most partisanship, most controversy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue from the opponent's language, never from his insight. You take him literally, you pick up his sentences, and you show what nonsense they are. You do not try to weigh what you see against what he sees; you contrast what you see with what he says. So debating becomes a way of confirming your own prejudices; it is never, never in any debate I have suffered through, a search for understanding from the angles of two differing insights. And, of course, in those more sinister forms of debating, court trials, where the stakes are so much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is to make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the other lawyer's contention. Men have been hanged as a result. How often in a political campaign does a candidate suggest that behind the platforms and speeches of his opponents there might be some new and valuable understanding of the country's need? The fact is that we argue and quarrel an enormous lot over words. Our prevailing habit is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not about the realities they express. In controversy we do not try to find our opponent's meaning: we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts to shape policies we do not seek out what is worth doing: we seek out what will pass for moral, practical, popular or constitutional. In this the Vice Commission reflected our national habits. For those earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It means these changes in industry, sex relations, law and public opinion. If you think it is worth the cost you can begin to deal with the problem. If you don't, then confess that you will not abolish prostitution, and turn your compassion to softening its effects." That would have left the issues clear and wholesome. But the procedure of the Commission is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions may "square with the public conscience of the American people" but they will not square with the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell you at the top of the page that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the ultimate ideal and twenty lines further on that the method must be constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence. Calf-worship was never more idolatrous than this. Truth would have slept more comfortably in Procrustes' bed. Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived ideas of the Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to conventionality--I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report, and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the minds of the Commission, and without them the report cannot be understood. They are typical idols of the American people. This report offers an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping them. A valuable contribution, then, must be _moral_. There is no doubt that the Commission means sexually moral. We Americans always use the word in that limited sense. If you say that Jones is a moral man you mean that he is faithful to his wife. He may support her by selling pink pills; he is nevertheless moral if he is monogamous. The average American rarely speaks of industrial piracy as immoral. He may condemn it, but not with that word. If he extends the meaning of immoral at all, it is to the vices most closely allied to sex--drink and gambling. Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined for the Commission. As we have seen, it means that sex must be confined to procreation by a healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple. All other sexual expression would come under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do the Commission no injustice. Now this limited conception of sex has had a disastrous effect: it has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual impulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any modification of the relationship of men and women was immediately put out of consideration. Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Havelock Ellis make could, of course, not even get a hearing. With this moral ideal in mind, not only vice, but sex itself, becomes an evil thing. Hence the hysterical and minute application of the taboo wherever sex shows itself. Barred from any reform which would reabsorb the impulse into civilized life, the Commissioners had no other course but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this they were compelled to discard the precious values of art, religion and social life of which this superfluous energy is the creator. Driven to think of it as bad, except for certain particular functions, they could, of course, not see its possibilities. Hence the poverty of their suggestions along educational and artistic lines. A valuable contribution, we are told, must be _reasonable_ and _practical_. Here is a case where words cannot be taken literally. "Reasonable" in America certainly never even pretended to mean in accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"--well one thinks of "practical politics," "practical business men," and "unpractical reformers." Boiled down these words amount to something like this: the proposals must not be new or startling; must not involve any radical disturbance of any respectable person's selfishness; must not call forth any great opposition; must look definite and immediate; must be tangible like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance, or a policeman's club. Above all a "reasonable and practical" proposal must not require any imaginative patience. The actual proposals have all these qualities: if they are "reasonable and practical" then we know by a good demonstration what these terms meant to that average body of citizens. To see that is to see exposed an important facet of the American temperament. Our dislike of "talk"; the frantic desire to "do something" without inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dollar standard; the unwillingness to cast any bread upon the waters; our preference for a sparrow in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the naïve inability to understand the inner satisfactions of bankrupt poets and the unworldliness of eccentric thinkers; success-mania; philistinism--they are pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure or unwillingness to project the mind beyond the daily routine of things, to play over the whole horizon of possibilities, and to recognize that all is not said when we have spoken. In those words "reasonable and practical" is the Chinese Wall of America, that narrow boundary which contracts our vision to the moment, cuts us off from the culture of the world, and makes us such provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own problems. Fixation upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real feeling that the world is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce panics. How this fascination of the obvious has balked the work of the Commission I need not elaborate. That the long process of civilizing sex received perfunctory attention; that the imaginative value of sex was lost in a dogma; that the implied changes in social life were dodged--all that has been pointed out. It was the inability to rise above the immediate that makes the report read as if the policeman were the only agent of civilization. For where in the report is any thorough discussion by sociologists of the relations of business and marriage to vice? Why is there no testimony by psychologists to show how sex can be affected by environment, by educators to show how it can be trained, by industrial experts to show how monotony and fatigue affect it? Where are the detailed proposals by specialists, for decent housing and working conditions, for educational reform, for play facilities? The Commission wasn't afraid of details: didn't it recommend searchlights in the parks as a weapon against vice? Why then isn't there a budget, a large, comprehensive budget, precise and informing, in which provision is made for beginning to civilize Chicago? That wouldn't have been "reasonable and practical," I presume, for it would have cost millions and millions of dollars. And where would the money have come from? Were the single-taxers, the Socialists consulted? But their proposals would require big changes in property interests, and would that be "reasonable and practical"? Evidently not: it is more reasonable and practical to keep park benches out of the shadows and to plague unescorted prostitutes. And where are the open questions: the issues that everybody should consider, the problems that scientists should study? I see almost no trace of them. Why are the sexual problems not even stated? Where are the doubts that should have honored these investigations, the frank statement of all the gaps in knowledge, and the obscurities in morals? Knowing perfectly well that vice will not be repressed within a year or prostitution absolutely annihilated in ten, it might, I should think, have seemed more important that the issues be made clear and the thought of the people fertilized than that the report should look very definite and precise. There are all sorts of things we do not understand about this problem. The opportunities for study which the Commissioners had must have made these empty spaces evident. Why then were we not taken into their confidence? Along what lines is investigation most needed? To what problems, what issues, shall we give our attention? What is the debatable ground in this territory? The Commission does not say, and I for one, ascribe the silence to the American preoccupation with immediate, definite, tangible interests. Wells has written penetratingly about this in "The New Machiavelli." I have called this fixation on the nearest object at hand an American habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an English one too. But in this country we have a philosophy to express it--the philosophy of the Reasonable and the Practical, and so I do not hesitate to import Mr. Wells's observations: "It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any extension of social organization is at present achieved. Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman and his attitude toward politics gains a new significance, and becomes accessible to a new series of solutions...." Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to cultivate what Mr. Wells calls the "mental hinterland" is a vice peculiar to the business man. The colleges submit to it whenever they concentrate their attention on the details of the student's vocation before they have built up some cultural background. The whole drift towards industrial training in schools has the germs of disaster within it--a preoccupation with the technique of a career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities of our schools and colleges, still less am I a lover of shallow specialists. The unquestioned need for experts in politics is full of the very real danger that detailed preparation may give us a bureaucracy--a government by men divorced from human tradition. The churches submit to the demand for immediacy with great alacrity. Look at the so-called "liberal" churches. Reacting against an empty formalism they are tumbling over themselves to prove how directly they touch daily life. You read glowing articles in magazines about preachers who devote their time to housing reforms, milk supplies, the purging of the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the political absorption of their sermons, you are told that the church must abandon forms and serve the common life of men. There are many ways of serving everyday needs,--turning churches into social reform organs and political rostra is, it seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of performing that service. When churches cease to paint the background of our lives, to nourish a Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate purposes and reaffirm the deepest values of life, then churches have ceased to meet the needs for which they exist. That "hinterland" affects daily life, and the church which cannot get a leverage on it by any other method than entering into immediate political controversy is simply a church that is dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform, but it has ceased to be a church. A large wing of the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical." Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great achievement. It forgets the difference between voting the Socialist ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is the tangible thing, and for that these Socialist politicians work. They get the votes, enough to elect them to office. In the City of Schenectady that happened as a result of the mayoralty campaign of 1911. I had an opportunity to observe the results. A few Socialists were in office set to govern a city with no Socialist "hinterland." It was a pathetic situation, for any reform proposal had to pass the judgment of men and women who did not see life as the officials did. On no important measure could the administration expect popular understanding. What was the result? In crucial issues, like taxation, the Socialists had to submit to the ideas,--the general state of mind of the community. They had to reverse their own theories and accept those that prevailed in that unconverted city. I wondered over our helplessness, for I was during a period one of those officials. The other members of the administration used to say at every opportunity that we were fighting "The Beast" or "Special Privilege." But to me it always seemed that we were like Peer Gynt struggling against the formless Boyg--invisible yet everywhere--we were struggling with the unwatered hinterland of the citizens of Schenectady. I understood then, I think, what Wells meant when he said that he wanted "no longer to 'fix up,' as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the development of that needed intellectual life without which all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile." For in the last analysis the practical and the reasonable are little idols of clay that thwart our efforts. The third requirement of a valuable contribution, says the Chicago Commission, is the constitutional sanction. This idol carries its own criticism with it. The worship of the constitution amounts, of course, to saying that men exist for the sake of the constitution. The person who holds fast to that idea is forever incapable of understanding either men or constitutions. It is a prime way of making laws ridiculous; if you want to cultivate _lèse-majesté_ in Germany get the Kaiser to proclaim his divine origin; if you want to promote disrespect of the courts, announce their infallibility. But in this case, the Commission is not representative of the dominant thought of our times. The vital part of the population has pretty well emerged from any dumb acquiescence in constitutions. Theodore Roosevelt, who reflects so much of America, has very definitely cast down this idol. Now since he stands generally some twenty years behind the pioneer and about six months ahead of the majority, we may rest assured that this much-needed iconoclasm is in process of achievement. Closely related to the constitution and just as decadent to-day are the Sanctity of Private Property, Vested Rights, Competition the Life of Trade, Prosperity (at any cost). Each one of these ideas was born of an original need, served its historical function and survived beyond its allotted time. Nowadays you still come across some of these ancient notions, especially in courts, where they do no little damage in perverting justice, but they are ghost-like and disreputable, gibbering and largely helpless. He who is watching the ascendant ideas of American life can afford to feel that the early maxims of capitalism are doomed. But the habit of mind which would turn an instrument of life into an immutable law of its existence--that habit is always with us. We may outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or Private Property only to establish some new totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by no means confined to the arts. Politics, religion, science are subject to it,--in politics we call it conservative, in religion orthodox, in science we describe it as academic. Its manifestations are multiform but they have a common source. An original creative impulse of the mind expresses itself in a certain formula; posterity mistakes the formula for the impulse. A genius will use his medium in a particular way because it serves his need; this way becomes a fixed rule which the classicalist serves. It has been pointed out that because the first steam trains were run on roads built for carts and coaches, the railway gauge almost everywhere in the world became fixed at four feet eight and one-half inches. You might say that genius works inductively and finds a method; the conservative works deductively from the method and defeats whatever genius he may have. A friend of mine had written a very brilliant article on a play which had puzzled New York. Some time later I was discussing the article with another friend of a decidedly classicalist bent. "What is it?" he protested, "it isn't criticism for it's half rhapsody; it isn't rhapsody because it is analytical.... What is it? That's what I want to know." "But isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew what it was...." And so the argument ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the article under certain categories he had come to accept, appreciation was impossible for him. I have many arguments with my classicalist friend. This time it was about George Moore's "Ave." I was trying to express my delight. "It isn't a novel, or an essay, or a real confession--it's nothing," said he. His well-ordered mind was compelled to throw out of doors any work for which he had no carefully prepared pocket. I thought of Aristotle, who denied the existence of a mule because it was neither a horse nor an ass. Dramatic critics follow Aristotle in more ways than one. A play is produced which fascinates an audience for weeks. It is published and read all over the world. Then you are treated to endless discussions by the critics trying to prove that "it is not a play." So-and-so-and-so constitute a play, they affirm,--this thing doesn't meet the requirements, so away with it. They forget that nobody would have had the slightest idea what a play was if plays hadn't been written; that the rules deduced from the plays that have already been written are no eternal law for the plays that will be. Classicalism and invention are irreconcilable enemies. Let it be understood that I am not decrying the great nourishment which a living tradition offers. The criticism I am making is of those who try to feed upon the husks alone. Without the slightest paradox one may say that the classicalist is most foreign to the classics. He does not put himself within the creative impulses of the past: he is blinded by their manifestations. It is perhaps no accident that two of the greatest classical scholars in England--Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern--are political radicals. The man whom I call here the classicalist cannot possibly be creative, for the essence of his creed is that there must be nothing new under the sun. The United States, you imagine, would of all nations be the freest from classicalism. Settled as a great adventure and dedicated to an experiment in republicanism, the tradition of the country is of extending boundaries, obstacles overcome, and pioneering exploits in which a wilderness was subdued to human uses. The very air of America would seem to be a guarantee against formalism. You would think that self-government finds its surest footing here--that real autonomy of the spirit which makes human uses the goal of effort, denies all inhuman ideals, seeks out what men want, and proceeds to create it. With such a history how could a nation fail to see in its constitution anything but a tool of life, like the axe, the spade or the plough? The West has in a measure carried its freedom over into politics and social life generally. Formalism sets in as you move east and south into the older and more settled communities. There the pioneering impulse has passed out of life into stupid history books, and the inevitable classicalism, the fear of adventure, the superstition before social invention, have reasserted themselves. If I may turn for a moment from description to prophecy, it is to say that this equilibrium will not hold for very long. There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms which it needs to-day--reforms which will free its economic life from the credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the marketing of its products--will follow the way of all agricultural communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain unnatural irritants which may be summed up as absentee ownership. The West is suffering from foreignly owned railroads, power-resources, and an alien credit control. But once it recaptures these essentials of its economic life, once the "progressive" movement is victorious, I venture to predict that the agricultural West will become the heart of American complacency. The East, on the other hand, with its industrial problem must go to far more revolutionary measures for a solution. And the East is fertilized continually by European traditions: that stream of immigration brings with it a thousand unforeseeable possibilities. The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. To-day perhaps, it is still predominantly a question for the East. But it means that America is turning from the contrast between her courage and nature's obstacles to a comparison of her civilization with Europe's. Immigration more than anything else is drawing us into world problems. Many people profess to see horrible dangers in the foreign invasion. Certainly no man is sure of its conclusion. It may swamp us, it may, if we seize the opportunity, mean the impregnation of our national life with a new brilliancy. I have said that the West is still moved by the tapering impulse of the pioneer, and I have ventured to predict that this would soon dwindle into an agricultural toryism. That prediction may very easily be upset. Far-reaching mechanical inventions already threaten to transform farming into an industry. I refer to those applications of power to agriculture which will inevitably divorce the farmer from the ownership of his tools. An industrial revolution analogous to that in manufacture during the nineteenth century is distinctly probable, and capitalistic agriculture may soon cease to be a contradiction in terms. Like all inventions it will disturb deeply the classicalist tendency, and this disturbance may generate a new impulse to replace the decadent one of the pioneer. Without some new dynamic force America, for all her tradition, is not immune to a hardening formalism. The psychological descent into classicalism is always a strong possibility. That is why we, the children of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism: universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial success; we have no tradition of intellectual revolt. The American college student has the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the "sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment with him. It seems at times as if our capacity for appreciating originality were absorbed in the trivial eccentricities of fads and fashions. The obvious novelties of machinery and locomotion, phonographs and yellow journalism slake the American thirst for creation pretty thoroughly. In serious matters we follow the Vice Commission's fourth essential of a valuable contribution--_that which will square with the public conscience of the American people_. I do not care to dilate upon the exploded pretensions of Mr. and Mrs. Grundy. They are a fairly disreputable couple by this time because we are beginning to know how much morbidity they represent. The Vice Commission, for example, bowed to what might be called the "instinctive conscience" of America when it balked at tracing vice to its source in the over-respected institutions of American life and the over-respected natures of American men and women. It bowed to the prevailing conscience when it proposed taboos instead of radical changes. It bowed to a traditional conscience when it confused the sins of sex with the possibilities of sex; and it paid tribute to a verbal conscience, to a lip morality, when, with extreme irrelevance to its beloved police, it proclaimed "absolute annihilation" the ultimate ideal. In brief, the commission failed to see that the working conscience of America is to-day bound up with the very evil it is supposed to eradicate by a relentless warfare. It was to be expected. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience. In order to do away with vice America must live and think and feel differently. This is an old story. Because of it all innovators have been at war with the public conscience of their time. Yet there is nothing strange or particularly disheartening about this commonplace observation: to expect anything else is to hope that a nation will lift itself by its own bootstraps. Yet there is danger the moment leaders of the people make a virtue of homage to the unregenerate, public conscience. In La Follette's Magazine (Feb. 17, 1912) there is a leading article called "The Great Issue." You can read there that "the composite judgment is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the judgment of any one individual mind. The people have been betrayed by their representatives again and again. The real danger to democracy lies not in the ignorance or want of patriotism of the people, but in the corrupting influence of powerful business organizations upon the representatives of the people...." I have only one quarrel with that philosophy--its negativity. With the belief that government is futile and mischievous unless supported by the mass of the people; with the undeniable fact that business has corrupted public officials--I have no complaint. What I object to is the emphasis which shifts the blame for our troubles from the shoulders of the people to those of the "corrupting interests." For this seems to me nothing but the resuscitation of the devil: when things go wrong it is somebody else's fault. We are peculiarly open to this kind of vanity in America. If some wise law is passed we say it is the will of the people showing its power of self-government. But if that will is so weak and timid that a great evil like child labor persists to our shame we turn the responsibility over to the devil personified as a "special interest." It is an old habit of the race which seems to have begun with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The word demagogue has been frightfully maltreated in late years, but surely here is its real meaning--to flatter the people by telling them that their failures are somebody else's fault. For if a nation declares it has reached its majority by instituting self-government, then it cannot shirk responsibility. These "special interests"--big business, a corrupt press, crooked politics--grew up within the country, were promoted by American citizens, admired by millions of them, and acquiesced in by almost all of them. Whoever thinks that business corruption is the work of a few inhumanly cunning individuals with monstrous morals is self-righteous without excuse. Capitalists did not violate the public conscience of America; they expressed it. That conscience was inadequate and unintelligent. We are being pinched by the acts it nourished. A great outcry has arisen and a number of perfectly conventional men like Lorimer suffer an undeserved humiliation. We say it is a "moral awakening." That is another dodge by which we pretend that we were always wise and just, though a trifle sleepy. In reality we are witnessing a change of conscience, initiated by cranks and fanatics, sustained for a long time by minorities, which has at last infected the mass of the people. The danger I spoke of arises just here: the desire to infect at once the whole mass crowds out the courage of the innovator. No man can do his best work if he bows at every step to the public conscience of his age. The real service to democracy is the fullest, freest expression of talent. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose. Hostile critics of democracy have long pointed out that mediocrity becomes the rule. They have not been without facts for their support. And I do not see why we who believe in democracy should not recognize this danger and trace it to its source. Certainly it is not answered with a sneer. I have worked in the editorial office of a popular magazine, a magazine that is known widely as a champion of popular rights. By personal experience, by intimate conversations, and by looking about, I think I am pretty well aware of what the influence of business upon journalism amounts to. I have seen the inside working of business pressure; articles of my own have been suppressed after they were in type; friends of mine have told me stories of expurgation, of the "morganization" of their editorial policy. And in the face of that I should like to record it as my sincere conviction that no financial power is one-tenth so corrupting, so insidious, so hostile to originality and frank statement as the fear of the public which reads the magazine. For one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer girl. Anybody can take a fling at poor old Mr. Rockefeller, but the great mass of average citizens (to which none of us belongs) must be left in undisturbed possession of its prejudices. In that subservience, and not in the meddling of Mr. Morgan, is the reason why American journalism is so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull. The people should be supreme, yes, its will should be the law of the land. But it is a caricature of democracy to make it also the law of individual initiative. One thing it is to say that all proposals must ultimately win the acceptance of the majority; it is quite another to propose nothing which is not immediately acceptable. It is as true of the nation as of the body that one leg cannot go forward very far unless the whole body follows. That is a different thing from trying to move both legs forward at the same time. The one is democracy; the other is--demolatry. It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol. It would be an endless task to hunt down all the masks, the will-o'-the-wisps and the shadows which divert us from our real purpose. Each man carries within himself the cause of his own mirages. Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit. And from this habit there is no permanent escape. Only effort can keep the mind centered truly. Whenever criticism slackens, whenever we sink into acquiescence, the mind swerves aside and clings with the gratitude of the weary to some fixed idea. It is so much easier to follow a rule of thumb, and obey the constitution, than to find out what we really want and to do it. * * * * * A great deal of political theory has been devoted to asking: what is the aim of government? Many readers may have wondered why that question has not figured in these pages. For the logical method would be to decide upon the ultimate ideal of statecraft and then elaborate the technique of its realization. I have not done that because this rational procedure inverts the natural order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical tangles and pseudo-problems. They come from an effort to state abstractly in intellectual terms qualities that can be known only by direct experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if you begin by announcing that politics must achieve "justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly what these words mean translated into concrete experiences, it is very doubtful whether you can really convey your meaning to anyone else. "Plaisante justice qu'une rivière borne. Vérité, au deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au de là," says Pascal. If what is good in the world depended on our ability to define it we should be hopeless indeed. This is an old difficulty in ethics. Many men have remarked that we quarrel over the "problem of evil," never over the "problem of good." That comes from the fact that good is a quality of experience which does not demand an explanation. When we are thwarted we begin to ask why. It was the evil in the world that set Leibniz the task of justifying the ways of God to man. Nor is it an accident that in daily life misfortune turns men to philosophy. One might generalize and say that as soon as we begin to explain, it is because we have been made to complain. No moral judgment can decide the value of life. No ethical theory can announce any intrinsic good. The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good. No formula can express an ultimate experience; no axiom can ever be a substitute for what really makes life worth living. Plato may describe the objects which man rejoices over, he may guide them to good experiences, but each man in his inward life is a last judgment on all his values. This amounts to saying that the goal of action is in its final analysis æsthetic and not moral--a quality of feeling instead of conformity to rule. Words like justice, harmony, power, democracy are simply empirical suggestions which may produce the good life. If the practice of them does not produce it then we are under no obligation to follow them, we should be idolatrous fools to do so. Every abstraction, every rule of conduct, every constitution, every law and social arrangement, is an instrument that has no value in itself. Whatever credit it receives, whatever reverence we give it, is derived from its utility in ministering to those concrete experiences which are as obvious and as undefinable as color or sound. We can celebrate the positively good things, we can live them, we can create them, but we cannot philosophize about them. To the anæsthetic intellect we could not convey the meaning of joy. A creature that could reason but not feel would never know the value of life, for what is ultimate is in itself inexplicable. Politics is not concerned with prescribing the ultimate qualities of life. When it tries to do so by sumptuary legislation, nothing but mischief is invoked. Its business is to provide opportunities, not to announce ultimate values; to remove oppressive evil and to invent new resources for enjoyment. With the enjoyment itself it can have no concern. That must be lived by each individual. In a sense the politician can never know his own success, for it is registered in men's inner lives, and is largely incommunicable. An increasing harvest of rich personalities is the social reward for a fine statesmanship, but such personalities are free growths in a cordial environment. They cannot be cast in moulds or shaped by law. There is no need, therefore, to generate dialectical disputes about the final goal of politics. No definition can be just--too precise a one can only deceive us into thinking that our definition is true. Call ultimate values by any convenient name, it is of slight importance which you choose. If only men can keep their minds freed from formalism, idol worship, fixed ideas, and exalted abstractions, politicians need not worry about the language in which the end of our striving is expressed. For with the removal of distracting idols, man's experience becomes the center of thought. And if we think in terms of men, find out what really bothers them, seek to supply what they really want, hold only their experience sacred, we shall find our sanction obvious and unchallenged. CHAPTER VII THE MAKING OF CREEDS My first course in philosophy was nothing less than a summary of the important systems of thought put forward in Western Europe during the last twenty-six hundred years. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we did gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages. For the rest we touched upon all the historic names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend approached me with a sour look on his face. "You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail out of this business. I agree with each philosopher as we study him. But when we get to the next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally says the other one was wrong. They can't all be right. Can they now?" I was too much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him. Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of motives and facts and ideas was incredible. I began to feel the force of Mr. John Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for social and industrial reforms continue to ignore principles ... they will have to pay the price which short-sighted empiricism always pays; with slow, hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track toward an unseen goal." The political theorists laid some claim to lighting up both the track and the goal, and so I turned to them for help. Now whoever has followed political theory will have derived perhaps two convictions as a reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard their systems as true and binding, and none of these systems are. No matter which one you examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a Platonist or a Benthamite in politics to-day. You cannot go to any of the great philosophers even for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be fairly complete, and relevant to American life. I returned to the sophomore mood: "Each of these thinkers has contributed something, has had some wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk the philosophers can't all be right or all wrong." But like so many theoretical riddles, this one rested on a very simple piece of ignorance. The trouble was that without realizing it I too had been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too was looking for something that could not be found. That happened in this case to be nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms, foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was on the point of damning the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to Marx. This is what one may call the naïveté of the intellect. Its hope is that some man living at one place on the globe in a particular epoch will, through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize his experience for all time and all space. It says in effect that there is never anything essentially new under the sun, that any moment of experience sufficiently understood would be seen to contain all history and all destiny--that the intellect reasoning on one piece of experience could know what all the rest of experience was like. Looked at more closely this philosophy means that novelty is an illusion of ignorance, that life is an endless repetition, that when you know one revolution of it, you know all the rest. In a very real sense the world has no history and no future, the race has no career. At any moment everything is given: our reason could know that moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life would be like the commuter's who travels back and forth on the same line every day. There would be no inventions and no discoveries, for in the instant that reason had found the key of experience everything would be unfolded. The present would not be the womb of the future: nothing would be embryonic, nothing would _grow_. Experience would cease to be an adventure in order to become the monotonous fulfilment of a perfect prophecy. This omniscience of the human intellect is one of the commonest assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have, it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity; the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists, materialists and determinists who believed in all sincerity that "Science" was capable of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If you want to see this faith in all its naïveté go into those quaint rationalist circles where Herbert Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of life," with only a few inessential details omitted. Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has ever realized such hopes. Mankind has certainly come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's observation that one of its favorite games is called "Cheat the Prophet."... "The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else." Now this weakness is not, as Mr. Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the clever men. But it is a weakness, and many people have speculated about it. Why in the face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the rocks of the unexpected do men continue to believe that the intellect can transcend the vicissitudes of experience? For they certainly do believe it, and generally the more parochial their outlook, the more cosmic their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try to believe that, however finite we may be, our intellect is something apart from the cycle of our life, capable by an Olympian detachment from human interests of a divine thoroughness. Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world." This is what most of us do in our search for a philosophy of politics. We forget that the big systems of theory are much more like village lamp-posts than they are like the sun, that they were made to light up a particular path, obviate certain dangers, and aid a peculiar mode of life. The understanding of the place of theory in life is a comparatively new one. We are just beginning to see how creeds are made. And the insight is enormously fertile. Thus Mr. Alfred Zimmern in his fine study of "The Greek Commonwealth" says of Plato and Aristotle that no interpretation can be satisfactory which does not take into account the impression left upon their minds by the social development which made the age of these philosophers a period of Athenian decline. Mr. Zimmern's approach is common enough in modern scholarship, but the full significance of it for the creeds we ourselves are making is still something of a novelty. When we are asked to think of the "Republic" as the reaction of decadent Greece upon the conservative temperament of Plato, the function of theory is given a new illumination. Political philosophy at once appears as a human invention in a particular crisis--an instrument to fit a need. The pretension to finality falls away. This is a great emancipation. Instead of clinging to the naïve belief that Plato was legislating for all mankind, you can discuss his plans as a temporary superstructure made for an historical purpose. You are free then to appreciate the more enduring portions of his work, to understand Santayana when he says of the Platonists, "their theories are so extravagant, yet their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined and beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies conscience and utters our inmost hopes." This insight into the values of human life, partial though it be, is what constitutes the abiding monument of Plato's genius. His constructions, his formal creeds, his law-making and social arrangements are local and temporary--for us they can have only an antiquarian interest. In some such way as this the sophomoric riddle is answered: no thinker can lay down a course of action for all mankind--programs if they are useful at all are useful for some particular historical period. But if the thinker sees at all deeply into the life of his own time, his theoretical system will rest upon observation of human nature. That remains as a residue of wisdom long after his reasoning and his concrete program have passed into limbo. For human nature in all its profounder aspects changes very little in the few generations since our Western wisdom has come to be recorded. These _aperçus_ left over from the great speculations are the golden threads which successive thinkers weave into the pattern of their thought. Wisdom remains; theory passes. If that is true of Plato with his ample vision how much truer is it of the theories of the littler men--politicians, courtiers and propagandists who make up the academy of politics. Machiavelli will, of course, be remembered at once as a man, whose speculations were fitted to an historical crisis. His advice to the Prince was real advice, not a sermon. A boss was telling a governor how to extend his power. The wealth of Machiavelli's learning and the splendid penetration of his mind are used to interpret experience for a particular purpose. I have always thought that Machiavelli derives his bad name from a too transparent honesty. Less direct minds would have found high-sounding ethical sanctions in which to conceal the real intent. That was the nauseating method of nineteenth century economists when they tried to identify the brutal practices of capitalism with the beneficence of nature and the Will of God. Not so Machiavelli. He could write without a blush that "a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion." The apologists of business also justified a rupture with human decencies. They too fitted their theory to particular purposes, but they had not the courage to avow it even to themselves. The rare value of Machiavelli is just this lack of self-deception. You may think his morals devilish, but you cannot accuse him of quoting scripture. I certainly do not admire the end he serves: the extension of an autocrat's power is a frivolous perversion of government. His ideal happens, however, to be the aim of most foreign offices, politicians and "princes of finance." Machiavelli's morals are not one bit worse than the practices of the men who rule the world to-day. An American Senate tore up the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, and with the approval of the President acted "contrary to fidelity" and friendship too; Austria violated the Treaty of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Machiavelli's ethics are commonplace enough. His head is clearer than the average. He let the cat out of the bag and showed in the boldest terms how theory becomes an instrument of practice. You may take him as a symbol of the political theorist. You may say that all the thinkers of influence have been writing advice to the Prince. Machiavelli recognized Lorenzo the Magnificent; Marx, the proletariat of Europe. At first this sounds like standing the world on its head, denying reason and morality, and exalting practice over righteousness. That is neither here nor there. I am simply trying to point out an illuminating fact whose essential truth can hardly be disputed. The important social philosophies are consciously or otherwise the servants of men's purposes. Good or bad, that it seems to me is the way we work. We find reasons for what we want to do. The big men from Machiavelli through Rousseau to Karl Marx brought history, logic, science and philosophy to prop up and strengthen their deepest desires. The followers, the epigones, may accept the reasons of Rousseau and Marx and deduce rules of action from them. But the original genius sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons afterward. This amounts to saying that man when he is most creative is not a rational, but a wilful animal. The political thinker who to-day exercises the greatest influence on the Western World is, I suppose, Karl Marx. The socialist movement calls him its prophet, and, while many socialists say he is superseded, no one disputes his historical importance. Now Marx embalmed his thinking in the language of the Hegelian school. He founded it on a general philosophy of society which is known as the materialistic conception of history. Moreover, Marx put forth the claim that he had made socialism "scientific"--had shown that it was woven into the texture of natural phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia crowds three heavy volumes, so elaborate and difficult that socialists rarely read them. I have known one socialist who lived leisurely on his country estate and claimed to have "looked" at every page of Marx. Most socialists, including the leaders, study selected passages and let it go at that. This is a wise economy based on a good instinct. For all the parade of learning and dialectic is an after-thought--an accident from the fact that the prophetic genius of Marx appeared in Germany under the incubus of Hegel. Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he wrote three volumes to justify it. Did not the Communist Manifesto appear many years before "Das Kapital"? Nothing is more instructive than a socialist "experience" meeting at which everyone tries to tell how he came to be converted. These gatherings are notoriously untruthful--in fact, there is a genial pleasure in not telling the truth about one's salad days in the socialist movement. The prevalent lie is to explain how the new convert, standing upon a mountain of facts, began to trace out the highways that led from hell to heaven. Everybody knows that no such process was actually lived through, and almost without exception the real story can be discerned: a man was dissatisfied, he wanted a new condition of life, he embraced a theory that would justify his hopes and his discontent. For once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. In the language of philosophers, socialism as a living force is a product of the will--a will to beauty, order, neighborliness, not infrequently a will to health. Men desire first, then they reason; fascinated by the future, they invent a "scientific socialism" to get there. Many people don't like to admit this. Or if they admit it, they do so with a sigh. Their minds construct a utopia--one in which all judgments are based on logical inference from syllogisms built on the law of mathematical probabilities. If you quote David Hume at them, and say that reason itself is an irrational impulse they think you are indulging in a silly paradox. I shall not pursue this point very far, but I believe it could be shown without too much difficulty that the rationalists are fascinated by a certain kind of thinking--logical and orderly thinking--and that it is their will to impose that method upon other men. For fear that somebody may regard this as a play on words drawn from some ultra-modern "anti-intellectualist" source, let me quote Santayana. This is what the author of that masterly series "The Life of Reason" wrote in one of his earlier books: "The ideal of rationality is itself as arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands rationality, what really demands rationality, what makes it a good and indispensable thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own nature, but our need of it both in safe and economical action and in the pleasures of comprehension." Because rationality itself is a wilful exercise one hears Hymns to Reason and sees it personified as an extremely dignified goddess. For all the light and shadow of sentiment and passion play even about the syllogism. The attempts of theorists to explain man's successes as rational acts and his failures as lapses of reason have always ended in a dismal and misty unreality. No genuine politician ever treats his constituents as reasoning animals. This is as true of the high politics of Isaiah as it is of the ward boss. Only the pathetic amateur deludes himself into thinking that, if he presents the major and minor premise, the voter will automatically draw the conclusion on election day. The successful politician--good or bad--deals with the dynamics--with the will, the hopes, the needs and the visions of men. It isn't sentimentality which says that where there is no vision the people perisheth. Every time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red flag of the socialists; every song from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the "International"; every metrical conclusion to a great speech--whether we stand at Armageddon, refuse to press upon the brow of labor another crown of thorns, or call upon the workers of the world to unite--every one of these slogans is an incitement of the will--an effort to energize politics. They are attempts to harness blind impulses to particular purposes. They are tributes to the sound practical sense of a vision in politics. No cause can succeed without them: so long as you rely on the efficacy of "scientific" demonstration and logical proof you can hold your conventions in anybody's back parlor and have room to spare. I remember an observation that Lincoln Steffens made in a speech about Mayor Tom Johnson. "Tom failed," said Mr. Steffens, "because he was too practical." Coming from a man who had seen as much of actual politics as Mr. Steffens, it puzzled me a great deal. I taxed him with it later and he explained somewhat as follows: "Tom Johnson had a vision of Cleveland which he called The City on the Hill. He pictured the town emancipated from its ugliness and its cruelty--a beautiful city for free men and women. He used to talk of that vision to the 'cabinet' of political lieutenants which met every Sunday night at his house. He had all his appointees working for the City on the Hill. But when he went out campaigning before the people he talked only of three-cent fares and the tax outrages. Tom Johnson didn't show the people the City on the Hill. He didn't take them into his confidence. They never really saw what it was all about. And they went back on Tom Johnson." That is one of Mr. Steffens's most acute observations. What makes it doubly interesting is that Tom Johnson confirmed it a few months before he died. His friends were telling him that his defeat was temporary, that the work he had begun was unchecked. It was plain that in the midst of his suffering, with death close by, he found great comfort in that assurance. But his mind was so realistic, his integrity so great that he could not blink the fact that there had been a defeat. Steffens was pointing out the explanation: "you did not show the people what you saw, you gave them the details, you fought their battles, you started to build, but you left them in darkness as to the final goal." I wish I could recall the exact words in which Tom Johnson replied. For in them the greatest of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical weakness of opportunist politics. There is a type of radical who has an idea that he can insinuate advanced ideas into legislation without being caught. His plan of action is to keep his real program well concealed and to dole out sections of it to the public from time to time. John A. Hobson in "The Crisis of Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens calls these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of existing Municipal or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the sole springs of action." Well may Mr. Hobson inquire, _"Now, what provision is made for generating the motor power of progress in Collectivism?"_ No amount of architect's plans, bricks and mortar will build a house. Someone must have the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the good sense of its program. It must find popular feeling, organize it, and make that the motive power of government. If you study the success of Roosevelt the point is re-enforced. He is a man of will in whom millions of people have felt the embodiment of their own will. For a time Roosevelt was a man of destiny in the truest sense. He wanted what a nation wanted: his own power radiated power; he embodied a vision; Tom, Dick and Harry moved with his movement. No use to deplore the fact. You cannot stop a living body with nothing at all. I think we may picture society as a compound of forces that are always changing. Put a vision in front of one of these currents and you can magnetize it in that direction. For visions alone organize popular passions. Try to ignore them or box them up, and they will burst forth destructively. When Haywood dramatizes the class struggle he uses class resentment for a social purpose. You may not like his purpose, but unless you can gather proletarian power into some better vision, you have no grounds for resenting Haywood. I fancy that the demonstration of King Canute settled once and for all the stupid attempt to ignore a moving force. A dynamic conception of society always frightens a great number of people. It gives politics a restless and intractable quality. Pure reason is so gentlemanly, but will and the visions of a people--these are adventurous and incalculable forces. Most politicians living for the day prefer to ignore them. If only society will stand fairly still while their career is in the making they are content to avoid the actualities. But a politician with some imaginative interest in genuine affairs need not be seduced into the learned folly of pretending that reality is something else than it is. If he is to influence life he must deal with it. A deep respect is due the Schopenhauerian philosopher who looks upon the world, finds that its essence is evil, and turns towards insensitive calm. But no respect is due to anyone who sets out to reform the world by ignoring its quality. Whoever is bent upon shaping politics to better human uses must accept freely as his starting point the impulses that agitate human beings. If observation shows that reason is an instrument of will, then only confusion can result from pretending that it isn't. I have called this misplaced "rationality" a piece of learned folly, because it shows itself most dangerously among those thinkers about politics who are divorced from action. In the Universities political movements are generally regarded as essentially static, cut and dried solids to be judged by their logical consistency. It is as if the stream of life had to be frozen before it could be studied. The socialist movement was given a certain amount of attention when I was an undergraduate. The discussion turned principally on two points: were rent, interest and dividends _earned_? Was collective ownership of capital a feasible scheme? And when the professor, who was a good dialectician, had proved that interest was a payment for service ("saving") and that public ownership was not practicable, it was assumed that socialism was disposed of. The passions, the needs, the hopes that generate this world-wide phenomenon were, I believe, pocketed and ignored under the pat saying: "Of course, socialism is not an economic policy, it's a religion." That was the end of the matter for the students of politics. It was then a matter for the divinity schools. If the same scholastic method is in force there, all that would be needed to crush socialism is to show its dogmatic inconsistencies. The theorist is incompetent when he deals with socialism just because he assumes that men are determined by logic and that a false conclusion will stop a moving, creative force. Occasionally he recognizes the wilful character of politics: then he shakes his head, climbs into an ivory tower and deplores the moonshine, the religious manias and the passions of the mob. Real life is beyond his control and influence because real life is largely agitated by impulses and habits, unconscious needs, faith, hope and desire. With all his learning he is ineffective because, instead of trying to use the energies of men, he deplores them. Suppose we recognize that creeds are instruments of the will, how would it alter the character of our thinking? Take an ancient quarrel like that over determinism. Whatever your philosophy, when you come to the test of actual facts you find, I think, all grades of freedom and determinism. For certain purposes you believe in free will, for others you do not. Thus, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, no determinist is prevented from saying "if you please" to the housemaid. In love, in your career, you have no doubt that "if" is a reality. But when you are engaged in scientific investigation, you try to reduce the spontaneous in life to a minimum. Mr. Arnold Bennett puts forth a rather curious hybrid when he advises us to treat ourselves as free agents and everyone else as an automaton. On the other hand Prof. Münsterberg has always insisted that in social relations we must always treat everyone as a purposeful, integrated character. Your doctrine, in short, depends on your purpose: a theory by itself is neither moral nor immoral, its value is conditioned by the purpose it serves. In any accurate sense theory is to be judged only as an effective or ineffective instrument of a desire: the discussion of doctrines is technical and not moral. A theory has no intrinsic value: that is why the devil can talk theology. No creed possesses any final sanction. Human beings have desires that are far more important than the tools and toys and churches they make to satisfy them. It is more penetrating, in my opinion, to ask of a creed whether it served than whether it was "true." Try to judge the great beliefs that have swayed mankind by their inner logic or their empirical solidity and you stand forever, a dull pedant, apart from the interests of men. The Christian tradition did not survive because of Aquinas or fall before the Higher Criticism, nor will it be revived because someone proves the scientific plausibility of its doctrine. What we need to know about the Christian epic is the effect it had on men--true or false, they have believed in it for nineteen centuries. Where has it helped them, where hindered? What needs did it answer? What energies did it transmute? And what part of mankind did it neglect? Where did it begin to do violence to human nature? Political creeds must receive the same treatment. The doctrine of the "social contract" formulated by Hobbes and made current by Rousseau can no longer be accepted as a true account of the origin of society. Jean-Jacques is in fact a supreme case--perhaps even a slight caricature--of the way in which formal creeds bolster up passionate wants. I quote from Prof. Walter's introduction in which he says that "The Social Contract _showed to those who were eager to be convinced_ that no power was legitimate which was guilty of abuses. It is no wonder that its author was buried in the Pantheon with pompous procession, that the framers of the new Constitution, Thouret and Lièyes and La Fayette, did not forget and dared not forget its doctrines, that it was the text-book and the delight of Camille Desmoulins and Danton and St. Just, that Robespierre read it through once every day." In the perspective of history, no one feels that he has said the last word about a philosophy like Rousseau's after demonstrating its "untruth." Good or bad, it has meant too much for any such easy disposal. What shall we call an idea, objectively untrue, but practically of the highest importance? The thinker who has faced this difficulty most radically is Georges Sorel in the "Reflexions sur la Violence." His doctrine of the "social myth" has seemed to many commentators one of those silly paradoxes that only a revolutionary syndicalist and Frenchman could have put forward. M. Sorel is engaged in presenting the General Strike as the decisive battle of the class struggle and the core of the socialist movement. Now whatever else he may be, M. Sorel is not naïve: the sharp criticism of other socialists was something he could not peacefully ignore. They told him that the General Strike was an idle dream, that it could never take place, that, even if it could, the results would not be very significant. Sidney Webb, in the customary Fabian fashion, had dismissed the General Strike as a sign of socialist immaturity. There is no doubt that M. Sorel felt the force of these attacks. But he was not ready to abandon his favorite idea because it had been shown to be unreasonable and impossible. Just the opposite effect showed itself and he seized the opportunity of turning an intellectual defeat into a spiritual triumph. This performance must have delighted him to the very bottom of his soul, for he has boasted that his task in life is to aid in ruining "le prestige de la culture bourgeoise." M. Sorel's defence of the General Strike is very startling. He admits that it may never take place, that it is not a true picture of the goal of the socialist movement. Without a blush he informs us that this central gospel of the working class is simply a "myth." The admission frightens M. Sorel not at all. "It doesn't matter much," he remarks, "whether myths contain details actually destined to realization _in the scheme_ of an historical future; they are not astrological almanacks; it may even be that nothing of what they express will actually happen--as in the case of that catastrophe which the early Christians expected. Are we not accustomed in daily life to recognizing that the reality differs very greatly from the ideas of it that we made before we acted? Yet that doesn't hinder us from making resolutions.... Myths must be judged as instruments for acting upon present conditions; all discussion about the manner of applying them concretely to the course of history is senseless. _The entire myth is what counts...._ There is no use then in reasoning about details which might arise in the midst of the class struggle ... even though the revolutionists should be deceiving themselves through and through in making a fantastic picture of the general strike, this picture would still have been a power of the highest order in preparing for revolution, so long as it expressed completely all the aspirations of socialism and bound together revolutionary ideas with a precision and firmness that no other methods of thought could have given." It may well be imagined that this highly sophisticated doctrine was regarded as perverse. All the ordinary prejudices of thought are irritated by a thinker who frankly advises masses of his fellow-men to hold fast to a belief which by all the canons of common sense is nothing but an illusion. M. Sorel must have felt the need of closer statement, for in a letter to Daniel Halèvy, published in the second edition, he makes his position much clearer. "Revolutionary myths ..." we read, "enable us to understand the activity, the feelings, and the ideas of a populace preparing to enter into a decisive struggle; _they are not descriptions of things, but expressions of will_." The italics are mine: they set in relief the insight that makes M. Sorel so important to our discussion. I do not know whether a quotation torn from its context can possibly do justice to its author. I do know that for any real grasp of this point it is necessary to read M. Sorel with great sympathy. One must grant at least that he has made an accurate observation. The history of the world is full of great myths which have had the most concrete results. M. Sorel cites primitive Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Mazzini campaign. The men who took part in those great social movements summed up their aspiration in pictures of decisive battles resulting in the ultimate triumph of their cause. We in America might add an example from our own political life. For it is Theodore Roosevelt who is actually attempting to make himself and his admirers the heroes of a new social myth. Did he not announce from the platform at Chicago--"we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord"? Let no one dismiss M. Sorel then as an empty paradoxer. The myth is not one of the outgrown crudities of our pagan ancestors. We, in the midst of our science and our rationalism, are still making myths, and their force is felt in the actual affairs of life. They convey an impulse, not a program, nor a plan of reconstruction. Their practical value cannot be ignored, for they embody the motor currents in social life. Myths are to be judged, as M. Sorel says, by their ability to express aspiration. They stand or fall by that. In such a test the Christian myth, for example, would be valued for its power of incarnating human desire. That it did not do so completely is the cause of its decline. From Aucassin to Nietzsche men have resented it as a partial and stunting dream. It had too little room for profane love, and only by turning the Church of Christ into the Church Militant could the essential Christian passivity obtain the assent of aggressive and masculine races. To-day traditional Christianity has weakened in the face of man's interest in the conquest of this world. The liberal and advanced churches recognize this fact by exhibiting a great preoccupation with everyday affairs. Now they may be doing important service--I have no wish to deny that--but when the Christian Churches turn to civics, to reformism or socialism, they are in fact announcing that the Christian dream is dead. They may continue to practice some of its moral teachings and hold to some of its creed, but the Christian impulse is for them no longer active. A new dream, which they reverently call Christian, has sprung from their desires. During their life these social myths contain a nation's finest energy. It is just because they are "not descriptions of things, but expressions of will" that their influence is so great. Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power; run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws. Robert Burns was right when he preferred poetry to charters. The recognition of this truth by Sorel is one of the most impressive events in the revolutionary movement. Standing as a spokesman of an actual social revolt, he has not lost his vision because he understands its function. If Machiavelli is a symbol of the political theorist making reason an instrument of purpose, we may take Sorel as a self-conscious representative of the impulses which generate purpose. It must not be supposed that respect for the myth is a discovery of Sorel's. He is but one of a number of contemporary thinkers who have reacted against a very stupid prejudice of nineteenth century science to the effect that the mental habits of human beings were not "facts." Unless ideas mirrored external nature they were regarded as beneath the notice of the scientific mind. But in more recent years we have come to realize that, in a world so full of ignorance and mistake, error itself is worthy of study. Our untrue ideas are significant because they influence our lives enormously. They are "facts" to be investigated. One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue. William James might also be cited for his defense of those beliefs that are beyond the realm of proof. His essay, "The Will to Believe," is a declaration of independence, which says in effect that scientific demonstration is not the only test of ideas. He stated the case for those beliefs which influence life so deeply, though they fail to describe it. James himself was very disconcerting to many scientists because he insisted on expressing his aspirations about the universe in what his colleague Santayana calls a "romantic cosmology": "I am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more probable than conventional idealism or the Christian Orthodoxy. All three are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth, to which probabilities are irrelevant." It is impossible to leave this point without quoting Nietzsche, who had this insight and stated it most provocatively. In "Beyond Good and Evil" Nietzsche says flatly that "the falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing...." Then he comments on the philosophers. "They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic...; whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or 'suggestion,' which is generally their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub 'truths'--and _very_ far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself; very far from having the good taste or the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.... It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography, and, moreover, that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.... Whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have acted as _inspiring_ genii (or as demons and cobolds) will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate _lord_ over all the other impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and, as _such_, attempts to philosophize." What Nietzsche has done here is, in his swashbuckling fashion, to cut under the abstract and final pretensions of creeds. Difficulties arise when we try to apply this wisdom in the present. That dogmas _were_ instruments of human purposes is not so incredible; that they still _are_ instruments is not so clear to everyone; and that they will be, that they should be--this seems a monstrous attack on the citadel of truth. It is possible to believe that other men's theories were temporary and merely useful; we like to believe that ours will have a greater authority. It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do. Many of us are ready to grant that in the past men's motives were deeper than their intellects: we forgive them with a kind of self-righteousness which says that they knew not what they did. But to follow the great tradition of human wisdom deliberately, with our eyes open in the manner of Sorel, that seems a crazy procedure. A notion of intellectual honor fights against it: we think we must aim at final truth, and not allow autobiography to creep into speculation. Now the trouble with such an idol is that autobiography creeps in anyway. The more we censor it, the more likely it is to appear disguised, to fool us subtly and perhaps dangerously. The men like Nietzsche and James who show the wilful origin of creeds are in reality the best watchers of the citadel of truth. For there is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions. From the political point of view, another observation is necessary. The creed of a Rousseau, for example, is active in politics, not for what it says, but for what people think it says. I have urged that Marx found scientific reasons for what he wanted to do. It is important to add that the people who adopted his reasons for what they wanted to do were not any too respectful of Marx's reasons. Thus the so-called materialistic philosophy of Karl Marx is not by any means identical with the theories one hears among Marxian socialists. There is a big distortion in the transmitting of ideas. A common purpose, far more than common ideas, binds Marx to his followers. And when a man comes to write about his philosophy he is confronted with a choice: shall the creed described be that of Marx or of the Marxians? For the study of politics I should say unhesitatingly that it is more important to know what socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers, think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for two reasons--because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant to our subject. Relevant it is in that it suggests the importance of style, of propaganda, the popularization of ideas. The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples. It is interesting to notice the explanation given by Frau Förster-Nietzsche for her brother's quarrel with Wagner. She dates it from the time when Nietzsche, under the guise of Wagnerian propaganda, began to expound himself. The critics and interpreters are themselves creative. It is really unfair to speak of the Marxian philosophy as a political force. It is juster to speak of the Marxian tradition. So when I write of Marx's influence I have in mind what men and women in socialist meetings, in daily life here in America, hold as a faith and attribute to Marx. There is no pretension whatever to any critical study of "Das Kapital" itself. I am thinking rather of stuffy halls in which an earnest voice is expounding "the evolution of capitalism," of little groups, curious and bewildered, listening in the streets of New York to the story of the battle between the "master class" and the "working class," of little red pamphlets, of newspapers, and cartoons--awkward, badly printed and not very genial, a great stream of spellbinding and controversy through which the aspirations of millions are becoming articulate: The tradition is saying that "the system" and not the individual is at fault. It describes that system as one in which a small class owns the means of production and holds the rest of mankind in bondage. Arts, religions, laws, as well as vice and crime and degradation, have their source in this central economic condition. If you want to understand our life you must see that it is determined by the massing of capital in the hands of a few. All epochs are determined by economic arrangements. But a system of property always contains within itself "the seeds of its own destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest a change: a dispossessed class compels it. So mankind has progressed through savagery, chattel slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or the capitalism of to-day. This age is pregnant with the socialism of to-morrow. So roughly the tradition is handed on. Two sets of idea seem to dominate it: we are creatures of economic conditions; a war of classes is being fought everywhere in which the proletariat will ultimately capture the industrial machinery and produce a sound economic life as the basis of peace and happiness for all. The emphasis on environment is insistent. Facts are marshaled, the news of the day is interpreted to show that men are determined by economic conditions. This fixation has brought down upon the socialists a torrent of abuse in which "atheism" and "materialism" are prevailing epithets. But the propaganda continues and the philosophy spreads, penetrating reform groups, social workers, historians, and sociologists. It has served the socialist purpose well. To the workingmen it has brought home the importance of capturing the control of industry. Economic determinism has been an antidote to mere preaching of goodness, to hero-worship and political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to concentrate attention on the ownership of capital: whenever any other interest like religion or patriotism threatened to diffuse that attention, socialist leaders have always been ready to show that the economic fact is more central. Dignity and prestige were supplied by making economics the key of history; passion was chained by building paradise upon it. In all the political philosophies there is none so adapted to its end. Every sanction that mankind respects has been grouped about this one purpose--the control of capital. It is as if all history converged upon the issue, and the workers in the cause feel that they carry within them the destiny of the race. Start anywhere, with an orthodox socialist and he will lead you to this supreme economic situation. Tyrannies and race hatred, national rivalries, sex problems, the difficulties of artistic endeavor, all failures, crimes, vices--there is not one which he will not relate to private capitalism. Nor is there anything disingenuous about this focusing of the attention: a real belief is there. Of course you will find plenty of socialists who see other issues and who smile a bit at the rigors of economic determinism. In these later days there is in fact, a decided loosening in the creed. But it is fair to say that the mass of socialists hold this philosophy with as much solemnity as a reformer held his when he wrote to me that the cure for obscenity was the taxation of land values and absolute free trade. Singlemindedness has done good service. It has bound the world together and has helped men to think socially. Turning their attention away from the romanticism of history, the materialistic philosophy has helped them to look at realities. It has engendered a fine concern about average people, about the voiceless multitudes who have been left to pass unnoticed. Not least among the blessings is a shattering of the good-and-bad-man theory: the assassination of tyrants or the adoration of saviors. A shallow and specious other-worldliness has been driven out: an other-worldliness which is really nothing but laziness about this one. And if from a speculative angle the Marxian tradition has shaded too heavily the economic facts, it was at least a plausible and practical exaggeration. But the drawbacks are becoming more and more evident as socialism approaches nearer to power and responsibility. The feeling that man is a creature and not a creator is disastrous as a personal creed when you come to act. If you insist upon being "determined by conditions" you do hesitate about saying "I shall." You are likely to wait for something to determine you. Personal initiative and individual genius are poorly regarded: many socialists are suspicious of originality. This philosophy, so useful in propaganda, is becoming a burden in action. That is another way of saying that the instrument has turned into an idol. For while it is illuminating to see how environment moulds men, it is absolutely essential that men regard themselves as moulders of their environment. A new philosophical basis is becoming increasingly necessary to socialism--one that may not be "truer" than the old materialism but that shall simply be more useful. Having learned for a long time what is done to us, we are now faced with the task of doing. With this changed purpose goes a change of instruments. All over the world socialists are breaking away from the stultifying influence of the outworn determinism. For the time is at hand when they must cease to look upon socialism as inevitable in order to make it so. Nor will the philosophy of class warfare serve this new need. That can be effective only so long as the working-class is without sovereignty. But no sooner has it achieved power than a new outlook is needed in order to know what to do with it. The tactics of the battlefield are of no use when the battle is won. I picture this philosophy as one of deliberate choices. The underlying tone of it is that society is made by man for man's uses, that reforms are inventions to be applied when by experiment they show their civilizing value. Emphasis is placed upon the devising, adapting, constructing faculties. There is no reason to believe that this view is any colder than that of the war of class against class. It will generate no less energy. Men to-day can feel almost as much zest in the building of the Panama Canal as they did in a military victory. Their domineering impulses find satisfaction in conquering things, in subjecting brute forces to human purposes. This sense of mastery in a winning battle against the conditions of our life is, I believe, the social myth that will inspire our reconstructions. We shall feel free to choose among alternatives--to take this much of socialism, insert so much syndicalism, leave standing what of capitalism seems worth conserving. We shall be making our own house for our own needs, cities to suit ourselves, and we shall believe ourselves capable of moving mountains, as engineers do, when mountains stand in their way. And history, science, philosophy will support our hopes. What will fascinate us in the past will be the records of inventions, of great choices, of those alternatives on which destiny seems to hang. The splendid epochs will be interpreted as monuments of man's creation, not of his propulsion. We shall be interested primarily in the way nations established their civilization in spite of hostile conditions. Admiration will go out to the men who did not submit, who bent things to human use. We may see the entire tragedy of life in being driven. Half-truths and illusions, if you like, but tonic. This view will suit our mood. For we shall be making and the makers of history will become more real to us. Instead of urging that issues are inevitable, instead of being swamped by problems that are unavoidable, we may stand up and affirm the issues we propose to handle. Perhaps we shall say with Nietzsche: "Let the value of everything be determined afresh by you." CHAPTER VIII THE RED HERRING At the beginning of every campaign the newspapers tell about secret conferences in which the candidate and his managers decide upon "the line of attack." The approach to issues, the way in which they shall be stressed, what shall be put forward in one part of the country and what in another, are discussed at these meetings. Here is where the real program of a party is worked out. The document produced at the convention is at its best nothing but a suggestive formality. It is not until the speakers and the publicity agents have actually begun to animate it that the country sees what the party is about. It is as if the convention adopted the Decalogue, while these secret conferences decided which of the Commandments was to be made the issue. Almost always, of course, the decision is entirely a "practical" one, which means that each section of people is exhorted to practice the commandment it likes the most. Thus for the burglars is selected, not the eighth tablet, but the one on which is recommended a day of rest from labor; to the happily married is preached the seventh commandment. These conferences are decisive. On them depends the educational value of a campaign, and the men who participate in them, being in a position to state the issues and point them, determine the political interests of the people for a considerable period of time. To-day in America, for example, no candidate can escape entirely that underlying irritation which socialists call poverty and some call the high cost of living. But the conspicuous candidates do decide what direction thought shall take about this condition. They can center it upon the tariff or the trusts or even the currency. Thus Mr. Roosevelt has always had a remarkable power of diverting the country from the tariff to the control of the trusts. His Democratic opponents, especially Woodrow Wilson, are, as I write, in the midst of the Presidential campaign of 1912, trying to focus attention on the tariff. In a way the battle resembles a tug-of-war in which each of the two leading candidates is trying to pull the nation over to his favorite issue. On the side you can see the Prohibitionists endeavoring to make the country see drink as a central problem; the emerging socialists insisting that not the tariff, or liquor, or the control of trusts, but the ownership of capital should be the heart of the discussion. Electoral campaigns do not resemble debates so much as they do competing amusement shows where, with bright lights, gaudy posters and persuasive, insistent voices, each booth is trying to collect a crowd; The victory in a campaign is far more likely to go to the most plausible diagnosis than to the most convincing method of cure. Once a party can induce the country to see its issue as supreme the greater part of its task is done. The clever choice of issues influences all politics from the petty manoeuvers of a ward leader to the most brilliant creative statesmanship. I remember an instance that happened at the beginning of the first socialist administration in Schenectady: The officials had out of the goodness of their hearts suspended a city ordinance which forbade coasting with bob-sleds on the hills of the city. A few days later one of the sleds ran into a wagon and a little girl was killed. The opposition papers put the accident into scareheads with the result that public opinion became very bitter. It looked like a bad crisis at the very beginning and the old ring politicians made the most of it. But they had reckoned without the political shrewdness of the socialists. For in the second day of excitement, the mayor made public a plan by which the main business street of the town was to be lighted with high-power lamps and turned into a "brilliant white way of Schenectady." The swiftness with which the papers displaced the gruesome details of the little girl's death by exultation over the business future of the city was a caution. Public attention was shifted and a political crisis avoided. I tell this story simply as a suggestive fact. The ethical considerations do not concern us here. There is nothing exceptional about the case. Whenever governments enter upon foreign invasions in order to avoid civil wars, the same trick is practiced. In the Southern States the race issue has been thrust forward persistently to prevent an economic alignment. Thus you hear from Southerners that unless socialism gives up its demand for racial equality, the propaganda cannot go forward. How often in great strikes have riots been started in order to prevent the public from listening to the workers' demands! It is an old story--the red herring dragged across the path in order to destroy the scent. Having seen the evil results we have come to detest a conscious choice of issues, to feel that it smacks of sinister plotting. The vile practice of yellow newspapers and chauvinistic politicians is almost the only experience of it we have. Religion, patriotism, race, and sex are the favorite red herrings of foul political method--they are the most successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. Yet for all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is one of the high selective arts of the statesman. In the debased form we know it there is little encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. It is always a pretty good working rule that whatever is a great power of evil may become a great power for good. Certainly nothing so effective in the art of politics can be left out of the equipment of the statesman. Looked at closely, the deliberate making of issues is very nearly the core of the statesman's task. His greatest wisdom is required to select a policy that will fertilize the public mind. He fails when the issue he sets is sterile; he is incompetent if the issue does not lead to the human center of a problem; whenever the statesman allows the voters to trifle with taboos and by-products, to wander into blind alleys like "16 to 1," his leadership is a public calamity. The newspaper or politician which tries to make an issue out of a supposed "prosperity" or out of admiration for the mere successes of our ancestors is doing its best to choke off the creative energies in politics. All the stultification of the stand-pat mind may be described as inability, and perhaps unwillingness, to nourish a fruitful choice of issues. That choice is altogether too limited in America, anyway. Political discussion, whether reactionary or radical, is monotonously confined to very few issues. It is as if social life were prevented from irrigating political thought. A subject like the tariff, for example, has absorbed an amount of attention which would justify an historian in calling it the incubus of American politics. Now the exaltation of one issue like that is obviously out of all proportion to its significance. A contributory factor it certainly is, but the country's destiny is not bound up finally with its solution. The everlasting reiterations about the tariff take up altogether too much time. To any government that was clear about values, that saw all problems in their relation to human life, the tariff would be an incident, a mechanical device and little else. High protectionist and free trader alike fall under the indictment--for a tariff wall is neither so high as heaven nor so broad as the earth. It may be necessary to have dykes on portions of the seashore; they may be superfluous elsewhere. But to concentrate nine-tenths of your attention on the subject of dykes is to forget the civilization they are supposed to protect. A wall is a wall: the presence of it will not do the work of civilization--the absence of it does not absolve anyone from the tasks of social life. That a statecraft might deal with the tariff as an aid to its purposes is evident. But anyone who makes the tariff the principal concern of statecraft is, I believe, mistaking the hedge for the house. The tariff controversy is almost as old as the nation. A more recent one is what Senator La Follette calls "The great issue before the American people to-day, ... the control of their own government." It has taken the form of an attack on corruption, on what is vaguely called "special privilege" and of a demand for a certain amount of political machinery such as direct primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall. The agitation has a curious sterility: the people are exhorted to control their own government, but they are given very little advice as to what they are to do with it when they control it. Of course, the leaders who spend so much time demanding these mechanical changes undoubtedly see them as a safeguard against corrupt politicians and what Roosevelt calls "their respectable allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated and decided as if in some way the vested rights of privilege had a first mortgage on the whole United States." But look at the _way_ these innovations are presented and I think the feeling is unavoidable that the control of government is emphasized as an end in itself. Now an observation of this kind is immediately open to dispute: it is not a clear-cut distinction but a rather subtle matter of stress--an impression rather than a definite conviction. Yet when you look at the career of Judge Lindsey in Denver the impression is sharpened by contrast. What gave his exposure of corruption a peculiar vitality was that it rested on a very positive human ideal: the happiness of children in a big city. Lindsey's attack on vice and financial jobbery was perhaps the most convincing piece of muckraking ever done in this country for the very reason that it sprang from a concern about real human beings instead of abstractions about democracy or righteousness. From the point of view of the political hack, Judge Lindsey made a most distressing use of the red herring. He brought the happiness of childhood into political discussion, and this opened up a new source of political power. By touching something deeply instinctive in millions of people, Judge Lindsey animated dull proposals with human interest. The pettifogging objections to some social plan had very little chance of survival owing to the dynamic power of the reformers. It was an excellent example of the creative results that come from centering a political problem on human nature. If you move only from legality to legality, you halt and hesitate, each step is a monstrous task. If the reformer is a pure opportunist, and lays out only "the next step," that step will be very difficult. But if he aims at some real human end, at the genuine concerns of men, women, and children, if he can make the democracy see and feel that end, the little mechanical devices of suffrage and primaries and tariffs will be dealt with as a craftsman deals with his tools. But to say that we must make tools first, and then begin, is to invert the process of life. Men did not agree to refrain from travel until a railroad was built. To make the manufacture of instruments an ideal is to lose much of their ideal value. A nation bent upon a policy of social invention would make its tools an incident. But just this perception is lacking in many propagandists. That is why their issues are so sterile; that is why the absorption in "next steps" is a diversion from statesmanship. The narrowness of American political issues is a fixation upon instruments. Tradition has centered upon the tariff, the trusts, the currency, and electoral machinery as the items of consideration. It is the failure to go behind them--to see them as the pale servants of a vivid social life--that keeps our politics in bondage to a few problems. It is a common experience repeated in you and me. Once our profession becomes all absorbing it hardens into pedantry. "A human being," says Wells, "who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the first place is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like gifts to the pretense--a quack." Reformers particularly resent the enlargement of political issues. I have heard socialists denounce other socialists for occupying themselves with the problems of sex. The claim was that these questions should be put aside so as not to disturb the immediate program. The socialists knew from experience that sex views cut across economic ones--that a new interest breaks up the alignment. Woodrow Wilson expressed this same fear in his views on the liquor question: after declaring for local option he went on to say that "the questions involved are social and moral and are not susceptible of being made part of a party program. Whenever they have been made the subject matter of party contests they have cut the lines of party organization and party action athwart, to the utter confusion of political action in every other field.... I do not believe party programs of the highest consequence to the political life of the State and of the nation ought to be thrust on one side and hopelessly embarrassed for long periods together by making a political issue of a great question which is essentially non-political, non-partisan, moral and social in its nature." That statement was issued at the beginning of a campaign in which Woodrow Wilson was the nominee of a party that has always been closely associated with the liquor interests. The bogey of the saloon had presented itself early: it was very clear that an affirmative position by the candidate was sure to alienate either the temperance or the "liquor vote." No doubt a sense of this dilemma is partly responsible for Wilson's earnest plea that the question of liquor be left out of the campaign. He saw the confusion and embarrassment he speaks of as an immediate danger. Like his views on immigration and Chinese labor it was a red herring across his path. It would, if brought into prominence, cut the lines of party action athwart. His theoretical grounds for ignoring the question in politics are very interesting just because they are vitalized by this practical difficulty which he faced. Like all party men Woodrow Wilson had thrust upon him here a danger that haunts every political program. The more issues a party meets the less votes it is likely to poll. And for a very simple reason: you cannot keep the citizenship of a nation like this bound in its allegiance to two large parties unless you make the grounds of allegiance very simple and very obvious. If you are to hold five or six million voters enlisted under one emblem the less specific you are and the fewer issues you raise the more probable it is that you can stop this host from quarreling within the ranks. No doubt this is a partial explanation of the bareness of American politics. The two big parties have had to preserve a superficial homogeneity; and a platitude is more potent than an issue. The minor parties--Populist, Prohibition, Independence League and Socialist--have shown a much greater willingness to face new problems. Their view of national policy has always been more inclusive, perhaps for the very reason that their membership is so much more exclusive. But if anyone wishes a smashing illustration of this paradox let him consider the rapid progress of Roosevelt's philosophy in the very short time between the Republican Convention in June to the Progressive Convention in August, 1912. As soon as Roosevelt had thrown off the burden of preserving a false harmony among irreconcilable Republicans, he issued a platform full of definiteness and square dealing with many issues. He was talking to a minority party. But Roosevelt's genius is not that of group leadership. He longs for majorities. He set out to make the campaign a battle between the Progressives and the Democrats--the old discredited Republicans fell back into a rather dead conservative minority. No sooner did Roosevelt take the stump than the paradox loomed up before him. His speeches began to turn on platitudes--on the vague idealism and indisputable moralities of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. The fearlessness of the Chicago confession was melted down into a featureless alloy. The embarrassment from the liquor question which Woodrow Wilson feared does not arise because teetotaler and drunkard both become intoxicated when they discuss the saloon. It would come just as much from a radical program of land taxation, factory reform, or trust control. Let anyone of these issues be injected into his campaign and the lines of party action would be cut "athwart." For Woodrow Wilson was dealing with the inevitable embarrassment of a party system dependent on an inexpressive homogeneity. The grouping of the voters into two large herds costs a large price: it means that issues must be so simplified and selected that the real demands of the nation rise only now and then to the level of political discussion. The more people a party contains the less it expresses their needs. Woodrow Wilson's diagnosis of the red herring in politics is obviously correct. A new issue does embarrass a wholesale organization of the voters. His desire to avoid it in the midst of a campaign is understandable. His urgent plea that the liquor question be kept a local issue may be wise. But the general philosophy which says that the party system should not be cut athwart is at least open to serious dispute. Instead of an evil, it looks to me like progress towards greater responsiveness of parties to popular need. It is good to disturb alignments: to break up a superficial unanimity. The masses of people held together under the name Democratic are bound in an enervating communion. The real groups dare not speak their convictions for fear the crust will break. It is as if you had thrown a large sheet over a mass of men and made them anonymous. The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged. I remember once speaking to a local boss about woman suffrage. His objections were very simple: "We've got the organization in fine shape now--we know where every voter in the district stands. But you let all the women vote and we'll be confused as the devil. It'll be an awful job keeping track of them." He felt what many a manufacturer feels when somebody has the impertinence to invent a process which disturbs the routine of business. Hard as it is upon the immediate plans of the politician, it is a national blessing when the lines of party action are cut athwart by new issues. I recognize that the red herring is more often frivolous and personal--a matter of misrepresentation and spite--than an honest attempt to enlarge the scope of politics. However, a fine thing must not be deplored because it is open to vicious caricature. To the party worker the petty and the honest issue are equally disturbing. The break-up of the parties into expressive groups would be a ventilation of our national life. No use to cry peace when there is no peace. The false bonds are best broken: with their collapse would come a release of social energy into political discussion. For every country is a mass of minorities which should find a voice in public affairs. Any device like proportional representation and preferential voting which facilitates the political expression of group interests is worth having. The objection that popular government cannot be conducted without the two party system is, I believe, refuted by the experience of Europe. If I had to choose between a Congressional caucus and a coalition ministry, I should not have to hesitate very long. But no one need go abroad for actual experience: in the United States Senate during the Taft administration there were really three parties--Republicans, Insurgents and Democrats. Public business went ahead with at least as much effectiveness as under the old Aldrich ring. There are deeper reasons for urging a break-up of herd-politics. It is not only desirable that groups should be able to contribute to public discussion: it is absolutely essential if the parliamentary method is not to be superseded by direct and violent action. The two party system chokes off the cry of a minority--perhaps the best way there is of precipitating an explosion. An Englishman once told me that the utter freedom of speech in Hyde Park was the best safeguard England had against the doctrines that were propounded there. An anarchist who was invited to address Congress would be a mild person compared to the man forbidden to speak in the streets of San Diego. For many a bomb has exploded into rhetoric. The rigidity of the two-party system is, I believe, disastrous: it ignores issues without settling them, dulls and wastes the energies of active groups, and chokes off the protests which should find a civilized expression in public life. A recognition of what an incubus it is should make us hospitable to all those devices which aim at making politics responsive by disturbing the alignments of habit. The initiative and referendum will help: they are a method of voting on definite issues instead of electing an administration in bulk. If cleverly handled these electoral devices should act as a check on a wholesale attitude toward politics. Men could agree on a candidate and disagree on a measure. Another device is the separation of municipal, state and national elections: to hold them all at the same time is an inducement to prevent the voter from splitting his allegiance. Proportional representation and preferential voting I have mentioned. The short ballot is a psychological principle which must be taken into account wherever there is voting: it will help the differentiation of political groups by concentrating the attention on essential choices. The recall of public officials is in part a policeman's club, in part a clumsy way of getting around the American prejudice for a fixed term of office. That rigidity which by the mere movement of the calendar throws an official out of office in the midst of his work or compels him to go campaigning is merely the crude method of a democracy without confidence in itself. The recall is a half-hearted and negative way of dealing with this difficulty. It does enable us to rid ourselves of an officer we don't like instead of having to wait until the earth has revolved to a certain place about the sun. But we still have to vote on a fixed date whether we have anything to vote upon or not. If a recall election is held when the people petition for it, why not all elections? In ways like these we shall go on inventing methods by which the fictitious party alignments can be dissolved. There is one device suggested now and then, tried, I believe, in a few places, and vaguely championed by some socialists. It is called in German an "Interessenvertrag"--a political representation by trade interests as well as by geographical districts. Perhaps this is the direction towards which the bi-cameral legislature will develop. One chamber would then represent a man's sectional interests as a consumer: the other his professional interests as a producer. The railway workers, the miners, the doctors, the teachers, the retail merchants would have direct representation in the "Interessenvertrag." You might call it a Chamber of Special Interests. I know how that phrase "Special Interests" hurts. In popular usage we apply it only to corrupting businesses. But our feeling against them should not blind us to the fact that every group in the community has its special interests. They will always exist until mankind becomes a homogeneous jelly. The problem is to find some social adjustment for all the special interests of a nation. That is best achieved by open recognition and clear representation. Let no one then confuse the "Interessenvertrag" with those existing legislatures which are secret Chambers of Special Privilege. The scheme is worth looking at for it does do away with the present dilemma of the citizen in which he wonders helplessly whether he ought to vote as a consumer or as a producer. I believe he should have both votes, and the "Interessenvertrag" is a way. These devices are mentioned here as illustrations and not as conclusions. You can think of them as arrangements by which the red herring is turned from a pest into a benefit. I grant that in the rigid political conditions prevailing to-day a new issue is an embarrassment, perhaps a hindrance to the procedure of political life. But instead of narrowing the scope of politics, to avoid it, the only sensible thing to do is to invent methods which will allow needs and problems and group interests avenues into politics. But a suggestion like this is sure to be met with the argument which Woodrow Wilson has in mind when he says that the "questions involved are social and moral and are not susceptible of being made parts of a party program." He voices a common belief when he insists that there are moral and social problems, "essentially non-political." Innocent as it looks at first sight this plea by Woodrow Wilson is weighted with the tradition of a century and a half. To my mind it symbolizes a view of the state which we are outgrowing, and throws into relief the view towards which we are struggling. Its implications are well worth tracing, for through them I think we can come to understand better the method of Twentieth Century politics. It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most. The first truth belongs to the Eighteenth Century: the second to the Twentieth. Neither of them can be neglected in our attitude towards the state. Without the Jeffersonian distrust of the police we might easily grow into an impertinent and tyrannous collectivism: without a vivid sense of the possibilities of the state we abandon the supreme instrument of civilization. The two theories need to be held together, yet clearly distinguished. Government has been an exalted policeman: it was there to guard property and to prevent us from quarreling too violently. That was about all it was good for. Yet society found problems on its hands--problems which Woodrow Wilson calls moral and social in their nature. Vice and crime, disease, and grinding poverty forced themselves on the attention of the community. A typical example is the way the social evil compelled the city of Chicago to begin an investigation. Yet when government was asked to handle the question it had for wisdom an ancient conception of itself as a policeman. Its only method was to forbid, to prosecute, to jail--in short, to use the taboo. But experience has shown that the taboo will not solve "moral and social questions"--that nine times out of ten it aggravates the disease. Political action becomes a petty, futile, mean little intrusion when its only method is prosecution. No wonder then that conservatively-minded men pray that moral and social questions be kept out of politics; no wonder that more daring souls begin to hate the whole idea of government and take to anarchism. So long as the state is conceived merely as an agent of repression, the less it interferes with our lives, the better. Much of the horror of socialism comes from a belief that by increasing the functions of government its regulating power over our daily lives will grow into a tyranny. I share this horror when certain socialists begin to propound their schemes. There is a dreadful amount of forcible scrubbing and arranging and pocketing implied in some socialisms. There is a wish to have the state use its position as general employer to become a censor of morals and arbiter of elegance, like the benevolent employers of the day who take an impertinent interest in the private lives of their workers. Without any doubt socialism has within it the germs of that great bureaucratic tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State. So it is a wise instinct that makes men jealous of the policeman's power. Far better we may say that moral and social problems be left to private solution than that they be subjected to the clumsy method of the taboo. When Woodrow Wilson argues that social problems are not susceptible to treatment in a party program, he must mean only one thing: that they cannot be handled by the state as he conceives it. He is right. His attitude is far better than that of the Vice Commission: it too had only a policeman's view of government, but it proceeded to apply it to problems that are not susceptible to such treatment. Wilson, at least, knows the limitations of his philosophy. But once you see the state as a provider of civilizing opportunities, his whole objection collapses. As soon as government begins to supply services, it is turning away from the sterile tyranny of the taboo. The provision of schools, streets, plumbing, highways, libraries, parks, universities, medical attention, post-offices, a Panama Canal, agricultural information, fire protection--is a use of government totally different from the ideal of Jefferson. To furnish these opportunities is to add to the resources of life, and only a doctrinaire adherence to a misunderstood ideal will raise any objection to them. When an anarchist says that the state must be abolished he does not mean what he says. What he wants to abolish is the repressive, not the productive state. He cannot possibly object to being furnished with the opportunity of writing to his comrade three thousand miles away, of drinking pure water, or taking a walk in the park. Of course when he finds the post-office opening his mail, or a law saying that he must drink nothing but water, he begins to object even to the services of the government. But that is a confusion of thought, for these tyrannies are merely intrusions of the eighteenth century upon the twentieth. The postmaster is still something of a policeman. Once you realize that moral and social problems must be treated to fine opportunities, that the method of the future is to compete with the devil rather than to curse him; that the furnishing of civilized environments is the goal of statecraft, then there is no longer any reason for keeping social and moral questions out of politics. They are what politics must deal with essentially, now that it has found a way. The policeman with his taboo did make moral and social questions insusceptible to treatment in party platforms. He kept the issues of politics narrow and irrelevant, and just because these really interesting questions could not be handled, politics was an over-advertised hubbub. But the vision of the new statecraft in centering politics upon human interests becomes a creator of opportunities instead of a censor of morals, and deserves a fresh and heightened regard. The party platform will grow ever more and more into a program of services. In the past it has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast of punishments. It promised that it would stop this evil practice, drive out corruption here, and prosecute this-and-that offense. All that belongs to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize the older view of the state: guardian and censor it has been, provider but grudgingly. The proclamations of so-called progressives that they will jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare" upon social evils, are simply the reiterations of men who do not understand the uses of the state. A political revolution is in progress: the state as policeman is giving place to the state as producer. CHAPTER IX REVOLUTION AND CULTURE There is a legend of a peasant who lived near Paris through the whole Napoleonic era without ever having heard of the name of Bonaparte. A story of that kind is enough to make a man hesitate before he indulges in a flamboyant description of social changes. That peasant is more than a symbol of the privacy of human interest: he is a warning against the incurable romanticism which clings about the idea of a revolution. Popular history is deceptive if it is used to furnish a picture for coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was being consummated. That is why it is so difficult for living people to believe that they too are in the midst of great transformations. What looks to us like an incredible rush of events sloping towards a great historical crisis was to our ancestors little else than the occasional punctuation of daily life with an exciting incident. Even to-day when we have begun to speak of our age as a transition, there are millions of people who live in an undisturbed routine. Even those of us who regard ourselves as active in mothering the process and alert in detecting its growth are by no means constantly aware of any great change. For even the fondest mother cannot watch her child grow. I remember how tremendously surprised I was in visiting Russia several years ago to find that in Moscow or St. Petersburg men were interested in all sorts of things besides the revolution. I had expected every Russian to be absorbed in the struggle. It seemed at first as if my notions of what a revolution ought to be were contradicted everywhere. And I assure you it wrenched the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling perambulators and children playing diavolo on the very square where Bloody Sunday had gone into history. It takes a long perspective and no very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be melodramatic about it. So much is left out of history and biography which would spoil the effect. The anti-climax is almost always omitted. Perhaps that is the reason why Arnold Bennett's description of the siege of Paris in "The Old Wives' Tale" is so disconcerting to many people. It is hard to believe that daily life continues with its stretches of boredom and its personal interests even while the enemy is bombarding a city. How much more difficult is it to imagine a revolution that is to come--to space it properly through a long period of time, to conceive what it will be like to the people who live through it. Almost all social prediction is catastrophic and absurdly simplified. Even those who talk of the slow "evolution" of society are likely to think of it as a series of definite changes easily marked and well known to everybody. It is what Bernard Shaw calls the reformer's habit of mistaking his private emotions for a public movement. Even though the next century is full of dramatic episodes--the collapse of governments and labor wars--these events will be to the social revolution what the smashing of machines in Lancashire was to the industrial revolution. The reality that is worthy of attention is a change in the very texture and quality of millions of lives--a change that will be vividly perceptible only in the retrospect of history. The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution: not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a revolution, we must not jump to the assurance that no revolution can be accomplished. True as it is that great changes are imperceptible, it is no less true that they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for the very reason that human life changes its quality so slowly, the panic over political proposals is childish. It is obvious, for instance, that the recall of judges will not revolutionize the national life. That is why the opposition generated will seem superstitious to the next generation. As I write, a convention of the Populist Party has just taken place. Eight delegates attended the meeting, which was held in a parlor. Even the reactionary press speaks in a kindly way about these men. Twenty years ago the Populists were hated and feared as if they practiced black magic. What they wanted is on the point of realization. To some of us it looks like a drop in the bucket--a slight part of vastly greater plans. But how stupid was the fear of Populism, what unimaginative nonsense it was to suppose twenty years ago that the program was the road to the end of the world. One good deed or one bad one is no measure of a man's character: the Last Judgment let us hope will be no series of decisions as simple as that. "The soul survives its adventures," says Chesterton with a splendid sense of justice. A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them. Mistakes do not affect us so deeply as we imagine. Our prophecies of change are subjective wishes or fears that never come to full realization. Those socialists are confused who think that a new era can begin by a general strike or an electoral victory. Their critics are just a bit more confused when they become hysterical over the prospect. Both of them over-emphasize the importance of single events. Yet I do not wish to furnish the impression that crises are negligible. They are extremely important as symptoms, as milestones, and as instruments. It is simply that the reality of a revolution is not in a political decree or the scarehead of a newspaper, but in the experiences, feelings, habits of myriads of men. No one who watched the textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1912 can forget the astounding effect it had on the complacency of the public. Very little was revealed that any well-informed social worker does not know as a commonplace about the mill population. The wretchedness and brutality of Lawrence conditions had been described in books and magazines and speeches until radicals had begun to wonder at times whether the power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was discouragingly weak--an occasional government investigation, an impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched the most impervious: story after story came to our ears of hardened reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent the strikers, of politicians aroused to action, of social workers become revolutionary. Daily conversation was shocked into some contact with realities--the newspapers actually printed facts about the situation of a working class population. And why? The reason is not far to seek. The Lawrence strikers did something more than insist upon their wrongs; they showed a disposition to right them. That is what scared public opinion into some kind of truth-telling. So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them. But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence, when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look at the problem more intelligently. We are not civilized enough to meet an issue before it becomes acute. We were not intelligent enough to free the slaves peacefully--we are not intelligent enough to-day to meet the industrial problem before it develops a crisis. That is the hard truth of the matter. And that is why no honest student of politics can plead that social movements should confine themselves to argument and debate, abandoning the militancy of the strike, the insurrection, the strategy of social conflict. Those who deplore the use of force in the labor struggle should ask themselves whether the ruling classes of a country could be depended upon to inaugurate a program of reconstruction which would abolish the barbarism that prevails in industry. Does anyone seriously believe that the business leaders, the makers of opinion and the politicians will, on their own initiative, bring social questions to a solution? If they do it will be for the first time in history. The trivial plans they are introducing to-day--profit-sharing and welfare work--are on their own admission an attempt to quiet the unrest and ward off the menace of socialism. No, paternalism is not dependable, granting that it is desirable. It will do very little more than it feels compelled to do. Those who to-day bear the brunt of our evils dare not throw themselves upon the mercy of their masters, not though there are bread and circuses as a reward. From the groups upon whom the pressure is most direct must come the power to deal with it. We are not all immediately interested in all problems: our attention wanders unless the people who are interested compel us to listen. Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. Often in the course of these essays I have quoted from H. G. Wells. I must do so again: "Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in the exciting community, and every party has its scientific minded and constructive leading section, with well defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of living, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that capacity for aggression upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs." The truth of this can be tested in the socialist movement. There is a section among the socialists which regards the class movement of labor as a driving force in the socialization of industry. This group sees clearly that without the threat of aggression no settlement of the issues is possible. Ordinarily such socialists say that the class struggle is a movement which will end classes. They mean that the self-interest of labor is identical with the interests of a community--that it is a kind of social selfishness. But there are other socialists who speak constantly of "working-class government" and they mean just what they say. It is their intention to have the community ruled in the interests of labor. Probe their minds to find out what they mean by labor and in all honesty you cannot escape the admission that they mean industrial labor alone. These socialists think entirely in terms of the factory population of cities: the farmers, the small shop-keepers, the professional classes have only a perfunctory interest for them. I know that no end of phrases could be adduced to show the inclusiveness of the word labor. But their intention is what I have tried to describe: they are thinking of government by a factory population. They appeal to history for confirmation: have not all social changes, they ask, meant the emergence of a new economic class until it dominated society? Did not the French Revolution mean the conquest of the feudal landlord by the middle-class merchant? Why should not the Social Revolution mean the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie? That may be true, but it is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame admission that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for exalting the unconscious failures of other revolutions into deliberate models for the next one. Just because the capacity of aggression in the middle class ran away with things, and failed to fuse into any decent social ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as possible to repeat the mistake. The lesson of it all, it seems to me, is this: that class interests are the driving forces which keep public life centered upon essentials. They become dangerous to a nation when it denies them, thwarts them and represses them so long that they burst out and become dominant. Then there is no limit to their aggression until another class appears with contrary interests. The situation might be compared to those hysterias in which a suppressed impulse flares up and rules the whole mental life. Social life has nothing whatever to fear from group interests so long as it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence, that is what renders social co-operation impossible, that is what makes catastrophes the method of change. The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for insurrections rests in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter. The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan, Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution. It seems to me that Roosevelt never spoke more wisely or as a better friend of civilization than the time when he said at New York City on March 20, 1912, that "the woes of France for a century and a quarter have been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had pre-Revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot; and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alterations of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went through misery to a shattered goal." Profound changes are not only necessary, but highly desirable. Even if this country were comfortably well-off, healthy, prosperous, and educated, men would go on inventing and creating opportunities to amplify the possibilities of life. These inventions would mean radical transformations. For we are bent upon establishing more in this nation than a minimum of comfort. A liberal people would welcome social inventions as gladly as we do mechanical ones. What it would fear is a hard-shell resistance to change which brings it about explosively. Catastrophes are disastrous to radical and conservative alike: they do not preserve what was worth maintaining; they allow a deformed and often monstrous perversion of the original plan. The emancipation of the slaves might teach us the lesson that an explosion followed by reconstruction is satisfactory to nobody. Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute. The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current until it overflowed the countryside. Fight labor's demands to the last ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes itself sovereign, and takes what it used to ask. That is a poor way for a nation to proceed. For the insurgent become master is a fanatic from the struggle, and as George Santayana says, he is only too likely to redouble his effort after he has forgotten his aim. Nobody need waste his time debating whether or not there are to be great changes. That is settled for us whether we like it or not. What is worth debating is the method by which change is to come about. Our choice, it seems to me, lies between a blind push and a deliberate leadership, between thwarting movements until they master us, and domesticating them until they are answered. When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party on a platform of social reform he crystallized a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of resentment into the agora of political discussion. He performed the real task of a leader--a task which has essentially two dimensions. By becoming part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered a power of effectiveness: by formulating a program for insurgency he translated it into terms of public service. What Roosevelt did at the middle-class level, the socialists have done at the proletarian. The world has been slow to recognize the work of the Socialist Party in transmuting a dumb muttering into a civilized program. It has found an intelligent outlet for forces that would otherwise be purely cataclysmic. The truth of this has been tested recently in the appearance of the "direct actionists." They are men who have lost faith in political socialism. Why? Because, like all other groups, the socialists tend to become routineers, to slip into an easy reiteration. The direct actionists are a warning to the Socialist Party that its tactics and its program are not adequate to domesticating the deepest unrest of labor. Within that party, therefore, a leadership is required which will ride the forces of "syndicalism" and use them for a constructive purpose. The brilliant writer of the "Notes of the Week" in the English New Age has shown how this might be done. He has fused the insight of the syndicalist with the plans of the collectivists under the name of Guild Socialism. His plan calls for co-management of industry by the state and the labor union. It steers a course between exploitation by a bureaucracy in the interests of the consumer--the socialist danger--and oppressive monopolies by industrial unions--the syndicalist danger. I shall not attempt to argue here either for or against the scheme. My concern is with method rather than with special pleadings. The Guild Socialism of the "New Age" is merely an instance of statesmanlike dealing with a new social force. Instead of throwing up its hands in horror at one over-advertised tactical incident like sabotage, the "New Age" went straight to the creative impulse of the syndicalist movement. Every true craftsman, artist or professional man knows and sympathizes with that impulse: you may call it a desire for self-direction in labor. The deepest revolt implied in the term syndicalism is against the impersonal, driven quality of modern industry--against the destruction of that pride which alone distinguishes work from slavery. Some such impulse as that is what marks off syndicalism from the other revolts of labor. Our suspicion of the collectivist arrangement is aroused by the picture of a vast state machine so horribly well-regulated that human impulse is utterly subordinated. I believe too that the fighting qualities of syndicalism are kept at the boiling point by a greater sense of outraged human dignity than can be found among mere socialists or unionists. The imagination is more vivid: the horror of capitalism is not alone in the poverty and suffering it entails, but in its ruthless denial of life to millions of men. The most cruel of all denials is to deprive a human being of joyous activity. Syndicalism is shot through with the assertion that an imposed drudgery is intolerable--that labor at a subsistence wage as a cog in a meaningless machine is no condition upon which to found civilization. That is a new kind of revolt--more dangerous to capitalism than the demand for higher wages. You can not treat the syndicalists like cattle because forsooth they have ceased to be cattle. "The damned wantlessness of the poor," about which Oscar Wilde complained, the cry for a little more fodder, gives way to an insistence upon the chance to be interested in life. To shut the door in the face of such a current of feeling because it is occasionally exasperated into violence would be as futile as locking up children because they get into mischief. The mind which rejects syndicalism entirely because of the by-products of its despair has had pearls cast before it in vain. I know that syndicalism means a revision of some of our plans--that it is an intrusion upon many a glib prejudice. But a human impulse is more important than any existing theory. We must not throw an unexpected guest out of the window because no place is set for him at table. For we lose not only the charm of his company: he may in anger wreck the house. * * * * * Yet the whole nation can't sit at one table: the politician will object that all human interests can't be embodied in a party program. That is true, truer than most politicians would admit in public. No party can represent a whole nation, although, with the exception of the socialists, all of them pretend to do just that. The reason is very simple: a platform is a list of performances that are possible within a few years. It is concerned with more or less immediate proposals, and in a nation split up by class, sectional and racial interests, these proposals are sure to arouse hostility. No definite industrial and political platform, for example, can satisfy rich and poor, black and white, Eastern creditor and Western farmer. A party that tried to answer every conflicting interest would stand still because people were pulling in so many different directions. It would arouse the anger of every group and the approval of its framers. It would have no dynamic power because the forces would neutralize each other. One comprehensive party platform fusing every interest is impossible and undesirable. What is both possible and desirable is that every group interest should be represented in public life--that it should have spokesmen and influence in public affairs. This is almost impossible to-day. Our blundering political system is pachydermic in its irresponsiveness. The methods of securing representation are unfit instruments for any flexible use. But the United States is evidently not exceptional in this respect. England seems to suffer in the same way. In May, 1912, the "Daily Mail" published a series of articles by H. G. Wells on "The Labour Unrest." Is he not describing almost any session of Congress when he says that "to go into the House of Commons is to go aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialized Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our affairs?" Further on Wells remarks that "this diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day.... In Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections. What really happens at a general election is that the party organizations--obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious funds--appoint about 1200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled angry way, to strike off the names of about half these selected gentlemen." A cynic might say that the people can't go far wrong in politics because they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents in the interest of a mediocre regularity. But suppose that politics were made responsive--suppose that the forces of the community found avenues of expression into public life. Would not our legislatures be cut up into antagonistic parties, would not the conflicts of the nation be concentrated into one heated hall? If you really represented the country in its government, would you not get its partisanship in a quintessential form? After all group interests in the nation are diluted by space and time: the mere separation in cities and country prevents them from falling into the psychology of the crowd. But let them all be represented in one room by men who are professionally interested in their constituency's prejudices and what would you accomplish but a deepening of the cleavages? Would the session not become an interminable wrangle? Nobody can answer these questions with any certainty. Most prophecies are simply the masquerades of prejudice, and the people who love stability and prefer to let their own well-being alone will see in a sensitive political system little but an invitation to chaos. They will choose facts to adorn their fears. History can be all things to all men: nothing is easier than to summon the Terror, the Commune, lynchings in the Southern States, as witnesses to the excesses and hysterias of the mob. Those facts will prove the case conclusively to anyone who has already made up his mind on the subject. Absolute democrats can also line up their witnesses: the conservatism of the Swiss, Wisconsin's successful experiments, the patience and judgment of the Danes. Both sides are remarkably sure that the right is with them, whereas the only truth about which an observer can be entirely certain is that in some places and in certain instances democracy is admittedly successful. There is no absolute case one way or the other. It would be silly from the experience we have to make a simple judgment about the value of direct expression. You cannot lump such a mass of events together and come to a single conclusion about them. It is a crude habit of mind that would attempt it. You might as well talk abstractly about the goodness or badness of this universe which contains happiness, pain, exhilaration and indifference in a thousand varying grades and quantities. There is no such thing as Democracy; there are a number of more or less democratic experiments which are not subject to wholesale eulogy or condemnation. The questions about the success of a truly representative system are pseudo-questions. And for this reason: success is not due to the system; it does not flow from it automatically. The source of success is in the people who use the system: as an instrument it may help or hinder them, but they must operate it. Government is not a machine running on straight tracks to a desired goal. It is a human work which may be facilitated by good tools. That is why the achievements of the Swiss may mean nothing whatever when you come to prophesy about the people of New York. Because Wisconsin has made good use of the direct primary it does not follow that it will benefit the Filipino. It always seems curious to watch the satisfaction of some reform magazines when China or Turkey or Persia imitates the constitutional forms of Western democracies. Such enthusiasts postulate a uniformity of human ability which every fact of life contradicts. Present-day reform lays a great emphasis upon instruments and very little on the skilful use of them. It says that human nature is all right, that what is wrong is the "system." Now the effect of this has been to concentrate attention on institutions and to slight men. A small step further, institutions become an end in themselves. They may violate human nature as the taboo does. That does not disturb the interest in them very much, for by common consent reformers are to fix their minds upon the "system." A machine should be run by men for human uses. The preoccupation with the "system" lays altogether too little stress on the men who operate it and the men for whom it is run. It is as if you put all your effort into the working of a plough and forgot the farmer and the consumer. I state the case baldly and contradiction would be easy. The reformer might point to phrases like "human welfare" which appear in his writings. And yet the point stands, I believe. The emphasis which directs his thinking bears most heavily upon the mechanics of life--only perfunctorily upon the ability of the men who are to use them. Even an able reformer like Mr. Frederic C. Howe does not escape entirely. A recent book is devoted to a glowing eulogy of "Wisconsin, an Experiment in Democracy." In a concluding chapter Mr. Howe states the philosophy of the experiment. "What is the explanation of Wisconsin?" he asks. "Why has it been able to eliminate corruption, machine politics, and rid itself of the boss? What is the cause of the efficiency, the thoroughness, the desire to serve which animate the state? Why has Wisconsin succeeded where other states have uniformly failed? I think the explanation is simple. It is also perfectly natural. It is traceable to democracy, to the political freedom which had its beginning in the direct primary law, and which has been continuously strengthened by later laws"; some pages later, "Wisconsin assumed that the trouble with our politics is not with our people, but with the machinery with which the people work.... It has established a line of vision as direct as possible between the people and the expression of their will." The impression Mr. Howe evidently wishes to leave with his readers is that the success of the experiment is due to the instruments rather than to the talent of the people of Wisconsin. That would be a valuable and comforting assurance to propagandists, for it means that other states with the same instruments can achieve the same success. But the conclusion seems to me utterly unfounded. The reasoning is perilously like that of the gifted lady amateur who expects to achieve greatness by imitating the paint box and palette, oils and canvases of an artist. Mr. Howe's own book undermines his conclusions. He begins with an account of La Follette--of a man with initiative and a constructive bent. The forces La Follette set in motion are commented upon. The work of Van Hise is shown. What Wisconsin had was leadership and a people that responded, inventors, and constructive minds. They forged the direct primary and the State University out of the impetus within themselves. No doubt they were fortunate in their choice of instruments. They made the expression of the people's will direct, yet that will surely is the more primary thing. It makes and uses representative systems: but you cannot reverse the process. A man can manufacture a plough and operate it, but no amount of ploughs will create a man and endow him with skill. All sorts of observers have pointed out that the Western States adopt reform legislation more quickly than the Eastern. Yet no one would seriously maintain that the West is more progressive because it has progressive laws. The laws are a symptom and an aid but certainly not the cause. Constitutions do not make people; people make constitutions. So the task of reform consists not in presenting a state with progressive laws, but in getting the people to want them. The practical difference is extraordinary. I insist upon it so much because the tendency of political discussion is to regard government as automatic: a device that is sure to fail or sure to succeed. It is sure of nothing. Effort moves it, intelligence directs it; its fate is in human hands. * * * * * The politics I have urged in these chapters cannot be learned by rote. What can be taught by rule of thumb is the administration of precedents. That is at once the easiest and the most fruitless form of public activity. Only a low degree of intelligence is required and of effort merely a persistent repetition. Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens. It was a profound observation when Bernard Shaw said that men dread liberty because of the bewildering responsibility it imposes and the uncommon alertness it demands. To do what has always been done, to think in well-cut channels, to give up "the intolerable disease of thought," is an almost constant demand of our natures. That is perhaps why so many of the romantic rebels of the Nineteenth Century sank at last into the comforting arms of Mother Church. That is perhaps the reason why most oldish men acquire information, but learn very little. The conservative who loves his routine is in nine cases out of ten a creature too lazy to change its habits. Confronted with a novelty, the first impulse is to snub it, and send it into exile. When it becomes too persistent to be ignored a taboo is erected and threats of fines and condign punishment are made if it doesn't cease to appear. This is the level of culture at which Sherman Anti-Trust acts are passed, brothels are raided, and labor agitators are thrown into jail. If the taboo is effective it drives the evil under cover, where it festers and emits a slow poison. This is the price we pay for the appearance of suppression. But if the problem is more heavily charged with power, the taboo irritates the force until it explodes. Not infrequently what was once simply a factor of life becomes the dominating part of it. At this point the whole routineer scheme of things collapses, there is a period of convulsion and Cæsarean births, and men weary of excitement sink back into a newer routine. Thus the cycle of futility is completed. The process bears as much resemblance to statecraft as sitting backward on a runaway horse does to horsemanship. The ordinary politician has no real control, no direction, no insight into the power he rides. What he has is an elevated, though temporary seat. Real statesmanship has a different ambition. It begins by accepting human nature. No routine has ever done that in spite of the conservative patter about "human nature"; mechanical politics has usually begun by ignoring and ended by violating the nature of men. To accept that nature does not mean that we accept its present character. It is probably true that the impulses of men have changed very little within recorded history. What has changed enormously from epoch to epoch is the character in which these impulses appear. The impulses that at one period work themselves out into cruelty and lust may at another produce the richest values of civilized life. The statesman can affect that choice. His business is to provide fine opportunities for the expression of human impulses--to surround childhood, youth and age with homes and schools, cities and countryside that shall be stocked with interest and the chance for generous activity. Government can play a leading part in this work, for with the decadence of the church it has become the only truly catholic organization in the land. Its task is essentially to carry out programs of service, to add and build and increase the facilities of life. Repression is an insignificant part of its work; the use of the club can never be applauded, though it may be tolerated _faute de mieux_. Its use is a confession of ignorance. A sensitively representative machinery will probably serve such statesmanship best. For the easy expression of public opinion in government is a clue to what services are needed and a test of their success. It keeps the processes of politics well ventilated and reminds politicians of their excuse for existence. In that kind of statesmanship there will be a premium on inventiveness, on the ingenuity to devise and plan. There will be much less use for lawyers and a great deal more for scientists. The work requires industrial organizers, engineers, architects, educators, sanitists to achieve what leadership brings into the program of politics. This leadership is the distinctive fact about politics. The statesman acts in part as an intermediary between the experts and his constituency. He makes social movements conscious of themselves, expresses their needs, gathers their power and then thrusts them behind the inventor and the technician in the task of actual achievement. What Roosevelt did in the conservation movement was typical of the statesman's work. He recognized the need of attention to natural resources, made it public, crystallized its force and delegated the technical accomplishment to Pinchot and his subordinates. * * * * * But creative statesmanship requires a culture to support it. It can neither be taught by rule nor produced out of a vacuum. A community that clatters along with its rusty habits of thought unquestioned, making no distinction between instruments and idols, with a dull consumption of machine-made romantic fiction, no criticism, an empty pulpit and an unreliable press, will find itself faithfully mirrored in public affairs. The one thing that no democrat may assume is that the people are dear good souls, fully competent for their task. The most valuable leaders never assume that. No one, for example, would accuse Karl Marx of disloyalty to workingmen. Yet in 1850 he could write at the demagogues among his friends: "While we draw the attention of the German workman to the _undeveloped state_ of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetich of the words, 'the people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.'" John Spargo quotes this statement in his "Life." Marx, we are told, could use phrases like "democratic miasma." He never seems to have made the mistake of confusing democracy with demolatry. Spargo is perfectly clear about this characteristic of Marx: "He admired most of all, perhaps, that fine devotion to truth as he understood it, and disregard of popularity which marked Owen's life. Contempt for popular opinion was one of his most strongly developed characteristics. He was fond, says Liebknecht, of quoting as his motto the defiant line of Dante, with which he afterwards concluded his preface to 'Das Kapital': 'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.'" It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set the intellectual standard of socialism on the most vigorous intellectual basis he could find. He knew better than to be satisfied with loose thinking and fairly good intentions. He knew that the vast change he contemplated needed every ounce of intellectual power that the world possessed. A fine boast it was that socialism was equipped with all the culture of the age. I wonder what he would have thought of an enthusiastic socialist candidate for Governor of New York who could write that "until men are free the world has no need of any more literary efforts, of any more paintings, of any more poems. It is better to have said one word for the emancipation of the race than to have written the greatest novel of the times.... The world doesn't need any more literature." I will not venture a guess as to what Marx would have said, but I know what we must say: "Without a literature the people is dumb, without novels and poems, plays and criticism, without books of philosophy, there is neither the intelligence to plan, the imagination to conceive, nor the understanding of a common purpose. Without culture you can knock down governments, overturn property relations, you can create excitement, but you cannot create a genuine revolution in the lives of men." The reply of the workingmen in 1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria, "a new terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if you please, contains this interesting objection: "Because although those comrades who intend to emigrate with Cabet may be eager Communists, yet they still possess too many of the faults and prejudices of present-day society by reason of their past education to be able to get rid of them at once by joining Icaria." That simple statement might be taken to heart by all the reformers and socialists who insist that the people are all right, that only institutions are wrong. The politics of reconstruction require a nation vastly better educated, a nation freed from its slovenly ways of thinking, stimulated by wider interests, and jacked up constantly by the sharpest kind of criticism. It is puerile to say that institutions must be changed from top to bottom and then assume that their victims are prepared to make the change. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots make a democracy out of an illiterate people. Those portions of America where there are voting booths but no schools cannot possibly be described as democracies. Nor can the person who reads one corrupt newspaper and then goes out to vote make any claim to having registered his will. He may have a will, but he has not used it. For politics whose only ideal is the routine, it is just as well that men shouldn't know what they want or how to express it. Education has always been a considerable nuisance to the conservative intellect. In the Southern States, culture among the negroes is openly deplored, and I do not blame any patriarch for dreading the education of women. It is out of culture that the substance of real revolutions is made. If by some magic force you could grant women the vote and then keep them from schools and colleges, newspapers and lectures, the suffrage would be no more effective than a Blue Law against kissing your wife on Sunday. It is democratic machinery with an educated citizenship behind it that embodies all the fears of the conservative and the hopes of the radical. Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization. Without a favorable culture political schemes are a mere imposition. They will not work without a people to work them. The real preparation for a creative statesmanship lies deeper than parties and legislatures. It is the work of publicists and educators, scientists, preachers and artists. Through all the agents that make and popularize thought must come a bent of mind interested in invention and freed from the authority of ideas. The democratic culture must, with critical persistence, make man the measure of all things. I have tried again and again to point out the iconoclasm that is constantly necessary to avoid the distraction that comes of idolizing our own methods of thought. Without an unrelaxing effort to center the mind upon human uses, human purposes, and human results, it drops into idolatry and becomes hostile to creation. The democratic experiment is the only one that requires this wilful humanistic culture. An absolutism like Russia's is served better when the people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them. But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens. A view of life in which man obediently allows himself to be made grist for somebody else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of self-government. You cannot long deny external authorities in government and hold to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident that the nineteenth century questioned a great deal more than the sovereignty of kings. The revolt went deeper and democracy in politics was only an aspect of it. The age might be compared to those years of a boy's life when he becomes an atheist and quarrels with his family. The nineteenth century was a bad time not only for kings, but for priests, the classics, parental autocrats, indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the Aristotelian Poetics and the validity of logic. If disobedience is man's original virtue, as Oscar Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily virtuous century. Not a little of the revolt was an exuberant rebellion for its own sake. There were also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The transvaluation of values was performed by many hands into all sorts of combinations. There have been other periods of revolution. Heresy is just a few hours younger than orthodoxy. Disobedience is certainly not the discovery of the nineteenth century. But the quality of it is. I believe Chesterton has hold of an essential truth when he says that this is the first time men have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels claimed to be more orthodox than the Church, to have gone back to the true authorities. The radicals of recent times proclaim that there is no orthodoxy, no doctrine that men must accept without question. Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily. They have their invisible popes, called Art, Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a catechism. But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism. It would not be difficult to find a similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a "man-made" world to the lady who would like to vote about her taxes, there is a feeling that woman must be something more than a passive creature. Walter Pater might be quoted in his conclusion to the effect that "the theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us." The desire for self-direction has made a thousand philosophies as contradictory as the temperaments of the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration is at hand: Nietzsche advising the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that _laughed_!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly: Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none of the bourgeois morality, and becomes most eloquent when he attacks other revolutionists. I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in the hundreds of artists and thinkers that are making the thought of our times. There is a kind of "professional reconciler" of opposites who likes to lump all the prominent rebels together and refer to them affectionately as "us radicals." Yet that there is a common impulse in modern thought which strives towards autonomy is true and worth remarking. In some men it is half-conscious, in others a minor influence, but almost no one of weight escapes the contagion of it entirely. It is a new culture that is being prepared. Without it there would to-day be no demand for a creative statesmanship which turns its back upon the routine and the taboo, kings and idols, and non-human purposes. It does more. It is making the atmosphere in which a humanly centered politics can flourish. The fact that this culture is multiform and often contradictory is a sign that more and more of the interests of life are finding expression. We should rejoice at that, for profusion means fertility; where a dead uniformity ceases, invention and ingenuity flourish. Perhaps the insistence on the need of a culture in statecraft will seem to many people an old-fashioned delusion. Among the more rigid socialists and reformers it is not customary to spend much time discussing mental habits. That, they think, was made unnecessary by the discovery of an economic basis of civilization. The destinies of society are felt to be too solidly set in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direction. Where there is no choice, of what importance is opinion? All propaganda is, of course, a practical tribute to the value of culture. However inevitable the process may seem, all socialists agree that its inevitability should be fully realized. They teach at one time that men act from class interests: but they devote an enormous amount of energy to making men conscious of their class. It evidently matters to that supposedly inevitable progress whether men are aware of it. In short, the most hardened socialist admits choice and deliberation, culture and ideals into his working faith. He may talk as if there were an iron determinism, but his practice is better than his preachment. Yet there are necessities in social life. To all the purposes of politics it is settled, for instance, that the trust will never be "unscrambled" into small competing businesses. We say in our argument that a return to the days of the stage-coach is impossible or that "you cannot turn back the hands of the clock." Now man might return to the stage-coach if that seemed to him the supreme goal of all his effort, just as anyone can follow Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of the clock if he pleases. But nobody can recover his yesterdays no matter how much he abuses the clock, and no man can expunge the memory of railroads though all the stations and engines were dismantled. "From this survival of the past," says Bergson, "it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice." This is the real necessity that makes any return to the imagined glories of other days an idle dream. Graham Wallas remarks that those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge cannot forget--"Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on principle.' But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we must face in all our calculations, and so in politics too, is that you cannot recover what is passed. That is why educated people are not to be pressed into the customs of their ignorance, why women who have reached out for more than "Kirche, Kinder und Küche" can never again be entirely domestic and private in their lives. Once people have questioned an authority their faith has lost its naïveté. Once men have tasted inventions like the trust they have learned something which cannot be annihilated. I know of one reformer who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate talks with powerful conservatives. He explains them to themselves: never after do they exercise their power with the same unquestioning ruthlessness. Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The application of it to politics is not difficult because politics is one of the interests of life. We can learn from him in what sense we are bound. "The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by colors spread out on the palette; but even with the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would have been to produce it before it was produced...." The future is explained by the economic and social institutions which were present at its birth: the trust and the labor union, all the "movements" and institutions, will condition it. "Just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed--in any case, is modified--under the very influence of the work he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form we are just assuming. It is then right to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also, that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually." What I have called culture enters into political life as a very powerful condition. It is a way of creating ourselves. Make a blind struggle luminous, drag an unconscious impulse into the open day, see that men are aware of their necessities, and the future is in a measure controlled. The culture of to-day is for the future an historical condition. That is its political importance. The mental habits we are forming, our philosophies and magazines, theaters, debates, schools, pulpits and newspapers become part of an active past which as Bergson says "follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside." Socialists claim that because the McNamara brothers had no "class-consciousness," because they were without a philosophy of society and an understanding of the labor movement their sense of wrong was bound to seek out dynamite. That is a profound truth backed by abundant evidence. If you turn, for example, to Spargo's Life of Karl Marx you see that all through his career Marx struggled with the mere insurrectionists. It was the men without the Marxian vision of growth and discipline who were forever trying to lead little marauding bands against the governments of Europe. The fact is worth pondering: the Marxian socialists, openly declaring that all authority is a temporary manifestation of social conditions, have waged what we must call a war of culture against the powers of the world. They have tried to arouse in workingmen the consciousness of an historical mission--the patience of that labor is one of the wonders of the age. But the McNamaras had a culture that could help them not at all. They were Catholics, Democrats and old-fashioned trade-unionists. Religion told them that authority was absolute and eternal, politics that Jefferson had said about all there was to say, economics insisted that the struggle between labor and capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life told them that society was brutal: an episode like the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to blasphemy and dynamite. Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and terrorism, are compounded of courage, indignation and ignorance. Civilization has much to fear from the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but the preaching of "class consciousness," far from being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic interests. Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a revolutionary period and nothing is so important as to be aware of it. The measure of our self-consciousness will more or less determine whether we are to be the victims or the masters of change. Without philosophy we stumble along. The old routines and the old taboos are breaking up anyway, social forces are emerging which seek autonomy and struggle against slavery to non-human purposes. We seem to be moving towards some such statecraft as I have tried to suggest. But without knowledge of it that progress will be checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for a splendid human civilization are all about us. They need to be used. For that there must be a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of impulses, competent to ward off the idols of its own thought, hospitable to novelty and sufficiently inventive to harness power. Why this age should have come to be what it is, why at this particular time the whole drift of thought should be from authority to autonomy would be an interesting speculation. It is one of the ultimate questions of politics. It is like asking why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was singled out as the luminous point of the Western World. We do not know enough to cut under such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why there was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries man seems extraordinarily creative. Perhaps the Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of change, and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to the great surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease of travel, the popularizing of knowledge, the break-down of frontiers have given us a new interest in human life by showing how temporary are all its instruments. Certainly placid or morose acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves either to ideas or to other men, it will be because they do not know they are slaves. Their intention is to be free. Their desire is for a full and expressive life and they do not relish a lop-sided and lamed humanity. For the age is rich with varied and generous passions. 
30432	----	A MODERN SYMPOSIUM BY G. LOWES DICKINSON "LIFE LIKE A DOME OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS STAINS THE WHITE RADIANCE OF ETERNITY" LONDON GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD MUSEUM STREET FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1905 REPRINTED 1930 REPRINTED 1934 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY UNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING FRATRUM SOCIETATI FRATRUM MINIMUS THE SPEAKERS LORD CANTILUPE A TORY ALFRED REMENHAM A LIBERAL REUBEN MENDOZA A CONSERVATIVE GEORGE ALLISON A SOCIALIST ANGUS MACCARTHY AN ANARCHIST HENRY MARTIN A PROFESSOR CHARLES WILSON A MAN OF SCIENCE ARTHUR ELLIS A JOURNALIST PHILIP AUDUBON A MAN OF BUSINESS AUBREY CORYAT A POET SIR JOHN HARINGTON A GENTLEMAN OF LEISURE WILLIAM WOODMAN A MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS GEOFFRY VIVIAN A MAN OF LETTERS A MODERN SYMPOSIUM SOME of my readers may have heard of a club known as the Seekers. It is now extinct; but in its day it was famous, and included a number of men prominent in politics or in the professions. We used to meet once a fortnight on the Saturday night, in London during the winter, but in the summer usually at the country house of one or other of the members, where we would spend the week-end together. The member in whose house the meeting was held was chairman for the evening; and after the paper had been read it was his duty to call upon the members to speak in what order he thought best. On the occasion of the discussion which I am to record, the meeting was held in my own house, where I now write, on the North Downs. The company was an interesting one. There was Remenham, then Prime Minister, and his great antagonist Mendoza, both of whom were members of our society. For we aimed at combining the most opposite elements, and were usually able, by a happy tradition inherited from our founder, to hold them suspended in a temporary harmony. Then there was Cantilupe, who had recently retired from public life, and whose name, perhaps, is already beginning to be forgotten. Of younger men we had Allison, who, though still engaged in business, was already active in his socialist propaganda. Angus MacCarthy, too, was there, a man whose tragic end at Saint Petersburg is still fresh in our minds. And there were others of less note; Wilson, the biologist, Professor Martin, Coryat, the poet, and one or two more who will be mentioned in their place. After dinner, the time of year being June, and the weather unusually warm, we adjourned to the terrace for our coffee and cigars. The air was so pleasant and the prospect so beautiful, the whole weald of Sussex lying before us in the evening light, that it was suggested we should hold our meeting there rather than indoors. This was agreed. But it then transpired that Cantilupe, who was to have read the paper, had brought nothing to read. He had forgotten, or he had been too busy. At this discovery there was a general cry of protest. Cantilupe's proposition that we should forgo our discussion was indignantly scouted; and he was pressed to improvise something on the lines of what he had intended to write. This, however, he steadily declined to attempt; and it seemed as though the debate would fall through, until it occurred to me to intervene in my capacity as chairman. "Cantilupe," I said, "certainly ought to be somehow penalized. And since he declines to improvise a paper, I propose that he improvise a speech. He is accustomed to doing that; and since he has now retired from public life, this may be his last opportunity. Let him employ it, then, in doing penance. And the penance I impose is, that he should make a personal confession. That he should tell us why he has been a politician, why he has been, and is, a Tory, and why he is now retiring in the prime of life. I propose, in a word, that he should give us his point of view. That will certainly provoke Remenham, on whom I shall call next. He will provoke someone else. And so we shall all find ourselves giving our points of view, and we ought to have a very interesting evening." This suggestion was greeted, if not with enthusiasm, at least with acquiescence. Cantilupe at first objected strongly, but yielded to pressure, and on my calling formally upon him rose reluctantly from his seat. For a minute or two he stood silent, humping his shoulders and smiling through his thick beard. Then, in his slow, deliberate way, he began as follows: "Why I went into politics? Why did I? I'm sure I don't know. Certainly I wasn't intended for it. I was intended for a country gentleman, and I hope for the rest of my life to be one; which, perhaps, if I were candid, is the real reason of my retirement. But I was pushed into politics when I was young, as a kind of family duty; and once in it's very hard to get out again. I'm coming out now because, among other things, there's no longer any place for me. Toryism is dead. And I, as you justly describe me, am a Tory. But you want to know why? Well, I don't know that I can tell you. Perhaps I ought to be able to. Remenham, I know, can and will give you the clearest possible account of why he is a Liberal. But then Remenham has principles; and I have only prejudices. I am a Tory because I was born one, just as another man is a Radical because he was born one. But Remenham, I really believe, is a Liberal, because he has convinced himself that he ought to be one. I admire him for it, but I am quite unable to understand him. And, for my own part, if I am to defend, or rather to explain myself, I can only do so by explaining my prejudices. And really I am glad to have the opportunity of doing so, if only because it is a satisfaction occasionally to say what one thinks; a thing which has become impossible in public life. "The first of my prejudices is that I believe in inequality. I'm not at all sure that that is a prejudice confined to myself--most people seem to act upon it in practice, even in America. But I not only recognize the fact, I approve the ideal of inequality. I don't want, myself, to be the equal of Darwin or of the German Emperor; and I don't see why anybody should want to be my equal. I like a society properly ordered in ranks and classes. I like my butcher or my gardener to take off his hat to me, and I like, myself, to stand bareheaded in the presence of the Queen. I don't know that I'm better or worse than the village carpenter; but I'm different; and I like him to recognize that fact, and to recognize it myself. In America, I am told, everyone is always informing you, in everything they do and say, directly or indirectly, that they are as good as you are. That isn't true, and if it were, it isn't good manners to keep saying it. I prefer a society where people have places and know them. They always do have places in any possible society; only, in a democratic society, they refuse to recognize them; and, consequently, social relations are much ruder, more unpleasant and less humane than they are, or used to be, in England. That is my first prejudice; and it follows, of course, that I hate the whole democratic movement. I see no sense in pretending to make people equal politically when they're unequal in every other respect. Do what you may, it will always be a few people that will govern. And the only real result of the extension of the franchise has been to transfer political power from the landlords to the trading classes and the wire-pullers. Well, I don't think the change is a good one. And that brings me to my second prejudice, a prejudice against trade. I don't mean, of course, that we can do without it. A country must have wealth, though I think we were a much better country when we had less than we have now. Nor do I dispute that there are to be found excellent, honourable, and capable men of business. But I believe that the pursuit of wealth tends to unfit men for the service of the state. And I sympathize with the somewhat extreme view of the ancient world that those who are engaged in trade ought to be excluded from public functions. I believe in government by gentlemen; and the word gentleman I understand in the proper, old-fashioned English sense, as a man of independent means, brought up from his boyhood in the atmosphere of public life, and destined either for the army, the navy, the Church, or Parliament. It was that kind of man that made Rome great, and that made England great in the past; and I don't believe that a country will ever be great which is governed by merchants and shopkeepers and artisans. Not because they are not, or may not be, estimable people; but because their occupations and manner of life unfit them for public service. "Well, that is the kind of feeling--I won't call it a principle--which determined my conduct in public life. And you will remember that it seemed to be far more possible to give expression to it when first I entered politics than it is now. Even after the first Reform Act--which, in my opinion was conceived upon the wrong lines--the landed gentry still governed England; and if I could have had my way they would have continued to do so. It wasn't really parliamentary reform that was wanted; it was better and more intelligent government. And such government the then ruling class was capable of supplying, as is shown by the series of measures passed in the thirties and forties, the new Poor Law and the Public Health Acts and the rest. Even the repeal of the Corn Laws shows at least how capable they were of sacrificing their own interests to the nation; though otherwise I consider that measure the greatest of their blunders. I don't profess to be a political economist, and I am ready to take it from those whose business it is to know that our wealth has been increased by Free Trade. But no one has ever convinced me, though many people have tried, that the increase of wealth ought to be the sole object of a nation's policy. And it is surely as clear as day that the policy of Free Trade has dislocated the whole structure of our society. It has substituted a miserable city-proletariat for healthy labourers on the soil; it has transferred the great bulk of wealth from the country-gentleman to the traders; and in so doing it has more and more transferred power from those who had the tradition of using it to those who have no tradition at all except that of accumulation. The very thing which I should have thought must be the main business of a statesman--the determination of the proper relations of classes to one another--we have handed over to the chances of competition. We have abandoned the problem in despair, instead of attempting to solve it; with the result, that our population--so it seems to me--is daily degenerating before our eyes, in physique, in morals, in taste, in everything that matters; while we console ourselves with the increasing aggregate of our wealth. Free Trade, in my opinion, was the first great betrayal by the governing class of the country and themselves, and the second was the extension of the franchise. I do not say that I would not have made any change at all in the parliamentary system that had been handed down to us. But I would never have admitted, even implicitly, that every man has a right to vote, still less that all have an equal right. For society, say what we may, is not composed of individuals but of classes; and by classes it ought to be represented. I would have enfranchised peasants, artisans, merchants, manufacturers, as such, taking as my unit the interest, not the individual, and assigning to each so much weight as would enable its influence to be felt, while preserving to the landed gentry their preponderance. That would have been difficult, no doubt, but it would have been worth doing; whereas it was, to my mind, as foolish as it was easy simply to add new batches of electors, till we shall arrive, I do not doubt, at what, in effect, is universal suffrage, without having ever admitted to ourselves that we wanted to have it. "But what has been done is final and irremediable. Henceforth, numbers, or rather those who control numbers, will dominate England; and they will not be the men under whom hitherto she has grown great. For people like myself there is no longer a place in politics. And really, so far as I am personally concerned, I am rather glad to know it. Those who have got us into the mess must get us out of it. Probably they will do so, in their own way; but they will make, in the process, a very different England from the one I have known and understood and loved. We shall have a population of city people, better fed and housed, I hope, than they are now, clever and quick and smart, living entirely by their heads, ready to turn out in a moment for use everything they know, but knowing really very little, and not knowing it very well. There will be fewer of the kind of people in whom I take pleasure, whom I like to regard as peculiarly English, and who are the products of the countryside; fellows who grow like vegetables, and, without knowing how, put on sense as they put on flesh by an unconscious process of assimilation; who will stand for an hour at a time watching a horse or a pig, with stolid moon-faces as motionless as a pond; the sort of men that visitors from town imagine to be stupid because they take five minutes to answer a question, and then probably answer by asking another; but who have stored up in them a wealth of experience far too extensive and complicated for them ever to have taken account of it. They live by their instincts not their brains; but their instincts are the slow deposit of long years of practical dealings with nature. That is the kind of man I like. And I like to live among them in the way I do--in a traditional relation which it never occurs to them to resent, any more than it does to me to abuse it. That sort of relation you can't create; it has to grow, and to be handed down from father to son. The new men who come on to the land never manage to establish it. They bring with them the isolation which is the product of cities. They have no idea of any tie except that of wages; the notion of neighbourliness they do not understand. And that reminds me of a curious thing. People go to town for society; but I have always found that there is no real society except in the country. We may be stupid there, but we belong to a scheme of things which embodies the wisdom of generations. We meet not in drawing-rooms, but in the hunting-field, on the county-bench, at dinners of tenants or farmers' associations. Our private business is intermixed with our public. Our occupation does not involve competition; and the daily performance of its duties we feel to be itself a kind of national service. That is an order of things which I understand and admire, as my fathers understood and admired it before me. And that is why I am a Tory; not because of any opinions I hold, but because that is my character. I stood for Toryism while it meant something; and now that it means nothing, though I stand for it no longer, still I can't help being it. The England that is will last my time; the England that is to be does not interest me; and it is as well that I should have nothing to do with directing it. "I don't know whether that is a sufficient account of the question I was told to answer; but it's the best I can make, and I think it ought to be sufficient. I always imagine myself saying to God, if He asks me to give an account of myself: 'Here I am, as you made me. You can take me or leave me. If I had to live again I would live just so. And if you want me to live differently, you must make me different.' I have championed a losing cause, and I am sorry it has lost. But I do not break my heart about it. I can still live for the rest of my days the life I respect and enjoy. And I am content to leave the nation in the hands of Remenham, who, as I see, is all impatience to reply to my heresies." REMENHAM in fact was fidgeting in his chair as though he found it hard to keep his seat; and I should have felt bound in pity to call upon him next, even if I had not already determined to do so. He rose with alacrity; and it was impossible not to be struck by the contrast he presented to Cantilupe. His elastic upright figure, his firm chin, the exuberance of his gestures, the clear ring of his voice, expressed admirably the intellectual and nervous force which he possessed in a higher degree than any man I have ever come across. He began without hesitation, and spoke throughout with the trained and facile eloquence of which he was master. "I shall, I am sure, be believed," he said, "when I emphatically assert that nothing could be more distressing to me than the notion--if I should be driven to accept it--that the liberal measures on which, in my opinion, the prosperity and the true welfare of the country depends should have, as one of their incidental concomitants, the withdrawal from public life of such men as our friend who has just sat down. We need all the intellectual and moral resources of the country; and among them I count as not the least valuable and fruitful the stock of our ancient country gentlemen. I regretted the retirement of Lord Cantilupe on public as well as on personal grounds; and my regret is only tempered, not altogether removed, when I see how well, how honourably and how happily he is employing his well-deserved leisure. But I am glad to know that we have still, and to believe that we shall continue to have, in the great Council of the nation, men of his distinguished type and tradition to form one, and that not the least important, of the balances and counter-checks in the great and complicated engine of state. "When, however, he claims--or perhaps I should rather say desires--for the distinguished order of which he is a member, an actual and permanent preponderance in the state, there, I confess, I must part company with him. Nay, I cannot even accept the theory, to which he gave expression, of a fixed and stable representation of interests. It is indeed true that society, by the mysterious dispensation of the Divine Being, is wonderfully compounded of the most diverse elements and classes, corresponding to the various needs and requirements of human life. And it is an ancient theory, supported by the authority of great names, by Plato, my revered master, the poet-philosopher, by Aristotle, the founder of political science, that the problem of a statesman is so to adjust these otherwise discordant elements as to form once for all in the body-politic a perfect, a final and immutable harmony. There is, according to this view, one simple chord and one only, which the great organ of society is adapted to play; and the business of the legislator is merely to tune the instrument so that it shall play it correctly. Thus, if Plato could have had his way, his great common chord, his harmony of producers, soldiers and philosophers, would still have been droning monotonously down the ages, wherever men were assembled to dwell together. Doubtless the concord he conceived was beautiful. But the dissonances he would have silenced, but which, with ever-augmenting force, peal and crash, from his day to ours, through the echoing vault of time, embody, as I am apt to think, a harmony more august than any which even he was able to imagine, and in their intricate succession weave the plan of a world-symphony too high to be apprehended save in part by our grosser sense, but perceived with delight by the pure intelligence of immortal spirits. It is indeed the fundamental defect of all imaginary polities--and how much more of such as fossilize, without even idealizing, the actual!--that even though they be perfect, their perfection is relative only to a single set of conditions; and that could they perpetuate themselves they would also perpetuate these, which should have been but brief and transitory phases in the history of the race. Had it been possible for Plato to establish over the habitable globe his golden chain of philosophic cities, he would have riveted upon the world for ever the institutions of slavery and caste, would have sealed at the source the springs of science and invention, and imprisoned in perennial impotence that mighty genius of empire which alone has been able to co-ordinate to a common and beneficent end the stubborn and rebellious members of this growing creature Man. And if the imagination of a Plato, permitted to work its will, would thus have sterilized the germs of progress, what shall we say of such men as ourselves imposing on the fecundity of nature the limits and rules of our imperfect mensuration! Rather should we, in humility, submit ourselves to her guidance, and so adapt our institutions that they shall hamper as little as may be the movements and forces operating within them. For it is by conflict, as we have now learnt, that the higher emerges from the lower, and nature herself, it would almost seem, does not direct but looks on, as her world emerges in painful toil from chaos. We do not find her with precipitate zeal intervening to arrest at a given point the ferment of creation; stretching her hand when she sees the gleam of the halcyon or the rose to bid the process cease that would destroy them; and sacrificing to the completeness of those lower forms the nobler imperfection of man and of what may lie beyond him. She looks always to the end; and so in our statesmanship should we, striving to express, not to limit, by our institutions the forces with which we have to deal. Our polity should grow, like a skin, upon the living tissue of society. For who are we that we should say to this man or that, go plough, keep shop, or govern the state? That we should say to the merchant, 'thus much power shall be yours,' and to the farmer, 'thus much yours?' No! rather let us say to each and to all, Take the place you can, enjoy the authority you can win! Let our constitution express the balance of forces in our society, and as they change let the disposition of power change with them! That is the creed of liberalism, supported by nature herself, and sanctioned, I would add with reverence, by the Almighty Power, in the disposition and order of His stupendous creation. "But it is not a creed that levels, nor one that destroys. None can have more regard than I--not Cantilupe himself--for our ancient crown, our hereditary aristocracy. These, while they deserve it--and long may they do so!--will retain their honoured place in the hearts and affections of the people. Only, alongside of them, I would make room for all elements and interests that may come into being in the natural course of the play of social forces. But these will be far too numerous, far too inextricably interwoven, too rapidly changing in relative weight and importance, for the intelligence of man to attempt, by any artificial scheme, to balance and adjust their conflicting claims. Open to all men equally, within the limits of prudence, the avenue to political influence, and let them use, as they can and will, in combined or isolated action, the opportunities thus liberally bestowed. That is the key-note of the policy which I have consistently adopted from my entrance into public life, and which I am prepared to prosecute to the end, though that end should be the universal suffrage so dreaded by the last speaker. He tells me it is a policy of reckless abandonment. But abandonment to what? Abandonment to the people! And the question is, Do we trust the people? I do; he does not! There, I venture to think, is the real difference between us. "Yes, I am not ashamed to say it, I trust the People! What should I trust, if I could not trust them? What else is a nation but an assemblage of the talents, the capacities, the virtues of the citizens of whom it is composed? To utilize those talents, to evoke those capacities, to offer scope and opportunity to those virtues, must be the end and purpose of every great and generous policy; and to that end, up to the measure of my powers, I have striven to minister, not rashly, I hope, nor with impatience, but in the spirit of a sober and assured faith. "Such is my conception of liberalism. But if liberalism has its mission at home, not less important are its principles in the region of international relations. I will not now embark on the troubled sea of foreign policy. But on one point I will touch, since it was raised by the last speaker, and that is the question of our foreign trade. In no department of human activity, I will venture to say, are the intentions of the Almighty more plainly indicated, than in this of the interchange of the products of labour. To each part of the habitable globe have been assigned its special gifts for the use and delectation of Man; to every nation its peculiar skill, its appropriate opportunities. As the world was created for labour, so it was created for exchange. Across the ocean, bridged at last by the indomitable pertinacity of art, the granaries of the new world call, in their inexhaustible fecundity for the iron and steel, the implements and engines of the old. The shepherd-kings of the limitless plains of Australia, the Indian ryot, the now happily emancipated negro of Georgia and Carolina, feed and are fed by the factories and looms of Manchester and Bradford. Pall Mall is made glad with the produce of the vineyards of France and Spain; and the Italian peasant goes clad in the labours of the Leicester artisan. The golden chain revolves, the silver buckets rise and fall; and one to the other passes on, as it fills and overflows, the stream that pours from Nature's cornucopia! Such is the law ordained by the Power that presides over the destinies of the world; and not all the interferences of man with His beneficent purposes can avail altogether to check and frustrate their happy operation. Yet have the blind cupidity, the ignorant apprehensions of national zeal dislocated, so far as was possible, the wheels and cogs of the great machine, hampered its working and limited its uses. And if there be anything of which this great nation may justly boast, it is that she has been the first to tear down the barriers and dams of a perverted ingenuity, and to admit in unrestricted plenitude to every channel of her verdant meadows the limpid and fertilizing stream of trade. "Verily she has had her reward! Search the records of history, and you will seek in vain for a prosperity so immense, so continuous, so progressive, as that which has blessed this country in the last half-century of her annals. This access of wealth was admitted indeed by the speaker who preceded me. But he complained that we had taken no account of the changes which the new system was introducing into the character and occupations of the people. It is true; and he would be a rash man who should venture to forecast and to determine the remoter results of such a policy; or should shrink from the consequences of liberty on the ground that he cannot anticipate their character. Which of us would have the courage, even if he had the power, to impose upon a nation for all time the form of its economic life, the type of its character, the direction of its enterprise? The possibilities that lie in the womb of Nature are greater than we can gauge; we can but facilitate their birth, we may not prescribe their anatomy. The evils of the day call for the remedies of the day; but none can anticipate with advantage the necessities of the future. And meantime what cause is there for misgiving? I confess that I see none. The policy of freedom has been justified, I contend, by its results. And so confident am I of this, that the time, I believe, is not far distant, when other countries will awake at last to their own true interests and emulate, not more to their advantage than to ours, our fiscal legislation. I see the time approaching when the nations of the world, laying aside their political animosities, will be knitted together in the peaceful rivalry of trade; when those barriers of nationality which belong to the infancy of the race will melt and dissolve in the sunshine of science and art; when the roar of the cannon will yield to the softer murmur of the loom, and the apron of the artisan, the blouse of the peasant be more honourable than the scarlet of the soldier; when the cosmopolitan armies of trade will replace the militia of death; when that which God has joined together will no longer be sundered by the ignorance, the folly, the wickedness of man; when the labour and the invention of one will become the heritage of all; and the peoples of the earth meet no longer on the field of battle, but by their chosen delegates, as in the vision of our greatest poet, in the 'Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.'" WITH this peroration Remenham resumed his seat. He had spoken, as indeed was his habit, rather as if he were addressing a public meeting than a company of friends. But at least he had set the ball rolling. To many of those present, as I well knew, his speech and his manner must have been eminently provocative; and naturally to none more than to Mendoza. I had, therefore, no hesitation in signalling out the Conservative chief to give us the opposite point of view. He responded with deliberation, lifting from his chest his sinister Jewish face, and slowly unfolding his long body, while a malicious smile played about his mouth. "One," he began, "who has not the privilege of immediate access to the counsels of the Divine Being cannot but feel himself at a disadvantage in following a man so favoured as my distinguished friend. The disadvantage, however, is one to which I have had, perforce, to grow accustomed during long years of parliamentary strife, I have resigned myself to creeping where he soars, to guessing where he prophesies. But there is compensation everywhere. And, perhaps, there are certain points which may be revealed to babes and sucklings, while they are concealed from beings more august. The worm, I suppose, must be aware of excrescences and roughnesses of the soil which escape the more comprehensive vision of the eagle; and to the worm, at least, these are of more importance than mountain ranges and oceans which he will never reach. It is from that humble point of view that I shall offer a few remarks supplementary to, perhaps even critical of, the eloquent apostrophe we have been permitted to enjoy. "The key-note of my friend's address was liberty. There is no British heart which does not beat higher at the sound of that word. But while I listened to his impassioned plea, I could not help wondering why he did not propose to dispense to us in even larger and more liberal measure the supreme and precious gift of freedom. True, he has done much to remove the barriers that separated nation from nation, and man from man. But how much remains to be accomplished before we can be truly said to have brought ourselves into line with Nature! Consider, for example, the policeman! Has my friend ever reflected on all that is implied in that solemn figure; on all that it symbolizes of interference with the purposes of a beneficent Creator? The policeman is a permanent public defiance of Nature. Through him the weak rule the strong, the few the many, the intelligent the fools. Through him survive those whom the struggle for existence should have eliminated. He substitutes the unfit for the fit. He dislocates the economy of the universe. Under his shelter take root and thrive all monstrous and parasitic growths. Marriage clings to his skirts, property nestles in his bosom. And while these flourish, where is liberty? The law of Nature we all know: The good old rule, the ancient plan That he should take who has the power, And he should keep who can! "But this, by the witchcraft of property, we have set aside. Our walls of brick and stone we have manned with invisible guards. We have thronged with fiery faces and arms the fences of our gardens and parks. The plate-glass of our windows we have made more impenetrable than adamant. To our very infants we have given the strength of giants. Babies surfeit, while strong men starve; and the foetus in the womb stretches out unformed hands to annex a principality. Is this liberty? Is this Nature? No! It is a Merlin's prison! Yet, monstrous, it subsists! Has our friend, then, no power to dissolve the charm? Or, can it be that he has not the will? "Again, can we be said to be free, can we be said to be in harmony with Nature, while we endure the bonds of matrimony? While we fetter the happy promiscuity of instinct, and subject our roving fancy to the dominion of 'one unchanging wife?' Here, indeed, I frankly admit, Nature has her revenges; and an actual polygamy flourishes even under the aegis of our law. But the law exists; it is the warp on which, by the woof of property, we fashion that Nessus-shirt, the Family, in which, we have swathed the giant energies of mankind. But while that shirt clings close to every limb, what avails it, in the name of liberty, to snap, here and there, a button or a lace? A more heroic work is required of the great protagonist, if, indeed, he will follow his mistress to the end. He shakes his head. What! Is his service, then, but half-hearted after all? Or, can it be, that behind the mask of the goddess he begins to divine the teeth and claws of the brute? But if nature be no goddess, how can we accept her as sponsor for liberty? And if liberty be taken on its own merits, how is it to be distinguished from anarchy? How, but by the due admixture of coercion? And, that admitted, must we not descend from the mountain-top of prophecy to the dreary plains of political compromise?" Up to this point Mendoza had preserved that tone of elaborate irony which, it will be remembered, was so disconcerting to English audiences, and stood so much in the way of his popularity. But now his manner changed. Becoming more serious, and I fear I must add, more dull than I had ever heard him before, he gave us what I suppose to be the most intimate exposition he had ever permitted himself to offer of the Conservative point of view as he understood it. "These," he resumed, "are questions which I must leave my friend to answer for himself. The ground is too high for me. I have no skill in the flights of speculation. I take no pleasure in the enunciation of principles. To my restricted vision, placed as I am upon the earth, isolated facts obtrude themselves with a capricious particularity which defies my powers of generalization. And that, perhaps, is the reason why I attached myself to the party to which I have the honour to belong. For it is, I think, the party which sees things as they are; as they are, that is, to mere human vision. Remenham, in his haste, has called us the party of reaction. I would rather say, we are the party of realism. We have in view, not Man, but Englishmen; not ideal polities, but the British Constitution; not Political Economy, but the actual course of our trade. Through this great forest of fact, this tangle of old and new, these secular oaks, sturdy shrubs, beautiful parasitic creepers, we move with a prudent diffidence, following the old tracks, endeavouring to keep them open, but hesitating to cut new routes till we are clear as to the goal for which we are asked to sacrifice our finest timber. Fundamental changes we regard as exceptional and pathological. Yet, being bound by no theories, when we are convinced of their necessity, we inaugurate them boldly and carry them through to the end. And thus it is that having decided that the time had come to call the people to the councils of the nation, we struck boldly and once for all by a measure which I will never admit--and here I regret that Cantilupe is not with me--which I will never admit to be at variance with the best, and soundest traditions of conservatism. "But such measures are exceptional, and we hope they will be final. We take no delight in tinkering the constitution. The mechanism of government we recognize to be only a means; the test of the statesman is his power to govern. And remaining, as we do, inaccessible to that gospel of liberty of which our opponents have had a special revelation, we find in the existing state of England much that appears to us to need control. We are unable to share the optimism which animates Remenham and his friends as to the direction and effects of the new forces of industry. Above the whirr of the spindle and the shaft we hear the cry of the poor. Behind our flourishing warehouses and shops we see the hovels of the artisan. We watch along our highroads the long procession of labourers deserting their ancestral villages for the cities; we trace them to the slum and the sweater's den; we follow them to the poorhouse and the prison; we see them disappear engulfed in the abyss, while others press at their heels to take their place and share their destiny. And in face of all this we do not think it to be our duty to fold our arms and invoke the principle of liberty. We feel that we owe it to the nation to preserve intact its human heritage, the only source of its greatness and its wealth; and we are prepared, with such wisdom as we have, to legislate to that end, undeterred by the fear of incurring the charge of socialism. "But while we thus concern ourselves with the condition of these islands, we have not forgotten that we have relations to the world outside. If, indeed, we could share the views to which Remenham has given such eloquent expression, this is a matter which would give us little anxiety. He beholds, as in a vision, the era of peace and good-will ushered in by the genius of commerce. By a mysterious dispensation of Providence he sees cupidity and competition furthering the ends of charity and peace. But here once more I am unable to follow his audacious flight. Confined to the sphere of observation, I cannot but note that in the long and sanguinary course of history there has been no cause so fruitful of war as the rivalries of trade. Our own annals at every point are eloquent of this truth; nor do I see anything in the conditions of the modern world that should limit its application. We have been told that all nations will adopt our fiscal policy. Why should they, unless it is to their interest? We adopted it because we thought it was to ours; and we shall abandon it if we ever change our opinion. And when I say 'interest' I would not be understood to mean economic interest in the narrower sense. A nation, like an individual, I conceive, has a personality to maintain. It must be its object not to accumulate wealth at all costs, but to develop and maintain capacity, to be powerful, energetic, many-sided, and above all independent. Whether the policy we have adopted will continue to guarantee this result, I am not prophet enough to venture to affirm. But if it does not, I cannot doubt that we shall be driven to revise it. Nor can I believe that other nations, not even our own colonies, will follow us in our present policy, if to do so would be to jeopardy their rising industries and unduly to narrow the scope of their economic energies. I do not, then, I confess, look forward with enthusiasm or with hope to the Crystal Palace millennium that inspired the eloquence of Remenham. I see the future pregnant with wars and rumours of wars. And in particular I see this nation, by virtue of its wealth, its power, its unparalleled success, the target for the envy, the hatred, the cupidity of all the peoples of Europe. I see them looking abroad for outlets for their expanding population, only to find every corner of the habitable globe preoccupied by the English race and overshadowed by the English flag. But from this, which is our main danger, I conjure my main hope for the future. England is more than England. She has grown in her sleep. She has stretched over every continent huge embryo limbs which wait only for the beat of her heart, the motion of her spirit, to assume their form and function as members of one great body of empire. The spirit, I think, begins to stir, the blood to circulate. Our colonies, I believe, are not destined to drop from us like ripe fruit; our dependencies will not fall to other masters. The nation sooner or later will wake to its imperial mission. The hearts of Englishmen beyond the seas will beat in unison with ours. And the federation I foresee is not the federation of Mankind, but that of the British race throughout the world." He paused, and in the stillness that followed we became aware of the gathering dusk. The first stars were appearing, and the young moon was low in the west. From the shadow below we heard the murmur of a fountain, and the call of a nightingale sounded in the wood. Something in the time and the place must have worked on Mendoza's mood; for when he resumed it was in a different key. "Such," he began, "is my vision, if I permit myself to dream. But who shall say whether it is more than a dream? There is something in the air to-night which compels candour. And if I am to tell my inmost thought, I must confess on what a flood of nescience we, who seem to direct the affairs of nations, are borne along together with those whom we appear to control. We are permitted, like children, to lay our hands upon the reins; but it is a dark and unknown genius who drives. We are his creatures; and it is his ends, not ours, that are furthered by our contests, our efforts, our ideals. In the arena Remenham and I must play our part, combat bravely, and be ready to die when the crowd turn down their thumbs. But here in a moment of withdrawal, I at least cannot fail to recognize behind the issues that divide us the tie of a common destiny. We shall pass and a new generation will succeed us; a generation to whom our ideals will be irrelevant, our catch-words empty, our controversies unintelligible. Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt. "The dust of oblivion will bury our debates. Something we shall have achieved, but not what we intended. My dream may, perhaps, be furthered by Remenham, and his by me, or, it may be, neither his nor mine by either. The Providence whose purposes he so readily divines is dark to me. And perhaps, for that reason, I am able to regard him with more charity than he has always been willing, I suspect, to extend to me. This, at any rate, is the moment of truce. The great arena is empty, the silent benches vanish into the night. Under the glimmer of the moon figures more than mortal haunt the scene of our ephemeral contests. It is they which stand behind us and deal the blows which seem to be ours. When we are laid in the dust they will animate other combatants; when our names are forgotten they will blazon others in perishable gold. Why, then, should we strive and cry, even now in the twilight hour? The same sky encompasses us, the same stars are above us. What are my opinions, what are Remenham's? Froth on the surface! The current bears all alike along to the destined end. For a moment let us meet and feel its silent, irresistible force; and in this moment reach across the table the hand of peace." With that he stretched his hand to Remenham, with a kind of pathos of appeal that the other, though I think he did not altogether like it, could hardly refuse to entertain. It was theatrical, it was un-English, but somehow, it was successful. And the whole episode, the closing words and the incomparable gesture, left me with a sense as though a curtain had been drawn upon a phase of our history. Mendoza, somehow, had shut out Remenham, even more than himself, from the field on which the issues of the future were to be fought. And it was this feeling that led me, really a little against my inclination, to select as the next speaker the man who of all who, made up our company, in opinions was the most opposed to Remenham, and in temperament to Mendoza. My choice was Allison, more famous now than he was then, but known even at that time as an unsparing critic of both parties. He responded readily enough; and as he began a spell seemed to snap. The night and the hour were forgotten, and we were back on the dusty field of controversy. "THIS is all very touching," he began, "but Mendoza is shaking hands with the wrong person. He's much nearer to me than he is to Remenham, and I don't at all despair of converting him. For he does at least understand that the character of every society depends upon its law of property; and he even seems to have a suspicion that the law, as we have it, is not what you would call absolute perfection. It's true that he shows no particular inclination to alter it. But that may come; and I'm not without hope of seeing, before I die, a Tory-Socialist party. Remenham's is a different case, and I fear there's nothing to be made of him. He does, I believe, really think that in some extraordinary way the law of property, like the Anglican Church, is one of the dispensations of Providence; and that if he removes all other restrictions, leaving that, he will have what he calls a natural society. But Nature, as Mendoza has pointed out, is anarchy. Civilization means restriction; and so does socialism. So far from being anarchy, it is the very antithesis of it. Anarchy is the goal of liberalism, if liberalism could ever be persuaded to be logical. So the scarecrow of anarchy, at least, need not frighten away any would-be convert to socialism. There remains, it is true, the other scarecrow, revolution; and that, I admit, has more life in it. Socialism is revolutionary; but so is liberalism, or was, while it was anything. Revolution does not imply violence. On the contrary, violence is the abortion of revolution. Do I, for instance, look like a Marat or a Danton? I ask you, candidly!" He certainly did not. On the contrary, with his short squat figure, pointed beard and spectacles, he presented a curious blend of the middle-class Englishman and the German savant. There was a burst of laughter at his question, in which he joined himself. But when he resumed it was in a more serious tone and somewhat in the manner of a lecturer. It was indeed, at that time, very largely by lectures that he carried on his propaganda. "No," he said, "socialism may roar; but, in England at any rate, it roars as gently as any sucking-dove. Revolution I admit is the goal; but the process is substitution. We propose to transform society almost without anyone knowing it; to work from the foundation upwards without unduly disturbing the superstructure. By a mere adjustment of rates and taxes we shall redistribute property; by an extension of the powers of local bodies we shall nationalize industry. But in all this there need be no shock, no abrupt transition. On the contrary, it is essential to our scheme that there should not be. We are men of science and we realize that the whole structure of society rests upon habit. With the new organization must therefore grow the new habit that is to support it. To precipitate organic change is merely to court reaction. That is the lesson of all revolution; and it is one which English socialists, at any rate, have learnt. We think, moreover, that capitalist society is, by its own momentum, travelling towards the goal which we desire. Every consolidation of business upon a grand scale implies the development of precisely those talents of organization without which the socialistic state could not come into being or maintain itself; while at the same time the substitution of monopoly for competition removes the only check upon the power of capital to exploit society, and brings home to every citizen in his tenderest point--his pocket--the necessity for that public control from which he might otherwise be inclined to shrink. Capitalist society is thus preparing its own euthanasia; and we socialists ought to be regarded not as assassins of the old order, but as midwives to deliver it of the child with which it is in travail. "That child will be a society not of liberty but of regulation. It is here that we join issue not only with doctrinaire liberals, but with that large body of ordinary common-sense Englishmen who feel a general and instinctive distrust of all state interference. That distrust, I would point out, is really an anachronism. It dates from a time when the state was at once incompetent and unpopular, from the days of monarchic or aristocratic government carried on frankly in the interests of particular classes or persons. But the democratic revolution and the introduction of bureaucracy has swept all that away; and governments in every civilized country are now moving towards the ideal of an expert administration controlled by an alert and intelligent public opinion. Much, it is true, has yet to be done before that ideal will be realized. In some countries, notably in the United States, the necessity of the expert has hardly made itself felt. In others, such as Germany, popular control is very inadequately provided for. But the tendency is clear; and nowhere clearer than in this country. Here at any rate we may hopefully look forward to a continual extension both of the activity and of the intelligence of public officials; while at the same time, by an appropriate development of the representative machinery, we may guard ourselves against the danger of an irresponsible bureaucracy. The problem of reconciling administrative efficiency with popular control is no doubt a difficult one; but I feel confident that it can be solved. This perhaps is hardly the place to develop my favourite idea of the professional representative; but I may be permitted to refer to it in passing. By a professional representative I mean one trained in a scientific and systematic way to elicit the real opinion of his constituents, and to embody it in practicable proposals. He will have to study what they really want, not what they think they want, and to discover for himself in what way it can be obtained. Such men need not be elected; indeed I am inclined to think that the plan of popular election has had its day. The essential is that they should be selected by some test of efficiency, such as examination or previous record, and that they should keep themselves in constant touch with their constituents. But I must not dwell upon details. My main object is to show that when government is in the hands of expert administrators, controlled by expert representatives, there need be no anxiety felt in extending indefinitely the sphere of the state. "This extension will of course be primarily economic, for, as is now generally recognized, the whole character of a society depends upon its economic organization. Revolution, if it is to be profound, must begin with the organization of industry; but it does not follow that it will end there. It is a libel on the socialist ideal to call it materialistic, to say that it is indifferent or hostile to the higher activities. No one, to begin with, is more conscious than a true socialist of the importance of science. Not only is the sociology on which his position is based a branch of science; but it is a fundamental part of his creed that the progress of man depends upon his mastery of Nature, and that for acquiring that mastery science is his only weapon. Again, it is absurd to accuse us of indifference to ethics. Our standards, indeed, may not be the same as those of bourgeois society; if they were, that would be their condemnation; for a new economic régime necessarily postulates a new ethic. But every régime requires and produces its appropriate standards; and the socialist régime will be no exception. Our feeling upon that subject is simply that we need not trouble about the ethic because it will follow of itself upon the economic revolution. For, as we read history, the economic factor determines all the others. 'Man ist was er isst,' as the German said; and morals, art, religion, all the so-called 'ideal activities,' are just allotropic forms of bread and meat. They will come by themselves if they are wanted; and in the socialist state they will be better not worse provided for than under the present competitive system. For here again the principle of the expert will come in. It will be the business of the state, if it determines that such activities ought to be encouraged, to devise a machinery for selecting and educating men of genius, in proportion to the demand, and assigning to them their appropriate sphere of activity and their sufficient wage. This will apply, I conceive, equally to the ministers of religion as to the professors of the various branches of art. Nor would I suggest that the socialist community should establish any one form of religion, seeing that we are not in a position to determine scientifically which, or whether any, are true. I would give encouragement to all and several, of course under the necessary restrictions, in the hope that, in course of time, by a process of natural selection, that one will survive which is the best adapted to the new environment. But meantime the advantage of the new over the old organization is apparent. We shall hear no more of genius starving in a garret; of ill-paid or over-paid ministers of the gospel; of privileged and unprivileged sects. All will be orderly, regular, and secure, as it should be in a civilized state; and for the first time in history society will be in a position to extract the maximum of good from those strange and irregular human organizations whose subsistence hitherto has been so precarious and whose output so capricious and uncertain. A socialist state, if I may say so, will pigeon-hole religion, literature and art; and if these are really normal and fruitful functions they cannot fail, like other functions, to profit by such treatment. "I have thus indicated in outline the main features of the socialist scheme--an economic revolution accomplished by a gradual and peaceful transition and issuing in a system of collectivism so complete as to include all the human activities that are really valuable. But what I should find it hard to convey, except to an audience prepared by years of study, is the enthusiasm or rather the grounds for the enthusiasm, that animates us. Whereas all other political parties are groping in the dark, relying upon partial and outworn formulae, in which even they themselves have ceased to believe, we alone advance in the broad daylight, along a road whose course we clearly trace backward and forward, towards a goal distinctly seen on the horizon. History and analysis are our guides; history for the first time comprehended, analysis for the first time scientifically applied. Unlike all the revolutionists of the past, we derive our inspiration not from our own intuitions or ideals, but from the ascertained course of the world. We co-operate with the universe; and hence at once our confidence and our patience. We can afford to wait because the force of events is bearing us on of its own accord to the end we desire. Even if we rest on our oars, none the less we are drifting onwards; or if we are checked for a moment the eddy in which we are caught is merely local. Alone among all politicians we have faith; but our faith is built upon science, and it is therefore a faith which will endure." WITH that Allison concluded; and almost before he had done MacCarthy, without waiting my summons, had leapt to his feet and burst into an impassioned harangue. With flashing eyes and passionate gestures he delivered himself as follows, his Irish accent contrasting pleasantly with that of the last speaker. "May God forgive me," he cried, "that ever I have called myself a socialist, if this is what socialism means! But it does not! I will rescue the word! I will reclaim it for its ancient nobler sense--socialism the dream of the world, the light of the grail on the marsh, the mystic city of Sarras, the vale of Avalon! Socialism the soul of liberty, the bond of brotherhood, the seal of equality! Who is he that with sacrilegious hands would seize our Ariel and prison him in that tree of iniquity the State? Day is not farther from night, nor Good from Evil, than the socialism of the Revolution from this of the desk and the stool, from this enemy wearing our uniform and flaunting our coat of arms. For nigh upon a century we have fought for liberty; and now they would make us gaolers to bind our own souls. 1789, 1830, 1848--are these dates branded upon our hearts, only to stamp us as patient sheep in the flock of bureaucracy? No! They are the symbols of the spirit; and those whom they set apart, outcasts from the kingdoms of this world and citizens of the kingdom of God, wherever they wander are living flames to consume institutions and laws, and to light in the hearts of men the fires of pity and wrath and love. Our city is not built with Blue books, nor cemented with office dust; nor is it bonds of red-tape that make and keep it one. No! it is the attraction, uncompelled, of spirits made free; the shadowing into outward form of the eternal joy of the soul!" He paused and seemed to collect himself; and then in a quieter tone: "Socialism," he proceeded, "is one with anarchy! I know the terrors of that word; but they are the terrors of an evil conscience; for it is only an order founded on iniquity that dreads disorder. Why do you fear for your property and lives, you who fear anarchy? It is because you have stolen the one and misdevoted the other; because you have created by your laws the man you call the criminal; because you have bred hunger, and hunger has bred rage. For this I do not blame you, any more than I blame myself. You are yourselves victims of the system you maintain, and your enemy, no less than mine, if you knew it, is government. For government means compulsion, exclusion, distinction, separation; while anarchy is freedom, union and love. Government is based on egotism and fear, anarchy on fraternity. It is because we divide ourselves into nations that we endure the oppression of armaments; because we isolate ourselves as individuals that we invoke the protection of laws. If I did not take what my brother needs I should not fear that he would take it from me; if I did not shut myself off from his want, I should not deem it less urgent than my own. All governing persons are persons set apart. And therefore it is that whether they will or no they are oppressors, or, at best, obstructors. Shut off from the breath of popular instinct, which is the breath of life, they cannot feel, and therefore cannot think, rightly. And, in any case, how could they understand, even with the best will in the world, the multifarious interests they are expected to control? A man knows nothing but what he practises; and in every branch of work only those are fitted to direct who are themselves the workers. Intellectually, as well as morally, government is eternally bankrupt; and what is called representative government is no better than any other, for the governors are equally removed in sympathy and knowledge from the governed. Nay, experience shows, if we would but admit it, that under no system have the rulers been more incompetent and corrupt than under this which we call democratic. Is not the very word 'politician' everywhere a term of reproach? Is not a government office everywhere synonymous with incapacity and sloth? What a miserable position is that of a Member of Parliament, compelled to give his vote on innumerable questions of which he does not understand the rudiments, and giving it at the dictation of party chiefs who themselves are controlled by the blind and brainless mechanism of the caucus! The people are the slaves of their representatives, the representatives of their chiefs, and the chiefs of a conscienceless machine! And that is the last word of governmental science! Oh, divine spirit of man, in what chains have you bound yourself, and call it liberty, and clap your hands! "And then comes one and says, 'because you are free, tie yourself tighter and tighter in your own bonds!' Are these hands not yours that fasten the knots? Why then do you fear? Here is a limb free; fasten it quick! Your head still turns; come, fix it in a vice! Now you are fast! Now you cannot move! How beautiful, how orderly, how secure! And this, and this is socialism! And it was to accomplish this that France opened the sluices that have deluged the earth with blood! What! we have broken the bonds of iron to bind ourselves in tape! We have discrowned Napoleon to crown ... to crown...." He looked across at Allison, and suddenly pulled himself up. Then, attempting the tone of exposition, "There is only one way out of it," he resumed, "the extension of free co-operation in every department of activity, including those which at present are regulated by the State. You will say that this is impracticable; but why? Already, in all that you most care about, that is the method you actually adopt. The activities of men that are freest in the society in which we live are those of art and science and amusement. And all these are, I will not say regulated by, but expressed in, voluntary organizations, clubs, academies, societies, what you will. The Royal Society and the British Association are types of the right way of organizing; and it is a way that should and must be applied throughout the whole structure. Every trade and business should be conducted by a society voluntarily formed of all those who choose to engage in it, electing and removing their own officials, determining their own policy, and co-operating by free arrangement with other similar bodies. A complex interweaving of such associations, with order everywhere, compulsion nowhere, is the form of society to which I look forward, and which I see already growing up within the hard skin of the older organisms. Rules there will be but not laws, rules gladly obeyed because they will have been freely adopted, and because there will be no compulsion upon anyone to remain within the brotherhood that approves and maintains them. Anarchy is not the absence of order, it is absence of force; it is the free outflowing of the spirit into the forms in which it delights; and in such forms alone, as they grow and change, can it find an expression which is not also a bondage. You will say this is chimerical. But look at history! Consider the great achievements of the Middle Age! Were they not the result of just such a movement as I describe? It was men voluntarily associating in communes and grouping themselves in guilds that built the towers and churches and adorned them with the glories of art that dazzles us still in Italy and France. The history of the growth of the state, of public authority and compulsion, is the history of the decline from Florence and Nuremberg to London and New York. As the power of the state grows the energy of the spirit dwindles; and if ever Allison's ideal should be realized, if ever the activity of the state should extend through and through to every department of life, the universal ease and comfort which may thus be disseminated throughout society will have been purchased dearly at the price of the soul. The denizens of that city will be fed, housed and clothed to perfection; only--and it is a serious drawback--only they will be dead. "Oh!" he broke out, "if I could but get you to see that this whole order under which you live is artificial and unnecessary! But we are befogged by the systems we impose upon our imagination and call science. We have been taught to regard history as a necessary process, until we come to think it must also be a good one; that all that has ever happened ought to have happened just so and no otherwise. And thus we justify everything past and present, however palpably in contradiction with our own intuitions. But these are mere figments of the brain. History, for the most part, believe me, is one gigantic error and crime. It ought to have been other than it was; and we ought to be other than we are. There is no natural and inevitable evolution towards good; no co-operating with the universe, other than by connivance at its crimes. That little house the brain builds to shelter its own weakness must be torn down if we would face the truth and pursue the good. Then we shall see amid what blinding storms of wind and rain, what darkness of elements hostile or indifferent, our road lies across the mountains towards the city of our desire. Then and then only shall we understand the spirit of revolution. That there are things so bad that they can only be burnt up by fire; that there are obstructions so immense that they can only be exploded by dynamite; that the work of destruction is a necessary preliminary to the work of creation, for it is the destruction of the prison walls wherein the spirit is confined; and that in that work the spirit itself is the only agent, unhelped by powers of nature or powers of a world beyond--that is the creed--no, I will not say the creed, that is the insight and vision by which we of the Revolution live. By that I believe we shall triumph. But whether we triumph or no, our life itself is a victory, for it is a life lived in the spirit. To shatter material bonds that we may bind closer the bonds of the soul, to slough dead husks that we may liberate living forms, to abolish institutions that we may evoke energies, to put off the material and put on the spiritual body, that, whether we fight with the tongue or the sword, is the inspiration of our movement, that, and that only, is the true and inner meaning of anarchy. "Anarchy is identified with violence; and I will not be so hypocritical and base as to deny that violence must be one of our means of action. Force is the midwife of society; and never has radical change been accomplished without it. What came by the sword by the sword must be destroyed: and only through violence can violence come to an end. Nay, I will go further and confess, since here if anywhere we are candid, that it is the way of violence to which I feel called myself, and that I shall die as I have lived, an active revolutionary. But because force is a way, is a necessary way, is my way, I do not imagine that there is no other. Were it not idle to wish, I could rather wish that I were a poet or a saint, to serve the same Lord by the gentler weapons of the spirit. There are anarchists who never made a speech and never carried a rifle, whom we know as our brothers, though perhaps they know not us. Two I will name who live for ever, Shelley, the first of poets, were it not that there is one greater than he, the mystic William Blake. We are thought of as men of blood; we are hounded over the face of the globe. And who of our persecutors would believe that the song we bear in our hearts, some of us, I may speak at least for one, is the most inspired, the most spiritual challenge ever flung to your obtuse, flatulent, stertorous England: Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire, Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till I have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. "England! No, not England, but Europe, America, the world! Where is Man, the new Man, there is our country. But the new Man is buried in the old; and wherever he struggles in his tomb, wherever he knocks we are there to help to deliver him. When the guards sleep, in the silence of the dawn, rises the crucified Christ. And the angel that sits at the grave is the angel of Anarchy." THUS abruptly he brought to a close his extraordinary peroration, to which I fear the written word has done but poor justice. A long silence followed; in it there was borne to us from below the murmur of the hidden fountain, the wail of the nightingale. It was night now; the moon had set, and the sky was thick with stars. Among them one planet was blazing red, just opposite where I sat; and I saw the eyes of my neighbour, Henry Martin, fixed upon it. He was so lost in thought that he did not hear me at first when I asked him whether he would care to follow on. But he assented willingly enough as soon as he understood. And as he rose I could not help admiring, as I had often done before, the singular beauty of his countenance. His books, I think, do him injustice; they are cold and academic. But there was nothing of that in the man himself; never was spirit so alert; and that alertness was reflected in his person and bearing, his erect figure, his brilliant eyes, and the tumultuous sweep of his now whitening beard. He stood for a moment silent, with his eyes still fixed on the red star; then began to speak as follows: "If," he said, "it be true, as certain mystics maintain, that the world is an effect of the antagonisms of spiritual beings, having their stations in opposite quarters of the heavens, then, I think, MacCarthy and myself must represent such a pair of contraries, and move in an antithetic balance through the cycle of experience. I, perhaps, am the Urthona of his prophet Blake, and he the Urizen, or vice versa, it may be, I cannot tell. But our opposition involves, on my part at least, no hostility; and looking across to his quarter of the sky I can readily conceive how proud a fate it must be to burn there, so red, so sumptuous, and so superb. My own light is pale by comparison, a mere green and blue; yet it is equally essential; and without it there might be a danger that he would consume the world. I speak in metaphors, that I may effect as gently as possible the necessary transition, so cold and abrupt, from the prophet to the critic. But you, sir, in calling upon me, knew what you were doing. You knew well that you were inviting Aquarius to empty his watering-pot on Mars. And Mars, I am sure, will pardon me if I obey. Unlike all the previous speakers, I am, by vocation, a sceptic; and the vocation I hold to be a noble one. There are people who think, perhaps, indeed, there is almost nobody who does not think, that action is the sole end of life. Criticism, they hold, is a kind of disease to which some people are subject, and which, in extreme cases, may easily be fatal. The healthy state, on the other hand, they think, is that of the enthusiast; of the man who believes and never doubts. Now, that such a state is happy I am very ready to admit; but I cannot hold that it is healthy. How could it be, unless it were based upon a sound, intellectual foundation? But no such foundation has been or will be reached except through criticism; and all criticism implies and engenders doubt. A man who has never experienced, nay, I will say who is not constantly reiterating, the process of criticism, is a man who has no right to his enthusiasm. For he has won it at the cost of drugging his mind with passion; and that I maintain is a bad and wrong thing. I maintain it to be bad and wrong in itself, and quite apart from any consequences it may produce; for it is a primary duty to seek what is true and eschew what is false. But even from the secondary point of view of consequences, I have the gravest doubts as to the common assumption that the effects of enthusiasm are always preponderantly if not wholly good. When I consider, for example, the history of religion, I find no warrant for affirming that its services have outweighed its disservices. Jesus Christ, the greatest and, I think, the sanest of enthusiasts, lit the fires of the Inquisition and set up the Pope at Rome. Mahomet deluged the earth with blood, and planted the Turk on the Bosphorus. Saint Frances created a horde of sturdy beggars. Luther declared the Thirty Years War. Criticism would have arrested the course of these men; but would the world have been the worse? I doubt it. There would have been less heat; but there might have been more light. And, for my part, I believe in light. It may, indeed, be true that intellect without passion is barren; but it is certain that passion without intellect is mischievous. And since these powers, which should be united, are, in fact, at war in the great duel which runs through history, I take my stand with the intellect. If I must choose, I would rather be barren than mischievous. But it is my aim to be fruitful and to be fruitful through criticism. That means, I fear, that I am bound to make myself unpleasant to everybody. But I do it, not of malice prepense, but as in duty bound. You will say, perhaps, that that only makes the matter worse. Well, so be it! I will apologize no more, but proceed at once to my disagreeable task. "Let me say then first, that in listening to the speakers who have preceded me, while admiring the beauty and ingenuity of the superstructures they have raised, I have been busy, according to my practice, in questioning the foundations. And this is the kind of result I have arrived at. All political convictions vary between the two extremes which I will call Collectivism and Anarchy. Each of these pursues at all costs a certain end--Collectivism, order, and Anarchy, liberty. Each is held as a faith and propagated as a religion. And between them lie those various compromises between faith and experience, idea and fact, which are represented by liberalism, conservatism, and the like. Now, the degree of enthusiasm which accompanies a belief, is commonly in direct proportion to its freedom from empirical elements. Simplicity and immediacy are the characteristics of all passionate conviction. But a critic like myself cannot believe that in politics, or anywhere in the field of practical action, any such simple and immediate beliefs are really and wholly true. Thus, in the case before us, I would point out that neither liberty nor order are sufficient ends in themselves, though each, I think, is part of the end. The liberty that is desirable is that of good people pursuing Good in order; and the order that is desirable is that of good people pursuing Good in liberty. This is a correction which, perhaps, both collectivist and anarchist would accept. What they want, they would say, is that kind of liberty and that kind of order which I have described. But as liberty and order, so conceived, imply one another, the difference between the two positions ceases to be one of ends and becomes one of means. But every problem of means is one of extreme complexity which can only be solved, in the most tentative way, by observation and experiment. And opinions based upon such a process, though they may be strongly held, cannot be held with the simplicity and force of a religious or ethical intuition. We might, conceivably, on this basis adopt the position either of the collectivist or of the anarchist; but we should do so not as enthusiasts, but as critics, with a full consciousness that we are resting not upon an absolute principle, but upon a balance of probabilities. "This, then, is the first point I wished to make, that the whole question is one to be attacked by criticism, not by intuition. But now, tested by criticism, both the extreme positions suggest the gravest possible difficulties and doubts. In the case of anarchy, especially, these force themselves upon the most superficial view. The anarchist maintains, in effect, that to bring about his ideal of ordered liberty all you have to do is to abolish government. But he can point to no experience that will justify such a belief. It is based upon a theory of human nature which is contradicted by all the facts known to us. For if men, were it not for government, might be living in the garden of Eden, how comes it that they ever emerged from that paradise? No, it is not government that is the root of our troubles, it is the niggardliness of Nature and the greed of man. And both these are primitive facts which would be strengthened, not destroyed, by anarchy. Can it be believed that the result would be satisfactory? The anarchist may indeed reply that anything would be better than what exists. And I can well understand how some generous and sensitive souls, or some victims of intolerable oppression, may be driven into such counsels. But they are surely counsels of despair. Or is it possible really to hold--as MacCarthy apparently does--that on the eve of a bloody revolution, whereby all owners of property will be summarily deprived of all they have, the friendly and co-operative instincts of human nature will immediately come into play without friction; that the infinitely complex problems of production and distribution will solve themselves, as it were, of their own accord; that there will be a place ready for everybody to do exactly the work he wants; that everybody will want to work at something, and will be contented with the wage assigned him, that there will be no shortage, no lack of adaptation of demand to supply; and all this achieved, not by virtue of any new knowledge or new capacity, but simply by a rearrangement of existing elements? Does anyone, does MacCarthy really, in a calm moment, believe all this? And is he prepared to stake society upon his faith? If he be, he is indeed beyond the reach of my watering-pot. I leave him, therefore, burning luridly and unsubdued, and pass on to Allison. "Allison's flame is gentler; and I would not wish, even if I could, altogether to extinguish it. But I am anxious, I confess, to temper it; for in colour, to my taste, it is a little ghastly; and I fear that if it increased in intensity, it might even become too hot, though I do not suggest that that is a present danger. To drop the metaphor, my objections to collectivism are not as fundamental as my objections to anarchy, nor are they based upon any lack of appreciation of the advantages of that more equitable distribution of the opportunities of life which I take to be at the bottom of the collectivist ideal. I do not share--no man surely who has reflected could share--the common prejudice that there is something fundamental, natural, and inevitable about the existing organization of property. On the contrary, it is clear to me that it is inequitable; and that the substitution of the system advocated by collectivists would be an immense improvement, if it could be successfully carried out, and if it did not endanger other Goods, which may be even more important than equality of opportunity. Nor do I hold that in a collectivist state there need be any dangerous relaxation of that motive of self-interest which every reasonable man must admit to be, up to a point, the most potent source of all practical energy. I do not see why the state should not pay its servants according to merit just as private companies do, and make the rewards of ambition depend on efficiency. In this purely economic region there is not, so it seems to me, anything absurd or chimerical in the socialist ideal. My difficulty here is of a different kind. I do not see how, by the democratic machinery contemplated, it will be possible to secure officials sufficiently competent and disinterested to be entrusted with functions so important and so difficult as those which would be demanded of them under the socialist régime. In a democracy the government can hardly rise above--in practice, I think, it tends to fall below--the average level of honesty and intelligence. In the United States, for example, it is notorious that the whole machinery of government, and especially of local government, where the economic functions are important, is exploited by the more unscrupulous members of the community; and this tendency must be immensely accentuated in every society in proportion as the functions of government become important. A socialist state badly administered would, I believe, be worse than the state under which we live, to the same degree in which, when well administered, it would be better. And I do not, I confess, see what guarantees socialists can offer that the administration will be good. I have far less confidence than Allison in mere machinery; and I am sure that no machinery will produce good results in a society where a large proportion of the citizens have no other idea than to exploit the powers of government in their own interest. But such, I believe, is the case in existing societies; and I do not see by what miracle they are going to be transformed. "Such is my first difficulty with regard to collectivism. And though it would not prevent me from supporting, as in fact I do support, cautious and tentative experiments in the direction of practical socialism, it does prevent me from looking to a collectivist future with anything like the breezy confidence which animates Allison. And I will go further: I will say that no man who possesses an adequate intelligence, and does not deliberately stifle it, has a right to any such confidence. Setting aside, however, for the sake of argument, this difficulty, and admitting the possibility of an honest and efficient collectivist state, I am confronted with a further and even graver cause of hesitation. For while I consider that the distribution of the opportunities of life is, under the existing system, in the highest degree capricious and inequitable, yet I would prefer such inequity to the most equitable arrangement in the world if it afforded a better guarantee for the realization of certain higher goods than would be afforded by the improved system. And I am not clear in my own mind, and I do not see how anyone can be clear, that collectivism gives as good a security as the present system for the realization of these higher goods. And this brings me back to the question of liberty. On this point there is, I am well aware, a great deal of cant talked, and I have no wish to add to it. Under our present arrangements, I admit, for the great mass of people, there is no liberty worth the name; seeing that they are bound and tied all their lives to the meanest necessities. And yet we see that out of the midst of all this chaos of wrong, there have emerged and do emerge artists, poets, men of science, saints. And the appearance of such men seems to me to depend on the fact that a considerable minority have the power to choose, for good or for evil, their own life, to follow their bent, even in the face of tremendous difficulties, and perhaps because of those difficulties, in the more fortunate cases, to realize, at whatever cost of suffering, great works and great lives. But under the system sketched by Allison I have the gravest doubts whether any man of genius would ever emerge. The very fact that everybody's career will be regulated for him, and his difficulties smoothed away, that, in a word, the open road will imply the beaten track, will, I fear, diminish, if not destroy, the enterprise, the innate spirit of adventure, in the spiritual as in the physical world, on which depends all that we call, or ought to call, progress. A collectivist state, it is true, might establish and endow academies; but would it ever produce a Shakespeare or a Michelangelo? It might engender and foster religious orthodoxy; but would it have a place for the reformer or the saint? Should we not have to pay for the general level of comfort and intelligence, by suppressing the only thing good in itself, the manifestation of genius? I do not say dogmatically that it would be so: I do not even say dogmatically that, even if it were, the argument would be conclusive against the collectivist state. But the issue is so tremendous that it necessarily makes me pause, as it must, I contend, any candid man, who is not prejudiced by a preconceived ideal. "Now, it is not for the sake of recommending any opinion of my own that I have dwelt on these considerations. It is, rather, to illustrate and drive home the point with which I began, that the intellect has its rights, that it enters into every creed, and that it undermines, in every creed, all elements of mere irrational or anti-rational faith; that this fact can only be disguised by a conscious or unconscious predetermination, not to let the intellect have its say; and that such predetermination is a very serious error and vice. It is without shame and without regret, on the contrary it is with satisfaction and self-approval, that I find in my own case, my intelligence daily more and more undermining my instinctive beliefs. If, as some have held, it were necessary to choose between reason and passion, I would choose reason. But I find no such necessity; for reason to me herself is a passion. Men think the life of reason cold. How little do they know what it is to be responsive to every call, solicited by every impulse, yet still, like the magnet, vibrate ever to the north, never so tense, never so aware of the stress and strain of force as when most irremovably fixed upon that goal. The intensity of life is not to be measured by the degree of oscillation. It is at the stillest point that the most tremendous energies meet; and such a point is the intelligence open to infinity. For such stillness I feel myself to be destined, if ever I could attain it. But others, I suppose, like MacCarthy, have a different fate. In the celestial world of souls, the hierarchy of spirits, there is need of the planet no less than of its sun. The station and gravity of the one determines the orbit of the other, and the antagonism that keeps them apart also knits them together. There is no motion of MacCarthy's but I vibrate to it; and about my immobility he revolves. But both of us, as I am inclined to think, are included in a larger system and move together on a remoter centre. And the very law of our contention, as perhaps one day we may come to see, is that of a love that by discord achieves harmony." THE conclusion of Martin's speech left me somewhat in doubt how to proceed. All of the company who were primarily interested in politics had now spoken; and I was afraid there might be a complete break in the subject of our discourse. Casting about, I could think of nothing better than to call upon Wilson, the biologist. For though he was a specialist, he regarded everything as a branch of his specialty; and would, I knew, be as ready to discourse on society as on anything else. Although, therefore, I disliked a certain arrogance he was wont to display, I felt that, since he was to speak, this was the proper place to introduce him. I asked him accordingly to take up the thread of the debate; and without pause his aggressive voice began to assail our ears. "I don't quite know," he began, "why a mere man of science should be invited to intervene in a debate on these high subjects. Politics, I have always understood, is a kind of mystery, only to be grasped by a favoured few, and then not by any processes of thought, but by some kind of intuition. But of late years something seems to have happened. The intuition theory was all very well when the intuitions did not conflict, or when, at least, those who were possessed by one, never came into real intellectual contact with those who were possessed by another. But here, to-night, have we met together upon this terrace, been confronted with the most opposite principles jostling in the roughest way, and, as it seems to the outsider, simply annihilating one another. Whence Martin's plea for criticism; a plea with which I most heartily sympathize, only that he gave no indication of the basis on which criticism itself is to rest. And perhaps that is where and why I come in. I have been watching to-night with curiosity, and I must confess with a little amusement, one building after another laboriously raised by each speaker in turn, only to collapse ignominiously at the first touch administered by his successor. And why? For the ancient reason, that the structures were built upon the sand. Well, I have raised no building myself to speak of. But I am one of an obscure group of people who are working at solid foundations; which is only another way of saying that I am a man of science. Only a biologist, it is true; heaven forfend that I should call myself a sociologist! But biology is one of the disciplines that are building up that general view of Nature and the world which is gradually revolutionizing all our social conceptions. The politicians, I am afraid, are hardly aware of this. And that is why--if I may say so without offence--their utterances are coming to seem more and more a kind of irrelevant prattle. The forces that really move the world have passed out of their control. And it is only where the forces are at work that the living ideas move upon the waters. Politicians don't study science; that is the extraordinary fact. And yet every day it becomes clearer that politics is either an applied science or a charlatanism. Only, unfortunately, as the most important things are precisely the last to be known about, and it is exactly where it is most imperative to act that our ignorance is most complete, the science of politics has hardly yet even begun to be studied. Hence our forlorn paralysis of doubt whenever we pause to reflect; and hence the kind of blind desperation with which earnest people are impelled to rush incontinently into practice. The position of MacCarthy is very intelligible, however much it be, to my mind--what shall I say?--regrettable. There is, in fact, hardly a question that has been raised to-night that is at present capable of scientific determination. And with that word I ought perhaps, in my capacity of man of science, to sit down. "And so I would, if it were not that there is something else, besides positive conclusions, that results from a long devotion to science. There is a certain attitude towards life, a certain sense of what is important and what is not, a view of what one may call the commonplaces of existence, that distinguishes, I think, all competent people who have been trained in that discipline. For we do think about politics, or rather about society, even we specialists. And between us we are gradually developing a sort of body of first principles which will be at the basis of any future sociology. It is these that I feel tempted to try to indicate. And the more so, because they are so foreign to much that has been spoken here to-night. I have had a kind of feeling, to tell the truth, throughout this whole discussion, of dwelling among the tombs and listening to the voices of the dead. And I feel a kind of need to speak for the living, for the new generation with which I believe I am in touch. I want to say how the problems you have raised look to us, who live in the dry light of physical science. "Let me say, then, to begin with, that for us the nineteenth century marks a breach with the whole past of the world to which there is nothing comparable in human annals. We have developed wholly new powers; and, coincidentally and correspondingly, a wholly new attitude to life. Of the powers I do not intend to speak; the wonders of steam and electricity are the hackneyed theme of every halfpenny paper. But the attitude to life, which is even more important, is something that has hardly yet been formulated. And I shall endeavour to give some first rough expression to it. "The first constituent, then, of the new view is that of continuity. We of the new generation realize that the present is a mere transition from the past into the future; that no event and no moment is isolated; that all things, successive as well as coincident, are bound in a single system. Of this system the general formula is causation. But, in human society, the specifically important case of it is the nexus of successive generations. We do not now, we who reflect, regard man as an individual, nor even as one of a body of contemporaries; we regard him as primarily a son and a father. In other words, what we have in mind is always the race: whereas hitherto the central point has been the individual or the citizen. But this shifting in the point of view implies a revolution in ethics and politics. With the ancients, the maintenance of the existing generation was the main consideration, and patriotism its formula. To Marcus Aurelius, to the Stoics, as later to the Christians, the subject of all moral duties was the individual soul, and personal salvation became for centuries the corner-stone of the ethical structure. Well, all the speculation, all the doctrine, all the literature based upon that conception has become irrelevant and meaningless in the light of the new ideal. We no longer conceive the individual save as one in a chain of births. Fatherless, he is inconceivable; sonless, he is abortive. His soul, if he have one, is inseparable from its derivation from the past and its tradition to the future. His duty, his happiness, his value, are all bound up with the fact of paternity; and the same, mutatis mutandis, is true of women. The new generation in a word has a totally new code of ethics; and that code is directed to the end of the perfection of the race. For, and this is the second constituent of the modern view, the series of births is also the vehicle of progress. It is this discovery that gives to our outlook on life its exhilaration and zest. The ancients conceived the Golden Age as lying in the past; the men of the Middle Ages removed it to an imaginary heaven. Both in effect despaired of this world; and consequently their characteristic philosophy is that of the tub or the hermitage. So soon as the first flush of youth was past, pessimism clouded the civilization of Greece and of Rome; and from this Christianity escaped only to take refuge in an imaginary bliss beyond the grave. But we, by means of science, have established progress. We look to a future, a future assured, and a future in this world. Our eyes are on the coming generations; in them centres our hope and our duty. To feed them, to clothe them, to educate them, to make them better than ourselves, to do for them all that has hitherto been so scandalously neglected, and in doing it to find our own life and our own satisfaction--that is our task and our privilege, ours of the new generation. "And this brings me to the third point in our scheme of life. We believe in progress; but we do not believe that progress is fated. And here, too, our outlook is essentially new. Hitherto, the conceptions of Fate and Providence have divided the empire of the world. We of the new generation accept neither. We believe neither in a good God directing the course of events; nor in a blind power that controls them independently and in despite of human will. We know that what we do or fail to do matters. We know that we have will; that will may be directed by reason; and that the end to which reason points is the progress of the race. This much we hold to be established; more than this we do not need. And it is the acceptance of just this that cuts us off from the past, that makes its literature, its ethics, its politics, meaningless and unintelligible to us, that makes us, in a word, what we are, the first of the new generation. "Well, now, assuming this standpoint let us go on to see how some of the questions look which have been touched upon to-night. Those questions have been connected mainly with government and property. And upon these two factors, it would seem, in the opinion of previous speakers, all the interests of society turn. But from the point where we now stand we see clearly that there is a third factor to which these are altogether subordinate--I mean the family. For the family is the immediate agent in the production and rearing of children; and this, as we have seen, is the end of society. With the family therefore social reconstruction should start. And we may lay down as the fundamental ethical and social axiom that everybody not physically disqualified ought to marry, and to produce at least four children. The only question here is whether the state should intervene and endeavour so to regulate marriages as to bring together those whose union is most likely to result in good offspring. This is a point on which the ancients, I am aware, in their light-hearted sciolism laid great stress. Only, characteristically enough, they ignored the fundamental difficulty, that nothing is known--nothing even now, and how much less then!--of the conditions necessary to produce the desired result. If ever the conditions should come to be understood--and the problem is pre-eminently one for science; and if ever--what is even more difficult--we should come to know clearly and exactly for what points we ought to breed; then, no doubt, it may be desirable for government to undertake the complete regulation of marriage. Meantime, we must confine our efforts to the simpler and more manageable task of securing for the children when they are born the best possible environment, physical, intellectual and moral. But this may be done, even without a radical reconstruction of the law of property simply by proceeding further on the lines on which we are already embarked, by insisting on a certain standard, and that a high one, of house-room, sanitation, food, and the like. We could thus ensure from the beginning for every child at least a sound physical development; and that without undermining the responsibility of parents. What else the state can do it must do by education; a thing which, at present, I do not hesitate to say, does not exist among us. We have an elementary system of cram and drill directed by the soulless automata it has itself produced; a secondary system of athletics and dead languages presided over by gentlemanly amateurs; and a university system which--well, of which I cannot trust myself to speak. I wish only to indicate that, in the eyes of the new generation, breeding and education are the two cardinal pillars of society. All other questions, even those of property and government, are subordinate; and only as subordinate can they be fruitfully approached. Take, for example, property. On this point we have no prejudices, either socialistic or anti-socialistic. Property, as we view it, is simply a tool for producing and perfecting men. Whether it will serve that purpose best if controlled by individuals or by the state, or partly by the one and partly by the other, we regard as an open question, to be settled by experiment. We see no principle one way or the other. Property is not a right, nor a duty, nor a privilege, either of individuals or of the community. It is simply and solely, like everything else, a function of the chain of births. Whoever owns it, however it is administered, it has only one object, to ensure for every child that is born a sufficiency of physical goods, and for the better-endowed all that they require in the way of training to enable them to perform efficiently the higher duties of society. "And as property is merely a means, so is government. To us of the new generation nothing is more surprising and more repugnant, than the importance attached by politicians to formulae which have long since lost whatever significance they may once have possessed. Democracy, representation, trust in the people and the rest, all this to us is the idlest verbiage. It is notorious, even to those who make most play with these phrases, that the people do not govern themselves, that they cannot do so, and that they would make a great mess of it if they could. The truth is, that we are living politically on a tradition which arose when by government was meant government by a class, when one man or a few exploited the rest in the name of the state, and when therefore it was of imperative importance to bring to bear upon those who were in power the brute and unintelligent weight of the mass. The whole democratic movement, though it assumed a positive intellectual form, was in fact negative in its aim and scope. It meant simply, we will not be exploited. But that end has now been attained. There is no fear now that government will be oppressive; and the only problem of the future is, how to make it efficient. But efficiency, it is certain, can never be secured by democratic machinery. We must, as Allison rightly maintains, have trained and skilled persons. How these are to be secured is a matter of detail, though no doubt of important detail; and it is one that the new generation will have to solve. What they will want, in any case, is government. MacCarthy's idea of anarchy is--well, if he will pardon my saying so, it is hardly worthy of his intelligence. You cannot regulate society, any more than you can spin cotton, by the light of nature and a good heart. MacCarthy mistakes the character of government altogether, when he imagines its essence to be compulsion. Its essence is direction; and direction, whatever the form of society, is, or should be, reserved for the wise. It is for wise direction that the coming generations cry; and it is our business to see that they get it. "I have thus indicated briefly the view of social and political questions which I believe will be that of the future. And my reason for thinking so is, that that view is based upon science. It is this that distinguishes the new generation from all others. Hitherto the affairs of the world have been conducted by passion, interest, sentiment, religion, anything but reasoned knowledge. The end of that régime, which has dominated all history, is at hand. The old influences, it is true, still survive, and even appear to be supreme. We have had ample evidence to-night of their apparent vitality. But underneath them is growing up the sturdy plant of science. Already it has dislodged their roots; and though they still seem to bear flower, the flower is withering before our eyes. In its place, before long, will appear the new and splendid blossom whose appearance ends and begins an epoch of evolution. That is a consummation nothing can delay. We need not fret or hurry. We have only to work on silently at the foundations. The city, it is true, seems to be rising apart from our labours. There, in the distance, are the stately buildings, there is the noise of the masons, the carpenters, the engineers. But see! the whole structure shakes and trembles as it grows. Houses fall as fast as they are erected; foundations sink, towers settle, domes and pinnacles collapse. All history is the building of a dream-city, fantastic as that ancient one of the birds, changeful as the sunset clouds. And no wonder; for it is building on the sand. There is only one foundation of rock, and that is being laid by science. Only wait! To us will come sooner or later, the people and the architects. To us they will submit the great plans they have striven so vainly to realize. We shall pronounce on their possibility, their suitability, even their beauty. Caesar and Napoleon will give place to Comte and Herbert Spencer; and Newton and Darwin sit in judgment on Plato and Aquinas." WITH that he concluded. And as he sat down a note was passed along to me from Ellis, asking permission to speak next. I assented willingly; for Ellis, though some of us thought him frivolous, was, at any rate, never dull. His sunburnt complexion, his fair curly hair, and the light in his blue eyes made a pleasant impression, as he rose and looked down upon us from his six feet. "This," he began, "is really an extraordinary discovery Wilson has made, that fathers have children, and children fathers! One wonders how the world has got on all these centuries in ignorance of it. It seems so obvious, once it has been stated. But that, of course, is the nature of great truths; as soon as they are announced they seem to have been always familiar. It is possible, for that very reason, that many people may under-estimate the importance of Wilson's pronouncement, forgetting that it is the privilege of genius to formulate for the first time what everyone has been dimly feeling. We ought not to be ungrateful; but perhaps it is our duty to be cautious. For great ideas naturally suggest practical applications, and it is here that I foresee difficulties. What Wilson's proposition in fact amounts to, if I understand him rightly, is that we ought to open as wide as possible the gates of life, and make those who enter as comfortable as we can. Now, I think we ought to be very careful about doing anything of the kind. We know, of course, very little about the conditions of the unborn. But I think it highly probable that, like labour, as described by the political economists, they form throughout the universe a single mobile body, with a tendency to gravitate wherever the access is freest and the conditions most favourable. And I should be very much afraid of attracting what we may call, perhaps, the unemployed of the universe in undue proportions to this planet, by offering them artificially better terms than are to be obtained elsewhere. For that, as you know, would defeat our own object. We should merely cause an exodus, as it were, from the outlying and rural districts. Mars, or the moon, or whatever the place may be; and the amount of distress and difficulty on the earth would be greater than ever. At any rate, I should insist, and I dare say Wilson agrees with me there, on some adequate test. And I would not advertise too widely what we are doing. After all, other planets must be responsible for their own unborn; and I don't see why we should become a kind of dumping-ground of the universe for everyone who may imagine he can better himself by migrating to the earth. For that reason, among others, I would not open the gate too wide. And, perhaps, in view of this consideration, we might still permit some people not to marry. At any rate, I wouldn't go further, I think, than a fine for recalcitrant bachelors. Wilson, I dare say, would prefer imprisonment for a second offence, and in case of contumacy, even capital punishment. On such a point I am not, I confess, an altogether impartial judge, as I should certainly incur the greater penalty. Still, as I have said, in the general interests of society, and in view of the conditions of the universal market, I would urge caution and deliberation. And that is all I have to say at present on this very interesting subject. "The other point that interested me in Wilson's remarks was not, indeed, so novel as the discovery about fathers having children, but it was, in its way, equally important. I mean, the announcement made with authority that the human race really does, as has been so often conjectured, progress. We may take it now, I suppose, that that is established, or Wilson would not have proclaimed it. And we are, therefore, in a position roughly to determine in what progress consists. This is a task which, I believe, I am more competent to attempt perhaps even than Wilson himself, because I have had unusual opportunities of travel, and have endeavoured to utilize them to clear my mind of prejudices. I flatter myself that I can regard with perfect impartiality the ideals of different countries, and in particular those of the new world which, I presume, are to dominate the future. In attempting to estimate what progress means, one could not do better, I suppose, than describe the civilization of the United States. For in describing that, one will be describing the whole civilization of the future, seeing that what America is our colonies are, or will become, and what our colonies are we, too, may hope to attain, if we make the proper sacrifices to preserve the unity of the empire. Let us see, then, what, from an objective point of view, really is the future of this progressing world of ours. "Perhaps, however, before proceeding to analyse the spiritual ideals of the American people, I had better give some account of their country. For environment, as we all know now, has an incalculable effect upon character. Consider, then, the American continent! How simple it is! How broad! How large! How grand in design! A strip of coast, a range of mountains, a plain, a second range, a second strip of coast! That is all! Contrast the complexity of Europe, its lack of symmetry, its variety, irregularity, disorder and caprice! The geography of the two continents already foreshadows the differences in their civilizations. On the one hand simplicity and size; on the other a hole-and-corner variety; there immense rivers, endless forests, interminable plains, indefinite repetition of a few broad ideas; here distracting transitions, novelties, surprises, shocks, distinctions in a word, already suggesting Distinction. Even in its physical features America is the land of quantity, while Europe is that of quality. And as with the land, so with its products. How large are the American fruits! How tall the trees! How immense the oysters! What has Europe by comparison! Mere flavour and form, mere beauty, delicacy and grace! America, one would say, is the latest work of the great artist--we are told, indeed, by geologists, that it is the youngest of the continents--conceived at an age when he had begun to repeat himself, broad, summary, impressionist, audacious in empty space; whereas Europe would seem to represent his pre-Raphaelite period, in its wealth of detail, its variety of figure, costume, architecture, landscape, its crudely contrasted colours and minute precision of individual form. "And as with the countries, so with their civilizations. Europe is the home of class, America of democracy. By democracy I do not mean a mere form of government--in that respect, of course, America is less democratic than England: I mean the mental attitude that implies and engenders Indistinction. Indistinction, I say, rather than equality, for the word equality is misleading, and might seem to imply, for example, a social and economic parity of conditions, which no more exists in America than it does in Europe. Politically, as well as socially, America is a plutocracy; her democracy is spiritual and intellectual; and its essence is, the denial of all superiorities save that of wealth. Such superiorities, in fact, hardly exist across the Atlantic. All men there are intelligent, all efficient, all energetic; and as these are the only qualities they possess, so they are the only ones they feel called upon to admire. How different is the case with Europe! How innumerable and how confusing the gradations! For diversities of language and race, indeed, we may not be altogether responsible; but we have superadded to these, distinctions of manner, of feeling, of perception, of intellectual grasp and spiritual insight, unknown to the simpler and vaster consciousness of the West. In addition, in short, to the obvious and fundamentally natural standard of wealth, we have invented others impalpable and artificial in their character; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear as the race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominate the East, they do, nevertheless, still persist, and give to our effete civilization the character of Aristocracy, that is of Caste. In all this we see, as I have suggested, the influence of environment. The old-world stock, transplanted across the ocean, imitates the characteristics of its new home. Sloughing off artificial distinctions, it manifests itself in bold simplicity, broad as the plains, turbulent as the rivers, formless as the mountains, crude as the fruits of its adopted country." "Yet while thus forming themselves into the image of the new world, the Americans have not disdained to make use of such acquisitions of the Past as might be useful to them in the task that lay before them. They have rejected our ideals and our standards; but they have borrowed our capital and our inventions. They have thus been able--a thing unknown before in the history of the world--to start the battle against Nature with weapons ready forged. On the material results they have thus been able to achieve it is the less necessary for me to dilate, that they keep us so fully informed of them themselves. But it may be interesting to note an important consequence in their spiritual life, which has commonly escaped the notice of observers. Thanks to Europe, America has never been powerless in the face of Nature; therefore has never felt Fear; therefore never known Reverence; and therefore never experienced Religion. It may seem paradoxical to make such an assertion about the descendants of the Puritan Fathers; nor do I forget the notorious fact that America is the home of the sects, from the followers of Joseph Smith to those of Mrs. Eddy. But these are the phenomena that illustrate my point. A nation which knew what religion was, in the European sense; whose roots were struck in the soil of spiritual conflict, of temptations and visions in haunted forests or desert sands by the Nile, of midnight risings, scourgings of the flesh, dirges in vast cathedrals, and the miracle of the Host solemnly veiled in a glory of painted light--such a nation would never have accepted Christian Science as a religion. No! Religion in America is a parasite without roots. The questions that have occupied Europe from the dawn of her history, for which she has fought more fiercely than for empire or liberty, for which she has fasted in deserts, agonized in cells, suffered on the cross, and at the stake, for which she has sacrificed wealth, health, ease, intelligence, life, these questions of the meaning of the world, the origin and destiny of the soul, the life after death, the existence of God, and His relation to the universe, for the American people simply do not exist. They are as inaccessible, as impossible to them, as the Sphere to the dwellers in Flatland. That whole dimension is unknown to them. Their healthy and robust intelligence confines itself to the things of this world. Their religion, if they have one, is what I believe they call 'healthy-mindedness.' It consists in ignoring everything that might suggest a doubt as to the worth of existence, and so conceivably paralyse activity. 'Let us eat and drink,' they say, with a hearty and robust good faith; omitting as irrelevant and morbid the discouraging appendix, 'for to-morrow we die.' Indeed! What has death to do with buildings twenty-four stories high, with the fastest trains, the noisiest cities, the busiest crowds in the world, and generally the largest, the finest, the most accelerated of everything that exists? America has sloughed off religion; and as, in the history of Europe, religion has underlain every other activity, she has sloughed off, along with it, the whole European system of spiritual life. Literature, for instance, and Art, do not exist across the Atlantic. I am aware, of course, that Americans write books and paint pictures. But their books are not Literature, nor their pictures Art, except in so far as they represent a faint adumbration of the European tradition. The true spirit of America has no use for such activities. And even if, as must occasionally happen in a population of eighty millions, there is born among them a man of artistic instincts, he is immediately and inevitably repelled to Europe, whence he derives his training and his inspiration, and where alone he can live, observe and create. That this must be so from the nature of the case is obvious when we reflect that the spirit of Art is disinterested contemplation, while that of America is cupidous acquisition. Americans, I am aware, believe that they will produce Literature and Art, as they produce coal and steel and oil, by the judicious application of intelligence and capital; but here they do themselves injustice. The qualities that are making them masters of the world, unfit them for slighter and less serious pursuits. The Future is for them, the kingdom of elevators, of telephones, of motor-cars, of flying-machines. Let them not idly hark back, misled by effete traditions, to the old European dream of the kingdom of heaven. '_Excudent alii_,' let them say, 'for Europe, Letters and Art; _tu regere argento populos, Morgane, memento_, let America rule the world by Syndicates and Trusts!' For such is her true destiny; and that she conceives it to be such, is evidenced by the determination with which she has suppressed all irrelevant activities. Every kind of disinterested intellectual operation she has severely repudiated. In Europe we take delight in the operations of the mind as such, we let it play about a subject, merely for the fun of the thing; we approve knowledge for its own sake; we appreciate irony and wit. But all this is unknown in America. The most intelligent people in the world, they severely limit their intelligence to the adaptation of means to ends. About the ends themselves they never permit themselves to speculate; and for this reason, though they calculate, they never think, though they invent, they never discover, and though they talk, they never converse. For thought implies speculation; discovery, reflection; conversation, leisure; and all alike imply a disinterestedness which has no place in the American system. For the same reason they do not play; they have converted games into battles; and battles in which every weapon is legitimate so long as it is victorious. An American football match exhibits in a type the American spirit, short, sharp, scientific, intense, no loitering by the road, no enjoyment of the process, no favour, no quarter, but a fight to the death with victory as the end, and anything and everything as the means. "A nation so severely practical could hardly be expected to attach the same importance to the emotions as has been attributed to them by Europeans. Feeling, like Intellect, is not regarded, in the West, as an end in itself. And it is not uninteresting to note that the Americans are the only great nation that have not produced a single lyric of love worth recording. Physically, as well as spiritually, they are a people of cold temperament. Their women, so much and, I do not doubt, so legitimately admired, are as hard as they are brilliant; their glitter is the glitter of ice. Thus happily constituted, Americans are able to avoid the immense waste of time and energy involved in the formation and maintenance of subtle personal relations. They marry, of course, they produce children, they propagate the race; but, I would venture to say, they do not love, as Europeans have loved; they do not exploit the emotion, analyse and enjoy it, still less express it in manners, in gesture, in epigram, in verse. And hence the kind of shudder produced in a cultivated European by the treatment of emotion in American fiction. The authors are trying to express something they have never experienced, and to graft the European tradition on to a civilization which has none of the elements necessary to nourish and support it. "From this brief analysis of the attitude of Americans towards life, the point with which I started will, I hope, have become clear, that it is idle to apply to them any of the tests which we apply to a European civilization. For they have rejected, whether they know it or not, our whole scheme of values. What, then, is their own? What do they recognize as an end? This is an interesting point on which I have reflected much in the course of my travels. Sometimes I have thought it was wealth, sometimes power, sometimes activity. But a poem, or at least a production in metre, which I came across in the States, gave me a new idea upon the subject. On such a point I speak with great diffidence; but I am inclined to think that my author was right; that the real end which Americans set before themselves is Acceleration. To be always moving, and always moving faster, that they think is the beatific life; and with their happy detachment from philosophy and speculation, they are not troubled by the question, Whither? If they are asked by Europeans, as they sometimes are, what is the point of going so fast? their only feeling is one of genuine astonishment. Why, they reply, you go fast! And what more can be said? Hence, their contempt for the leisure so much valued by Europeans. Leisure they feel, to be a kind of standing still, the unpardonable sin. Hence, also, their aversion to play, to conversation, to everything that is not work. I once asked an American who had been describing to me the scheme of his laborious life, where it was that the fun came in? He replied, without hesitation and without regret, that it came in nowhere. How should it? It could only act as a brake; and a brake upon Acceleration is the last thing tolerable to the American genius. "The American genius, I say: but after all, and this is the real point of my remarks, what America is, Europe is becoming. We, who sit here, with the exception, of course, of Wilson, represent the Past, not the Future. Politicians, professors, lawyers, doctors, no matter what our calling, our judgments are determined by the old scale of values. Intellect, Beauty, Emotion, these are the things we count precious; to wealth and to progress we are indifferent, save as conducing to these. And thus, like the speakers who preceded me, we venture to criticize and doubt, where the modern man, American or European, simply and wholeheartedly accepts. For this it would be idle for us to blame ourselves, idle even to regret; we should simply and objectively note that we are out of court. All that we say may be true, but it is irrelevant. 'True,' says the man of the Future, 'we have no religion, literature, or art; we don't know whence we come, nor whither we go; but, what is more important, we don't care. What we do know is, that we are moving faster than any one ever moved before; and that there is every chance of our moving faster and faster. To inquire "whither" is the one thing that we recognize as blasphemous. The principle of the Universe is Acceleration, and we are its exponents; what is not accelerated will be extinguished; and if we cannot answer ultimate questions, that is the less to be regretted in that, a few centuries hence, there will be nobody left to ask them.' "Such is the attitude which I believe to be that of the Future, both in the West and in the East. I do not pretend to sympathize with it; but my perception of it gives a peculiar piquancy to my own position. I rejoice that I was born at the end of an epoch; that I stand as it were at the summit, just before the plunge into the valley below; and looking back, survey and summarize in a glance the ages that are past. I rejoice that my friends are Socrates and Plato, Dante, Michelangelo, Goethe instead of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I rejoice that I belong to an effete country; and that I sit at table with almost the last representatives of the culture, the learning and the ideals of centuries of civilization. I prefer the tradition of the Past to that of the Future; I value it the more for its contrast with that which is to come; and I am the more at ease inasmuch as I feel myself divested of all responsibility towards generations whose ideals and standards I am unable to appreciate. "All this shows, of course, merely that I am not one of the people so aptly described by Wilson as the 'new generation.' But I flatter myself that my intellectual apprehension is not coloured by the circumstances of my own case, and that I have given you a clear and objective picture of what it is that really constitutes progress. And with that proud consciousness in my mind, I resume my seat." THE conclusion of this speech was greeted with a hubbub of laughter, approval, and protest confusedly mixed; in the midst of which it occurred to me that I would select Audubon as the next speaker. My reason was that Ellis, as I thought, under cover of an extravagant fit of spleen, had made rather a formidable attack on the doctrine of progress as commonly understood by social reformers. He had given us, as it were, the first notes of the Negative. But Audubon, I knew, would play the tune through to the end; and I thought we might as well have it all, and have it before it should be too late for the possible correctives of other speakers. Audubon was engaged in some occupation in the city, and how he came to be a member of our society I cannot tell; for he professed an uncompromising aversion to all speculation. He was, however, a regular attendant and spoke well, though always in the sense that there was nothing worth speaking about. On this occasion he displayed, as usual, some reluctance to get on to his feet; and even when he was overruled began, characteristically, with a protest. "I don't see why it should be a rule that everybody must speak. I believe I have said something of the kind before"--but here he was interrupted by a general exclamation that he had said it much too often; whereupon he dropped the subject, but maintained his tone of protest. "You don't understand," he went on, "what a difficult position I am in, especially in a discussion of this kind. My standpoint is radically different from that of the rest of you; and anything I say is bound to be out of key. You're all playing what you think to be the game of life, and playing it willingly. But I play only under compulsion; if you call it playing, when one is hounded out to field in all weathers without ever having a chance of an innings. Or, rather, the game's more like tennis than cricket, and we're the little boys who pick up the balls--and that, in my opinion, is a damned humiliating occupation. And surely you must all really think so too! Of course, you don't like to admit it. Nobody does. In the pulpit, in the press, in conversation, even, there's a conspiracy of silence and bluff. It's only in rare moments, when a few men get together in the smoking-room, that the truth comes out. But when it does come out it's always the same refrain, 'cui bono, cui bono?' I don't take much account of myself; but, if there is one thing of which I am proud, it is that I have never let myself be duped. From the earliest days I can remember I realized what the nature of this world really is. And all experience has confirmed that first intuition. That other people don't seem to have it, too, is a source of constant amazement to me. But really, and without wishing to be arrogant, I believe the reason is that they choose to be duped and I don't. They intend, at all costs, to be happy, or interested, or whatever it is that they prefer to call it. And I don't say they are not wise in their generation. But I'm not made like that; I just see things as they are; and I see that they're very bad--a point in which I differ from the Creator. "Well, now, to come to to-night's discussion, and my attitude towards it. You have assumed throughout, as, of course, you were bound to do, that things are worth while. But if they aren't, what becomes of all your aims, all your views, all your problems and disputes? The basis on which you are all agreed, however much you may differ in detail, is that things can be made better, and that it's worth while to make them so. But if one denies both propositions, what happens to the superstructure? And I do deny them; and not only that, but I can't conceive how anyone ever came to accept them. Surely, if one didn't approach the question with an irrational bias towards optimism, one would never imagine that there is such a thing as progress in anything that really matters. Or are even we here impressed by such silly and irrelevant facts as telephones and motor-cars? Ellis, I should think, has said enough to dispel that kind of illusion; and I don't want to labour a tedious point. If we are to look for progress at all we must look for it, I suppose, in men. And I have never seen any evidence that men are generally better than they used to be; on the contrary, I think there is evidence that they are worse. But anyhow, even granting that we could make things a bit better, what would be the use of doing it in a world like this? If the whole structure of the universe is bad, what's the good of fiddling with the details? You might as well waste your time in decorating the saloon of a sinking ship. Granting that you can improve the distribution of property, and raise the standard of health and intelligence and all the rest of it, granting you could to-morrow introduce your socialist state, or your liberal state, or your anarchical co-operation, or whatever the plan may be--how would you be better off in anything that matters? The main governing facts would be unaltered. Men, for example, would still be born, without being asked whether they want it or no. And that alone, to my mind, is enough to condemn the whole business. I can't think how it is that people don't resent more than they do the mere insult to their self-respect involved in such a situation. Nothing can cure it, nothing can improve it. It's a fundamental condition of life. "If that were all it would be bad enough. But that's only the beginning. For the world into which we are thus ignominiously flung turns out to be incalculable and irrational. There are, of course, I know, what are called the laws of nature. But I--to tell the honest truth--I don't believe in them. I mean, I see no reason to suppose that the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the seasons will continue to observe their course, or that any of our most certain expectations will be fulfilled in the future as they have been in the past. We import into the universe our own prejudice in favour of order; and the universe, I admit, up to a point appears to conform to it. But I don't trust the conformity. Too many evidences abound of frivolous and incalculable caprice. Why should not the appearance of order be but one caprice the more, or even a crowning device of calculated malice? And anyhow, the things that most concern us, tempests, epidemics, accidents, from the catastrophe of birth to the deliverance of death, we have no power to foresee or to forestall. Yet, in face of all this, borne home to us every hour of every day, we cling to the creed of universal law; and on the flux of chaos write our 'credo quia impossibile.' "Well, that is a heresy of mine I have never found anyone to share. But no matter. My case is so strong I can afford to give it away point by point. Granting then, that there were order in the universe, how does that make it any better? Does it not rather make it worse, if the order is such as to produce evil? And how great that evil is I need not insist. For it has been presupposed in everything that has been said to-night. If it were a satisfactory world you wouldn't all be wanting to alter it. Still, you may say--people always do--'if there is evil there is also good.' But it is just the things people call good, even more than those they admit to be evil, that make me despair of the world. How anyone with self-respect can accept, and accept thankfully, the sort of things people do accept is to me a standing mystery. It is surely the greatest triumph achieved by the Power that made the universe that every week there gather into the churches congregations of victims to recite their gratitude for 'their creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.' The blessings! What are they? Money? Success? Reputation? I don't profess, myself, to be anything better than a man of the world; but that those things should be valued as they are by men of the world is a thing that passes my understanding. 'Well, but,' says the moralist, 'there's always duty and work.' But what is the value of work if there's nothing worth working for? 'Ah, but,' says the poet, 'there's beauty and love.' But the beauty and love he seeks is something he never finds. What he grasps is the shadow, not the thing. And even the shadow flits past and eludes him on the stream of time. "And just there is the final demonstration of the malignity of the scheme of things. Time itself works against us. The moments that are evil it eternalizes; the moments that might be good it hurries to annihilation. All that is most precious is most precarious. Vainly do we cry to the moment: 'Verweile doch, du bist so schön!' Only the heavy hours are heavy-footed. The winged Psyche, even at the moment of birth, is sick with the pangs of dissolution. "These, surely, are facts, not imaginations. Why, then, is it that men refuse to look them in the face? Or, if they do, turn at once away to construct some other kind of world? For that is the most extraordinary thing of all, that men invent systems, and that those systems are optimistic. It is as though they said: 'Things must be good. But as they obviously are not good, they must really be other than they are.' And hence these extraordinary doctrines, so pitiful, so pathetic, so absurd, of the eternal good God who made this bad world, of the Absolute whose only manifestation is the Relative, of the Real which has so much less reality than the Phenomenal. Or, if all that be rejected, we transfer our heaven from eternity to time, and project into the future the perfection we miss in the present or in the past. 'True,' we say, 'a bad world! but then how good it will be!' And with that illusion generation after generation take up their burden and march, because beyond the wilderness there must be a Promised Land into which some day some creatures unknown will enter. As though the evil of the past could be redeemed by any achievement of the future, or the perfection of one make up for the irremediable failure of another! "Such ideas have only to be stated for their absurdity to be palpable. Yet none the less they hold men. Why? I cannot tell. I only know that they do not and cannot hold me; that I look like a stranger from another world upon the business of this one; that I am among you, but not of you; that your motives and aims to me are utterly unintelligible; that you can give no account of them to which I can attach any sense; that I have no clue to the enigma you seem so lightly to solve by your religion, your philosophy, your science; that your hopes are not mine, your ambitions not mine, your principles not mine; that I am shipwrecked, and see around me none but are shipwrecked too; yet, that these, as they cling to their spars, call them good ships and true, speak bravely of the harbour to which they are prosperously sailing, and even as they are engulfed, with their last breath, cry, 'lo, we are arrived, and our friends are waiting on the quay!' Who, under these circumstances is mad? Is it I? Is it you? I can only drift and wait. It may be that beyond these waters there is a harbour and a shore. But I cannot steer for it, for I have no rudder, no compass, no chart. You say you have. Go on, then, but do not call to me. I must sink or swim alone. And the best for which I can hope is speedily to be lost in the silent gulf of oblivion." OFTEN as I had heard Audubon express these sentiments before, I had never known him to reveal so freely and so passionately the innermost bitterness of his soul. There was, no doubt, something in the circumstances of the time and place that prompted him to this personal note. For it was now the darkest and stillest hour of the night; and we sat in the dim starlight, hardly seeing one another, so that it seemed possible to say, as behind a veil, things that otherwise it would have been natural to suppress. A long silence followed Audubon's last words. They went home, I dare say to many of us more than we should have cared to confess. And I felt some difficulty whom to choose of the few who had not yet spoken, so as to avoid, as far as possible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selected Coryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hoping he might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit into which we had slipped. He responded from the darkness, with the hesitation and incoherence which, in him, I have always found so charming. "I don't know," he began, "of course--well, yes, it may be all very bad--at least for some people. But I don't believe it is. And I doubt whether Audubon really--well, I oughtn't to say that, I suppose. But anyhow, I'm sure most people don't agree with him. At any rate, for my part, I find life extraordinarily good, just as it is, not mine only, I mean, but everybody's; well, except Audubon's, I suppose I ought to say, and even he, perhaps finds it rather good to be able to find it so bad. But I'm not going to argue with him, because I know it's no use. Its all the other people I want to quarrel with--except Ellis, who has I believe some idea of the things that really count. But I don't think Allison has, or Wilson, or most of the people who talk about progress. Because, if you project, so to speak, all your goods into the future, that shows that you don't appreciate those that belong to life just as it is and wherever it is. And there must, I am sure, be something wrong about a view that makes the past and the present merely a means to the future. It's as though one were to take a bottle and turn it upside down, emptying the wine out without noticing it; and then plan how tremendously one will improve the shape of the bottle. Well, I'm not interested in the shape of bottles. And I am interested in wine. And--which is the point--I know that the wine is always there. It was there in the past, it's here in the present, and it will be there in the future; yes, in spite of you all!" He flung this out with a kind of defiance that made us laugh. Whereupon he paused, as if he had done something indiscreet, and then after looking in vain for a bridge to take him across to his next starting-place, decided, as it seemed, to jump, and went on as follows: "There's Wilson, for instance, tells us that the new generation have no use for--I don't know that he used that dreadful phrase, but that's what he meant--that they have 'no use for' the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Middle Ages, or the eighteenth century, or anything but themselves. Well, I can only say I'm very sorry for them, and very glad I'm not one of them. Why, just think of the extraordinary obliquity, or rather blindness of it! Because you don't agree with Plato, or Marcus Aurelius, or Saint Francis, you think they're only fit for the ash-heap. You might as well say you wouldn't drink any wine except what was made to-day! The literature and art of the past can never be dead. It's the flask where the geni of life is imprisoned; you've only to open it and the life is yours. And what life! That it's different from ours is just its merit. I don't mean that it's necessarily better; but it preserves for us the things we have dropped out. Because we, no more than the men of the past, exhaust all the possibilities. The whole wonderful drama of life is unfolded in time, and we of this century are only one scene of it; not the most passionate either or the most absorbing. As actors, of course, we're concerned only with this scene. But the curious thing is, we're spectators, too, or can be if we like. And from the spectator's point of view, many of the episodes in the past are much more interesting, if not more important, than those of the present. I mean, it seems to me so stupid--I oughtn't to say stupid, I suppose, because of course you aren't exactly----" Whereat we laughed again, and he pulled himself up. "What I mean is, that to take the philosophy or the religion of the past and put it into your laboratory and test it for truth, and throw it away if it doesn't answer the test, is to misconceive the whole value and meaning of it. The real question is, What extraordinary, fascinating, tragic or comic life went to produce this precious specimen? What new revelation does it give of the possibilities of the world? That's how you look at it, if you have the sense of life. You feel after life everywhere. You love it when you touch it. You ask it no questions about being good or bad. It just is, and you are akin to it. Fancy, for instance, a man being able to walk through the British Museum and pass the frieze of the Parthenon, and say he has no use for it! And why? Because, I suppose, we don't dress like that now, and can't ride horses bareback. Well, so much the worse for us! But just think. There shrieking from the wall--no, I ought to say singing with the voice of angels--is the spirit of life in its loveliest, strongest, divinest incarnation, saying 'love me, understand me, be like me!' And the new generation passes by with its nose in the air sniffing, 'No! You're played out! You didn't know science. And you didn't produce four children a-piece, as we mean to. And your education was rhetorical, and your philosophy absurd, and your vices--oh, unmentionable! No, no, young men! Not for us, thank you!' And so they stalk on, don't you see them, with their rational costume, and their rational minds, and their hard little hearts, and the empty place where their imagination ought to be! Dreadful, dreadful! Or perhaps they go, say, to Assisi, and Saint Francis comes to talk to them. And 'Look,' he says, 'what a beautiful world, if you'd only get rid of your encumbrances! Money, houses, clothes, food, it's all so much obstruction! Come and see the real thing; come and live with the life of the soul; burn like a flame, blossom like a flower, flow like a mountain stream!' 'My dear sir,' they reply, 'you're unclean, impudent and ignorant! Moreover you're encouraging mendicancy and superstition. Not to-day, thank you!' And off they go to the Charity Organisation Committee. It's--it's----" He pulled himself up again, and then went on more quietly. "Well, one oughtn't to get angry, and I dare say I'm misrepresenting everybody. Besides, I haven't said exactly what I wanted to say. I wanted to say--what was it? Oh, yes! that this kind of attitude is bound up with the idea of progress. It comes of taking all the value out of the past and present, in order to put it into the future. And then you _don't_ put it there! You can't! It evaporates somehow, in the process. Where is it then? Well, I believe it's always there, in life, and in every kind of life. It's there all the time, in all the things you condemn. Of course the things really are bad that you say are bad. But they're so good as well! I mean--well, the other day I read one of those dreadful articles--at least, of course they're very useful I suppose--about the condition of the agricultural labourer. Well, then I took a ride in the country, and saw it all in its setting and complete, with everything the article had left out; and it wasn't so bad after all. I don't mean to say it was all good either, but it was just wonderful. There were great horses with shaggy fetlocks resting in green fields, and cattle wading in shallow fords, and streams fringed with willows, and little cheeping birds among the reeds, and larks and cuckoos and thrushes. And there were orchards white with blossom, and little gardens in the sun, and shadows of clouds brushing over the plain. And the much-discussed labourer was in the midst of all this. And he really wasn't an incarnate grievance! He was thinking about his horses, or his bread and cheese, or his children squalling in the road, or his pig and his cocks and hens. Of course I don't suppose he knew how beautiful everything was; but I'm sure he had a sort of comfortable feeling of being a part of it all, of being somehow all right. And he wasn't worrying about his condition, as you all worry for him. I don't mean you aren't right to worry, in a way; except that no one ought to worry. But you oughtn't to suppose it's all a dreadful and intolerable thing, just because you can imagine something better. That, of course, is only one case; but I believe it's the same everywhere; yes, even in the big cities, which, to my taste, look from outside much more repulsive and terrible. There's a quality in the inevitable facts of life, in making one's living, and marrying and producing children, in the ending of one and the beginning of another day, in the uncertainties and fears and hopes, in the tragedies as well as the comedies, something that arrests and interests and absorbs, even if it doesn't delight. I'm not saying people are happy; sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. But anyhow they are interested. And life itself is the interest. And that interest is perennial, and of all ages and all classes. And if you leave it out you leave out the only thing that counts. That's why ideals are so empty; just because, I mean, they don't exist. And I assure you--now I'm going to confess--that often, when I come away from some meeting or from reading some dreadful article on social reform, I feel as if I could embrace everything and everyone I come across, simply for being so good as to exist--the 'bus-drivers, the cabmen, the shop-keepers, the slum-landlords, the slum-victims, the prostitutes, the thieves. There they are, anyhow, in their extraordinary setting, floating on the great river of life, that was and is and will be, itself its own justification, through whatever country it may flow. And if you don't realize that--if you have a whole community that doesn't realize it--then, however happy and comfortable and equitable and all the rest of it you make your society, you haven't really done much for them. Their last state may even be worse than the first, because they will have lost the natural instinctive acceptance of life, without learning how to accept it on the higher plane. "And that is why--now comes what I really do care about, and what I've been wanting to say--that is why there is nothing so important for the future or the present of the world as poetry. Allison, for instance, and Wilson would be different men if only they would read my works! I'm not sure even if I may say so, that Remenham himself wouldn't be the better." Remenham, however, smilingly indicated that he had read them. Whereat Coryat rather comically remarked, "Oh, well! Yes! Perhaps then my poetry isn't quite good enough. But there's Shakespeare, and Milton, and--I don't care who it is, so long as it has the essential of all great poetry, and that is to make you feel the worth of things. I don't mean by that the happiness, but just the extraordinary value, of which all these unsolved questions about Good and Evil are themselves part. No one, I am sure, ever laid down a great tragedy--take the most terrible of all, take 'Lear'--without an overwhelming sense of the value of life; life as it is, life at its most pitiless and cruel, with all its iniquities, suffering, perplexity; without feeling he would far rather have lived and had all that than not have lived at all. But tragedy is an extreme case. In every simpler and more common case the poet does the same thing for us. He shows us that the lives he touches have worth, worth of pleasure, of humour, of patience, of wisdom painfully acquired, of endurance, of hope, even I will say of failure and despair. He doesn't blink anything, he looks straight at it all, but he sees it in the true perspective, under a white light, and seeing all the Evil says nevertheless with God, 'Behold, it is very good.' You see," he added, with his charming smile, turning to Audubon, "I agree with God, not with you. And perhaps if you were to read poetry ... but, you know, you must not only read it; you've got to feel it." "Ah," said Audubon, "but that I'm afraid is the difficulty." "I suppose it is. Well--I don't know that I can say any more." And without further ado he dropped back into his seat. SITTING next to Coryat was a man who had not for a long time been present at our meetings. His name was Harington. He was a wealthy man, the head of a very ancient family; and at one time had taken a prominent part in politics. But, of late, he had resided mainly in Italy devoting himself to study and to the collection of works of art. I did not know what his opinions were, for it so happened that I had never heard him speak or had any talk with him. I had no idea, therefore, when I called upon him, what he would be likely to say, and I waited with a good deal of curiosity as he stood a few moments silent. It was now beginning to get light, and I could see his face, which was unusually handsome and distinguished. He had indeed the air of a seventeenth-century nobleman, and might, except for the costume, have stepped out of a canvas of Van Dyck. Presently he spoke in a rich mellow voice and with a gravity that harmonized with his bearing. "Let me begin with a confession, perhaps I ought even to say an apology. To be among you again after so many years is a privilege; but it is one which brings with it elements of embarrassment. I have lived so long in a foreign land that I feel myself an alien here. I hear voices familiar of old, but I have forgotten their language; I see forms once well known, but the atmosphere in which they move seems strange. I am fresh from Italy; and England comes upon me with a shock. Even her physical aspect I see as I never saw it before. I find it lovely, with a loveliness peculiar and unique. But I miss something to which I have become accustomed in the south; I miss light, form, greatness, and breadth. Instead, there is grey or golden haze, blurred outlines, tender skies, lush luxurious greenery. Italy rings like metal; England is a muffled drum. The one has the ardour of Beauty; the other the charm of the Picturesque. I dwell upon this because I seem to see--perhaps I am fanciful--a kindred distinction between the north and the south in quality of mind. The Greek intelligence, and the Italian, is pitiless, searching, white as the Mediterranean sunshine; the English and German is kindly, discreet, amiably and tenderly confused. The one blazes naked in a brazen sky; the other is tempered by vapours of sentiment. The English, in particular, I think, seldom make a serious attempt to face the truth. Their prejudices and ideals shut them in, like their green hedges; and they live, even intellectually, in a country of little fields. I do not deny that this is soothing and restful; but I feel it--shall I confess--intolerably cooping. I long for the searching light, the wide prospect; for the vision of things as they really are. I have consorted too long with Aristotle and Machiavelli to find myself at home in the country of the Anglican Church and of Herbert Spencer." Here he paused, and seemed to hesitate, while we wondered what he could be leading up to. Then, resuming, "This may seem," he went on, "a long introduction; but it is not irrelevant; though I feel some hesitation in applying it. But, if the last speaker will permit me to take my text from him, I would ask him, is it not a curiously indiscriminate procedure to affirm indifferently value in all life? A poet surely--and Coryat's practice, if he will allow me to say so, is sounder than his theory--a poet seeks to render, wherever he can find it, the exquisite, the choice, the distinguished and the rare. Not life, but beauty is his quest. He does not reproduce Nature, he imposes upon her a standard. And so it is with every art, including the art of life itself. Life as such is neither good nor bad, and, Audubon's undistinguishing censure is surely as much out of place as Coryat's undistinguishing approval. Life is raw material for the artist, whether he be the private man carrying out his own destiny, or the statesman shaping that of a nation. The end of the artist in either case is the good life; and on his own conception of that will depend the value of his work. "I recall to your minds these obvious facts, at the risk of being tedious, because to-night, seeing the turn that our discussion has taken, we must regard ourselves as statesmen, or as would-be statesmen. And I, in that capacity, finding myself in disagreement with everybody, except perhaps Cantilupe, and asking myself the reason why, can only conclude that I have a different notion of the end to be pursued, and of the means whereby it can be attained. All of you, I think, except Cantilupe, have assumed that the good life, whatever it may be, can be attained by everybody; and that society should be arranged so as to secure that result. That is, in fact, the democratic postulate, which is now so generally accepted not only in this company but in the world at large. But it is that postulate that I dispute. I hold that the good life must either be the privilege of a few, or not exist at all. The good life in my view, is the life of a gentleman. That word, I know, has been degraded; and there is no more ominous sign of the degradation of the English people. But I use it in its true and noble sense. I mean by a gentleman a man of responsibility; one who because he enjoys privileges recognizes duties; a landed proprietor who is also, and therefore, a soldier and a statesman; a man with a natural capacity and a hereditary tradition to rule; a member, in a word, of a governing aristocracy. Not that the good life consists in governing; but only a governing class and those who centre round them are capable of the good life. Nobility is a privilege of the nobleman, and nobility is essential to goodness. We are told indeed, that Good is to be found in virtue, in knowledge, in art, in love. I will not dispute it; but we must add that only a noble man can be virtuous greatly, know wisely, perceive and feel finely. And virtue that is mean, knowledge that is pedantic, art that is base, love that is sensual are not Goods at all. A noble man of necessity feels and expresses himself nobly. His speech is literature, his gesture art, his action drama, his affections music. About him centres all that is great in literature, science, art. Magnificent buildings, exquisite pictures, statues, poems, songs, crowd about his habitation and attend him from the cradle to the grave. His fine intelligence draws to itself those of like disposition. He seeks genius, but he shuns pedantry; for his knowledge is part of his life. All that is great he instinctively apprehends, because it is akin to himself. And only so can anything be truly apprehended. For every man and every class can only understand and practise the virtues appropriate to their occupations. A professor will never be a hero, however much he reads the classics. A shop-walker will never be a poet, however much he reads poetry. If you want virtue, in the ancient sense, the sense of honour, of courage, of self-reliance, of the instinct to command, you must have a class of gentlemen. Otherwise virtue will be at best a mere conception in the head, a figment of the brain, not a character and a force. Why is the teaching of the classics now discredited among you? Not because it is not as valuable as ever it was, but because there is no one left to understand its value. The tradesmen who govern you feel instinctively that it is not for them, and they are right. It is above and beyond them. But it was the natural food of gentlemen. And the example may serve to illustrate the general truth, that you cannot revolutionize classes and their relations without revolutionizing culture. It is idle to suppose you can communicate to a democracy the heritage of an aristocracy. You may give them books, show them pictures, offer them examples. In vain! The seed cannot grow in the new soil. The masses will never be educated in the sense that the classes were. You may rejoice in the fact, or you may regret it; but at least it should be recognized. For my own part I regret it, and I regret it because I conceive that the good life is the life of the gentleman. "From this it follows that my ideal of a polity is aristocratic. For a class of gentlemen presupposes classes of workers to support it. And these, from the ideal point of view, must be regarded as mere means. I do not say that that is just; I do not say it is what we should choose; but I am sure it is the law of the world in which we live. Through the whole realm of nature every kind exists only to be the means of supporting life in another. Everywhere the higher preys upon the lower; everywhere the Good is parasitic on the Bad. And as in nature, so in human society. Read history with an impartial mind, read it in the white light, and you will see that there has never been a great civilization that was not based upon iniquity. Those who have eyes to see have always admitted, and always will, that the greatest civilization of Europe was that of Greece. And of that civilization not merely an accompaniment but the essential condition was slavery. Take away that and you take away Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Plato. Dismiss Greece, if you like. Where then will you turn? To the Middle Ages? You encounter feudalism and serfdom. To the modern world? You run against wage-labour. Ah, but, you say, we look to the future. We shall abolish wage-labour, as we have abolished slavery. We shall have an equitable society in which everybody will do productive work, and nobody will live at the cost of others. I do not know whether you can do this; it is possible you may; but I ask you to count the cost. And first let me call your attention to what you have actually done during the course of the past century. You have deposed your aristocracy and set up in their place men who work for their living, instead of for the public good, merchants, bankers, shop-keepers, railway directors, brewers, company-promoters. Whether you are better and more justly governed I do not pause to enquire. You appear to be satisfied that you are. But what I see, returning to England only at rare intervals, and what you perhaps cannot so easily see, is that you are ruining all your standards. Dignity, manners, nobility, nay, common honesty itself, is rapidly disappearing from among you. Every time I return I find you more sordid, more petty, more insular, more ugly and unperceptive. For the higher things, the real goods, were supported and sustained among you by your class of gentlemen, while they deserved the name. But by depriving them of power you have deprived them of responsibility, which is the salt of privilege; and they are rotting before your eyes, crumbling away and dropping into the ruck. Whether the general level of your civilization is rising I do not pronounce. I do not even think the question of importance; for any rise must be almost imperceptible. The salient fact is that the pinnacles are disappearing; that soon there will be nothing left that seeks the stars. Your middle classes have no doubt many virtues; they are, I will presume, sensible, capable, industrious, and respectable. But they have no notion of greatness, nay, they have an instinctive hatred of it. Whatever else they may have done, they have destroyed all nobility. In art, in literature, in drama, in the building of palaces or villas, _nihil tetigerunt quod non faedaverunt_. Such is the result of entrusting power to men who make their own living, instead of to a class set apart by hereditary privilege to govern and to realize the good life. But, you may still urge, this is only a temporary stage. We still have a parasitic class, the class of capitalists. It is only when we have got rid of them, that the real equality will begin, and with it will come all other excellence. Well, I think it possible that you might establish, I will not say absolute equality, but an equality far greater than the world has ever seen; that you might exact from everybody some kind of productive work, in return for the guarantee of a comfortable livelihood. But there is no presumption that in that way you will produce the nobility of character which I hold to be the only thing really good. For such nobility, as all history and experience clearly shows, if we will interrogate it honestly, is the product of a class-consciousness. Personal initiative, personal force, a freedom from sordid cares, a sense of hereditary obligation based on hereditary privilege, the consciousness of being set apart for high purposes, of being one's own master and the master of others, all that and much more goes to the building up of the gentleman; and all that is impossible in a socialistic state. In the eternal order of this inexorable world it is prescribed that greatness cannot grow except in the soil of iniquity, and that justice can produce nothing but mediocrity. That the masses should choose justice at the cost of greatness is intelligible, nay it is inevitable; and that choice is the inner meaning of democracy. But gentlemen should have had the insight to see, and the courage to affirm, that the price was too great to pay. They did not; and the penalty is that they are ceasing to exist. They have sacrificed themselves to the attempt to establish equity. But in that attempt I can take no interest. The society in which I believe is an aristocratic one. I hold, with Plato and Aristotle, that the masses ought to be treated as means, treated kindly, treated justly, so far as the polity permits, but treated as subordinate always to a higher end. But your feet are set on the other track. You are determined to abolish classes; to level down in order to level up; to destroy superiorities in order to raise the average. I do not say you will not succeed. But if you do, you will realize comfort at the expense of greatness, and your society will be one not of men but of ants and bees. "For Democracy--note it well--destroys greatness in every kind, of intellect, of perception, as well as of character. And especially it destroys art, that reflection of life without which we cannot be said to live. For the artist is the rarest, the most choice of men. His senses, his perception, his intelligence have a natural and inborn fineness and distinction. He belongs to a class, a very small, a very exclusive one. And he needs a class to appreciate and support him. No democracy has ever produced or understood art. The case of Athens is wrongly adduced; for Athens was an aristocracy under the influence of an aristocrat at the time the Parthenon was built. At all times Art has been fostered by patrons, never by the people. How should they foster it? Instinctively they hate it, as they hate all superiorities. It was not Florence but the Medici and the Pope that employed Michelangelo; not Milan but Ludovic the Moor that valued Leonardo. It was the English nobles that patronized Reynolds and Gainsborough; the darlings of our middle class are Herkomer and Collier. There have been poets, it is true, who have been born of the people and loved of them; and I do not despise poetry of that kind. But it is not the great thing. The great thing is Sophocles and Virgil, a fine culture wedded to a rich nature. And such a marriage is not accomplished in the fields or the market-place. The literature loved by democracy is a literature like themselves; not literature at all, but journalism, gross, shrieking, sensational, base. So with the drama, so with architecture, so with every art. Substitute the mass for the patron, and you eliminate taste. The artist perishes; the charlatan survives and flourishes. Only in science have you still an aristocracy. For the crowd sees that there is profit in science, and lets it go its way. Because of the accident that it can be applied, it may be disinterestedly pursued. And democracy hitherto, though impatiently, endures an ideal aim in the hope of degrading its achievement to its own uses. "Such being my view of democratic society I look naturally for elements that promise not to foster, but to counteract it. I look for the germs of a new aristocracy. They are hard to discover, and perhaps my desires override my judgment. But I fancy that it will be the very land that has suffered most acutely from the disease that will be the first to discover the remedy. I endorse Ellis's view of American civilization; but I allow myself to hope that the reaction is already beginning. I have met in Italy young Americans with a finer sense of beauty, distinction, and form, than I have been able to find among Englishmen, still less among Italians. And once there is cast into that fresh and unencumbered soil the seed of the ideal that made Greece great, who can prophecy into what forms of beauty and thought it may not flower? The Plutocracy of the West may yet be transformed into an Aristocracy; and Europe re-discover from America the secret of its past greatness. Such, at least, appears to me to be the best hope of the world; and to the realization of that hope I would have all men of culture all the world over unite their efforts. For the kingdom of this earth, like that of heaven, is taken by violence. We must work not with, but against tendencies, if we would realize anything great; and the men who are fit to rule must have the courage to assume power, if ever there is to be once more a civilization. Therefore it is that I, the last of an old aristocracy, look across the Atlantic for the first of the new. And beyond socialism, beyond anarchy, across that weltering sea, I strain my eyes to see, pearl-grey against the dawn, the new and stately citadel of Power. For Power is the centre of crystallization for all good; given that, you have morals, art, religion; without it, you have nothing but appetites and passions. Power then is the condition of life, even of the life of the mass, in any sense in which it is worth having. And in the interest of Democracy itself every good Democrat ought to pray for the advent of Aristocracy." ALL of our company had now spoken except two. One was the author, Vivian, and him I had decided to leave till the last. The other was John Woodman, a member of the Society of Friends, and one who was commonly regarded as a crank, because he lived on a farm in the country, worked with his hands, and refused to pay taxes on the ground that they went to maintain the army and navy. If Harington was handsome, Woodman was beautiful, but with beauty of expression rather than of features, I had always thought of him as a perfect example of that rare type, the genuine Christian. And since Harington had just revealed himself as a typical Pagan, I felt glad of the chance which brought the two men into such close juxtaposition. My only doubt was, whether Woodman would consent to speak. For on previous occasions I had known him to refuse; and he was the only one of us who had always been able to sustain his refusal, without unpleasantness, but without yielding. To-night, however, he rose in response to my appeal, and spoke as follows: "All the evening I have been wondering when the lot would fall on me, and whether, when it did, I should feel, as we Friends say, 'free' to answer the call. Now that it has come, I am, I think, free; but not, if you will pardon me, for a long or eloquent speech. What I have to say I shall say as simply and as briefly as I can; and you, I know, will listen with your accustomed tolerance, though I shall differ even more, if possible, from all the other speakers, than they have differed from one another. For you have all spoken from the point of view of the world. You have put forward proposals for changing society and making it better. But you have relied, for the most part, on external means to accomplish such changes. You have spoken of extending or limiting the powers of government, of socialism, of anarchy, of education, of selective breeding. But you have not spoken of the Spirit and the Life, or not in the sense in which I would wish to speak of them. MacCarthy, indeed, I remember, used the words 'the life of the spirit.' But I could not well understand what he meant, except that he hoped to attain it by violence; and in that way what I would seek and value cannot be furthered. Coryat, again, and Harington spoke of the good life. But Coryat seemed to think that any and all life is good. The line of division which I see everywhere he did not see at all, the line between the children of God and the children of this world. I could not say with him that there is a natural goodness in life as such; only that any honest occupation will be good if it be practised by a good man. It is not wealth that is needed, nor talents, nor intellect. These things are gifts that may be given or withheld. But the one thing needful is the spirit of God, which is given freely to the poor and the ignorant who seek it. Believing this, I cannot but disagree, also, with Harington. For the life of which he spoke is the life of this world. He praises power, and wisdom, and beauty, and the excellence of the body and the mind. In these things, he says, the good life consists. And since they are so rare and difficult to attain, and need for their fostering, natural aptitudes, and leisure and wealth and great position, he concludes that the good life is possible only for the few; and that to them the many should be ministers. And if the goods he speaks of be really such, he is right; for in the things of the world, what one takes, another must resign. If there are rulers there must be subjects; if there are rich, there must be poor; if there are idle men there must be drudges. But the real Good is not thus exclusive. It is open to all; and the more a man has of it the more he gives to others. That Good is the love of God, and through the love of God the love of man. These are old phrases, but their sense is not old; rather it is always new, for it is eternal. Now, as of old, in the midst of science, of business, of invention, of the multifarious confusion and din and hurry of the world, God may be directly perceived and known. But to know Him is to love Him, and to love Him is to love His creatures, and most all of our fellow-men, to whom we are nearest and most akin, and with and by whom we needs must live. And if that love were really spread abroad among us, the questions that have been discussed to-night would resolve themselves. For there would be a rule of life generally observed and followed; and under it the conditions that make the problems would disappear. Of such a rule, all men, dimly and at moments, are aware. By it they were warned that slavery was wrong. And had they but read it more truly, and followed it more faithfully, they would never have made war to abolish what they would never have wished to maintain. And the same rule it is that is warning us now that it is wrong to fight, wrong to heap up riches, wrong to live by the labour of others. As we come to heed the warning we shall cease to do these things. But to change institutions without changing hearts is idle. For it is but to change the subjects into the rulers, the poor into the rich, the drudges into the idle men. And, as a result, we should only have idle men more frivolous, rich men more hard, rulers more incompetent. It is not by violence or compulsion, open or disguised, that the kingdom of heaven comes. It is by simple service on the part of those that know the law, by their following the right in their own lives, and preaching rather by their conduct than by their words. "This would be a hard saying if we had to rely on ourselves. But we have God to rely on, who gives His help not according to the measure of our powers. A man cannot by taking thought add a cubit to his stature; he cannot increase the scope of his mind or the range of his senses; he cannot, by willing, make himself a philosopher, or a leader of men. But drawing on the source that is open to the poorest and the weakest he can become a good man; and then, whatever his powers, he will be using them for God and man. If men do that, each man for himself, by the help of God, all else will follow. So true is it that if ye seek first the kingdom of heaven all these things shall be added unto you. Yes, that is true. It is eternal truth. It does not change with the doctrines of Churches nor depend upon them. I would say even it does not depend on Christianity. For the words would be true, though there had never been a Christ to speak them. And the proof that they are true is simply the direct witness of consciousness. We perceive such truths as we perceive the sun. They carry with them their own certainty; and on that rests the certainty of God. Therein is the essence of all religion. I say it because I know. And the rest of you, so it seems to me, are guessing. Nor is it, as it might seem at first, a truth irrelevant to your discussion. For it teaches that all change must proceed from within outward. There is not, there never has been, a just polity, for there has never been one based on the love of God and man. All that you condemn--poverty, and wealth, idleness and excessive labour, squalor, disease, barren marriages, aggression and war, will continue in spite of all changes in form, until men will to get rid of them. And that they will not do till they have learnt to love God and man. Revolution will be vain, evolution will be vain, all uneasy turnings from side to side will be vain, until that change of heart be accomplished. And accomplished it will be in its own time. Everywhere I see it at work, in many ways, in the guise of many different opinions. I see it at work here to-night among those with whom I most disagree. I see it in the hope of Allison and Wilson, in the defiance of MacCarthy, in the doubt of Martin, and most of all in the despair of Audubon. For he is right to despair of the only life he knows, the life of the world whose fruits are dust and ashes. He drifts on a midnight ocean, unlighted by stars, and tossed by the winds of disappointment, sorrow, sickness, irreparable loss. Ah, but above him, if he but knew, as now in our eyes and ears, rises into a crystal sky the first lark of dawn. And the cuckoo sings, and the blackbird, do you not hear them? And the fountain rises ever in showers of silver sparks, up to the heaven it will not reach till fire has made it vapour. And so the whole creation aspires, out of the night of despair, into the cool freshness of dawn and on to the sun of noon. Let us be patient and follow each his path, waiting on the word of God till He be pleased to reveal it. For His way is not hard, it is joy and peace unutterable. And those who wait in faith He will bless with the knowledge of Himself." As he finished it was light, though the sun had not yet risen. The first birds were singing in the wood, and the fountain glistened and sang, and the plain lay before us like a bride waiting for the bridegroom. We were silent under the spell; and I scarcely know how long had passed before I had heart to call upon Vivian to conclude. I have heard Vivian called a philosopher, but the term is misleading. Those who know his writings--and they are too few--know that he concerned himself, directly or indirectly, with philosophic problems. But he never wrote philosophy; his methods were not those of logic; and his sympathies were with science and the arts. In the early age of Greece he might have been Empedocles or Heraclitus; he could never have been Spinoza or Kant. He sought to interpret life, but not merely in terms of the intellect. He needed to see and feel in order to think. And he expressed himself in a style too intellectual for lovers of poetry, too metaphorical for lovers of philosophy. His Public, therefore, though devoted, was limited; but we, in our society, always listened to him with an interest that was rather enhanced than diminished by an element of perplexity. I have found it hard to reproduce his manner, in which it was clear that he took a conscious and artistic pleasure. Still less can I give the impression of his lean and fine-cut face, and the distinction of his whole personality. He stood up straight and tall against the whitening sky, and delivered himself as follows: "Man is in the making; but henceforth he must make himself. To that point Nature has led him, out of the primeval slime. She has given him limbs, she has given him brain, she has given him the rudiment of a soul. Now it is for him to make or mar that splendid torso. Let him look no more to her for aid; for it is her will to create one who has the power to create himself. If he fail, she fails; back goes the metal to the pot; and the great process begins anew. If he succeeds, he succeeds alone. His fate is in his own hands. "Of that fate, did he but know it, brain is the lord, to fashion a palace fit for the soul to inhabit. Yet still, after centuries of stumbling, reason is no more than the furtive accomplice of habit and force. Force creates, habit perpetuates, reason the sycophant sanctions. And so he drifts, not up but down, and Nature watches in anguish, self-forbidden to intervene, unless it be to annihilate. If he is to drive, and drive straight, reason must seize the reins; and the art of her driving is the art of Politics. Of that art, the aim is perfection, the method selection. Science is its minister, ethics its lord. It spares no prejudice, respects no habit, honours no tradition. Institutions are stubble in the fire it kindles. The present and the past it throws without remorse into the jaws of the future. It is the angel with the flaming sword swift to dispossess the crone that sits on her money-bags at Westminster. "Or, shall I say, it is Hercules with the Augean stable to cleanse, of which every city is a stall, heaped with the dung of a century; with the Hydra to slay, whose hundred writhing heads of false belief, from old truth rotted into lies, spring inexhaustibly fecund in creeds, interests, institutions. Of which the chief is Property, most cruel and blind of all, who devours us, ere we know it, in the guise of Security and Peace, killing the bodies of some, the souls of most, and growing ever fresh from the root, in forms that but seem to be new, until the root itself be cut away by the sword of the spirit. What that sword shall be called, socialism, anarchy, what you will, is small matter, so but the hand that wields it be strong, the brain clear, the soul illumined, passionate and profound. But where shall the champion be found fit to wield that weapon? "He will not be found; he must be made. By Man Man must be sown. Once he might trust to Nature, while he was laid at her breast. But she has weaned him; and the promptings she no longer guides, he may not blindly trust for their issue. While she weeded, it was hers to plant; but she weeds no more. He of his own will uproots or spares; and of his own will he must sow, if he would not have his garden a wilderness. Even now precious plants perish before his eyes, even now weeds grow rank, while he watches in idle awe, and prates of his own impotence. He has given the reins to Desire, and she drives him back to the abyss. But harness her to the car, with reason for charioteer, and she will grow wings to waft him to his goal. That in him that he calls Love is but the dragon of the slime. Let him bury it in the grave of Self, and it will rise a Psyche, with wings too wide to shelter only the home. The Man that is to be comes at the call of the Man that is. Let him call then, soberly, not from the fumes of lust. For as is the call, so will be the answer. "But for what should he call? For Pagan? For Christian? For neither, and for both. Paganism speaks for the men in Man, Christianity for the Man in men. The fruit that was eaten in Paradise, sown in the soul of man, bore in Hellas its first and fairest harvest. There rose upon the world of mind the triple sun of the Ideal. Aphrodite, born of the foam, flowered on the azure main, Tritons in her train and Nereids, under the flush of dawn. Apollo, radiant in hoary dew, leapt from the eastern wave, flamed through the heaven, and cooled his hissing wheels in the vaporous west. Athene, sprung from the brain of God, armed with the spear of truth, moved grey-eyed over the earth probing the minds of men. Love, Beauty, Wisdom, behold the Pagan Trinity! Through whose grace only men are men, and fit to become Man. Therefore, the gods are eternal; not they die, but we, when we think them dead. And no man who does not know them, and knowing, worship and love, is able to be a member of the body of Man. Thus it is that the sign of a step forward is a look backward; and Greece stands eternally at the threshold of the new life. Forget her, and you sink back, if not to the brute, to the insect. Consider the ant, and beware of her! She is there for a warning. In universal Anthood there are no ants. From that fate may men save Man! "But the Pagan gods were pitiless; they preyed upon the weak. Their wisdom was rooted in folly, their beauty in squalor, their love in oppression. So fostered, those flowers decayed. And out of the rotting soil rose the strange new blossoms we call Faith, and Hope, and Charity. For Folly cried, 'I know not, but I believe'; Squalor, 'I am vile, but I hope'; and the oppressed, 'I am despised, but I love.' That was the Christian Trinity, the echo of man's frustration, as the other was the echo of his accomplishment. Yet both he needs. For because he grows, he is dogged by imperfection. His weakness is mocked by those shining forms on the mountain-top. But Faith, and Hope, and Charity walk beside him in the mire, to kindle, to comfort and to help. And of them justice is born, the plea of the Many against the Few, of the nation against the class, of mankind against the nation, of the future against the present. In Christianity men were born into Man. Yet in Him let not men die! For what profits justice unless it be the step to the throne of Olympus? What profit Faith and Hope without a goal? Charity without an object? Vain is the love of emmets, or of bees and coral-insects. For the worth of love is as the worth of the lover. It is only in the soil of Paganism that Christianity can come to maturity. And Faith, Hope, Charity, are but seeds of themselves till they fall into the womb of Wisdom, Beauty, and Love. Olympus lies before us, the snow-capped mountain. Let us climb it, together, if you will, not some on the corpses of the rest; but climb at least, not fester and swarm on rich meadows of equality. We are not for the valley, nor for the forests or the pastures. If we be brothers, yet we are brothers in a quest, needing our foremost to lead. Aphrodite, Apollo, Athene, are before us, not behind. Majestic forms, they gleam among the snows. March, then, men in Man! "But is it men who attain? Or Man? Or not even he, but God? We do not know. We know only the impulse and the call. The gleam on the snow, the upward path, the urgent stress within, that is our certainty, the rest is doubt. But doubt is a horizon, and on it hangs the star of hope. By that we live; and the science blinds, the renunciation maims, that would shut us off from those silver rays. Our eyes must open, as we march, to every signal from the height. And since the soul has indeed 'immortal longings in her' we may believe them prophetic of their fruition. For her claims are august as those of man, and appeal to the same witness. The witness of either is a dream; but such dreams come from the gate of horn. They are principles of life, and about them crystallizes the universe. For will is more than knowledge, since will creates what knowledge records. Science hangs in a void of nescience, a planet turning in the dark. But across that void Faith builds the road that leads to Olympus and the eternal gods." By the time he had finished speaking the sun had risen, and the glamour of dawn was passing into the light of common day. The birds sang loud, the fountain sparkled, and the trees rustled softly in the early breeze. Our party broke up quietly. Some went away to bed; others strolled down the gardens; and Audubon went off by appointment to bathe with my young nephew, as gay and happy, it would seem, as man could be. I was left to pace the terrace alone, watching the day grow brighter, and wondering at the divers fates of men. An early bell rang in the little church at the park-gate; a motor-car hooted along the highway. And I thought of Cantilupe and Harington, of Allison and Wilson, and beyond them of the vision of the dawn and the daybreak, of Woodman, the soul, and Vivian, the spirit. I paused for a last look down the line of bright statues that bordered the long walk below me. I fancied them stretching away to the foot of Olympus; and without elation or excitement, but with the calm of an assured hope, I prepared to begin the new day. _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ AFTER TWO THOUSAND YEARS PLATO AND HIS DIALOGUES THE MEANING OF GOOD JUSTICE AND LIBERTY A POLITICAL DIALOGUE RELIGION AND IMMORTALITY RELIGION: A CRITICISM AND A FORECAST THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE LETTERS FROM JOHN CHINAMAN APPEARANCES: BEING NOTES ON TRAVEL AN ESSAY ON THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA, CHINA AND JAPAN CONTRIBUTION OF ANCIENT GREECE TO MODERN LIFE THE INTERNATIONAL ANARCHY, 1904-1914 EVOLUTION IN RE-ACTION IN MODERN FRANCE 1789-1871 THE EUROPEAN ANARCHY WAR: ITS NATURE, CAUSE AND CUBE CAUSES OF INTERNATIONAL WAR THE CHOICE BEFORE US DOCUMENTS AND STATEMENTS RELATING TO PEACE PROPOSALS AND WAR AIMS, DECEMBER 1916-1918 ETC. OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR Plato and His Dialogues La. Cr. 8vo. 6s. 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38086	----	THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC BY HON. ERNESTO QUESADA Attorney-General of the Argentine Republic; Professor in the Universities of Buenos Ayres and La Plata Publication No. 636 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Reprinted from THE ANNALS, May, 1911 Price 25 cents This Reprint is made from the May, 1911, volume of THE ANNALS, the complete contents of which are INDIVIDUAL EFFORT IN TRADE EXPANSION. +Hon. Elihu Root+, United States Senator from New York. THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE AMERICAN STATES. +Hon. Henry White+, Chairman of the American Delegation to the Fourth International Conference of the American States. THE FOURTH PAN-AMERICAN CONFERENCE. +Paul S. Reinsch+, Delegate to the Fourth Pan-American Conference; Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin. THE MONROE DOCTRINE AT THE FOURTH PAN-AMERICAN CONFERENCE. +Hon. Alejandro Alvarez+, Of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Santiago, Chile. BANKING IN MEXICO. +Hon. Enrique Martinez-Sobral+, Chief of the Bureau of Credit and Commerce of the Mexican Ministry of Finance. THE WAY TO ATTAIN AND MAINTAIN MONETARY REFORM IN LATIN-AMERICA. +Charles A. Conant+, Former Commissioner on the Coinage of the Philippine Islands, New York. CURRENT MISCONCEPTIONS OF TRADE WITH LATIN-AMERICA. +Hugh MacNair Kahler+, Editor of "How to Export"; Vice-President, Latin-American Chamber of Commerce; Publisher of the Spanish periodicals, "America" and "Ingenieria." INVESTMENT OF AMERICAN CAPITAL IN LATIN-AMERICAN COUNTRIES. +Wilfred H. Schoff+, Secretary, Commercial Museum, Philadelphia. COMMERCE WITH SOUTH AMERICA. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION IN PERU. +Albert A. Giesecke, Ph.D.+, Rector of the University of Cuzco, Cuzco, Peru. THE MONETARY SYSTEM OF CHILE. +Dr. Guillermo Subercaseaux+, Professor of Political Economy, University of Chile. THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC. +Hon. Ernesto Quesada+, Attorney-General of the Argentine Republic; Professor in the Universities of Buenos Ayres and La Plata. COMMERCIAL RELATIONS OF CHILE. +Hon. Henry L. Janes+, Division of Latin-American Affairs, Department of State, Washington. CLOSER COMMERCIAL RELATIONS WITH LATIN-AMERICA. +Bernard N. Baker+, Baltimore, Md. IMMIGRATION--A CENTRAL AMERICAN PROBLEM. +Ernst B. Filsinger+, Consul of Costa Rica and Ecuador, St. Louis, Mo. Price $1.50 bound in cloth; $1.00 bound in paper. Postage free. THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC[1] BY THE HON. ERNESTO QUESADA, Attorney-General of the Argentine Republic; Professor in the Universities of Buenos Ayres and La Plata. To condense into a few pages several centuries of the history of a nation like the Argentine Republic, to give some idea of the nature of the forces that have determined the development of this country from the end of the sixteenth century, the period of its discovery, to this the second decade of the twentieth, when it is celebrating the first centennial of its independence, is a task at once delicate and arduous. For, aside from these natural difficulties, it will be necessary to avoid all details, to shun statistics, and even to lay aside historical evidence, in order to crystallize into seemingly dogmatic statements, the complicated social evolution of a people in process of transformation, a people still in a formative period. It is a venture bordering upon the impossible. A century after the commencement of the conquest of the American continent and after the scattering over the land of the invading race, at once warlike and religious, an expedition which was purely Andalusian discovered the River Plate in the southern extremity of the continent. Instead of penetrating to the south, the expedition fixed its gaze northward, searching for a route by which to renew relations with the rich district of the old empire of the Incas. This was in obedience to that thirst after wealth which characterized the taking possession of America. Two centuries later, these remote provinces had been converted into the very important viceroyship of the River Plate. In one direction it extended from the tropical viceroyship of Peru and the torrid lands of Portuguese Brazil, to Cape Horn, lashed by the raging Antarctic seas, and in the other direction it stretched from the chain of the Andes, which runs like a solid wall the length of one of its flanks, to the Atlantic Ocean, which bathes its extensive coasts. This enormous territory thus embraced every sort of climate, and was inhabited by a heterogeneous collection of aboriginal races. Its conquest and colonization had been effected upon two convergent lines, that by water, by the River Plate, that by land, from the north. This impressed upon the civilization of these regions different characteristics which must be defined since, even after a century of political independence, their mark is still stamped upon the ideals, aspirations and conduct of the inhabitants. The "Leyes de Indias,"[2] faithful reflections of the purposes of Spanish colonization in America, show how extraordinary was the importance of the native races, how relatively few were the Spanish conquerors and how closely the two races became mingled, through the régime of the _encomiendas_[3] the _mitas_[4] and the _yanaconazgos_.[5] The Spanish colonies were founded and developed in the midst of a mass of people, who, because of their enormous superiority in point of numbers, necessarily reacted in turn upon the small number of the invaders, either by interbreeding with the latter, or by the contact of daily life, or by their superior adaptability to their natural environment. The conquerors themselves presented different traits, according to the region of Spain from which they came, and naturally they sought to group and to settle themselves in obedience to the ethnic affinities of their origin. Biscayans, Basques, Castillians, Aragonese, Andalusians, etc., gave typical characteristics to every American region where they established themselves. They transplanted their social prejudices, their spirit of communal independence, their concentrated energy and their buoyant temperament. From this it resulted that in whatever corner of America a particular Spanish strain of blood was found, there were reflected the traits of the corresponding district of Spain. As the native races varied according to the region, from those of a peaceful and civilized character to those of an untamable and warlike nature, and even to ferocious savages, the Spanish settlements existed without any common plan. They made a republic with the tribes, and they were the beginning of a creole type which was quite distinct in each locality. In the viceroyship of Buenos Ayres the ethnic geography of the aborigines shows a kaleidoscopic variety of races. In the north and in the regions which formerly had been subject to the rule of the Incas, the population--both servient and dominant classes--was peaceful, attached to the soil, resigned and passive. In those regions lying between the two great rivers the population was of a gentle and peace-loving nature and, therefore, was easily molded by missionary civilization. Along the slopes of the Andes the people were daring, excitable and independent. The south or Patagonian extremity was overrun by brave and unconquerable tribes, closely related to that Araucanian race which the Spanish conquest never entirely succeeded in subduing. The Spanish settlements on the other hand presented different characteristics. In the north they came from Lima, and were Biscayan and Castillian, aristocratic, very proud of their ancestry, holding aloof, enriched by the mines of Potosi and the commerce of the fleet of Portobello. Southward were Andalusians and Spanish common folk, little given to titles and conventionalities. They were condemned to pursue the smuggler's trade, because the mother country, following an economic error of the time and perhaps owing to deficient geographic knowledge, permitted them only an overland commerce, by mule back, from the Panama fleet which unloaded its cargoes in Callao. Hence in the provinces of the north, called High Peru, and in the present provinces of Jujuy and Tucuman, the Spanish population held up Lima as their ideal, and exhibited both its vices and its virtues. Out of it was formed the aristocratic, commercial and luxurious city of Salta. On the other hand, in the river provinces, the existence of the cities was precarious and fraught with the dangers of a smuggling trade carried on with the Portuguese neighbors--the source of the centuries-old controversy of Sacramento colony. These settlements were not unacquainted with the fear of pirates, of daring navigators and of roving slave dealers, who on their arrival at the River Plate unloaded the "products of their country," with the toleration and secret complicity of the government officials and with the connivance of the inhabitants. These inhabitants were true outlaws. They scoffed at the administration and fiscal measures and trusted more to their fists than they feared being caught in the complicated meshes of the uneconomic laws. The interbreeding of these different classes of population resulted in creole types, characteristic of each region. In the central cities of the north, they were always aristocratic and devoted to learning, while in the vast stretches of country they lived the semi-feudal life of _encomenderos_. The interbreeding with the Indians formed an inferior class of half breed which approached the type of the mother more than that of the father and which was certainly not a robust or handsome race. In the river region, the population lived on a democratic plane of equality in the cities, while in the rural districts they became that creole type known as the _gaucho_.[6] Found amidst a scattered population and inheriting the far from sedentary habits of the Spanish mother race, the _gaucho_ preferred the free and roving existence of the pampas. He lived by the herds of semi-wild animals, which had multiplied amazingly since Mendoza's expedition had introduced the very limited stock, destined later to be converted into the stupendous riches of this country. In the central, more mountainous region also, the interbreeding of the races produced very definite results and the creole population of the rural districts acquired traits as though living closely associated with the _gauchos_ of the pampas. In the south the aboriginal races remained pure, except for the insignificant mixing which came from the Spanish captive women, victims of the attacks of the Tehuelches populations. Wherever the native population was dense and attached to the soil the creoles living in the country and about the cities show a closer affinity with it, than with the Spanish blood. They adopt native habits and conform to native peculiarities, even to the extent of adopting the melancholy rhythm of the music and songs, those unique _tristes_ which are heard even to-day in the Argentine provinces of the north, from Santiago del Estero to the Bolivian frontier. There the creole laborers of the land and the half breeds of the districts about the cities tenderly preserve the _quichua_, or native language of their ancestors, by intermixing it with the Spanish. The same close affinity with the native element is found in the river provinces, and especially in Corrientes, where in the rural and semi-rural districts the dregs of the missionary population have preserved as their most precious possession the _guarani_ dialect. But, where the native population was more scattered and nomadic, the creole population became transformed and converted into the _gaucho_ or cowboy of the pampas, a very handsome half breed, full of energy, of noble instincts, accustomed to the freest sort of life over boundless plains, where each one depended solely upon himself and recognized no superior. Here we have the explanation of the great hold which this type (_gaucho_) has upon the imagination. In spite of these differences, however, the colonial life was stamped with a certain uniformity which served as a background for these local peculiarities. Spanish-American society was zealously preserved from contact with other European nations. Only inhabitants of Spain were free to go and come, so that this triple characteristic--that they were Spanish, monarchical and orthodox Catholic--was the salient feature common to all South America. The person of the monarch and the supreme authority of the colonial office were very distant and the tribunals of the viceroys and governors holding actual sessions there upon the territory, were the real and tangible personifications of the monarchy. The Pope himself was also very distant and had given over the superintendence of ecclesiastical affairs to the crown, which had in turn confided it to the respective viceroys. The bishops and religious orders were, strictly speaking, the visible representatives of religion. In this way throne and altar came in touch with the colonial populations, who took heated sides in the formidable conflicts which used to arise between the representatives of each. But they retained respect for them; they recognized their high merits and prerogatives and obeyed them as representing that which could neither be questioned nor altered. Public officials of all grades were drafted from Spain and remained for definite periods. The laws forbade them to mix with the populations and they kept themselves aloof, with the ostensible purpose of assuring their complete impartiality. But the result was that they tried to take advantage of their period in office to swell their personal fortunes, without allowing themselves to be deterred by any scruples or drawing rein to their appetites. The priests even, both secular and those regularly ordained, allowed themselves to be carried away by that spirit of self-seeking which led them to look upon America as a mine to be exploited. Doubtless there were zealous officials both civil and religious who performed the best type of service. The Spaniards were established amidst a native population, who devoted themselves to commerce or to mining in the north, and to the raising of cattle and lesser trades in the river and central districts, and they always looked upon their residence in this part of American territory as a temporary sojourn, during which to acquire riches. The creoles, of every class, both of the city and of the country, perhaps because they seemed to be looked down upon by the Spaniards, were unconsciously trying to enlarge their hold upon affairs of all kinds. They felt themselves, as it were, rooted to the soil, and far from proceeding only from selfish motives of money making, they took an interest in local affairs, which, for them, were of greater importance than those of a crown, only vaguely known to them by report. The city creoles, thanks to an advanced communal spirit, aroused by the establishment of the _cabildos_ or Spanish town council, were diligently at work on their own municipal problems. They thus became accustomed to limit their horizon to the limits of their own city and of the immediately surrounding country district, because communication between the cities was slow, difficult and dangerous, a condition which resulted in their virtual isolation from each other. The city might almost be regarded as the center of their universe. From the rest of the world news arrived months and years later, tempered or misrepresented. It awakened not the faintest echo. It might as well have been the news of far away ages and peoples. The mass of the natives, with whose women the military and civil population cohabited, since relatively few Spanish women came to America, took no interest whatsoever in the affairs of a monarchy which was not that of their ancestors but of a race different from themselves. They showed, rather, such a passive indifference that each community seemed a world unto itself, occupied and pre-occupied only with its own matters. The religious and civil officials, in their turn, were soon contaminated by this environment. They gave to local affairs so excessive an importance that it also appeared to their eyes as if the boundary of the Indian city was the _ultima Thule_ of civilization. In the northern provinces, which had reached the final stage of perfection under the old Inca conquest, the native population preserved and protected its pre-Columbian traditions by the use of their dialect, the _quichua_ tongue. The régime of the _encomienda_, the _mitas_ and the _yanaconazgo_ had produced only a formal subjection of the natives. In the depths of their souls the natives preserved and fostered traditions of bygone centuries. In this way the creoles, the product of interbreeding, were recast into the dense mass of the Indian population and became more conversant with American traditions than Spanish. Amongst the missionary converts, the Jesuits had erected cities that flourished artificially under their care. They were inhabited only by Indian races, and the Jesuits zealously guarded them from contact with the Spaniards whom they removed far from their admirable theocratic empire as though they were the very incarnation of evil. An unreal civilization was thus created, governed patriarchially by the priests and without any vitality of its own. Hence, the expulsion of the priests by the _coup d' état_ of Charles III brought about the destruction of these populations, which had realized during the century of their existence, the ideal of the most exacting of Utopian civilization. But the results were not such as had been desired. These Indians, on being distributed over the colonies, did not coalesce with the rest of the inhabitants, but returned to the depths of barbarism or, as in the present province of Corrientes, constituted the mass of the population, an element indifferent to national interests just as the old missionaries had been to those of the crown and sensible only to the recollection of their ancient and traditional life, that is to say, to their own local affairs. In the central and river provinces, the marvelous increase of animals capable of domestication but still in a wild state brought about a profound transformation. The native tribes, sparser than in the north, without losing any of their savage customs, soon possessed themselves of the horse and overran the boundless pampas. The creoles of the country districts and the _gauchos_ in their turn vied for the possession of the horse. No longer able to remold their life to that of the savage tribes, they checked their bold and ferocious habits and became keen and cautious, forming a race of special type, midway between the Indian and the Spaniard. They were extreme individualists, for in the immense pampas, authority, both civil and religious could obtain but a weak hold. The _gaucho_ made so complete a face-about from his former self as to devote his life solely to cattle raising. He evolved a special fitness or adaptability to his new life and created the most curious types, from the _sumbon compadrito_ with his peculiar cloak and _chiripa_, who flashed his sarcastic jests with such grace and elegance, to the poet troubador and famous animal tracker who was but little less keen than the hound in scenting and following the trail of man or beast. As the _gauchos_ came in contact with not a few of the city population, upon whom they were dependent for obtaining the things they needed in exchange for pelts and the products of the country, they formed with such of the latter as came most closely in touch with them, a community of ideas and aims. Thus by busying themselves only with their own special lives, they became independent and without attachment for any but their respective municipal centers. Each region possessed its local feature, each was separated from the rest and all were but nominally linked and united with their remote and common monarch. In the River Plate region, leaving aside the factor of geographic interest, to which I have just made allusion, the racial history was limited to the Spanish population and its Creole interbreeding with the native races, because the negro population had no importance whatsoever, in this part of America. The quantity of negro slaves introduced by the "dealers" was reduced to a minimum, and even these, upon the breaking out of the war of independence, were killed off, for now that their masters were freeing them, they formed the great body of the troops. In this way they helped the American cause. The mulattoes, consequently, were also reduced in number. This process was carried to such a point that the singular scarcity of pure negroes or even of mulattoes was a real characteristic of this country. Foreign influence could only penetrate by way of the Atlantic, and even then only covertly, unless it were by crossing the rocky barrier of the Andes. The Portuguese influence was limited to the profitable commercial relations with the smugglers. That of other nations only made itself felt through the occasional visits of ships forced to take shelter in the La Plata from time to time, or dropping anchor upon various pretexts, but always with the intention of smuggling. This was an open secret to the then few inhabitants of Buenos Ayres, the possibilities of which as a port, although gainsayed by the crown, had been ordained by nature. When, during the last days of colonial domination, commerce was permitted to the port of Buenos Ayres, there was no longer time for foreign influence to penetrate to the heart of the country. The English invasions left a greater residue of influence through the distribution of the English prisoners, who in great part established homes in the midland regions to which they were sent. There, in the midst of the Spanish families, with whom they were left, they disseminated ideas of liberty and standards of independence, unknown among the rest of the population, the best classes of which in those days of unrest, were a turbulent and irrepressible element. The revolution of May, 1810, wrought a fundamental change in the social situation. Distinguished officers of the Napoleonic wars came to the country to offer their military services. English merchants, attracted by the reports of the English invasions of the Argentine Republic in 1806 and 1807, hurried over in increasing numbers. Soon they were influencing the society of Buenos Ayres which adopted London fashions, many of its customs, and became accustomed to the English character. Foreign commerce was concentrated in the hands of the English and many of these merchants finally married in the country. During the colonial epoch only books expurgated by the Inquisition had been admitted, but now the revolutionary movement unmuzzled these mysteries and flung wide the doors through which penetrated a flood of French and English works. The doctrines of the French revolution were at that time the passion of the majority of our public men, and its influence, even its Jacobin and terrorist phases, is traceable from the first instant. This is revealed in the "plan of government" of Moreno. On the other hand, the constitutional doctrines of the Anglo-Saxons were embraced only by the few. Dorrego went to the United States and there absorbed them. During the first decade after the revolution, the educational system scarcely advanced at all but followed closely to the traditional path of teaching taught by the University of Cordoba. The University of Buenos Ayres was founded in the second decade, and made an effort to reform public education. But the war of independence was not yet over and the internal situation of the country at the end of the anarchical dissolution which took place in 1820, was such that a multitude of affairs demanded attention, and as yet it was hardly possible, outside of the large cities, to turn to such questions of reform. The winning of independence was the cause of the sad dismemberment of the viceroyship of the River Plate and the statesmen of the period could not have prevented it. From what was once a single historic province there have gradually been detached the province of High Peru, to-day the Republic of Bolivia; the province of Paraguay, to-day the Republic of the same name; the eastern missions which now constitute the present Brazilian provinces of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catalina and Sao Paulo. The Banda Oriental has since become the Republic of Uruguay; the Falkland Islands were snatched by England; the territory about the Straits of Magellan was ceded later to Chile, under color of regulating the boundary line. The Argentine Republic, during the first century of its existence as an independent nation, far from acquiring a single square mile of territory, has continued to lose territory at every point of the compass. Her international policy, from that point of view, has been lamentable and the memory of it is still a bitter lesson. Within the enormous territorial expanse which now constitutes the Argentine Republic political integration was effected slowly. The different populations settled at intervals along the routes which connected Buenos Ayres with Lima on the one side, with the Andes on another and with Asuncion on still another. Each settlement was an oasis of Spanish population set in the midst of a savage country. In order to establish something approaching unity within each section, the people organized themselves after the pattern of the urban centers of Spain with their _Cabildo_ or town council as the communal authority, which controlled and regulated the extremes of opinion and conditions and brought the whole municipal life to a focus. Each settlement lived a life apart, separated from the others. In fact they were cast in the mold of the ancient Spanish village society, and the central authority only made itself felt at infrequent intervals. The inhabitants of each village thus developed an aptitude for municipal life and for self-government, and a concentration upon local interests which became the basis of their political development. They fostered a local character which was the very foundation and essence of their later federal tendency. To the interests and pretensions of the crown as formulated by the "Council of the Indies," they preferred the authority of the viceroy and of the intendants, but their main preference was the municipality itself, whose frank and loyal mouthpiece was the traditional Cabildo. For this reason, when the movement for independence commenced, each village and each city was led by its own Cabildo, and it was the Cabildo which gave vigor and form to the revolution. Around the Cabildo the inhabitants of the vicinity grouped themselves in the different organic or anarchic revolts which followed. It was for this reason, too, since the present republic possessed no basis of political division, that each one of the cities formed a nucleus in its respective province of the same name, and that the whole territory was subdivided according to the radius of authority exercised by the principal cities of colonial times, without any account being taken of economic autonomy or of demography. Federal sentiment made its appearance profoundly rooted in tradition and blood, and the tendency towards centralization only emanated from certain groups of dreamers at the metropolis who with their eyes closed to the past believed along with such deluded men as Rivadavia that, by destroying the traditional Cabildo, they would wipe the state clean of such precedents, just as the Jacobins of the French Revolution did with the institutions of the ancient régime. Argentine society issued from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries already shaped toward local self-government and local loyalty. It already appeared a federation in fact which was easily transformed into a federation in law, because the federal idea was at bottom the very heart and soul of things. The development of our colonization also indicated that of our civilization. As we approach the north, the brilliant center of civilization of Lima society becomes more aristocratic, infatuated with its learning, luxurious and fastidious. The youth of the Plate Valley were attracted to the University of Chuquisaca, where, amidst its cloisters, they acquired a grave and disputacious manner. Later the University of Cordoba, like a pale reflection of the former, drew upon a part of these youths and, if they left its lecture halls also practiced in the art of sophistry, they did not imbibe in return that atmosphere of aristocratic aloofness, pomp and presumption. Buenos Ayres and the river country were without a university and without an aristocracy. At the periodic auctions of titles of nobility, the receipts of which were added to the colonial contributions and were intended to meet a certain deficit in the Spanish treasury, not a purchaser appeared and there was not a single herder of the pampas nor a single rich smuggler who would bid. The titles which were thus put up to sale remained unpurchased, for the people held them in no esteem. With no resources other than its commerce and industry which were both of a contraband nature, Buenos Ayres developed more rapidly than other cities and with a greater freedom from "red tape" and formalism, in spite of its being the seat of the general government, with its Spanish officials, its civil, military and religious authorities and an administrative machinery identical with that of the other capitals of the viceroyship. For here there was not the same atmosphere, the life was simple and democratic, the officials had no stage from which to display their importance, and within the narrow walls of the modest home of the government, the few inhabitants of this metropolis used to mingle in its marshy, unpaved streets, or in their unpretentious and simple adobe houses. They treated each other with a certain equality, which was due precisely to those conditions of intense individualism developed of necessity in a cattle raising community. In the northern and central districts society was cast in the Peruvian mold, a reproduction of Spanish civilization, aristocrats adopting primogeniture and, in modified form, the feudal régime of the _encomenderos_. In the river and mountain region, the urban was a reflection of the rural population, independent, haughty, brave, accustomed to making forays upon horseback over the endless pampas, trusting to its own decision and in the end to the knife, which was a symbol of the worship of personal courage, inherited from Spanish ancestors who had developed it during the centuries of the struggle against the Moors. In the river district the commerce, which in the main was carried on illegally by doggedly persevering merchants who plied their trade fearlessly with pirates and foreign smugglers, caused a certain spirit of self-confidence to grow. This spirit made itself felt in the popular movement of the reconquest of 1806, and in the impulse of the revolution of May, 1810. From Buenos Ayres started the movement for independence, and the Cabildos of the interior cities fell in with the movement with more or less alacrity. Hence the further inland these cities were, the less enthusiastic. The Paraguayan region isolated itself and followed the conservative policy of the Cabildo of Asuncion. The province of High Peru, in spite of its efforts, was the last to revolt and never followed with any ardor the movement initiated by the metropolis. Indeed, the revolution of May, which had spread to the banks of the Paraguay river and over the plateau of Bolivia, might not, perhaps, have succeeded in so closely cementing, in spite of the righteousness of its cause, the independence proclaimed in Tucuman in 1816, had not the inspiration of San Martin added that powerful impulse which flung armies across the Andes, liberated Chile from Spanish dominion and brought independence to Peru. He might have pursued this glorious course toward the independence of the whole continent, if the colossal egotism of Bolivar in that tragic conference of Guayaquil had not placed our national hero in the dilemma of either eliminating himself and leaving his selfish rival to wear the laurels planted and nurtured by Argentine blood or of sacrificing the fruits of the campaign for independence, by not being able to obtain from him the military assistance he was in need of. He placed his country before his own glory and yielded the field to one to whom personal renown was preferable to all else. For the social evolution of Argentine the sacrifice of San Martin was of incalculable importance. Upon eliminating himself, he left to his rival the army which he had himself led until then and this country was deprived of its one organizing force. Disintegrating tendencies manifested themselves without counter-check. In the second decade of the century, various little republics were defiantly established in the interior. They were constructed upon the plan of the old settlements which had risen to something greater. They were governed by Cabildos, and these in turn obeyed the local leader, who was raised to dictatorship over the districts. Each province was sufficient unto itself. It barely communicated with the others and retrograded towards barbarism without regularly organized government or other will than that of its respective tyrant and the free-lances who were his immediate followers. Schools closed; families took refuge within the walls of their dwellings; terror pervaded; life was everywhere insecure; those who could, emigrated, leaving behind them on the land the sick, the women and the children. Men were bedfellows in misery; there was no industry, no commerce; sin flourished and virtue was trampled under foot. These thirty years of bloody and merciless civil strife made prominent the idea of the rule of force. People were taken from peaceful work, efficient teaching languished, every social bond was weakened and in the end a society evolved in which not education, ancestry or fortune exercised the least influence, but audacity, the impulse of the local leader, the mob instincts of the city population and of the rural _gaucho_. The local leaders and their followers alone wielded any real power. They dominated without possibility of counter-check and an entire generation tolerated this condition during that terrible period. The local leadership, like the legendary tyranny of ancient Rome, demolished everything which tried to rise above the obedient, passive, resigned and common level. It brutally choked it or forced it to emigrate, and Argentine society had to develop in these anaemic surroundings. There was no possibility of foreign immigration, or of establishing industry and commerce. The idea of nationality was observed by party passion and the factions were ready to launch out upon some fight upon the slightest pretext. Social classes were divided into irreconcilable parties, the reds or federalists, and the blues or centralists, those who believed in the local leader, and those who detested him. The former were called federalists, because they believed that each locality ought to adopt the kind of government which best suited it; the latter were called the centralists, because in their weakness they leaned upon the influence of the national government in order to give to the whole country a common unified administration of which the local government would be the agent. Rosas met this situation and put an end to it. After the dismemberment of the ephemeral republic of 1825, and the national convention, and following upon the Brazilian war, the centralist party, deceived in its principles and in its men, closed its doors to counsel and committed the error of executing Dorrego at Navarro. The mass of the rural population resisted the straight jacket proposed by the doctrinaires of the centralist party and in this they showed themselves unrelenting. Then Rosas came into power in the government of Buenos Ayres and also secured control of the situation in the provinces. He succeeded in bringing about the organization of each province with a view to forming the Argentine Confederation. He was entrusted by the federation with the management of foreign relations. He left the interior provinces to organize themselves after the pattern of the government of Buenos Ayres. Doubtless, during the long quarter of a century while he was dictator, real security and peace were never enjoyed, for the centralist party was ambitious, arrogant and factious, plotting within itself, and when it was not exciting to rebellion, or leading an invasion it was provoking foreign intervention. Finally the terrible and merciless war between the centralists and the federalists developed a state of terror which culminated in the excesses of the year 1840. The dictator treated his adversaries without mercy and they in their turn had none for him. To be strictly truthful, neither party can be absolved from wicked and culpable action. Nor can I shut my eyes to the fact that the great power bred pride, and that pride bred hatred of the subject class. But this prolonged dictatorship saved the country from the anarchy of the petty republics of 1820, it solidified the country into a sovereign entity and it gave to the different parts the cohesion of a nation capable of victoriously resisting the French and Anglo-French interventions. This much is owed definitely to the centralist party, who in this way solved the difficulty traditional to our national organization and so guided along the right road the severest crisis of Argentine history, not only from a political but also from a sociological point of view. The chasm that separated the social classes of the capital city from those of the provincial districts was bridged; the prejudices of blood, of caste and fortune were destroyed and there was established complete equality, where every man was the heir of his own labor and depended only upon his own hands. After the battle of Caseros, in 1852, the government which had so used and abused oppression and patronage fell, leaving the country, however, in such a condition of stability and internal organization that the different provinces grouped themselves logically under the Convention of San Nicolas. The Argentine Federation was maintained and Urquiza was placed at the head of the government. Despite the local character of the revolution of Buenos Ayres, on the eleventh of September the country at large adopted the fundamental constitution of 1853, at the Congress of Santa Fé. The government of the recalcitrant province of Paraná realized but slowly the new organization, with which it finally incorporated itself, while the nation continued developing in the path established by its constitution. Without losing sight, therefore, of the bitter lessons of this phase of our evolution, it is but fair to show an appreciation of its benefits. The characteristic of this intermediate epoch is the very slight introduction of the foreign element. To-day this element is scattered over the land, but at that time such as were firmly rooted in the country, principally in Buenos Ayres, were very few. Of these the English formed the greater part, for the infusion of German blood, which resulted from the distribution of prisoners taken from the German regiments at Ituzaingo, though they included some estimable families constituted a very subordinate factor. English commerce was always respected and in spite of the bitterness produced by the naval interventions, it was left to develop peacefully. But as it did not increase in volume and was never reinforced by that of other nations, it did not become great. The path of social evolution was in the direction of the commingling of the city and rural population, and of the participation of the _gauchos_ in public life, either by forming a large and worthy element in the army or by becoming the active nucleus of the popular civic movements. The democratization of the country was complete, for in general, the upper classes of society in the cities affiliated themselves with the centralist party, while the populace supported the federal party. Hence the bloody triumph of the latter brought about its complete predominance and from this period the social and political problems remained more enduring in nature, while differences of blood and tradition were put aside. Since the constitution of 1853, the social evolution of Argentine has been guided and carried forward by two factors, immigration and foreign capital. Under their influence, the characteristics of the prior period were gradually modified to a certain extent. The administration of Mitre struggled against the difficulties of inadequate means of communication between the distant cities and against traditional custom of guerilla warfare. Force was employed in order to remain master of the field and to break up the resistance which the men of the interior set up against the prominence of those of Buenos Ayres, and a cruel war against Paraguay was undertaken. The ability and consistency of this Argentine statesman was great. When the passions of his contemporaries had been assuaged, he became the "grand old man" of the nation, growing in stature as posterity forms its judgment on his policy. That administration, like the following one of Sarmiento, had to cope with two factors, the great uninhabited tracts of land and the survival of ancient custom. On the one hand the different Argentine regions lived in isolation from one another, communication between them being difficult; on the other hand there still survived the custom of local chieftainship and of the constant and armed movements of different political factions, who would set out upon guerilla forays on any pretext whatsoever, raising their banners on high as though their behavior was patriotic and praiseworthy, whereas it was but the vicious habit of a barbaric and backward age. The administration of Avellaneda continued the task of combating such tendencies by the establishment of the telegraph which would unite all these centers to each other; by the construction of railroads to facilitate communication; and by the encouragement of European immigration for purposes of settlement and in order to mix other races with that of Argentine and so modify its political idiosyncracies by more conservative standards and interests. The conquest of the Patagonian wilds, with the final subjugation of the warlike native tribes of the south, opened and ushered in an era in the Argentine evolution. This occurred contemporaneously with the historic solution of the problem of federalism versus centralism, which silenced forever the old antagonism between the inhabitants of the metropolis and those of the provinces. From 1880 till the present, the work of multiplying the telegraphs and railway routes has gone on, as has also the increase of foreign immigration. These have produced the desired effect in the social transformation of the country. The telegraph and the railroad have definitely killed the seditious germs of guerilla warfare and of local chieftainship. Local uprisings are no longer possible. The city and rural populations have become convinced of this, and the popular mind is at peace since the generation has disappeared which saw the last revolts of the _gauchos_, and other forms of popular uprising. Foreign capital commenced and encouraged the exploitation of our natural resources. The sugar industry of the northern provinces, the wine culture of the Andes provinces, even the stock raising and agriculture of the river districts have been the combined work of these three progressive elements. Immigration has helped immensely toward this same end, but the settlement of new lands does not advance by leaps and bounds, but spreads gradually. Starting from the port of arrival, the stream of immigration continues to spread clinging closely to the land and little by little it mixes with the existing population, inter-breeds with it, fuses with it, and gives a great surging impulse to agriculture, industry and commerce. The social transformation of the river provinces is due to this junction of the two currents as a result of which the _gaucho_ of the metropolis of Santa Fé or of Entre Rios, who, formerly famous for his bold and lawless tendencies, has to-day been so fused with the different foreign elements that all but the memory of this ancient type has disappeared, and the country is covered over with populous settlements, laborious, prosperous and progressive. The great fertility of the soil has returned with interest the foreign capital which first watered it, and has enriched marvelously all who have engaged in its cultivation. The development of the national resources, in turn, has given birth to such conservative interests that it is incomprehensible to the new generation that the former generation could, at the signal of a semi-barbarous chief jump on their horses and, rushing over the fields, kill, pillage and destroy. It is true that the transition has been effected at the cost of producing a certain political indifference in the new generations, which no doubt, will be overcome in time. The social evolution of the Argentine Republic has finally found its true channel and to-day is in full course of development. In proportion as the foreign immigration continues bringing therewith its happy complement of foreign capital, the country will continue to develop industrially. The astonishing increase in industries, with a total production out of all proportion to the growing population, is only explained by the use on a large scale of the most advanced machinery. But such a metamorphosis spreads from the river districts toward the interior of the country. It does not jump from one point to another without connecting links between them, but always preserves a channel through which a relation is maintained between the different zones already transformed or in process of transformation. The first effect of each infusion of foreign blood into creole veins is to appease the hot political passions of other times, abolish the old institution of the local chieftainship, even blot him from memory and replace it by an absorption in our growing material interests. These material interests appear to have conspired to bring about that indifference towards the state, as such, which makes men look mistakenly at a political career as a profession which thrives off the real working classes. For, our government both municipal, provincial and national appears to be the heritage of a well-defined minority--the politicians--who devote themselves to politics just as other social classes devote themselves to agriculture, stock raising, industry, commerce, etc. Public life with its complex machinery of elections and governing bodies has been, so to say, delivered into the hands of a small group of men who at present are not productive of anything new in the general social situation of former times; that is to say, these men form a definite class, moved by the influence of this or that personality. Though it has suppressed the bloody characteristics of the previous period it has not relapsed into their heresies. Little by little this shadow of the old system changes into that of the "boss" of the settlement and ward. The boss makes his business that of the mass of the voters, he stirs them up from their indifference, makes them go to the polls, deliberately falsifies public opinion, and so wins for himself a political managership, which gives him a marked influence in the back offices of officials and in the lobbies of legislatures. From such methods there spring no little censurable legislation of privilege and a great loss of contentment on the part of the people. When public spirit strengthens and shakes from itself the dust of inertia, and when the laboring classes have passed beyond that first stage of money grabbing, all the inhabitants of the nation will commence to busy themselves about the common weal. The thorn of the "boss" will prick them and they will then be able to form into political parties with unselfish programs and platforms. Every voter will cast his ballot to send to the legislature candidates who uphold the principles of his particular platform. As yet the people have not even reached the gateway to this goal. The past is still seen in full process of evolution and it is not easy to foresee the end. This does not mean that the present moment of transition is valueless. On the contrary, it is of very great importance, because the social situation in the Argentine Republic is in process of making. The politicians, now that they look upon themselves as called to stand forth above the heads of the rest of the people, have to be real statesmen. In this historic period, such statesmen, have the personality of the chauffeur who directs one of those swift engines of our century upon its dizzy course, the mechanism of which is so sensitive to the controlling pressure of the hand that it can deftly avoid all accident or cause a catastrophe of fatal consequences. There is required in such a man extraordinary coolness, clearness of vision as to responsibility, perfect knowledge of the course to be run, besides ceaseless vigilance, iron nerve when the time of trial arrives and a complete concentration upon the task. The legitimate tasks of government, in this very grave period of Argentine evolution, require a special training on the part of public leaders. They must study thoroughly the problems of our social evolution, and they must form a clear idea of the necessary solutions. Towards this they must steer with undiverted eye. The necessity of further exploitation of our national resources, the successive expansion of enterprise over zone after zone of our territory, the assimilation of the foreign immigrants by the creole population, the slow formation of a national spirit in the new generation, all these monopolize for the present the national energies and prevent them from turning to other problems. The country is converted, as it were, into a giant boa constrictor. It is entirely given over to the task of converting its food into nourishment, of abstracting the juices from the hard and resisting substances, of passing a multitude of different elements through its living organs so that they may later form a new tissue, adapted to the present and future needs of the country. From this point of view the present moment in the evolution of Argentine is of immense sociological interest. We are permitted to be present at the visible transmutation of a society, too weak even to direct itself, and absorbed in the fusion of different influences. The direction of this process has been handed over without counter-check to public men who are obliged to dictate and put into practice legislation and administrative rules of every kind, as though they enjoyed absolute power. Furthermore, by the very nature of things, the administrative functions in such periods have to discount the future and effect in the present a series of public works or social regulations which will weigh upon future generations not only from the point of view of the general finances but even from the point of view of national character. The national transformation of the land with ports, canals, railroads, telegraphs and every sort of means of communication, indeed, with every kind of public work, cannot be accomplished with present resources. A call must be made upon those of the future, by means of loans which will be a burden upon coming generations. If such a governmental policy is not accompanied by a skillful and prudent financial management, the burdens of our descendants will be considerably increased. They may even be committed to a policy that will cause eventual bankruptcy and an inevitable retrogression in the national development. The intellectual metamorphosis of the nation by a proper system of primary, secondary and higher education and by special schools of technical training, in order to form the national spirit of the future type of Argentine citizen, is certainly our most difficult governmental problem, because it is a question of molding the very soul of the nation. To teach different and contradictory systems, to do and then undo, each day changing the courses of study to successively adopt antagonistic standards and show a real lack of fixity in pedagogic methods, is to commit the greatest of all crimes, because it is not a crime against the exchequer of posterity but against its very soul. To accomplish a fusion of the currents of foreign immigration, to sort out the best from them, and to direct the formation of the new type which is being evolved, melting it in the crucible of the school, of the army, and of public life, is perhaps, to-day our task of transcendent difficulty. Such a problem is greater than that of directing the stream of foreign capital which, while fructifying the national soil, clings to it like the countless tentacles of a gigantic octopus and absorbs a great part--sometimes too great a part--of the riches produced only to transmit them through the arteries of the Republic, to foreign nations who employ it to their exclusive profit. Perhaps no moment in the history of our nation requires a greater combination of qualifications in its public men. The student may contemplate this most interesting transformation, displayed before his eyes like the moving film of a gigantic cinematograph which permits him to grasp at once the different phases of the social problem which it presents. Rarely in the history of humanity has it been possible to contemplate a like spectacle. The United States presented it a half century ago, to the astonished gaze of men of that day who were but little familiar with social problems. The Argentine Republic is repeating now the same phenomenon, with this difference that it can observe itself and be guided by the experience acquired elsewhere. Other countries of the world, in the future will, no doubt, in their turn repeat a similar evolution, though perhaps in a different environment. But the interesting part of the present moment is that the Argentine Republic is sailing upon the same course in the twentieth century that the United States did in the nineteenth. Our evolution is proceeding with greater care because it is being worked out amid better conditions. We can now take advantage of the costly experience gained by our brothers of the north and so by avoiding many of their errors, seek to escape the shoals upon which they stranded and the mistakes which they involuntarily committed, even though we have in our turn special problems which they did not have. Thus the tremendous politico-social crisis of the North American War of Secession will not be repeated in the southern hemisphere and the Argentine social evolution will not have to solve the profound anthropological problem of the rivalry of races, which, in the United States, arises from the white, black and yellow races, living together side by side. In Argentine there are no ethnic problems. The social antagonism raised by an arrogant plutocracy on the one hand and poverty stricken proletariat on the other, is not presented as an Argentine problem, because riches are still in process of formation there, and easily pass from one hand to another. A monopoly of riches cannot be prolonged beyond a single generation because with the system of compulsory division of descendants' estates, it soon returns to the common mass of the population. Social conditions in our evolution, present distinct problems from those which characterize other nations and demand, therefore, a direct study on the ground and must not be viewed through the doctrines developed in other nations and amid other conditions. The molding of the national spirit by uniform and compulsory schools and the slow adaptation of the mass of the immigrants to historical traditions and to future national aims, demand much time and they are now in the full process of being worked out. The celebration of the Centenary of our independence has made prominent the fact that such an evolution is much more advanced than one would think. There still remains, nevertheless, not a little to be done in this direction, though the national compulsory school system and the army conscription are factors of great importance which are working for fusion. But, in the country districts and in those places where the error has been committed of permitting the formation of settlements, homogeneous in race and religion, which regard themselves as autonomous offshoots of their mother country, resisting the Argentine school or any intermingling with the mass of neighboring population--in such districts, the fusion, though inevitable, will be necessarily slower. All these sociological problems might and should have been exhaustively studied in the history of the United States during the nineteenth century, a history which, as I have said, the Argentine Republic is repeating in the twentieth. Foreign immigration at this time has no outlet more profitable than the River Plate. The doors of North America are gradually being closed, and the other regions do not yet present the same advantages as those offered by our country. The same thing that happens with the excess of population of other nations also occurs with its surplus capital; no other quarter of the globe offers better prospects for the investment of capital and for a greater rate of return. The "manifest destiny" of Argentine depends for the present entirely upon the development of its commercial relations with the rest of the world. It must convert itself into the granary and the meat market of Europe. The closest bonds of mutual interest unite Argentina with Europe, because being producers of unlike commodities, the European markets consume our exportation and our markets consume theirs. With the rest of America our interchange of trade must be upon a smaller scale, because for more than a century to come we shall be countries producing similar commodities. Therefore, our respective markets will not reciprocally serve to buy the excess of production, but only that which by reason of climate or industrial development is to be found or manufactured in any other country than our own. This has happened to us notably in the case of the United States with its tremendous industrial expansion. In order to fulfill this "manifest destiny," we need _pax multa_ with the whole world. We need to give attention exclusively to our development without intermeddling in that of others. In this is summed up everything. Hence our international policy has to be pacific and neutral; we must be every man's friend, and shun imperialistic fancies. The "splendid isolation" of England fits her condition and her inclination. We must work and we must be allowed to work. Our social evolution still requires a century to acquire a definite contour. Though results may be foreseen from their beginnings, it is not possible to foretell what will be the future Argentine type, physically, mentally or materially. For the present, the only proper thing for us to do is to devote ourselves exclusively to the exploitation of our resources for we have seen how much effort will be required to assimulate our population, to form a national spirit, to build up a great future nation, to develop an administration which shall be a model of honesty and scientific preparation, and to adapt the republic to its future needs by public works and institutions, and by showing ourselves firm in faith and effective in works. The present social tendencies in Argentine evolution give promise of a great future for the country. The nation is not hesitating or vacillating before the realization of its manifest destiny. It follows with profound interest the new and colossal social experiment, which is unfolding to the view of the world the different phases of the formation of a nation in whose development the shoals are being avoided where others were wrecked, and which is putting into practice the improvements suggested by the experience of the other nations in order to realize the new evolution easily, prudently, and successfully. FOOTNOTES: [1] The Academy wishes to express its appreciation to Layton D. Register, Esq., of the Law Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and to Mr. Enrique Gil, of the National University of La Plata, of the Argentine Republic, for the translation of this article. [2] Old Spanish legislation for the Spanish-American colonies. [3] _Encomienda_ is the Spanish name for the concession, granted by the crown during the Spanish Colonial period, of a certain number of native Indians, to a Spanish conqueror for purposes of service. The _Encomendero_ was the recipient of such a concession from the crown. [4] _Mita._ Spanish term for the distribution by lot of the native Indians for purposes of public work. [5] _Yanaconazgo._ Spanish term for that peculiar kind of land tenantship by which the tenant has no title to the land, but receives a proportion of the product of his labors upon the land. [6] The cowboy of the Argentine Pampas. 
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42985	----	Transcriber's Notes: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. Blank pages have been eliminated. Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. A few typographical errors have been corrected. SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN PORTO RICO BY FRED K. FLEAGLE DEAN, UNIVERSITY OF PORTO RICO D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY D. C. HEATH & CO. 1 E 7 FOREWORD IT would seem presumptuous, even after ten years of residence in Porto Rico, to attempt to classify the social problems of the Island and offer suggestions as to their solution, were it not for the fact that this work does not claim to be a complete and final analysis of the situation, but is designed merely to gather up the material available, and present it in such form that it may be made the basis of class-room study. The absence of such a collection of data was a handicap to the author in his work in rural sociology in the University of Porto Rico, and this book represents, in a somewhat abbreviated form, the material covered. The fundamental principles of sociology are touched on but lightly, since there are already available many excellent books presenting this phase of the subject. It is expected that the instructor will supplement by references and discussions, using the facts presented here to bring out the general principles of theoretical sociology. It is to be understood that the facts and data presented here are not to be taken as a criticism of Porto Rico or of the Porto Ricans. They are merely an exposition of the social situation as it exists, and do not differ greatly, either in quantity or character, from similar facts which could be gathered relating to any country. It is necessary, however, to know our troubles if they are to be corrected, and we deceive no one if we claim a state of human perfection which does not exist. Neither do we relieve ourselves of responsibility for our own mistakes by calling attention to the fact that other people have made greater ones than we have. A frank facing of the situation, the acknowledgment of whatever there may be that is unpleasant in a social situation, and a sincere desire and attempt to make corrections, is the only honest thing to do. I have always been optimistic for the future of Porto Rico. It is an island endowed by Nature with more than the usual amount of beauty and brightness. My relations with the people of Porto Rico have been such as to convince me that they have absorbed much of the natural atmosphere of brightness and sunshine which is their heritage, and I believe them sons and daughters worthy of such a beautiful and pleasant island home as Porto Rico. It will be noted that the emphasis in the following pages has been placed on rural problems. This does not mean that there are more social problems in the country than in the towns, but so little has been done regarding country problems, and the course for which this material was used as a basis being devoted to rural social problems, no attempt was made to take up a discussion of the many topics which might be found in the urban situations. Special acknowledgment is made for the material used from the reports of Drs. Ashford and Gutierrez, and for the data from the reports of the Insular Bureau of Labor while under the direction of Mr. J. Clark Bills, Jr. Some of this material is quoted verbatim from the reports, and the author does not wish to claim it as his own. FRED K. FLEAGLE, _University of Porto Rico_ CONTENTS PAGE POPULATION 1 THE JÍBARO 6 OVERPOPULATION 19 THE FAMILY 28 RURAL HOUSING CONDITIONS 37 WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR 50 INDUSTRIES 56 THE LAND PROBLEM AND UNEMPLOYMENT 61 POVERTY 68 SICKNESS AND DISEASE 76 CRIME 84 INTEMPERANCE 93 JUVENILE DELINQUENTS 97 RURAL SCHOOLS 105 THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY 112 RELATION OF THE TEACHER TO THE COMMUNITY 119 PRESENT-DAY RURAL SCHOOL MOVEMENTS 125 PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND LONGEVITY 130 SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN PORTO RICO POPULATION THE Island of Porto Rico, covering an area of about 3,500 square miles, had in 1910 a total population of 1,118,012. The population was divided between the towns and country as follows: Urban population 224,620, or 20.1 per cent of the total number, and rural population 893,392, or 79.9 per cent of the total number. From these figures it is evident that the greatest problems of Porto Rico--those which affect nearly 80 per cent of the population--are problems connected with rural life. Of course, many of the people classified as rural inhabitants do not fall strictly within this class, as by urban centers we mean towns with a population of 2,500 inhabitants or more, and thus many of the smaller towns, which really have the advantages of town life, are classified officially as rural centers. The population of Porto Rico is 65.5 per cent, or nearly two thirds, white, 30 per cent mulatto, and 4.5 per cent black. It is 98.9 per cent native and 1.1 per cent foreign born. During the period from 1899 to 1910 there was an increase in the total population of the Island of 17.3 per cent, which covered an increase of 25 per cent for the native whites, a decrease of 14.5 per cent for the foreign born whites, a decrease of 15.4 per cent for the blacks, and an increase of 10.1 per cent for the mulattoes. The decrease in the number of foreign born whites is due to the fact that in the census of 1899 this group included persons born in the United States, while in 1910 these were classified as natives. The decrease in the number of blacks is doubtless due to intermarriage with other classes, and as a result we have the children of such marriages classified as mulattoes. If the number of such marriages were sufficiently great, the births of blacks would be insufficient to offset the deaths, and the number of blacks would, in that case, necessarily decrease. On this assumption we might very well prophesy that within a few generations the black population in Porto Rico will absolutely disappear, and that we shall have an increased number of mulattoes who, in their turn, will tend to disappear, as they mingle in marriage with people of less colored blood, and in time the black race will be practically absorbed by the whites. Of the foreign countries represented, Spain, with 56.3 per cent of the total foreign born, leads the list. Cuba and the other West Indies have 20.5 per cent to their credit, France 5.8 per cent, Italy 3.1 per cent, England 2.9 per cent, Germany 1.9 per cent, Denmark 1.6 per cent, while no other single country contributes so much as one per cent to the foreign born population. The total number of foreign born in 1910 was 11,766. The rural population of 893,392 was divided among the races as follows: Whites 604,541, blacks 32,918, mulattoes 255,923. Thus we see that the great majority of the rural population is of the white race, due no doubt, to the fact that the colder climate of the highlands of the interior does not agree with the hereditary love which the colored race has for a warm climate. The population of Porto Rico comprises a mixture of bloods and races that complicates the social problems of the Island. The French, Italian, and Spanish elements have tended to mix with the descendants of the Indians originally found here, and to this has been added in many cases a mixture of the blood of the colored race, introduced as slaves into the Island. In some cases the races from the north of Europe have also mingled, so that to-day it is inaccurate to speak of the Porto Ricans as a people of one blood, and the characteristics of the people might be called a composite of the various race elements which have entered into the formation of the native population. The geographical and geological formation of the Island renders it chiefly agricultural. Little is found in the way of mineral deposits, and manufacturing on a large scale will never be carried on, due to the lack of fuel supply and water power. The climate is agreeable and has no doubt tended to render the people less active than would have been the case in a colder climate. The prevalence of anemia and malaria throughout the Island has also weakened the productive ability of the people and has caused the casual observer to classify the Porto Rican countryman as unambitious and lazy. The loss of vitality caused by the diseases just mentioned, together with others which have visited the Island from time to time, is almost impossible to determine, but there is no doubt but that the laziness with which the Porto Rican countryman is credited, disappears with great rapidity when his system has been freed from the effects of disease. The Island imports a great part of its food supply, although food stuffs of a vegetable nature are easily produced and might be raised in sufficient quantity to maintain our present population. The Island is too small to provide grazing areas for large numbers of cattle. The problems of the rural population have been practically untouched up to the present time, as the dominating element in the social and political life of Porto Rico has come from the towns. The rural people have consequently lacked stimulus for self-improvement, inasmuch as there was nothing done to make them dissatisfied with their condition and lead them to try to better it. A system of rural schools has been established by the Department of Education, but not in sufficient number to accommodate all of the children of the country. The solution of the rural situation depends upon proper schooling, a system of instruction which will fit the children for living better rural lives and which shall not be simply the graded system of the towns transplanted to the country. The special problems of the country should be taken into consideration in working out the course of study for the schools, and specially trained teachers should be provided,--teachers who will look upon their work in the rural school as their profession in life, and who will make every effort to adapt themselves to the needs of the community in which they may be located. A continuation of the work which the Government has already started to improve the sanitary and hygienic conditions under which the country people live, the abolishing of anemia and malaria through continuous effort, and instruction as to proper diet and care of the body, together with instruction as to how to secure the necessary kinds of food seems to be the only solution to the rural situation. Certain other problems which relate to the rural family will solve themselves as the educational and economic situation is bettered. THE JÍBARO THE rural population of Porto Rico may be roughly divided into the landowners, or planters, and the wage-earning countrymen. The planters are usually people who in many ways closely resemble the country gentleman or squire of England. They are people of considerable importance in their communities, frequently well educated and widely traveled, men who do not hesitate to spend their money freely for their comfort and that of their families when the crops are plentiful and the prices good. They exercise a sort of patronage over the country people who work for them, many of whom live in houses on land provided by the landlord. The laborers look to the landlord for guidance and for advice in practically all matters pertaining to their economic life, and the planter usually reciprocates by caring for the welfare of the countryman to the best of his ability. Many of the planters, especially such as are located in the coffee districts, have been badly handicapped by the partial destruction of their coffee plantations through cyclones, and by the low price for their product, since they have had to compete with South American coffee in the European and American markets. In addition to this economic disadvantage, the planters are also handicapped by the infirmity of their laborers, most of whom are sufferers from anemia, and few of whom are able to work without the immediate direction of a foreman. The economic and social condition of the planters is not a matter of particular interest to us in this connection, inasmuch as they are so situated that they enjoy all of the advantages of an advanced stage of civilization. The problem that confronts the progress of Porto Rico is to be found in the day laborer of the country districts. The following is taken from the book on _Uncinariasis in Porto Rico_, by Doctors Ashford and Gutierrez: "Our patient has been in times past the _jíbaro_ and will be in time to come. As we have seen already, while all country districts furnish an incredible number of sick, the great breeding places of _necator americanus_ are the coffee plantations, and this is the home of _el palido_ (the pale man) of Porto Rico. "The _jíbaro_ is a type to be well studied before we essay to interest him in bettering his own condition. Many have written of his virtues, many of his defects, but few, even in Porto Rico, have seen through the mist of a pandemic the real man beyond. "Coll y Toste says that the origin of the word _jíbaro_ proceeds from a port in Cuba (Jibara), and that it is composed of two words of Indian origin, _jiba_, meaning mountain, and _ero_, man. We cannot see the necessity of invoking this port of Cuba with the excellently applicable philology he gives us. "Brau says that the term is applied to-day to a laborer, but that its true significance is 'a mountain dweller.' "Our understanding of the term, as it is applied to-day, is a peasant, a tiller of the soil, a man whose life is not that of the town, and who lacks its culture. And when we say that a man is a _jíbaro_, we put him in a separate and distinct class, a class of country laborers. These people 'live now as they lived 100 or 200 years ago, close to the soil.' The _jíbaro_ is a squatter and does not own the land upon which he builds his modest house, nor does that house cost him anything save the trouble of building it. It is a framework of poles, with walls of the bark of the royal palm (the _yagua_), with roof of the same material or of a tough grass which is used for thatching, and with a floor of palm boards. Generally the floor is well raised from the ground on posts, and the family is truly a poor and miserable one which is content to have an earthen floor. As a rule, there is but one room for a family, which rarely goes below five, and whose upper limit is measured by the accommodation afforded for sleeping. The cooking is done under a shed on a pile of stones. Weyl says that the house should be valued at about $20. "The food of the _jíbaro_ is poor in fats and the proteids are of difficult assimilation, being of vegetable origin, as a rule. "He arises at dawn and takes a cocoanut dipperful of _café puya_ (coffee without sugar). Naturally, he never uses milk. With this black coffee he works till about twelve o'clock, when his wife brings him his breakfast, corresponding to our lunch. This is composed of boiled salt codfish, with oil, and has one of the following vegetables of the island to furnish the carbohydrate element: banana, platano, ñame, batata or yautia. "At three in the afternoon he takes another dipperful of coffee, as he began the day. At dusk he returns to his house and has one single dish, a sort of stew, made of the current vegetables of the island, with rice and codfish. At rare intervals he treats himself to pork, of which he is inordinately fond, and on still rarer occasions he visits the town and eats quantities of bread, without butter, of course. "Of all this list of country food there are only three elements that are bought--rice, codfish, and condiments. Rice is imported from the United States and codfish from Nova Scotia. The bread he eats on his visits to town is made of American flour. "This is a normal _jíbaro_ diet. With the wage paid him he can get no better, but aside from this he is wedded to cheap bulky foods, chiefly for reasons to be stated, and is completely ignorant of the importance of certain foods which any hygienist would like to add to his bill of fare. If the normal food of the _jíbaro_, as stated, were his usual food, it would not be so serious a matter, nor would the _jíbaro_ complain so bitterly of his wretched ration, but the fact is he does not get the menu detailed above save when he can be said to be prosperous. Only a few cents difference in wages will cut out the small proportion of animal proteids he obtains, the codfish, and a cyclone will drive him in sheer desperation to the town. "Aside from all this, if wages were better, it is said, he would leave his ration as it now is and spend his surplus otherwise. This has not been given, however, a very earnest trial. He takes also more rum than he is given credit for by those who have accepted the formula that the _jíbaro_ does not drink, but it is true that he is not usually intemperate in this sense. One of his vices is _la mascaura_ (the wad of tobacco), and he believes the juice of the tobacco to be beneficial in warding off tetanus. "The _jíbaro_, mountain bred, avoids the town whenever possible, avoids the genteel life of a civilization higher than that of his own. He instinctively tucks his little hut away in the most inaccessible spots; he shrinks from the stranger and lapses into stolid silence when brought face to face with things that are foreign to his life. He does this because he has been made to feel that he must do all that he is told to do by established authority, and he knows that this authority never takes the trouble to look for him unless it expects to get something out of him; because he is suspicious of outsiders, having been too often led astray by false prophets and disappointed by broken promises; because he realizes that he is not a free agent anywhere save in the mountain fastnesses. In other words, he seeks liberty in his home, freedom from the constant repression of those he recognizes as his superiors, and exemption from a repetition of deceptions that have been so often practiced upon him. He has always been made to stay strictly in his class, in the _jíbaro_ class. Frequently when he tries to express himself he is laughed down, frowned down, or growled down. '_Tu eres un jíbaro_' is not a term of reproach exactly, but it means 'You are not in a position to express yourself, for you are only a mountaineer. You know nothing of our world; you are still a child. Your place is under the shade of the coffee tree; the mark you bear is clear to everyone; you are a _jíbaro_.' Thus there is a great difference between the _jíbaro_ and those who are not _jíbaros_, _i.e._, those who live in towns or those who command in the country. This distinction is neither made unkindly nor roughly. All the Porto Rican people are kindly and they love their _jíbaros_, but nevertheless they treat them as though they were children. And the _jíbaro_ loyally follows his educated, emancipated fellow citizen, perfectly satisfied to be guided as the latter sees fit. "Much of this guidance is excellent, and it is not our mission to seek to break down barriers which to-day, may be needful. The _jíbaro_ is respectful and obedient, fearful of the law and never defiant of his superiors; he is generous to a fault, sharing with any wayfarer his last plantain; he is devoted to his family and to his friends. Had he been ill treated by the educated and controlling class in the island he would be sullen and savage, but this has not been the case. If it is true that the _jíbaro_ is in many ways differentiated from the upper classes, it is equally true that there is no masonry so strong as that existing among the _jíbaros_ of Porto Rico. Bound to each other by the most intricate ties of relationship and by a still more potent one, the eternal bond conferred by the title _compadre_ or godfather, they share their troubles and shield each other as though they belonged to one great family. It is really wonderful to see how quickly and with what complete self-abnegation an orphaned child or widowed mother is gathered into some poor neighbor's hut and there cared for. For these very same reasons search for a miscreant in the mountains is a formidable undertaking. On inquiry no one knows him, never saw him, never even heard of him, and the closest scrutiny of their faces will not detect the faintest trace of interest or even of intelligence. "Care must be taken in deducing facts from questioning a group of _jíbaros_ even in the most unimportant matters. They are tremendously suspicious and generally let someone among them who is _leido_ (one who has established a local reputation for worldly wisdom) speak for them. One can be pretty sure that the rest will say 'amen' to all of his remarks. It is said that this deep suspicion of a strange investigator proceeds from the methods employed by the Spanish _guardia civil_ or rural guard, to run down those suspected of unfaithfulness to the administration, petty infringement of the law, etc. "The _jíbaro_ is equally superstitious and very quickly impressed by a supernatural explanation of any phenomena he cannot understand. The more outlandish the explanation of a disease the better he likes it, and for this reason the _curandero_ or local charlatan is so popular and powerful in the mountains. We very much fear that our abrupt tumbling in the dust of an ancient explanation of his for anemia, our assertion that it was due to 'worms' and our administration of 'strong medicine' which practically put him _hors de combat_ for the day, accounts for part of our early success. In spite of this lack of knowledge of the world above him he has one quality which is his ever ready defense, his astuteness. There is one phrase much used in describing the _jíbaro's_ acuteness of observation. Referring to a trade it is said: '_Para un jíbaro, otro, y para los dos, el demonio_,' which means, 'To get the best of a jíbaro, employ another, and to catch both, Satan himself must take charge of them.' "This astuteness, despite all of the great obstacles in the path of our work among them, was what chiefly led to success in bringing these people under treatment. They soon saw that we got results, and with a fact capable of sensational proof in our hands, the _jíbaro_ accepted us and we joined the 'order' to which we have made reference. From that time he has been our friend, and better friends no man ever had, for his entire support is given us; he preaches our 'new medicine' and wherever we have expounded these things to him by word of mouth and by virtue of proof he takes pride in explaining, better than any representative of the upper classes, how the disease is acquired and how it may be prevented. "The prime fact, however, is that he has, until recently, been much neglected, neglected by those who are not of his class, neglected by the authorities. There are municipalities whose town forms but a tenth of the population of the outlying country, whose taxes are collected to support it, yet which seem to forget the submerged mass in the mountains. This being so for the towns which are surrounded by these people, how attenuated the interest becomes in the capital and larger cities of the island, and how extremely diluted that of the continental American who neither knows his needs nor even what _jíbaro_ means. "Education will transform this _jíbaro_ into something much better or much worse, for he will not remain content as he is when he can read, write, and see the world with his own eyes. In this education the respect he bears his more fortunate compatriots, the power for good they have over him, and the confidence he reposes in them must be preserved. The labor he must perform to enrich the island must be dignified by his employer and by himself, or else the hills will be deserted and the _jíbaro_ will become a vicious hanger-on of towns. Better homes, better means of communication with towns, now becoming an accomplished fact, better food, education, in which remarkable progress is being made at this day, better habits of life, especially in the modern prevention of disease, must form a part of any plan adopted to improve his condition. The planter who to-day sees the laborer must see in him the man whose bodily, mental, and moral development will make the plantation a success. The planter is the man of all men in Porto Rico who must begin to help the _jíbaro_ upward in order to emerge from his own present industrial depression. This lack of mental contact, of a common ground of interest between the _jíbaro_ and the better class of Porto Ricans drives the former to charlatans for his medical advice, to the wild fruits and vegetables of the interior for his food, and to weird creeds for his religious comfort. "His dependency causes him to look for protection, for direction and for ideas from the planter, from the municipality, and from the Insular Government. He considers himself a ward of his employer and of those placed in authority over him. He does not care to accept any responsibility for the simple reason that he has always been made to feel that he is not a responsible person. Therefore, how can we blame him when we find him without shoes, knowing that by wearing them he will protect himself against a dangerous infirmity; without bacon and corn, without household furniture, with but one room for his entire family. "It is a specious excuse, nothing more nor less, which avers that the _jíbaro_ is born the way he is and cannot be changed at this late day, that we must await a new generation, etc. On that principle we could expect very little from the antituberculosis crusades in New York. The truth is that to change the _jíbaro_, we must convince him that he will be bettered by the change, and he is sharp enough to change then, but the gist of all is that these changes must be begun by the men to whom the _jíbaro_ has always looked for light, and this means good hard work and much perseverance, tact, and genuine personal interest. From our acquaintance with the men to whom this burden will fall we should say that they are not only sufficiently good business men to realize the benefit they would get out of a healthy laboring class, but that the innate patriotism of the Porto Rican agriculturist and the deeper underlying sympathy for his _jíbaro_ will some day bring about reforms that they alone can make possible. "Agricultural laborers, in spite of the small wages they receive, are nearly if not quite as expensive as those in the United States, for with 50 per cent less of efficiency from disease and wasteful methods of work, the difference in wage is of small advantage. Weyl states: 'The small equity which the planter holds in the estate which he cultivates does not permit him to pay any higher wages, and the poverty of the planter prevents him from making the outlay necessary for the proper cultivation of his land.' "Few coffee planters have anywhere near a reasonable amount of their land under cultivation for the reason that with the poor help and methods now existent they are unable to extend their plant. The regular labor, employed all the year round, the peons--who form a relatively small percentage of the entire number available for work--are paid for a full day's work, and their degree of anemia is such as to prevent their doing but about 50 per cent of what they are paid for doing. Our estimate of the relative efficiency of labor was made from what the planter himself told us and by a simple experiment which we tried upon about 500 adult workers in different parts of the interior. We questioned each one as to the amount of coffee he could pick in a day and found that from two to three _almudes_ was the utmost the majority could do, and that one _almud_ was too much for many. Some stated that after picking a sack full in a remote part of the plantation they were unable to get it in to the mill without a mule, on account of the fact that their limbs refused to bear them up. When these people were working at light work, and at a time when the more they picked, the greater the profit to themselves, is it reasonable to suppose that when working for a wage without this incentive this 50 or 60 per cent labor would be any more efficient? This reduction in laboring capacity demonstrates what a heavy toll is paid by both employer and employee to uncinariasis in Porto Rico. "As to absentee landlords, Weyl says: 'Many of the absentee owners of Porto Rican properties and many of their agents in Porto Rico consider the island and its population as equally fit for the crassest exploitation, and are as contemptuous of the people as they are enthusiastic about the island. The current use by many Americans of an opprobrious epithet for Porto Ricans bespeaks an attitude which takes no account of the human phase of the problem, but considers the population as composed merely of so many laborers willing to work for such and such a price.' "Thus the poor laborer, his earning capacity cut down by his disease, with employment which is at best very irregular, with his sick wife and children for whom he has to buy 'iron tonics' that cost all that he can rake and scrape together, without money for clothes, much less for shoes, with a palm-bark hut not too well protected against the damp cold of the grove in which he lives, with not a scrap of furniture save, perhaps, a hammock, and, worst of all, with a miserable diet lacking in proteids and fats, lives from day to day, saving nothing, knowing nothing of the world beyond his plantation, working mechanically simply because he is not the drone he has been too frequently painted outside of Porto Rico, but without any object save to keep on living as generations have done before him. It has been our experience that when he is asked 'Why have you sought our dispensary?' the answer has almost invariably been, 'Because I can no longer work.' The _jíbaro_, nevertheless, has ever been the lever which has raised the bank account of Porto Rico, and with an average of 40 per cent of hemoglobin and two and a half millions of red corpuscles per cubic millimeter he has labored from sun to sun in the coffee plantation of the mountains, in the sugar estate of the coast land, and in the tobacco field of the foothills, in addition to his personal coöperation in other industries and commercial enterprises. He is a sick man and deserves our highest respect, and merits our most careful attention as a vital element in the economic life of the island. The American people should take seriously into account his future, which is at present anything but promising." OVERPOPULATION WHEN we say that a country is overpopulated we speak in relative terms, inasmuch as the overpopulation of a country does not depend upon the density of the population alone, but also upon the ability of that country to produce a sufficient amount of foodstuffs to maintain its population. Thus a country which has a relatively small population and a still smaller ability to produce foodstuffs would be more overpopulated than a country of similar size with a larger population and a still greater production of foodstuffs. In considering the case of Porto Rico, we find that the Island contains 8,317 square kilometers of land. The estimated population at the present time is 1,200,000. This gives about 140 persons to the square kilometer as compared with 72 persons in France, 237 persons in Belgium, and 252 in Saxony. If the productive ability of the soil of Porto Rico is as great as that of Belgium and Saxony, we must conclude that Porto Rico is not overpopulated. If for any reason it is less, then the extent of overpopulation increases directly as the soil grows less in productive ability. Porto Rico has about ten times as many inhabitants per square acre as the average throughout the United States; but the conditions of climate do a great deal to equalize this difference. In the first place, the soil is available in Porto Rico for the production of crops throughout the twelve months of the year, whereas in parts of the United States and in northern Europe the soil is usable for only a portion of the year on account of its unproductive condition during the winter months. Another matter that must be taken into consideration in the question of overpopulation, is the severity of the climate. Where the climate is severe, the country will maintain in comfort a much smaller population than where the climate is as friendly to the human race as we find it in Porto Rico. Of the population of Porto Rico in 1910, about 75 per cent lived in communities that had less than 500 inhabitants, showing conclusively that the great majority of the people of Porto Rico should be classified as rural inhabitants and that the problems which affect the rural people of Porto Rico are the problems which would affect, to a great extent, the entire Island. Only two cities in the Island have a population of more than 25,000, while only 30 would fall under the head of urban territory, that is, towns which have a population of 2,500 or more. The rate of increase of population in Porto Rico is far in excess of the rate of increase in the United States, and this is one of the things that must be taken into consideration in considering the question of overpopulation. In the United States the rate of increase among the class of people whose salaries range from $700 to $2,500 is from ten to twelve per thousand. In Porto Rico, the rate of increase is about twenty per thousand. The following table shows a comparison between the birth rate, death rate, and rate of increase in the United States and Porto Rico, the figures given representing the birth and death rate for every thousand of the population in each country. UNITED STATES Birth rate Death rate Increase _Poor Class_: 35 to 40 25 to 35 5 to 10 _Intermediate class_: 25 to 30 15 to 18 10 to 12 _Well-to-do class_: 12 to 18 12 to 15 4 to 6 PORTO RICO (1914-15) Birth rate Death rate Increase 39.12 19.72 19 to 20 In order to maintain the population of a country, there must be about 400 children between the ages of one and five years for every thousand women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. The following table shows how Porto Rico compares in this respect with other countries. United States 492 children per thousand women France 409 " " " " Germany 535 " " " " England 429 " " " " Sweden 522 " " " " Porto Rico 725 " " " " Thus we see that the rate of increase of the population of Porto Rico is much greater than that of the United States. When we take into consideration the advancement being made in sanitary science in Porto Rico and in the elimination of disease, as well as the increased facilities for caring for sickness, we may expect that the rate of increase here will be augmented each year. The general opinion is that Porto Rico is so thickly populated that a crisis is inevitable, unless some means is found for remedying the present situation. It does not seem, however, that we are justified in coming to such a conclusion when we consider the much more densely populated countries of Belgium and Saxony. Increased production of the soil due to intensive agriculture, and modern methods of farming, as well as the breaking up of the land into small farms, have been the means of taking care of the vast populations of European countries where climatic conditions are not as favorable as they are in Porto Rico. Of the total acreage of Porto Rico about 94 per cent is in farms, and we find that only 30,000 people are directly dependent upon these farms for their support. Of the total number of acres included in farm land, about 75 per cent is improved and under cultivation, so that there is still about one quarter of the land that can be devoted to agriculture when it has been connected with markets, or by other means rendered available for this purpose. There are in Porto Rico more than 58,000 farms, 46,779 of which are operated by their owners. These, in the great majority of cases, are small farms and are of the kind which bring the greatest amount of benefit to the Island. Some 10,000 farms are operated by tenants, and these farms also are usually small. The following table shows the number of farms of various sizes in the Island to-day: Farms under 5 acres 20,650 Farms from 5 to 9 acres 11,309 Farms from 10 to 19 acres 10,045 Farms from 20 to 49 acres 8,872 Farms from 50 to 99 acres 3,728 Farms from 100 to 174 acres 1,726 Farms from 175 to 499 acres 1,502 Farms from 500 to 999 acres 332 Farms of 1000 acres or more 207 Of the owners and tenants of these farms 44,521 are white and 13,850 are colored. About 95 per cent of all the owned farms are free from mortgage. The average size of the farms in Porto Rico is about 35¾ acres. The experience of European countries has been that large farms, in a densely populated country are detrimental to the community welfare, because the holding of such farms by a few condemns a large percentage of the population to a dependent condition. As the number of farms decreases, the number of salaried laborers must increase, and as this floating population increases, there is also a tendency for crime to increase, as the man who has no responsibilities as a proprietor of land often lacks the fundamental stimulus to make him observe the laws of his country. The landowner, having obtained even a small parcel of land, has an incentive for hard work, wishing to better his financial condition, while the dependent salaried man, with no visible stimulus for saving, tends to spend his money as fast as it is earned and seldom accumulates any property. To such an extent is the possession of land regarded as a benefit to the individual and an incentive toward good citizenship, that in some European countries the government has made arrangements to loan money to worthy young men for the purchase of small farms on the ground that the government gains a desirable citizen every time that it creates a landholder. The Government of Porto Rico might well take some steps to encourage dependent laborers to accumulate property, either by means of loans to those who desire to purchase property, or by opening up government land for settlement under the Homestead Act. The rise in the price of land and the fact that the greater part of the land of Porto Rico is devoted to industries which are most productive when conducted on a fairly large scale, has tended to the accumulation of large tracts of land, and legal measures should be enacted against the accumulation of tracts of land of more than 100 or 200 acres, and providing for the distribution of any large tracts in case of the death of the present owner: At the present time a good deal of the foodstuffs of Porto Rico is imported into the Island while if there were more widely extended division of the land into a large number of small farms, the production of these foodstuffs could be greatly increased, although, of course, this would tend to decrease the production of certain other crops which at present claim the chief attention of the people of Porto Rico. According to the Report of the Governor of Porto Rico for 1914-15, the division of land among the various industries, as well as the average value per acre of land for each of the industries, is shown by the following table: Average value Crop Acreage per acre Cane 211,110 $106.95 Coffee 165,170 61.60 Tobacco 18,040 80.81 Pineapples 3,761 105.24 Citrus fruits 5,274 121.78 Coconuts 6,088 118.33 Minor fruits 102,274 27.53 From this table we see that certain industries, such as the cultivation of pineapples or citrus fruits, which can be carried on successfully on relatively small farms, bring practically as high a return per acre as does the production of sugar cane, which is essentially a large farm product. This argument would not necessarily do away with the cultivation of sugar cane, but would tend to increase the cultivation of other crops wherever and whenever the soil and climatic conditions would permit. An increase in the number of owned farms and a consequent decrease in the number of dependent wage earners, together with the increased production of foodstuffs which such a system of land management would necessarily bring as a result, providing the management of the farms was carried on under modern scientific methods, would, to a great extent, relieve the situation of overpopulation which we now face. Porto Rico can support twice the population which she now has with comparative ease, providing some means is found to relieve the economic situation of the greater part of the people and to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a comparatively small number. It is estimated at the present time that the wealth of Porto Rico is in the hands of less than 15 per cent of the population, and the remaining 85 per cent are dependent for their living upon daily or monthly wages. Such a situation must be changed or else the question of overpopulation will become indeed serious. There is no particular reason to fear that the population will increase to such an extent that we shall be unable to support ourselves on what the Island may produce; but with the increase of population under present conditions, trouble between capital and labor and between workmen and their employers cannot be avoided. Emigration as a means of relief to the overpopulation of Porto Rico will not solve the question. In the first place, the Porto Rican people are essentially a home-loving people, clinging closely to family ties and not at all disposed to migrate to other countries. A few cases of Porto Rican families who have moved to other countries have shown that in the majority of instances the migration was not successful. In the second place, in order to relieve the situation at all it would be necessary to provide for the emigration of a large number of families. The removal of 100 or 500 families from Porto Rico would not make any appreciable difference in the economic situation that we find to-day. The average family consists of five people, and the removal of 5,000 unskilled laborers from the Island would not tend to relieve the situation. The only means of meeting the situation of overpopulation is through increasing the food production of the Island by means of division into small farms, intensive cultivation, and modern methods of farming. The school must do its share in the teaching of small-farm and garden farming, and the Government should assume the responsibility for fostering the increase of the number of small farms as well as for assisting in the educational work to improve the methods of cultivation. THE FAMILY THE family is the simplest combination of individuals that we find in organized society and is the basis of social group forms. It ranks in importance as a social institution with the church, the state, and the school, coming into existence before any of these three institutions. It existed in a complete form, consisting of father, mother, and children long before there was such an institution as civil or religious marriage. In the history of mankind, the family and marriage grew up together, the importance of the family requiring certain marriage customs by which the members of the family could be held together to protect the interests of the children. In Porto Rico we find the average family consisting of five people, and according to the census of 1910, in the total population 15 years of age and over, 43.7 per cent of the males and 38 per cent of the females were single; 36.2 per cent of the males of the total population and 35.4 per cent of the females were married, while 16 per cent of the males (or a total of 50,113), and 15.7 per cent of the females (or a total of 51,073), were consensually married, that is, living together by mutual consent, but without the benefit of a civil or ecclesiastical marriage.[1] This proportion is somewhat lower than it was in 1899, as the percentage of consensual marriages in comparison with the population at that time was 16.3 per cent for the males and 15.2 per cent for the females. The difference, however, does not exceed one half of one per cent, and there were actually 17,046 more people living together consensually in 1910 than in 1899. The seriousness of the situation may be seen when we consider that of the total population of the Island over 15 years of age, 31.7 per cent, nearly one third, representing 101,186 people, are living together without any form of marriage ceremony. [1] The difference in numbers between men and women living together consensually is doubtless due to the fact that many men who have legitimate wives also have consensual wives or mistresses. Many reasons have been given for the prevalence of the consensual marriage in Porto Rico, among which are to be found the necessity of the ecclesiastical marriage with its complicated forms and the relatively costly ceremonies which prevailed before the institution of civil marriage under the American Government. It seems quite probable, however, that this custom is a relic of the consensual marriage form, which was established by the early colonizers of Porto Rico, many of whom came to the Island, leaving their families behind, and entered into consensual marriage relations with the native women of the Island. In this way the custom was established, and there was a lack of public opinion against it which has existed down to the present time, and until, through the influence of the schools, public opinion against this form of union can be roused, very little progress will be made in changing conditions. There is no doubt but that many of the consensual marriages are considered by the parties concerned just as permanent as those performed by civil or ecclesiastical authorities, and the question of immorality does not enter into their view of the situation. It is a question of mutual consent, and especially in the country districts, the knowledge of the law in regard to these matters is very vague. The greatest harm in cases of marriage of this sort lies in the tendency to prevent the spread of public opinion against the custom and in the ease with which the family relations can be broken at the will of either member of the family, with the resulting unprotected condition of the children which may have been born into the family. The number of persons of illegitimate birth in the Island of Porto Rico, as given by the census of 1899 and that of 1910, is as follows: White illegitimates 1899 66,855 White illegitimates 1910 76,695 Colored illegitimates 1899 81,750 Colored illegitimates 1910 78,554 Thus we see that there was an actual increase of nearly 10,000 white illegitimate children from the year 1899 to 1910, or an increase of 14.7 per cent; but during the same time the white population had increased 24.7 per cent, so that there was an actual decrease in the percentage, according to population, of nearly 10 per cent. During the same period the colored population had increased 5.9 per cent, but the number of colored illegitimate children had decreased 3.9 per cent, there being actually a less number of colored illegitimate children in 1910 than in 1899, although the population had increased. It seems very probable that this is due to the fact that the great majority of the colored population in Porto Rico is to be found in the towns, where the school system is more efficient than in the country districts and where customs change more easily, due to wider associations and to more frequent and continued intercourse with people of other points of view. In the country the custom has remained, with little change, due to the fact that the isolation of the country people and the comparatively small number of children in the rural schools has given little opportunity to work against the existing situation. Of the children from the ages of one to ten years there was only an increase of 1,397 white illegitimate children between 1899 and 1910, which was not anywhere near the rate of increase of the white population as a whole. During the same period there was an actual decrease in the number of colored illegitimate children between the ages of one and ten years, amounting to 7,717, or a total decrease of illegitimate children under 10 years of age of 6,320, which would lead us to believe that within the last ten years the births of consensual marriage and the number of illegitimate children have decreased much more rapidly than the total census figures would indicate. In addition to the question of consensual marriages, we find that under the Spanish administration, when ecclesiastical marriage was the only form recognized, there were no divorces registered in the Island of Porto Rico. With the introduction of the civil marriage after the American occupation, and the institution of divorce laws and the recognition of divorce by the civil authorities, the question of divorce began to demand attention, and in 1910 we find a total of 1,246 divorces among the people in the Island of Porto Rico. About two thirds of these were women,[2] and the divorce question will undoubtedly in time bring as many problems in Porto Rico as it has in the United States. [2] This would indicate that many of the divorced men had remarried and were listed in the census as married instead of divorced. According to the last report of the Insular Chief of Police, it is estimated that there are in the Island of Porto Rico at the present time about 10,000 homeless children under 12 years of age who live by whatever means they are able, many of them begging or stealing, and most of them having no permanent lodging place, sleeping at night in boxes or on doorsteps, or wherever they happen to find a lodging place secure from the rain. These children are, for the most part, deserted and abandoned children of illegitimate parentage, or orphan children whose parents have left no provision for their care and education, and they constitute a fertile soil for the implanting of criminal tendencies and are ready material for older people of criminal habits. They constitute a danger to the security of the community, and if it were not for the relatively high death rate that is found among people of this class, the Island would soon be overrun by citizens brought up under these criminal-forming conditions. The Insular Government should take measures to reduce this danger by means of the compulsory industrial education of this class of boys and girls. There is enough Government land available to colonize them in different parts of the Island under the care of people trained in reformatory and industrial methods, and this should be done in order that they may become self-supporting individuals who will contribute to the comfort of the community, rather than parasites who live on the charity of others. There are any number of small industries in which they might be trained, as well as along agricultural lines, and the trades which lack skilled workmen in Porto Rico would be much benefited by adding to their number graduates of industrial trade schools, taken from children of this class; these schools should be operated by the Government, at Government expense, but could be made largely self-supporting by means of the sale of the services of the boys, or through the sale of the products turned out. The living accommodations of the average rural family are very unsatisfactory, consisting, as they do, of a dwelling house of one room, or at the most, two. This reduced house space makes it necessary to eat and live and sleep in the same room, rendering impossible any degree of privacy on the part of any of the family. This condition in the case of growing boys and girls is very undesirable, particularly since it is a custom to take in as members of the family relatives, sometimes of a rather remote degree of relationship, in case they are left unprotected. Another feature of family life which tends toward degeneration and which is found to a great extent in Porto Rico, is the intermarriage between relatives within comparatively close degrees of consanguinity. The civil laws of Porto Rico prohibit the marriage of persons of closer degrees of relationship than first cousins, and the ecclesiastical laws of the Roman Church prohibit marriage within eight degrees of consanguinity. In the record of one family which produced 25 cases of insanity in two generations, it was found that there had been a considerable amount of intermarriage between relatives, one of the grandparents marrying a person who was prohibited by the ecclesiastical law on four different grounds on account of consanguinity. Ecclesiastical permission had been obtained to overcome these difficulties and the marriage took place. There is no doubt that close intermarriage and the failure to introduce new stock into the family tends to both mental and physical degeneration. And where families intermarry for generations, as we find to be the custom in a great many instances in Porto Rico, there can be no doubt of the ultimate disastrous outcome from this custom. The average Porto Rican family lives very happily and contentedly, the parents displaying great affection for the children and for relatives even of a remote degree of relationship. In the case of the death of parents, relatives usually adopt or take charge of the children which may be left and bring them up as carefully as they would children of their own. The family group is naturally closer among Latin peoples than among Anglo-Saxon races, and this has tended to do away with some of the vices of family life which are found among Anglo-Saxon peoples, while the same circumstances have tended to increase other unsatisfactory conditions of family life peculiar to Latin races. One of the features which, from the standpoint of society, may have an unfortunate result is the mixture of races in the family life. While this has not taken place to such an extent in the country districts as it has in the towns, nevertheless, a great many families in Porto Rico are composed of mixed races. The biological tendency in cases of mixed races, according to most authorities, is a decrease in the number of children in the family as generation succeeds generation, unless there is an addition of new blood to a considerable extent. This may possibly be one of the means which Nature has provided for solving the problem of overpopulation in Porto Rico, but there is the added fact that usually as the succeeding generations become fewer in regard to numbers, they also become less capable mentally and physically. The race question in Porto Rico will undoubtedly come to be one of the problems that has to be solved, and it will be more difficult of solution than the race problem in the United States, where the races are becoming more widely separated every year and where it is very infrequent to find persons of the two races in the same family. In Porto Rico the problem will be intensified because it is not merely a problem between races, but a race problem which involves the family organization in many cases. The government of Brazil has predicted that in a hundred years there will be no black inhabitants in the Brazilian republic, that they will be entirely assimilated by the white race or carried off by disease. The census report for Porto Rico shows a falling off in the black race of about 9,000 in the last ten years, and an increase of about 30,000 in the mixed or mulatto population. Thus the assimilation of the black population is gradually taking place, and whether this will in time lead to a complete assimilation, or whether the mixed race will become weakened through this racial intermarriage to such an extent that it will eventually refuse to propagate, is a question which only time can answer. There is no doubt, however, that this is one of the problems that must be confronted in Porto Rico. RURAL HOUSING CONDITIONS THE housing of a people is always a matter of prime importance in their social life and development. There is little progress until the housing conditions are comfortable and hygienic, and the development of the home and the family life depends to a great extent on the conditions under which a people lives. The housing conditions in Porto Rico, especially for the poorer classes, are far from satisfactory. The dwellings of the country people are described as follows, in the Report on the Housing Conditions in Porto Rico, published by the Insular Bureau of Labor in 1914: "There are five general problems which the laborer or employer in tropical countries, who is anxious to build cheap but proper houses, has to meet. The first is to provide adequate protection against the heat. As in northern countries it is necessary to shut out the cold winds and generate and conserve artificial heat within the house, so in tropical countries it is equally important to let in the breezes and to clear out any artificial heat that may arise. "The second problem is to provide protection against the frequent tropical rains. This is especially important in tropical countries that have a protracted rainy season, as it is often difficult to shut out the rain without also shutting out the fresh air. "The third problem is the provision of adequate sanitary facilities. Due to the heat in southern countries and to the humidity that prevails during certain seasons of the year, this problem is more difficult of solution and likewise more important than in countries farther north. "The fourth problem is that of securing cheap and durable building materials. In a land like Porto Rico where tropical shrubs and the palm are practically the only woods that the laborers are able to obtain, we must not expect the same solid, commodious habitations which are found in northern countries where the pine and hemlock abound. "The fifth problem, perhaps as important as any of the preceding and certainly as difficult to remedy, arises partly from the generosity of nature herself. People can live in tropical countries in almost any form of habitation. Cold winters have not obliged the poorer classes to be adepts in house construction. Poverty has forced them to live as cheaply as possible. Naturally, the laboring classes engaged in tilling the soil still make their homes in the cheapest forms of huts. This problem has, therefore, three aspects--an over-indulgent climate, poverty, and a lack of opportunity by the poorer classes to learn better methods of house construction. "In Porto Rico we have, in addition to the problems mentioned above, two special conditions which have influenced the form and quality of our laborers' houses. The first is that the seasonal character of many of our agricultural industries forces the laborers to migrate from one section to another in order to find work and, naturally, they are not inclined to go to the expense and exertion of building substantial homes. The second, and more important, arises from the fact that the greater part of our laborers do not own the land their houses are placed upon and, being subject to ejection at the will of their landlords, they have no incentive to beautify or improve their homes. "According to the census of 1910, the urban territory of Porto Rico--that is, the places of 2,500 inhabitants or more--contained 224,620 inhabitants, or 20.1 per cent of the total population, while 893,392 inhabitants, or 79.9 per cent, lived in places of less than 2,500 inhabitants, and of these, 837,725 lived in strictly rural territory. Needless to state, the greater part of the rural inhabitants belong to the laboring classes and live in the types of rural homes described in this section. "We have divided the habitations of rural laborers, according to their construction, into the following types: (1) Single houses of thatch, (2) single houses of wood and zinc, (3) tenements of wood and zinc. "Most of the thatched huts in the rural sections have been built by the laborers who live in them. The land upon which these houses are built is, however, usually the property of some plantation or landowner. Only in the more inaccessible sections inland do the laborers who have built these thatched houses also own the land they are placed upon. It is the custom among the landowners to allow laborers who work for them to take the necessary materials--grass, sticks, palm-bark, etc.--from the land and build their huts. This is done, of course, with the consent of the landowner, and the huts so built are legally attached to the land and become the property of the landowner. As a matter of fact, the laborers who have built these huts claim them as their property and are allowed to live in them without charge or molestation so long as they work for the landowner when their services are needed. When a laborer who has built a hut leaves it and moves to another's land, the hut is claimed by the landowner and some other laborer is allowed to move into it. There are also some of these huts that have been built by the landowners at their own expense, but the plantation owners and other landowners who have gone into the business of building houses for their workmen usually construct a better type of house. The thatched hut, therefore, while it is legally a plantation house, is not usually so considered, either by the landowner or the laborer. "If we judge the importance of a type of house from the number of people who live in it, this thatched hut is far more important than any other rural or urban type. The great mass of the rural laborers live in houses of this type and, as has been shown, fully three-fourths of the total laborers of the Island live in rural sections. "The homes of the wealthy in all parts of the world are constructed to conform to the standards of the age and place in which they are erected, and to the personal desires of the occupants, regard being taken only of the absolutely necessary conditions of environment. The houses of the poor, on the other hand, are the direct product of local environment. The hut of the inland laborer of Porto Rico, the _jíbaro_, is a striking illustration of the effect of environment upon the type of house in which the poor live. "The problem of obtaining cheap and durable building materials is a very difficult one for the poor laborers of Porto Rico. Hard woods are extremely scarce, and the poor inland laborer cannot afford to buy imported lumber, and, therefore, he has been obliged to utilize the coarse grasses and the products of the palm trees that are accessible at little or no expense except the labor necessary in their preparation. Furthermore, many of these people have not the skill nor the necessary tools to use materials such as stone and clay which they might be able to obtain. Also, the migratory character of many of these inland laborers, and the fact that they do not own the land their houses are built upon, have been fundamental influences in preventing the development of better house types. The principal agricultural industries, _i.e._, coffee, sugar, and tobacco, have a busy and a dull season, and many of the inland laborers are obliged to migrate from one section to another in order to find work. For this reason hundreds of laborers pass annually from the inland hills where coffee is grown down to the sugar plantations on the coast, and then back again to the hills, the busy seasons of sugar and coffee being at different times of the year. Of course, these laborers cannot move their houses with them about the Island, and they naturally tend to build the cheapest kind of temporary structures. Also very few of them own the land their houses are placed upon. They are mere squatters, or tenants at will, and the land owner may eject them at any time for little or no cause, so that there is no incentive to build substantial structures, and there is no chance of developing that pride in the home which is so essential to the building of good houses. "The inland laborers who live in these huts have been their own architects and builders, and they model their homes after the old type that has prevailed among the hills for centuries. The framework of these huts is of poles and small sticks cut from shrub trees and nailed or tied together at the corners with native fiber ropes. The roofs are generally thatched with a long, tough grass, and the walls are constructed by binding leaves of the royal palm (_yaguas_) with sticks and fiber. The floor is of boards or slabs and is raised from one to two feet above the ground. In some sections _yaguas_ are also used for the roofs, and in the inland there are many huts with walls of slabs from the trunk of the palm trees. These huts are usually divided into two rooms by a flimsy partition of _yaguas_, one room being used as a bedroom and the other as a combined living and dining room. The kitchen is a separate room or shed at the rear, and, probably because of the danger of fire, is usually without floor. The furniture consists of hammocks, boxes for chairs, a rough table, and a few dishes, all made from gourds, except the iron pot used in cooking. The value of such furniture is usually from $4 to $6, and the value of such a house from $10 to $20. "This hut of the inland laborer with its thatched roof and open construction is, in many respects, a much better house than the casual observer is likely to believe. A well-constructed thatch roof, when it is new, offers sufficient protection against rain and excellent protection from the heat of the tropic sun. New palm bark walls are also adequate to keep out the rains. Furthermore, almost without exception, the floors are raised above the ground, so that the surface waters after a shower run freely under the hut and wash away any refuse that may have accumulated, and then the sunlight and winds quickly dry the remaining dampness. In other words, a new well-built hut of this type is a properly ventilated, cool, and reasonably sanitary habitation, and represents the best effort of the laborers to adapt themselves, in their poverty-stricken condition, to the circumstances of their environment. On the other hand, these huts deteriorate very rapidly. Within six months or a year, a dozen varieties of insects have made their nests in the thatched roof, the palm-leaves have cracked, and the floor sags. "One who stands on some projecting point high up on a mountain side in the interior of the Island and carefully scans the hillsides about and the valley beneath, will be amazed at the number of small huts of this type that lie within his view. There are hundreds of them. Every knoll is crowned by its hut; every hillside is dotted by them. No two are ever placed together; each family seeks its own free life. It is practically true that one cannot shout in any part of our Island and not be heard by the occupants of one or more of these huts. "To say that these people are contented and prefer to live as they do, is not true. Customs clinch themselves upon a people so that they appear contented, and these inland laborers have lived under the same conditions for three centuries. Their standards of living are modest, and their desires are few. In this sense they are contented. Yet there is a deep and powerful change coming over them. They are going to the cities in greater number than ever before; their children are attending the little schools in the hills. New ambitions are awakening. When the dull season comes, they cannot find work. There are times when many of them are hungry. They are not contented. "That the Porto Rican laborer is of cheerful disposition is especially true of the so-called _jíbaro_. He has been obliged to find his joy in simple things. He greets you with a smile; he welcomes you to his house and cheerfully divides his cup of coffee with you; he dances with a show of gayety on a Sunday afternoon. He is ever cheerful, but not happy. There may be some customs and prejudices of minor importance that he is loath to change, but in the main he prefers to live as he does because he is obliged so to live. Those who adhere to the _laissez faire_ policy and believe that conditions are good enough as they are, do not know the real heart of these people. They need and deserve and must ultimately receive the opportunity to improve their living and working conditions. "There are two important causes for the erection of plantation houses: (1) For the employer, the practical advantage of having a resident supply of labor on his land; (2) for the laborer, the necessity of living near his work. Laborers who live in plantation houses are more largely dependent upon the plantation than are laborers who live in their own homes. One of the conditions of occupying a plantation house is that the occupants will work for the plantation whenever their services are required. Laborers living in plantation houses, can, therefore, be depended upon by their employers, and this is a great advantage to the plantation owner. Furthermore, such houses are usually much better than the laborers who live in them could afford to build for themselves. Frequently, also, the holdings of the plantation are so extensive that it would not be possible for the laborers, even if they had the money, to buy land upon which to build their houses within walking distance of their work. "There are great differences between the single houses of wood and zinc erected by the various plantations. The better types have been built by employers who wished to provide healthful and comfortable quarters--increase the efficiency of their laborers as well as to hold their labor supply. Unfortunately, at present, such houses are not being erected by the plantations in all parts of the Island. The majority of these houses have been built with the sole purpose of holding as large a labor supply as possible at the least expense. "The houses of this type are usually roofed with large strips of zinc, nailed directly upon the rafters. These roofs are low, unceiled and, as a result, the houses are extremely hot. The walls are of imported lumber, sometimes the boards being matched and in other cases clapboarded. The better houses are painted to diminish the depreciation and to awaken the pride of the occupants in their homes. The walls are six or seven feet high. The floors are of boards and raised from one to two feet above the ground. The houses are set upon posts so that there is a clear space under them that can be easily cleaned. On the interior they are divided by half partitions into two or three rooms and are usually provided with separate kitchens, frequently one kitchen serving for from one to four houses. These houses cost from $70 to $150, the average being about $80, according to their size and construction. This description refers to the better houses of this type and, unfortunately, the majority of the single plantation houses are not so well constructed. "These tenements represent the older type of plantation houses and fortunately very few of them are being built at the present time. Their construction has been prompted by the same reason that has induced employers to build the single type of plantation house--the desire to hold a resident supply of labor on the plantation. They are, however, far inferior to the single houses. "The better rural tenements are built with zinc roofs, board walls and floors, and are raised from one to two feet above the ground. They are unceiled and have no windows. In the inland many of them have zinc walls. The poorer ones are located on low, swampy land and are built of oil cans, pieces of boxes, and other odds and ends. Some of them have separate kitchens and sanitary facilities, but many have nothing except such temporary and inadequate structures as the occupants have themselves built. The first reason for building tenements of this type has been, of course, to house the greatest number of laborers at the least expense. They are long structures, one or two rooms wide, each room an apartment, and crowded with people. Although these rural tenements are not usually being built at present, there are still hundreds of them in use. "The worst housing conditions upon the plantations prevail in the buildings, usually tenements of this type, set aside as sleeping quarters for unmarried laborers. This type of labor is transient, coming for a few months during the busy season and then passing on to another section of the Island. Consequently, they are crowded into whatever quarters may be available at the time. The leaky rooms of the old sugar mills, the worst rooms in the tenements, single houses that have been unused for six months and are out of repair and filthy, are usually used for the emergency--an emergency that lasts from three to six months. Six, eight, or ten hammocks are hung up between bare walls in a room 10 feet by 15 feet and are all filled each night. Conditions of ventilation and general sanitation are frightful. "There is one notable exception. One of the largest centrals of our Island has constructed a large, well-ventilated, and comfortable men's apartment. The floor is of matched boards, solid and clean. The walls are also of matched boards, but there is an open space two feet wide at the top of the walls extending around the building. Overhanging eaves prevent the rain from beating in through this opening. The roof is of heavy paper nailed to a thick wooden ceiling. Frames are arranged in the interior of the building for hanging hammocks, and around the walls are large individual lockers for the use of those sleeping there. Finally, the building is cleaned thoroughly every day. "No description of the housing conditions of rural laborers would be complete without mention of the gardens cultivated by the occupants of the houses. It is safe to say that nine out of every ten laborers in the rural sections, with the exception of those who live in plantation houses where there is no land that they are permitted to cultivate, have planted some sort of garden. It is also true that these gardens are, in most cases, of very little practical use. Well cultivated and productive gardens belonging to rural laborers are hard to find. "The average garden consists of two or three plantain or banana trees, a few tubers, and some medicinal plants. Frequently, there are many and beautiful flowers. Whatever vegetables there may be are poorly cared for and do not produce more than a third of a proper yield. "This subject is of tremendous importance. The soil and climate of Porto Rico are such that it should be able, even with its dense population, to produce most of its food. There are unused plots of ground around practically every hut in the interior of the Island. The decrease in the production of sugar is going to throw many laborers out of work and they will be obliged to raise most of their own food or suffer. Many reasons have been advanced to explain the absence of good small gardens. The laborers themselves say that they do not plant and cultivate gardens because they do not own the land and they are allowed to plant only on condition that they give the greater part of their produce to the landowners. They claim also that it does not pay to break up the ground for one crop and that after they have got plantains, etc., growing they may be obliged to move. It is also true that in most cases they have not money enough to buy the seed or hire the oxen and implements needed for breaking up the ground. "Also, in some parts of the south coast, it is too dry for profitable gardening. On the other hand, landowners frequently say that the reasons why laborers in the rural sections do not plant gardens are lack of knowledge of gardening methods, lack of realization of the benefits that they could derive from good gardens, and custom. Without discussing the relative merits of these reasons, there are two things that must be faced--such laborers must be educated, so far as possible by example, and they must be offered the opportunity to hold land with some fixity of tenure, either by purchasing it on the installment plan or by obtaining leases from the present landowners." WOMAN AND CHILD LABOR FORTUNATELY, the factory system has not been introduced to any great extent into Porto Rico, nor in all probability will woman and child labor in factory employment ever constitute a serious problem. The census of 1910 gives only a total of 1912 woman wage earners in various industries of the Island. This, of course, does not include the woman who works throughout the rural districts, and whose condition constitutes the problem which must be studied and remedied in the Island. The average unskilled laborer in the country districts of Porto Rico does not earn a sufficient sum to enable him to maintain his family in comfort. As a result, the wife, and frequently the children, must contribute to the support of the family as much as they can. In some parts of the Island, the tasks of the country women are largely limited to their housework and the cultivation of whatever garden products they may raise, because such crops as sugar cane do not call to any great extent for the use of woman labor. In other sections of the Island, however, particularly those parts where coffee growing is the chief industry, the gathering and caring for the coffee crop is left, to a great extent, to the women and children. This, of course, results in a financial saving to the coffee grower, as the wages for woman and child labor are much less than for the services of men. The unhealthful results, however, more than offset the advantages gained by adding the mother's wages to the family income. The harmful results from woman labor may be classified as direct and indirect. Under the directly harmful results are the weakened physical condition of the mother, the increased susceptibility to diseases which are especially common in the coffee districts, particularly anemia, and such diseases as are the results of exposure. The larva of the hookworm lives and finds a fertile field for action in the damp and shady regions devoted to the production of coffee, and as the majority of the women laborers are not accustomed to wear shoes, they easily permit contact and contagion from this disease. The strength of children and their ability to withstand disease depends to a great extent upon whether or not they are physically strong at the period of their birth and during the time they are under the direct care of the mother. A mother whose system has been weakened by the debilitating effects of anemia, cannot nourish her child and provide him with the necessary amount of food, and as a result, the child is either anemic, or a victim to malnutrition as a result of introducing solid food into his system before the digestive organs are prepared to take care of such food. Among the indirectly harmful results of woman labor is the necessary separation of the mothers from the children of the family. The mother on going to work, either leaves her children in the care of a neighbor, or leaves them at home where the older children take care of the younger. This deprives the children of the mother's influence and allows them liberty to associate with children who may be undesirable companions, which would be avoided to a great extent if the mother were present to take care of them. The Juvenile Court records in the United States show that 85 per cent of the delinquent children brought before the court have been led into bad habits through the failure of one or both of the parents to take care of their supervision during play hours. Divorce in the United States has been strongly attacked for the reason that it deprives the child of one of his legal protectors. From the same point of view, woman and child labor, which deprives the child of the care of his mother, must inevitably produce bad results in the growing generation. The use of child labor in Porto Rico is not particularly preferred except in coffee districts and in certain agricultural sections where boys are used at certain times of the year to help drive the oxen, or to help in planting the crop. As this is outdoor work it does not have the devitalizing effect upon the child's body which factory work would have, and as it does not require concentrated attention, it is relieved from the monotony which would tend to lower the child's mental ability. The evil results which must be guarded against are those arising from overwork and from association with undesirable characters while the child is not under the supervision of his parents. In addition to this, the child who is engaged at work must lose the benefits which he should be receiving from attendance at school. During the last year, the Department of Education has attempted to solve this problem by changing the vacation period, so that the long vacation of three months will fall at the coffee-picking season in such sections of the Island as are devoted to the production of this crop, and where previously there was a great decrease in school attendance at the time when the harvesting of the coffee was in progress. This, undoubtedly, will greatly help to do away with the harmful results which formerly were the consequences of irregular attendance or non-attendance at school on the part of a great many of the children in the coffee-growing districts. An increase in the number of rural schools so that all of the children of the rural districts can be accommodated, is also necessary before this problem is entirely solved. At the present time, a large number of the children in the country cannot attend school, either because the school in the neighborhood is overcrowded, or because the nearest school is at too great a distance for them to attend with regularity. The removal of these conditions unfortunately depends upon an added appropriation for the maintenance of the Department of Education, and it is doubtful whether the income of the Island will be sufficient to supply the needed increase for years to come. With the gradual improvement of roads, consolidated schools may help to solve the problem, and a half-day enrollment for each group will tend to increase the number of children that can be taken care of. Children who find that they cannot obtain a place in the school will naturally be made use of by their parents for wage-earning purposes whenever possible, but the great majority of parents would not put their children at work if the children were enrolled in school and if irregularity of attendance were to lead to dismissal from the school. Another thing that would help to relieve the situation, as far as woman and child labor is concerned, would be the establishment of a minimum wage for unskilled farm labor, such wage to be sufficient to enable the laborer to maintain his family without the help of money earned by the wife or children. The time of the wife could be occupied in poultry raising and in caring for the family garden, which would also tend to reduce the cost of living for the family and could easily be established, if the landowner were to provide sufficient garden space with each house in addition to the regular wages paid his laborers. Of course, methods of gardening would have to be included in the rural school programs, and the rural teacher should act as a supervisor of these gardens and advisor to the people of the community in which he is employed. The important things to guard against in the life of the family, from the standpoint of the welfare of both the family and the community, are that the mother need not be obliged to dissipate the strength, through outside labor, which she needs in the raising and caring for her family. The lack of proper supervision of the children through the absence of the mother from the home must also be guarded against. In case it can be proved that a father is unable through his own efforts to earn sufficient to maintain his family, a system of mothers' pensions carried on by the government should be established in order that the mother may be safeguarded from want in case of the death of her husband, and that she may not be obliged to help him in the maintenance of the family through the performance of such labor as would interfere with her regular family obligations. INDUSTRIES THE principal industries of Porto Rico are necessarily of an agricultural character, and their importance to the Island financially is shown by the fact that during the year 1914-15 exports to the value of $49,356,907 left for the United States and foreign countries. The imports for the same period reached the amount of $33,884,296, thus giving a good surplus to the Island after the total imports had been paid for. The principal classes of imports are the foodstuffs which might be produced in sufficient quantities to maintain the population of Porto Rico. This is a situation which should receive attention, inasmuch as the Island is capable of producing all of the foodstuffs which it needs for its own consumption. The principal article of export from Porto Rico is sugar and other products of the sugar cane. The article of export second in value is tobacco in its various forms. Third comes coffee; and these three products make up the chief source of wealth. The chief criticism in regard to the agricultural situation of Porto Rico at the present time, is that there has been very little development of small farm products which would tend to make it possible and profitable for the landholder who is in possession of only a few acres to earn a comfortable living. The climate and soil of Porto Rico would, undoubtedly, lend themselves to the production of many fruits and vegetables which could be raised with profit on farms limited in size, and which would enable the small farmer to maintain his family. In addition to the introduction of agricultural products fitted for small farm production, an opportunity should be given and efforts encouraged for the establishment and improvement of such lines of work as can be carried on in the homes or by a small group of people working independently. Among these kinds of work are several, such as the hat-making and basket-making industries, the production of handmade lace and embroidery, and other forms of needlework, which might be carried on by women working independently during the time they have free from the occupations of their household work. These handmade articles of Porto Rico are much sought after by tourists, and there is no doubt but that a large and profitable market could be opened for them in the United States, if efforts were made to establish the production on a commercial basis. The individual living in a small town who devotes himself to hat making is handicapped because he has no steady market for his goods and is obliged to sell them or trade them for whatever he can obtain from retail dealers, who themselves attempt to secure only the limited trade which enters their stores. In order to make industries of this sort profitable to the producers, it will be necessary to secure a new and permanent market for the goods, and either the government or some group of individuals who will not exploit the workers, should act as middlemen to see that the work is uniform in character, and to attend to the handling of the finished products and the supplying of a market for it in the United States. Working as individuals, the countrymen or dwellers in small towns have turned out products which differ in quality and in design, and very frequently the lack of resources has obliged them to construct their products from unsuitable or cheap materials. They have been accustomed to ask for their products as high a price as they thought they could obtain, and often this price is too high for the quality of the article, while sometimes it does not pay for the labor and time which has been expended in the production of the article. By systematizing the work and putting it under the direction of competent supervisors who would specify the quality of material to be used in the production of the articles, and who would fix a price which would fairly represent the time and labor expended by the producer, and who would be able to reject work that did not meet the standard set, the value of the goods would be increased. An equally necessary step in this matter would be the providing of a regular market for the goods and the supervision of production, so that the market would not be overloaded with certain articles and lacking in others. Experiments already carried out have proved the existence of a market for Porto Rican goods in the United States, and the matter should be taken up under the supervision of the Insular Government. In order to produce trained workers for the production of these articles, it would be necessary to establish schools for their instruction which might well be under the direction of the Department of Education. These schools would not necessarily last throughout the year, nor would they require any great expenditure of money for their maintenance. The character of the school should depend upon the locality in which it was established and should be designed only for the training of skilled workmen, either child or adult, in particular lines of work. Short courses of two or three months in these industrial schools should be offered, and the people who attend them should be assured of a market for their goods when they have arrived at a point where they can produce goods of the proper standard. The money expended in the establishment and maintenance of these schools would more than double the earning capacity of the unskilled worker, and the general welfare of the community would be increased by the changing of unskilled and unproductive citizens into trained, productive laborers. It is a well established fact that the trained workman is the most desirable kind of citizen. The unskilled laborer has no steady market for his labor and is the first victim in the wage system whenever a financial crisis causes the employer to lessen his expenses. The unskilled laborer has for sale a product which the average employer is not anxious to obtain, whereas the skilled worker can find a much more steady and regular market for his labor. The lawless, irresponsible class of citizens in any community is always composed to a great extent of the unskilled laborers, and any country which has an overwhelming proportion of its population composed of this class of people is in constant danger of labor disturbances and conflicts between employers and employees. The great majority of the men in penal institutions are unskilled laborers, and if the proportion of this type of citizens is sufficiently large, it may constitute a real danger to the community. With increased ability to earn wages comes the desire to improve living conditions and to rise higher in the social scale. This demands added education, more hygienic surroundings, and better food and clothing. The man who earns fifty cents a day, and that at irregular periods, is an early victim to dissatisfaction and is easily made to believe that life has not much for him in the future, and that he has not been fairly treated by his employer. The skilled laborer who earns double this amount or more, begins to take a new interest in life, as he can see the results which have come from his directed efforts, and values the benefit to his family; he educates his children, sees to it that they are well clothed and fed, and he himself becomes interested in the life and problems of the community as he becomes gradually a person of some importance in its economic and social life. A dependent wage-earning population usually lacks ideals of self-improvement, but the steady-working, independent producer of marketable goods is constantly striving to improve the amount and quality of his products. THE LAND PROBLEM AND UNEMPLOYMENT ONE of the most difficult problems to solve in the case of a small country such as Porto Rico, and one which has a definite bearing on both the economic and the social life of the people, is the land situation. This is especially true when the chief industries are such as lend themselves more readily to large plantation farming rather than to small industries or crops which can be raised profitably on small areas. The most important products of Porto Rico to-day are large-farm products, and they naturally tend to develop a small number of large landowners and a large number of landless citizens. There were in 1910, 46,799 farms operated by their owners, and it was estimated that 600,000 people or 117,647 families in rural sections belonged to the landless class. An equally large proportion of landless citizens is found in urban centers. Of the 10,936 people in Puerta de Tierra in 1913, only 178 or about 30 families owned the land on which their houses were located. It is estimated that there are at least 800,000 people or 156,860 landless families in Porto Rico. In addition to the tendency toward lawlessness that is always found where there is an overproportion of landless citizens, the systems of land rental in Porto Rico have certain unfortunate economic aspects which call for consideration. Part of the renters live in houses which are owned by the proprietor of the land upon which their houses are located, and here the case resolves itself simply into the ordinary relations of renters and householders. This system does not differ to any great extent from the ordinary rent system in the States and has the same disadvantages, both economical and social, which are to be found wherever the rental system is in operation. A second system which has been known as the "Land Rent System" is somewhat different. Under this system a man rents a lot from the owner of the property and proceeds to erect his own house upon the land. He then owns the house but not the land upon which it is located. Usually he rents from the proprietor from month to month or from year to year and has no definite lease of the land, and there is nothing to prevent the owner from raising the rental price or from demanding the house of the renter whenever he feels so inclined. As a matter of fact, it frequently happens that the land is rented to householders at fifty cents or a dollar monthly for the purpose of building houses, and within a short time after the completion of the house the owner of the land advances the price of rent, so that the house owner finds himself unable to meet the increased cost. He then has no choice except to move out and leave his house, together with the amount of work and invested money which it represents, or to sell the house to another person. Usually the house is sold to the owner of the land himself, who thus comes into possession, at a very reduced price, of a house which he, in turn, rents to another individual. This system is extremely unfortunate for the renter and should be abolished by the passing of legislation which would require the granting of a lease for a certain definite period to every person who builds upon land owned by another. A modification of this system is frequently found in the cases where employees build their houses upon the land which belongs to the plantation. In many cases the employer does his utmost to make the life of his tenants as pleasant as possible, granting them garden plots and trying to make them permanent employees by offering them certain advantages. In many cases, however, the employer maintains a company store and requires his employees to purchase all their provisions from the store, thus making a double profit from them, and frequently charging them higher prices than they would have to pay elsewhere. In other cases the employer guarantees the credit of his workmen at a given local store, and on pay day he turns over to the local storekeeper the amount due the workmen and the storekeeper deducts from this the amount which is owing him for provisions and hands over to the workmen what may be left. As the average countryman has little idea of business and is lacking in knowledge of how to keep accurate accounts, and, moreover, since a credit system always tends to extravagance, it frequently happens that the workman is never entirely out of debt. There is a law approved in 1908 which makes it unlawful "for any corporation, company, firm or person engaged in any trade or business, whether directly or indirectly, to issue, sell, give or deliver to any person employed by such corporation, company, firm or person, payments of wages to such laborers, or as an advance for labor not due, in any script, token, draft, check or other evidence of indebtedness payable or redeemable otherwise than in lawful money." Section 2 of the same law provides that "if any corporation, company, firm or person shall coerce or compel or attempt to coerce or compel an employee to purchase goods or supplies in payment of wages due him from any corporation, company, firm or person, such said named corporation, company, firm or person shall be guilty of a misdemeanor." In this way attempts have been made to protect the laborer from exploitation, but violations of the law are not uncommon. There is need for legislation to provide opportunity for the man of small means to purchase sufficient land to establish a home. In Porto Rico there are about 121,346 acres of government lands located in various parts of the Island which might well be opened to settlement at a nominal price. Legislation should also be passed which would provide that private land which is not used for produce for a given term of years might be opened to settlement and sold to people who would occupy it and use it for production. There are many acres of private land in Porto Rico which are not used at all and have not been used for years. The accumulation of land by an individual or a corporation for purposes of speculation or for purposes other than cultivation and use for the production of crops should be discouraged, because the limited amount of land in the Island does not permit such accumulation except at the expense of the poorer class of people. There is at present a law preventing the accumulation of more than 500 acres of land by any company or corporation, but no penalty has been provided for the violation of this law, and it is practically useless as it stands at present. In addition to providing means by which people would be encouraged to own and manage small farms, coöperative organizations for providing a market for the products of these farms should be established. Undoubtedly, the government should start such a movement. The spirit of coöperation is not strong in Porto Rico at the present time, and the small farm holder finds himself at a disadvantage when he has to compete with the larger producer and when he is obliged to find a market for his goods. Some such system as exists in Denmark, where the farmers of a community have joined themselves into coöperative associations for selling their products and the purchase of necessary supplies, might very well be introduced into Porto Rico. This would tend not only to improve the economic situation by bringing better prices and a steady market for the farm products, and by making possible the purchase of necessary supplies in larger quantities, but it would also help to encourage a sense of unity and mutual confidence among the people of a given community, which would be of immense value in raising the standard of citizenship. Community pride and a definite desire for improvement would necessarily follow such a movement. Farming is one of the few occupations which is not influenced by seasons, so far as unemployment is concerned. Practically all of the trades have their busy seasons and their idle seasons, and any movement which would tend to make employment more permanent by providing small farms for a larger number of people, would be of immense benefit to the Island as a whole. The Bureau of Labor of Porto Rico in an investigation which covered the last five months of the year 1913, found that of the total number of union men reported, 27 per cent were unemployed during the month of August, 26 per cent during September, 38 per cent during October, 34 per cent during November, and 46 per cent during December. The men reporting were engaged in various occupations. It was estimated that 28 per cent of all the laborers who reported were unemployed on account of lack of work and not on account of not desiring work. The different trades represented are as follows: among the dock laborers 62 per cent were unemployed, 56 per cent of the carpenters, 47 per cent of the agricultural laborers, 23 per cent of the cigar makers, and 10 per cent of the typesetters reported that they could not find employment. Thus it will be seen that when the individual workman is at the mercy of the employer, he has no independent status such as he would have were he the owner of even a very modest piece of property, and it is inevitable that he will find employment only part of the year. Part time employment tends to low standards of living, because during the period of reduced financial income the standards of living are lowered, and when it is found that the family can exist on the reduced income there is little inducement for seeking work since the desire for economy and saving is not greatly developed among the working classes of Porto Rico. We find a gradual lowering of the moral standard as the necessary accompaniment of low standards of living, and if continued long enough, this low moral standard gradually leads to moral and social degeneration. The necessary steps should be taken by the legislature to provide for the relief of the landless and unemployed classes, as otherwise these people will constitute a serious handicap for the economic and social development of a competent body of citizens. POVERTY THE meaning of the word poverty is relative and depends upon the class of people to whom the word is applied. Poverty, technically, is the lack of an income sufficient to maintain the individual as the society in which he lives demands that he should live. Thus a wealthy man may live in relative poverty if he is in a circle of acquaintances who are much more wealthy than he is. The amount of income necessary to keep one from being classed in the poverty-stricken group decreases with the simplicity of individual, family, and community life. The amount of property necessary to keep one from poverty in the country is not as great as the amount of property necessary to keep one from poverty in the cities, due to the fact that the standards of living in the country are much simpler and require less expenditure of money to conform to the social standards. Pauperism is not the same as poverty. Poverty may be only temporary, depending upon unfavorable conditions which have reduced the income of the family, such as sickness, accident, lack of employment, or other factors beyond the control of the individual. Poverty does not necessarily involve any moral degeneration, while the pauper is entirely dependent on society and is a moral degenerate. Poverty, in general, however, is a dangerous condition, because it generally leads to pauperism. Poverty perpetuates itself if not taken care of; and if the poor man should give up the struggle against poverty, the general effect on society would be injurious, because, through contact, standards of living, social disease, and bad morals are contagious. The competition between capital and labor, which often leads to poverty, is not fair if it is limited to the individual members of society. As the individual capitalist has more influence than the individual laborer, labor must be organized in order to equalize the situation. The competitive process between capital and labor, and between industrial organizations, should be controlled so that people should not be compelled to compete on an unfair basis. The existing conditions in any community are largely responsible for poverty and often for pauperism. They are especially responsible for the attitude of the individual in regard to poverty as to whether he will make a fight to gain a place in society above the poverty-stricken class, or whether he simply resigns himself to his fate and continues to live in a poverty-stricken condition. In this situation, the well-to-do class is more responsible for poverty than any other class, because they have the most power, both legislative and moral, and they must assume for this reason a greater share of responsibility regarding the conditions in any given community. Poverty can be alleviated, but probably not entirely eliminated, and some of the means of combating poverty are the following: First.--Education. By this means the efficiency of the individual in adjusting himself to trade environment is increased. Second.--The self-support of weaker classes through voluntary associations among themselves, such as labor movements. Third.--The proper kind of legal protection, such as factory, and woman and child labor laws, safeguards in factory work, the minimum wage, and accident laws. Fourth.--Rational charity, by which cases of unusual necessity can be cared for. This charity should act as a temporary agency and should not become permanent, as in that case it tends to pauperism. Fifth.--Eugenics, by which the physically and mentally unfit, who contribute largely to the pauper class, may be eliminated from society and prevented from propagating a second generation. Modern charity is more democratic than older charity, and in its workings material aid is made subordinate to moral aid. It is optimistic and believes that radical improvements in social conditions are possible. It believes that the family should always be a self-supporting group, that charity should try to make the poverty-stricken family self-supporting, and that the family should be kept together. One of the improvements in modern charity is what is known as organized charity, which is a sort of clearing house for the charities of a community. Organized charity does not extend material aid so much as it attempts to find work for needy individuals and thus do away with poverty by putting the family on a self-supporting basis. Organized charity would do away with the begging pauper and require him to present his case at the headquarters of the society, where an investigation of the necessities of his particular case could be made and an effort to find suitable employment for him undertaken. The individual who wished to contribute to charity would contribute to the central organization instead of to the wandering beggar. This would have two distinct benefits to society, as it would prevent the disagreeable sights often encountered where begging is allowed in public, and it would prevent the individual member of society from being imposed upon by a beggar who might be in sufficiently good physical condition to undertake work which would bring in enough to maintain himself and his family. The question of organized charity in Porto Rico has been suggested at different times, but it has never met with any great popular response, due to the customs and traditions of a charity-giving people. The Island to-day has a large number of paupers who are entirely dependent upon the charity which they receive through begging, and the custom of giving in response to the requests of these beggars is so widespread, that at the present time organized charity would have a most difficult field of work to undertake. The Island of Porto Rico is prosperous. In the last fiscal year there was a surplus of about $15,000,000 of exports over the imports into the Island; but the distribution of wealth in Porto Rico is not equalized. It has been estimated that the wealth of the Island is in the hands of about 15 per cent of the population, and that the remaining 85 per cent are practically dependent upon uncertain labor and wage conditions for their maintenance. The per capita wealth of a country determines to a great degree the financial situation as far as the average individual is concerned. From the following list of per capita wealth in some of the leading countries, it will be possible to estimate how the average Porto Rican compares with the average citizen of other countries in this regard. The following list is based on statistics of 1909: Great Britain per capita wealth $1,442 France " " " 1,257 Australia " " " 1,228 United States " " " 1,123 Denmark " " " 1,104 Canada " " " 949 Belgium " " " 734 Germany " " " 707 Spain " " " 548 Austria Hungary " " " 499 Greece " " " 485 Italy " " " 485 Portugal " " " 417 Russia " " " 296 Porto Rico " " " 182 From the above table it will be seen that the average individual in Porto Rico is comparatively poor. The economic situation in Porto Rico is giving rise to the formation of classes based on wealth. With the introduction of available markets and modern methods of commerce and industry which followed the American occupation, the land values rapidly increased. The small landholder, seeing the increase in price which came about and believing that it was to his best advantage to sell his land, disposed of it to the representatives of large landholding concerns for what, to him, was a fabulous price. As soon as the money from this sale was expended, the original landholder found himself absolutely dependent upon the mercy of a wage-paying employer. In this way a great part of small landholdings passed into the hands of representatives of large landholdings and caused the formation of the two groups, the capitalistic group, which is limited to a comparatively small number of people, and the wage-earning group, which comprises probably 90 per cent of the population of Porto Rico. As a result we lack in Porto Rico the great middle class of financially independent farmers which constitutes the strength of the United States and the more prosperous European countries. A serious and systematic effort to build up a prosperous and independent middle class, either by encouraging small-farm or other industries, is necessary if the majority of the people are to attain the advantages which they should enjoy, and if the social and economic status of the Island is to be made equitable and stable. The reduced wage system and the absolute dependence of the wage-earning group has given rise to a great many labor disturbances within the last few years. These labor disturbances have included both city and country groups and have in nearly all cases been caused by an effort to better the working conditions and to secure an increase of wages. In the great majority of the cases there is no doubt but that the laborers were justified in asking for better conditions than those which actually existed. That the disturbances sometimes ended in riots and led to the destruction of property is the fault of the educational condition of the people, who are easily excited and led to believe that only by the use of violence can they secure the things which they demand. The relation between poverty and health and poverty and morals is very close. The poverty-stricken family cannot be led to take any great amount of interest in society or health betterment until means have been produced by which the economic situation of the family group can be bettered. The expense of living uses up the daily wage of the ordinary unskilled laborer in Porto Rico, who averages fifty or sixty cents per day for the time that the weather and his physical condition permit him to work. There is also a close relation between sickness and poverty, the average countryman of Porto Rico being only partly as efficient a worker as he should be, due to physical weakness caused by anemia or malaria. Poverty is closely related to degeneration and crime, especially when it descends into pauperism and absolute dependence upon charity. The climate and geographical conditions of Porto Rico have never provided the laborer with any incentive to economize, inasmuch as he has no need for providing against a period of cold, and Nature produces some form of plant or vegetable food throughout the entire year. Clothing and lodging may be of the simplest and still prevent much suffering under such conditions, and with physical weakness caused by disease, the tendency is to live for the present, and to take little care for the future through a system of saving and economy. The average manual laborer saves nothing and makes little effort to accumulate property. Incentive must be provided through education which will accustom the countryman to the idea of accumulation of property in a small way, so that dependence upon charity will not be necessary in the case of a financial or economic crisis. That there is a movement toward saving is evident from the fact that on June 30, 1915, there were savings accounts to the amount of $1,909,969.34 in the various banks in the Island. This, however, is a comparatively small amount, and the younger generation should be given definite instruction and incentives along the line of savings. The introduction of the Postal Savings Bank has been of great value in this respect, and the school savings banks have also done their share in inculcating the principles of economy. SICKNESS AND DISEASE THE Island of Porto Rico is more free from disease than the average tropical or semi-tropical country, due to the active efforts of the medical profession and of the special commissions and departments created for the elimination of disease within the last few years. Nevertheless, a great deal of sickness which might be avoided, part of which is responsible for death, and part of which merely incapacitates the sufferers or renders them less useful citizens, is to be found. The elimination of such diseases as smallpox and yellow fever, which formerly were responsible for a great number of deaths and which descended upon the Island as epidemics with considerable regularity, has been accomplished, and if similar care were taken in the case of less dreaded diseases, there is reason to believe that they could also be wiped out of existence in the Island. For the year 1915-16 there was a total of 26,572 deaths in Porto Rico. Most of these deaths were from diseases classified as transmissible, and, consequently, from diseases which could be prevented by complete quarantine. Following is a list of the number of deaths from the diseases which took the heaviest toll in the Island: Rickets 1,271 Tuberculosis (lungs) 2,125 Malaria 1,290 Typhoid fever 94 Whooping cough 167 Tetanus 109 Cancer 365 Meningitis 344 Epilepsy 57 Acute bronchitis 1,015 Chronic bronchitis 309 Bronco-pneumonia 822 Pneumonia 569 Diarrhea and enteritis under two years 3,485 Diarrhea and enteritis two years and over 870 Infantile tetanus 729 Lack of care in infancy 117 Congenital debility in children 1,145 Uncinariasis 479 Smallpox 9 Diphtheria 26 The two diseases which are of most vital importance to the people of Porto Rico at present are undoubtedly tuberculosis and anemia. The ravages of tuberculosis are more noticeable in the cities, and it has been stated that in 1912, on one street in San Juan, 12 out of every 100 residents died of this disease. Anemia is prevalent throughout the Island, but is more noticeable in the country districts than in the cities, and while the death rate for anemia is not so high as the death rate of some other diseases, yet by reason of weakening the vitality of the sufferers it tends to offer a fertile spot for the incubation of germs of other diseases, and the working and producing power of the individual is lessened with the acuteness of the disease. It has been claimed that anemia was introduced into Porto Rico by the negroes who were brought here as slaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the identity of the disease with the anemia existing in about 20 per cent of all the negroes of the Gold Coast has been determined. The disease was for a long time limited to the coast land and was propagated on the sugar plantations, but after the introduction of coffee, which has come to be the chief product of the mountain regions, the disease was propagated throughout the entire Island. This disease has left its trace among the country people and they have been accused of laziness and idleness when it is probable that the cause of the apparent disinclination for work is due to the weakened physical condition which is a result of the anemia. In this connection, Drs. Gutierrez and Ashford in their work on _Uncinariasis in Porto Rico_ quote Col. George D. Flinter, an Englishman in the service of Spain, who published in 1834 "An account of Porto Rico," as follows: "The common white people, or lowest class (called _jíbaros_), swing in their hammocks all day long, smoking cigars and scraping their native guitars.... Most of these colonists are inconceivably lazy and indifferent. Lying back in their hammocks, the entire day is passed praying or smoking. Their children, isolated from the cities, without education, live in social equality with the young negroes of both sexes, acquiring perverted customs, only to later become cruel with their slaves." Commenting on this statement, Drs. Gutierrez and Ashford speak as follows: "What if these people were merely innocent victims of a disease, modern only in name? What if the brand placed by the Spaniard, the Englishman, and the Frenchman in olden times upon the _jíbaro_ of Porto Rico were a bitter injustice? The early reports savor strongly of those touristic impressions of the Island which from time to time crop out in the press of modern America, in which 'laziness and worthlessness' of the 'natives' are to be inferred, if, indeed, these very words are not employed to describe a sick workingman, with only half of the blood he should have in his body." "True, Col. Flinter, Field Marshall Count O'Reilly, and the rest of the long list of early 'observers' did not know what uncinariasis was. But is it necessary that we have a record of microscopic examinations of the feces of the people they describe to realize what can be read between the lines? Convicts, adventurers, and gypsies may have formed part of the element that colonized Porto Rico, but we cannot believe that these were all, nor that their descendants were 'lazy' and 'worthless.' "We cannot believe that vicious idleness comes natural to the Spanish colonist, even in the Tropics, for the very reason that we have seen these descendants at their very worst, after the neglect of four centuries by their mother country, and after the laborious increase of an anemic population in the face of a deadly disease, whose nature was neither known nor studied, work from sunrise to sunset and seek medical attention, not because they felt sick, but because they could no longer work. "We strongly feel that these writers have unconsciously described uncinariasis. Are the Spanish people considered 'lazy' by those who know them? Were those Spaniards who conquered Mexico, Peru, and all South America, who formed so formidable a power in the Middle Ages, a lazy people? "Is it 'laziness' or disease that is this very day attracting the attention of the United States to the descendant of the pure-blooded English stock in the Southern Appalachian Range, in the mountains of Carolina and Tennessee, the section of our country where the greatest predominance of 'pure American blood' occurs, despised by the negro who calls him 'poor white trash'?" During the year 1914-15 there were 6,644 deaths of children under two years of age, which constituted 28.8 per cent of the total mortality of the Island. Approximately 14 out of every 100 children born, died in infancy, and the death rate for the total population was 5.55 per cent for children under one year of age, and 7.71 per cent for children under two years of age. Diarrhea and enteritis were responsible for 33.8 per cent of infant mortality; congenital debility for 13.14 per cent; infantile tetanus for 10.32; while disease of the respiratory organs caused 16.17 per cent of the infant mortality. It has never been definitely determined just what losses, from the point of view of days of labor, or from the point of view of vitality of the laborer, have been caused by malaria. Mr. D. L. Van Dine, in an article in the _Southern Medical Journal_ for March, 1915, gives the result of some of his investigations among the laboring class in Louisiana. In this study, which was made on one of the large plantations and which covered 74 tenant families with a total of 299 individuals, he shows the losses which occurred from May to October 15, 1914. There were 970 days of actual illness of such a nature that the illness was reported to the physician. Forty-eight out of the seventy-four families were reported to the doctor for malaria. According to Mr. Van Dine, this does not take into consideration mild attacks of malaria which were not reported to the physician, especially in the cases of children. He has estimated that there were at least 487 days lost in cases which were not reported to the doctor. He also estimates that there was a loss of 385 days on the part of the adults who assisted in caring for the malaria patients. It is estimated that there was a loss in days of labor equal to nearly six days and a half for each case of malaria. It will easily be seen that this may be a serious loss of time as far as the production of crops is concerned, and even thus it does not fairly represent the loss, as it does not take into consideration the weakened energy of the man just before or just after the malarial attack. Undoubtedly, there is as great a loss in Porto Rico from malaria as is indicated in the statements just made. It has been reported that in some sections of the Island, 85 per cent of the people were found to have malaria germs in their blood. Between the two diseases of malaria and anemia, there is no doubt that the physical condition of the Porto Rican countrymen is gradually debilitated. Since the American occupation, stress has been laid upon the attempts to eliminate anemia, and this work has received special attention since 1906. During the year 1914-15 there were 32,278 new cases of anemia treated in different parts of the Island, and 15,497 cases were discharged as cured. Undoubtedly a great deal of the illness in Porto Rico is the result of improper food, or food prepared in an improper manner. Malnutrition among children is frequent and leads to such diseases as rickets, which we find has an exceptionally high death rate. In the recent measurements given at the University among university students, it has been found that there was an average depth of chest of nearly half an inch more than is found in the American boy or girl of the same age, and this has been considered as an indication of malnutrition and general softening of the bones in early childhood. A hemoglobin test which was given to the students of the University this year showed that the average among the men was 80.04 per cent, and only 77.6 per cent among the women. The average for Porto Rico should not fall below 85 per cent, and the anemic conditions indicated by the low average is an indication that the disease is to be found not only among the country people, but also among people of the best conditions of life. It will be impossible to settle the economic and social problems of Porto Rico until the question of personal health has been more nearly solved than it is to-day. With a large proportion of the country people sick from anemia and malaria, and with tuberculosis as prevalent as it is at the present time, the weakened vitality will not permit strenuous or continued work sufficient to improve economic conditions to any great extent. Social conditions, depending as they do upon the economic situation, must also be slow of improvement, and the most important work facing the Government of Porto Rico at present is the elimination of such diseases as impair the physical condition of the people and thus interfere with economic and social progress. CRIME GENERALLY speaking, criminals may be divided into three classes: first, those who direct crime but who take no active part in the commission of the crime themselves; second, those who commit crimes which require a considerable amount of personal courage; third, those who commit crimes which do not necessarily involve any great amount of personal courage. There might be added a fourth class, which would consist of those who commit crime through ignorance of the law or carelessness in informing themselves of exact legal measures and in heeding this knowledge when once obtained. During the year 1915-16 there was a total of 53,006 arrests in the Island of Porto Rico. Of this number, nearly 47,000 were men and the rest were women. On the basis of a population of 1,200,000, this would give one arrest for every 22 persons in the Island. Of this total number of arrests, however, only 438 were cases of felony. There were a great many arrests for the infraction of municipal ordinances,--something over 11,000 in all,--and more than 8,000 arrests for disturbance of the peace. Over 9,000 were for gambling, and over 2,000 for petty larceny; about 5,000 arrests were for infraction of the sanitary laws, and nearly 2,000 arrests were for infraction of road laws. This shows that the greater number of arrests was for comparatively unimportant crimes; by unimportant meaning, of course, those crimes which do not directly involve the loss of life or of any great amount of property. The felonies committed during the year were as follows: Murders 41 Homicides 26 Attempt at murder 30 Robbery 5 Rape 15 Seduction 24 Crime against nature 3 Arson 5 Burglary 148 Forgery 6 Counterfeiting 1 Grand larceny 10 Cattle stealing 25 Smuggling 5 Extortion 2 Crime against the public health and security 55 Mayhem 11 Violation of postal laws 5 Violation of graves 1 Conspiracy 8 Falsification 7 giving a total of 438, which includes not only those sentenced but also those indicted and acquitted. From this table it will be seen that a relatively small number of the actual felonies committed are felonies involving loss of life or an attempt against life. In support of this table, and in proof of the fact that crimes of violence are relatively few in Porto Rico, the following table is given, which is a record of the convictions of the district courts of the Island of Porto Rico in criminal cases, for the years 1913-14 and 1914-15, and of the convicts in the penitentiary June 30, 1915: Number of Percentage In peni- Per cent convictions of crimes tentiary in prison 1913- 1914- 1913- 1914- 14 15 14 15 Violation of laws enacted in exercise of police powers 220 842 .23 .45 142 .10 Against persons 286 432 .30 .23 371 .25 Against property 329 312 .34 .17 779 .53 Against the administration of public justice 29 142 .03 .08 21 .01 Against decency 40 51 .04 .03 97 .06 Against good morals 36 35 .04 .02 20 .01 Against reputation 9 16 .01 .01 ... ... Unclassified 10 7 .01 .01 38 .03 --- ----- ----- Totals 959 1,837 1,468 From the above table it will be seen that crimes against persons constitute 23 to 30 per cent of the crimes committed. Of the total number of convicts in the penitentiary for the commission of crime, 25 per cent, during the year 1914-15, were there for crimes against persons. Thus we may definitely state that about 25 per cent of the crimes carried to the district courts of Porto Rico are those which involve attempts against the life or well-being of another person. It will be noticed from the above table that with few exceptions the percentages of crimes for the two years are very nearly equal. In 1913-14, 34 per cent of the crimes were against property, which was not strange when we consider that this was a year of financial crisis, due to the sugar situation. In the same year 23 per cent of the crimes were in violation of laws enacted in exercise of police powers. These crimes included breach of the peace. In the following year, 1914-15, when we had about 17,000 laborers engaged in strikes throughout the Island, and when in addition to this there was a general Insular election, we find that the number of crimes against property dropped to 17 per cent, whereas the number of crimes in violation of laws enacted in exercise of police powers rose from 23 per cent to 45 per cent. This would tend to prove that the average lawbreaker in Porto Rico is easily influenced by economic circumstances and by social surroundings, and that at such a period as that of strikes or elections criminal tendencies take the direction of breach of the peace and violation of municipal ordinances, rather than such crimes as arson, burglary, embezzlement, or forgery. The influence of the election year is also noticeable in the group of crimes prejudicial to the administration of public justice, which includes contempt of court, bribery, and perjury. During the year 1913-14, 3 per cent of the convictions fell under this head, while during the year 1914-15, the amount was 8 per cent. It will be noticed that of the prisoners in the penitentiary the percentage of those convicted for violation of laws enacted in exercise of police power is only 10 per cent, much less than the percentage of those convicted in the district courts. This, of course, is accounted for by the fact that the great majority of violations of these laws are punishable by fines rather than by imprisonment. In the same way, the percentage of prisoners for crimes against property is much larger than the percentage of convictions in the district courts for this crime, due, of course, to the fact that these crimes are more frequently punished by a prison sentence than by a fine, thus giving an accumulation from year to year of convicts, which overbalances the per cent of the court convictions for any single year. According to the report of the Insular Chief of Police, the town which had the greatest number of arrests, in proportion to its population, for the year 1915-16, was Arroyo, where there was one arrest for every 8.47 persons. This was followed by Salinas, with one arrest for every 8.82 persons. The town with the best record was Las Marías, where there was one arrest for every 162.03 persons. On the basis of the records of the municipal courts for the three years of 1912-13, 1913-14, and 1914-15, the judicial districts stand in the following relation as far as the number of criminal cases presented during that time is concerned. The table given shows one criminal case presented every three years for the number of inhabitants indicated in each judicial district. San Juan, one case for every 17.79 persons Rio Piedras " " " " 18.42 " Patillas " " " " 19.94 " Vieques " " " " 19.98 " Salinas " " " " 23.34 " Guayama " " " " 24.62 " Yauco " " " " 24.14 " Mayaguez " " " " 27.50 " Vega Baja " " " " 28.74 " Humacao " " " " 27.31 " San Lorenzo " " " " 30.66 " Ciales " " " " 31.07 " Fajardo " " " " 31.40 " Juana Diaz " " " " 33.00 " Cáguas " " " " 33.01 " Yabucoa " " " " 33.24 " Añasco " " " " 36.29 " Ponce " " " " 36.92 " Manatí " " " " 37.89 " Arecibo " " " " 38.23 " Cayey " " " " 38.29 " Lares " " " " 40.83 " Rio Grande " " " " 40.90 " Barros " " " " 41.09 " Bayamón " " " " 43.87 " San Germán " " " " 44.70 " Adjuntas " " " " 44.97 " Coamo " " " " 45.19 " Camuy " " " " 47.13 " San Sebastián " " " " 48.55 " Aguadilla " " " " 50.22 " Utuado " " " " 54.61 " Carolina " " " " 57.63 " Cabo Rojo " " " " 64.99 " The great proportion of crime in San Juan, as compared with the rest of the Island, is of course largely due to social conditions, inasmuch as it is the largest city in the Island and to a great extent the resort of undesirable characters for this reason. In the second place, as a coast town and the most important shipping and commercial center, it has a more or less shifting population, and a population composed to a great extent of an uneducated type among the working classes. Every seaport town offers opportunities for criminal classes which inland towns do not possess. The second town in the list, Rio Piedras, is the natural outlet between San Juan and the rest of the Island, which undoubtedly accounts for its large percentage of crime. The rest of the towns where crime is found in large proportion will be discovered to have a large floating population, people who are day laborers and who have no particular interest in the community, except as it provides them with an opportunity for earning daily wages. This class of population is always unfavorable to a community and is always to be found where large industries exist which employ a great number of men; and this is especially true when little attempt is made on the part of the employer to render the permanence of the job desirable by furnishing well-provided living facilities for the employee. It is noticeable that in Cabo Rojo, where the percentage of criminal cases is lowest, the population depends chiefly upon the hat-making industry for its support. This is added proof of the value of small industries from the point of view of community welfare. It is noteworthy that there was an immense increase in the number of crimes committed in the following districts: Ciales, where the number of cases increased from 431 in 1912 to 754 in 1915; Lares, where the increase was from 352 to 853; Vieques, where the increase was from 341 to 684; Yabucoa, where the increase was from 589 to 831; Yauco, where the increase was from 867 to 1,490. In the rest of the districts the number of crimes did not vary greatly from year to year, even decreasing in the case of Rio Piedras from 1,101 in 1912 to 911 in 1915. Of course, the difference in crime percentage might depend upon the efficiency of the police force or upon the severity of the Municipal Judge, but undoubtedly it will be found more often to depend upon local conditions such as strikes, or the introduction of large numbers of workingmen from another district to take part in agricultural or industrial work. The change of location and the resulting necessity of accommodation to local surroundings is apt to be dangerous to the morals of the individual. The great majority of the arrests were for crimes which would be termed city crimes. The average countryman of Porto Rico is a man who has a great deal of respect for the law and is inclined to obey it unless led into trouble in a moment of passion or while under the influence of alcoholic drinks. Throughout the country districts premeditated crime is rare, and from the standpoint of improvement of the community, the cities and large towns should be the chief points of attack. A great deal of carelessness exists as to complying with local laws and municipal ordinances, and it is estimated that on June 30, 1915, there were confined in the Insular jails and detention houses, prisoners in the relation of one to every 7.17 inhabitants of the Island. The chief work of the schools along the line of prevention of crime should be the explanation of laws, both Insular and municipal, and the explanation of the reasons for such laws, in order that the individual may be led by his own volition to avoid lawbreaking. Parents should also be impressed with the necessity of inculcating in their children a respect for constituted authority and the necessary obedience to it in order that as the children develop into men and women they may have the proper respect for the laws and those who have been appointed to enforce them. INTEMPERANCE IT is unnecessary to say anything about the evil effects of the use of alcoholic drinks, whether it be from the physical, moral, or economic point of view. The recent agitation in favor of the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in Porto Rico, however, has caused more discussion regarding the situation here than has ever before been the case, and a brief statement of facts may not be unwarranted. The Porto Ricans are not given to the overconsumption of alcoholic drinks. They are not heavy drinkers, and drunkenness is not at all common. Probably every village has its unfortunate inhabitants, few in number, who live usually under the influence of intoxicants. But the great majority of the people are not given to the excessive use of alcohol. The use of wines is common, a custom characteristic of most Latin peoples. Porto Rico produces a great deal of alcohol, it being one of the by-products of the sugar cane. Data are not available to show just how much of the rum and alcohol produced is used in the Island, and how much is exported, or how much is used for drinking purposes and how much for commercial uses. During the fiscal year 1915-16, a total revenue of $1,111,834.30 was paid to the Insular government on alcoholic liquors manufactured in Porto Rico or imported into the Island. This gives a per capita revenue of nearly one dollar, and this revenue was paid on 3,886,705 liters of alcoholic liquors either manufactured here or imported--a per capita allowance of more than three liters for every inhabitant of the Island. It is probably true that a great deal of the alcohol manufactured in Porto Rico was exported, but even granting that one half was not used here, the amount of one and a half liters for every inhabitant is excessive. The average grocery store carries a complete line of bottled drinks, and often beer in the keg, as well. This is one of the first things which impresses the visitor from the States when he enters a grocery store and sees the shelves packed with all kinds of bottles. There is a constant sale for goods of this sort, usually to the workingmen and poorer class of people, who purchase in small quantities, a drink at a time, for three or five cents; many of them, no doubt, attempting to keep up their physical strength by the use of such a stimulant, since a more noticeable stimulating effect is produced by five cents' worth of rum than could be obtained through the consumption of five cents' worth of food. When this custom becomes as prevalent as it is in Porto Rico, it involves serious evil effects. There are few drug users in the Island, and the strict enforcement of the Harrison Drug Law will prevent drug using from becoming the menace to health and morals to the extent that we find to be the case in many of the cities of the United States. There is, however, a large quantity of patent medicines used, many of which have a sufficient amount of alcohol or narcotic drug element to render them dangerous from the point of view of habit formation. Many of the poorer people do not have the money to pay the fees of a doctor and to purchase at a drug store the medicine which he prescribes. Moreover, many medical men do not listen with as much patience as they might, to the detailed list of complaints which the countryman has to offer. As a consequence, the countryman buys a bottle of medicine which has been recommended to him by a friend, or perhaps by the druggist, who often serves as a consulting physician in the smaller towns. If the medicine makes him feel better, he becomes a firm believer in its power to cure. Whether the result produced is actually a bettering of his physical condition, or merely a deadening of the nerves by means of a narcotic, he does not stop to ask. He recommends the medicine to his friends as a sure remedy for all their illnesses, and probably makes of it a household remedy, to be used by all members of the family when they feel indisposed. The author has known of many instances in which medicine has been purchased from patent medicine firms in the States, because of advertisements in the newspapers, and of several cases, where the money was returned by federal authorities with the statement that the company addressed had been closed by the post office authorities because it was found that their claims were not legitimate and that their medicines were valueless. The average Porto Rican places a great deal of confidence in what he reads in the newspapers, and the papers are not as careful as they should be regarding the question of admitting advertising matter. There is no great amount of public opinion against the use of alcohol in Porto Rico, and until, through the schools, the press, or some other agency, the people as a whole can be brought to see the disadvantage of its use, there can be but little accomplished in the direction of temperance and prohibition. The prohibition movement in the United States is not a matter of the moment alone, it is a movement which has been growing for years, and at the present time seems to have the majority of the population behind it. This is not the case in Porto Rico, and it is doubtful whether an abrupt change, unless backed up by strong public opinion, and the authority of the great majority of the people, would accomplish much in the way of betterment of conditions. JUVENILE DELINQUENTS ONE of the most difficult problems that faces organized society to-day is the disposal of delinquent children, and in order to meet this problem, the Juvenile Court system has been established in the United States, and by a law approved March 11, 1915, the Juvenile Court system was introduced into Porto Rico to take effect on June 1, 1915. Up to within recent times juvenile offenders have been subjected to the same laws and the same penalties as hardened criminals, and there is no doubt but that a great many boys and girls who had broken some law or local ordinance, often through carelessness or ignorance, were placed in detention houses with older criminals and in this way became accustomed to the criminal classes and frequently were induced to enter upon a life of crime. The prevailing idea of criminal law is to punish the offender for the offense committed against the laws of the state. Modern social science teaches that it is unfair to boys or girls of tender age to visit a punishment of this sort upon them, especially when it may lead to a continuance of crime, rather than to an avoidance of it in the future. Consequently, with the introduction of the Juvenile Court system the cases are taken out of criminal procedure and placed under the jurisdiction of courts of equity. The trials are usually informal, although the child has a right to a trial by jury in case he is accused of a serious offense, and he has the right to legal counsel, if he so desires. These rights, however, are very seldom exercised, inasmuch as it is coming to be recognized that the judges represent an actual attempt to do what is best for the child and do not represent in any way the prosecuting power of the state. The principal figure in a Juvenile Court is the judge of the court, and wherever it is possible to do so, men especially trained in juvenile psychology should be appointed to this office. A knowledge of children and an understanding and appreciation of their feelings is necessary on the part of the judge, and he should be a person of sufficiently magnetic personality to win the sympathies of the children and to enable him to gain their confidence. To what an extent the influence of a single man may reach in the case of juvenile offenders and how far his influence may prevent crime among children, is well seen in the case of Judge Lindsey, of Denver, Colorado. The second official in the court is the probation officer, who is under the authority of the judge, makes the necessary investigations when cases are reported to him, and presents the facts in the case to the judge of the court. He also must look after the children who have passed through the court to see that the sentences of the court are carried out; and if the children are placed on probation under the guardianship of relatives or friends, he must make visits sufficient in number and often enough so that he can be sure that the best interests of the child are being safeguarded, and if he finds the case to be otherwise, to report the facts to the judge of the court. As the financial situation in Porto Rico did not permit the establishment of a completely new judicial system, it was decided to appoint the judge of each of the seven district courts of the Island to act as judge of the Juvenile Court. The prosecutors and municipal court judges are also probation officers _ex officio_, and the justices of the peace and others appointed by the district judges may be asked to serve as special probation officers. The Juvenile Courts in Porto Rico have original jurisdiction over juvenile offenders, and any case appealed from the Juvenile Courts may go directly to the Supreme Court of the Island. The courts are courts of record and the judges have authority to set the dates and places when and where sessions of the court will be held, to summon witnesses and compel them to appear in court. The jurisdiction of the Juvenile Courts in Porto Rico extends to all children under 16 years of age who are accused of any crime whatsoever, and it also applies to all people under 21 years of age, if they have ever been under the jurisdiction of the Juvenile Court before they were 16. The Juvenile Court also has jurisdiction over adults who have been responsible for the abandonment of children or who have contributed in any way to the delinquency of the child. Of course, this situation is not an ideal one for the best working out of the problems that confront a Juvenile Court system. In the first place, it is practically impossible for men who act as criminal judges or criminal prosecutors to adopt the attitude so necessary for the fulfillment of the work of a juvenile court officer, as their training has been such as to influence them to believe that the prisoner is an offender and that violations of the law must be punished with sufficient severity to prevent a repetition of the offense on the part of the prisoner, and to serve as a warning for others who might be tempted to commit the same offense. The Juvenile Court officer, on the other hand, should regard only the best future interests of the child, and the question with him should not be as to whether a proper punishment may be inflicted for what the child has done, but as to how the future conduct of the child may be bettered after a due consideration of all the influences of heredity and environment in each particular case. From July 1, 1915, to January 1, 1916, a total of 164 cases came before the Juvenile Courts. Of these, three cases were girls accused of petty larceny, and two were charged with being abandoned. The remaining 159 cases were boys. The cause given in nearly every case for the bad conduct of the children was one of the four following: 1. Lack of parental authority. 2. Bad environment. 3. Ignorance. 4. Poverty. Of the total number, 83 boys were accused of larceny, 25 were abandoned children, 18 were accused of fighting, 9 were accused of gambling, 7 were accused of breach of the peace, 4 were accused of attempts at larceny, 3 were accused of stoning buildings, and the rest were accused of various minor offenses. An investigation of the home conditions of these boys brings out some pertinent facts in connection with the influence of a broken home upon the actions of the children. Of the total number of cases presented, 21 lived with their parents, 54 lived with their mothers, 23 lived with their fathers, and 22 lived with relatives, 13 lived with guardians, 13 had absolutely no homes and existed as best they might, with no permanent dwelling place, while 8 lived with friends. Thus we see that in the great majority of cases the children came from homes where they lacked the guidance and authority of at least one parent. Only 50 of the 164 had attended school, and only 15 had succeeded in passing the third grade in the public schools. Of the total number, 85 were illegitimate children, and 15 did not know whether their parents were married or not. It is estimated that the city of San Juan alone has 500 homeless children and that there are at least 10,000 children in the Island who have absolutely no home and who are entirely without the influence of parental control. Doubtless, a great majority of these children are the result of illegitimate unions. What that means to the future of Porto Rico can very easily be imagined when we consider that they are growing up absolutely without control and without respect for authority of any sort. In very few cases do they attend the public schools, and they must remain in this homeless condition, living as best they can, stealing or begging, when honest means of obtaining food do not avail. Thus they grow up learning the vice that can be found among the most poverty-stricken and criminal classes with whom they associate, and forming a group of people with criminal tendencies, and in their turn causing to be produced another generation of children who will be handicapped by the environment and the training which their fathers have received. The Government should colonize these homeless children on government lands where they may be taught a trade and where an attempt should be made to give them some idea of what life may mean to the educated, industrious citizen. The results would more than justify the necessary expenditure of money. The Juvenile Court in Porto Rico has three means at its disposal for taking care of children that fall under its jurisdiction. It may send them to the Reform School at Mayaguez, in case they are boys. (There is no Reform School for girls in the Island.) It may also send them to one of the two charity schools in existence, or it may place them under the supervision of a friend or relative who must respond to the probation officer for their good conduct. The Reform School at Mayaguez will accommodate only 100 inmates, and as these are usually required to complete a rather long term of years in the institution, the number of vacancies occurring in the school each year is very small. The charity schools, both for boys and girls, are also overcrowded, and there is very little chance of the Juvenile Court being able to send any of its cases to either of these institutions. As a result, special wards have been prepared in the Insular penitentiary, and the most serious cases are assigned to these wards until such a time as there is a possibility of their being placed in the Reform School. An attempt is made to give the inmates of these special wards industrial work and some academic instruction, and they are kept absolutely separate from adult prisoners. Of the 164 cases mentioned, the following disposition was made of the children: 34 were sent to correctional institutions (most of these were sent to the special wards in the penitentiary), 38 were placed under the care of their mothers, 24 were placed under the care of their fathers, 9 were placed under the care of both parents, 8 under the care of friends, 12 under the care of guardians, 17 under the care of relatives, and 6 were sent to the charity schools. The problem of juvenile offenders is more acute in Porto Rico than in the United States, due to the fact that there are more opportunities open in Porto Rico for juvenile offenders than are to be found, possibly with the exception of the largest cities, in the United States. The early physical development of the tropics adds to the difficulties of the situation, and also the temptations that surround homeless children even at a comparatively early age. In addition to this, we have many instances of consensual marriages, which offer a temptation to even the very young to lower the standards of morality and to become careless regarding the marriage relation. The large number of poverty-stricken and homeless undoubtedly contributes a great deal to physical as well as mental and moral degeneration, and the combination of these factors may perhaps account for the large number of weak-minded and insane that we find at large in the majority of the towns of the Island. In addition, promiscuous sexual relations undoubtedly contribute to this degeneracy, and if active steps are not taken to prepare these homeless children for better living and to enable them to earn an honest living, they will serve as the propagators of another generation of equally homeless, pauperized, and degenerate citizens. RURAL SCHOOLS ONE of the most perplexing problems which the Department of Education has to face in Porto Rico is the problem of the rural schools. In addition to a school budget too small to provide the number of rural schools necessary for all of the children of school age, there are added difficulties in the way of poverty and sickness among the country people which lead to irregular attendance on the part of the children, poor roads, and the keeping of children out of school in order to help earn money to support the family, especially in districts where child labor may be used profitably; and above all these difficulties is the great difficulty of furnishing the rural schools with teachers who are adequately trained and who have a comprehensive view of their mission as teachers and of the duty of the school to the community in which it is located. The rural school problem will never be solved until we are able to provide teachers who are thoroughly prepared for the work which they have to do, and who look upon this work as being as important as any other profession. At present the rural school teachers fall into two rather large classes: first, the young, inexperienced, and often untrained teacher; and, second, the old, often out-of-date teacher, who has been unable to keep step with the progress of the town schools and has been pushed out into the country. Neither of these classes is fitted to give the best instruction in the rural schools; neither of them considers the position of a rural teacher as a permanent one, and in order to accomplish his best work the rural teacher should be expected to live in one community for a term of years so that he may fully understand and appreciate the problems of that community and become thoroughly acquainted with the patrons of his school. The wages of the rural teacher should be such as will enable him to live in comfort, and as part of his wages the Government might very well assign him a parcel of land, together with living quarters, which would tend to make his residence in the district more permanent and which would enable him to carry on experimental work in agriculture at his own home. There is no doubt but that the time will come when consolidated schools will be established in each _barrio_ for the benefit of the children of the community. In this way, better teachers, better school buildings, better equipment, and a better arranged schedule of studies can be provided, as an untrained teacher who works with poor facilities and who has to handle two different groups of children in the day and who may have six grades to teach, is working under a disadvantage which greatly handicaps the work. This is especially true when the teacher has no permanent interest in the rural school problem and regards his term of office there simply as a stepping-stone to a place in the graded school system of the town. In the annual report of the Commissioner of Education for 1914-15 we find the following data in regard to the rural schools of Porto Rico: "The rural schools are located in the _barrios_ or rural subdivisions of the municipalities. Of the 1,200,000 inhabitants which comprise the total population of the Island, about 79 per cent live in this rural area and about 70 per cent of them are illiterate. At the present time there are approximately 331,233 children of school age (between 5 and 18 years) living in the barrios. Of these only 91,966 or 27 per cent were enrolled in the rural schools at any time during the past year. This shows a decrease from the figures reported last year, but the fact is accounted for by an order issued from the central office prohibiting rural teachers from enrolling more than 80 pupils. In some of the populous barrios the teachers were enrolling 150 pupils and sometimes more. Inasmuch as neither the material conditions of the school buildings nor the professional equipment of the teachers justified such a burden, it was deemed wise, even in the face of an overwhelming school population for which no provision is made, to limit the enrollment to a size compatible with a semblance of efficiency. The average number of pupils belonging during the year to the rural schools was 76,341. The average number of teachers at work in these schools was 1,243. This figure includes a number of teachers whose salary was paid by the school boards from their surplus funds. The corps of teachers for the entire Island is fixed by the legislature each year when the appropriations to pay their salaries are made, the commissioner being charged with its distribution among the various municipalities, but the school boards may, within certain limitations, increase the number allotted to them provided they pay their salaries from any surplus funds at their disposal. The average number of pupils taught by each teacher was about 63. The average daily attendance was 69,786, or 89.7 per cent, which gives an average of about 58 pupils receiving instruction daily from each teacher. About 59 per cent of the pupils were boys and 41 per cent girls. The average age of all pupils in the rural schools was 10.1 years. "The above figures show, in a way, the magnitude of the problem to be solved before the people of Porto Rico can assume in full the duties and privileges of self-government. That enormous mass of illiterates, in its primitive, uncured condition, is not safe timber to build the good ship of state. We realize that there are serious social and economic problems to be solved before the people of Porto Rico reach the desired goal. But the pioneer work must be done by the rural school. Those people must be brought to a realization of their condition and to wish to improve it. The rural school, adapted more and more to actual conditions, is the one agency that can bring this about. At present, we are making provision for less than one third of the rural school population. It is as if we had an enormous debt and our resources did not permit us to pay the interest on it. The problem calls for heroic measures. "Of the 1,243 teachers in charge of the rural schools during the past year, 1,217 or 91 per cent had double enrollment, i.e., one group of 40 pupils or less in the morning for three hours, and another similar group in the afternoon for the same period. The distribution of time among the various subjects of the curriculum depends, of course, on whether the school has double enrollment or not, as well as on the number of grades grouped in any one session. "The course of study of the rural schools extends over a period of six years. Of the 91,966 different pupils enrolled during the year, 49.1 per cent were found in the first grade, 25.7 per cent in the second, 15.9 per cent in the third, 8.4 per cent in the fourth, and the remaining 0.9 per cent in the fifth and sixth grades. Of the total enrollment 93.2 per cent were on half time, the remaining 6.8 per cent receiving instruction six hours daily. "Any enrichment of the rural course of study has been necessarily conditioned by the meager professional equipment of the rural teaching force, many of whom entered the service with nothing more than a common-school education and a few scraps of information about school management gotten together for the examination. Up to the present the academic requirements for admission to the examinations for the rural license have been limited to the eighth-grade diploma or its equivalent, and the examinations for the obtention of the license have covered the following subjects: English, Spanish, arithmetic, history of the United States and of Porto Rico, geography, elementary physiology and hygiene, nature study, and methods of teaching. It has been announced already that in all probability candidates for the rural license will have to present four high-school credits for admission to the examinations. The excess of teachers now obtaining and the increasing output of the Normal School will afford opportunity for selection and will raise the standard of efficiency of the force. At its last quarterly meeting the board of trustees of the University of Porto Rico voted to raise the entrance requirements of the Normal Department from four high-school credits to eight. In view of this, the Department of Education will probably increase the requirements for admission to the examinations for the rural license sufficiently to bring them up to the standard established by the board of trustees for admission to the Normal Department of the University. "The rural teachers are elected by the school boards, subject to the approval of the Commissioner of Education, who pays their salaries from an Insular appropriation. The teachers are divided into three salary classes, as follows: First class, $40; second class, $45; third class, $50. All rural teachers begin at the $40 salary, and after three years of experience pass to the $45 class and after five years to the $50 class. Last year all rural teachers received a salary of $38 only, due to financial embarrassment. "The rural schools were housed in 1,193 separate buildings, containing a total of 1,250 classrooms. Of these 1,193 rural buildings, 320 are owned by the school boards and were especially constructed for school purposes from plans approved by the Department of Education and the sanitary officials. Most of the rural school buildings contain but one room, although not a few have two, three, and even four, the tendency toward the centralized school growing steadily. In all, 24 new rural school buildings have been erected during the year. Most of these are frame structures, but some are built of reënforced concrete and have a very pleasing appearance." THE SCHOOL AND THE COMMUNITY THE movement toward using the schoolhouse as a center for the social activities of the community is gaining ground every year and through this movement the school, as an organization consisting of the teacher and pupils, is rapidly coming to have much more influence in the community life than was formerly the case when the school was considered as merely an organization for the teaching of academic subjects. The need of a social center in the country districts is especially marked, inasmuch as there is a decided tendency among the country people to gather in small groups, based upon relationship or intimate friendship, to the exclusion of the wider interests of the community. Little attempt is usually made to direct in any way the outside activities or the recreation hours of the young people and often their activities take a direction which is distinctly unsocial. The school in adapting itself to the community in order that it may serve as a social center must make certain investigations, because the need of social service and the kind of service which shall be instituted, depends upon existing local conditions. Some of the most necessary lines of investigation to be made by the teacher and pupils before the most effective aid can be rendered, are those which follow: First.--The number of farmers who own the farms upon which they live and the number of tenant farmers. Second.--The average size of the farms; the number of well-arranged homes; the total number of acres devoted to each of the important crops. Third.--The distance to the nearest market, and the number of miles of well-kept roads. These three points will determine largely the direction which any social movement must take, because upon them is based the economic situation of the community. In addition to considering the community from the economic point of view, we may also consider the sanitary conditions that prevail in the district, and the teacher and pupils should make a survey of the district with the following points in mind: First.--The sources of water supply. If water is from open wells, where are they located, and what is the distance from barns and outhouses; are they built in accordance with specifications from the Department of Sanitation? Second.--How is garbage disposed of in the neighborhood; are common drinking cups and the common towel prohibited in the schoolroom? Is the school furnished with a covered water tank, and does it have facilities for washing the hands and face? Do the people of the neighborhood know the regulations of the Department of Sanitation in regard to sanitary conditions; is there much preventable illness in the district, and to what extent are patent medicines used by the patrons of the school? Third.--Are the houses, including the schoolhouses, well ventilated and well located as far as distance from standing water or other mosquito-breeding places is concerned? Is the floor of the schoolhouse swept every night, and are foot scrapers and doormats provided? Does the teacher inspect the outhouses, and are they built according to specifications from the Department of Sanitation? A union of all the patrons of the district is necessary if any movement is to be carried out with telling effect, and the teacher should find out if there is or has been any organization of the men, women, girls, or boys in the district of a social or civic type; has the school done anything up to the present time to improve the social life in the district, and has it ever encouraged local fairs or exhibits of school or agricultural products, and has it founded boys' or girls' agricultural or home economics clubs? How does the religious condition affect the community, and what is the attitude of the community toward these matters and toward social affairs? How do the young men and young women spend their leisure time? Has the school any magazines or farm papers in its library, and how many homes in the district have any library, or any musical instruments? What has been the attitude of the previous teachers in the district toward the affairs of the community; how long has each remained in the district? Are changes in the position of the teachers frequent, and if so, what is the reason? Have previous teachers actually resided in the community or have they lived in the nearest town? Have the previous teachers been professionally trained, and have they taken any interest in the affairs of the community outside of their regular school duties? When the school has succeeded in getting together the information noted in the above paragraphs, it will then be in a position to determine what lines of social activity will be best for the particular community. The organization of men's clubs and women's clubs for the discussion of topics of general interest and for the purpose of arousing a feeling of community interest should be undertaken as soon as possible, the teacher always remembering that the management of these organizations should be in the hands of the members who compose them, and that the teacher should act only as an adviser in case advice may be necessary. The people should feel that on them rests the responsibility of developing the civic and social life of the community, and the teacher should not allow them to shift this responsibility. The organization of boys' clubs and girls' clubs will present no difficulties to the teacher who has made a study of the situation and who is prepared for his work. The boys and girls are in the most easily influenced period of their lives, and whether or not they will develop a sense of civic and social responsibility, depends very largely upon the attitude which their teachers take in regard to these matters. Rural life in any community has a tendency to be monotonous and deadening to the finer qualities. Uninterrupted and unduly prolonged physical labor tends to the detriment of both the physical and the mental abilities of the individual. The isolation of the country home tends to narrow and restrict social intercourse, and the difficulty of travel and communication increases the monotony of country life. These circumstances do a great deal to offset the advantage of living in the country and have contributed a great deal to the stigma that has always been attached to the countryman. If there is to be any reform in this isolated social life of the community, the reform must come about through the schools. The Government can aid to a great extent through the provision of well-kept roads and by the establishment of means of communication such as the telephone and the telegraph. The man who is in touch with the large affairs of life forgets his own petty annoyances in the contemplation of problems of greater importance, while the man who has nothing to think about except the annoyances of his own life tends to become self-centered and narrow. Rural social center work in the United States has made great progress within the last few years and has been successful in practically all the places where it has been tried, especially if the teacher is a person of tact and intelligence. A great deal depends upon the attitude which the teacher has in this work, and it is not enough that the teacher should undertake such work as a burden added to the already overcrowded curriculum of the day, but the teacher should enter into the movement with a sincere desire to improve the condition of the community and bring the patrons of the district to a higher degree of efficiency as workmen and as citizens. In every community there are many young women and young men who are above the average school age who are compelled to work during the day, and who are fast becoming fixed in the monotonous life that has surrounded the older people of the community, who might easily be interested by the teacher and influenced through the formation of social clubs, so that they would form the nucleus for a better coming generation of citizens. The meetings of young people should partake of recreation as well as of serious study, and while the avowed intention of new clubs formed by the school should be for the purpose of bettering the social and civic condition of the people of the community, they must be placed in as favorable a light as possible, for it should be remembered that people will often undertake a movement which will have decidedly beneficial results if it is disguised under the form of recreation, when they would hesitate to give their continued assistance to such a movement if it partook entirely of the nature of serious study. The Department of Education in the Island of Porto Rico is making a special effort at the present time to interest the older girls and the women of the towns in social betterment through the medium of mothers' clubs and girls' clubs, organized under the direction of the teachers of home economics. These clubs have been organized in practically all of the towns of the Island and are meeting with general success. In many cases the girls' clubs assume an aspect of economic improvement in that they undertake the production of certain salable articles such as embroidery or handwork, and the teacher in charge of the group provides the market for the articles produced. Little has been done up to the present in organizing the men and boys into social groups. Boy scout organizations were widely established through the Island several years ago, but on account of the lack of some individual to devote his time to the organizing side of the movement they have decreased in number and in influence. Anyone who is at all familiar with the social situation in Porto Rico, especially in the rural districts, will see at once the necessity of organizations of the kind mentioned above and will be impressed with the possibilities for good in a community which can be exercised by the rural school under the direction of an efficient, well trained, enthusiastic teacher. The democratic form of government which the Island enjoys demands the highest possible development of civic and social ideas and obligations, and in order to fulfill its highest mission the school should undertake such lines of work as will tend to develop not only better educated people of academic attainments, but also better trained citizens in the social and civic sense. RELATION OF THE TEACHER TO THE COMMUNITY IN rural sections the school should be a factor of much more importance than it is in the urban centers for the reason that the country people are almost entirely shut off from other educative institutions such as public libraries, free lectures, and association with their fellow-citizens, privileges which the urban resident is able to use to great advantage. To carry out effectively the mission of the rural school in a community and to make it a center from which there may be spread an influence for social betterment, as well as for intellectual improvement, the teacher is the all-important factor. There are certain duties which a teacher owes to his profession, in case he is working in the country, which cannot be neglected if he is to obtain the results which he should obtain. Following are some of the most important of these duties: First.--The teacher should visit all homes and get acquainted with the patrons. This is important in order that he may get an insight into the conditions under which the people are living, and that he may know the particular difficulties of the pupils with whom he has to deal. Moreover, acquaintance on the part of the parents with the teacher will often aid in avoiding disciplinary difficulties, inasmuch as the parents come to have increasing confidence in him and his work as their acquaintance with him increases. Second.--The teacher should study conditions from all angles so as to adapt the school work to the needs of the community. Even in so small an island as Porto Rico, we have distinctly different occupations centered in different parts of the Island, and the teacher should remember that the majority of his pupils will undoubtedly grow up to take a part in the prevailing industry of the community in which they are born and raised. The schedule and work of the rural school should not be an attempt to imitate the plan of study of the urban schools, inasmuch as the problems are entirely different, and until a teacher has convinced himself of this fact and has made an attempt to model his work on the needs of the community, the school will not accomplish its full mission. Third.--The teacher should live in the district seven days in the week during the school term. More and more the idea is becoming prevalent that rural teachers should be provided with a house and a small plot of ground near the school in order to become permanent residents of the district. The average farmer is very conservative and needs visual demonstration of the merits of new ideas before he will accept them. No amount of theoretical teaching will improve farming conditions to any great extent, and unless the teacher is able to become a demonstrator of his ideas by actually putting them into practice on the plot of ground which he himself manages, he cannot expect to influence to any great extent the agricultural movements of the community in which he works. The school should aim not only for the education of the children who are actually enrolled, but also for the betterment of the agricultural and social conditions of the community. Fourth.--The rural teacher should be loyal to his pupils and patrons. The teacher who feels himself an individual superior to the members of the community whom he is serving and allows this feeling to express itself in his attitude toward them, loses the greater part of his influence through this action. The countryman likes to be met on equal terms and does not enjoy a condescending attitude any more than does his brother who lives in the town. The teacher should have in mind only the benefits which he may bring to the community, and if he actually and actively takes part in the social movements of the place he will come to learn that human nature is the same in the country as in the town, and he will be able to acquire a sincere liking for the people with whom he works. Fifth.--The teacher should so conduct himself outside of the school as to win respect for himself and for his profession. The idea that a teacher's duty to the school ends with the closing of the actual school day is a mistaken one. Any action on the part of the teacher outside of his school work which would tend to lower him in the estimation of his pupils or their parents, inevitably tends to reduce the amount of influence which he can exert. A teacher is on duty constantly and cannot limit his working hours or his working habits to certain defined periods of time. Sixth.--The teacher should stay more than one year in a district, unless a change means decided professional and financial advancement. Short term teachers are often of more harm than benefit to the children of a community. The advent of a new teacher means a change in plans and usually a change in methods of work. These changes tend to upset the minds of the children who naturally like to follow well-defined lines of work. The constant change of teachers also means that none of them stays sufficiently long to learn the needs of the community and the best method of meeting these needs. School boards should offer inducements to rural teachers in the way of increasing the salary for increased length of service, and thus there would be less desire on the part of the teacher to move from one district to another. Seventh.--The teacher should arouse an interest in the school and do his part to convince the patrons of the need of a better school to meet the demands of the present day. A great part of the teacher's work lies outside of his actual teaching, and more and more we are coming to conceive the school as a social as well as an educational institution, and by means of parents' meetings, using the school as a social center and making the schoolhouse a gathering place for the patrons of the district, where they may meet and discuss the problems with which they are confronted, the present-day teacher supplements his actual teaching duties. There are few other ways in which the social needs of the country people can be better met than through the rural school. Moreover, by means of these meetings it is possible to show parents the progress which is being made by their children in the school work and to impress them with the necessity of regular and punctual attendance. One of the surest ways to win the approval of men and women is by interesting them in the progress of their children, and the wise teacher will take advantage of every opportunity which presents itself, and go to great lengths to make opportunities for cultivating the interest of the parents in the school, through this means. Eighth.--The teacher in a rural school should have as the aim of rural education "better men, better farming, and better living." The country teacher who appreciates and realizes this is aware of the chief factors in the solution of the farm problem. He must also remember that he is a public servant and that the public has a right to expect him to put his whole soul into the welfare of the community. The schools are held to be largely responsible for ineffective farming and the low ideals of country life. A great many of our rural teachers are not at all in sympathy with rural ideals and rural customs. They regard their position as merely temporary, and express, even though it may be involuntary on their part, the idea that the town is much preferable to the country, and in this way inculcate in the children a distaste for the life of the country, when it should be their duty to present the best features of rural life in order to persuade the children to remain on the farms. Ninth.--The teacher should be able to discriminate between essentials and non-essentials and omit the latter, thus giving more time to the problems of country life. He should get away from the formalism of textbooks, using them only as tools, and adapt all his work to the needs and interests of the community. He should not attempt to be too scientific, but should teach in terms of child life. And even in his intercourse with the patrons of the school he should put himself, in manners and conversation, on terms of equality with them. The teacher should learn to use his energy for better and more definite planning, and in the schoolroom should do for the children fewer of those things that may be done by the pupils themselves. There is no reason why pupils should not be taught to study and work independently, and the school that fulfills its highest mission trains children to become independent workers. Especially is this true in the country, where pupils should work as well as study and recite. Mere academic training in the rural school will defeat the purpose of the school and will be very apt to produce young men and young women who are dissatisfied with the conditions under which they must live after leaving school. PRESENT-DAY RURAL SCHOOL MOVEMENTS WITHIN the last few years, rural education in the United States has received a great deal of attention, and many plans have been suggested for the betterment of rural teaching. Conferences of state and national educators have been held for the purpose of discussing the rural school question, and out of the mass of school movements, discussions, and ideas which have been presented, there are some which might be made applicable to the situation as it exists in Porto Rico. The following ideas seem to indicate the spirit which underlies rural education of the present day. They are the result of a conference held in Kentucky in 1914 by people who were especially interested in rural school problems: First.--The greatest social need of the century is the organization and consequent up-building of the rural life of America. Second.--This must be the outgrowth of the self-activity of rural life forces. Third.--Outside forces can only assist in the work. Fourth.--There is a need of raising the general level of living in the country in order to keep the brightest and best people from leaving the country in too great numbers. Fifth.--To educate the young in the schools, to elevate their ideals, to arouse their ambitions without raising the level of living and offering them a broader field for the exercise of their talents, may do as much harm as good. Sixth.--The school is only one of the agencies for community up-building. Seventh.--There must be coöperation among the rural life forces, all working together for a common end. Eighth.--The farmer, the country woman, the country teacher, the country editor, the country doctor, and the country business man must all join hands for better living along every line in the country. Ninth.--The community is the proper unit for rural development. Tenth.--The community must learn how to educate, to organize, and to develop itself. In attempting to carry out the ideas expressed in the statements quoted above, emphasis has been laid upon educational rallies, school farms, farmers' Chatauquas, and other means which have as their aim the idea of arousing community pride and community coöperation, not only for the benefit and betterment of the school, but also for the benefit and betterment of the members of the community who are not of school age. A great deal of emphasis has been laid upon rural school extension work, that is, work carried on under the supervision of school officers but which really devotes its main efforts to adults who are living in rural communities. One of the most recent steps in this direction was the passing of the bill known as the "Smith Lever Act" by the Federal Congress in 1914, which ultimately carries with it an appropriation of over $4,500,000 for agricultural extension and rural welfare. Under this bill, Porto Rico receives $10,000 per year for extension work among the farmers, the work being carried out under the supervision of the Federal Experiment Station located at Mayaguez. Another movement which is prominent in rural school affairs at present, is the tendency toward a larger unit of organization for taxation and administration. The rural schools of Porto Rico are already under the municipal unit of school administration, which probably will not be changed, as close supervision demands rather small units of organization. In the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1915-16 a suggestion is made that the appropriation of money for schools throughout the Island be determined by the school population in a given community and not by the taxable wealth of that community. It frequently happens that the wealthiest municipalities are the ones which are least in need of additional school facilities, and this recommendation tends to make the unit for school taxation and appropriation of funds an Insular rather than a municipal unit, as we have to-day. The idea, of course, is based upon the fact that Porto Rico is small enough so that every citizen should be interested in the education of all the children of the Island, and that the movements in education should be Insular in unit rather than municipal. Demonstration schools for rural communities have been organized with a view to showing the people in a definite and concrete way what a school can do for a community. These demonstration schools are usually placed in a central location and put under the charge of the teachers of greatest experience and ability. All of the children in the different grades included in the rural school course have a course of study to complete in the schoolroom, and another equally emphasized course of study to complete in the home and on the farm. Experiments and studies are being carried on which involve the use of every day throughout the year. To accomplish this end, the father and mother have become the assistant supervisors of the home work and the farm work, and they receive the advice, the suggestion, and the instruction of the rural supervisors of schools. While working to get the best possible results from the efforts made, and to establish the facts by samples, by photographs, and by financial relations of cost and return, these undertakings are accompanied by neighborhood meetings of many kinds which have had the effect of enlarging community interest, community support, and community improvement. Out of these efforts have come better social conditions, more harmonious relations, a development of better ideals, and a higher conception of life. These demonstration schools, in addition to being a force among the people in the community where they are located, also serve as educational centers which are to be visited by the other rural teachers of the community in order that the inexperienced and untrained teacher may receive the benefit of the teacher of more experience. In addition, these schools also serve the purpose of experimental schools where many ideas are worked out and put into effect, and new methods of teaching as well as untried methods of farming are given a trial. The rural school situation is being studied more to-day than ever before, for it is being realized that our country schools are not functioning to the best advantage. The social side of the task, extension work among the patrons of the district, consolidated and more efficient schools, and better trained teachers are only a few of the phases of this movement toward making the rural school a real force throughout the country. The movement is gaining ground each year, and though there are many problems to be solved and many difficult situations to be met, yet there is every reason to believe that out of this mass of experiments there will evolve the rural school of the future, which will be a more vital factor in the community than has been the case up to the present day. PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT AND LONGEVITY THE anthropometric examinations given in the University of Porto Rico during the last two years have provided data from which to determine the physical development of the Porto Rican. A total of 1,412 examinations has been made, including 616 men and 796 women. These students ranged in age from fifteen to thirty years. A comparison of the physical development of American and Porto Rican boys and girls of the same age shows that the Porto Rican surpasses the American in nearly every point, at the ages of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. At eighteen the physical development is about the same, but from that time there seems to be little additional growth on the part of the Porto Rican, while the American continues to develop up to and including the twenty-second year. This seems to confirm the generally accepted theory that a person matures earlier in the tropics than he does in a temperate climate. That the slighter physical development is the effect of geographic or climatic conditions, and is not entirely due to race, is proved by the fact that measurements of Chilean boys, who are of Spanish blood, more nearly approximate those of North American boys than they do those of Porto Ricans. The following tables show a comparison of the development of the Porto Rican students with the average development of American men and women. The measurements are in pounds and inches. TABLE I ==================================================================== |Average measurements | Average | of Porto Rican male |measurements of |students from 16 to 28 | American men | years of age |from 17 to 30 | | years of age ---------------------------+-----------------------+---------------- Height | 64.94 | 67.6 Weight | 110.67 | 138.6 Chest, transversal | 10.26 | 10.8 Chest, anterior-posterior | 7.92 | 7.5 Shoulders | 15.06 | 16.1 Neck | 13.05 | 13.9 Chest, contracted | 30.63 | 33.7 Chest, expanded | 33.25 | 36.7 Waist | 27.92 | 29.1 Right forearm | 9.33 | 10.4 Left forearm | 9.20 | 10.4 Right arm up | 9.61 | 11.9 Right arm down | 8.45 | 10.4 Left arm up | 9.42 | 11.8 Left arm down | 8.22 | 10.3 Right thigh | 17.97 | 20.3 Left thigh | 17.83 | 20.2 Right calf | 12.64 | 13.8 Left calf | 12.66 | 13.8 ---------------------------+-----------------------+---------------- TABLE II ==================================================================== | Average measurements | Average | of Porto Rican women | measurements of | students from 16 to | American women | 28 years of age | from 17 to | | 30 years of age --------------------------+-----------------------+------------------ Height | 61.78 | 62.9 Weight | 107.82 | 116. Chest, transversal | 9.35 | 10. Chest, anterior-posterior | 6.93 | 6.8 Shoulders | 13.64 | 14.4 Neck | 11.98 | 12.1 Chest, natural | 29.19 | 29.7 Chest, contracted | 28.57 | 29.6 Chest, expanded | 31.29 | 32. Waist | 25.14 | 24.3 Hips | 33.76 | 35.7 Right forearm | 8.71 | 8.8 Left forearm | 8.61 | 8.6 Right arm down | 8.44 | 9.8 Left arm down | 8.40 | 9.7 Right arm up | 8.99 | 10.8 Left arm up | 8.82 | 10.6 Right thigh | 18.79 | 21.1 Left thigh | 18.65 | 21. Right calf | 12.66 | 13. Left calf | 12.64 | 13. --------------------------+-----------------------+----------------- If it is true that the Porto Rican reaches the height of physical development at the age of eighteen, then we may consider that an average of the measurements of the men and women from and after that age will give us what is practically the representative physical development of the Porto Rican adult. These averages are found in the following table. TABLE III _Representative development of Porto Rican students at the University of Porto Rico, of more than 18 years of age._ =============================================== | Men | Women ---------------------------+----------+-------- Height | 65.87 | 61.83 Weight | 116.21 | 107.93 Shoulders | 15.39 | 13.67 Chest, transversal | 10.39 | 9.34 Chest, anterior-posterior | 8.07 | 6.98 Neck | 13.32 | 12.01 Chest, muscular | 32.74 | 30.27 Chest, natural | 31.87 | 29.45 Chest, expanded | 33.84 | 31.30 Chest, contracted | 31.36 | 28.23 Waist | 27.96 | 25.08 Hips | 32.13 | 33.45 Right arm down | 8.62 | 8.49 Right arm up | 9.79 | 8.95 Right forearm | 9.53 | 8.61 Left arm down | 8.43 | 8.36 Left arm up | 9.61 | 8.83 Left forearm | 9.46 | 8.29 Right thigh | 18.38 | 18.76 Left thigh | 18.15 | 18.61 Right calf | 12.85 | 12.68 Left calf | 12.90 | 12.64 ---------------------------+----------+-------- For the purpose of comparing the Porto Rican boys with boys of Spanish blood, but of another climate, Table IV, which shows the comparative development of Porto Rican and Chilean boys from 16 to 20 years of age, is given. The measurements for the Chilean boys were furnished by the Museo Nacional of Santiago, Chili. TABLE IV --------------------------+------------+---------- Sixteen years | Porto Rico | Chili --------------------------+------------+---------- Number observed | 16. | 340. Height | 64.42 | 64.49 Weight | 105.44 | 123.64 Chest | 31.01 | 33.09 Chest, transversal | 9.69 | 10.34 Chest, anterior-posterior | 7.79 | 7.66 Waist | 27.28 | 25.11 | | Seventeen years | | | | Number observed | 75. | 248. Height | 64.41 | 65.43 Weight | 113.41 | 128.48 Chest | 32.06 | 33.52 Chest, transversal | 10.11 | 10.72 Chest, anterior-posterior | 7.99 | 7.97 Waist | 25.05 | 25.54 | | Eighteen years | | | | Number observed | 92. | 138. Height | 65.72 | 65.86 Weight | 118.43 | 133.32 Chest | 32.61 | 34.33 Chest, transversal | 10.36 | 11.04 Chest, anterior-posterior | 8.14 | 8.09 Waist | 28.08 | 26.09 | | Nineteen years | | | | Number observed | 107. | 65. Height | 65.47 | 65.94 Weight | 111.53 | 133.98 Chest | 32.33 | 34.66 Chest, transversal | 10.27 | 11.35 Chest, anterior-posterior | 8.15 | 8.17 Waist | 27.15 | 26.13 | | Twenty years | | | | Number observed | 78. | 18. Height | 65.91 | 66.18 Weight | 113.32 | 113.52 Chest | 32.36 | 34.71 Chest, transversal | 10.39 | 11.43 Chest, anterior-posterior | 7.77 | 8.33 Waist | 27.58 | 26.44 --------------------------+------------+---------- A study of the census of 1910 showing the distribution of the population of Porto Rico by race and by age periods gives some interesting information. If the situation given there is taken to be typical of general conditions, by considering the number of children of each class under one year of age, we find that the highest birth rate is among the mulattoes; next in order come the native whites of native parentage, next the blacks, and last the native whites of foreign or mixed parentage. The actual percentage of each class under one year of age is as follows: mulattoes, 3.9 per cent; native whites of native parentage, 3.6 per cent; blacks, 2.5 per cent; native whites of foreign or mixed parentage, 2 per cent. The percentage of the population under five years of age in each class tends to confirm this statement. It is as follows: mulattoes 17.9 per cent; native whites of native parentage, 14.7 per cent; blacks, 12.2 per cent; native whites of foreign or mixed parentage, 9.5 per cent. While the mulattoes have the highest birth rate, it is also true that, as a general thing, they are the shortest lived of any of the classes mentioned. The class which generally has greatest longevity consists of the negroes; next in order come the native whites of mixed or foreign parentage, then the native whites of native parentage, and last, the mulattoes. Thus the order, as regards length of life, is nearly the reverse of what it is as regards birth rate. It is observed also that while native whites of foreign or mixed parentage have a comparatively great length of life and a comparatively low birth rate, their children, who fall in the class of native whites of native parentage, have shorter lives and tend to produce larger families, than did the parents. In each class the females outnumber the males, the proportion being 100 females to 99.4 males for the total population, which, however, includes the foreign-born whites, where the males outnumber the females. In the classes of native-born citizens, the difference between the numbers of the sexes is greater than the ratio for the total population would indicate, being the greatest among the mulattoes, where the ratio is 93.6 males for every 100 females. In each class it is found that the women enjoy greater length of life than do the men. The following table shows what proportion of the total number of each class of the population falls under the age groups designated. Transcriber's Note: The following abbreviations were used to keep this table to a reasonable width: M = Males F = Females TABLE V ===================================================================== | | | | Native | | | | Native | white | | Negroes | Mulattoes | white | of foreign| Foreign | | | of native | or mixed | born white | | | parentage | parentage | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- | M | F | M | F | M | F | M | F | M | F ---------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- Under | | | | | | | | | | 5 years | 12.9| 11.6| 18.3| 17.4| 17.1| 16.4| 10.1| 8.9| .8| 2.1 5 to 24 | 42.3| 42.5| 48.2| 47.1| 46.2| 46.4| 45.6| 45.9| 18.8| 20.8 25 to 54 | 34.4| 34.8| 29. | 30.1| 31.7| 31.5| 36.6| 35.6| 64.6| 57.2 55 to 84 | 9.7| 10.5| 4.4| 5.3| 5. | 5. | 7.4| 9.3| 15.6| 19.2 85 years | | | | | | | | | | and over | .7| .8| .1| .2| .1| .2| .1| .3| .2| .8 ---------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- It will be noticed that above the age of 55 there is a larger proportion of women than men in each class. Judging the median age for each group to be the year which divides the total number of that group into two equal divisions, so far as number is concerned, we find the following median ages: blacks, 23; mulattoes, 18; native whites of native parentage, 20; native whites of foreign or mixed parentage, 22; foreign-born whites, 37. These results correspond exactly with the statements previously made regarding the longevity of each group. This would, of course, only give the median age for each class at the time the census was taken, in 1910, but as practically the same age distribution is also found in the census of 1899, it may be concluded that the results are approximately correct. This means that 50 per cent of each group does not live beyond the age indicated, and is sometimes known as the "mean length of life." Data for calculating the average length of life are not available. A comparison of the age groups in the United States and in Porto Rico shows that the proportion in the younger ages is greater in Porto Rico than it is in the United States. TABLE VI ==================+==============+=============== | Native white | Colored +------+-------+------+-------- | Porto| United| Porto| United | Rico | States| Rico | States ------------------+------+-------+------+-------- Under 5 years | 16.5 | 13.5 | 17.1 | 12.9 5 to 14 years | 26.3 | 23. | 27.1 | 24.4 15 to 24 years | 20. | 20.3 | 19.8 | 21.3 25 to 44 years | 25.4 | 26.5 | 24.2 | 26.8 45 to 64 years | 9.6 | 13. | 9.4 | 11.3 65 years and over | 2.2 | 3.6 | 2.4 | 3. ------------------+------+-------+------+-------- Undoubtedly the work of the Department of Sanitation and of the Institute of Tropical Medicine will do much to change the death rate within the next few years, and to prolong life. We may well expect the next census to show a much larger percentage of the population in the higher age groups. 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36489	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) MODERN SOCIETY. BY JULIA WARD HOWE. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1881. COPYRIGHT, 1880, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. PRINTED BY ALFRED MUDGE AND SON. CONTENTS MODERN SOCIETY 5 CHANGES IN AMERICAN SOCIETY 49 MODERN SOCIETY. What means this summons, oh friends! to the groves of Academe? I heard, in the distance, the measured tread of Philosophy. I mused: "How grave and deliberate is she! How she matches thought with thought! How patiently she questions inference and conclusion! No irrelevance, no empty ballooning, is allowed in that Concord school. Nothing frivolous need apply there for admission." And lo! in the midst of this severe entertainment an interlude is called for in the great theatre. The stage manager says, "Ring up Puck. Wanted, an Ariel." And no Shakespeare being at hand, I, of the sex much reproved for never having produced one, am invited to fly hither as well as my age and infirmities will allow, and to represent to you that airy presence whose folly, seen from the clouds, is wisdom; that presence which, changing with the changes of the year and of the day, may yet sing, equally with the steadfast stars and systematic planets,-- "The hand that made me is divine." Modern society, concerning which you have bid me discourse to you, is this tricksy spirit, many-featured and many-gestured, coming in a questionable shape, and bringing with it airs from heaven and blasts from hell. I have spoken to it, and it has shown me my father's ghost. How shall I speak of it, and tell you what it has taught me? You must think my alembic a nice one indeed, since you bid me to the analysis of those subtle and finely mingled forces. You have sent for me, perhaps, to receive a lesson instead of giving one. You may intend that, having tried and failed in this task, I shall learn, for the future, the difficult lesson of holding my peace. For so benevolent, so disinterested an intention, I may have more occasion to thank you beforehand, than you shall find to thank me, having heard me. But, since a text is supposed to make it sure that the sermon shall have in it one good sentence, let me take for my text a saying of the philosopher Kant, who, in one of his treatises, rests much upon the distinction to be made between logical and real or substantial opposition. According to him, a logical opposition is brought in view when one attribute of a certain thing is at once affirmed and denied. The statement of a body which should be at once stationary and in motion would imply such a contradiction, of which the result will be _nihil negativum irrepræsentabile_. A real or substantial opposition is found where two contradictory predicates are recognized as coexistent in the same subject. A body impelled in one direction by a given force, and in another by its opposite, is easily cogitable. One force neutralizes the other, but the result is something, viz., rest. Let us keep in mind this distinction between opposites which exclude each other, and opposites which can coexist, while we glance at the contradictions of all society, ancient as well as modern. How self-contradictory, in the first place, is the nature of man! How sociable he is! also how unsociable! We have among animals the gregarious and the solitary. But man is of all animals at once the most gregarious and the most solitary. This is the first and most universal contradiction, that of which you find at least the indication in every individual. But let us look for a moment at the contrasts which make one individual so unlike to another. We sometimes find it hard to believe the saying that God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth. This in view of the contrast between savage and civilized nations, or between nations whose habits and beliefs differ one from the other. In the same race, in the same family also, we shall find the unlikeness which seems to set the bond of nature at defiance. See this sly priest, bland and benevolent in proportion to the narrow limits of the minds which he controls. He hears the shrift of the brigand and assassin, of the girl mastered by passion, of the unfaithful wife and avenging husband. He gives an admonition, perhaps a grave one. He inflicts a penance, light or severe. He does not trust his penitents with the secret which can heal the plague-sores of humanity,--the secret of its moral power. But see the meek flock who come to him. See the whole range of consciences which cannot rest without his dismissing _fiat_. The rugged peasant drops on his knees beside the confessional. His horny palm relinquishes, without hesitation, the coin upon which it has scarcely closed. Or here alights from her carriage some woman of the world, bright in silks and jewels. With a hush and a rustle, reaching the lowly bench, she, too, drops down, rehearses her wrong-doing, promises such reparation as is enjoined, and asks for the word of peace. Now this confessor, and one or more of his penitents, may be the children of the same father and mother, and yet they shall be as unlike in attitude and in character as two human beings can be. In the closest alliance of blood you may thus find the opposite poles of one humanity. Humanity is, then, a thing of oppositions, and of oppositions which are polar and substantial. Its contradictions do not exclude, but, on the contrary, complement each other, and the action and reaction of these contradictions result in the mighty agreements of the State and of the Church, the intense sympathies and antipathies which bind or sunder individuals, the affections and disaffections of the family. The opposite extremes of human nature embrace, between them, a wonderful breadth and scope. The correlation and coaction of this multitude of opposing forces on the wide arena of the world naturally give rise to a series of manifestations, voluntary and involuntary, changeful in form and color as a phantasmagoria, fitful as a fever-dream, but steadfast and substantial in the infinite science, out of which all things come. The unity in this web of contradictions is its great wonder. How if this unity prove to be the law of which the oppositions are but one clause? How if the perfect unity were only attainable through the freedom of the natural diversity? And what is the substance and sum of this fundamental agreement? The desire of good, the progressive conception of which marks, more than anything else, the progress of the race. We cannot tell out of what dynamics comes the initial of this fruitful and productive opposition. It is, perhaps, the very unity of the object which develops the diversity of action. In the progress of human society the diversity becomes constantly multiplied. Is the sense of the unity lost in consequence? No, it grows constantly with the growth of this opposing fact. As education is enlarged, as freedom becomes more general and entire, the agreement of mankind becomes greater in the objects to be attained for the promotion of their best interests. We can suppose a family cast upon a barren shore, or forced to sit down in the midst of an uninhabited region. All of its members will wish to secure the necessary conditions of life, such as food, fuel, shelter, safety from destructive agencies. If left to themselves, one will naturally bestir himself to find fish, game, or fruits; another will bring in firewood; a third will plan a tent or hut; a fourth will stand sentry against any possible alarm. So a camp is a world in miniature; and if food and drink be plenty, and there be time to think of recreation, some one will carve a pipe from reed or willow, and, in answer to the piping, will come the dance. Or, if our pilgrims are too mystic and solemn for this, hymns will be sung, and the voice of prayer will lift the soul out of the poverty of its surroundings into that realm of imagination whose wealth far exceeds that of Ormus or of Ind. I seem to hear at this point the _non placet_ of those who ask for one thing and receive another. I was not sent for to philosophize, but to represent; and, with regard to the former process, "how not to do it" should have been my study. Modern society is my theme. Where shall I find society for you? Henry Thoreau found it here, in the passionless face of Nature. Here, the shy Hawthorne could dwell unmolested, not even overshadowed by the revered sage who makes reserve and distance such important elements of good manners. Mr. Alcott has transplanted here those olives whose sacred chrism rests upon his honored brow. The society which my words shall introduce here must be neither vulgar nor dull. Now, if I had a flying-machine! Well, I have one, and its name is Memory. Sit with me, upon its movable platform, and I will give you some peeps at the thing itself, leaving you to discuss after me its _raison d'être_, its right to be. In experimental analysis, specimens are always exhibited. Let us look at modern society in Cairo, Shepherd's hotel, and the omnibus that bears one thither. The _table d'hôte_ unites a catalogue as various as that of Don Giovanni. Here sit Sir Samuel and Lady Baker, famous as African explorers. You may all know something of the entertaining volumes which chronicle their discoveries and adventures. Lady Baker wears, at times, a necklace made of tiger's claws. Her husband shot the tiger in the great wilds of Africa, she loading the gun with which he did it. She is Roumanian by birth, English by adoption, fair and comely. Sir Samuel is a burly Briton. They have with them a young African servant, dark and under-sized, with wild, crimped hair. Sir Samuel tells me that this is altogether the best human creature he ever knew. Lady Baker does not resent the extreme statement. I sit at table between a Russian count and an English baronet. The Russian and his two daughters are amiable and simple people. The baronet is a stanch Tory, as you will think natural when you hear his story. He was once a poor boy, hard at work in a coal mine. He used to walk six or seven miles daily, after working hours, in order to acquaint himself with those three Fates who are familiarly called the three R's. Becoming an expert in the coal business, he went through the upward grades of his profession, became a large owner of mines, and has now a heavy contract for supplying the Egyptian government with coal. He is a member of Parliament, and, when I saw him, was ready to start homeward on the first news of a division in the House. It was lately stated in a London paper that Lord Beaconsfield would probably raise him to the peerage before his own retirement from office. So, it may have been done by this time. My Russian neighbors are much troubled about the fate of a poor Italian family whose chief has lost his occupation, and which is thus reduced to the extreme of want. "Why not get up a subscription at this hotel?" say I. They are very willing that I should. I draw up a paper, we sign our names and contributions. Sir George snubs us dreadfully, but gives us a sovereign. Sir Samuel snubs, and gives nothing. The necessary sum of money is raised, and the family is sent to its own country. Here, you see, are Russia, England, and America, combining, on Egyptian soil, to save Italy. This strange mixture is characteristic of the medley of the time. We will not move yet, for the panorama of the table will save us that trouble. Here is one of the recognized beauties of London society. A very pretty woman, with dewy eyes, pearly teeth, dark, glossy hair, and a soft, fresh complexion. A French wardrobe sets off those natural advantages, with its happy disguises and apposite revelations. But it is not good for beauty that it should become a profession. This lady's fine eyes and teeth are made to do duty with such evident persistence of intention, that one absolutely dreads to see the glitter of the one and the flash of the other in the gymnastic of an advertised flirtation. I cannot yet release you. Here are two gentlemen who wear the _tarbouche_ with their European costume. They were rebels in our war of secession, and at its close took service with the Khedive. Ignoring ancient sectional differences, they are very cordial with us, their countrywomen. They would be glad to see their country again, but cannot get their salaries paid, the French and English commissioners having taken the direction of Egyptian finances, and making no allowance for the past services of these American officers, who were dismissed at their instance. We are still at Shepherd's _table d'hôte_, and before us sit an English nobleman and his wife, who have obtained permission to give a _fête_ at the Pyramids. A gay party of English residents and visitors are gathering to accompany them, and presently the carriages and cavalcade start, with a band of music, and a small army of servants. They illuminate the Great Pyramid with colored fires, race their horses and donkeys through the desert, sup and sleep in the Khedive's _kiosk_, not without much boisterous mirth and disturbance. Or, behold me on Bairam day, paying a New-Year's visit to the harem of the Khedive. A row of grinning eunuchs, black as night, guard the entrance. After various turns of ceremonial, we greet the three princesses, all wives of the Khedive, who has many others not of this rank. In order not to give offence, we are obliged to smoke the _chibouque_, a pipe about five feet in length. We smile and courtesy at the proper moment, but find conversation difficult. They are curious to hear where we came from, and whither we are going. I ask whether they, also, enjoy travelling, and am reminded that their institutions do not allow it. These poor princesses little knew that in two months from that time an involuntary journey awaited them, on the occasion of the Khedive's abdication, and departure from the country. We please ourselves, in these days, with the praise of Islamism, and think, quite rightly, that Mahomet and his Koran had their _raison d'être_, and have done their part for mankind. But here is Islamism in modern society. The howling dervishes sit on the ground groaning _Allah, Allah_. By and by they rise, and bend their heads backward and forward until the most eminent among them fall in fits, and are taken up in an unhappy condition. Within a short distance from our hotel, we hear of a company of men met for a religious exercise. One of them chews a glass goblet and swallows it. Another endeavors to swallow a small snake. A third gashes himself wildly with a sword. These are religious enthusiasts. If their faith be genuine, these dangerous experiments, they say, can do them no harm. These things remind us of the temptation of Christ: "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence." But let us leave the city and hotel, and betake ourselves to the historic river, dumb with all its mouths, and poor with all its wealth. Modern society is well represented on board our steamer. Here are two Californian gentlemen, two sons of a Sandwich Island missionary, two or three Italians. Here is a sister-in-law of John Bright. She has visited Alaska, and considers this Nile trip a small parenthesis in her voyage round the world. Here are an English couple, belonging to fashionable life. Here is a clergyman of the same nation, who glories in the fact that Dr. Johnson hated, or said he hated, a Whig. Here is an American who cannot visit the ruins because his whole day is divided into so many glasses of milk, to be taken at such and such times. We land one day at Assiout, and visit its bazaars. The trade in ostrich feathers is brisk, the natives steadily raising their prices as the demand increases, until we find that the feathers might be more cheaply bought in London or Paris. Amid the general confusion of tongues I am accosted by a handsome youth, cleanly and civil, who speaks fair English, and asks if he can serve me. Who are you? A pupil of the American Mission School in this place. He brings two of his fellow-pupils to speak with me. One of these is a girl, whose innocent, uncovered face seems to rebuke the hidden faces of the Arab women, veiled and disfigured to evince their modesty, but making more evident the immodesty of the men. We return to our steamer, followed by a crowd of boys and girls, shrieking and naked, who plunge into the water to get the _backshish_, which some of our party throw them. On the bank stand two beautiful youths, nearly black, with eyes like sloes, and with crisped hair standing erect like a flame above their foreheads. They are clad in kilts of white cotton cloth. Struck with their beauty, we inquire of what tribe they are. "Of the Bischouri," says our dragoman, "a tribe of the desert, who feed only upon uncooked grain." To the last their bright smile pursues us with its pathos. Would that they, too, were pupils of the American Mission School. Would not our vegetarian chief send for them?[1] [1] Mr. Alcott, Dean of the Concord School of Philosophy, has always been known as a vegetarian. We gallop across the sands to a point opposite Philæ, and reach the sacred spot by boat. We picnic among its tombs, climb its _pylon_, and remark upon the beauty of the view. At the first cataract, which is very near this place, an Arab woman shows me her baby with the pride of Eve or Queen Victoria. It has a nose-ring of brass wire, and similar adornments in the top of each ear. On my way back to the boat, my pocket is picked by a cunning youth. The Arabs of the desert will compare in this respect with the Arabs of European streets. A little Arab girl offers to sell me her rag doll, whose veil is bedizened with spangles. A little water-carrier, proud of her English, says, "Lady, give me backshish." This shall end my peep at modern society in Egypt. But one more personal remembrance you must accord me. The scene is a dirty, muddy street in a Cyprus seaport. The time is not far from noon. I am exploring, with some curiosity, the new jewel which Lord Beaconsfield has added to the crown of Great Britain. What a mean, poor bazaar is this; what dull streets, what a barren place to live in, especially since _methymenic_ Albion has drunk up all the best of the wine! I pass a shop, and a bright presence beams out upon me. It is Lady Baker, with her fair, luminous face, full of energy and resource. Sir Samuel, she tells me, is in the back shop buying hardware for a hard journey. For they intend to travel through the island in a huge covered wagon, drawn by oxen, which will be to them at once vehicle and hotel. Where they went, and how they fared, I know not, nor would it here import us, if I did. I only mention the appearance of these friends in this place, because this appearance was so characteristic of modern society, and because so many of its elements appeared there in their persons. The education and high society of England, the court, the literary circles, the almighty publisher, for an intended volume was surely looming in the foreground of their picture. And here I have clearly got hold of one feature of modern society; this is, that everything is everywhere. The Zulus are in London, the Londoners in Zululand. Empress Eugenie, the exploded star of French fashion in its highest supremacy, visits Cape Town. The stars and stripes protect American professors on the shores of the Bosphorus, within view of Mount Lebanon. It would not surprise us to learn that a party of our countrymen had read the Declaration of Independence beside the Pools of Solomon, or within the desolate heart of Moab. In Jaffa of the Crusaders, Joppa of Peter and Paul, I find an American Mission School, kept by a worthy lady from Rhode Island. Prominent among its points of discipline is the clean-washed face which is so enthroned in the prejudices of Western civilization. One of her scholars, a youth of unusual intelligence, finding himself clean, observes himself to be in strong contrast with his mother's hovel, in which filth is just kept clear of fever point. "Why this dirt?" quoth he; "that which has made me clean, will cleanse this also." So without more ado, the process of scrubbing is applied to the floor, without regard to the danger of so great a novelty. This simple fact has its own significance, for if the innovation of soap and water can find its way to a Jaffa hut, where can the ancient, respectable, conservative dirt-devil feel himself secure? The maxim also becomes vain nowadays, that there should be a place for everything, and that everything should be in its place. Cleopatra's Needles point their moral in London and in New York. The Prince of Wales hunts tigers in the Punjaub. Hyde Park is in the desert or on the Nile. America is all over the world. Against this universal game of "Puss in the Corner," reaction must come, some day, in some shape, or anywhere will mean nowhere, for those who, starting in the geographical pursuit of pleasure, fail to find it and never return home. The oppositions of humanity have undergone many changes. Paul characterized them in his day as "Greek and Barbarian, bond and free, male and female." Christianity effaced old oppositions and created new ones. The old oppositions were national, personal, selfish. The new opposition was moral. It struck at evils, not at men, and tended to unite the latter in a patient and reasonable overcoming of the former. I know that the white heat at which its first blow was dealt left much for philosophy to elaborate, for science to adjust and apply. A Jesus, arrived at the plenitude of his intellectual vigor, could only have three years in which to formulate his weighty doctrine, and could not have had these without much care and hindrance. His work lay in the normal direction of human nature. In spite of lapses and relapses, mankind slowly creep towards the great unification which will make the savage animals and the selfish passions the only enemies of the human race. Modern society rests upon this unification as its basis of action. A positive philosophy which Auguste Comte did not elaborate absorbs its highest thought, and dictates its largest measures. And so prophetic souls bid farewell to the old negations. In their view, the lion is already reconciled to the lamb. The taming of the elements prefigures the general reconciliation. The deadly lightning runs on errands and carries messages. The Titan steam is the servant of commerce and industry, meek as Hercules when armed with the distaff of Omphale. Emulation, the desire to excel, exquisite, dangerous stimulant to exertion, is not in our day educated to the intensification of self, but to the enlargement of public spirit and of general interest. The constant discoveries of new treasures in our material world, of gold, silver, iron, and copper, of states to be built up and of harvests to be sown and reaped, are accompanied by corresponding discoveries concerning the variety of human gifts and their application to useful ends. What men and women can be good for may be more voluminously stated to-day than in any preceding age of the world's history. Comparison should be a strong point in modern society. When travelling was laborious and difficult, the masses of one country knew little concerning those of another. When learning was rare, and instruction costly and insufficient, the few knew the secrets of thought and science, the many not even knowing that such things were to be known. When wealth was uncommon, luxury was monopolized by a small class, the greater part of mankind earning only for themselves the right to live poorly. When distinctions were absolute, low life knew nothing of high life but what the novelist could invent, or the servant reveal. How changed is all this to-day! Competence, travel, tuition, and intelligent company are within the reach of all who will give themselves the trouble to attain them. The first consequence of this is that we become able to make the largest and most general comparison of human conditions which has ever been possible to humanity, nor does this ability regard the present alone. The unveiling of the treasures of the past, the interpretation of its experience and doctrine which we owe to the scholar and archæologist, enable us to compare remote antiquity with the things of the last minute. The work of antiquarian science culminates in the discovery of the prehistoric man. Theology had long before invented the post-historic angel. Now, indeed, we ought to be able to choose the best out of the best, since the whole is laid in order before us. But the chronic trouble hangs upon us still. Had we but such wisdom to choose as we have chance to see! The gifts of our future are still shown us in sealed caskets. Which of these conceals the condition of our true happiness? The leaden one, surely, of which we distrust the dull exterior, trusting in the inner brightness which it covers. What is the problem of modern society? How to use its vast resources. Here is where the office of true ethic comes in. No gift can make rich those who are poor in wisdom. The wealth which should build up society will pull it down if its possession lead to fatal luxury and indulgence. The freedom of intercourse which makes one nation known to another, and puts the culture of the most advanced at the service of the most barbarous, is like a flood which carries everywhere the seeds of good and of evil. The ripening of these depends much upon the accident of the human soil they may happen to find. But careful husbandry will have even more to do with the result. To America it was said at the outset, "Prepare to receive the World, and to make it free." Oh, World, so full of corruption and of slavery, wilt thou not rather bind us with thy gangrenous fetters? Wilt not the wail of thy old injustice and suffering prolong itself until the new strophe of hope shall be lost and forgotten? Where is God's image in this human brute who lands on our shores, full only of the insolence of beggary? Far, far be from us ever the methods and procedures which have made or left him what he is. Honor and glory to those patient, good men and women who will redeem his children from the degradation which seems almost proper to him. Theirs be a crown above that of the poet or orator! Modern society, then, is chiefly occupied with a vast assimilation of novelties. This task is by no means imposed upon us alone. While the New World has to digest races and traditions, the Old World has to digest ideas. Thanks to the good Puritan stomach which we inherit, the process goes on here, with little interruption. But across the seas, in Rome, in Germany, in Russia, what nausea, what quarrelling with the fatal morsel upon which Providence compels the lips to close! "_Non possumus!_" say the priests of the old order. "_Possum_," replies the eternal power. The French republic and the English monarchy succeed best in this altering of old habits to suit new emergencies. But where extremes are greatest, the contest is naturally fiercest. A Pope fears the cup of poisoned chocolate, and dares not drink the wine of the eucharist without a taster; the throne of the Russian autocrat is over the deadly mine of the Nihilist. German vanity and diplomacy bring back the shadow of the mediæval muddle. The living heart's blood of humanity comes to us out of these struggles, an immeasurable gift, for good or for evil. Can we be quick enough with our schools, just enough in our government, sincere and devout enough in our churches? What will Europe do with the ideas? What will America do with the people? These are the questions of the present time. One of the serious social questions of the day is the omnipotence of money. People often use this expression in a _quasi_ sarcastic sense, not seriously intending what they say. But the power of money nowadays is such that it becomes us seriously to ask whether there is anything that it cannot do. What ancient strongholds of taste, sentiment, and prejudice has it not stormed and carried? A servant, who sought a place during the first years of the shoddy inflation, asked a lady who was willing to engage her, "Are you shoddy, ma'am, or old family? I want to live with shoddy, because it pays the highest wages." The watchwords of society as often come from its humbler as from its higher level, and this woman unconsciously uttered the word which was to rule society from that time to this. Money, during the last twenty years, has swept over most of the old landmarks, and obliterated them. Religion itself stands aghast at this baptism of gold, which can convert the alien and the heathen, ay, the brigand and the robber, into saints of social prestige. For money bribes the court and pulpit, and buys the press; the highest rank, the highest genius, pay homage to it. If the duke has not money, he will seek in wedlock the most undesirable of women, if she be also the richest. Royalty bows to the splendid cloak of vulgarity, and invites it to dine and drive. Happy day, you will say, for labor, which money symbolizes. Monarchs may well show it respect. But money does not always symbolize honest and intelligent industry. A great fortune often represents transactions akin to theft; sometimes the thing itself, which the world is Spartan enough to approve of, if the criminal can only escape positive detection. Those, too, who have earned their money honestly, leave it to children who turn their back upon the class of which their parents came, and desire to know nothing of the bread-winning arts which they were constrained to practise. We have had, within the last ten years, a severe lesson concerning the instability of wealth in some of its most trusted forms. Yet are we not compelled by sympathy and antipathy, at the bottom of our hearts, to pay it an homage which our lips would not avow? Do we not desire wealth for our children as the condition which shall set our minds at rest concerning them? When we see mediocrity and vulgarity riding in the swift carriage, and wearing the jewels and the robes, bright in everybody's eyes and praised in everybody's mouth, do we not harbor somewhere a regret that we have not, in some way possible to us, set our best abilities to work to secure a similar distinction for ourselves? It should not frighten one to see the court and its underlings venal. Court and courtiers are a show, and money is the condition by which a show lives. But I look into the domain of letters, and ask whether that is still uncorrupted. I do not think that it is. The refined tastes of literary people lead them to value entertainment at the hands of the rich. The luxurious rooms, the abundant table, the easy _persiflage_ in which worldly tact knows enough to flatter recognized talent. Do not these _illicebræ_ seduce, to-day, even the stern heart of philosophy? How unkind was society to Margaret Fuller! It was reluctant to show her the courtesy due to a gentlewoman. Its mean gossip treated her as if she had been beyond the pale of elegance and good taste, verging away even from good behavior. What was her offence against society? A humanity too large and absorbing, a mind too brave and independent for its commonplace. Add to these the fact that she had neither fashion nor fortune. The things she asked for are granted to-day by every thinking mind, and she is remembered as illustrious. But if she could come back to-morrow as she was, poor in purse and plain in person, and assume her old leadership, would Boston treat her any better than it did in days of yore? Would she not find, even among Brook farmers, a looking toward Beacon Street which might surprise her? The literary man, who went so bravely from abstract philosophy to its concrete expression, whose learned hands took up the spade and hoe, and whose early peas were praised by those who contemned his principles, would he, at a later day,--grown urbane and fashionable,--would he have bowed without a pang to his former self, if he had met him, dusty and on foot, in Central Park, he himself being well mounted? I said just now that money could buy the press. This is shameful, because the press, more than any other power, can afford to be frank and sincere. Freedom is the very breath of life in its nostrils, yet is it to-day largely salaried by the enemies of freedom. While speaking of the press, I will mention the regret with which I lately read, in the "Boston Daily Advertiser," an editorial treating of the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. The writer, who denounced this measure with some severity, described the religious body with which it deals as a band of mild and inoffensive men, chiefly occupied with the tuition of youth. He might as well have characterized a tiger as a harmless creature, incapable of the use of firearms. To me the worship of wealth means, in the present, the crowning of low merit with undeserved honor,--the setting of successful villany above unsuccessful virtue. It means absolute neglect and isolation for the few who follow a high heart's love through want and pain, through evil and good report. It means the bringing of all human resources, material and intellectual, to one dead level of brilliant exhibition--a second Field of the Cloth of Gold--to show that the barbaric love of splendor still lives in man, with the thirst for blood, and other _quasi_ animal passions. It means, in the future, some such sad downfall as Spain had when the gold and silver of America had gorged her soldiers and nobles; something like what France experienced after Louis XIV. and XV. I am no prophet, and, least of all, a prophet of evil; but where, oh where, shall we find the antidote to this metallic poison? Perhaps in the homoeopathic principle of cure. When the money miracle shall be complete, when the gold Midas shall have turned everything to gold, then the human heart will cry for flesh and blood, for brain and muscles. Then shall manhood be at a premium, and money at a discount. The French have found, among many others, one fortunate expression. They speak of a life of representation, by which they mean the life of a person conspicuous in the great world. This society of representation has some recognition in every stage of civilization, since even nations which we consider barbarous have their festivals and processions. The ministerial balls in Paris, and perhaps many other entertainments in that city, are of this character. The guests are admitted in virtue of a card, which is really a ticket, though money cannot command it. Many of the persons entertained are not personally acquainted with either host or hostess, and do not necessarily make their acquaintance by going to their house. Everything is arranged with a view to large effects: music, decorations, supper, etc. A party of friends may go there for their own amusement, or a single individual for his own. But there are no general introductions given, there is no social fusion. Now this I call society of representation. It bears about the same relation to genuine society that scene-painting bears to a carefully finished picture. People of culture and education enjoy a peep at this spectacular drama of the social stage, but their idea of society would be something very different from this. Where this show-society monopolizes the resources of a community, it implies either a dearth of intellectual resources, or a great misapprehension of what is really delightful and profitable in social intercourse. Where the stage form of society predominates too largely, its intimate form languishes and declines. The communings of a chosen few around a table simply spread, with no view to the recognition of the great Babylon, but rather with a pleasure in its avoidance; refined sympathy and support given and received in a round of daily duties, by those whose hands are busy and whose minds are full; the inner sweetness of a beautiful song or poem, the kindling of mind from mind, till all become surprised at what each can do,--this sort of society maintains itself by keeping the noisy rush of the crowd at arm's length. Horace says,-- "Odo profanum vulgus et arceo," and I, a democrat of the democrats, will say so too. I reverence the masses of mankind, rich or poor. My heart beats high when I think of the good which human society has already evolved, and of the greater good which is in store for those who are to come after us. But I hate the profane vulgarity which courts public notice and mention as the chief end of existence, and which, in so doing, puts out of sight those various ends and interests which each generation is bound to pursue for itself, and to promote for its successors. The time of poor Marie Antoinette was the culmination of such a period of show. Its glare and glitter, and its lavish waste, had put out of sight the true and intimate relations of man to man. And so, as the gilded portion of the age made its musters of beautiful empty heads, of vanities throned upon vanities, the ungilded part made its deadly muster of discontent, displeasure, and despair. The empty heads fell, and much that was precious and noble fell with them. The great stage produced its bloody drama, and the curtain of horror closed upon it. Critics of society usually direct their invective against the extravagance and shallowness of this exhibitory department, and would almost make these an excuse for the opposite extreme of misanthropic spleen and avoidance. They should remember that while society, from an inward necessity, provides for these musterings and displays, it is unable to provide for that intimate and personal intercourse which individuals must found and cultivate for themselves. So much is left for each one of us to do, to find our peers, and open with them an honest exchange of our best for their best. The family most easily begins this, with its intense and ever-enlarging interests. Out of true family life comes a neighborhood; out of a neighborhood the body politic, and the body sympathetic. If, in the matter of social intercourse, show is allowed to usurp the place of substance, the indolence of mankind must bear its part of the blame. It is far easier to order a suit for the great occasion, than to brighten one's mental jewels for the small one. Many a soldier is brave on parade, who would not shine on a field of battle. Many a woman will pass for elegant in a ball-room, or even at a court drawing-room, whose want of true breeding would become evident in a chosen company. The reason why education is usually so poor among women of fashion is, that it is not needed for the life which they elect to lead. With a good figure, good clothes, and a handsome equipage, with a little reading of the daily papers, and of the fashionable reviews, and above all, with the happy tact which often enables women to make a large display of very small acquirements, the woman of fashion may never feel the need of true education. We pity her none the less, since she will never know its peace and delight. In our own country, at this moment, and in Europe as well, ambitions seem to be unduly directed to this department of social action, the training and discipline for which differ widely from that proper to intimate and domestic life. Hence comes an observable regard, not to appearances only, but to appearance. As actors often paint their faces too highly for near effects, in order to look well at the farthest point of view, so the dress and manners of the day fit themselves for the stage of the great world, and their wearers seem to meditate not only what will not appear amiss, but what will attract attention by some singularity of becoming effect. Hence the supremacy for the time of those whose calling it is to minister to appearance. The tailor has long been a man of destiny, but the modern plainness of male attire has somewhat sobered his pretensions. But look at the sublime arrogance of the ladies' dressmaker, and the almost equally sublime meekness of the victim, who not only submits, but desires to be as wax in her hands. This supreme functionary has, of course, _carte blanche_ for her ordinances. The subject says to her, "Do what you will with me. Make me modest or immodest. Tie up my feet or straighten my arms till use of them becomes impossible. Deprive my figure of all drapery, or upholster it like a window-frame. Nay, set me in the centre of a movable tent, but array me so that people shall look at me, and shall say I look well." I cannot but hate, to-day, the slavish fashion which seems to have been invented in order to intensify that self-consciousness which is the worst enemy of beauty. It is administered by means of a system of lacets and whalebones, which everywhere impinge upon nature. A young lady who is in her dress like a sword in its scabbard (the French name for the fashion is _fourreau_), is made to think of this point, and of that, until her whole gait and movement become an interrogation of her silks and elastics. Can I sit? Can I walk? Can I put this foot forward, or lift this hand to my head? Ask the satin strait-jacket in which your artist has imprisoned you, receiving high compensation for the service. Much as I resent this constraint and restraint of the body, my saddest thought is, that where it is endured the mind has first been enslaved. Foreign travel is so established a feature in American life, that it may well become us to take account of what it costs and comes to. Our own importation of men and women is various and enormous. They who come to us poor and ignorant in one generation, are seen comfortable and well educated in the next. The disfranchised and landless man comes to us, and receives political rights, and the title of a farm in fee simple. No inordinate tribute robs him of the product of his industry, be it large or small. He pays to the State what it pays him well to afford, for protection and education. But how is it with the tribute which Europe levies upon us in the shape of our sons and daughters? Many polite tastes have, no doubt, been fostered in our young men by studies pursued in a German university, or art learned in a French studio. Some of the best scholars of the elder generation have profited, in their youth, by such advantages. But if we go beyond the limits of literary or professional life, we may not consider the results so fortunate. Our society-men sometimes become so depolarized in their tastes and feelings, as to be at ease nowhere but in Europe, and not much at ease there. Those who return bring back a love of betting and of horse-racing, and ape the display of European grandees as far as their fortunes will allow. And our young women? Some of them study soberly abroad, and return to give their countenance and support to all that is improving and refining in their own country. Some float hither and thither, between England and Italy, like a feather on the wave, disappearing at last. The Daisy Millerish chit is seen, offending in pure ignorance of what common-sense should easily teach mothers and daughters. Family groups of Americans are often met with in Europe, in which one figure is wanting. This is the father, absent, in America, working at his business or speculation. These ladies are often companionable people, who enjoy good hotels, galleries, music on the public square, and, above all, the sensation of being far from home. One feels about them a dreary atmosphere of homelessness. As the writer of the Potiphar papers, while watching a gay young mother's performance in the "German," was constrained to think of a complaining babe in her nursery, so, in hearing those ladies boast of their enjoyments, one cannot help remembering with commiseration the wifeless husband and daughterless father at home, who works like a steam-fan to keep these butterflies in motion. More sad still are my reflections, when I hear that numbers of American girls, with large or even moderate fortunes, go abroad and allow it to be known that they seek a husband with a title. These are to be had, of various grades, if the pecuniary consideration be only sufficient. And so many of our laborious men of business work hard in order to earn for themselves the luxury of a titled son-in-law, who has not the ability to earn his own support, and would scorn to do it if he had. American women with money are at a premium in fashionable Europe. Even without this supreme merit, they are favorites. A London journal calls attention to the fact that some of the leading ladies in the fashionable London of to-day are Americans. The versatility of mind and ease of manner which a free and social life develops, appear in strong contrast with the results of the more formal education, which are often seen in the opposite extremes of timidity and assurance. As our young men are often entrapped, while abroad, into marriages which prove to be very unwise and unsuitable, I wish very much that we might bring and keep our young people in a better understanding with each other, so that even the most ambitious among them should be content to marry with their peers, and abide in the home of their fathers. I have been surprised, at some periods of my late visit to Europe, to perceive the growing interest of thinking people in all that is most characteristic of American progress. Again and again, in private and in public, I have found myself invited to discourse concerning the happy country in which popular education has been so long established, that its results are no longer putative, but ascertained and verified. The country in which the fairest woman, provided she be a modest one, can walk abroad by day or night, unmolested and unsuspected, the country in which women have acquired the courage to think for themselves, and to stand by each other. These invitations, though not given in derision, yet seemed akin to the Hebrew refrain, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!" And when I related the facts familiar to all of us, to those who listened with half-incredulous wonder, it was, indeed, like singing the Lord's song of freedom in a strange land. The reasons why Europe should come to America are obvious and pressing. The reasons why America should visit Europe are equally binding and cogent. The material and the moral life of to-day are kept at their height by this flux and reflux of human personality, which carries with it every variety of opinion and experience. Could we only send our best abroad, and for the best reasons! Could Europe only send her best, also, for their best help and study! But the human average profits first of all by its material enlargement, and will be received just as it is. So, our fools go abroad, to show that folly is a thing of all times and climes; and, along with the tidal wave of ignorance and bigotry, the dark, designing Jesuit seeks our shore, and spins his fatal web among our rose-trees. Sun of divine truth, storms of divine justice, sweep away the evil and ripen the good! When I see an American of either sex caught in the vortex of European attraction, depolarized from natural relations, and charmed into alliance with feudal barbarism and ignorance, my heart rings the bell of alarm which is hung at the gates of Paradise. From all these Western splendors can this shallow soul turn away? From these golden fields whose overflow gives Europe food, while her human overflow gives them labor? From this large construction of human right, which lifts the cruel yoke from the neck of labor, and gives him who earns the livelihood of many his own life to enjoy and perfect? From this holy record of pious endeavor, from these splendid achievements of souls inspired by freedom, thou canst go, joyous and triumphant, to pay homage to the lies which are no longer believed by those who profess them; lies whose fallacy America exposes every day and hour to the detection of the world. Thou wilt accept a title, empty as an egg-shell, for a thing truly noble! Thou wilt call a courtier's grimace polite, a courtesan's fashion elegant! Thou wilt curry favor in a vulgar court, courtesying low to a prince of harlequins and harlots! Thou, child of the Puritans, wilt kneel and kiss the hand which, still and sole, disputes with Christ the mastery of the world! Then art thou simply an anachronism! Some are born into the world centuries before their time, some centuries after it. Other attractions, innocent in themselves, and conceivable to all, detain some of our valued fellow-citizens in perpetual exile. The quiet and beauty of English country-life, the literary and artistic resources of a foreign capital, the romances of ancient chateaux and cathedrals, some delicious touch of climate, some throbbing beauty of a southern sky. How delightful we have found these, it is as much a pain as a pleasure to remember! But let us also call to mind the lesson of a well-known fairy tale. While Beauty prolongs her absence, the faithful Beast languishes and comes nigh unto death. While we enjoy these choice delights, the society to which we belong is sowing its wheat and its tares. We are far from the field in which the life of our own generation is planted and tended. Every honest heart, every thinking mind, has its value in the community to which it belongs. Our value, such as it is, remains wanting to our community, and, when its crises of trial shall come, we shall not have been trained by watchful experience to understand either their cause or their remedy. How delightful was Italy to Milton! His Allegro and Pensieroso show that he could fully appreciate both its mirth and its majesty. He returns not the less to live out a life of illustrious service in his own country, where his brave heart and philosophic mind were of more avail to his time than even his sacred song to ours. No one has any reason to be surprised at any new manifestation of human folly. Yet I am sometimes surprised, to-day, by the disrespect which is often shown to the word "Protestant." This name dates, at farthest, from the time of Luther, but the fact for which it stands is as old as human history. Moses made a protest when he led his people out of the luxury and slavery of Egypt to find the free hills of Judæa, and to build on one of them a temple to the God of freedom. Christ made His protest against the hypocrisy and injustice of the old social and ecclesiastical order. England and France have made their protests against monarchical supremacy. Both went back from their daring determination, but the lesson was not forgotten. The Puritans made their protest when they faced the frowning sea and the savage wilderness, in order that they might train their children, and live themselves in the freedom which conscience asks. Mr. Garrison and his associates made their protest against American slavery. Mrs. Butler, of England, makes her protest to-day against the personal degradation of women. Lucy Stone makes hers against their political enslavement. Does society inherit? Is man the heir of man? Whence come those creatures of the present day who smile, and shrug their shoulders, and feebly say, "We don't protest. Our fathers did something of the kind, upon what ground we cannot possibly imagine. But we are quite of another sort. We don't protest." To those courageous souls which, alone and unaided, have been able to face the world's passion and inertia,--to those leaders of forlorn hopes who have seen glory in the depths of death and have sought it there,--to those voices proclaiming in the wilderness the triumphant progress of truth,--to those brave spirits whose strength the fires of hell have annealed, not consumed,--my soul shall ever render its glad and duteous homage. And if, in my later age, I might seek the crowning honor of my life, I should seek it with that small, faithful band who have no choice but to utter their deepest conviction, and abide its issues. Fruitful shall be their pains and privations. They who have sown in tears the seeds of unpopular virtue, shall reap its happy harvest in the good and gratitude of mankind. CHANGES IN AMERICAN SOCIETY. I have been invited to speak to you to-day concerning changes in American society. In preparing to consider this subject, I cannot but remember that the very question of social change is to some people an open one. The supposition of any real onward movement in society is as unwelcome and as untrue to these persons as was Galileo's theory concerning the revolution of the earth around the sun. They will assert, as indeed they may, that the same crimes are committed in all ages, with the same good deeds to counterbalance them and that the capital tendencies of human nature are always substantially the same. This also must be allowed. The error of these friends consists in overlooking the most characteristic and human of these tendencies, which is that of progressive desire. This trait, deeper and stronger than the mere love of change, pushes the whole heterogeneous mass of humanity onward in a way from which there is no return. The laws of human motive and action, meanwhile, remain as steadfast and immovable as the laws by whose application Galileo made his discovery. To discern at once the steadfast truth and its metamorphic developments will be the task of the greatest wisdom. When Theodore Parker invited the religious world to consider the transient and the permanent elements of Christianity, he made a popular application of a truth long known to philosophy. This truth is that life in all of its aspects exhibits these two opposite qualities or conditions. Much is transient in the individual, more is permanent in the race. The study of anthropology, so greatly enriched to-day by discovery and investigation, would give us much to say under both of these heads, but most, I think, under the last. I remember that in reading Livy's history of the second Punic war, in our own war time, I was struck by certain resemblances between the time in which he wrote and that in which I read him. When I learned from his pages that the merchants and ship-owners of ancient Rome managed to impose the most worthless of their vessels upon the government for the transport of troops and provisions, I exclaimed, "What Yankees these Romans were!" In reading some well-known satires of Horace I have been struck with the resemblance of the ancient to the modern bore. Boileau's famous take-off of the dinner given by a _parvenu_ is scarcely more than a French adaptation of the feast of Nasidienus, as described by the Roman bard who was Boileau's model. In Virgil's account of the good housewife, who rises early in order to measure out the work of the household, and in Solomon's description of the thrifty woman of his time, one sees the value set upon feminine industry and economy in times far removed from our own, yet resembling it in this appreciation. On the other hand, the dissimilarity of ancient and modern society is equally seen in the same mirror of literature. The mention of matters which, by common consent, are banished from decent speech to-day, the position of Woman, from the vestal virgin buried alive for breach of trust to the _devium scortum_, whom Horace frankly invites to his feast, the gross superstition which saw in religion little save portents and propitiation,--these mark on the dial of history an hour as distant from our own in sympathy as in time. You will wish to hear from me some account of changes which have come within the sphere of my own observation, both as I have been able to see for myself, and to compare what I have seen with what I have received from the generation immediately preceding my own. Let me remind you that, with all the advantages of personal observation, it may be more difficult for us to give a true account of the age to which we belong than of more distant times, upon which thought and reflection have already done their critical and explanatory work. Familiarity so dulls the edge of perception, as to make us least acquainted with things and persons making part of our daily life. Mindful of these difficulties, I will do my best to characterize the threescore years which have carried me into and out of the heart of the nineteenth century. I have seen in this time a great growth in the direction of liberal thought, of popular government, of just laws and useful institutions. I have seen human powers so multiplied by mechanical appliances as to destroy the old measures of time and distance, and almost to justify the veto once laid by the great Napoleon upon the use of the word "impossible": "_Ne me dîtes jamais ce bête de mot_," said he; and it has now become more _bête_ than ever. What feature of society has not changed in the phantasmagoria of these wonderful lustres? Each decade has made a fool of the one which went before it. Whether in the region of extended observation and experiment, or in that of subtle and profound investigation, human effort has seemed in this time to put itself at compound interest, working at once with matters infinitely little and with matters infinitely great, and surely introducing mankind to a higher plane of comfort and co-operation than has been reached in anterior ages. While the mechanism of life has thus been brought much nearer to perfection by the labor of our age, the principles of life remain such as they have always been. Pile luxury as high as you will, health is better, and the body of a well-fed and not over-worked ploughman is, nine times out of ten, a better possession than the body of a man of fortune, especially if he be at the same time a man of pleasure. Marshal and gild the pomp of circumstance, and do it homage with bated breath, character remains the true majesty, honor and intelligence its prime ministers. Money can help people to education, by paying for the support of those who can give it. But money cannot excuse its possessor from the smallest of the mental operations through which, if at all, a man comes to know what, as a man, he should know. The great _desiderata_ of humanity still remain these: to preserve the integrity of nature, the purity of sentiment, and the coherence of thought. The great extension of educational opportunities which we see to-day should make the attainment of these objects easier than in ages of less instruction. But while the pursuit of them is ever normal to the human race, the inherent difficulties of their attainment remain undiminished. Without self-discipline and self-sacrifice, no man to-day attains true education, or the dignity of true manhood. For here comes in the terrible fact of man's freedom as a moral agent. Could our age possess and administer the powers of the universe to its heart's content, in that heart would yet rest the issues of its life and of its death. The period of which I have to speak has certainly witnessed great improvements in the theory of hygiene. The old heroic treatment of diseases has nearly disappeared. The nauseous draughts, the blood-letting and blisters, have given place to moderate medication, the choice of climate and the regulation of diet. Women have been admitted as copartners with men in the guardianship of the public health. Athletic sports help the student to fresh blood and efficient muscle, without which the brain sickens and perishes. But even in this department how much is left to desire and to do! Our greatest and richest city is still festering with the corruption that breeds disease. No board of health seems to have power to sweep its side streets and dark alleys. Fashion keeps her avenues clean, and neglects the rest of the vast domain, for which she has her reward in many a ghastly epidemic. The late Edward Clarke, of Boston,--heaven rest his soul!--could alarm the whole continent with his threats of the physical evils which the more perfect education of one sex would entail on both. But he has left no public protest against the monstrosities of toilet which deform and mutilate the bodies of women to-day, nor against the selfish frivolity of life in both sexes, which is equally inimical to true motherhood and to true fatherhood. I have seen in fashions of dress and furniture the curious cycle which my elders foretold, and which it takes, I should think, half a century to fulfil. My earliest childish remembrance is of the slim dresses which display as much as is possible of the outlines of the figure. I remember the _élégantes_ of Gotham walking the one fashionable street of fifty-five years ago, attired in pelisses of pink or blue satin. A white satin cloak trimmed with dark fur seemed, even to my childish observation, a chill costume for a pedestrian in the heart of winter. My mother's last Paris bonnet, bought probably in 1825, appeared to her children, twenty years later, such a caricature, that pious hands destroyed it, in order that we might have no ludicrous association with the sweet young creature whose death had left us babes in the nursery. After many fluctuations and oscillations, I have seen modern head-gear near of kin to the subject of this holocaust. I have seen the old forms and colors return to popular favor. I have even heard that the very white satin cloak, which seemed _outré_ to the critic of six years, has been worn and greatly admired in the recent gay world of Paris. The return in these cases, it must be said, is not to the identical point of departure. Progress, according to some thinkers, follows a spiral, and is neither shut in a circle nor extended in a straight line. The hoops of our great-grandmothers are not the hoops which we remember to have seen or worn. Their eelskin dresses are not the model of ours. Still, the recurrence of the same vein of fancy marks a periodical approximation to the region or belt of influence in which certain forgotten possibilities suggest themselves to the seeker of novelty, and in which the capricious, antithetical fancy delights to crown with honor all that it found most devoid of beauty a few lustres ago. Does this encyclical tendency in the familiar æsthetics of life imply a corresponding tendency in the moral and intellectual movement of mankind? I fear that it does. I fear that seriousness and frivolity, greed and disinterest, extravagance and economy, in so far as these are social and sympathetic phenomena, do succeed each other in the movement of the ages. But here the device of the spiral can save us. We must make the round, but we may make it with an upward inclination. "Let there be light!" is sometimes said in accents so emphatic, that the universe remembers and cannot forget it. We carry our problem slowly forward. With all the ups and downs of every age, humanity constantly rises. Individuals may preserve all its early delusions, commit all its primitive crimes; but to the body of civilized mankind, the return to barbarism is impossible. The æsthetic elaboration of ethical ideas, always a feature of civilization, becomes in our day a task of such prominence as to engage the zeal and labor of those even who have little natural facility for any of its processes. The ignoring of this department of culture by our Puritan ancestors, had much to do with the bareness of surrounding and poverty of amusement which almost affright us in the record of their society. With all their insufficiency, these periods of severe simplicity are of great importance in the history of a people. The temporary withdrawal from the sensible and pleasurable to the severe verities of ethical study accumulates a reserve force which is sure to be very precious in the emergencies to which all nations are exposed. The reaction against the extreme of this is as likely to be excessive as was the action itself. If we tend to any extreme, nowadays, it is to that of making art take the place of thought, as may somewhat appear in the general rage for illustration and decoration. The ministrations of art to ethics are indeed unspeakably grand and helpful. The cathedrals of the Old World, and its rich and varied galleries, preserve for us the fresh and naïve spirit of mediæval piety. Religious art, indeed, becomes almost secularized by its repetitions; yet each of its great works has the isolation of its own atmosphere, and speaks its own language, which we reverently learn while we look upon it. Of all arts, music is the one most intimately interwoven with the ethical consciousness of our own time. The oratorios of Handel and of Mendelssohn so blend the sacred text and the divine music, that we think of the two together, and almost as of things so wedded by God, that man must not seek to put them asunder. When I have sat to sing in the chorus of the Messiah, and have heard the tenor take up the sweet burden of "Comfort ye my people!" I have felt the whole chain of divine consolation which those historic words express, and which link the prophet of pre-Christian times to the saints and sinners of to-day. In far-off Palestine I have been shown the plain on which it is supposed that the shepherds were tending their flocks when the birth of the Messiah was announced to them. But as I turned my eyes to view it, my memory was full of that pastoral symphony of Handel's, in which the divine glory seems just muffled enough to be intelligible to our abrupt and hasty sense. Nay, I lately heard a beloved voice which read the chapter of Elijah's wonderful experiences in the wilderness. While I listened, bar after bar of Mendelssohn's music struck itself off in the resonant chamber of memory, and I thanked the Hebrew of our own time for giving the intensity of life to that mystical drama of insight and heroism. The transcendentalists of our own country made great account of the relation of art to ethics, and perhaps avenged the Puritan partiality by giving art the leading, and ethics the subordinate place in their statements and endeavors. But the masters of the transcendental philosophy in Europe did not so. Spinoza, Kant, and Fichte were idealists of the severest type. Standing for the moment between the two, I will only say that the danger of forgetting the high labors and rewards of thought in the pleasure of beautiful sights and sounds is one to which the highest civilization stands most exposed. To think aright, to resolve and pray aright, we must retire from those delights to the contemplation of that whose sublimity they can but faintly image, as we pass with joy from the likeness of our friend into his presence. Love of ornament is by no means synonymous with love of the beautiful. The taste which overloads dress and architecture with superfluous irrelevancies, is often quite in opposition to that true sense of beauty which is indispensable to the artist and precious to the philosopher. "[Greek: To kalon]," the Greeks said. Was it a naïve utterance on their part? Was it through their poverty of expression, or their want of experience, that the same word with them signified the good and the beautiful? No. It was through the depth of their insight, and the power of their mental appreciation, that they so stamped this golden word as that it should show the supreme of form on one of its faces, and the supreme of spirit on the other. The social domain of religion has also undergone a change. In my early life I remember that all earnest and religious people were supposed to live out of the great world, and to keep company only with one another and with the subjects of their charitable beneficence. The disadvantages of this course are easily seen. Free intercourse with the average of mankind is one of the most important agencies in enlarging and correcting the action of the human mind. The exigencies of ordinary intercourse develop a sense of the dependence of human beings upon each other, and a power corresponding to the needs involved in this interdependence. The religious susceptibilities of individuals, which are at once very strong in their character and very uncertain in their action, are liable to become either exaggerated or exhausted by a course of life which should rely wholly upon them for guidance and for interest. Let us, therefore, by all means have saints in the world, keeping to their pure standard, and recommending it more by their actions than by their professions. But these saints must be brave as well as pure. Unworthy doctrine must not escape their reprobation. When a just cause is contemned, they must stand by it. If the world shall cast them out in consequence, it will not be their fault. The social leagues which group themselves around the various churches of to-day, seem to me a feature of happy augury. It is the office of the church to inspire and direct the tone of social intercourse, and these associations should greatly help it to that end. I lately heard Wendell Phillips complain that church exercises nowadays largely consist of picnics and other merry-makings. Only a little before, Mr. Phillips, in his reply to Mr. Parkman's article against Woman Suffrage, had spoken of the growth of social influence as a good. It does, to be sure, look a little whimsical to read on the bulletin of a Methodist church such announcements as this,--"Private theatricals for the benefit of the Sunday school." But Wesley introduced the use of secular tunes in his church on the ground that the devil should not have all the good music. Neither should he monopolize the innocent amusements with which, if they are left to him, he does indeed play the devil. Although the great ocean will always hold Europe at arm's length from us, yet the currents of belief and sympathy bring its various peoples near to us in various ways. I remember to have taken note of this long before the ocean steamships brought the eastern hemisphere within a few days' journey from our own seaboard, and very long before the time-annihilating cables were dreamed of. The French have always had with us the prestige of their social tact and sumptuary elegance. The English manners are affected by those among us who mistake the aristocracy of position for the aristocracy of character. The Italians rule us by their great artists in the past, and by their subtle policy in the present. The Germans have, as they deserve, the pre-eminence in music, in metaphysics, and in many departments of high culture. I have not long since been taken to task by a writer in a prominent New York paper for some strictures regarding the quasi-omnipotence of money in the society of to-day. The writer in question enlarged somewhat upon the greatly increased expenditure of money in our own country, as if this must be considered as a good in itself. He concludes his statement by remarking that Mrs. Howe has never studied the proper significance of the money question. I desire to say here only that I have not neglected the study of this question, which so regards the very life of society. One of its problems I have ventured to decide for myself, viz., whether the luxury of the rich really supports the industry of the poor. The æsthetic of luxury is a mean and superficial one. The critique of luxury is compliant and cowardly; and, despite its glittering promise to pay any price for what it desires, luxury orders poorly, pays poorly, and in the end undermines the credit of the State, the very citadel of its solvency. I regret and deplore its prevalence to-day, and consider it not as the safeguard, but as the most dangerous enemy of republican institutions. In our America, ay, even in our Puritan New England, the day has come in which economy is a discredit and poverty a disgrace. With the common school ever at work to lift the social level, unfolding to the child of the day-laborer the page which instructs the son of the peer, the cry is still that money is God, and that there is none other. One may ask, in the business streets, whether rich people have any faults, or poor people any virtues. A woman who sells her beauty for a rich dower is honored in church and in State. Both alike bow to the money in her hand. One proverb says that Time is money, as if it were "Only that, and nothing more." Another proverb says that Money is power. And in this form, no doubt, it receives the most fervent worship, for luxury palls sooner or later, while ambition is never satisfied. But we constantly meet, on the other hand, with instances in which money is not power. Money does not give talent or intelligence. You cannot buy good government, good manners, or good taste: You cannot buy health or life. Do some of you remember the shipwreck, some twenty years ago, of a steamer homeward-bound from California? The few survivors told how the desperate passengers brought their belts and bags of gold to the cabin, and threw them about with a bitter contempt of their worthlessness. States have such shipwrecks, in which avenging Fate seems to say to those who have sacrificed all for wealth, "Thy money perish with thee." The heroics of history are full of the story of great ends, accomplished by very small means. Now a handful of resolute men hold the forces of a great empire in check, and beat back the ocean surge of barbarism from the marble of their strong will. Now a single martyr turns the scale of the world's affection by throwing into the balance the weight of one small life. Now a State with every disadvantage of territory, cursed with sterility, or exposed to the murderous overflow of the salt sea, takes its stand upon the simple determination to conquer for itself a free and worthy existence. Frederick of Prussia and his small army, Washington, with his handful of men, in these and so many other instances, we admire the attainment of mighty ends through means which seem infinitesimal in proportion to them. How shall it be in our country, to which Nature has given the widest variety of climate, soil, and production? Shall we become a lesson to the world in the opposite direction? Shall we show how little a people may accomplish with every circumstance in its favor, and with nothing wanting to its success but the careful mind and resolute spirit? God forbid! The belief in pacific methods of settling international differences has made a noticeable progress in my time. In my school-days I remember a grave Presbyterian household at whose fireside I one day saw an elderly man seat himself, with little notice from the members of the family. I inquired who he might be, and was told, with some good-natured laughter, that this old gentleman was the American Peace Society, _i.e._, the last surviving member of that association. This was a humorous exaggeration of the truth. Judge Jay, of New York, was living at that time, and all the enthusiasm of the peace cause lived in him, and no doubt in many others. I have remembered the incident, nevertheless; and when I have seen the stately Peace Congresses held in Europe and elsewhere, when I have seen rapacious England submitting to arbitration, when I have seen the flag of military prestige go down before the white banner of Peace, as in the late change of the ministry in that country, I have remembered that day of small things, and have learned that the faith of individuals is the small seed from which spring the mighty growths of popular conviction and sympathy. The extensive wars which have taken place within the last forty years, as extensive and as deadly as any the world ever saw, are sometimes quoted in derision of those who believe, as I do, in the sober, steady growth of the pacific spirit among people of intelligence. The reasons for this advance lie deeper than the vision of the careless observer may reach. Within the period of our own century the value of human life to the individual has been greatly increased by the wide diffusion of the advantages of civilization. The value of the individual to the State has become greatly increased by the multiplication of industrial resources, and by the immense emigration which at times threatens to drain the older society of its working population. The spread of education has at once undermined the blind belief of the multitude in military leaders, and toned down the blind ferocity of instinct to which those leaders are forced to appeal. Wars of mere spoliation are scarcely permitted to-day. Wars of pure offence are deeply disapproved of. The military and diplomatic injustice of past times has left unsettled many questions of territory and boundary which will not rest until they shall be set right. The populations which war has plundered and subjugated, lay their cause before the world's tribunal. In aid of this, the friends of the true law and order are ever busy in forming a nucleus of moral power, which governments will be forced to respect. Thus, though the war-demon dies hard, he is doomed, and we shall yet see the battlements of his grim cathedrals places for lovers to woo and for babes to play in. In religion I have seen the dark ministrations of terror give way before the radiant gospel of hope. I remember when Doctrine sat beside the bed of death, and offered its flimsy synonym to the eyes upon which the awful, eternal truth was about to dawn. I remember when a man with a poor diploma and a human commission assumed to hold the keys of heaven and hell in his hands, and to dispense to those who would listen to him such immortality as he thought fit. I remember when it went hard with those who, in forming their religious opinions, persisted in daring to use the critical power of their own judgment. They were lonely saints; they wandered in highways and byways, unrecognized, excommunicated of men. No one had power to burn their bodies, but it was hoped that their souls would not escape the torment of eternal flame. I have seen this time, and I have lived to see a time in which these rejected stones, hewn and polished by God's hand, have come to be recognized as corner-stones in the practical religious building of the age. What a discredit was it once to hear Theodore Parker! How happy are they now esteemed who have heard him! Let not Mr. Emerson's urbanity lead him to forget the days in which polite Boston laughed him to scorn. Brook Farm was once looked upon as a most amusing caricature. But when the world learned something about Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Ripley, William Henry Channing, John Dwight, and George William Curtis, the public heart bowed itself with remorseful homage before the ruined threshold of what was, with all its shortcomings, a blameless temple to ideal humanity. It is quite true that every change which I have seen in the society of my time cannot be said to be, in itself, for the better. The price of progress, like that of liberty, is eternal vigilance. A time of religious enfranchisement may induce a period of religious indifference. Cosmopolitan enlargement may weaken the force of patriotism. The charity of society may degenerate into an indifference concerning private morals, which, if it could prevail, would go far towards destroying public ones. Humanity ever needs the watchman on the tower. It needs the warning against danger, the guidance out of it. I can imagine a set of prophets less absolute than the Hebrew seers, whose denunciation of evils, near or present, should always couple itself with profound and sober suggestions of help. And this will be the work of faith in our day, to believe in the good which can overcome the evil, and to seek it with earnest and brave persistence. Let me return for a moment, very briefly, to what I touched upon just now, the great changes in religious thought which this century has witnessed. What manifold contrasts have we observed in this domain! What a wild and wide chase in the fields of conjecture! What impatience with the idols of the past, historical and metaphysical! There have been moments in the last twenty years in which one might have said to the religious ideals of past ages that the time had come in which every one who raised his hand against them thought that he was doing God service. This iconoclasm had its time, and, one supposes, its office. But the religious necessities of mankind are permanent, and will outlast any and all systems of pure criticism. The question arises, in all this havoc of illusory impressions, Who is to provide for the culture and direction of those instincts of reverence which are so precious to, so ineradicable in the race? We must ask this service of those who believe that religion is, on the whole, wiser than its critics. Those who have been able to hold fast this persuasion will be the religious trainers of our youth. Those who have relinquished it will have no more skill to teach religion than a sculptor will have to feed an army. The greatest trouble with human society is, that its natural tendency leads it, not to learn right measure through one excess, but, on becoming convinced of this, to rush into an opposite excess with equal zeal and equal error. The mechanism of society requires constant correction in order to keep up the succession of order and progress through and despite this proneness to extravagance and loss of power. This rectification of direction without interruption of movement is the office of critical and constructive thought. Precious are the men, and rare as precious, who carry this balance in their minds, and, while the ship lurches now on this side and now on that, strain after the compass with masterful courage and patience. We have all known such men, but we have known, too, that their type is not a common one. Among all who are out of work to-day, so far as the market is concerned, those men of careful and critical judgment are the least called for, and the least wished for by the majority of men. Headlong enthusiasm, headlong activity, headlong doubt and cynicism, the prevalence of these shows the force with which the present whirl of the spindle was cast. Fair and softly, my quick-flying Century. To find out whether you are going right or wrong, whether you are faithful or faithless, solvent or bankrupt, you must have recourse to these same slow, patient men and women, who try such questions by a more accurate and difficult method than that of the popular inclination. I find that the philosopher Kant, writing more than a hundred years ago, remarks that in so sociable an age as his own Culture must naturally be expected to assume an encyclopedic character. It will, he says, necessarily desire to present a manifold number of agreeable and instructive acquisitions, easy of apprehension, for entertainment in friendly intercourse. These words seem prophetic of the efforts after general information, with a view to conversation as an accomplishment, which have constituted a marked feature of American and English society within forty years. In the dissolving view of the public predilection, this object has lost much of its prominence. The ornate and well-rounded periods of the conversationist are not more in request, nowadays, than were the high-sounding sentiments of Joseph Surface to Sir Peter Teazle, when experience had shown him their emptiness. Blunt speech and curt expression rather are in favor. The heroines of novels are supposed to fall in love with men of a somewhat brutal type. Adonis is out of fashion. Hercules pleases, and even Vulcan is preferred. One thinks that the influence of the mercantile spirit may be recognized in this change. Long speeches and roundabout statements are found not to pay. The man who listens to them with one ear, hearkens with the other for the ocean telegrams, news of the stock market, considers the maturing of a note, the success or failure of a scheme. When there is no one to listen, loquacity itself will grow economical of breath. The world is quite right in its tacit protest against over talk. A great deal of empty, irrelevant speech is liable to be imposed upon the good-nature of society in the garb of instructive conversation. It is weary to listen by the hour to men or women who principally teach you their own opinion of their own erudition. But woe to the world if its haste and greed should ever be such that the true teacher should want an audience, the long lessons of philosophy find interpreters, but no pupils. The present is, on the whole, an encyclopedic, cosmopolitan era. I suppose that it succeeds as a reaction to one of more special and isolated endeavor. The example and influence of Goethe have had much to do with the formation of the ideas of culture which have been prevalent in our time. This wonderful man went, with such a happy tact, from one thing to another. In poetry he did so much, in high criticism so much, in science so much, and in world-wisdom so much! How naturally were the lovers of study, who made him their model, led to undertake, as he did, to render the most eminent service, to attain the highest honors in a dozen different departments! But the man Goethe was more wonderful even than his writings. His individuality was too powerful to suffer loss through the variety of his pursuits. He could be at once a courtier and a philosopher, a poet and a scientist, a critic of morals and a man of the world, and in all things remain himself. I sometimes wonder why we Americans are so apt to show, in our conduct and remarks, an undue preponderance of what the phrenologists term love of approbation. This is an amiable and useful trait in human nature, which may degenerate into a weak and cowardly vanity, or even into a malignant selfishness. To desire the approbation which can enlighten us as to the merits of what we have done or attempted, is wise as well as graceful. To make constant laudation a prominent object in any life is a capital mistake in its ordering. To prefer the praise of men to the justification of conscience, is at once cowardly and criminal. I observe these three phases in American life. I value the first, compassionate the second, and reprobate the third. Surely, if there is any virtue which a republican people is bound to show, it is that self-respect which is the only true majesty, and which can afford to be as generous and gracious as majesty should be. It is, perhaps, natural that many of us should, through a want of experience, mistake the standpoint of people conspicuous in the older European society as greatly superior to our own. We can learn much, indeed, from the observation of such a standpoint; but, in order to do so, we must hold fast our own plain, honest judgment, as we derive it from education, inheritance, and natural ability. It must, I should think, be very tedious and very surprising to Europeans to hear Americans complain of being so young, so crude, so immature. This is not according to nature. Imagine a nursery full of babies who should bewail the fact of their infancy. Any one who should hear such a complaint would cry out, "Why, that's the best thing about you. You have the newness, the promise, the unwasted vigor of childhood,--gifts so great that Christ enjoined it upon holy men to recover, if they had lost them." If our society is young, its motto should be the saying of Saint Paul to Timothy, "Let no man despise thy youth." The great men of our early history deserve to rank with the ripest products of civilization. Was Washington crude? Was Franklin raw? Were Jay, Jefferson, and Hamilton immature? The authorities of the older world bowed down to them, and did them homage. The Republicans of France laid the key of the Bastille at the feet of Washington. Franklin was honored and admired in the court circle of Louis XVI. There was a twofold reason for this. These men represented the power and vigor of our youth; but our youth itself represented the eternal principles of truth and justice, for whose application the world had waited long. And thinking people saw in us the dignity of that right upon which we had founded our hope and belief as a nation. I will instance a single event of which I heard much during my last visit in Rome. A German, naturalized in America, and who had made a large fortune by a railroad contract in South America, had purchased from some European government the title of "Count." He was betrothed to the sister-in-law of a well-known California millionnaire, whose wife has been for some years a resident of Paris, where her silver, her diamonds, and her costly entertainments are matters of general remark. All of these parties are Roman Catholics. The wedding took place in Rome, and was signalized by a festival, at which twelve horses, belong to the bridegroom, were ridden in a race, whose prizes were bestowed by the hand of the bride. The invitations for this occasion were largely distributed by a monsignor of the Romish Church, and the king of Italy honored the newly married pair by his presence. Not long after this, I read in the Italian papers that this very count had become a candidate for a seat in the Italian Parliament. I suppose that money will assist an election as much in Italy as elsewhere. The monsignor who interested himself so efficiently about the invitations for the wedding party, was none other than the master of ceremonies of Pope Leo XIII. He would, no doubt, have taken even greater interest in the return of his friend to the Parliament. I do not know whether this gentleman has ever succeeded in usurping the place of a representative of the Italian people; but the chance of his being able to do so lay in the American gold of which he had become possessed. Here is one instance of the direct relations between Rome and America which Americans so placidly overlook. In this day of the world hope is so strong, and the desire for an improved condition so prevalent, that much may be looked for in Europe as the result of the legitimate action and influence of America. But if American capital busies itself with upholding the shams of the old world, if American taste and talent are led and pledged to work with the reactionary agents everywhere against the enfranchisement of the human race, where shall the hope of the world find refuge? Goldsmith has a touching picture of the emigrants who, in his time, were compelled to leave the country which would not feed them, for a distant bourne, which could, by no means, be to them a home. But let us assist at the embarkation of another group of exiles. These people have been living abroad, and are about to return home. The rich, beautiful land whose discovery has changed the fortunes of the human race, invites them on the other side of the Atlantic. The flag which represents the noblest chapter of modern history waves over them. From dynastic, aristocratic Europe they go to inherit the work of an ancestry heroic in thought and action. They go to the land which still boasts a Longfellow, a Whittier, an Emerson, a Harriet Beecher Stowe. Are they glad? Are they happy? No. They have learned the follies of the old world, not its wisdom. They are not going home,--they are going into exile. Let us look a little at their record in the Europe which they regret so passionately. They went abroad with money, and the education which it commands, with leisure and health. What good deeds may they not have done! What gratifying remembrance may they have left behind them! Shall we not find them recorded as donors to many a noble charity, as students in many a lofty school? We shalt indeed, sometimes. But in many cases we shall hear only of their fine clothes and expensive entertainments, with possible mortifying anecdotes of their fast behavior. If the mother leaves a daughter behind her, it is likely to be as the wife of some needy European nobleman, who despises all that she is bound to hold dear, and is proud not to know that which it should be her glory to understand. I said at Concord, and I say it to-day, that the press is much affected by the money debauch of the period. Let us examine the way in which this result is likely to be brought about. A newspaper or periodical is almost always an investment in which the idea of gain is very prominent. This expectation may either regard what the proposed paper shall earn as a medium of information, or the profit of certain enterprises which its statements may actively promote. Special organs are founded for special emergencies, as is a campaign sheet, or for the advocate of special reforms, like the antislavery "Standard" of old, and the "Woman's Journal" of to-day. These papers rarely repay either the money advanced for them, or the literary labor bestowed upon them. Under the head of its earnings the newspaper depends upon two classes of persons, viz., its advertisers and its subscribers. Either or both of these may be displeased by the emphatic mention of some certain fact, the expression of some certain opinion. "If we tell this unwelcome truth," say the managers, "we shall lose such and such subscribers. If we take this stand, some of our wealthiest advertising firms will choose another medium of communicating with the public." The other set of considerations just spoken of, the enterprises which are to be favored and promoted, may still more seriously affect the tone and action of the paper, which will thus be drawn in a twofold way to lend itself to the publication only of what it will pay to say. The annals of journalism in this country will, no doubt, show a fair average of courageous and conscientious men among its chiefs. I am willing to believe all things and to hope all things in this direction. But I must confess that I fear all things, too, in view of a great power, whose position makes it almost an irresponsible one. And I should regard with great favor the formation of an unofficial censorship of public organs, in view not so much of what may be published, as of what is unfairly left out of the statements and counterstatements of conflicting interests. Of all the changes which I can chronicle as of my own time, the change in the position of women is perhaps the most marked and the least anticipated by the world at large. Whatever opinions heroic men and women may have held concerning this from Plato's time to our own, the most enlightened periods of history have hardly given room to hope that the sex in general would ever reach the enfranchisement which it enjoys to-day. I date the assurance of its freedom from the hour in which the first university received women graduates upon the terms accorded to pupils of the opposite sex. For education keeps the key of life, and a liberal education insures the first conditions of freedom, viz., adequate knowledge and accustomed thought. This first and greatest step gained, the gate of professional knowledge and experience quickly opened, and that of political enfranchisement stands already ajar. The battle can have but one result, and it has been fought, with chivalrous temper and determination, not by one sex against the other, but by the very gospel of fairness and justice against the intrenched might of selfish passion, inertia, and prejudice. Equal conditions of life will lift the whole level of society, which is so entirely one body that the lifting or lowering of one half lifts or lowers the other half. This change, which in the end appeared to come suddenly, has been prepared by such gradual tentatives, by such long and sound labor, that we need not fear to lose sight of it in any sudden collapse. There are women of my age, and women of earlier generations, who have borne it in their hearts all their lives through, who have prayed and worked for it, without rest and without discouragement. Horace Mann was its apostle, Theodore Parker was its prophet, Margaret Fuller, Lucy Stone, and a host of wise and true-hearted women, whom the time would fail me to name, have been its female saints. It was in nature; they have brought it into life; even as Christ said, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." The slender thread which crossed the dark abyss of difficulty was not the silken spinning of vanity, nor the cobweb fibre of madness. From the faith of pure hearts the steadfast links were wrought, and the great chasm is spanned, and is ready to become the strong and sure highway of hope, for this nation and for the nations of the earth. The customs of society prescribe the mental garb and gait proper to those who desire the favorable notice of their peers in their own time. As these are partly matters of tradition and inheritance, we can learn something of the merits and demerits of a generation by studying the habits of familiar judgment which it hands down to its successor. A narrow, ill-educated generation leaves behind it corresponding garments of rule and prescription, to which the next generation must for a time accommodate itself, because a custom or a fashion is not made in a day. The rulers of society seem often more occupied in dwarfing the mind to suit the custom than in enlarging the custom so as to fit it to the growth of mind. The most dangerous rebellions, individual and social, are natural revolts against the small tyranny which perpetuates the insufficiency of the past. The copper shoes which so cramp the foot of a female infant in China as to destroy its power of growth, are not more cruel or deleterious than are the habits of unreflecting prejudice which compress the growth of human minds until they, too, lose their native power of expansion, and the idol Prejudice is enthroned and worshipped by those on whom it has imposed its own deformity as the standard of truth and beauty. The heavy tasks which nature imposes upon women leave them less at leisure than men to reform and readjust these inherited garments. The necessity for prompt and early action obliges them to follow the intuitive faculties, as all must do who have not time to work out the problems of the reasoning ones. The instinct of possession is a ruling one in human nature, and a woman inheriting a superstition or a prejudice holds fast to it because it is something, and she has got it. It seems to her a possession. It may be a mischievous and unfortunate one, but it will take a good deal of time and thought to find that out. Those who have the training of women's minds often train them away from such a use of time and from such a labor of thought. Hence the fatal persistence of large classes of women in superstitions which the thinking world has outgrown, and the equally fatal zeal with which they impose the same insufficient modes of judgment upon their children. I pray this generation of women, which has seen such enlargements of the old narrow order regarding the sex, I pray it to deserve its high post as guardian of the future. Let it bequeath to its posterity a noble standard of womanhood, free, pure, and, above all, laborious. The standard of manhood really derives from that of womanhood, and not _vice versa_, as many imagine. However we may receive from tradition the order of their material creation, in that of training and education, the woman's influence comes before that of the man, and outlasts it. The figure of the infant Christ dwells always in our mind, accompanied by that of the gracious mother who gave Him to the world. Let the fact of this great gift prefigure to us the august office of Woman. Hers be it also to preserve and transmit from age to age the Christian doctrine and the Christlike faith. And, in order that she may fully realize the glory and blessedness of giving, let her remember that what is worthily given to one time is given to all time. * * * * * UNIFORM WITH ARNOLD'S POEMS. THE LIGHT OF ASIA; OR, The Great Renunciation. Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (as told in verse by an Indian Buddhist). BY EDWIN ARNOLD, M.A. "It is a work of great beauty. It tells a story of intense interest, which never flags for a moment; its descriptions are drawn by the hand of a master with the eye of a poet and the familiarity of an expert with the objects described; its tone is so lofty that there is nothing with which to compare it but the New Testament; it is full of variety, now picturesque, now pathetic, now rising into the noblest realms of thought and aspiration; it finds language penetrating, fluent, elevated, impassioned, musical always, to clothe its varied thoughts and sentiments."--OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, _International Review_, October, 1879. "In Mr. Edwin Arnold, Indian poetry and Indian thought have at length found a worthy English exponent. He brings to his work the facility of a ready pen, a thorough knowledge of his subject, a great sympathy for the people of this country, and a command of public attention at home."--_Calcutta Englishman._ "'The Light of Asia' is a remarkable poem, and worthy of a place amongst the great poems of our time. Mr. Arnold is far more than 'a coiner of sweet words'--he is the exponent of noble impressions. He is a scholar and a philosopher; but he is also a true singer."--_London Daily Telegraph._ LIBRARY EDITION. 16mo. Cloth. Price $1.00 CHEAP EDITION. 16mo. Paper. Price .25 ROBERTS BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON. _Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications._ ON THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. A LECTURE. By WILLIAM P. ATKINSON, Professor of English and History in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 16mo. Cloth. Price 50 cents. "Full of good sense, sound taste, and quiet humor.... 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For it takes only a brief reading to perceive that in this single lecture the results of wide experience in teaching and of long study of the true principles of education are generalized and presented in a few pages, each one of which contains so much that it might be easily expanded into an excellent chapter."--_The Library Table._ READING AS A FINE ART. By ERNEST LEGOUVÉ, of the Académie Française. Translated from the Ninth Edition by ABBY LANGDON ALGER. 16mo. Cloth. 50 cents. (_Dedication._) TO THE SCHOLARS OF THE HIGH AND NORMAL SCHOOL. For you this sketch was written: permit me to dedicate it to you, in fact, to intrust it to your care. Pupils to-day, to-morrow you will be teachers; to-morrow, generation after generation of youth will pass through your guardian hands. An idea received by you must of necessity reach thousands of minds. Help me, then, to spread abroad the work in which you have some share, and allow me to add to the great pleasure of having numbered you among my hearers the still greater happiness of calling you my assistants. E. LEGOUVÉ. We commend this valuable little book to the attention of teachers and others interested in the instruction of the pupils of our public schools. It treats of the "First Steps in Reading," "Learning-to Read," "Should we read as we talk," "The Use and Management of the Voice," "The Art of Breathing," "Pronunciation," "Stuttering," "Punctuation," "Readers and Speakers," "Reading as a Means of Criticism," "On Reading Poetry," &c., and makes a strong claim as to the value of reading aloud, as being the most wholesome of gymnastics, for to strengthen the voice is to strengthen the whole system and develop vocal power. _Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, by the Publishers_, ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. THE NO NAME (SECOND) SERIES. 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Not the least attractive portion of the work is the sketch of Wagner with which it closes. [Illustration] "NO NAME SERIES." _The First Series, completed_, COMPRISES TWELVE NOVELS, VIZ., MERCY PHILBRICK'S CHOICE. HETTY'S STRANGE HISTORY. IS THAT ALL? WILL DENBIGH, EMAN. KISMET. THE WOLF AT THE DOOR. THE GREAT MATCH. MARMORNE. A MODERN MEPHISTOPHELES. MIRAGE. AFTERGLOW. GEMINI. AND TWO POETICAL VOLUMES: DEIRDRÉ. A Novel in Verse. A MASQUE OF POETS. Original Poems, by Fifty Poets, written specially for this book; including "GUY VERNON," an entire Novelette in verse. Fourteen volumes in all, uniformly bound in black cloth, red and gilt lettered. Price $1.00 each. NO NAME [SECOND] SERIES. The new series will retain all the peculiar features which made the first so popular, differing from it only in the style of binding. Now ready, SIGNOR MONALDINI'S NIECE, THE COLONEL'S OPERA CLOAK, HIS MAJESTY, MYSELF, MRS. BEAUCHAMP BROWN, Price $1.00 each. SALVAGE. _Our publications are to be had of all booksellers. When not to be found send directly to_ ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, BOSTON. THE "NO NAME SERIES." KISMET. A Nile Novel. Opinions, generous tributes to genius, by well-known authors whose names are withheld. "Well, I have read 'Kismet,' and it is certainly very remarkable. The story is interesting,--any well-told love story is, you know,--but the book itself is a great deal more so. Descriptively and sentimentally,--I use the word with entire respect,--it is, in spots, fairly exquisite. It seems to me all glowing and overflowing with what the French call _beauté du diable_.... The conversations are very clever, and the wit is often astonishingly like the wit of an accomplished man of the world. 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When not to be found, send directly to ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, Boston. PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT. _From the Boston Daily Advertiser._ THE "NO NAME SERIES." "LEIGH HUNT, _in his 'Indicator,' has a pleasant chapter on the difficulty he encountered in seeking a suitable and fresh title for a collection of his miscellaneous writings. Messrs. Roberts Brothers have just overcome a similar difficulty in the simplest manner. In selecting_ "NO NAME," _they have selected the very best title possible for a series of Original American Novels and Tales, to be published Anonymously. These novels are to be written by eminent authors, and in each case the authorship of the work is to remain an inviolable secret. "No Name" describes the Series perfectly. No name will help the novel, or the story, to success. Its success will depend solely on the writer's ability to catch and retain the reader's interest. Several of the most distinguished writers of American fiction have agreed to contribute to the Series, the initial volume of which is now in press. Its appearance will certainly be awaited with curiosity_." [Illustration] The plan thus happily foreshadowed will be immediately inaugurated by the publication of "MERCY PHILBRICK'S CHOICE," from the pen of a well-known and successful writer of fiction. It is intended to include in the Series a volume of anonymous poems from famous hands, to be written especially for it. The "No Name Series" will be issued at convenient intervals, in handsome library form, 16mo, cloth, price $1.00 each. ROBERTS BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS. BOSTON, Midsummer, 1876. * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Punctuation has been normalized. On page 52 "immediatly" changed to "immediately". "... the generation immediately preceding my own." On page 54 "self-dicipline" changed to "self-discipline". "Without self-discipline and self-sacrifice...." On page 61 "superflous" changed to "superfluous." "... with superfluous irrelevancies...." On page 72 "religous" changed to "religious." "... will be the religious trainers...." On page 72 capitalization in "Who" retained as printed. On page 86 "aginst" changed to "against." "... revolts against the small tyranny...." 
38022	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) NATURE AND CULTURE BY HARVEY RICE SECOND EDITION BOSTON 1890 LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 10 MILK ST. NEXT "THE OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE" CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM NEW YORK 718 AND 720 BROADWAY _Copyright, 1889_, BY HARVEY RICE. University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. NOTE. The first edition of "Nature and Culture" was published in 1875. The degree of favor with which the book was received has induced the author to publish a second edition, in which he has made a few changes and additions of such a character as to render the work, he trusts, still worthier of acceptance. CLEVELAND, OHIO, August 20, 1889. CONTENTS. PAGE NATURE AND HER LESSONS 11 EDUCATION OF THE MASSES 53 WOMAN AND HER SPHERE 93 AIM HIGH 139 AMERICA AND HER FUTURE 163 CAREER OF REV. JOSEPH BADGER 197 MISSION MONUMENT 225 NATURE AND HER LESSONS. NATURE AND CULTURE. NATURE AND HER LESSONS. Nature declares herself in her works. What exists beyond her domain, if anything, becomes necessarily a matter of faith or imagination; and yet the origin of the material universe presents a problem which neither the vagaries of the ancients nor the speculations of the moderns have been able to solve in a satisfactory manner. In modern methods of logic, we reason from cause to effect, from the known to the unknown; but in attempting to penetrate the region of the unknown, we are often left without a reliable guide. Analogy may aid, but cannot assure us. The powers of the human mind, if not infinite, may admit of infinite culture. What is supposed to be "unknowable" may therefore become known. However this may be, there is no divine injunction which prescribes a limit to human possibilities. Whatever we may think or believe, the volume of Nature contains nothing but truth; it is a divine record which is as inexhaustible in its wealth of knowledge as it is conclusive in its logic. Men of science, in attempting to read this unerring record, have advanced many plausible theories in relation to the processes by which the earth acquired its embodiment, and took its place among the golden orbs of heaven. There are reasons for believing that matter has always existed in some form or other, and that it is infinite in extent as well as in duration. Nor need we hesitate to infer, from the knowledge we have of the various forms in which matter exists, that what is true of the earth in its processes of development is equally true of every other planet. Whether the earth in its origin was a fragment thrown off from some exploded planet which had filled the measure of its destiny, or whether it arose from the gradual accretion of elementary substances diffused in infinite space, are questions which cannot be satisfactorily answered. Either method is not only plausible, but consistent with the known laws and operations of Nature. It seems quite probable that those erratic bodies known as comets are but incipient planets, which continue, as they revolve in their mystical flight, to accumulate gaseous matter until they have acquired and condensed a sufficient amount to become orbs, or worlds; when, by the influence of physical forces, they take their places in some one or other of the existing planetary systems. It is thus perhaps that the law of development constructs a world with as much ease as it constructs a grain of sand; nor can we doubt that the processes of aggregation and dissolution are made reciprocal in their relations, and perpetual in their action. In a philosophical sense, "life" and "death" are but conventional terms, meaning nothing more than a change of matter from one form of existence to another. Whatever changes may take place, matter can neither be increased nor diminished. Infinite space, being an immateriality, could never have been created and cannot therefore be limited or annihilated. In all probability it still is, and always has been, filled with the elements of matter,--too subtile, perhaps, to be perceived, yet destined in the course of eternal ages to be wrought and re-wrought into infinite varieties of corporeal existences, mineral, vegetal, and animal, ever progressing from the imperfect to the perfect. Thus Nature teaches us the lesson that in perfection dwells the central Life, the quickening power of the universe. In accordance with this view, we may regard every particle of matter in the universe as the germ of a world. And yet what are called original elements may be such, or may not. Supposed monads, or simple unities, if they exist at all, may be capable of analysis by the application of physical agencies or forces as yet unknown to science. Though science has disclosed much that is wonderful in the mechanism of Nature, there still lies before us an infinite unknown. Whether ultimately the human mind will become so enlarged and extended in its powers as to comprehend the infinite, admits of no positive assurance; yet in the unrevealed design of the great future, such may be the result. It is only in modern times that science has taken the advanced step, and led philosophy into the beautiful avenues of Nature, where, amid the infinite, she gazes at the universe, listens to the music of the spheres, and beholds the golden wealth of the infinite displayed on every side. It is thus that philosophy has become inspired with a desire to account for everything, and finds that Nature has written her own history in the hills and in the rocks, in the depths of the sea, and in the stars of heaven, leaving nothing for man to do except to read the record, and accept its truthful teachings. In fact, the material universe may be regarded as an outspoken revelation of the infinite. The elementary substances which compose the earth and its atmosphere are essentially the same, and are not numerous, so far as ascertained. The leading vital principle is oxygen, which constitutes at least one half of all known matter. The earth's crust is estimated to be about fifty miles thick. This estimate is based on the fact that in penetrating the earth, the heat uniformly increases at a rate which would fuse all mineral substances at that depth. Hence, the interior of the earth is believed to be a region of molten substances, fiery billows that roll impatient of restraint, and escape here and there in the form of volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes are, therefore, but the outposts of gigantic central forces, and earthquakes but the spasmodic trials of their strength. It would seem, go where we will, that "fiery billows" literally roll beneath our feet. What Nature's ultimate designs are, it is impossible to predict. But it is pretty certain that her internal fires are working out some mystical problem. A scientific German has recently ascertained that the surface of the earth is gradually becoming hotter, and that in five hundred millions of years it will attain to such a degree of heat as to destroy human life. And yet there are other scientists equally wise, perhaps, who assert that the earth's crust is gradually cooling and contracting, and therefore radiating less heat, the final result of which will be the destruction of all life and a return of the glacial period. Geological science, as well as revelation, impresses us with the belief that in the beginning "the earth was without form, and void,"--a chaos of atoms which were gathered, comet-like, from infinite space, and made to revolve in a globular mass by physical forces, until it became, by the condensation of its vapory atmosphere, submerged in a flood of dark and interminable waters. In consequence of the action of the waters on mineral substances, vast deposits of sediment accumulated, which, with the aid of pressure and chemical heat, gradually hardened into rocks, strata upon strata, like solid masonry, and varying in thickness from the fraction of a mile to thirty miles or more. Nature seems to have adopted this method of construction as a prerequisite to the severance of the land from the waters. In effecting this object, the explosive forces, long confined in the earth's interior, are supposed to have burst asunder the walls of their prison-house, suddenly upheaving continents and mountains from the depths of a dismal and shoreless ocean. It was then that the "dry land" made its first appearance, and was baptized in the pure sunlight of heaven. The virgin soil of the earth, when thus exposed to the genial influence of the sun, soon produced vegetal life, and vegetal life animal life,--the one the food of the other. Thus Nature ever provides for her guests in advance of their reception. Yet in her formative processes she "makes haste slowly," though she may sometimes leap to conclusions. Her work never ceases. A million of years is to her as one day, and one day as a million of years. Hence everything has its age, and is lost in the ages. Of this fact we have reliable evidence in the strata of the rocks, and in the limited field of our own observation. There can be no doubt the earth has been many times baptized in fire and water, and its crust broken into fragments and thrown into strange angles and relations. These grand upheavals have occurred at dates vastly remote from each other, and are recognized by science as great geological periods. The Ages of Nature, so far as relates to the earth, may be classed briefly as: the primary, or reign of fishes; the secondary, or reign of reptiles; the tertiary, or reign of mammals; and the modern, or reign of man. Each of these ages constitutes a grand chapter in the earth's history, which is easily read and understood by the masters of geological science. The same agencies which were employed in constructing the earth's crust are still employed in reconstructing it. In fact, the work of creation is still going on as in the beginning, if beginning there ever was in Nature's material processes. We see this illustrated in the changes which are produced on the earth's surface in our own time by the action of the rain, the wind, the frost, the flood, the glacier, the volcano, and the earthquake. It is by these agencies that the hills and the mountains are graded down, and the _detritus_ deposited in the valleys and in the sea; thus are valleys enriched and broadened, vast plains and deltas created, and continents enlarged. When the present hills and mountains have been reduced to plains, and the fertility of the soil exhausted, it is quite probable that another grand upheaval of the earth's foundations will occur,--the birth-power by which new hills and mountains are lifted up, and continents changed to ocean-beds, and ocean-beds to continents. It is these mighty changes and exchanges that prepare the way, and fit the earth for the production of higher orders of plants and animals, and perhaps a higher order of man. In the course of unknown ages, Nature has enriched and extended the valley of the Nile hundreds of miles into the sea, by transporting thither the pulverized wealth of the Abyssinian mountains. Thus fertilized, Egypt has for many thousands of years sustained a dense population. Very justly has she been called not only the cradle of mankind, but the granary of the world. In like manner, the Ganges transports from the interior of India a sufficient amount of sediment annually to cover a township five miles square to the depth of ten feet, and by this means has extended the land hundreds of miles into the ocean. The Hoang-Ho, a river of China, by its deposits of alluvium in the sea has added an entire province to that country, comprising an area of ninety-six thousand square miles. Indeed, all rivers are tributaries to the sea, and all seas tributaries to the rivers. This exchange is effected mainly by the rains and the snows, the exhalations and the waterspouts. The clouds are but common carriers; this commerce is therefore a matter of mutual interest, and grows out of the positive necessities of sea and land. Though the elements appear to move in conflict, they really move in perfect harmony, and bring order out of seeming confusion. In executing a gigantic work, no river has excelled the Mississippi. This "Father of Waters" has distinctly indicated in the record of his career the prehistorical age of the world, and the equally prehistorical advent of man. In his "march to the sea" he has left enduring landmarks, and with his battle-axe notched centuries long lost in the mighty past. The land which this majestic river has formed, by depositing sediment in the Gulf of Mexico, comprises an area of thirty thousand square miles. This deposit or delta has a depth exceeding one thousand feet; and the period required for its accumulation has been estimated by Mr. Lyell, the renowned geologist, at one hundred thousand years. This estimate only embraces the deposits since the river ran in its present channel. The bluffs along the river rise in many places two hundred and fifty feet, and contain shells, with the remains of the mastodon, elephant, tapir, megalonyx, and other huge animals. It is evident that these bluffs must have belonged to an ancient plain or valley long anterior to the present level. In several sections of the valley as it now exists, excavations have been made deeper than the Gulf of Mexico, and successive growths of cypress-timber found, to the number of four or five distinct growths, the lowest lying at the depth of six hundred feet. Some of these trees are ten feet in diameter, and have from five to six thousand annual rings of growth. As the valley of the river from age to age grew in elevation by deposits of sediment, a new growth of cypress was produced, and is now supervened by the live-oak plain, so called, which has had an existence, as estimated by the annual rings of the oaks, of fourteen thousand years. In excavating for gas-works at New Orleans, a human skull was found beneath the roots of a cypress belonging to the fourth-forest level, in a good state of preservation, while the other bones of the skeleton crumbled to dust on exposure to the air. The type of the cranium was that of the aboriginal American. Now, if we take the period required to form the live-oak level, and add it to the time required to produce the next three subterranean growths of cypress, which overlie the fourth growth, in which the cranium was found, it clearly proves that the human race existed in the great valley of the Mississippi more than fifty-seven thousand years ago. Not only in the valley of the Mississippi have fossil remains of man and animals been discovered at depths and in formations that prove their remote antiquity, but in many other parts of the world. Not many years ago, a human skull was found in Brazil, embedded in a sandstone rock overgrown with lofty trees. There is still preserved, in the museum at Quebec, a human skull which was excavated from the solid schist-rock on which the citadel now stands. Human skeletons have also been found in the island of Guadeloupe, embedded in a rock said to be as hard as the finest statuary marble. Even so recently as the year 1868, while sinking a well at the Antelope station, on the Union Pacific Railroad, the workmen penetrated a rock six feet thick, and at eighty feet below the rock discovered a human skeleton in such a state of preservation as to be readily recognized as such. In another instance it is said that a human skull was discovered in Calaveras County, Cal., at the bottom of a shaft which had been sunk one hundred and thirty feet below the surface. It was found deposited in a bed of gravel with other organic remains, and beneath the eighth distinct geological layer of earth and gravel, where it must have lain, according to the estimate of Professor Whitney, the geologist, for a period of at least one hundred thousand years. This remote antiquity of man is also confirmed by discoveries in every part of the world of the fossil remains of domestic animals as well as of man, including implements of human invention, such as flint arrow-heads, stone axes, war-weapons, cooking-utensils, in localities which preclude the idea of their belonging to an age that has a written history. It is not unfrequent that fossil remains of human bones and of animals are found embedded in the coral-reef limestone of Florida. In fact, says Professor Agassiz, the whole peninsula of Florida has been formed by successive growths of coral reefs and shells; he estimates the formation of the southern half of the peninsula as occupying a period of one hundred and thirty-five thousand years. The sea contains ingredients which feed innumerable animalcula, especially the polypes, or coral-builders, which have the power of secreting calcareous matter. These myriads of noiseless architects are ever busy in building for themselves fairy temples in the depths of the ocean, of the most delicate and beautiful workmanship, and in erecting pyramids and islands, and in extending continents. In the mean time there are other agencies of a very different character continually at work, modifying the earth's surface, and preparing it for sustaining a still higher order of vegetal and animal life. As a result of these agencies, especially the volcanic, it often happens that serious calamities befall the human family. In the course of a century, not less than two thousand volcanic eruptions occur on the globe, equal to twenty a year, or one every eighteen days. The whole number of volcanoes known to be active at the present time exceeds three hundred; and doubtless many times that number have long since become extinct. In Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, there are extensive tracts or belts of country which are volcanic in their character; and especially is this true of the entire American-Pacific coast, and the ocean-bed adjoining it. Often have long lines of this coast been elevated or depressed many feet, as if the whole continent were afloat, and tossing like a ship on a stormy sea. Neither in the past, nor in the present, has the earth seemed to rest on a sure foundation. Even in apparent security there is no positive safety. Nature must and will exercise her sterner as well as her milder powers. In achieving gigantic works, she employs gigantic powers. Her forces are her own; and when she directs them to execute her mandates, she is promptly obeyed. She models and remodels the earth's exterior and interior at pleasure, but never without a beneficent design. Earthquakes break up the earth's crust. Internal fires melt it. Exploding gases lift it. Gravitation moulds it. The atmosphere cools it. The sun and the rain clothe it with verdure; and flowers crown it with beauty. In this way the earth's surface seems to have been prepared for the advent of man, and its interior supplied with coal-fields and reservoirs of oil and gas for his use. Though Nature has made for man ample provision, she requires him not only to help himself, but to take care of himself. Nor does she give him formal notice to keep out of harm's way when she wishes to break up the earth's crust and re-cast it, but proceeds at once. She may sink or elevate a continent at a blow, or she may do it by slow degrees. The earliest writers give us accounts of terrific earthquakes. Thucydides alludes to volcanic eruptions which occurred five hundred years before the Christian era. In the vicinity of volcanic mountains, it has happened that city after city, in the course of ages, has been engulfed, one upon another, in molten lava, or cinders, leaving no record behind them of their unhappy fate. Herculaneum lies buried a hundred feet deep beneath the modern city of Portici; and beneath Herculaneum, a city still more ancient has been discovered, whose name and history are entirely unknown. How many other cities lie buried at the foot of the old fire-crowned monarch of Italy, no one can tell; but doubtless there are several of them. What induced people to occupy a locality so perilous, it is difficult to say, unless it was the superior fertility of a volcanic soil. No part of the world is exempt from sudden calamities of a similar character. The earthquake experienced by the city of Antioch in Syria, in the year 626, destroyed two hundred and fifty thousand people. The great eruption of Mount Etna, in 1669, overflowed fourteen towns, containing from three to four thousand inhabitants each. The stream of lava which issued from the mountain was half a mile wide and forty feet deep, and swept everything before it, until lost in the sea. The earthquake at Lisbon, in 1775, killed sixty thousand persons in six minutes; the shock was felt in Switzerland, in Scotland, in Massachusetts, and on the shore of Lake Ontario. In 1783, a large river in Iceland was sunk into the earth by volcanic action, and entirely obliterated. In 1792, an earthquake in the island of Java sunk a tract of land fifteen miles long and six miles wide, carrying down with it forty small villages. In our own country and in our own neighborhood, in 1811, several islands in the Mississippi River, near New Madrid, were sunk by an earthquake, and the course of the river driven back eighteen miles, causing it to overflow the adjacent lands; about half the county of New Madrid, as well as the village, was submerged. Several new lakes were created, one of which was sixty miles long and several miles wide. The earth's surface rose in undulations like the billows of the sea, and with terrific utterances, opened yawning chasms, from which vast columns of sand and water, and a substance resembling coke, were thrown out. The whole face of the country in that region was materially changed. And, what is a little singular, one of the lakes thus created by the earthquake extended to the river at a point nearly opposite the famous Island No. 10, thus affording a natural canal by which the Union forces in the late civil war approached and took the island. It is not improbable that the entire chain of our great northwestern lakes, from Ontario to Superior, were created by the volcanic collapse of a mountain range that once occupied the same localities. Of this fact there are plausible, if not irresistible, evidences to be seen in the volcanic character of the rocks at various points along the entire coast. Nor can it be very well doubted that subsequent volcanic action has elevated much of the coast into several corresponding ridges, from one to two miles apart, which distinctly mark the successive boundaries of these inland seas. Nature removes mountains, or creates them, at pleasure. She also makes and unmakes lakes and rivers, to say nothing of oceans and continents. In California, and doubtless in other parts of the world, there are as many dead as living rivers. The miners of California have already discovered the old channels of a dozen or more dead rivers, as they call them, encased and sealed up in the very heart of the mountain ranges, and extending in some instances hundreds of miles in the general direction of the ranges, and leaping from mountain to mountain at a common level or grade. These ancient channels are filled with sand, gravel, and small bowlders, evidently worn and polished by long attrition. Some of the channels are a mile wide, or more, and from ten to one hundred feet deep. In the angles or eddies, the sands are found to be exceedingly rich in gold, sometimes yielding fifty dollars or more to the cubic yard. It is estimated that over five hundred millions of dollars have already been taken from the sands of these dead rivers, and that they are now yielding at least ten millions a year. It is evident that these dead rivers must have been living rivers long before the volcanic era arrived, which elevated the ancient valleys into mountain ranges, and depressed the ancient mountain ranges into valleys. In the South-American earthquake of August, 1868, thirty thousand lives were lost, several cities entirely obliterated, and three hundred millions of dollars' worth of property destroyed. A tidal wave, more than forty feet deep, swept over the land and deposited, high and dry, and beyond recovery, several first-class ships; the effect of this earthquake was felt along the coast for a distance of six to seven thousand miles. In October of the same year, the city of San Francisco was visited by an earthquake, which shattered many buildings, and destroyed several lives. It is supposed that this was but a prolongation of the South-American earthquake. In some parts of California and South America, thunder and lightning seldom occur, while earthquakes are frequent; in regions like these, earthquakes would seem to be a substitute for thunder and lightning. In all probability both are but electrical phenomena, differing only in the fact that the one is an earthquake, the other a skyquake. It is in plains and valleys that earthquakes prove the most destructive. Doubtless the solid material composing the mountain ranges affords a better conductor of electricity than the alluvial soil of the plains and the valleys; hence, while the one serves as a lightning-rod, the other becomes the battleground of conflicting elements. It may be that electrical forces are generated in the earth's interior, as well as in the atmosphere, and that the earthquake is but the shock produced by the restoration of an equilibrium. The earth and the atmosphere are essentially the same in their elements, and are ever contributing of their substance to the requisitions of each other. When physical science shall be so far advanced as to explain the true causes of the earthquake, if it does not make man "master of the situation," it will doubtless place in his hands the power of avoiding, to some extent at least, the calamities which now so often befall life and property. There can be no doubt that the earth is a physical necessity not yet fully developed; only about one-fourth part of its surface is land, the remainder water. Nearly three times more land lies north of the equator than south of it. Why this should be so, is not quite clear. In the course of the earth's future development, however, it is not improbable that additional continents and islands will appear, and the waters subside into narrower and deeper channels, thus giving to man, and to land-life generally, a wider domain. And yet the present seas were not made in vain, but have always abounded with plant-life and animal-life, though of an inferior order as compared with land-life. Life in itself is infinite, and appears in infinite varieties both on land and in the sea. Whether man needs more land for his use and future development, is difficult to say. At any rate, everything that exists has its mutual relations, and adapts itself to the ultimate aim of Nature,--the perfection of man. In the Western Hemisphere, the mountains take the general direction of north and south; in the Eastern, the general direction of east and west. In the one hemisphere, the ranges essentially accord with the lines of longitude; in the other, with the lines of latitude. These mountain ranges are but continental watersheds, from which flows the elemental wealth that enriches the plains and the valleys. The rivers and their tributaries are the commercial agents. The rain and the frost are the miners whose labors will never cease until the mountains are levelled. The mountains also attract and guide the storms and modify their force, condense the mists, the raindrop, and the dewdrop, and thus aid in refreshing the valleys in connection with the heat of the sunbeams. In this way the seasons, as well as the elements of the soil, are so modified and vitalized as to give to man seedtime and harvest, and needful food to every "living and creeping thing." In addition to the world of life that is visible, there is a world of life that is invisible,--a microscopic realm of animalcula, which "live and move and have their being" in every element of life, and in every life, and yet are so minute as to be imperceptible to the naked eye. These invisibles, or infusoria, abound everywhere and in everything. They pervade the sea, the land, the air. They swarm in every drop of water, and revel in every morsel of food. We can neither eat nor drink without infringing on their domain and consigning myriads of them, perhaps, to an unprovoked destruction. They are almost as various in grade, size, and shape, as they are numerous. Some are hideous, while others are comely. They feed on each other, the superior on the inferior, and are ever struggling for life and for the mastery. They engage in the "battle of life" to sustain life, and hold to the doctrine that "to the victors belong the spoils." It is an ascertained fact that a speck of potato-rot, the size of a pin-head, contains hundreds of these little ferocious animals, fighting and devouring each other without mercy and without cessation. What seems still more surprising is that they probably have a perfect organization,--heart, lungs, stomach, circulation of blood, and are endowed, perhaps, with all the five senses. Infinite numbers of them, it is supposed, exist in so minute a form that no microscope, however great its power, can detect them. Nor need we doubt that even these living invisibles are beset with parasites vastly minuter than themselves, which feed and breed on their surfaces. In the very blood-circulation of the minutest, it is not improbable that other infusoria, still more minute, swim and prey upon each other. The uses for which this invisible world of life were created, though doubtless for a wise purpose, cannot be comprehended. Yet it is evident that every living thing, however minute, has a destiny of some sort, ever progressing, it may be, from a lower to a higher sphere,--from the material to the spiritual, from the finite to the infinite. "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul." The atmosphere, supposed to extend sixty miles in height, surrounds the earth like an invisible ocean, and gives to it almost entirely its life-material. In fact, the atmosphere is the great reservoir of the vital elements, from which is derived the principal part, if not all, the material, solid or liquid, which enters into the composition of both plant and animal, whether it be a blade of grass, a leaf, or a tree; an insect, a fish, or a man. It is true, however, that animal-life is more directly the outgrowth of plant-life; and yet the vital forces of both are derived from the air, and return to the air by solar agencies. It is quite certain that all matter, as seen embodied in various forms, consists entirely of certain gases condensed or solidified by chemical laws. The atmosphere itself, and probably infinite space, are filled with matter in the gaseous form, or in some unknown form, destined to be condensed, dissolved, and recondensed in a series of changes as continuous as the infinite ages. In this sense, not only the earth, but every other planet, contains within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. Yet matter, whatever its form, is still indestructible, and will forever retain its vital forces. It would seem that life is the soul of matter, and that electricity is the soul of life,--immaterial, it may be, and if so, then immortal. Where the material ends, or where the spiritual begins, it is impossible to say. We know that we are endowed with the five senses at birth. We also know that they are the media through which we receive all the impressions and perceptions of our environment; it is from their report that we learn what is agreeable or disagreeable to our physical needs. We choose the agreeable, and reject the disagreeable. Here reason begins, and pronounces judgment. Memory records facts and conclusions. The physical and the mental grow in strength from infancy to manhood; they are a living unit. The one is real, and the other ideal. Of spirit or soul we know nothing, nor can we prove their existence, unless we accept the proofs as furnished by revelation. It is certain, however, that our moral character survives us and continues to have an influence in the world for good or for evil "according to the deeds done in the body." This fact is something which we can comprehend as constituting the ideal of our spiritual existence. Nor need we doubt that in discharging our duties to our fellow-men, we discharge our duties to God. Everywhere about us, and especially in atmospheric phenomena, we see an epitome of Nature's processes and marvellous formative power. Not a snowflake falls to the ground that does not bring with it a crystallization of the most beautiful specimens of artistic embroidery, far excelling the finest needle-work ever wrought by woman's hand. The same is true of the silver frostwork traced on the window-pane by the delicate touch of invisible fingers. In truth, every gem that glitters in the mine, every flower of the field, and every star in the sky, is but a crystallized expression of the beautiful, blended with a silent love that is pure and heartfelt, as if akin to us. In reality they are our kindred, and we are their kindred. Nature seems to delight in creating the wonderful as well as the beautiful, and often combines both in the same exhibition. Hence she entertains us occasionally with a magnificent display of fireworks, known as Northern Lights; or with an apparent shower of falling stars; or with the sudden descent of an aërolite, all ablaze, as if dropped from the fiery forge of the sun; or with a brilliant comet, which with its long and glittering trail sweeps in ladylike style the star-dust from the pavement of the sky. These singular occurrences, though sometimes regarded as ominous, are but a part of Nature's systematic operations. They cannot with any foundation in truth be attributed to accident; for it is impossible that accidents should happen in the workshops of Nature, or in the administration of her government. How the various meteors are actually formed, or whence they come, is a mystery which has induced much speculation among scientific men. Some say they are volcanic fragments thrown from the moon, or from some distant planet, or perhaps from a crater of the sun; while others, with more reason, suppose that they are generated in space, or in the earth's atmosphere, and are nothing more than condensed gases which constitute the elements of solid matter, and which become in some instances so hardened by chemical action as to assume the solidity of stone or iron. And hence it often happens that the latter class of these erratic strangers fall from the sky to the earth with a terrific explosion. In ancient times their appearance was regarded as portentous of national or individual calamities. The Chinese have records of meteoric showers, and the fall of aërolites, which occurred more than six hundred and forty years before the Christian era. The Greeks and Romans observed and recorded similar phenomena. Between the years 903 and 1833, not less than nineteen periodical star-showers have been recorded. The regular period of their occurrence is once in every thirty-three years, or thereabout, and usually about the middle of November. But what are called sporadic meteors, or shooting-stars, are of frequent occurrence, and may be seen almost every evening in the year. The most brilliant meteoric shower on record is that of 1833, when meteors fell at the rate of two hundred and forty thousand per hour, creating the impression that all the stars of heaven had been unsphered, and were falling like a sheet of fire to the earth, and threatening a universal conflagration. Occurring as it did at midnight, and continuing for two or more hours, thousands of people, who witnessed the scene with fear and trembling, supposed the day of judgment had come. In just thirty-three years after this, Nov. 14, 1866, occurred another periodical shower of a similar character, which, though less brilliant, was seen on a more extended scale in Europe than in the United States. Why this apparent storm of fire should occur every thirty-three years, is a mystery which science has not yet been able to explain. It may be a part of the machinery of our planetary system, and is perhaps as regular in its revolutions as the planets; or it may be a method of dissipating an over-accumulation in the earth's atmosphere, or in infinite space, of inflammable gaseous matter, which thus ignites spontaneously, and presents to the eye the appearance of burning sparks flying off, as it were, from the broad anvil and ponderous sledge employed in the great workshop of Nature. Be this as it may, meteoric showers, so far as known, have always proved harmless in their results. But the aërolite assumes a more formidable character. In outline it is a globular mass heated to intensity, and in its approach comes with a hissing sound, and usually explodes in the atmosphere or when it strikes the earth. Its fragments show that it is a solid body, composed mostly of a ferruginous material. The illumination it creates in its passage through the atmosphere is sometimes seen at the distance of five or six hundred miles. Erratic masses of this kind have been known to fall in all ages and in all countries, and are of frequent occurrence. So recent as the year 1867, an aërolite of large dimensions fell in Tennessee, penetrating a hillside of rocky formation to the depth of twenty feet. It was seen at a great distance, and came hissing on its way like a planet on fire, and when it struck the earth, produced a shock like that of an earthquake. So intensely heated was it, that for three days after it fell it generated and sent up from the moist earth a dense column of steam, which rose and floated away like a cloud in the sky. When excavated, its mass was found to be composed principally of iron, and measured seven feet from apex to base, and ten feet in circumference. Fragments of it have been preserved, and may be seen at Washington, and in several collections of minerals belonging to scientific individuals. But where did it come from? Did it come from the sun, the moon, the earth, or from some exploded planet? or was it generated in the atmosphere? Though the question has not been satisfactorily answered, there are plausible reasons for believing that aërolites, and meteors generally, are the spontaneous production of atmospherical agencies. Physical forces are at work all over the earth, charging the atmosphere with the identical materials that compose the meteoric stone, or aërolite. Volcanoes emit their gases, and hurl with terrific force burning fragments of rock into the depths of the sky. The tornado, or land-spout, takes up in its grasp sand, with other solid material, and rotates it with such violence as to produce fusion of the mass, giving it a globular form and hurling it to an invisible height, and then leaving it to gravitate brilliantly and rapidly until it reaches the earth. This theory is confirmed by many facts, and especially by the occurrence of a land-spout near the village of Ossonval in France, where, on the 6th of July, 1822, some broken clouds, coming from different directions, and collecting over the sandy plain, formed a single cloud, which covered the heavens, when an elongated nether portion of it descended, presenting its vortex downward, and having its base in the cloud. It then became violent in its revolutions, and being driven by the wind, overturned buildings, uprooted trees, twirling them in the air with liberal quantities of sand and water, which it had scooped up in its course, when from its centre, amid sulphurous vapors, globes of fire were seen to issue, as if projected from an engine of terrific power, attended with a sound like that of heavy cannon discharged in the distance. Throughout its entire course it left the fearful traces of its devastation. The globes of fire which were projected from its centre, it may well be supposed, possessed all the characteristics of veritable aërolites, and were thus manufactured by electrical heat and fusion out of the earth-material lifted from the plain. Not long since, there fell near Romney, Ind., an aërolite in a liquid, or molten state, which flew into fragments the moment it struck the earth's surface. The spot where it fell was deeply indented and scorched; and the material of which it was composed was found scattered about in the vicinity, having the appearance of cinders, yet moulded into the form of small spherical bodies varying in size from a buckshot to that of a cannon-ball. It is somewhat remarkable that in subjecting fractured portions of the cinders to intense heat, no perceptible odor was emitted, neither was the color nor weight changed. The fact that these cinders descended in spherical bodies would seem to indicate that the parent mass approached the earth in a state of fusion, projecting from its surface, as it revolved, detached fragments, which, taking a rotatory impulse, became its attendant satellites in accordance with planetary laws. Among many other aërolites that have fallen in different parts of our country, one of considerable magnitude was seen to fall near Concord, Muskingum County, Ohio, on the 1st of May, 1860; it approached the earth with a brilliancy as vivid as the sun, and exploded when it struck. Several fragments of it were excavated while quite hot, one of which, weighing eleven pounds, has been deposited in the Historical Rooms at Cleveland. It is composed of ferruginous matter, and seems almost as heavy as pure iron. It is impossible for us to comprehend, from the standpoint we occupy in this life, our real relations either to the past or to the present, much less to the future. Earth has her manifold wonders, yet they are but few when compared with the infinite wonders of the heavens. Vast as our solar system truly is, it may still be regarded as but a chandelier suspended in the entrance-hall of Nature's great temple. When we consider that infinite space has neither centre nor circumference, and that it is filled with stars, and that every star is a world inhabited like our own, and that there are still infinite numbers of stars whose light, though travelling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles a second ever since the dawn of creation, has not yet reached the earth, we are lost,--lost in wonder and amazement, lost in thought, still wanting a thought broad enough and strong enough to grasp the infinite. Who is there that would not, if he could, explore the untrodden yet brilliant domains of infinite space,--the garden of God, ever blossoming with golden flowers,--and thus acquire for himself divine wisdom? If we would become as gods, and walk with God, we must learn to partake the food, and drink the beverage, of the gods. In physical science there is much that has a direct influence on the growth and vigor of moral science. In fact, Nature does much more for the welfare and education of man than he does for himself. The mountains elevate his thoughts, and teach him moral sublimity. The vast ocean, apparently shoreless, suggests to him the idea of eternity and a future life. The earthquake, the hurricane, and the lightning inspire him with a belief in the existence of a supreme Power, a divine Governor of the universe. Thus impressed with a sense of his own weakness and dependence, man naturally implores protection, and trusts in the beneficence and in the clemency of the great Invisible. Hence his faith, his hope, his aspirations. In this way was laid the primitive foundation of his creed and religious tendencies. And yet his weakest passion would seem to be his strongest,--a desire not only to perpetuate himself beyond this life, but to acquire superhuman power. It is for this that he struggles, erects altars, and solicits aid from visionary as well as from divine sources. Whether the perfection of mankind be the end and aim of Nature, need not be questioned. It is evident that she regards man as a favorite, and for this reason solicits him to accept the lessons of wisdom which are ever falling from her lips. In the plenitude of her love she attempts to lead him upward into a broader and a holier sphere. If man was able to trace his descent and ascertain his origin, do you think he would find it in the ape, as Darwin affirms, or in the dust of the earth? Revelation replies, In the dust; and a sound philosophy confirms the fact. Nature never stultifies herself, nor does she develop a new species of animal or plant from an existing species, but doubtless encourages "natural selection" in the line of each distinct species, and by so doing promotes progress in her grand scheme of attaining perfection; nor can it be doubted that from new conditions a new species may appear. In fact, every living thing is born of its appropriate conditions, and will continue to propagate its kind so long as its appropriate conditions exist. When conditions change, results change. In this way a new species of plant or animal may be, and perhaps often is, generated. The process is simply one of change in the relation of the requisite life-elements,--a process which results from the unceasing operation of a great natural law. In Nature there is nothing constant but change. Life, in all its varieties, whether vegetal or animal, has a rudimental origin, traceable perhaps to a minute egg, cell, or spore, call it what you will, from which is evolved in due time a perfect plant or animal. But if asked whence is derived the egg, cell, or spore, we can only reply that they have their origin in certain primitive life-elements, which are brought into contact in a way so subtile as to elude the investigations of science. This life-law, whatever it may be, acts in reference to kind, and produces its kind. Nearly all forms of life have resemblances; and though we accept the doctrine of evolution, it does not follow that man was developed from an ape, or the bird from a flying-fish. Everything that lives, whether plant or animal, has its leading characteristics. Nearly all plants, as well as animals, evince a degree of intelligence in their choice of nutriment and in their methods of obtaining it. Some plants, like animals, shrink at the touch; while others have the power of locomotion. Some seek the sunlight; while others prefer the shade. Some imprison and appropriate insects as food; while others extend themselves in this or that direction in search of favorite companionship. It is doubtless true that plants, as well as animals, however low their grade, have sensation, perhaps consciousness, and if so, a ray of reason. It would seem that mind is but an outgrowth of matter, and that every living thing has a degree of intelligence. Indeed, every particle of matter, organic or inorganic, has motive power, and is therefore endowed with a living principle, however sluggish or inert it may appear. An intelligent vitality seems to pervade the entire material of the universe. Hence it has been said with some degree of plausibility that "matter thinks." However this may be, it is certain that its motive power acts in reference to adapting means to ends, and is therefore controlled by reason,--a reason that is infinitely superior to human reason. In other words, all matter is the subject of law. The one is manifestly the condition of the other. The law cannot exist without the matter, nor can the matter exist without the law. Both are therefore co-existent, and doubtless co-eternal. Nature is ever active in working "wonders in the heavens and in the earth." Her domain includes both. In the beam of every star she sends us a messenger revealing the fact that the stars are constructed of the same materials as the earth. In like manner we have assurance that the same is true of the nebulous masses, which seem to float, like continents, in infinite space, awaiting the slow processes which are destined to mould them into golden orbs. And thus from the depths of the infinite comes world after world, system after system, ever sweeping onward in the "eternal dances of the sky," until lost in the infinite. And thus it is that the work of creation has neither beginning nor ending, but is ever progressing in its subtile methods of combining, dissolving, and recombining the entire matter of the universe. Everything, whether orb or atom, moves in a circle, because there is a divinity that stirs within it. Philosophize as we may, it is certain that we are surrounded by the infinite, and are of the infinite. All that is terrestrial in us, all individualities, are evanescent, passing from one form into another. Nothing remains identical. Yet in her experiments, Nature never fails of success. In dissolving pearls, she creates others of higher value; in extinguishing stars, she lights up others of greater brilliancy and magnitude. And yet nothing becomes extinct; elements never die. Every plant and every animal is but the fruitage of the inherent life that pervades the material world. In some form or other we always have existed and always will exist. It has been well said that man in his nature is "half dust and half deity." His life does not begin with his birth, nor does it end with his death; he is immortal. And so is everything, whether animate or inanimate, immortal. Even death survives itself. Nor is there a particle of matter in the universe that has not lived and breathed; nor is there a drop of water in the ocean that has not slaked the thirst of some living thing. Every star that glitters in the fathomless depths of space swarms with life, and every life achieves its aim. In a word, everything is infinite, and subserves an infinite purpose. We need neither go nor come to reach heaven. It is here; it is everywhere,--not a place, but a state. It is only the moral atmosphere of our social and individual life that requires purification,--a work that must begin in the head and in the heart in order to be effective. When this purification has been achieved, then with our earth-life will come moral elevation, and with moral elevation, harmony with heaven. The God of Nature is the God in Nature, who not only reveals himself in her lessons, but takes us by the hand, and with the love and patience of a parent leads us onward and upward-- "Along the line of limitless desires." EDUCATION OF THE MASSES. It is the welfare of society, rather than that of the individual, which is sought to be promoted by a system of popular education. Every part of the social fabric should be fitted to its place, and go into place like the materials in Solomon's temple, without the sound of the hammer; yet a refined civilization cannot be attained without first securing a liberal mental culture of the masses. Nature, as if inspired by a divine instinct, is ever engaged in refining her materials. The laws by which she works are as applicable to mind as to matter. In man we see both mind and matter combined,--two natures, the intellectual and the physical. But in order to learn what we are and what we should be, we must first understand the relations in which we are placed. In attempting to do this, we must study man as well as Nature, and advance step by step, if we would achieve the highest attainments of which we are capable. He only is a man in the true sense whose mental, moral, and physical capacities have been fully developed. To be "twenty-one years of age and six feet high" does not of itself constitute a man. He must attain to something more than this,--he must have the head and the heart and the soul of a man. He must appreciate the true character of his position, and have the moral courage to discharge his duties,--in short, he must live for others as well as for himself, act from generous impulses, and in all he does, yield to "the divinity that stirs within him," if he would comprehend the import of his godlike destiny. The highway to knowledge, though rugged, is equally free and open to all. Whoever will, may enter the temple of Nature, interrogate her face to face, unlock her treasures, appropriate her wealth, and subject her subtle agencies to human service. This the nineteenth century has already done to a considerable extent. Thus far it has been a bold century, and has taken many bold steps. It has "knocked holes through the blind walls" of the last ten centuries, and exposed to daylight the "moles and the bats" of antiquity; and still it demands more light. Such is the spirit of the age,--a demand for naked truth in all its beautiful proportions. Never, until this nineteenth century, have the masses really discovered their mission,--the great fact that they were created to think as well as work, and to govern as well as be governed. And yet the world may be regarded as still in its infancy; nor has the human mind, as compared with its possibilities, emerged from its cradle, or even thrown off its swaddling garments. Though capable of sublime achievements, man at birth is not only one of the most helpless, but one of the most ignorant, specimens of animal existence. It is said by physiologists that an infant can neither smile nor shed a tear until forty days old. In his infancy the world to him is but a panorama of strange objects. In due time, however, he discovers that he has everything to learn, and needs to learn everything before he can comprehend himself or wield the power which Heaven has assigned him. The degree of culture required to render man what he should be--godlike in his character--admits of no compromise with ignorance, superstition, or sectarianism, but on the contrary, involves the necessity of establishing and sustaining such an educational system as will be adapted to the needs of the masses, and work in accordance with the laws of matter and of mind. It is to the masses that our country must look for her best material, and for her future intellectual giants. In every age of the world more or less great men have been produced. At a time when most needed, our own country produced a Washington, a Jefferson, and a Franklin, who distinguished themselves and the age in which they lived,--the age which gave birth to human rights. At a later period appeared a Jackson, a Clay, and a Webster,--the defenders of the Constitution and of the Union,--who have left behind them a brilliant record; but notwithstanding their conservative efforts, there came a spirit of reform, sowing dragon-teeth, which soon sprang to life and filled the land with armed heroes, who bravely met in deadly conflict and decided forever the great question of human freedom; and consequently we now have, instead of a few, a great many men of world-wide renown, who have made for themselves and for their country a proud history. In order to preserve our liberties we must have men of large hearts and wise heads,--men who can wear the armor of giants because they are giants. In short, we must recognize the great fact that every child in the land has a God-given right to an education,--a right which no parent should be allowed to sell for "a mess of pottage." Our national watchword should be "Education;" and the system should be so constructed as to reach all classes of youth by methods not only efficient but attractive. It will be said by some, perhaps, that it is quite impossible to educate the masses in the higher branches of learning, unless they be withdrawn from the indispensable labors of the field and the workshop, and thus be compelled to neglect the industrial pursuits on which they must depend for their physical comforts,--bread, raiment, and shelter. However plausible this objection may seem, it certainly does not afford a sufficient reason why the facilities of acquiring a good education should not be equally extended to all classes. Manual labor and a high degree of intelligence are by no means incompatible, but on the contrary, must be associated, in order to achieve great or brilliant results. It is true, however, that the physical wants of man must first be supplied before you can proceed successfully with the cultivation of his intellectual powers. The fact is every day exemplified that bread is much easier gained by an intelligent than by an ignorant laborer. Whatever faith may do, it is certain that science and labor must be combined if we would either tunnel or "remove mountains;" and though native talent may have been distributed with more liberality to some than to others, all are under the highest obligations to improve such as they have, whether it be one talent or twenty talents. The farmer, the mechanic, the merchant, and even the busy housewife, have more or less leisure hours,--long winter evenings, holidays, and sabbath days, amounting to nearly half a lifetime,--which might with great profit be employed in the acquisition of useful knowledge through the medium of choice books and interchange of thought. Indeed, almost every one who has received a common-school education may so improve the fragments of time which fall in his way as to acquire in the course of an ordinary lifetime a pretty thorough acquaintance with the sciences, and with general literature. Though our leisure hours may seem too few to be worth improving, yet it is by saving pennies that we accumulate wealth. Surprising as it may seem, there are within the allotted age of man ten years of sabbaths when taken in the aggregate,--ample time, one would suppose, for perfecting, in a good degree at least, his intellectual and moral culture. If mankind were as orthodox in their actions as they profess to be in their creeds, the moral regeneration of the world would soon be accomplished. One of the most formidable barriers in the way of human advancement is the faith we have derived, not from revelation, but from the blind interpretation of it. A true theology and a sound philosophy can never come in conflict. In this enlightened age, it is absurd to expect that Science will confine her inquiries within the circumference of a circle, or so modify her annunciations of truth as to coincide with the mystical traditions which have been handed down to us from a remote antiquity. As an encouragement to the friends of popular education, the fact should not be overlooked that the masses have been to a great extent relieved from the necessity of constant toil by the introduction of modern machinery. In fact, genius has conquered time, and given time to the masses. It has broken the fetters that bound them, and thus afforded them leisure for self-culture, social intercourse, and the investigation of truth. It is the magic power of genius which has given life and brain to machinery, and which compels it to perform the hard work of the factory, of the workshop, of the farm, and of the household. In almost every department of industry, machinery does the hard work. It spins and weaves and knits. It saws and planes and wields the hammer. It reaps and mows and thrashes. It churns and washes and plies the needle. In fact, it does nearly everything else for us, except to breathe, eat, and digest our food. It was the inventive genius of our Northern people--the legitimate outgrowth of our common-school system--that produced, at the moment when wanted, iron-clads, monster cannon, and Greek fire, and in the sequel, saved the Union, and overawed the powers of Europe. It was these warlike inventions which secured us the elements of a lasting peace, and the respect of the civilized world. It may be truly said that we now live longer in ten years than our ancestors did in twenty, and accomplish twenty times as much. Still it is not possible for any one man to know and do everything. Men of genius are specialties, seldom or never universalities. Hence, a diversity of talent naturally dictates a division of labor. And yet American genius, if not universal, must be acknowledged eminently inventive and practical. The Americans have made, we may venture to assert, more valuable discoveries in the last half century than all the world besides. The reason why this is so may be attributed to the operation of a physical law, in connection with the effect of a liberal system of popular education. The Americans are a mixed race, made up of all nations, and have been improved and elevated as a race by transfusion of blood, which has resulted in producing increased activity of brain, with new modes of thought and new exhibitions of intellectual power. But notwithstanding this peculiarity of character, there still remains, as it seems to me, one great and glaring error in the prevailing system of American education. This error consists in our neglecting to develop more fully the physical man, through the instrumentalities of systematic labor combined with systematic study. In many of the German States, if not in all, the plan of educating youth is much more sensible and philosophical than in this country. There they combine daily labor with daily study; and the result is that the youth of Germany acquire vigor of body and vigor of mind at the same time. From youth to manhood they are taught to regard labor as honorable, and they feel that it is so. Hence the Germans are characterized as a race by the possession of an iron constitution, and by a mental energy which enables them to meet the stern realities of life not only with fortitude, but with a spirit that never yields to adversity. No country has ever produced a more athletic or a more enduring race than Germany; nor has any country produced finer scholars in every branch of human learning, especially in philosophy and in classical literature. But in this country it may be difficult, perhaps impracticable, to establish an educational system of this character, to any considerable extent, for the reason that we are for the most part an agricultural people, who do not concentrate in hamlets, like the peasantry of Europe, but prefer to occupy many acres and to distribute ourselves over a vast expanse of territory,--and what is more, have a way of our own in all we do. The truth is, Young America does not like work. He prefers fine clothes and fast horses, and apes the man before he is a man. And yet he assumes to know everything, and to do everything,--except work. These peculiarities in the character of Young America seem to have been generated by the spirit of our free institutions. Whether too much freedom or too little freedom is the greater evil, presents a grave question. Whatever may be the cause, it is evident that we as a people are degenerating into a nation of speculators. Almost every man nowadays seeks to acquire wealth by some grand speculation,--by some other means than by the honest "sweat of his brow." Even mental acquisitions are often sought as a means of speculation,--as a means of living without work; and hence we see the learned professions crowded to overflowing. Go into the main streets of our cities and villages, and you will see the fronts of nearly all the buildings on either side of the way shingled over with the signs of lawyers and doctors, who in the estimation of the populace lead lives of little work and great dignity. Doubtless a foreigner, with such an exhibition before his eyes, would think us a nation of lawyers and doctors, living on the misfortunes of each other; nor would his conclusion be very wide of the mark. Nor can it be doubted that there are thousands in the clerical profession who, if they do not subsist on each other, subsist in a "mysterious way" on salaries entirely inadequate to their support. It would seem that the supply of professional men in this country exceeds the demand. For this there may be no remedy. Yet a step in the right direction should be taken by advancing the standard of professional attainments so as to exclude mediocrity and shallow pretence from registration on the "roll of honor." Wide as the world is, it has no room for idlers or pretenders. This over-supply of professional men not only indicates a false estimate of what really constitutes a true manhood, but clearly proves that in American education and in American public sentiment there are prevalent errors which are inconsistent with the welfare of man and the democratic character of our institutions. These errors can be corrected only through the influence of a well-directed course of popular education; but nothing is more difficult than the correction of popular errors. It is a task the reformer often attempts, but seldom accomplishes. In most cases it must be a work of time, perhaps of ages. In every school there should be a regular system of physical as well as mental exercises established. Health and strength of body are pre-requisites to health and strength of mind. In most of our colleges and boarding-schools the physical development of the pupil receives but little attention; and consequently he is enfeebled in body if not in mind, and is then sent out into the world to endure its hardships without the physical ability to take care of himself. All this is radically wrong, and calls loudly for reform. An exclusive culture of the mental powers can never produce a strong man or woman. This fact is painfully illustrated in all our large towns and cities. The kind of education, therefore, which attempts to refine our young men and young ladies by giving them an artificial nature too delicate to endure soiled hands will never do. The coarse as well as the fine work of practical life must be done by somebody. Though some may be too proud, none are too good to work, however elevated may be their social position. There is really nothing in our daily routine of duty--in the coarse work of the world--from which an enlightened mind should shrink. It is to be hoped the time will soon come when all our public schools, colleges, and universities will have their workshops and gardens, affording the necessary facilities for instructing our youth, male and female, in some industrial art or trade, as well as in books, and thus give them a relish for labor, and the physical ability to endure it. If such a method were adopted, the women of our country would soon become practically fitted to compete with the men in many, if not all, the channels of a business life. If it be true that the women have been deprived of their rights, it is certainly not the fault of the men, but a fault of education,--a radical error which should be remedied. If parents will not apply the remedy in the early education of their daughters, then there is no relief. Let a course of education make it as fashionable for a woman to pursue some industrial art or trade as it is to be a lily that neither "toils nor spins," and you would soon see American women not only capable of taking care of themselves, but more generally solicited than they now are to assume the endearing cares of their appropriate sphere. The true mission of woman is divine. To her belongs the post of honor,--that of a wife and mother,--a position which she prefers to occupy when yielding to the impulses of her nature. In educating her, therefore, this great fact should be kept in view. There is no knowledge she needs more than a correct knowledge of human character. This she can only acquire by coming in contact with the world as it is, in childhood as well as in womanhood; in the public school as well as in the social circle. The old puritanic idea that the sexes must be schooled separately in order to secure them from exposure to moral dangers, seems to me not only erroneous, but absurd. The public school, when made up of both sexes, is in fact an epitome of the world, where its good and its evil are seen, and where the child should be taught to accept the good and reject the evil under the guidance of correct moral principles. It is in a pure home influence, however, that a primary education should begin. Indeed, mothers must take the initiatory step in giving to youthful impulse the right direction. "Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined." But in order to appreciate the full import of their duties and responsibilities, mothers themselves must first be properly educated. Where, then, is this all-important work to be commenced? Where can it be commenced, except in our common schools? It is in the common schools only that the masses can be educated. It is to the common schools only that we can look for the proper education of the future fathers and mothers of the land, and for the correction of popular errors. It is to this class of schools, more than to any other, that we must look for our future patriots and scholars, statesmen and philosophers, and last, not least, for our future school-teachers. The mission of a school-teacher is truly a mission of divine import. It is the school-teacher who moulds the youthful mind, and converts it into a casket of gems; it is the school-teacher who gives direction to budding thought, and awakens in the soul of youth the slumbering fires of genius,--in short, it is the school-teacher who lays the broad foundations of the Republic, and hews the pillars that sustain our civil and religious institutions. The school-teacher should therefore possess the qualifications of a master-builder, be able to plan his work, and execute it with tact, taste, and judgment. He should not only govern himself, but should be able to govern his pupils without seeming to govern. In a word, he should be a model character, and regard his profession as one of honor, and honor his profession by elevating it to the dignity of a learned profession. He should remember that he is placed in a position which gives him a vast influence,--an influence broad as the ocean of time; an influence which should be pure in its character, and as refreshing to the growth of the inner life as the dews of heaven to the unfolding flowers. There is no means, perhaps, more efficient in promoting the success of a professional teacher than the instruction to be derived from institutes, or normal schools, in which the art of teaching is made a specialty. This class of schools should be made a part of our school system. At least every Congressional district, if not every county, should have its normal school. It is only in this way that our public schools can be supplied with accomplished teachers, and be made worthy of being called the "people's colleges." But the truth is, the masses are not as yet more than half awake to their real interests. In the cause of popular education the wonder is that educators have done so much, and legislators so little. The true educator is a philanthropist. He sees and feels that public sentiment needs to be enlightened and liberalized before it will yield its sanction to such a system of public schools as ought to be established. In perfecting our present system, we need a National Bureau of Education, authorized to act as a central power in directing, if not in controlling, the general educational interests of the entire country. A department of this kind, it is believed, would give efficiency and equality to all public schools, and thus greatly elevate their general character. And with this view Congress should be required by the Constitution, not only to establish, but support in each of the States at least one national college; and these colleges should constitute a national university, in which the crowning studies should be natural science, military science, and the science of government. It is doubtless true that educators have already become a power in the land. Of this fact they seem to be aware, and the danger is that their influence may be subordinated to the uses of political aspirants. Every educator has a right, of course, to express his own individual opinions; but he certainly has not the right to employ educational instrumentalities to promote the interests of a selfish partisanship, either in State or Church. Whenever it is attempted to sow "tares" of this kind among the wheat, it is to be hoped that an indignant public sentiment will eradicate them with an unsparing hand. It is always pleasant to recall our early schooldays, with their many delightful and refreshing memories, which still linger about the old school-house where we received our elementary education,--the dear old school-house by the wayside, with its noisy group, its sunny spots, and its hours of fun and frolic, and especially its birchen sceptre, which so often taught us the "doctrine of passive obedience." It is unquestionably true that every school-house, to some extent at least, reflects its character in the character of its pupils. Hence we should not only look to the character of our schools, but should build our school-houses in a neat, if not imposing style; for they, though silent, are eloquent teachers, whose influence should create such impressions as will tend to refine the tastes and elevate the aspirations of the youthful mind. But no system of education which is contracted, or revolves in a circle, can fully meet the exigencies of the mind, or satisfy the demands of the age. In most American colleges, as well as in the universities of Europe, a definite course of study is prescribed and made a fixed fact,--a kind of Procrustean bed on which every lad is either stretched or abridged to fit; and this is done, as scholastics tell us, for the purpose of disciplining the mind. No two persons were ever created to think, act, or look alike in every respect; nor can an educational system be prescribed by square and compass which will be alike adapted to all minds. In my humble judgment, those studies best discipline the mind which tend most to enlarge and liberalize it, and which are essentially concordant with its native powers and capacities. The course of education, therefore, which will best develop the peculiar genius, talent, or marked preference of the pupil, should be adopted so far as practicable. If a young man, for instance, exhibits a native talent or taste for music, painting, mechanics, law, medicine, theology, agriculture, or commerce, his education should take the direction indicated. If this plan were pursued in all our colleges and other schools of a high order, we should soon see, instead of here and there a star, a galaxy of brilliant men and women in the sky of our national renown, whose excellence in their several specialties would challenge the admiration of mankind. The truth is, our modern colleges are not modern enough. They look to the ancients for wisdom, instead of seeking it from Nature and the revelations of modern science. In a word, the dead languages are studied too much; the living, too little. Next to mathematics, the natural sciences should take the preference. No man is thoroughly educated who is not thoroughly instructed in these sciences, especially in chemistry and geology. Every farmer should be familiar with agricultural chemistry, and be able to apply its principles. It is the utility, the practical good to be derived from an education, that gives to it value and solidity. It is practical, not fanciful knowledge, which the masses need. In order to secure their elevation and social equality, every State in the Union should be required to maintain an efficient system of common schools, in which all instruction should be given in the English language, and the schools made accessible to all classes of youth, and be "good enough for the richest, and cheap enough for the poorest." In order to effect this, the system should recognize the theory as an equitable principle, that the property of the State is bound to educate the youth of the State. This principle is certainly a just one, since the man of property, though he have no children, is as much benefited by its application as the man who has children but no property, for the reason that the security of property, as well as the rights of persons and the stability of the Republic, must ever depend on the degree of intelligence possessed by the people. In fact, each State should be regarded as one great school-district, and all its resident youth as the children of the State, for whose common education every citizen having taxable property is bound to contribute his proportionate share. In this way every child can be educated, and elevated to the social position of a true manhood; and it is only in this way that a work of such magnitude can be accomplished. In every point of view it is much wiser to educate than to punish, much wiser to build school-houses than prisons, much wiser to sustain school libraries than billiard-tables. It is a matter of congratulation, however, that there is now much more confidence placed in the theory of common schools than in former years. In most of the States prejudice has yielded to enlightened sentiment, and the "people's colleges" have come to be regarded as the most useful and influential institutions in the land. All should be done that can be to render these schools pleasant and attractive. The school-house should be built not only in good taste, but its surroundings should be made as cheerful and inviting as possible by planting about it ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowers. Its interior walls should be enriched with appropriate maps and charts, historical paintings, and portraits of renowned men and women. In addition to this, every school should be supplied with an ample apparatus, embracing specimen weights and measures, mathematical figures in wood, together with globes and a planetarium,--not omitting a cabinet of the leading minerals, metals, and coins. Their uses and characteristics should be explained and illustrated by the teacher in a simple style of language, and in the presence of the entire school, at least once or twice a week. Familiar exercises of this kind would deeply interest the pupils, and impart to their minds a degree of valuable knowledge which they would not be likely to obtain in any other way, and which might awaken, perhaps, some unconscious genius, who would in after-life so develop his powers as to advance the interests of science, and take his place among her proudest masters. In nearly every instance our truly great men have arisen from an obscure origin. The time has already arrived, I am inclined to think, when there should be added to the usual course of studies pursued in our colleges, academies, and high schools, a systematic training in military science and discipline, as a means not only of physical culture, but as an easy method of fitting our young men to become practical soldiers and defenders of the Republic. We as a people, in consequence of the late Civil War in which we have been involved, are evidently undergoing a transition, which has already had the effect to change in a good degree our national traits of character. If we would have invincible men, we must, like the ancient Greeks, accustom our sons to hardships and manly exercises, give them muscle as well as mind, teach them to love and defend their country, and if need be, to die for it,--die on the battle-field,-- "Where gory sabres rise and fall Like shoots of flame on midnight's pall!" The attempt which we are making in our public schools to educate our children in the shortest possible time is a grave error. We ought rather to "make haste slowly," if we would do the work well. A work of this character is one which requires patience and perseverance. There is no short way to knowledge, no patent right that can produce it to order. It can only be obtained by study, persevering study, aided by the patient efforts of competent teachers. It is all-important therefore that we should furnish our children with such elementary books as are best adapted to their capacities and needs, and with such teachers as are qualified to teach them lessons contained not only inside of books but outside of books,--lessons which abound everywhere, both in the natural and in the moral world. We should also furnish them with school libraries composed of standard works, and including the best current literature of the day. A library of this character should be established in every school-district, and be made accessible to every citizen. In this way, and only in this way, can the masses be supplied with the mental food which they so much need, and which is indispensable to their moral and intellectual elevation. No matter what the cost, public libraries always pay a liberal dividend in the shape of mental and moral power, if not in dollars and cents. No matter what dangers may threaten our free institutions, depend upon it, a reading people will take care of themselves. The ancients built temples for their gods; we build school-houses for our children. This one fact exhibits perhaps more clearly than any other the distinctive character which marks the career of ancient and modern civilization, and indicates the great change which has been wrought in the course of ages by the law of progress. We may justly regard our numerous school-houses and churches as the mirrors not only of moral character, but as the safeguards of the Republic. In the pursuit of knowledge, it is quite absurd to suppose that all high attainment in art, in literature, and in science, must of necessity be confined to the "learned professions," as they are called by way of pre-eminence. It does not matter what a man professes to know, but the question is, what does he know, compared with what he might know? There should never be such a monopoly allowed to exist as a monopoly of knowledge. The learned professions have nothing in them sacred, no forbidden fruit,--nothing more than what everybody may know who chooses; nor can there be any good reason why every employment in the various departments of human industry--every trade, every mechanic art--should not be regarded as a learned profession, and be made a learned profession, in which brains as well as hands should co-operate in achieving success and in solving new problems. There is food for thought in every human pursuit. In order to be successful, in order to achieve high aims, the laboring man must not only think, but be capable of thinking profoundly. Indeed, every man may live like a philosopher, and be a philosopher, if he will. But no man can be a true philosopher who is not both a practical worker and a practical thinker. There is nothing the world needs more than workers and thinkers to make it a paradise. The masses are workers, and if educated, would become thinkers. It is only once or twice in a century, it is said, that "God lets loose upon the earth a great thinker." Of the past, this may be true, but not of the present. We have scores of men now living who are greater thinkers than Plato, Newton, or Franklin, because modern science has introduced them into broader fields of thought. The chemists, geologists, inventors, and discoverers of the present day have never been excelled as profound thinkers. Ours is literally an age of philosophers. Truth, though eternal, is never stationary; nor will the law of progress ever reach a standpoint. There is always something to be done, some vacuum to be filled. It is said by philosophers that Nature abhors a vacuum. I do not doubt it, especially if it be a vacuum in the human head. It is pretty certain that the youthful head, if not filled with sense at the proper time, will soon be filled with nonsense. Neither errors of the head nor errors of the heart can be easily eradicated, when once implanted. The moral nature of the child may be moulded at will; but the cherished opinions of age can seldom, if ever, be either reversed or essentially modified. In the great battle of life our success as individuals must depend on the kind of armor in which we are clad, and the kind of weapons with which we are supplied. For effective service there is nothing which can be brought into the field so formidable or so irresistible as the artillery of logic. Intellect is always sure of becoming the ultimate victor. We read of giants in the chronicles of the early ages,--physical giants, who could overthrow the pillars of the proudest temples, and bear off mountains upon their shoulders; yet of what value to the world were their marvellous exploits, if really true, compared with the achievements of those intellectual giants who have appeared at different epochs, and taught mankind the most useful lessons in the arts, in the sciences, and in philosophy? And here let me say to the young aspirant for worldly honors that if he would achieve high aims, he must not only aim high, but have faith in himself as well as in a Divine Providence. Indeed, every man, however humble, may become great in his vocation, if he will; yet no man can become truly great who is not truly good. So far as human perfection can be defined, it consists in the purity and sublimity of moral action,--a perfection which may be approached, if not reached, by all who are so disposed. How truly has it been said that we are never too old or too wise to learn! Nor is any man so ignorant but he may teach a philosopher something. No matter how conservative we may be in our creeds and opinions, the world will continue to move onward; nor can it stand still if it would. The time is at hand when errors in creed, as well as in education, to which we cling, will not only be exposed, but exploded. However hopeless the condition of the masses may seem, they are already demanding more light and only await an opportunity to proclaim their emancipation from mental thraldom. The statistics relating to the numbers of mankind, and to the frail tenure of human life, convey lessons which ought not to be disregarded in the estimate we make of what man can do to elevate himself. Strange as it may seem, it is a fact pretty well ascertained that the entire population of the globe neither increases nor diminishes, but remains essentially the same. And yet the population of the earth is continually undergoing changes from the operation of local causes, increasing here and diminishing there, as the ages advance. The law involved seems based on the principle of a just compensation for all diminution. In other words, the earth has a limited capacity, and like a cup when filled, can hold no more, yet always remains full. When we consider the fact that one fourth of mankind die before reaching seven years of age; one half before reaching seventeen years; and that sixty persons die every minute,--we are struck with astonishment, and are naturally led to inquire into the reasons. The causes which abridge life may for the most part be attributed to popular ignorance, or disregard of physical law,--either in ancestor, parent, or child. Nothing can be truer than the fact that the "sins of the fathers are visited upon their children unto the third and fourth generation," and even to indefinite generations. It is indeed a fearful inheritance, when life comes to us tainted with constitutional disease. For this there seems to be no remedy, except in the adoption of such a popular system of education as will diffuse a practical knowledge of the laws of health. It may be safely asserted that many people, especially in America, where food is abundant and the style of living luxurious, "dig their own graves with their teeth." Americans, as we all know, are disposed to live fast, and of course die prematurely. In short, we are a sanguine, impatient people; have morbid appetites, crave rich viands, seek wealth and office, and care for little else. In our successes we commit excesses. In the pure elixir of life we infuse drops of poison. Yet Nature proffers us the gift of long life, and waits our acceptance with a patient spirit. Though extreme longevity may not be desirable, yet many more than now do, might attain to the dignity of centenarians, if they would but live in obedience to physical law. In the elements of his physical nature, man is truly "of the earth earthy." Chemists say that a man of ordinary size is composed of forty pounds solid matter and five buckets of water, all of which may be converted into gas. However this may be, man is a delicate piece of mechanism, a combination of divine inventions. For example, his eye is a telescope, which penetrates the mysteries of the stars; his ear is a drum, which repeats every sound in nature; his heart a timepiece, which marks, with measured beat, the fleeting moments of his life; his vocal organs a harp with a thousand strings, which is capable of uttering the divinest music. And yet man in his moral nature, though created but "a little lower than the angels," is a profound puzzle. He advances many theories, questions even divine truth, yet believes in absurdities. Nor need we marvel at this, perhaps, when we recall the fact that mankind speak more than three thousand different languages, and profess more than one thousand different religions. Whether regarded as a common brotherhood, or as composed of distinct races, it is evident that the human family have made rapid advancement in the amelioration of their condition during the last century, through the instrumentalities of a world-wide commercial intercourse, and the consequent diffusion of nobler incentives to action. Yet of the one thousand millions that compose the great family of man, more than six hundred millions are still groping their way in the darkness of a moral midnight, awaiting the advent of the school-master and the promulgation of a purer and holier faith. Even in Christian countries, especially in the South-American States, and in many parts of Europe, the masses are almost universally illiterate and superstitious, and have so long been accustomed to oppression that they have become quite indifferent, if not insensible, to their natural rights; nor dare they, if they would, assert their manhood. In Italy, the land of art and of beauty, the proportion of those who can read is from twenty to thirty in a hundred, while among the inhabitants within a circle of thirty miles around Rome, there is not one in a hundred, it is said, who can read. Not only in these countries, but in more than half the globe, the masses submit to oppression, because it is the policy of their oppressors to hold them, spell-bound, in ignorance. If they are ever elevated to the social and political rank which the God of Nature designed them to occupy, it must be done by the school-master, armed with his text-books and sustained by the efforts of an enlightened Christian philanthropy. For this ultimate object God works, and man should work. There can be no doubt but natural scenery, as well as climate, exercises a decided influence in the formation of national character. Whether we advert to Palestine, Switzerland, or New England, it is easy to discover that the mountains of these countries have by their silent eloquence inspired the masses of the people, not only with reverence, but with a love of freedom. In the sublimity of the cloud-capped mountains, they seem to recognize a divine presence which has taught them to look skyward, and to feel that they are destined to ascend in the scale of existence; while in low and level countries, especially on the plains of Russia and Asia, the inhabitants take horizontal views of things, and consequently submit to oppression, and never dare, like mountain-bred men, to break their fetters or question the decrees of fate. The ancient Hebrews, as everybody knows, were not only brave in warfare, but were distinguished above all other nations as a reverential and God-fearing people. Their form of government was essentially theocratic. In the earthquake they recognized the footsteps of God; in the solemn thunder they heard his voice; in the lightning's flash they saw an expression of his anger; in the rainbow they beheld a token of his promise,--in a word, they were a peculiar people, who have, in the record of their experiences, transmitted to mankind a sacred inheritance. Switzerland is emphatically a land of mountains and of heroes. Almost every hill and vale within her borders has its consecrated spots and its sanctified memories. In the recesses of her mountains the love of freedom ever burns with a pure and a holy flame, because it is a love which was born of the mountains. In New England it is equally apparent that the silent grandeur of her mountains contributes to inspire her inhabitants with lofty sentiments, and with a love of civil and religious liberty,--a love which can never be subjected to the reign of oppression, nor be misdirected in its action, except by its own enthusiasm. It often happens that the inhabitants who occupy distinct portions of a common country differ as widely in their sentiments as in their manners and customs. Especially is this true of the United States, where it is easy to distinguish the Eastern, Western, and Southern people from each other. It may be natural causes, or it may be local interests, that have created these differences, and marked the people of each region with those peculiar personal traits which give them character. The New Englanders are generally characterized as sedate, formal, and puritanical, guessing at everything, yet pretty shrewd at guessing. They possess genius, are prolific in inventions, and scrupulous in matters of faith. In discussing theological questions, they split hairs; in making a bargain, they conclude to split the difference. In all things they are quick to see advantages, and apt to take advantages. In whatever they undertake, they look ahead and go ahead. In every sixpence which falls within their grasp, they recognize an element of power which "leads on to fortune;" and when they have acquired a fortune, they are pretty sure to keep it. And, as Halleck the poet says,-- "They love their land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught other reason why; Would shake hands with a king upon his throne, And think it kindness to his majesty; A stubborn race, fearing and nattering none. Such are they nurtured, such they live and die, All but a few apostates, who are meddling With merchandise, pounds, shillings, pence, and peddling!" In the Western States, where Nature educates men on a liberal scale by giving them broad rivers, broad lakes, and broad prairies, we find a people characterized by broad and liberal views of things, large-heartedness, frank manners, generous sympathies; a philanthropy which regards all mankind as a brotherhood, and a public sentiment which rebukes intolerance. In truth, Western men despise "little things" and devise "liberal things," and would sooner sacrifice their lives than yield obedience to the mandates of either political or ecclesiastical oppression. In the Southern States Nature has not as yet effected much in the exercise of her educational influences. In whatever she has attempted in this direction she seems to have been overruled by circumstances,--by the difference in races, and by the prejudices of caste. Though the South has produced intellectual men of a high order, she has contributed comparatively but little either to science or to standard literature. Yet it must be conceded that the South has always been justly distinguished for her hospitality, cordiality, and chivalric spirit. Whatever human institutions may achieve, it is certain that Nature in the manifest wisdom of her works contributes largely to the education of all classes of men in all countries. In her great school, even the uncivilized man not unfrequently becomes a profound philosopher. The coinage of her mint has the true ring in it and passes current everywhere. Her light is the light of the world, yet the masses are too blind, or rather too ignorant, to see it. Without intending the least disrespect to the one thousand different theologies which distract mankind, it may be asserted that the Book of Nature is in itself a divine revelation, which has been divided by her own hand into chapter and verse, and may be read in the alphabet of the flowers, in the rocks of the hills, and in the stars. In its language it is not only beautiful, but every word is suggestive; in its doctrines it is pure and truthful; in its wide range of thought it treats principally of life, and of the conditions of life, and assures us that the silent process of creation--of eternal change--still goes on, now as ever; and that every particle of matter in the universe is constantly active, achieving something. In a philosophical sense, there is nothing dead that does not live. Matter combines, dissolves, and re-combines. New forms of life and new conditions of life appear and disappear. The very dust under our feet has lived and breathed, and will live again. Nature waits to be gracious, and is ever ready to reveal her mysteries as fast as man can comprehend them. And though she speaks with a silent lip, she invites all to share her bounties. Her wealth is infinite. In every star, in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every grain of sand, in everything visible and invisible, there is life, light, and beauty. In everything there is power. We cannot look at a grain of sand, insignificant as it may seem, without seeing in its composition the material which enables us to read the golden record of the heavens. In the falling raindrop, when converted into steam, we recognize the existence of a power which has revolutionized the world. In the kiss of the sunbeam we discover a magical influence which tints the flower, gives color to everything in Nature, and by its impress presents us with an exact and lifelike transcript of ourselves and of our friends. In the lightning's flash we have a language in which we can converse with our friends throughout the civilized world, at any moment we please. When we consider what has been achieved in the way of scientific discovery during the last half-century, who can tell what may not be achieved in the next century, in the next ten centuries,--when the great mysteries of Nature shall be more fully revealed, and when new sciences, now unknown, shall disclose new principles, new forces, and still subtler agencies? In her desire to advance human knowledge, Nature invokes interpreters--unborn interpreters--who, though far away in the distance, will yet come, and when they do come, will interpret in accordance with truth the mystical language in which her undiscovered secrets are written, and thus extend the empire of thought until it becomes infinite,--an empire in which man, still rising in the scale of intelligence, will acquire divine powers, and assume the dignity of a perfect manhood. WOMAN AND HER SPHERE. Woman, like a flower, sprang to life in a garden of flowers,--sprang from the side of her lord, and took her place at his side, as a meet companion to share his earth-life, his joys, and his sorrows. The Greeks believed that the gods collected everything that is beautiful in Nature, out of which they formed the first woman, and having crowned her brow with sunshine, intrusted her with the irresistible power of fascination. It is certainly not less pleasant than natural to believe that woman was made of a more refined material than man; and it is doubtless true that every sincere worshipper of the beautiful delights to regard the "angel of his dreams" not only as an incarnation of all that is lovable, but as a divine spirituality,--a vision from a brighter and holier sphere. An old writer remarks that in order to make an entirely beautiful woman, it would be necessary to take the head from Greece, the bust from Austria, the feet from Hindostan, the shoulders from Italy, the walk from Spain, and the complexion from England. At that rate she would be a mosaic in her composition; and the man who married her might well be said to have "taken up a collection." However mystical may be the origin of woman, it is certain that we should look to the moral beauty of her life, rather than to her personal charms, in estimating the true value of her character. In her nature woman is a loyalist,--loyal to man and loyal to God. In all ages of the world, in all countries and under all circumstances, she has ever been distinguished for her patience, her fortitude, and her forbearance, as well as for those still higher and diviner attributes, her love and her devotion. Endowed with charms which give her the power of conquest, woman ever delights in making conquests; and though she may sometimes "stoop to conquer," she never fails to elevate the conquered. With the smile of love resting on her brow, she aims to fulfil her mission by scattering flowers along the pathway of life, and inspiring the sterner sex with reverence for her virtues and for the angelhood of her nature. The true woman exhibits a true womanhood in all she does, in all she says,--in her heart-life and in her world-life. Her love, once bestowed on him who is worthy of it, increases with her years and becomes as enduring as her life,-- "In death, a deathless flame." Not only in the sincerity of her love, but in all her sympathies, in her quick sense of duty, and in her devotion to all that is good, right, and just, she discloses without being conscious of it the divinity of her character. It is in sacred history that we find the earliest record of woman's virtues, acquirements, and achievements. It is there that we read of women who were not only distinguished for their exalted piety and exemplary habits of life, but who often excelled even the great men of renown in sagacity of purpose and in the exercise of sceptred power. It is in sacred history that we have the earliest account of the social and domestic relations of the human family, the most prominent of which is the institution of marriage. The first marriage of which we have any account took place in a garden, without the usual preliminaries and ceremonies which have marked its solemnization in subsequent periods of the world's history; yet we must believe that it was the most august and sublime wedding that ever occurred. The witnesses of the ceremony were none other than the angels of God. Nature presented her choicest flowers, and the birds of Paradise sang the bridal hymn, while earth and sky rejoiced in the consummation of the "first match made in heaven." It may be presumed, perhaps, that all matches are made in heaven; yet somehow or other, sad mistakes occur when least expected. Even our first parents, though placed in a garden of innocence, encountered a serpent in their pathway. It need not seem very strange, therefore, that "the course of true love never did run smooth." Yet there are but few who would not concur with Tennyson in thinking-- "'Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all." In affairs of the heart there is no such thing as accounting for the freaks of fancy, or the choice of dissimilar tastes. Singular as it may be, most people admire contrasts. In other words, like prefers unlike; the tall prefer the short; the beautiful the unbeautiful; and the perverse the reverse. In this way Nature makes up her counterparts with a view to assimilate her materials and bring harmony out of discord. It is from accords and discords that we judge of music and determine its degree of excellence. In wedded life even discords have their uses, since a family jar now and then is often attended with the happiest results, by bringing into timely exercise a higher degree of mutual forbearance, and inspiring the heart with a purer, sincerer, and diviner appreciation of the "silken tie." There is no topic, perhaps, of deeper interest to a woman than that of wedlock. It is an event, when it does occur, which brightens or blasts forever her fondest hopes and her purest affections. The matrimonial question is therefore the great question of a woman's life. In deciding it, she takes a risk which determines the future of her heart-life. When the motive is stamped with the imperial seal of Heaven, it is certain the heart will recognize it as genuine, and trust in it. The language of love speaks for itself, sometimes in mysteries, sometimes in revelations. It is a telegraphic language which every woman understands, though written in hieroglyphics. Hence the preliminaries to wedlock, usually called courtships, are as various in their methods as the whims of the parties. In many parts of the world these methods are as amusing as they are singular. In royal families matrimonial alliances are controlled by State policy, and the negotiations conducted through the agencies of ministerial confidants. In some Oriental countries, parents contract their sons and daughters in marriage while yet in their infancy, nor allow the parties an interview until of marriageable age, when the wedding ceremonies are performed, and the happy pair unveiled to behold each other for the first time. At such a moment "a penny for their thoughts" would be cheap enough. The philosophy of this absurd custom seems to be based on the classical idea that "love is blind." This may be true; yet blind though it be, the heart will always have its preference, and contrive some way or other to express it. In some of the Molucca Islands, when a young man is too bashful to speak his love, he seizes the first opportunity that offers of sitting near the object of his affection, and tying his garments to hers. If she allows him to finish the knot, and neither cuts nor loosens it, she truly gives her consent to the marriage. If she merely loosens it, he is at liberty to try his luck again at a more propitious moment; but if she cuts the knot, there is an end of hope. In Lapland it is death to marry a girl without the consent of her friends. When a young man proposes marriage, the friends of both parties meet to witness a race between them. The girl is allowed, at starting, the advantage of a third part of the race; if her lover does not overtake her, it is a penal offence for him ever to renew his offers of marriage. If the damsel favors his suit, she may run fast at first, to try his affection; but she will be sure to linger before she comes to the end of the race. In this way all marriages are made in accordance with inclination; and this is the probable reason of so much domestic contentment in that country. In ancient times marriageable women were the subjects of bargain and sale, and were more generally obtained by purchase than courtship. The prices paid in some instances seem incredible, if not extortionate. Of course, "pearls of great price" were not to be had for the mere asking. Jacob purchased his wife, Rachel, at a cost of fourteen years hard labor. The Babylonians, who were a practical people, gathered their marriageable daughters once a year from every district of their country, and sold them at auction to bachelors, who purchased them for wives, while the magistrates presided at the sales. The sums of money thus received for the beautiful girls were appropriated as dowries for the benefit of the less beautiful. Of course rich bachelors paid liberal prices for their choice, while poor bachelors, in accepting the less beautiful, generally obtained the best wives, with the addition of a handsome sum of money. In this way all parties were accommodated who aspired to matrimonial felicity. But in these modern times most of our young men, instead of purchasing their wives, prefer to sell themselves at the highest price the market affords. Fortune-hunting is therefore regarded as legitimate. In the mind of a fast young man wealth has a magical influence, which is sure to invest the possessor, if a marriageable young lady, however unattractive, with irresistible charms. If his preliminary inquiry--Is she rich?--be answered in the affirmative, the siege commences at once. Art is so practised as to conceal art, and create, if possible, a favorable impression. An introduction is sought and obtained. Interview follows interview in quick succession. The declaration is made; the diamond ring presented and graciously accepted; consent obtained, and the happy day set. Rumor reports an eligible match in high life, and the fashionable world is on tiptoe with expectation. But instead of its being an "affair of the heart," it is really a very different affair,--nothing but a hasty transaction in fancy stocks. And if the officiating clergyman were to employ an appropriate formula of words in celebrating the nuptials, he would address the parties thus:-- "Romeo, wilt thou have this delicate constitution, this bundle of silks and satins, this crock of gold, for thy wedded wife?"--"I will." "Juliet, wilt thou have this false pretence, this profligate in broadcloth, this unpaid tailor's bill, for thy wedded husband?"--"I will." The happy pair are then pronounced man and wife. And what is the result? A brief career of dissipation, a splendid misery, a reduction to poverty, domestic dissension, separation, and finally a divorce. But how different is the result when an honest man, actuated by pure motives, marries a sincere woman, whose only wealth consists in her love and in her practical good sense! It is man who degrades woman, not woman who degrades man. Asiatic monarchs have ever regarded woman, not as a companion, but as a toy, a picture, a luxury of the palace; while men of common rank throughout Asia and in many parts of Europe treat her as a slave, a drudge, a "hewer of wood and a drawer of water," and make it her duty to wait, instead of being waited on; to attend, instead of being attended. Out of this sordid idea of woman's destiny has grown in all probability the custom of regarding her as property. Influenced by this idea, there are still some persons to be found among the lower classes, even in our own country, who do not hesitate to sell, buy, or exchange their wives for a material consideration. Some of our American forefathers, in the early settlement of Jamestown, purchased their wives from England, and paid in tobacco, at the rate of one hundred and fifty pounds each, and thought it a fair transaction. Perhaps this is the reason why ladies are so generally disgusted with the use of the "Virginia weed." But the doctrine that woman was created the inferior of man, though venerable for its antiquity, is not less fallacious than venerable. It is simply an assertion which does not appear to be sustained by historical facts. It is true that woman is called in Scripture the "weaker vessel;" weaker in physical strength she may be, but it does not follow that she is weaker in mind, wit, judgment, shrewdness, tact, or moral power. The sterner sex need not flatter themselves, therefore, that superiority of muscle necessarily implies superiority of mind. History sufficiently discloses the fact that woman has often proved herself not only a match, but an over-match, for man, in wielding the sceptre, the sword, and the pen, to say nothing of the tongue. Illustrations of this great fact, like coruscations of light, sparkle along the darkened track of the ages, and abound in the living present. But in looking into the broad expanse of the historical past, we cannot attempt to do more than glance here and there at a particular star, whose undiminished lustre has given it a name and a fame, not only glorious, but immortal. As in all ages there have been representative men, so in all ages there have been representative women, who crowned the age in which they lived with honor, and gave tone to its sentiment and character. In the career of Semiramis, who lived about two thousand years before the Christian era, we have a crystallization of those subtle attributes of female character, which are not less remarkable for their diversity than extensive in their power and influence. It will be remembered that she was the reputed child of a goddess, a foundling exposed in a desert, fed for a year by doves, discovered by a shepherd, and adopted by him as his own daughter. When grown to womanhood, she married the governor of Nineveh, and assisted him in the siege and conquest of Bactria. The wisdom and tact which she manifested in this enterprise, and especially her personal beauty, attracted the attention of the King of Assyria, who mysteriously relieved her of her husband, obtained her hand in wedlock, resigned to her his crown, and declared her queen and sole empress of Assyria. The aspirations of Semiramis became at once unbounded; and fearing her royal consort might repent the hasty step he had taken, she abruptly extinguished his life, and soon succeeded in distinguishing her own. She levelled mountains, filled up valleys, built aqueducts, commanded armies, conquered neighboring nations, penetrated into Arabia and Ethiopia, amassed vast treasures, founded many cities, and wherever she appeared, spread terror and consternation. Under her auspices and by means of her wealth, Babylon, the capital of her empire, became the most renowned and magnificent city in the world. Her might was invincible; her right she regarded as co-extensive with her power. Her prompt action was the secret of her success. When she was informed, on one occasion, that Babylon had revolted, she left her toilet half made, put herself at the head of an armed force, and instantly quelled the revolt. She was a woman of strong passions and of strong mind, and, what is now very uncommon, of strong nerves. And yet her peerless beauty and the fascination of her manners appear to have been as irresistible as the sway of her sceptre. The fatality of her personal charms, her inordinate love of power, and the evils which arise from the indulgence of vain aspirations, indicate the lessons which are taught by her career. In the twenty-fifth year of her reign, her life was suddenly terminated by the violent hand of her own son. After death she was transformed, as it was believed, into a dove, under the symbol of which she received divine honors throughout Assyria. It would seem that literary women were not less known in ancient times than at the present day. Sappho took her place in the galaxy of literary fame six hundred years before Christ. So sublime, and yet so sweet, were her lyric strains that the Greeks pronounced her the tenth Muse. Longinus cites from her writings specimens of the sublime, and extols her genius as unrivalled. Beneficent as talented, she instituted an academy of music for young maidens, wrote nine books of lyric verse, and many other compositions of great merit. But of all her writings, however, only one or two of her odes have survived. Her fate was an unhappy one. She became violently enamoured of a young man of Mitylene, who was so ungallant as not to reciprocate her attachment; and being reduced to a state of hopeless despair, she precipitated herself into the sea from the steep cliff of Leucate, ever since called the "Lover's Leap." In this connection we ought not to omit the name of Aspasia, who, at a period two centuries later than Sappho, emerged like a star in a darkened sky and charmed the age in which she lived with the fascinations of her rhetoric. She was not less stately and queen-like in her person than accomplished in her manners. It is said of her, that she possessed rhetorical powers which were unequalled by the public orators of her time; she was as learned as eloquent. Plato says she was the instructress of Socrates. She also instructed Pericles in the arts of oratory, and afterwards married him. He was largely indebted to her for his finish of education and elegance of manners, for which he was so much distinguished. So charming were Aspasia's conversational powers that the Athenians sought every opportunity to introduce their wives into her presence, that they might learn from her the art of employing an elegant diction. On one occasion when the Athenian army had been disheartened, she appeared in the public assembly of the people and pronounced an oration, which so thrilled their breasts as to inspire new hopes, and induce them to rally and redeem their cause. Among female sovereigns but few have evinced more tact or talent in an emergency than Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. She was a native of Syria, a descendant of Ptolemy; married Odenatus, a Saracen, and after his death succeeded to the throne, about the year of our Lord 267. She had been highly educated, wrote and spoke many different languages, had studied the beauties of Homer and Plato under the tuition of Longinus, and was not less renowned for her beauty, melody of voice, and elegance of manners, than for her heroic deeds. In the five years of her reign she conducted many warlike expeditions, extended her empire, compelling Cappadocia, Bithynia, and Egypt to recognize her authority, and acknowledge her "Queen of the East,"--a favorite title which she had assumed. Her power had now become so extended as to alarm the Roman government for their own safety, who sent Aurelian with a formidable army to subjugate and reduce her empire to a province. Zenobia, after being defeated in two severe battles, retired with her forces to Palmyra, her capital, fortified it, and resolved never to surrender. Aurelian invested the city with his entire army, and in the course of the siege was severely wounded by an arrow, and being thus disabled, the progress of the siege was so far retarded as to give the citizens of Rome occasion to utter against him bitter invectives, and to question the character of the "arrow" that had pierced him. In other words, they accused him of complicity. In his letter of self-justification to the senate, he says, "The Roman people speak with contempt of the war I am waging against a woman. They are ignorant of the character and the power of Zenobia. It is impossible to enumerate her warlike preparations of stones and arrows, and every species of missile weapons. The walls of the city are strongly guarded, and artificial fires are thrown from her military engines. The fear of punishment has armed her with desperate courage. Still I trust in the gods for a favorable result." In this letter the stern and proud Roman general frankly admits the might of woman. Feeling humiliated and almost despairing of success, he now attempted to procure a surrender of the city by negotiation, and offered the most liberal advantages to the queen. In her reply she said to him, "It is not by negotiation, but by arms, that the submission you require of me can be obtained." This laconic reply was certainly worthy of a heroine and a queen. Yet after a protracted and desperate defence, and finding that her allies, instead of coming to her relief as they promised, had accepted bribes from the enemy to remain at a distance, she saw that all was lost, and mounting her fleetest dromedary, sought to escape into Persia, but was overtaken on the banks of the Euphrates and captured. When brought into the presence of her conqueror, and asked how she dared resist the power of Rome, she replied, "Because I recognize Aurelian alone as my sovereign." Zenobia was sent to Rome to grace the triumph of Aurelian. She entered the city on foot, preceded by her own chariot, with which she had designed, in the event of having won the victory, to make her grand entry into Rome as the triumphant "Queen of the East." But the fortunes of war subverted her ambitious scheme, and subjected her to the mortification of gracing a Roman triumph; yet for this indignity she felt that she was somewhat compensated in knowing that her appearance in Rome would create a sensation. In the grand procession she followed her chariot, so laden with jewels and chains of gold as to require the support of a slave to prevent her from fainting beneath the weight. After enjoying the satisfaction of a triumph, Aurelian treated his beautiful captive with kind consideration, and provided for her a delightful residence on the banks of the Tiber, where she passed the remainder of her days, honored by all as a matron of rare virtue and accomplishments. She lived to educate her daughters, and to see them contract noble alliances. Her descendants were ranked among the first citizens of Rome, and did not become extinct until after the fifth century. Near the commencement of the fifteenth century there appeared in France a brilliant meteor,--a youthful maiden, whose development of character was as mystical as it was heroic. Joan of Arc was born of obscure parents, in an obscure village on the borders of Lorraine, and was bred in a school of simplicity. She possessed beauty, united with an amiable temper and generous sympathies. In her religious faith she was sincere, even angelic. Her love of country was ardent and irrepressible. Finding her country-men distracted by a bitter partisan feeling, she identified herself with the patriots, and desired to secure the coronation of Prince Charles, as the only means, in her belief, of restoring the authority of the legitimate government. The reigning king had become hopelessly demented, and anarchy prevailed in almost every part of his dominions. The rival houses of Orleans and Burgundy were contending for the supremacy, and had entered upon a career of murder and massacre, instead of adopting a regular system of warfare. Both parties invoked the aid of the English, who interfered in behalf of Burgundy; but instead of affording relief, their interference only imposed still weightier calamities on the country. At this crisis a prophecy became current among the people, that a virgin would appear and rid France of her enemies. This prophecy reached the ear of Joan of Arc, and inspired her with the belief that she was the chosen one of Heaven to accomplish the work. In confirmation of this belief, she heard mysterious voices which came to her in her dreams, and which she regarded as divine communications, directing her to enter upon her great mission. On conferring with her parents in relation to the matter, they advised her to abandon her mad scheme, and desired her to marry and remain with them in her native village; but she declined, insisting that the current prediction--"France shall be saved by a virgin"--alluded to her. The English army had already besieged Orleans, and all hope of saving the city seemed lost. Her friends, regarding her as endowed with supernatural powers, provided her with a war-horse and a military costume, and sent her with an escort to the court of Prince Charles, whom she had never seen, but whose cause she had espoused. He received her with distrust, though he desired her proffered assistance. In order to avoid being charged with having faith in sorcery, he handed her over to a commission of ecclesiastics, to ascertain whether she was inspired of Heaven, or instigated by an evil spirit. Among other tests, the ecclesiastics desired her to perform miracles. She replied, "Bring me to Orleans, and you shall witness a miracle; the siege shall be raised, and Prince Charles shall be crowned king at Rheims." They approved her project, and she received the rank of a military commander. She then demanded a mysterious sword which she averred had been concealed by a hero of the olden time within the walls of an ancient church. On search being made, the sword was found and delivered to her. In a short time, with this mysterious sword in hand, she appeared at the head of an enthusiastic army, within sight of the besieged city of Orleans. The English army was astonished at the novel apparition. She advanced, and demanded a surrender of the city, but was indignantly refused; yet the citizens of Orleans were elate with joy at the prospect of relief. Joan boldly assaulted the outposts, and carried them. The besieged citizens, who had escaped outside the walls, now rallied under her banner, and swelled the ranks of her army. Fort after fort was captured. The English fought with desperation. Joan, cheering on her brave forces, and calling on them to follow, seized a scaling-ladder, and ascended the enemy's breastworks, when she was pierced with an arrow in the shoulder, and fell into the fosse. Her undaunted followers rescued her, when she, seeing her banner in danger, though faint and bleeding, rushed forward, seized and bore it off in triumph. The English army, amazed at this, and believing her more than human, became panic-stricken, and retreated in confusion. In their flight they lost their commander and many of their bravest men. Thus, in one week after her arrival at Orleans, she compelled the English to abandon the siege. In truth, she had performed a miracle, as her country-men believed, and as she had promised the ecclesiastics she would do. For this brilliant achievement she acquired the title, "Maid of Orleans." In addition to this, she subsequently fought several severe battles with the English and defeated them. Even the sight of her approaching banner often terrified the enemy into a surrender. In less than three months from the commencement of her career, she saw Prince Charles crowned king at Rheims. In gratitude for her pre-eminent and timely services in his cause, Charles issued his royal edict ennobling her and her family. Not long after this, the opposing faction of King Charles captured the Maid of Orleans, as she was now called, and imprisoned her in a strong fortress. She attempted to escape by leaping the walls, but was secured and transferred to the custody of the English. The University of Paris, at the instance of dominant ecclesiastics, demanded her trial on the charge of sorcery and the assumption of divine powers. The judges, intolerant as the priests, condemned her to be burned at the stake. Her friends were overawed, and failed to interfere in her behalf. The only condition in her sentence was recantation and the acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Church. In view of so terrific a death, she recanted; but hearing the mysterious voices of her former dreams upbraid her, she re-asserted her faith in her divine mission, was again seized at the instance of the priesthood, and the cruel sentence of death at the stake carried into execution. Never did a sadder fate overtake an innocent, patriotic, and noble-hearted woman. Her only crime was her love for her country, and her contempt for ecclesiastical assumption. Her purity of life was never questioned. It was said of her that she never allowed a profane word to be uttered in her presence. Her religion was a religion of the heart, too exalted for the times in which she lived. So sincere was the belief of the populace in her sanctity that many persons made pilgrimages from every part of the empire to touch her garments, believing that if they could be allowed the privilege, they would be especially blest, both in this life and in the life to come. There was no woman of the sixteenth century, perhaps, who was more conspicuous or more talented than Elizabeth, Queen of England. Highly educated in the ancient and modern languages, as well as in philosophy, she embraced at an early age the Protestant faith, and in consequence of the religious jealousies of the times, encountered great opposition in her advent to the throne, and while yet in her girlhood, suffered a long imprisonment in the Tower by order of her sister Mary, who was at that time the reigning queen. But events which transpired in 1558 resulted in the elevation of Elizabeth to the throne, at the age of twenty-five. So fearful were the Catholics of her influence in matters of faith that they sent to her a distinguished ecclesiastic, who demanded from her a declaration of her religious creed. To this intrusive demand she, being an adept at rhyming, replied, impromptu,-- "Christ was the Word that spake it; He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it." So frank and faultless was this avowal that it confounded the artful priest, who, feeling rebuked, went away as wise as he came, if not a little wiser. In her personal appearance Elizabeth was stately and majestic, but by no means remarkable for her beauty, or amiableness of temper. Her good judgment and discrimination enabled her to call to her aid wise men for ministers and counsellors. She patronized talent and intellect. It was during her reign that Spenser, Shakespeare, Raleigh, Bacon, and other eminent characters flourished, giving to her times and to literature the distinction of the "Elizabethan age." The leading events of her reign amply attest her capacity to grapple with emergencies in sustaining her prerogatives and in maintaining the defiant attitude of England. She loved money as well as power, and though penurious, wielded her power with decision, crushed domestic rebellion at a blow, removed her fears of Mary, Queen of Scots, by consigning her to the block, defied the power of Spain, and with the timely assistance of a providential whirlwind, sank the Spanish Armada in the depths of the sea. Though unattractive, her charms induced sundry propositions of marriage, particularly from the King of Sweden, from the King of Spain, and from a young prince of France, twenty-five years younger than herself. For this young prince, it is said, she entertained a sincere attachment, and went so far as to place publicly on his finger a costly ring, as a pledge of their union, but being taken soon afterwards by some strange whimsicality, dismissed him, and thus gave him leisure to reflect on the vanity of human aspirations. Yet, like most artful women, she delighted in flirtations, and always retained in her retinue a few special favorites, among whom were the Earls of Leicester and of Essex. On these men she bestowed official positions of high rank, and evidently desired to make great men of them; but Leicester proved to be deficient in brains, and Essex turned traitor, and was finally executed. When advised to marry by her counsellors, she replied that she could not indulge such a thought for a moment, for she had resolved that the inscription on her tombstone should be: "Here lies a queen who lived and died a virgin." In her seventieth year she died of grief, it is said, for having signed the death-warrant of Essex, for whom she entertained a sincere yet "untold love." The events of her reign wrought great changes in the destinies of nations. By her firm adherence to the Protestant faith, she contributed much towards enlarging and strengthening the foundations of civil and religious liberty. She succeeded by her wisdom and diplomacy in circumventing the subtle machinations of rival powers. In few words, it may be said of her that she was a noble specimen of _manly womanhood_. Catherine I., Empress of Russia, was born of obscure parents, near the close of the seventeenth century. In girlhood she was known by the name of Martha, until she embraced the Greek religion, when her name was changed to Catherine. Her father died when she was but three years old, and left her to the care of an invalid mother in reduced circumstances. When old enough to be useful, Catherine devoted her services to the care and support of her mother, and in attaining to womanhood, grew to be exceedingly beautiful. Her mother had instructed her in the rudiments of a common education, which she afterwards perfected under the tuition of a neighboring clergyman. Among other accomplishments, Catherine acquired a knowledge of music and dancing, and soon became as attractive for her elegance of manners as she was celebrated for her beauty. In 1701, she married a Swedish dragoon, and immediately accompanied him to the military post assigned him in the war which had just broken out between Sweden and Russia. In a battle which soon followed, she was taken prisoner by the Russians. Her personal charms soon attracted the attention of Peter the Great. What became of her husband is not known, but may be imagined. At any rate, the emperor succeeded in winning her affections, acknowledged her as his wife, and placed the imperial diadem on her head and the sceptre in her hand. She soon proved herself to be a woman of wonderful tact, shrewdness, and judgment, and obtained an unbounded influence over her husband. In fact, her advice controlled his action; and in following it, he acquired the enviable and lasting title of "Peter the Great." Like her, thousands of women have made their husbands great men, and often out of very indifferent materials. After Peter's death, Catherine was proclaimed empress and autocrat of all the Russias. Her reign, though short, was brilliant. Her frailties, if she had any, were few, and ought to be attributed to the character of her favorites rather than to herself. She died at the early age of forty-two, after a brief reign of a little less than two years as sole empress. Her native endowments constituted her brightest jewels,--modesty, simplicity, and beauty; it was these angelic gifts which elevated her from the obscurity of rural life to the throne of a great empire. Here let us turn from the Old World to the New, and look into the parlor, instead of the palace, for specimens of true womanhood. It is in the private walks of life, in the domestic and social circles, that we must look if we would contemplate the character of woman in its purest and proudest development. It is in her daily exhibition of heart, soul, sympathy, generosity, and devotion that woman attains to perfection and crowns herself with a diadem. Everywhere in this great Republic are thousands of women whose excellence of character challenges our admiration. Among those who have passed into the better life, and whose names are recorded on the tablet of every American heart, is Martha Washington. In her character we have the character of an accomplished American lady. Few, if any, have ever excelled her. When the war of the Revolution commenced, she accompanied her husband, who had just been appointed commander-in-chief of the American armies, to the military lines about Boston, and witnessed the siege and evacuation of that city. She was ever the guardian spirit of the general, and aided him materially in his military career by her wise counsels and timely attentions. While he reasoned logically and deliberately, she came to logical conclusions instantly, without seeming to reason,--a faculty of logic which characterizes almost every woman. In her figure, Martha was slight; in her manners, easy and graceful; in her temper, mild yet cheerful; in her conversation, calm yet fascinating; in her looks beautiful, especially in her youthful days. So universally admired and respected was she, that everybody spoke of her as "Lady Washington." She did the honors of the presidential mansion with polished ease, dignity, and grace. Her connubial life with Washington was not less exemplary than it was happy. His regard for her was as profound as her devotion to him was sincere. So solicitous was she for preserving his good name and fame that immediately after his death, she destroyed all the domestic letters which he had addressed to her, for fear they might some day be published, and be found to contain some word or expression of a political nature which might be construed to his prejudice. Faithful as a wife, as a friend, and as a Christian, she proved herself a model woman. She survived her husband but two years, and died at the age of seventy. In life she occupied a position which queens might envy, and in death bequeathed a memory which will be cherished in a nation's heart, when the proud monuments of kings and queens have crumbled into dust and been forgotten. If it could be done without making invidious distinctions, it would be no less delightful than instructive to refer specifically to the names and deeds of many other American women who have graced the age in which they lived, and added lustre to the annals of our Republic. But we must content ourselves by alluding to them in general terms; and in doing this, we must admit the fact that the noble deeds and exalted virtues of woman occupy a much less space in the world's history than they ought. It is sufficiently evident to everybody that women, in all the relations of life, exhibit a keener appreciation of right and wrong than men. Hence they are usually the first to approve what is right, and the last to concur in what is wrong. It was this devotion to principle which induced American women in the days of the Revolution to submit to the severest trials and deprivations, while they encouraged their sons, husbands, and brothers to go forth to the battle-field in defence of their country. In proof of their patriotism, these noble women, with their own hands and with cheerful hearts, spun, wove, knit, and baked for the brave and suffering soldiers, and even made an offering of their jewels on the altar of liberty, and rather than see the enemy enriched by traffic and unjust revenues, complacently approved the policy which cast rich cargoes of their favorite beverage into the depths of the sea. It was the same spirit, the same patriotism, which inspired the women of our own times on a still broader scale, in the late struggle of the North to crush the rebellion of the South and sustain in all its purity, its honor, and its glory, the dear old flag of the Union. This great work has been done manfully and nobly, and at immense sacrifices of treasure and of blood; but it could not have been done without the aid and encouragement of woman. It was woman who held the key and unlocked the hearts of twenty millions of people, and induced them, by her pleading appeals, to pour out their noble charities, as from floodgates, to supply the urgent needs of the largest and bravest army the world ever beheld. It was woman whose delicate hand nursed the sick, the wounded, and the dying soldier, and whose sympathies and prayers soothed and cheered his departing spirit. In the sanitary commission, in the Christian commission, woman was the master-spirit, the angel of mercy, the music of whose hovering wings animated the weary march of our gallant volunteers, and inspired their souls with invincible courage. It is woman who weaves the only wreath of honor which a true-hearted hero desires to wear on his brow, and the only one worthy of his highest aspirations. It is an indisputable fact that the power, the patriotism, and the influence of woman constitute the great moral elements of our Republic, and of our civil and religious institutions. It is the educated and accomplished women of our country who have refined the men as well as the youth of the land, and given tone to public sentiment. It is this class of women who have purified our literature, and moulded it to harmonize with the pure principles of a Christian philosophy. In the fine arts, and even in the abstruse sciences, women have excelled as well as men. In the catalogue of distinguished authors there are to be found, both in this country and in Europe, nearly as many women as men. From the facts which we have already adduced, it is evident enough that woman, in the exercise of intellectual, if not political power, is fully the equal of man; while in tact and shrewdness she is generally his superior. According to the old but truthful saying, it is impossible for a man to outwit a shrewd woman; and instead of asking, What can a woman do? we should ask, What is there a woman cannot do? Whenever women are left to take care of themselves in the world, as thousands are, they should not only have the right, but it is their duty, to engage in any of the industrial pursuits for which they are fitted. The principal difference between man and woman is physical strength; and for this reason the lighter employments should be assigned to women. In whatever employment men are out of place, women should take their place; especially in retailing fancy goods, in book-keeping, in telegraphing, in type-setting, in school-teaching, and in many other like employments; nor need they be excluded from the learned professions. In fact, we already have lady clergymen and lady physicians; and some think the character of the Bar would be much elevated by the admission of lady lawyers. We cannot doubt that unmarried ladies, if admitted, would excel in prosecuting suits commenced by "attachment," but in other cases their success is not assured, if we may judge from the following incident: A lady lawyer of presidential aspirations, in conducting a suit before the late Judge Cartter in the district court at Washington, was opposed by an eminent lawyer of the other sex, who raised a vexed legal question which had not been "dreamed of in the philosophy" of the lady lawyer, and which so perplexed her that she, in the midst of her embarrassment, appealed to the judge for advice as to the course she had better pursue. The judge, who hesitated somewhat in his utterances, replied, "I think you had _bet-bet-better_ employ a lawyer." If women choose to compete with men in any of the learned professions, or in any other pursuit, and are fitted to achieve success, there is nothing in the way to prevent them; yet it does not follow that they can take the places of men in everything, especially in those employments which require masculine strength and great physical endurance. Nor does it follow that women who pay taxes should therefore have the right of suffrage. The fact that they hold property does not change their _status_, nor does it confer political rights. The right of suffrage is a political right and not a natural right. The exercise of this political right carries with it the law-making power, the duty of protecting persons and property, and consequently of maintaining and defending the government. They who make the government are therefore bound to defend it. Nature never intended that women should become soldiers and face the cannon's mouth in the battle-field; nor did she give them strength to construct railroads, tunnel mountains, build war-ships, or man them. Yet women, prompted by affection or romantic sentiment, have been known to become soldiers in disguise, and perhaps have fought bravely in the battle-field. But this, of itself, proves nothing; it is merely an exception to a general rule, or in other words, an eccentricity of character. In all ages of the world, as we have shown, the mere force of circumstances has occasionally unsphered woman and placed her in unnatural situations, in which she has sometimes achieved a brilliant success,--on the throne and off the throne, in peace and in war, in political life and in social life. Yet in stepping out of her sphere, whatever may be her success, every true woman feels that she "o'ersteps the modesty of nature." When woman glides into her natural position,--that of a wife,--it is then only that she occupies her appropriate sphere, and exhibits in its most attractive form the loveliness of her character. Marriage is an institution as essential to the stability and harmony of the social system as gravity is to the order and preservation of the planetary system. In the domestic circle the devoted wife becomes the centre of attraction, the "angel of the household." Her world is her home; her altar, the hearthstone. In her daily ministrations she makes herself angelic by making home a heaven, and every one happy who may come within the "charmed circle" of her kind cares and generous sympathies. In fact, there is no place like home, "sweet home," when on its sacred altar burns the blended incense of harmonious souls,-- "Two souls with but a single thought; Two hearts that beat as one." It is certain that man and woman were never created to live independent of each other. They are but counterparts, and therefore incomplete until united in wedlock. Hence they who prefer single blessedness are justly chargeable with the "sin of omission," if not the "unpardonable sin." It is difficult to estimate the fearful responsibilities of those fossilized bachelors who persist in sewing on their own buttons and in mending their own stockings. Yet these selfish gentlemen frankly admit that there may have been such a thing as "true love" in the olden times, but now, they say, the idea has become obsolete; and if a bachelor were to ask a young lady to share his lot, she would immediately want to know how large the "lot" is and what is its value. In further justification they quote Socrates, who, being asked whether it were better for a man to marry or live single, replied, "Let him do either and he will repent it." But this is not argument, nor is it always true, even in a sordid marriage, as appears in the following instance: Not long since, in New York, a bachelor of twenty-two married a rich maiden of fifty-five, who died within a month after the nuptials and left him a half-million of dollars. He says he has never "repented" the marriage. The age in which we live is one of experiment and of novel theories, both in religion and in politics. In modern spiritualism we have entranced women, who give us reports from the dead. In modern crusades we have devout women, who visit tippling-houses and convert them into sanctuaries of prayer. In politics we have mismated and unmated women, who hold conventions, clamor for the ballot, and advocate the doctrine of "natural selection." It is true that every marriageable woman has a natural right to select, if not elect, a husband; and this she may and ought to do, not by ballot, but by the influence of her charms and her virtues. If all marriageable men and women were but crystallized into happy families, earth would soon become a paradise. Yet if this were done, we doubt not there would still remain some "strong-minded" women, who would get up a convention to reform paradise. The truth is, the women will do pretty much as they please, and the best way is to let them. Yet all must admit that a woman of refinement is not only a ruling spirit, but "a power behind the throne greater than the power on the throne." Her rights are therefore within her own grasp. Among these she has the right, and to her belongs the responsible duty, of educating her children in first principles, and in those sanctified lessons which have been revealed to man from heaven. It is the mother's precepts which constitute the permanent foundation of the child's future character. Hence no woman is really competent to discharge the responsible duties of a mother as she ought, unless she has first been properly educated. There can be no object more deserving of commiseration, perhaps, than a mother who is surrounded by a family of young children, and yet is so ignorant as to be unable to instruct them in the rudiments of a common-school education and in the fundamental principles of a Christian life. The character of every child, it may be assumed, is essentially formed at seven years of age. The mother of Washington knew this, and felt it, and in the education of her son, taught him at an early age the leading truths of Christianity. She took the Bible for her guide, and taught him to take the Bible for his guide. His subsequent career proves that he adhered to the instructions of his mother. When he came to pay her a visit, at the close of the war, after an absence of seven long years, she received him with the overflowing heart of a mother, as her dutiful son, and thought of him only as a dutiful son, never uttering a word in reference to the honors he had won as a military chieftain. Soon after this, General Lafayette, wishing to make the acquaintance of the mother of Washington before returning to France, called at her residence in Virginia, and introduced himself. He found her at work in the garden, clad in a homespun dress, and her gray head covered with a plain straw hat. She saluted him kindly, and calmly remarked, "Ah, Marquis, you see an old woman; but come, I can make you welcome in my poor dwelling without the parade of changing my dress." In the course of conversation Lafayette complimented her as the mother of a son who had achieved the independence of his country, and acquired lasting honors for himself. The old lady, without the least manifestation of gratified pride, simply responded, "I am not surprised at what George has done, for he was always a very good boy." What a noble response, in its moral grandeur, was this! Certain it is that such a mother was worthy of such a son. A monument, plain, yet expressive in its design, has been erected at Fredericksburg to her memory. It bears this simple, yet sublime inscription: "Mary, the Mother of Washington." The extent of woman's moral power can only be limited by the extent of her capacities. In every circle, whether domestic, social, or political, the accomplished woman is a central power--_imperium in imperio_; and though she may not directly exercise the right of suffrage, yet her influence and her counsels, even an expression of her wish, enable her to control the political, as well as the social, destinies of men and of nations. It is in this way that she may "have her way." It was the accomplished wife of Mr. Monroe who made him President of the United States. She was the first to propose his name as a candidate. Her influence with members of Congress induced them to concur in advocating his election; he was elected. His administration, as we all know, was distinguished as "the era of good feeling." The prevalent idea that women need less education than men is a gross error, worthy of heathendom perhaps, but entirely unworthy of Christendom. Let women be as generally and as liberally educated as men, and, my word for it, the question of woman's rights would soon settle itself. The right of women to be thus educated cannot be doubted, because it is a divine right, and because God has made woman the maternal teacher of mankind, and the chief corner-stone of the social fabric. Yet she should be educated with reference to her proper sphere as woman,--a sphere which is higher than that of man in the economy of Nature. Her capacities for industrial pursuits, such as are consistent with her physical abilities, should be developed so that she may be qualified to provide for herself, and to sustain herself in life's battle, if need be, without the aid of a "companion in arms." Nevertheless, marriage is one of Heaven's irrevocable laws. It is, in fact, the great law of all animal-life, and even of plant-life. Nowhere in Nature is there a single instance in which this law is not obeyed, in due time, except in the case of mankind. Why is this? It certainly would not be so if it were not for some grand defect in our social system,--some false notions acquired by education, which are peculiar to our civilization, and which induce apostasy to truth and natural justice. Man was created to be the protector of woman, and woman to be the helpmeet of man. Each therefore has an appropriate sphere; and the obligations of each are mutual, growing out of their mutual interest and dependence. The sphere of the one is just as important as the sphere of the other. Neither can live, nor ought to live, without the aid, the love, and the sympathy of the other. Whether so disposed or not, neither can commit an infraction of the other's rights, without violating a law of Nature. Whatever may be the evils of our present social or political system, it is evident that the right of suffrage, if extended to woman, could not afford a remedy, but on the contrary, would tend to weaken, rather than strengthen, mutual interests, by creating unwomanly aspirations and domestic dissensions, thus sundering the ties of love and affection which naturally exist between the sexes. In a word, it would be opening Pandora's box, and letting escape the imps of social and political discord, and finally result in universal misrule, if not in positive anarchy. Modesty and delicacy are the crowning characteristics of a true woman. She naturally shrinks from the storms of political strife. Give her the right of suffrage,--a boon no sensible woman desires; place her in office, in the halls of legislation, in the Presidential chair; enrobe her with the judicial ermine, or make her the executive officer of a criminal tribunal,--and how could she assume the tender relations of a mother, and at the same time officiate in any of these high places of public trust, in which the sternest and most inflexible duties are often required to be performed? It is not possible, however, that the erratic comets, whose trailing light occasionally flashes athwart our political sky, will ever acquire sufficient momentum to jostle the "fixed stars" out of place, because there is a fixed law of Nature which preserves them in place. There is also a law of Nature which makes man not only the protector, but the worshipper, of woman,--a worship which is as instinctively paid as reciprocated, and which is by no means inconsistent with the worship of God, but in truth is a part of it. It is this kind of worship--this natural and holy impulse of the heart--which constitutes the basis of man's rights and of woman's rights, and should harmonize all their relations in life. We see the instinctive exhibition of man's reverence for women almost every day of our lives, and often in a way that proves how ridiculous are modern theories in regard to woman's rights, when brought to the test in practical life. Not long since, in one of our cities where a woman's rights convention was in session, a strong-minded female delegate entered a street railway car, when an old gentleman arose to give her his seat, but at that moment, suspecting her to be a delegate, asked, "Be you one of these women's righters?"--"I am." "You believe a woman should have all the rights of a man?"--"Yes, I do." "Then stand up and enjoy them like a man." And stand up she did,--the old gentleman coolly resuming his seat, to the great amusement of the other passengers. Whatever maybe the pretensions of agitators, it is certain that no woman of refined culture, or of proper self-respect, will attempt to step outside of her appropriate sphere. This she cannot do if she would, without doing violence to the sensibilities of her nature. When true to herself, woman, like the lily-of-the-valley, prefers the valley, where she can display her native loveliness in comparative retirement, secure from the inclemencies of a frowning sky; while man, born with a more rugged nature, prefers, like the sturdy oak, to climb the hills and the mountains, where he delights to breast the assaults of storm and tempest, and to fling the shadow of his stately form over the valley, as if to protect the ethereal beauty of the lily from the too ardent gaze of the sun. And, though a solitary flower may sometimes be seen climbing the mountain height, it is only the modest lily-of-the-valley--the true woman--whose cheering smile man aspires to share, and whose purity of character calls into exercise his reverent admiration. "Honored be woman! she beams on the sight, Graceful and fair as an angel of light; Scatters around her, wherever she strays, Hoses of bliss on our thorn-covered ways; Roses of paradise, sent from above, To be gathered and twined in a garland of love!" AIM HIGH. In addressing you as a graduating class, permit me to suggest for your consideration a few thoughts on the importance of regarding self-culture not only as a duty, but as the only means of elevating and ennobling your aspirations in life. Though you have completed your academical course with a degree of success which does you credit, you should remember that the great work of education still lies before you, and that the formation of your characters and the shaping of your destinies are committed to your own hands. And here let me assure you that it is little rather than great things which mark the character of a true gentleman. In fact, there is but one way in which a refined education can be acquired, and that is, "little by little." It is thus from day to day, from year to year, from everybody, and from everything, that you may learn, if you will, something new, something useful; and though you care not to do it, yet you will, in spite of yourselves, learn something, good or evil, just as you may choose to apply it. You certainly have the power to choose between good and evil,--in other words, to achieve the loftiest aims. Yet in directing your aspirations, you must adapt means to ends; collect your materials and refine them, and in refining them give them the brilliancy of costly jewels,--jewels which you can wear with becoming grace and dignity wherever you may go, and at all times and under all circumstances. The acquisition of a mere book-knowledge, however desirable, will avail you but little, unless you acquire at the same time correct habits and principles, united with refinement of manners. The world will be likely to take your personal appearance, your style of dress and address, as the true index of your character, and whether deceived at first view or not, will finally estimate you at your true value. In perfecting your education, it is not to be expected that you are to master every branch of human learning, but rather that you are to make your life a life of thought, of study, of observation, of strife to excel in all that is good, and in doing good. In attempting to achieve great things in the world, you must not overlook little things,--little attentions, little civilities due to others with whom you may come in contact; for your claims to consideration will be estimated by the character of your conduct in social life. There are certain conventionalities recognized in good society which you must respect, and to which you must conform, if you would be well received. Your manners and habits are therefore of vital importance as elements of character. It has been truly said that man is a "bundle of habits." It may be said with equal truth that our own worst enemies are "bad habits." We all know that bad habits fasten themselves upon us, as it were, by stealth; and though we may not perceive the influence which they exert over us, yet other persons perceive it, remark it, and judge us accordingly. The formation of correct habits in early life is comparatively easy, while the correction of bad habits, when once formed, is always difficult, especially in more advanced years. In a word, if you would become model characters, you must discard all bad habits, all odd habits, all that is ungracious or ungraceful in word, deed, or manner, and make it the leading rule of your life to observe the proprieties of life in all places and under all circumstances. In order to achieve all this, it is indispensable that you should study yourselves, watch yourselves, criticise yourselves, and know yourselves as others know you. The value of self-examination has been forcibly as well as beautifully expressed in a single stanza by Robert Burns,-- "O wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, An' ev'n devotion!" It is true that in relation to the laws of etiquette many books have been written, which are in fact more read than observed, and which are more perplexing than practical. No lady or gentleman was ever made truly polite, truly agreeable, truly amiable, by a strict observance of artificial rules. Something more is needed; something must be done. It is in the heart, in the exercise of all the moral and Christian virtues, that true politeness has its foundation. True politeness is never selfish, never ostentatious, but always overflowing with kindness, always angelic in its attributes. In word and deed, it is always considerate, delicate, and graceful; yet in its ministrations it always preserves its own self-respect, while it manifests its sincere respect for all that is good and for all that is meritorious. Heaven has imposed on us the duty of acquiring all the knowledge we can. In discharge of this heaven-born duty, we should begin at once the great work of self-culture,--a work never to be discontinued. He who would build a spacious and a lofty temple, a fit dwelling-place for divinity, must first lay the foundations broad and deep,--not in sand, but on a rock; and then, though storm and tempest beat against it, it cannot fall, because it is founded on a rock. But in adopting a system of self-culture, too much care cannot be bestowed on the cultivation of your manners, your attitudes, your style of conversation, and your expression of sentiment. In regard to manners, it is impossible to prescribe exact rules. The best models for you to copy are to be found in the manners of the model men and women of our country who give tone to society. At any rate, be governed by good sense and by the dictates of nature, so modified by art as to conceal art. To disguise art is the perfection of art. In this lies the secret power of angelic charms,--the charm of polished womanhood and manhood. In your social intercourse employ a pure and unambitious style of diction, and be careful to maintain a quiet and unobtrusive deportment; and above all things avoid singularities and eccentricities, nor attempt to attract attention for the sake of gratifying an overweening vanity. And while you manifest a due respect for others, be careful to maintain your own self-respect. Never indulge in exhibiting violence of temper; but on all occasions control your feelings and expressions, though provocations arise which justly excite your indignation. If you would attain to the highest possible standard of social refinement and moral virtue, you must rely on yourselves, must look into the mirror of your own hearts and behold your own defects, and then proceed at once to apply the appropriate remedies. To do this effectively may cost you much labor, yet the task will be found comparatively easy when you have resolved to execute it. It is not only your privilege, but your duty, to acquire knowledge from every source, as the bee gathers honey from every flower. Collect and compare facts; for in every fact, whether great or small, there lies hid a lesson of wisdom,--a logic which is not only irresistible, but divine. Theories are of but little value unless attested by facts. All mere theories are alike worthless, whether they relate to the physical or moral world. "Prove all things, and hold fast that which is good." No better rule than this, for your guidance through life, ever was or ever can be given. Facts, though "stubborn things," are never falsehoods. You may therefore regard facts as truth, as the kind of mental food you should acquire, digest, and convert into nutriment, and thus grow strong and wise, until you have realized the great fact that "man was created but a little lower than the angels." For the purpose of self-culture, in its highest sense, an ordinary lifetime seems quite too short, though prolonged to threescore years and ten. The value of time cannot be overestimated. If we would but consider how many precious moments we fritter away and lose in an unprofitable manner, we should see that it is the want of a due regard for the value of time, rather than a want of time, of which we should complain. It is not, therefore, the fault of a Divine Providence that we have not time enough to perfect ourselves in the arts of a refined civilization, and in the realization of the highest enjoyment of which our nature is capable. Whatever else you may lose, never lose a moment of time which can be profitably employed. A moment of time once lost can never be regained. Insignificant as a moment may seem, your destiny may depend on the improvement you may make of it, on the deed or thought it may prompt. Life, though long, is made up of moments, and terminates in a moment; and all true knowledge is founded in truth. If you would prolong your lives, and enjoy health and happiness accompanied with vigor of mind, study the laws of health and obey them. Make yourselves thoroughly acquainted with yourselves, by becoming acquainted with the physiology of the human system, and by living in compliance with the requisitions of its principles. Nature is the best physician you can employ, whatever may be your malady; but in order to be healed by her prescriptions, you must apply to her in time, and adopt the uniform and temperate habits of life which her laws require. It is said that Nature has her favorites. This may be true. It would seem that some persons are born poets, some philosophers, some fiddlers, some one thing, and some another. It may be said that such persons are specialists, born to accomplish a special purpose. They doubtless subserve the interests of mankind as models, or standards of merit, in their respective specialties; yet to be born a genius is not in itself a matter of merit, but it is the good one does in the world which creates merit and crowns life with honors. Nearly all of our truly great men are men of self-culture, who have acquired brains by the slow process of a lifelong industry in the pursuit of knowledge. This class of men are not only much more numerous than born geniuses, but much more useful. They have a wider range of intellect and wield a wider influence. They are men who read, think, and digest what they read. In their choice of books they select standard authors. They are not book-worms, devouring everything that is published; nor are they literary dyspeptics, who feed on sentimentalism and French cookery, but hale, hearty men, who prefer common-sense and roast beef,--caring more for the quality of their food than for the quantity. The world in which we live is a beautiful world. He who made it pronounced it good, and designed it for the residence of the good. It is in itself a paradise for all who choose to make it a paradise. In a physical sense, it is not only a beautiful world, but a great storehouse full of knowledge, full of wisdom, full of facts,--a record of the past and of the future, written by a divine hand. In short, it is the great Book of Life--of Revelation--in every word of which we may find an outspoken thought,-- "Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything." In estimating your life-work, you should feel that yours is a high destiny, and that much is expected of you. If you would succeed in the world, you must have faith in yourselves as well as in a Divine Providence, and act upon the principle that "God helps those who help themselves." Wherever you go, make yourselves as acceptable and as agreeable to all with whom you come in contact as possible. If you would be preferred, prefer others; and if you would be beloved, scatter flowers by the wayside of life, but never plant thorns, and in all you do and say, unite modesty with simplicity and sincerity. There can be no true manhood or womanhood that does not rest on character, in the highest sense of the term. In fact, it is the character we bear that defines our social position. The formation of character is a work of our own, and requires the exercise of all the better and higher powers of our nature. On character depends not only our usefulness in life, but our individual happiness. Character is the engraved mark, or sign, by which every individual is known, and indicates the essential traits of his moral composition, the qualities of his head and heart, as displayed in his aspirations and in the work of his life. Character is more enduring than reputation. God respects character; man respects reputation. The one is as lasting as eternity; the other as evanescent as the bubble that glitters in the sunshine for a moment, and then disappears forever. In forming a true character, such an one as crowns the true man with an imperishable diadem, there are many things to be considered, especially the materials which enter into its moral masonry. Its foundation must be solid and immovable, its superstructure chaste and elegant, and its proportions harmonious and beautiful. Like a temple built for the gods, it should be worthy of the gods. It should be not only beautiful in its exterior, but be in its interior the life-work of a truly heroic soul. Character represents soul. As character is moulded by human instrumentalities, so is soul. Soul is therefore the essence of a true manhood, a living principle that cannot die. It is an influence in itself, and out of itself, felt everywhere and forever. It is the moral life and the eternal life. Like a pebble cast into the broad ocean, its impulse is sensibly felt by the entire ocean; every particle moves a particle, until the vast deep is moved. Such is individual influence. If character, then, be what it should be, truthful, noble, divine, it will necessarily be godlike, and exert an influence in harmony with the benevolent designs of Heaven. And yet there are thousands who seem to live without purpose,--live merely to vegetate. Of course such persons do not live in earnest, and hence do nothing in earnest. They have life, but no lofty aspirations. They may have souls; but if so, they remain undeveloped. In fact, persons of this character have no character, no earnest work, no significance. And for this reason, though living, they are literally dead. If we would make the world what it should be, we must first make ourselves what we should be. The work must begin at home in our own hearts, and with a view to our own moral needs. In the cultivation of a pure heart-life, we should begin by cultivating "a conscience void of offence." If we would unlock the gate of paradise, we must look for the key where it is to be found. We may rest assured that it cannot be found in an uncultivated field of brambles and briers, nor amid the rubbish of a misspent life; yet to find it, only requires diligent search. Though everything beautiful, everything noble, everything sublime, may lie in the distance, yet it is attainable; it is the _ultimatum_ that we should seek,--something substantial, something eternal. Mere fame is nothing worth. It is a thing of earth, and not of heaven. There may be an innate feeling or principle that constitutes what is called conscience; yet it must be conceded that conscience is practically but the product or outgrowth of education, and may therefore be so moulded as to become the just or unjust judge of the moral questions which involve both our present and future welfare. How important, then, that this judge should not only be a righteous, but an educated judge, familiar with the principles of right and wrong, and stern in the application of them! In a word, conscience is the central life of character,--the silent monitor within our own breasts, whose moral influence controls our destiny. The law of love may be regarded as the great law which underlies all law, because it is divine. In fact, love is the law that pervades the universe, and in itself is sufficiently indicative of our moral obligations. He who is governed by it, cannot err. It is not, however, what we do for ourselves, but rather what we do for others, that can afford the most substantial happiness. If you would receive, you must give, influenced by a kind and generous spirit. "Overcome evil with good." In this way, like a moral Alexander, you may conquer the world. It is doubtless true that conscience, being essentially the outgrowth of education, is ever in a formative state, and may therefore be strengthened and elevated in its moral perceptions by culture. The more perfect its judgment, the more perfect the man or woman. There can be no religion without conscience; nor can there be conscience without religion. The one is a counterpart of the other; and equally true is it that the character of the one reflects the character of the other. A true religion does not consist in a mere profession of faith, nor in church membership, but in that which is the leading principle of our lives; in that which binds us to achieve an ultimate aim; in that which calls into exercise all our moral powers, and harmonizes our lives with the requisitions of the divine law. Yet any religion is better than none. Even the pagan is not destitute of a religion of some sort, however debased it may be. It is simply the refinement of a higher civilization which has made the difference between the pagan and the Christian. Nothing can be more important, therefore, than the kind of education which is bestowed on us in childhood, or the kind of self-culture which we choose to bestow on ourselves. And though circumstances may be adverse to our interests, it is our duty to conquer circumstances, and take into our own hands the fabrication of our fortunes. In this life every day brings with it new lessons; and though some of them may be pernicious, all of them have their value. If there were nothing evil, there would be nothing good,--for the reason that there would be no contrast, no standard of comparison. And yet between good and evil there is no halfway house, no "happy medium." In every question of right and wrong there are but two sides. The one or the other we must take, either directly or indirectly. We cannot take a neutral stand if we would; nor can we identify ourselves with both sides. Sincerity and hypocrisy are not born of the same parentage, and cannot therefore walk hand in hand, nor take the same social position. They are marked by a different sign, and by their sign they are readily recognized. Appear where they will, the one will be respected, the other despised. If you would excel in anything, in any particular pursuit, you must first resolve to excel, and then persevere, cost what it will. If you encounter lions in your path, exterminate them. In ascending mountains, make difficulties your stepping-stones, and never look back until you reach the summit, and can breathe freely in a pure atmosphere. If you would reach the stars, construct your own ladder, and climb until you not only reach them, but are crowned with them. The soul never becomes truly heroic until it becomes truly godlike in its aspirations and purposes. It is only in the practice of the cardinal virtues--prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude--that we acquire that divine power which alone can make us divine. It is only in the adoption of lofty aims that we can expect to reach a lofty ideal. Everything is possible to him who has resolved to make it possible. In other words, where there is a will there is a way. The will is the motive-power; if this be wanting, then all is wanting that goes to make up the character of an heroic soul. The world needs moral as well as physical heroes,--heroes who know their duty, and dare do it. In the battle of life none but the wise and the valiant can be safely intrusted with the command. The hostile powers of darkness, of ignorance, of superstition, challenge the field, and cannot be overcome without a severe conflict. The crisis has come. Whether armed or unarmed, you must meet the foe; for results you must trust in yourselves. It will never do to trust in shields, in breastplates, in fire-arms, or in faith without works. If you would conquer, you must go into battle inspired with lofty aims, and with a divine enthusiasm; then will victory perch on your standard, and the eagle of freedom, fire-eyed, pierce the sun. And yet you should remember that in your attempts to achieve success, you must deserve success. It is only in severe moral discipline that you can see what you need, and acquire what you need,--eminent virtue, industry, and sagacity. In social life, be social, amiable, and accomplished; in domestic life, be something more,--be kind, considerate, and sympathetic. Whether you have one or more talents, improve them; they will grow brighter by constant use. Whatever may be your capacities, never indulge in vain aspirations. However seductive the temptations which may beset you, never compromise your integrity. However ambitious you may be in your ultimate aims, regard a good moral character as of infinite value. Always true to yourselves, be true to others. Place implicit confidence in no one, but confide in the strength of your own individuality. In adversity be hopeful, and always look on the bright side of things. In selecting a profession or business for life, be governed by your natural taste or capacity,--your peculiar talent for this or that pursuit. If embarrassed by circumstances, never yield to them, but resolve to excel in whatever you undertake. Perseverance is the secret of success. If born with the gift of genius, make it available; do something new; invent something new; and in this way bequeath something valuable to mankind. In other words, live for mankind, and if need be, die for mankind. Adopt this as the religious sentiment of your life, and act in accordance with it, and your works will sufficiently attest the purity of your faith. And yet you are not required to crucify yourselves; but on the contrary, it is your duty, while striving to live for others, to live for yourselves, and thus make yourselves and your homes as happy as possible. It is not in the shade, but in the sunshine, that you should seek to live. It is only the _now_ of life, the fleeting present, of which you are certain. If, then, you would be prosperous, if you would be happy, if you would look to the future with a pleasing hope, so live as to feel that you are sustained, in all you do, by an approving conscience, and by the divine counsels of Infinite Wisdom. It is only by living thus that you can make life on earth what it should be,--a heaven-life. He who made all things has made no distinction between heaven and earth. It is man that has made the distinction. The natural atmosphere which surrounds the earth is pure and healthful; it is only the moral atmosphere that has become impure and deleterious. It needs no chemical agencies to purify it; it must be purified, if at all, by moral agencies. In other words, we must recognize our obligations to our fellow-men, and obey the "Golden Rule," as prescribed by the law of love, if we would succeed in making earth a heaven. Almost every American of culture has an object in view for which he lives,--some ultimate aim or aspiration which stimulates him to effort. It may be a desire to excel in some one of the learned professions, or to become a millionnaire, a hero in the battle-field, a Solon in the halls of legislation, perhaps President of the United States. In attempting achievements of this character, it should be remembered that knowledge is the basis of success. It is knowledge that gives power, and wisdom that should direct us in wielding it. Yet a man may be learned, and still be a cipher in the world. God gave to man a divine outline, and then left him to perfect himself, at least in a mental sense. This he must do, or remain an animal, and "feed on husks." Nearly all our great men are self-made men. This is true of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and scores of others who, like them, have acquired an enviable renown. Thus, in all ages of the world, have men of noble aspirations reached eminent positions and immortalized their names. It is somewhat surprising, however, that most of our American graduates look to the learned professions, rather than to a practical business life, as affording the widest field for the acquisition of wealth and high social position. This, it seems to me, is a great mistake. Not more than one professional man in ten ever rises above mediocrity in his profession, though he may prove to be useful, and succeed in acquiring a comfortable livelihood. In fact, the learned professions have yet to learn that the supply exceeds the demand. And hence there is but little use in attempting to shine as a "star" in any of the professions, unless you have a sufficient brilliancy to take rank as a "star of the first magnitude." And yet we cannot have too many men of liberal education; the more the better. They are needed in every pursuit in life, and in every place. It is not the occupation that dignifies a man, but the man that dignifies the occupation. When you have chosen a pursuit, whatever it may be, aim high. Yes,-- "Give me a man with an aim, Whatever that aim may be; Whether it's wealth or whether it's fame, It matters not to me. Let him walk in the path of right, And keep his aim in sight, And work and pray in faith alway, With his eye on the glittering height. "Give me a man who says, 'I will do something well, And make the fleeting days A story of labor tell.' Though aim he has be small, It is better than none at all; With something to do the whole year through, He will not stumble or fall. "But Satan weaves a snare For the feet of those who stray With never a thought or care Where the path may lead away. The man who has no aim Not only leaves no name When this life is done, but, ten to one, He leaves a record of shame. "Give me a man whose heart Is filled with ambition's fire; Who sets his mark in the start, And keeps moving higher and higher. Better to die in the strife, The hands with labor rife, Than to glide with the stream in an idle dream, And lead a purposeless life. "Better to strive and climb And never reach the goal, Than to drift along with time, An aimless, worthless soul. Ay, better to climb and fall, Or sow, though the yield be small, Than to throw away day after day, And never strive at all." AMERICA AND HER FUTURE. There is something in the very name of America, when applied to the United States, which carries with it an inspiring influence,--an ideal of freedom and of true manhood. In referring to the incidents of her origin, in connection with the events of her subsequent career, it would seem that America is none other than a "child of destiny." She was born amid the storms of a revolution, and commenced at birth to work out the great problems of civil and religious liberty. She has an abiding faith in herself, and believes it to be her mission to originate new views and discover new principles, as well as to try new experiments in the science of popular government. The greatest peculiarity in her character is that her past cannot be safely accepted as an index of her future; in other words, her past is not likely to be repeated. In fact, she does not wish to repeat or perpetuate anything that can be improved. Her political creed is as simple as it is brief,--the "greatest good to the greatest number;" and yet it is the most complex creed, perhaps, that ever existed, involving questions which have not been, and cannot be, satisfactorily settled. America knows what she has been, but does not know what she will be. It is doubtful if she knows what she would be. She has several favorite watchwords, such as progress, freedom, and equal rights, and but few, if any, settled opinions. Her present position, unstable as it may be, is her standpoint of judgment. In attempting to achieve what she most desires, she relies on experiment rather than precedent. In her forecast consist her welfare and her political sagacity; yet she can no more predict than control her future. None but a divine intelligence can comprehend the extent or grandeur of her future. One thing is certain, the rapidity of her career approaches railway speed. What impediments may lie in her track, or what collisions may occur, it is impossible for man to foresee. It would seem, however, that she is an instrumentality in divine hands; a nationality, whose task it is to work out the great problem of a just government,--one in which all political power is vested in the people, and exercised by the people for the common purpose of securing the greatest possible good to the greatest possible number. The right to live under such a government is a natural right, and should be accorded to every human being, the world over. In all human governments there are, and probably ever will be, more or less imperfections growing out of mistaken theories, or arising from their practical workings. Though it may not be possible by legislation or otherwise to remedy every imperfection, yet there can be no political inequality which may not be so far modified as to extend to every citizen equal rights and equal justice. There is a natural love of freedom and of justice implanted within the human breast, which lies at the foundation, not only of the political, but of the social, fabric. This love of freedom and of justice is an instinctive feeling, if not an inspired sentiment, which ennobles the patriot, and converts him into a hero. When oppressed, the true hero smites his oppressor. This is a law of his nature--an attempt to redress a wrong--and therefore an element of human government. When a civil government has been instituted, positive law becomes the rule of right. But when nations differ, and diplomacy fails in its mission, there remains no recognized alternative for adjustment but a reference to the arbitrament of the sword. This final method of redressing national wrongs has descended to modern times from the primitive ages of barbarism, and when adopted, as often terminates in perpetuating the wrong as in redressing it. It is, to say the least of it, a method which is entirely inconsistent with the refined civilization of the present age. There seems to be no good reason why an international code of laws might not be adopted by all civilized nations for their common government in redressing their grievances. If such a code could be framed and accepted, it would not only secure the just rights of nations from infraction as against each other, but would unite them in their mutual interests and sympathies by the indissoluble ties of a common fraternity. Then all differences and dissensions could be settled, as they should be, by negotiation or voluntary submission to arbitration; and then wars would cease, and rivers of blood no longer flow. Nations, in their relations to each other, are but individuals, and should, as such, be subjected to wholesome restraints by some recognized authority. The proper authority would seem to be a representative Congress of Nations. This view of the matter is an American idea, and one which has been suggested by American experience. The assumption that every nation is an independent sovereignty, if not absurd in theory, is by no means true in fact. No civilized nation can live within itself and for itself, but must and will, in order to supply its wants, hold commercial intercourse with other nations. The productions of the earth belong to man, and are essential, whether of this or that clime, to his health and happiness, and will therefore be sought and distributed. Even the social relations of one nation with another are hardly less conducive to the general welfare than their commercial relations, especially since steam-power and the telegraph-wire have comparatively made all men next-door neighbors. In these modern times no government which is not just in its administration can long survive without provoking a revolution. It is only as a last resort that revolution becomes an elementary right, and then it must succeed in order to be recognized as a right. Nations succeed each other as naturally as individuals, sooner or later. The interest of all, whether national or individual, is the interest of each. Hence mankind the world over should be regarded as a common brotherhood, entitled to the enjoyment of equal rights and equal justice as the legitimate sequence of their fraternal relationship. And yet neither in ancient nor in modern times do we find a perfect government. It is true, however, that we sometimes speak of our own American Republic as a perfect system of popular government; yet it is nothing more, in fact, than an unsatisfactory experiment. It is a system which grew out of circumstances, and one which changes with circumstances. It was near the close of the eighteenth century when America began to lose her affectionate regard for her mother England. This change in her affections grew out of the fact that the mother evinced a sincerer love for money than for the welfare of her daughter. Remonstrance, though calmly uttered, proved unavailing. It was then that America for the first time gave indications of possessing a proud puritanic spirit that would not brook oppression. The imposition of the Stamp Act had incurred her displeasure; nor did an invitation to "take tea" restore her to equanimity. Instead of condescending to take so much as a "sip" of that favorite beverage, she had the audacity to commit whole cargoes of it to the voracity of the "ocean wave." This offence provoked England to take an avowed hostile attitude. America, still unawed, proceeded to beat her ploughshares and pruning-hooks into broadswords; war, with all its horrors, ensued. The result was that after a seven-years contest, liberty triumphed, and American independence became an acknowledged fact. America had statesmen in those days who were men of pluck. When they signed the Declaration of American Independence, and proclaimed it to the civilized world, they took their lives in their hands, and so far as human foresight could determine, were as likely to reach the gallows as to maintain the position they had assumed. But fortune "favored the brave," and instead of ascending the gallows, they ascended the pinnacle of fame, and now take rank among "The few, the immortal names That were not born to die." It will be recollected that our Pilgrim Fathers, on landing at Plymouth Rock, entered into a written compact which contained the germs of a republic,--principles which were expanded in the subsequent articles of colonial confederation, and finally were so developed and enlarged in their sweep and comprehension as to constitute not only the framework, but the life and spirit, of the federal Constitution, which has been accepted as the written will of a free and magnanimous people. In a republic like ours, the popular will, when clearly expressed, commands respect and must be obeyed. There is no alternative, nor should there be. As Americans, we believe in the Constitution, and in the "stars and stripes," and would die, if need be, in their defence. We also believe in ourselves, and in our capacity to take care of ourselves. This great fact is sufficiently illustrated in our past history as a nation. When her population was but a small fraction of what it now is, America not only compelled England to acknowledge her independence, but also compelled her, in a subsequent war, to acknowledge the doctrine of "free trade and sailors' rights." Ever intent on enlarging the "area of freedom," America next sent out her armies and took possession of the ancient palaces of the Montezumas, and finally settled differences by accepting the "golden land" of California, nor thought it at the time much of a bargain. And last, not least, she suppressed within her own borders, despite the adverse influences of England, one of the most formidable rebellions the world ever beheld, and succeeded in restoring fraternal harmony throughout the Union. In the history of the world there have been many forms of human government, which have arisen at successive periods, and which may be classed as the patriarchal, the monarchical, the aristocratic, and the democratic. The last was originally a direct rule of the people, but from necessity and convenience has now become a representative government, chosen by the people, and controlled by their will and action as expressed through the medium of the ballot-box. The doctrine that "the majority must rule" is evidently based on the scriptural idea that in a "multitude of counsellors there is safety;" and yet this is not always true. Minorities are often right, and majorities wrong. What is right and what is wrong, is a matter of opinion, ever changing with the advance of civilization. Take any form of government you please, and analyze it, and you will find that its vitality and its ability to preserve itself, are based on physical power,--a power to coerce; and when this power fails, the government fails, and either anarchy or revolution is the inevitable consequence. Yet the moral power of a government, though it may not save it, is not less important than its physical power. When both are exercised with no other view than a sincere desire to promote the public welfare, the government is pretty certain of being sustained, and simply for the reason that it is approved by a generous and healthful public sentiment. But let public sentiment become corrupted by the influences of aspiring demagogues, or by men who avow principles in conflict with the public interests, and no government, however pure and just in its inception, can long command respect, or preserve its authority. Every nation has its representative men. America has hers. Cotton Mather was a Puritan and a theocrat; Benjamin Franklin, a patriot and a philosopher; George Washington, a great general and a model man; Thomas Jefferson, a true democrat and a wise statesman; Andrew Jackson, a hero at New Orleans, and a Jupiter in the Presidential chair; and Abraham Lincoln, a man of destiny, who crushed rebellion, and proclaimed freedom to four millions of slaves. These were the men of power in the hands of Divine Power; and yet they did not comprehend the sequence of their mission. Their achievements marked the age in which they lived, and will doubtless exercise a living influence, more or less controlling, throughout the coming ages of the civilized world. Nations, as well as individuals, have their destiny in their own hands. It is the character of the individuals constituting the nation which gives to the nation its true character. America began her career by laying the foundations of her character, not in the sand, but on the rock of free schools, free churches, and a free public press. Without these institutions true freedom can neither be acquired, nor be preserved. They are the only legitimate nurseries of a healthful and vigorous public sentiment. Preserve these institutions, and the nation will continue to be free and prosperous and happy and powerful and glorious. And yet there may be corrupting influences growing out of the manner in which a popular government is administered, or growing out of the exercise and extent of the right of popular suffrage. Indeed, it has already become a grave question how far it is safe to extend the right of suffrage. It cannot be denied that our American population is but an intermixture of different nationalities, thrown together by a common desire to become free men in a free land. Yet immigrants continue to come from the Old World, differing as widely in their political and religious education and predilections as in their language, customs, and social habits. It is this foreign element that makes our population what it is,--an assimilating, and yet an unassimilated mass. A five-years residence, under our present naturalization laws, entitles aliens to citizenship and the right of suffrage. When they have acquired citizenship, demagogues assume to be their best friends, only to deceive them and advance their own selfish aspirations. In this way the original peculiarities of the different nationalities are wrought into political subserviency, and employed as an element of power in securing the balance of power. It is in this way that the people are first corrupted, and then the government. It is in this way that we, as a nation, allow demagogues to educate the masses into a low and degrading estimate of what constitutes a popular government, and of what are its true legitimate objects. The right of suffrage is clearly a political, not a natural, right. It should be exercised with wisdom, and only with reference to the "greatest good to the greatest number." The ignorant cannot exercise this right with safety, for the reason that they are not sufficiently intelligent. A certain degree of education should therefore be regarded as an indispensable prerequisite. A mere residence of five years in the country, without the ability to read and write the English language, should not be accepted as a presumptive qualification, though strengthened by an oath of allegiance. There are some statesmen, as well as other persons, both in this country and in Europe, who are earnestly engaged in agitating the question of extending the right of suffrage to women, on the ground that women are citizens, and often own taxable property, and consequently have the same interest as men in securing and maintaining a just and proper administration of the government under which they live. While this is true, it is equally true that men are endowed by nature with more physical, if not more mental, strength than women, and have a higher regard for the diviner sex than they have for themselves, and consequently were created to be their protectors and guardians. In fact, the two sexes are but counterparts of each other. In Nature's arithmetic, the two count but one, and should be but one in heart and in life. But somehow or other, many of these counterparts get strangely mismatched, or are never matched at all. This is not a fault of Nature, but a defect in our social system. If it were considered as proper for women as for men to be the first to propose marriage, it would doubtless lead to the happiest results. But taking things as they are, the thought has occurred to me that it would be wise for the State to limit the right of suffrage to married men, for the reason that such men would naturally feel the deepest interest in sustaining a good government. Let the right to vote and to hold office depend on marriage, let the honors of State and of society be conferred on none but those who have honored themselves by assuming the duties and responsibilities of wedded life, and I doubt not that all marriageable bachelors would aspire to the honors of full citizenship, while marriageable women would soon find their proper places in their proper sphere, and the government become what it should be,--pure in its principles and just in its administration. America is in a transition state, and will in all probability continue to trust in the success of untried experiment, rather than rely on her past experience. But still there survives within the American breast a popular sentiment, which, like the magnetic needle, ever points to an unerring polar star. It is only amid clouds and storms that dangers arise, or become alarming. It is therefore important that the ship of State should be intrusted to none but skilful mariners. The pilot should appreciate the dignity of his position, and comprehend the extent of his responsibilities. Whether the "golden age" of America terminated with the outbreak of her great Civil Rebellion, or commenced at the date of its final suppression, remains, perhaps, an undecided question; yet there are thousands who believe that her golden age has passed, never to return. This may or may not be true. It is hardly to be expected, however, that a happier age will ever arrive than that which existed prior to the Southern Rebellion. The people generally, both North and South, before an appeal to arms occurred, were characterized by a genial sincerity in the expression of their political views and in the recognition of their constitutional obligations, as well as in their ecclesiastical connections and social relations. They, in fact, felt that they were akin to each other, and regarded each other as a common brotherhood, having mutual interests in sustaining a common government,--a government which their fathers had framed, and bequeathed to them and to coming generations. In this genial relation, for nearly a century, the North and the South enjoyed uninterrupted peace and prosperity; and America took her position as one of the great and powerful nations of the earth. It is to be hoped, however, that the result of the late Civil War will prove a "blessing in disguise," though laden with many unpleasant memories. If we cannot obliterate the "dark spots" in the sunlight of our past history as a republic, we can at least cultivate friendly relations and a liberal spirit, such as will give to our future history a spotless character. It now becomes a grave question whether the freedom of the emancipated slaves will prove a boon or a curse to them. As yet they cannot comprehend their relative position; nor can they foresee their ultimate though not distant destiny. As a race, they differ widely in their natural characteristics from the Saxon race among whom they have been diffused. They belong to Africa. The two races, being distinct in the conditions of their origin and physical structure, as well as in their temperament and tastes, can never harmonize as one people, either in their social or political relations, on the basis of a perfect equality. The thing is impossible, simply for the reason that the law of antagonism which exists between the two races is founded in Nature, and is therefore a divine law, which can neither be controlled nor essentially modified by legislation or education. In fact, a "war of races" has already become imminent, and must, when it does come, terminate in the expulsion, if not extinction, of the African race. In the future of America there are mystic events which time only can disclose. "Onward" is the watchword of the living present. Every American believes there is "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." The "almighty dollar" is his leading star. Hoards of gold and silver glitter in the distance. In acquiring wealth he acquires power. He knows that wealth is power; and hence the acquisition of wealth has become the ruling passion of the age. In other words, money supersedes merit, while moral honesty is held at a discount. Lamentable as the fact may be, it is evident that an unscrupulous desire to obtain wealth and political honors pervades all classes of American society, from the highest to the lowest. In order to facilitate the accumulation of wealth, and achieve their ambitious aims, individuals consolidate their capital in corporations, and corporations consolidate themselves into overgrown monopolies. In this way almost every leading branch of trade and of manufactures, as well as railroad interests, shipping interests, and telegraph lines, are merged in corporations,--in fact, nearly all that remains of individuality is lost in corporationality. Of course the mere individual, however meritorious, becomes literally powerless unless recognized by a corporation. Though a trite saying, it is nevertheless true that corporations are "soulless," and therefore devoid of human feeling and of human sympathies. Among the most formidable of these monopolies are the railroad corporations, ever busy in weaving their spider-like webs over the entire continent. In discharging their duties to the public they seldom subordinate their own interests. Almost every man of wealth in America is a stockholder in one or more incorporated companies, and will of course act politically, as well as individually, in accordance with his interests. Both the commercial and financial operations of the country are essentially in the hands of corporations. They in fact monopolize the banking institutions; and if they do not control, they evidently desire to control, the legislation and government of the entire country. Indeed, the time has already come, when in quite too many instances the popular voice yields to the corporative voice, while personal merit and qualification for office become questions of secondary importance. It is easy to be seen that corporative interests have become not only gigantic, but are engaged, with pick and spade, in undermining the very foundations of the Republic. If the people would preserve their equal rights, and enjoy the blessings of a free government, they must not only remember, but act on the principle, that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." It is owing to the tendency of capital to combine its productive energies that working-men, as they are pleased to designate themselves, conceive the idea that capital and labor are antagonistic in their interests. Hence working-men, especially miners and mechanics, combine against capitalists for the purpose of securing higher rates of wages. In doing this, they resort to "strikes," violate their contracts, and dictate their own prices. If their terms are not accepted, they refuse to work, and the great leading industries of the country are crippled, if not suspended. A train of moral and physical evils follows, which are more seriously felt by the "strikers" than by capitalists. If movements of this kind are continued, the obvious result will be to drive capital out of the country to seek a more reliable investment. It is labor that produces capital, and capital that furnishes labor. The one must depend on the other. Their interests are therefore mutual, and both are entitled to equal protection; their relations to each other must necessarily be regulated by the law of supply and demand. There is no other law or power that can do it. If force be applied, it is certain to react. Yet the field is alike open to all. The laborer often becomes a capitalist, and the capitalist a laborer. What are known as "strikes," therefore, can effect no lasting good to any one. They are but elements of social discord, which demagogues seize and control for their own aggrandizement. In fact, "Trades Unions" are nothing more nor less than organized conspiracies against capitalists and the best interests of the country. If tolerated, the government itself is in danger of being ultimately subverted. It is clear that the tendency of these unions is to produce disunion. They have already become so formidable in numbers and in political influence as to render it doubtful whether any legislation could be obtained, or military power enforced, which would either control or restrain them in their action and ultimate aims. In view of this state of things, it would seem that the time has come when the American people, as a nation, should pause and "take the sober second thought." It is often said that the world is governed too much. But so far as this country is concerned, the reverse seems much nearer the truth. Our government is presumed to be the creature of public opinion. In theory it is so; but in practice we generally find that what is called public opinion is manufactured by a few scheming politicians, through the instrumentalities of packed conventions and a subservient public press. And hence candidates for office are selected with a view to their availability rather than for their known capacity and integrity. This failure to select the best men of the country to govern it, and administer its laws, has already resulted in degrading American character by the corrupt practices which it has generated, if not sanctioned, in every department of government, whether federal, State, or municipal. In fact, dangers lurk on every side. There is no safety, unless it can be found in the virtue and intelligence of the people. If in this respect the people are deficient, it is the fault of their education. The rights of citizenship should depend on education, and the masses, if need be, should be educated by compulsion. As it now is, the learned professions are regarded as the main pillars that sustain the social fabric. They in fact give tone to public sentiment, and erect the standard of public morals. The masses accept their opinions, and seldom question their accuracy; and yet the masses are often misled. The few corrupt the many. Hence it is that we so often see the lawyer, the doctor, and even the clergyman, swayed in their action by political incentives; and especially is this true of professed politicians and official dignitaries. As a matter of course, public sentiment becomes demoralized, and almost every species of fraud and corruption comes to be regarded as quite respectable. If for this state of things there be a remedy, it is only to be found in our public schools and in the moral teachings of our churches. It is here that the work of reform must begin, the sooner the better. It should begin by re-laying the foundations of the Republic deeper and broader, and with principles as solid and permanent as the masonry of the everlasting hills. When this great radical work has been accomplished, the threatening clouds which now cast their shadows over our national future "Will fold their tents like the Arabs, And as silently steal away." While in the tendencies of the age we see much to admire, we also see much to be regretted. In a word, there is too much friction in the complicated machinery that spins and weaves the web and woof of American character. In religion, morals, and politics, wide differences of opinion are to be expected, yet they should be honest. While a free public press may be regarded in theory as the "palladium of American liberty," it seems to proceed practically on the belief that its own interests are the public interests. Especially is this true of the political press. Money, instead of principle, is too often its guiding star. By its influence, men in office and out of office are made and unmade at pleasure. And this will ever be the case so long as editorial utterances are accepted as oracular. And yet there is hope, and perhaps safety, even in the freedom of our partisan prints, so long as they continue to expose the falsities of each other, whatever may be their motives. If, as in China, the head of every editor who knowingly publishes an untruth were demanded as a forfeit, it is to be feared that gentlemen of the "tripod" would soon become "few and far between" in this broad land of the free. Yet the newspaper is the controlling power of the government, and the mouth-piece of public sentiment. Editors should therefore appreciate their responsibility, as well as "take the responsibility." Though rotation in office may be regarded as a wholesome principle in the administration of a popular government, it is evident from the history of the past that frequent elections tend to disturb the peace and harmony of society. One political campaign scarcely ends before another begins. Especially is this true of our Presidential elections. The spirit of these elections extends to all our local elections, and often renders them equally bitter and intolerant. These are growing evils which seem to threaten the stability of the Republic, and which require the application of a radical remedy. In the first place, the right of suffrage should be made uniform in all the States, and extend to none except citizens who can read, write, and speak the English language. This must be done, if we would preserve our American nationality from a confusion of tongues and the contamination of disloyal principles. In the next place, the President should be elected by a direct popular vote for a term of eight or ten years, and be rendered ineligible thereafter. If provisions of this character were incorporated into the federal Constitution, the President would have no other motive in the discharge of his official duties than a desire to make for himself a good record; while professional politicians would disappear, and our county be saved from the demoralizing influences of a constant partisan warfare. In regard to the Presidential question, the keynote is usually sounded by the friends of the administration, who wish to retain its patronage, or by opponents, who seek to overthrow it for the sake of the "spoils." Though candidates for office contend loudly for principles and reform, it is evident that with many of them the public treasury is the centre of attraction. It is true, however, that there are some honorable exceptions,--some men who are influenced by patriotic motives, who love their country and desire to promote its real welfare, and who would rather "do right than be President of the United States." In a government like ours, which is essentially partisan in its character, there exists a manifest want of promptitude in the exercise of its central power. In other words, it takes a republic too long to move and execute in a crisis. It is prevented from doing this by the popular trammels which environ it. And yet it is often as difficult to ascertain what is the popular will as it is to comply with it. For this reason it is often a slavish fear, rather than a sense of right, that controls the administration of the government. Even our best men, when placed in power, become so sensitive to public opinion that their moral courage "oozes out at their fingers' ends." They see lions in their path, and therefore fear to do their duty. So long as a love of office, rather than a love of country, influences the action of the politician and the statesman, there can be neither strength nor stability in the framework of democratic institutions. For an illustration of this, we need only appeal to the histories of Greece and Rome. America has produced, however, many model men, and doubtless will produce many more of a like character. It is men that we want,--men of nerve and pluck, as well as men of wisdom, not only to enact our laws, but to administer them. All conspiracies of one class against the rights of another class, or against the rights of individuals, should by Congressional enactment be declared crimes, and the perpetrators promptly punished, no matter by what name their associations may be known. It is the prompt enforcement of criminal law that gives it moral force and overawes the offender. It is impossible to predict the future, except as we see it from a standpoint of the present. Hence it is, perhaps, that we apprehend dangers when there are none. Yet we know that the elements of dissolution are incorporated into the very material that constitutes the universe. And so it is with the nations of the earth. The law of change is universal. It affects alike both the moral and the physical world. In his desires, man, as an individual, is insatiable; and so are nations. It is a prominent trait of Americans to want territory, and to acquire territory. They must have elbow-room; but the misfortune is, they do not know when they have enough. It seems as if they aspired to grasp the world and to govern the world. It is doubtless true that we, as a nation, have already acquired too much territory. The result is, the government has become unwieldly, and the danger great that it will break down, sooner or later, of its own weight. So vast is the national domain, and so various is it in its climate, productions, and population, that its central power cannot so legislate as to do equal justice to all interests, and at the same time harmonize the conflict of public sentiment. This state of things had its influence in producing the outbreak of the late Rebellion. For grievances of this character there would seem to be no other remedy than that of revolution. We can but hope, however, that the States now known as the United States will continue to increase in numbers, and to harmonize as one people, one nation, and one government. Yet it is quite possible that the time will come when they will sever into groups and become independent of their present federal relation to each other, in accordance with their peculiar sectional interests, "peaceably if they can, forcibly if they must." Then, instead of one, we shall probably have several independent American confederacies, whose future boundaries are clearly indicated, not only by differences of climate and productions, but by Nature, as marked by her great intervening rivers, lakes, and mountain ranges. These confederacies, when organized, will doubtless consist of those groups of States now known as the Eastern, Western, Southern, and Pacific States. In addition to sectional interests and geographical differences, there are other considerations tending to induce a division of the Union. Among these are an almost unlimited number of political aspirants, and a rapidly increasing population. In Europe, and in many parts of Asia, an overgrown population, in connection with geographical differences and tribal distinctions, is doubtless the original cause which led to subdivisions of empire, and the establishment of so many petty kingdoms as now exist in those countries. The same causes are evidently at work on the American continent, and must ultimately produce similar results. In little more than a century our population has increased from seven to sixty millions. In the next century, at present rates, the increase from natural growth and the influx from foreign emigration will in all probability approximate two or three hundred millions. Europe alone, judging from present indications, will transfer to this continent within that period a large share of that number. If this be assumed as worthy of credence, is it not time that we, as American citizens, should look ahead, as well as go ahead, and if possible, preserve our national character? It is true that an intermixture of foreign blood with American blood may tend to develop a higher order of manhood; yet when we go so far as to permit foreign languages to be taught in our public schools at the public expense, as essential to an American education, and that, too, at the dictation of denizens whose education and predilections are in conflict with our own, have we not reason to fear the ultimate results? If this insidious influence of foreign growth be allowed to control our educational system, it will not be long before we shall adopt foreign habits and sentiments, and lose forever our American nationality. If America would be true to herself, she must preserve not only the purity of her principles, but the purity of her spoken language. If foreigners choose to become American citizens, they must expect to become Americanized in language and sentiment, as well as accept our form of government. We want no foreign element incorporated into our free institutions which does not harmonize with them. In a word, we want no union of Church and State, no "confusion of tongues" in our public schools, no aping of foreign manners and habits, no foreign dictation,--nothing but pure American freedom and pure American principles. It is in this country that Church and State, for the first time in the history of the civilized world, have been separated, and allowed to conduct their own affairs in their own way, and independently of each other. So far as experience has gone in this respect, it proves the wisdom of the policy. And yet there are many statesmen, who, in reading the "signs of the times," think there are reasons for believing that the priesthood have inherited their ancient love of civil power, and are quietly endeavoring, in various ways, to secure such a degree of moral power over the popular mind as will, in effect if not in fact, transfer to them the control of the civil government. If the priesthood are to control the government, it matters but little whether it be the Catholic or the Protestant. Catholicism regards the Church as supreme and the State as subordinate, repudiates public schools, and trains her youth in the Church and for the Church, thus preparing them to become not only adherents to the faith, but "soldiers of the cross;" while Protestantism asks the recognition of God in the Constitution, urges a fraternal union of all her various denominations, with a view to concentrate and direct their moral force, and even goes so far as to discuss politics in the pulpit,--thus attempting to control the results of our popular elections, especially when great moral questions are supposed to be involved. In all this there may be no insidious design; but facts carry with them a degree of significance which ought not to be disregarded. If a "religious war" must come, it will be a fearful contest, and one which must result in the subversion of free government, and finally extinguish the last hope of every true philanthropist. And yet, as a people, we need never "despair of the Republic" so long as we sustain free public schools and confide the government to none other than an enlightened and philanthropic statesmanship. If America continues to respect herself, she is evidently destined to wield, not only the moral power of the world, but to complete the civilization of the world. Inspired with a desire to ameliorate the condition of mankind the world over, she annually expends millions of money in advancing the cause of a true Christianity. So inviting are her free institutions that she is rapidly becoming a central nation in point of wealth, talent, and population, as well as in moral and political influence. It should be her pleasure, as well as aim, not only to perfect her own government, but to diffuse a knowledge of her liberal principles throughout the world. In reverting to the history of the past, we see that nations, like individuals, have their career, succeed each other, and finally become extinct. On this continent the red race has been rapidly succeeded by the white race. Whether a still higher order of man will succeed the white race, is a question which time only can determine. Nature is provident, and like Divine Providence, works in "mysterious ways," and with an aim to achieve ultimate results. What America now is, we know; what she will be, we know not. It is devoutly to be wished, however, that her career may continue to be characterized by great and noble achievements, and that her "star-spangled banner" may forever float in triumph "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." CAREER OF REV. JOSEPH BADGER. There have been but few men in the clerical profession who have made a worthier or more exemplary life-record for themselves than Rev. Joseph Badger. He fought for liberty in the Revolution, and for Christianity in the wilds of the Western Reserve. In the one case he fought with the musket, in the other with the sword of the Spirit. Whether serving as a soldier or as a missionary, he proved himself sincere and steadfast in his devotion to duty. Rev. Joseph Badger was born at Wilbraham, Mass., Feb. 28, 1757. He was a lineal descendant of Giles Badger, who emigrated from England and settled at Newburyport, not far from Boston, about the year 1635. The father of Joseph was Henry Badger, who married Mary Landon. They were both devoutly pious, and equally poor in this world's goods. They instructed their son Joseph, at an early age, in the catechism of the Puritan faith, and gave him such further elementary education as they were able at the domestic fireside. He grew strong in the faith as he grew to manhood, when he began to realize that in sharing life with his parents, good and kind as they were, he shared their poverty. In consulting his mirror he was often painfully reminded of the fact that his garments, patched as they were, displayed about as many colors as the coat of his ancient namesake. Inspired with the patriotic sentiment of the times, and desiring not only to provide for himself, but to obtain sufficient money to give himself a liberal education, he enlisted in 1775, when but eighteen years of age, in the Revolutionary army, as a common soldier, and was assigned to the regiment commanded by Colonel Patterson. The regiment was stationed at Fort No. 3, near Lechmere's Point, in the vicinity of Boston. At the battle of Bunker Hill this regiment was posted on Cobble Hill, in a line with the front of the American battery, and about half a mile distant, where every man of the regiment could see the fire from the whole line, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing the British break their ranks, run down the hill, and then reluctantly return to the charge. On their third return, as luck would have it, they carried the works at the point of the bayonet. This was the first time after his enlistment that young Joseph had an opportunity to smell the smoke of British gunpowder. It was some time in September of the same year he enlisted that the British landed three or four hundred men on Lechmere's Point to take off a herd of fat cattle. Colonel Patterson ordered his regiment to attack the marauders and prevent them from capturing the cattle. A sharp conflict ensued, in which Joseph tested the virtues of his musket and poured into the enemy nine or ten shots in rapid succession and with apparent effect. Several were killed and others wounded on both sides. Joseph escaped unharmed. But soon after this skirmish he took a violent cold, attended with a severe cough. His captain advised him to return home until he could recover. This he did, and within twenty days came back and rejoined his regiment quite restored to health. The British evacuated Boston on the 17th of March, 1776. On the next day Colonel Patterson's regiment, with several other regiments, was ordered to New York, where they remained for three weeks, and were then ordered to Canada. They were transported up the Hudson to Albany, and thence by way of Lakes George and Champlain to St. Johns, and thence to La Prairie on the banks of the St. Lawrence and in sight of Montreal. On the way the troops suffered severely from exposure to rain-storms and snow-storms, and from want of provisions. They arrived at La Prairie late in the day, and in a state bordering on starvation, where they encamped supperless. The next day each soldier received a ration of a few ounces of mouldy bread for breakfast, and a thin slice of stale meat for supper. Joseph accepted his share of the dainty feast without a murmur, but doubtless thought the wayfaring soldier had a pretty "hard road to travel." A part of Colonel Patterson's regiment was then ordered up the river to a small fort at Cedar Rapids, which was besieged by a British captain with one company of regulars and about five hundred Indians, led by Brant, the famous Indian chief. The Indians were thirsting for blood. A fierce conflict ensued, which lasted for an hour or more, when the enemy was compelled to retreat towards the fort. At this juncture a parley was called, and the firing ceased. A number were killed, and more wounded. It so happened that the fifth company, to which Joseph belonged, did not arrive in time to participate in the fight, though they had approached so near the scene as to hear the firing and see the rolling cloud of battle-smoke. Joseph expressed his regret that he had lost so good an opportunity to give his flint-lock a second trial. The detachment was now ordered to retreat to La Chine,--a French village about six miles above Montreal. Here they were reinforced by the arrival of eight hundred men, under command of General Arnold. The entire force advanced to the outlet of Bason Lake, at St. Ann's, where they embarked on board the boats and steered for a certain point about three miles distant. In passing, the force was fired upon by the enemy, armed with guns and two small cannon. A shower of shot seemed to come from every direction, and as the boats containing the Americans were about to land at the point sought, they received, amid hideous yells from the Indians in ambush, a hailstorm of bullets that rattled as they struck the boats, and slightly injured some of the men. The men in the boats returned the fire as best they could. It was marvellous that none of the Americans were killed or seriously injured. "It appeared to me," said Joseph, "a wonderful, providential escape." A British captain by the name of Foster was shot in the thigh. It was now nearly sunset, when General Arnold ordered a retreat. The night was spent in making preparations for the morrow. It was near morning when Captain Foster came over to General Arnold and agreed with him to a cartel by which certain prisoners were exchanged. The American prisoners were returned in a destitute and forlorn condition. The pitiful sight deeply excited the generous sympathies of the kind-hearted Joseph, who did what he could to comfort them by dividing his own supplies with them. General Arnold now returned with his troops to Montreal, exercising great vigilance to avoid further surprise. He then crossed the St. Lawrence and encamped at St. Johns. Here the small-pox appeared in camp. In order to avoid the severity of the disease, Joseph procured the necessary virus and inoculated himself with the point of a needle, which produced the desired effect. Two days after the disease had appeared in camp, the troops were ordered to Chambly. The British hove in sight and began to land on the opposite side of the bay. The invalids were numerous and continued to increase. They were directed to march back to St. Johns,--a distance of twelve miles. Most of them could hardly carry gun, cartridge-box, and blanket, and were often obliged to sit down and rest by the wayside, Joseph among the rest. In the course of a few days the sick were transported to Isle aux Noix, at which place all the shattered army were collected under command of General Heath. From this place the troops, including the sick, proceeded amid sundry embarrassments to Crown Point, where they encamped. Here the small-pox spread among the men, and in its most aggravated form, with fearful rapidity. The scene in camp soon became appalling. The groans and cries of the sick and dying were heard night and day without cessation. As it happened, the surgeons, for want of medicines and hospital stores, could render but little aid. In some instances as many as thirty patients died in a day, and were buried in a single vault or pit, for the reason that there were not well men enough to bury them in separate graves. The humane and philanthropic Joseph, who had previously inoculated himself with success, and thus avoided further danger from the contagion, now devoted himself to nursing and caring for his sick companions-in-arms with unwearied assiduity. As soon as the contagion began to abate, the sick were transferred in boats to Fort George, while the men fit for service were ordered to Mount Independence, opposite Ticonderoga, to erect works of defence. The mount was covered with forest trees, loose rocks, and dens infested with rattlesnakes, which often crept into camp and were killed. At this time Joseph suffered for want of the clothes he had lost in the retreat from Canada, and had, in fact, worn the only shirt he had for six weeks, and was so incommoded with vermin that he was compelled to take off his shirt, wash it without soap, wring it out, and put it on wet. He was also scourged with an irritating cutaneous disease, which induced him to retire some distance from camp, fire a log-heap, and roast himself, after anointing with a mixture of grease and brimstone. The camp was destitute of indispensable conveniences, and the hospital in which lay the sick had not a dish of any kind in which could be administered a sup of gruel, broth, or a drink of water. Resort was had to wooden troughs, or dishes, cut out with a hatchet or penknife. The colonel, in passing through the hospital, said, "I wish there was a man to be found here who can turn wooden dishes." Joseph, who understood the art, replied, "Furnish me the tools and I will do it." The tools were furnished, and Joseph soon turned from the aspen poplar an ample supply of wooden cups and trenchers. He was also often employed in making bread, and in fact was a sort of universal genius and could do almost anything. At the instance of General Washington he was also employed at times to aid in negotiating treaties of friendship with the Indians. But after being transferred several times from one military point to another, and suffering more or less from hardships, his health became so impaired that the principal surgeon gave him a discharge, and he returned to his home in Massachusetts. He soon afterward so far recovered that he re-enlisted and served as an orderly sergeant in defence of the seaport towns till the 1st of January, 1778, when his time expired, and he returned to his father's house once more, having been in the service a little more than three years. He received, on retiring from the army, about two hundred dollars in paper currency, which was so depreciated that he could not purchase with the whole of it a decent coat. He then (for the next six months) engaged in the business of weaving on shares, and during that time wove sixteen hundred yards of plain cloth. This enabled him to clothe himself decently, and to spend the ensuing winter in improving his education. At this time, as he said, he "had no Christian hope," but continued to labor and study during the year 1779, when a religious revival occurred, and he acquired a Christian hope, with a determination to fit himself for the ministry. Encouraged by his friend, Rev. Mr. Day, he prosecuted the requisite preliminary studies, and at the same time taught a family school in order to meet his expenses. He entered college in 1781, and graduated in 1785. He then studied theology, and was licensed to preach in 1786. He soon received a call and was ordained as pastor of the church at Blandford, Mass. He had previously married Miss Lois Noble, who was a young lady of refinement and exemplary piety. In October, 1800, he resigned his pastorship at Blandford and received a regular dismissal. The Connecticut Missionary Society, whose central office was at Hartford, had formed a high estimate of the character and piety of Rev. Joseph Badger, and at once tendered him the appointment to go, under the auspices of the society, as a missionary to the Western Reserve. This was the kind of Christian labor in which he preferred to engage. He therefore accepted the appointment; and leaving his family at home until he could explore somewhat his new field of service, he took his departure on horseback, Nov. 15, 1800, bound for the Western Reserve. He took what was then called the southern route, crossed the Alleghany mountains in the midst of a snow-storm, and after a weary journey, arrived at Pittsburgh on the 14th of December. Here he rested for a day or two, and then resumed his "journey through the wilderness," and after a weary ride of nearly a hundred miles, reached Youngstown, one of the earliest settlements in the Reserve, on Saturday night at a late hour, and was kindly received. The next day he preached at Youngstown his first sermon in the Reserve. The town at that time consisted of some half-dozen log cabins. His audience included nearly every soul in town, though but a handful, who had assembled in one of the larger cabins, and who seemed pleased to receive from his lips "the good tidings of great joy." Gratified with his reception at Youngstown, and resolving to lose no time in expediting his missionary labors, he rode the next day to Vienna, where but one family had settled; thence to Hartford, where but three families had settled, and thence to Vernon, where he found but five families. In making these successive visits he did good work. While at Vernon he was informed that Mr. Palmer, the head of the family settled at Vienna, had been taken suddenly sick and was not expected to live. There was no doctor residing in all that region of country. Rev. Mr. Badger hastened at once to the relief of the sick man, and nursed him for eight days, when he so far recovered that his providential nurse could safely leave him. In this way Rev. Mr. Badger visited, in the course of the year 1801, every settlement and nearly every family throughout the Western Reserve. In doing this he often rode from five to twenty-five or thirty miles a day, carrying with him in saddlebags a scanty supply of clothing and eatables, and often traversing pathless woodlands amid storms and tempests, swimming unbridged rivers, and suffering from cold and hunger, and at the same time here and there visiting lone families, giving them and their children religious instruction and wholesome advice, and preaching at points wherever a few could be gathered together, sometimes in a log cabin or in a barn, and sometimes in the open field or in a woodland, beneath the shadows of the trees. At about this time he preached the first sermon ever heard in Cleveland. In response to all this benevolent work he had the satisfaction of knowing that he was almost universally received with a heartfelt appreciation of his services, and with a liberal hospitality. Though most of the early settlers were poor, they cheerfully "broke bread with him," and gave him the larger share of such luxuries as they happened to have at command. Even the Indians, who were quite numerous, treated him kindly and with respect. He took especial pains to enlighten and instruct them, and soon acquired such a knowledge of their language as enabled him to communicate readily with them. In September of 1801, he journeyed on horseback to Detroit, with a view to extend the field of his missionary labors. On reaching the banks of the Huron River, late in the evening, he stopped at an Indian hut, desiring to remain for the night. He was kindly received by the inmates,--an aged Indian chief and his squaw. The squaw cut fodder from the cornfield and fed his horse, and soon presented him with a supper of boiled string-beans, buttered with bear's oil, in a wooden bowl that was cut and carved out from the knot of a tree with a hatchet and knife. Hungry as he really was, he relished the feast. She then spread for him on the floor a bed of bearskins and clean blankets, on which he enjoyed a refreshing night's sleep. In the morning she gave him for breakfast a corn-bread cake, baked in the embers. It contained inside a sprinkling of black beans, and resembled plum-cake. While he was eating, he expressed his admiration of the bread. The squaw replied, "Eat; it is good. It is such bread as God gives the Indians." He then resumed his journey to Detroit, where he remained a few days. While there, and while on his way to and from there, he held religious interviews with all he met who were willing to converse in relation to their spiritual welfare, whether white men or Indians, but found no one, as he said, in all that region, whom he could regard as a Christian, "except a black man, who appeared pious." On his return he visited Hudson, where he found a few professors of religion. Here he organized a church, consisting of ten males and six females. This was the first church organized in the Western Reserve. The next morning, October 25, he took his departure from the Reserve, and returned by way of Buffalo to his family in New England, preaching, as he went, at such settlements as offered a favorable opportunity. He arrived at home Jan. 1, 1802, after an absence of thirteen months and fifteen days. He found his dear family all well, and like David of old, blessed the Lord, who had "redeemed his life from destruction and crowned him with loving-kindness and tender mercies." Soon after his arrival, he visited Hartford and reported to the missionary society what he had done, and the character of his work, and agreed to return with his family to the same field of missionary labor, and for such compensation as the society chose to allow him, which was but seven dollars per week. This was at that time considered a sufficient sum to meet the current expenses of himself and family. He exchanged his former homestead at Blandford for land in the Western Reserve. On the 23d of February, 1802, he started on his journey to the Western Reserve in a wagon drawn by four horses and loaded with a few household goods, his wife and six children, and himself driving the team. He took the route leading through the State of New York to Buffalo, and thence followed the southerly shore of Lake Erie to Austinburg, in the Reserve, where he and his family were received with a hearty welcome to the home and hospitalities of his friend, Colonel Eliphalet Austin. He accomplished the journey, a distance of six hundred miles, in sixty days. This was travelling at a pretty rapid rate, as was then thought. He remarked, when he had reached the hospitable home of his friend Austin, that he and his family seemed destined to share God's promise to his ancient Israel: "And they shall dwell safely in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods." He now purchased a small lot of land in Austinburg, and soon, with the aid of a few kind settlers, erected a log cabin in which to shelter his family. He found it difficult to procure sufficient provisions, but soon succeeded in obtaining a sack of coarse flour in the vicinity; and hearing of a barrel of pork for sale at Painesville, he sent a man with a team thirty miles through the woods to purchase it, and paid twenty silver dollars for it, and found on opening it that it contained the "whole hog,"--feet, head, snout and ears,--and weighed but one hundred and seventy pounds. This, with the milk from two cows that were pastured in the woods and sometimes missed for a day or two, was all the provision he could make for his family when it became necessary for him to leave them and enter upon his missionary labors in other parts of the Reserve. He visited Mentor, Chagrin, and other settlements. At Euclid he found a family by the name of Burke, who had resided in a lone situation in the woods for over three years, in so destitute a condition that the wife had been obliged to spin cattle's hair and weave it into blankets to cover her children's bed and save them from suffering in cold weather. At Newburg he visited five families, the only residents in the place, but discovered to his regret "no apparent piety among any of them. They all seemed to glory in their infidelity." He continued visiting families and preaching throughout the southeastern part of the Reserve, and establishing churches. He called on his return at "Perkins' Station" in Trumbull County, where an election was pending and a goodly number of voters present. He was invited to dine with them. All took their seats and began to help themselves, when he interrupted them and remarked: "Gentlemen, if you will attend with Christian decency, and hear me invoke the blessing of God, I will sit down with you; otherwise I cannot." Knives and forks were instantly laid down and a blessing invoked. The dinner was then discussed with a keen relish by the assemblage, who seemed to appreciate the fact that "blessings sometimes come in disguise." He then continued on his way home. Soon after this a revival commenced in most of the infant settlements, and his missionary labors were largely increased. In some of the settlements the revival was attended with miraculous power. In many instances the converts were stricken down in convulsions, groaned in apparent agonies, and tore their hair; and in other instances they fell in a trance, saw visions, awoke, and leaped for joy, shouting long and loud, "Glory to God!" All this surprised the itinerant missionary and presented him with a problem which he could not solve; yet being a disciple of the "Calvinistic school," and charitably inclined, he attributed the "spasmodic demonstrations" to the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit. The people far and near partook of the excitement and flocked to hear him. On one occasion he preached to an audience of five hundred. Though some scoffed, many professed to have experienced religion. The general impression was in those days that conversion consisted in experiencing some sudden and mysterious shock,--a puritanic idea that is now held to be absurd; yet this wild excitement doubtless produced some good fruit, if not a "rich harvest." Be this as it may, Rev. Mr. Badger persevered in extending his labors, and between June 18 and July 1 of the year 1802, rode two hundred miles, preached eight sermons, and administered two sacraments. In riding through the dense woodlands, especially after nightfall, he was often followed by hungry wolves and bears, manifesting a desire to cultivate a toothsome acquaintance with him. On one occasion, when riding through a dark and pathless forest late at night, along the banks of Grand River, and drenched with rain, he discovered by the sound of distinct footsteps that some large animal was following him. He stopped his horse, turned on the saddle, and with loud vociferations and clapping of hands attempted to frighten the animal away, but instead of the noise having the desired effect, the bear, as it proved to be, sprang towards him with hair standing on end and with eyes flashing fire. At this critical juncture, as Rev. Mr. Badger states in his diary: "I had no weapon of defence. I thought best to leave the ground, turned to the left, and walked my horse partly by the bear, when the brute stepped directly on behind me and within a few paces. By this time it had become so dark that I could see nothing, not even my hand holding the bridle, and the bear was still snapping his teeth and approaching nearer. I had in my hand a large heavy horse-shoe, took aim by his nose, and threw the shoe, but effected no alarm of the enemy. To ride away was impossible in a pathless wood, thick with brush and fallen timber. I concluded to resort to a tree if I could find one. I reined my horse first to the right and then to the left, at which instant some sloping limbs brushed my hat. On feeling them, I found them to be long pliable beech limbs. I reined my horse again and came with his shoulder close to the tree. I tied the bridle to the limbs, raised myself on the saddle, and by aid of the small limbs began to climb. I soon got hold of a limb large enough to bear me; and at this instant the evil beast came to the tree with violent snuffing and snapping. I fixed my stand on the limb, took out a sharp knife, the only weapon I had, and prepared for battle. But I soon heard the bear snuffing near the horse's nose as he was crunching the boughs and leaves within his reach. I then ascended about forty feet, as near the top of the tree as I thought was safe, found a convenient place to sit on a limb, and then tied myself with a large bandanna to the tree, so as not to fall if I fell into a drowse. The bear continued smelling at the horse until he had passed around him to the opposite side of the tree; and all was still but the champing of the horse. By the roaring of the wind it appeared that a heavy gust was approaching. It soon began to rain powerfully, with wind and heavy peals of thunder. At this time the horse shook himself, which startled the bear to a quick rush for a few rods, when he stopped and violently snapped his teeth, and there remained until a few minutes before daylight, when he went off. My horse standing as he did at the foot of the tree, without moving a foot from the place where I left him, and in no way frightened by the approach and management of the bear, seemed to be peculiarly providential. This was the only time I was disturbed in camping out many times. As soon as I could see to take my course, I mounted my horse and arrived at my house, about six miles from my lodging-place in the tree, with a pretty good appetite for breakfast. Having in my saddlebags two volumes of the 'Ohio State Laws,' it was remarked by some of my friends that the old bear did not like so near a 'union of Church and State.'" Rev. Mr. Badger continued his missionary work with zeal and with highly encouraging prospects. He organized many churches and schools, and distributed many Bibles and school-books, and often assisted the settlers in erecting their log cabins and in securing their harvests. In 1804, the missionary society reduced his compensation to six dollars a week, being the same they allowed their missionaries nearer home. This he did not relish, but accepted the reduced pittance, remarking that he would go on with his work and trust to Him who "feeds the ravens." At this time he was obliged to pay at the rate of sixteen dollars a barrel for salt pork, though the other provisions were comparatively cheap and plenty. Early in the spring of 1809, his house was burned, and nothing saved but two beds and a few articles of clothing. He at once built a small cabin, with the generous aid of his neighbors, and moved his family into it, without bedstead, table, knife, fork, or spoon. In June of the same year he returned to Hartford, Connecticut, and made a final settlement with the Connecticut Missionary Society, and received an honorable discharge from further services as a missionary under its auspices. He then proposed to engage in missionary work among the Indians west of the Cuyahoga, known as the Wyandots; and having within a short time received cash donations from the Massachusetts Missionary Society to the amount of over a thousand dollars, he returned to the Reserve and commenced his missionary labors among the Indians at Upper Sandusky, which he regarded as a central point, and from which he extended his labors in the region round about so as to include all the Indian villages in the vicinity of the lake, from the west side of the Cuyahoga River to the city of Detroit. This mission was called the "Wyandot Mission." His labors in this missionary field consisted mainly in visiting the Indians in their lodges, instructing them and their children in the elementary principles of Christianity and in the observance of peaceful relations. He also gave them practical lessons in agriculture and other arts of civilized life, and tried to reform their intemperate habits by condemning the use of whiskey. He was a stanch advocate of "temperance in all things," denounced slavish habits and also slavery long before the latter became the subject of political agitation. In 1812, he took a deep and active interest in the war, and accepted the position of chaplain in the command of General Harrison. He also exercised a wide influence over the Indians in preventing them from making alliances with the enemy. At the close of the war he resumed his missionary labors. In August, 1818, his good wife died, and left to him the care of their children. His grief seemed inconsolable, but he soon so far overcame it as to marry in April, 1819, Miss Abigail Ely for a second wife. In the following June he took his bridal trip with her to his old home in New England, and after a brief but delightful visit, returned and devoted himself to preaching in the eastern part of the Reserve, where he soon settled as pastor of the church at Austinburg,--a church which he had organized, and which had become so large in the number of its communicants that it was generally known as the "mother church" of the Reserve. He subsequently officiated as pastor of the church at Ashtabula for some years, then at Kingsville, and lastly at Gustavus, Trumbull County, where he settled in 1825, and officiated not only as pastor of the parish, but as postmaster, having been appointed to the latter office by the postmaster-general. In 1835, he resigned his position as pastor at Gustavus, and preached a farewell sermon, taking the following words for his text: "Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you." The sermon was a masterly one, and the audience was affected to tears. It was long remembered, and was never forgotten by those who heard it. He had now become so enfeebled by age as to disqualify him for further service as pastor of a church. From Gustavus he went to reside with his married daughter in the township of Plain, Wood County, Ohio, where for eight or nine years, he devoted more or less time, as he was able, to missionary work in the vicinity. In 1844, he changed his residence and went to the neighboring town of Perrysburg, where he lived with his married granddaughter, and where he died in 1846, at the advanced age of eighty-nine years. In six months afterward his wife died. But two of his six children survived him. In personal appearance Rev. Joseph Badger was tall, slim, erect, had blue eyes, brown hair, and a pleasing expression of face. In temperament and action he was quick and somewhat impulsive, yet he was considerate and slow of utterance, rarely, if ever, uttering an imprudent word. In his social intercourse he was sedate or facetious as the occasion seemed to require. He enjoyed hearing and telling amusing anecdotes. In his style of preaching he was apostolic, plain, simple, and logical. In creed he was an orthodox Presbyterian. He had but one grand aim in life, and that was to do what he could to advance the moral and spiritual welfare of mankind. In a word, Rev. Joseph Badger, though dead, still lives and will ever live in memory as the early western missionary whose lifelong labors were prompted by the spirit of a true Christian philanthropy. "His youth was innocent, his riper age Marked with some act of goodness every day; And watched by eyes that loved him, calm and sage, Faded his late declining years away. Cheerful he gave his being up, and went To share the holy rest that waits a life well spent." MISSION MONUMENT. [Dedicated at Williamstown, Mass., July 28, 1867.] In the accomplishment of great moral purposes, a Divine Providence employs human instrumentalities. Of this we have ample evidence, not only in the history of nations, but in the career of individuals. A little more than eighteen centuries ago, a few obscure fishermen, while casting their nets into the Sea of Galilee, were called to abandon their nets, and become "fishers of men." A little more than sixty years ago, a few obscure young men, while pursuing their classical studies in Williams College, were called to go into benighted lands beyond the sea, and proclaim the divine doctrine of "peace on earth and good-will to men." These students, though unknown to fame, were young men of thought and of high moral aspirations. Influenced by a devotional spirit, they felt that God had a great work for them to do, and that it was therefore important for them to comprehend their true relations, both to God and to man. What was the precise character of the great work assigned them, they did not seem to know; and for this reason they sought for more light, and for guidance from the Mighty Counsellor, whose wisdom is infinite, and who cannot err. In seeking for that knowledge which "cometh from above," they were accustomed, in the milder months of the year, to hold occasional prayer-meetings in the solitudes of Nature, believing that "The groves were God's first temples." And doubtless they felt that the Divine Presence dwells more essentially in the silent sanctuaries of Nature than in "temples made with hands." It was here, within the quiet and cool retreat of the maple-grove in which we are now assembled, that they had convened at the close of a sultry summer day, in the year 1806, to hold the accustomed prayer-meeting, when they were overtaken by a sudden shower of rain, and compelled to seek the friendly shelter afforded them by a neighboring haystack. The group of young evangelists who were present at the prayer-meeting on this particular occasion consisted of Samuel J. Mills, James Richards, Francis L. Robbins, Harvey Loomis, and Byram Green. Protected from the rain by the haystack, they continued, amid the conflict of the elements, their devotional exercises, and also discussed religious topics of deep interest to themselves and to the world. It was a sublime moment for them and for the world. The heavens were darkened; the lightnings flashed; dread thunders rolled; the rain fell; yet amid this conflict of the elements there came "a still small voice," as if from the storm-cloud. It was a divine whisper, an inspired thought, which stirred the life-currents in the heart of Mills, and diffused upon his brow a celestial radiance. That inspired thought, broad as the earth in its comprehension, Mills announced to his devout companions. They felt its divinity, and regarded it as a divine communication. At the instance of Mills, they knelt in prayer, and besought divine aid and guidance in executing the great work which they now believed had been revealed to them. It was nothing less than a mission to some foreign heathen land, and the ultimate evangelization of the world. In offering up the last prayer at this meeting, so enthusiastic became Mills that he invoked "the red artillery of Heaven to strike down the arm that should be raised against a herald of the cross." And now, as the storm-cloud passed away, the skies became bright and serene; the air was pure and fragrant as balm. The raindrops, like jewels, glittered on the leaves in the grove, and on the grass and wild-flowers in the meadows. In short, the smile of Heaven was reflected in the face of Nature. And the sublimity of the scene, as it may be supposed, was heightened by the appearance of a rainbow in the east,--that glorious emblem of a divine love, which is so ample in its character as to embrace within its golden circle the great world of mankind, of "every nation, kindred, and tongue." As these inspired young men of the haystack wended their way back to the college halls, they "pondered these things in their hearts" and communicated their thoughts to such of their fellow-students as they believed would sympathize with them in the desire they felt to consecrate their lives to the great work of foreign missions, and especially a mission to India. Several of their associates became at once inspired with a similar missionary spirit. But as yet the interest felt in this new enterprise was restricted to the circle of the "Society of Brethren," as it was designated. This society was a secret organization, composed of such students as had made a profession of religion, and had for its object the promotion of the spiritual welfare of its members. In pursuance of this object, they held private prayer-meetings in each others' rooms, and discussed questions of special religious interest, and often, in the summer season, retired for the same purpose to the neighboring groves. In this way was sown the first grain of "mustard seed," which was destined soon to vegetate and grow to a tree of gigantic proportions. The planting of this "smallest of all seeds" constituted a nucleus for more extended effort. Consequently other societies were soon organized to promote the good work. In fact, new life was breathed into the "dry bones" of every valley; and Heaven repeated the command, "Go, teach all nations." The grand result of this day of "small things" was the organization at Bradford, in 1810, of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,--an organization which under the direction and favor of a Divine Providence has achieved so much for the civilization and evangelization of the benighted races of mankind. Of this we need adduce no other proof than the leading facts of its history. In its inception, this Board consisted of but few members. At its first meeting there were but five members present, and at its second, but seven. Its receipts for the first year were but a thousand dollars. Now its annual receipts exceed a half-million of dollars, and its annual meetings are attended by thousands of people. In the aggregate, it has collected and disbursed nearly twelve millions of dollars. It has never lost a dollar by the fraud or embezzlement of any of its officers or agents. Since its first meeting of five persons, in 1810, its corporate members have been increased to two hundred, and its honorary members to seventeen thousand. It has sent into the missionary field thirteen hundred persons, in various capacities, including nearly five hundred ordained missionaries. It has established missions in almost every benighted region of the habitable globe, especially in the Eastern Hemisphere,--in India, in China, in Persia, in Syria, in Greece, in Turkey, in Africa, and also in several isles of the sea, including the Sandwich Islands. It has more than a hundred missionary stations, and nearly two hundred out-stations occupied by native helpers. It has in the native ministry three hundred Christian converts, about seventy of whom are pastors of churches. These native Christian churches have now increased to two hundred, in communion with which more than sixty thousand hopeful converts have been received. It has printing-presses, which have printed more than a thousand millions of pages of religious and educational matter, which has been distributed in forty-two living languages, as now spoken in pagan and other unevangelized lands. It has invented alphabets, and reduced eighteen native languages to writing. It has put in successful operation more than four hundred native schools, in which more than twelve thousand native children have been taught. All this has been done in less than sixty years, and still the great work progresses with increasing zeal and efficiency. Thus has the Board proved itself to be, in the providence of God, a great moral power in the nineteenth century. It is the star in the West, which flings its cheering light into the East. The wise men have seen it, and the shepherds have seen it. Like the star of Bethlehem, its errand is divine, for it was born of an inspired thought which has now become an invincible element in the moral world,--a power which must and will do its work; and though opposition and discouragement may come,-- "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again." Yes, millions of Christian heroes will come to the rescue, still bearing aloft the banner of the cross, and shouting the battle-cry of civil and religious freedom. And woman, first at the sepulchre, first in deeds of charity, first in every good work, will renew her activities in the great warfare with moral darkness, until the "uttermost parts of the earth" have been illuminated with the light of divine truth. It is expected, perhaps, that some allusion will be made to the motive which has induced the erection of the monument you see standing before you in its modest yet truthful significance. The motive was simply a desire felt in common with many other persons to see a spot which has become sacred in missionary history commemorated by some permanent expression of Christian gratitude. An expression of this kind seemed due not only to the great and good cause of American Foreign Missions, but to the revered memories of the five young men of prayer, who knelt here, under shelter of the haystack, and received from on high a divine commission. And permit me to add that the filial regard I entertain for my Alma Mater, and for my native State of Massachusetts, has had its influence in disposing me to make this contribution to a heaven-born enterprise, and in remembrance of those truly good, and therefore truly great, men, whose names are inscribed on the monument. The plan of the monument, as well as its erection here, it gives me pleasure to state, has received the cordial approval of the Faculty and Trustees of the college. The grand object for which the monument has been erected, is the commemoration of the "birthplace of American Foreign Missions;" and to this object we now dedicate it, in the name of a Christian philanthropy, whose "field is the world." In its character the monument is not less unique than emblematical. It stands on the identical spot where the haystack stood. As a specimen of fine material and artistic sculpture, it is strictly a Berkshire production, composed of Berkshire marble quarried at Alford, and wrought in the workshops of The Berkshire Marble Company. Its entire height is twelve feet; its shaft, cap, and base, square; its surface polished; its color a silver-blue. It is surmounted with a globe three feet in diameter, traced in geographical lines. On its eastern face, and immediately below the globe, are inscribed these words, "The Field is the World." Then follows a similitude of the haystack, sculptured in bas-relief, and encircled with these words, "The Birthplace of American Foreign Missions, 1806." And beneath this appear the names of the five young men who held the prayer-meeting under the shelter of the haystack. The maple-grove, amid whose cool shadows we now stand, is the same grove from which the five heavenly minded young men were driven by the impending rain-storm. This maple-grove, which has now become ever memorable, is included within the boundaries of Mission Park. The park contains ten acres, and was purchased on account of its historical interest, and made part of the domains of Williams College. It is the design of the friends of the college to embellish the park with specimens of the trees and shrubs and flowers of every foreign land to which missionaries have been sent by the American Board, so far, at least, as such specimens can be successfully acclimated in this country. When its embellishments have been perfected, Mission Park will become a place of delightful resort, full of sacred memories, which will accumulate and grow in interest with the lapse of time. Every year will bring within its inviting precincts hundreds of pilgrims, and every college commencement its missionary jubilee. Then will Mission Park possess, not only an attractive aspect, but a moral power which will awaken a renewed zeal in behalf of missions. And here may this consecrated monument, which is so expressive of a highly interesting fact in the history of missions, ever remain as an educator of coming generations, and as a landmark in the pathway of the citizen, the student, and the stranger! And here let the moral hero of the present, and of the future, stay his steps, and make still higher and holier resolves. Nor let us of the present generation forget that we have a great work still to accomplish in the moral field,--a field which is as broad as the earth, and in which we ought to renew our diligence,--feeling assured that with the final triumph of truth will come universal freedom, universal love, and universal brotherhood. It is due to Williams College to say that her educational and Christian influences have ever been directed by a benevolent and philanthropic spirit,--a spirit that burned on the prayerful lips of Mills at the haystack, and which has inspired with heroic zeal in the cause of truth thousands of human souls throughout our Western Hemisphere. Humble as the college may have been in its infancy, time and the favor of Heaven have made it a power in the land. In every department of literature and of science it has furnished mental giants who have made their mark in the world. In addition to this, it has sent forth its thousands of faithful workers, who are engaged, far and near, in pulling down the strongholds of error, and in building up in their stead towers of strength, founded on a Christian basis. In its teachings of literature and of science, it teaches those still higher and diviner principles which give to man the graces of a true manhood. In a word, its refining and harmonizing influences are felt, not only by its sons, but by thousands of others, the world over. Few indeed are the men who have wielded a more extensive influence for good, or contributed more to the permanent value of our theological literature, than the learned and venerated President of Williams College, Dr. Hopkins. Though the world owes much more to the efforts and vigilance of the Faculty and Trustees of Williams College than it has ever acknowledged, yet these patient, earnest, and hopeful men will continue to work on in silence, still inspired with the belief that in casting "an handful of corn in the earth, upon the top of the mountains, the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon." THE END. * * * * * NATURE AND CULTURE BY HARVEY RICE. SECOND EDITION PRICE, $1.00. _NOTICES OF THE FIRST EDITION._ "The author has been a careful reader of the science and literature of the day, and has formed generally intelligent opinions upon the great questions of modern thought. He is also scholarly in his use of language."--_Chicago Tribune._ "Mr. Rice's ideas upon matters which he treats appear to us sound and practical; and the modesty with which they are put in his volume will not detract from their value in the minds of sensible persons."--_Boston Times._ "The style is pure, and the thought, if not new, is fresh, and at times presented to the reader in a fine poetic setting. Nature is spoken of as by one who really loves her, and who has seen her face to face, and not through the eyes of another."--_Christian Leader._ "The collection of miscellaneous essays embraced in this volume without any apparent bond of connection are worthy the attention of intelligent readers, from the thoughtfulness of their tone, the sobriety of their judgments, and the naturalness of their style."--_New York Tribune._ For sale by all booksellers. Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price. LEE & SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. BOSTON, 1889. PIONEERS OF THE WESTERN RESERVE. BY HARVEY RICE. _SECOND EDITION._ PRICE, $1.25. _NOTICES OF THE PRESS._ "The name and character of Hon. Harvey Rice are sufficient guarantee that anything which comes from his hands is worthy of consideration, and it is with this assurance that in this work he has produced something of great historical value, as well as of interest in its style and incident, that we commend the work without hesitation."--_Cleveland Leader._ "The incidents of the book have not only real historic value, but they are of great interest as giving the present generation some idea of the hardships and privations to which the early pioneers of Ohio were subjected."--_Sunday Gazette, Akron, Ohio._ "Mr. Rice tells the story of the early struggles of the early settlers, their haps and mishaps, and gradual development, in a most interesting style."--_The American, Waterbury, Conn._ "It is altogether an instructive and valuable book, and especially interesting to the people of our historic and noble state."--_Christian Secretary, Hartford, Conn._ "There is much that is fresh and interesting in the narrative, and much that helps the making of history, though it does not itself claim to rank as history."--_Boston Journal._ "The reader's interest is sustained by remarkable historic facts, heroic adventures and thrilling incidents, which the author has taken pains to collect from authoritative sources."--_Christian Intelligencer, New York._ "A book on the early settlers of the Western Reserve that will keep one awake, like a novel by Scott or Dickens."--_North American Review._ Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price. LEE & SHEPARD, Publishers. BOSTON, 1889. SELECT POEMS. BY HARVEY RICE. Illustrated edition. Price, $1.00. _NOTICES OF THE PRESS._ "'Select Poems,' recently published by Lee & Shepard, Boston, pp. 174, 12mo, are from the pen of Hon. Harvey Rice of Cleveland, O., and author of 'Nature and Culture,' published by the same firm in 1875, and which contained several essays on those subjects worthy of the deepest consideration. "In the volume now before us, the same love and admiration of all things good, noble, patriotic, and beautiful, are to be observed; and we wish that some of our magazine-writers would take pattern by the plain, almost severe, Saxon verbiage in which the deepest thought and most vivid fancy find expression."--_Journal of Commerce, Boston._ "A second edition indicates the public estimate of these piquant, graceful, and, in many regards, beautiful creations. We still think that 'Unwritten Music' rightfully fills the first place. It is simply exquisite."--_Christian Leader, Boston._ "Among the best of the long poems are 'The Mystery of Life,' 'Mount Vernon,' 'Ancestral Portraits,' 'Home of my Youth,' and 'Freedom.' The short poems are all good, some of them being perfect gems."--_Eastern Argus, Portland, Me._ "A collection of original poems, all of which are pleasing in structure, pure and elevated in sentiment, vigorous and refined in diction, and faultless in numbers. The religion is that of the natural man, the morality that of works, the sympathy tender, and the wit general. The lovers of good poetry will relish the feast."--_Epis. Recorder, Phil._ "Mr. Rice writes true poetry."--_New York Methodist._ _Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price._ LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. BOSTON, 1889. 
3540	----	Transcribed from the 1887 Tomas Y. Crowell "What to do?" edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org MOSCOW CENSUS--FROM "WHAT TO DO?" ARTICLE ON THE CENSUS IN MOSCOW. [1882.] The object of a census is scientific. A census is a sociological investigation. And the object of the science of sociology is the happiness of the people. This science and its methods differ sharply from all other sciences. Its peculiarity lies in this, that sociological investigations are not conducted by learned men in their cabinets, observatories and laboratories, but by two thousand people from the community. A second peculiarity is this, that the investigations of other sciences are not conducted on living people, but here living people are the subjects. A third peculiarity is, that the aim of every other science is simply knowledge, while here it is the good of the people. One man may investigate a nebula, but for the investigation of Moscow, two thousand persons are necessary. The object of the study of nebulae is merely that we may know about nebulae; the object of the study of inhabitants is that sociological laws may be deduced, and that, on the foundation of these laws, a better life for the people may be established. It makes no difference to the nebula whether it is studied or not, and it has waited long, and is ready to wait a great while longer; but it is not a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of Moscow, especially to those unfortunates who constitute the most interesting subjects of the science of sociology. The census-taker enters a night lodging-house; in the basement he finds a man dying of hunger, and he politely inquires his profession, his name, his native place, the character of his occupation, and after a little hesitation as to whether he is to be entered in the list as alive, he writes him in and goes his way. And thus will the two thousand young men proceed. This is not as it should be. Science does its work, and the community, summoned in the persons of these two thousand young men to aid science, must do its work. A statistician drawing his deductions from figures may feel indifferent towards people, but we census-takers, who see these people and who have no scientific prepossessions, cannot conduct ourselves towards them in an inhuman manner. Science fulfils its task, and its work is for its objects and in the distant future, both useful and necessary to us. For men of science, we can calmly say, that in 1882 there were so many beggars, so many prostitutes, and so many uncared-for children. Science may say this with composure and with pride, because it knows that the confirmation of this fact conduces to the elucidation of the laws of sociology, and that the elucidation of the laws of sociology leads to a better constitution of society. But what if we, the unscientific people, say: "You are perishing in vice, you are dying of hunger, you are pining away, and killing each other; so do not grieve about this; when you shall have all perished, and hundreds of thousands more like you, then, possibly, science may be able to arrange everything in an excellent manner." For men of science, the census has its interest; and for us also, it possesses an interest of a wholly different significance. The interest and significance of the census for the community lie in this, that it furnishes it with a mirror into which, willy nilly, the whole community, and each one of us, gaze. The figures and deductions will be the mirror. It is possible to refrain from reading them, as it is possible to turn away from the looking-glass. It is possible to glance cursorily at both figures and mirror, and it is also possible to scrutinize them narrowly. To go about in connection with the census as thousands of people are now about to do, is to scrutinize one's self closely in the mirror. What does this census, that is about to be made, mean for us people of Moscow, who are not men of science? It means two things. In the first place, this, that we may learn with certainty, that among us tens of thousands who live in ease, there dwell tens of thousands of people who lack bread, clothing and shelter; in the second place, this, that our brothers and sons will go and view this and will calmly set down according to the schedules, how many have died of hunger and cold. And both these things are very bad. All cry out upon the instability of our social organization, about the exceptional situation, about revolutionary tendencies. Where lies the root of all this? To what do the revolutionists point? To poverty, to inequality in the distribution of wealth. To what do the conservatives point? To the decline in moral principle. If the opinion of the revolutionists is correct, what must be done? Poverty and the inequality of wealth must be lessened. How is this to be effected? The rich must share with the poor. If the opinion of the conservatives is correct, that the whole evil arises from the decline in moral principle, what can be more immoral and vicious than the consciously indifferent survey of popular sufferings, with the sole object of cataloguing them? What must be done? To the census we must add the work of affectionate intercourse of the idle and cultivated rich, with the oppressed and unenlightened poor. Science will do its work, let us perform ours also. Let us do this. In the first place, let all of us who are occupied with the census, superintendents and census-takers, make it perfectly clear to ourselves what we are to investigate and why. It is the people, and the object is that they may be happy. Whatever may be one's view of life, every one will agree that there is nothing more important than human life, and that there is no more weighty task than to remove the obstacles to the development of this life, and to assist it. This idea, that the relations of men to poverty are at the foundation of all popular suffering, is expressed in the Gospels with striking harshness, but at the same time, with decision and clearness for all. "He who has clothed the naked, fed the hungry, visited the prisoner, that man has clothed Me, fed Me, visited Me," that is, has done the deed for that which is the most important thing in the world. However a man may look upon things, every one knows that this is more important than all else on earth. And this must not be forgotten, and we must not permit any other consideration to veil from us the most weighty fact of our existence. Let us inscribe, and reckon, but let us not forget that if we encounter a man who is hungry and without clothes, it is of more moment to succor him than to make all possible investigations, than to discover all possible sciences. Perish the whole census if we may but feed an old woman. The census will be longer and more difficult, but we cannot pass by people in the poorer quarters and merely note them down without taking any heed of them and without endeavoring, according to the measure of our strength and moral sensitiveness, to aid them. This in the first place. In the second, this is what must be done: All of us, who are to take part in the census, must refrain from irritation because we are annoyed; let us understand that this census is very useful for us; that if this is not cure, it is at least an effort to study the disease, for which we should be thankful; that we must seize this occasion, and, in connection with it, we must seek to recover our health, in some small degree. Let all of us, then, who are connected with the census, endeavor to take advantage of this solitary opportunity in ten years to purify ourselves somewhat; let us not strive against, but assist the census, and assist it especially in this sense, that it may not have merely the harsh character of the investigation of a hopelessly sick person, but may have the character of healing and restoration to health. For the occasion is unique: eighty energetic, cultivated men, having under their orders two thousand young men of the same stamp, are to make their way over the whole of Moscow, and not leave a single man in Moscow with whom they have not entered into personal relations. All the wounds of society, the wounds of poverty, of vice, of ignorance--all will be laid bare. Is there not something re-assuring in this? The census-takers will go about Moscow, they will set down in their lists, without distinction, those insolent with prosperity, the satisfied, the calm, those who are on the way to ruin, and those who are ruined, and the curtain will fall. The census-takers, our sons and brothers, these young men will behold all this. They will say: "Yes, our life is very terrible and incurable," and with this admission they will live on like the rest of us, awaiting a remedy for the evil from this or that extraneous force. But those who are perishing will go on dying, in their ruin, and those on the road to ruin will continue in their course. No, let us rather grasp the idea that science has its task, and that we, on the occasion of this census, have our task, and let us not allow the curtain once lifted to be dropped, but let us profit by the opportunity in order to remove the immense evil of the separation existing between us and the poor, and to establish intercourse and the work of redressing the evil of unhappiness and ignorance, and our still greater misfortune,--the indifference and aimlessness of our life. I already hear the customary remark: "All this is very fine, these are sounding phrases; but do you tell us what to do and how to do it?" Before I say what is to be done, it is indispensable that I should say what is not to be done. It is indispensable, first of all, in my opinion, in order that something practical may come of this activity, that no society should be formed, that there should be no publicity, that there should be no collection of money by balls, bazaars or theatres; that there should be no announcement that Prince A. has contributed one thousand rubles, and the honorable citizen B. three thousand; that there shall be no collection, no calling to account, no writing up,--most of all, no writing up, so that there may not be the least shadow of any institution, either governmental or philanthropic. But in my opinion, this is what should be done instantly: Firstly, All those who agree with me should go to the directors, and ask for their shares the poorest sections, the poorest dwellings; and in company with the census-takers, twenty-three, twenty-four or twenty-five in number, they should go to these quarters, enter into relations with the people who are in need of assistance, and labor for them. Secondly: We should direct the attention of the superintendents and census-takers to the inhabitants in need of assistance, and work for them personally, and point them out to those who wish to work over them. But I am asked: What do you mean by _working over them_? I reply; Doing good to people. The words "doing good" are usually understood to mean, giving money. But, in my opinion, doing good and giving money are not only not the same thing, but two different and generally opposite things. Money, in itself, is evil. And therefore he who gives money gives evil. This error of thinking that the giving of money means doing good, arose from the fact, that generally, when a man does good, he frees himself from evil, and from money among other evils. And therefore, to give money is only a sign that a man is beginning to rid himself of evil. To do good, signifies to do that which is good for man. But, in order to know what is good for man, it is necessary to be on humane, i.e., on friendly terms with him. And therefore, in order to do good, it is not money that is necessary, but, first of all, a capacity for detaching ourselves, for a time at least, from the conditions of our own life. It is necessary that we should not be afraid to soil our boots and clothing, that we should not fear lice and bedbugs, that we should not fear typhus fever, diphtheria, and small-pox. It is necessary that we should be in a condition to seat ourselves by the bunk of a tatterdemalion and converse earnestly with him in such a manner, that he may feel that the man who is talking with him respects and loves him, and is not putting on airs and admiring himself. And in order that this may be so, it is necessary that a man should find the meaning of life outside himself. This is what is requisite in order that good should be done, and this is what it is difficult to find. When the idea of assisting through the medium of the census occurred to me, I discussed the matter with divers of the wealthy, and I saw how glad the rich were of this opportunity of decently getting rid of their money, that extraneous sin which they cherish in their hearts. "Take three hundred--five hundred rubles, if you like," they said to me, "but I cannot go into those dens myself." There was no lack of money. Remember Zaccheus, the chief of the Publicans in the Gospel. Remember how he, because he was small of stature, climbed into a tree to see Christ, and how when Christ announced that he was going to his house, having understood but one thing, that the Master did not approve of riches, he leaped headlong from the tree, ran home and arranged his feast. And how, as soon as Christ entered, Zaccheus instantly declared that he gave the half of his goods to the poor, and if he had wronged any man, to him he would restore fourfold. And remember how all of us, when we read the Gospel, set but little store on this Zaccheus, and involuntarily look with scorn on this half of his goods, and fourfold restitution. And our feeling is correct. Zaccheus, according to his lights, performed a great deed. He had not even begun to do good. He had only begun in some small measure to purify himself from evil, and so Christ told him. He merely said to him: "To-day is salvation come nigh unto this house." What if the Moscow Zaccheuses were to do the same that he did? Assuredly, more than one milliard could be collected. Well, and what of that? Nothing. There would be still greater sin if we were to think of distributing this money among the poor. Money is not needed. What is needed is self-sacrificing action; what is needed are people who would like to do good, not by giving extraneous sin-money, but by giving their own labor, themselves, their lives. Where are such people to be found? Here they are, walking about Moscow. They are the student enumerators. I have seen how they write out their charts. The student writes in the night lodging-house, by the bedside of a sick man. "What is your disease?"--"Small-pox." And the student does not make a wry face, but proceeds with his writing. And this he does for the sake of some doubtful science. What would he do if he were doing it for the sake of his own undoubted good and the good of others? When children, in merry mood, feel a desire to laugh, they never think of devising some reason for laughter, but they laugh without any reason, because they are gay; and thus these charming youths sacrifice themselves. They have not, as yet, contrived to devise any means of sacrificing themselves, but they devote their attention, their labor, their lives, in order to write out a chart, from which something does or does not appear. What would it be if this labor were something really worth their while? There is and there always will be labor of this sort, which is worthy of the devotion of a whole life, whatever the man's life may be. This labor is the loving intercourse of man with man, and the breaking-down of the barriers which men have erected between themselves, so that the enjoyment of the rich man may not be disturbed by the wild howls of the men who are reverting to beasts, and by the groans of helpless hunger, cold and disease. This census will place before the eyes of us well-to-do and so-called cultivated people, all the poverty and oppression which is lurking in every corner of Moscow. Two thousand of our brothers, who stand on the highest rung of the ladder, will come face to face with thousands of people who stand on the lowest round of society. Let us not miss this opportunity of communion. Let us, through these two thousand men, preserve this communion, and let us make use of it to free ourselves from the aimlessness and the deformity of our lives, and to free the condemned from that indigence and misery which do not allow the sensitive people in our ranks to enjoy our good fortune in peace. This is what I propose: (1) That all our directors and enumerators should join to their business of the census a task of assistance,--of work in the interest of the good of these people, who, in our opinion, are in need of assistance, and with whom we shall come in contact; (2) That all of us, directors and enumerators, not by appointment of the committee of the City Council, but by the appointment of our own hearts, shall remain in our posts,--that is, in our relations to the inhabitants of the town who are in need of assistance,--and that, at the conclusion of the work of the census, we shall continue our work of aid. If I have succeeded in any degree in expressing what I feel, I am sure that the only impossibility will be getting the directors and enumerators to abandon this, and that others will present themselves in the places of those who leave; (3) That we should collect all those inhabitants of Moscow, who feel themselves fit to work for the needy, into sections, and begin our activity now, in accordance with the hints of the census-takers and directors, and afterwards carry it on; (4) That all who, on account of age, weakness, or other causes, cannot give their personal labor among the needy, shall intrust the task to their young, strong, and willing relatives. (Good consists not in the giving of money, it consists in the loving intercourse of men. This alone is needed.) Whatever may be the outcome of this, any thing will be better than the present state of things. Then let the final act of our enumerators and directors be to distribute a hundred twenty-kopek pieces to those who have no food; and this will be not a little, not so much because the hungry will have food, but because the directors and enumerators will conduct themselves in a humane manner towards a hundred poor people. How are we to compute the possible results which will accrue to the balance of public morality from the fact that, instead of the sentiments of irritation, anger, and envy which we arouse by reckoning the hungry, we shall awaken in a hundred instances a sentiment of good, which will be communicated to a second and a third, and an endless wave which will thus be set in motion and flow between men? And this is a great deal. Let those of the two thousand enumerators who have never comprehended this before, come to understand that, when going about among the poor, it is impossible to say, "This is very interesting;" that a man should not express himself with regard to another man's wretchedness by interest only; and this will be a good thing. Then let assistance be rendered to all those unfortunates, of whom there are not so many as I at first supposed in Moscow, who can easily be helped by money alone to a great extent. Then let those laborers who have come to Moscow and have eaten their very clothing from their backs, and who cannot return to the country, be despatched to their homes; let the abandoned orphans receive supervision; let feeble old men and indigent old women, who subsist on the charity of their companions, be released from their half-famished and dying condition. (And this is very possible. There are not very many of them.) And this will also be a very, very great deal accomplished. But why not think and hope that more and yet more will be done? Why not expect that that real task will be partially carried out, or at least begun, which is effected, not by money, but by labor; that weak drunkards who have lost their health, unlucky thieves, and prostitutes who are still capable of reformation, should be saved? All evil may not be exterminated, but there will arise some understanding of it, and the contest with it will not be police methods, but by inward modes,--by the brotherly intercourse of the men who perceive the evil, with the men who do not perceive it because they are a part of it. No matter what may be accomplished, it will be a great deal. But why not hope that every thing will be accomplished? Why not hope that we shall accomplish thus much, that there shall not exist in Moscow a single person in want of clothing, a single hungry person, a single human being sold for money, nor a single individual oppressed by the judgment of man, who shall not know that there is fraternal aid for him? It is not surprising that this should not be so, but it is surprising that this should exist side by side with our superfluous leisure and wealth, and that we can live on composedly, knowing that these things are so. Let us forget that in great cities and in London, there is a proletariat, and let us not say that so it must needs be. It need not be this, and it should not, for this is contrary to our reason and our heart, and it cannot be if we are living people. Why not hope that we shall come to understand that there is not a single duty incumbent upon us, not to mention personal duty, for ourselves, nor our family, nor social, nor governmental, nor scientific, which is more weighty than this? Why not think that we shall at last come to apprehend this? Only because to do so would be too great a happiness. Why not hope that some the people will wake up, and will comprehend that every thing else is a delusion, but that this is the only work in life? And why should not this "some time" be now, and in Moscow? Why not hope that the same thing may happen in society and humanity which suddenly takes place in a diseased organism, when the moment of convalescence suddenly sets in? The organism is diseased this means, that the cells cease to perform their mysterious functions; some die, others become infected, others still remain in perfect condition, and work on by themselves. But all of a sudden the moment comes when every living cell enters upon an independent and healthy activity: it crowds out the dead cells, encloses the infected ones in a living wall, it communicates life to that which was lifeless; and the body is restored, and lives with new life. Why should we not think and expect that the cells of our society will acquire fresh life and re-invigorate the organism? We know not in what the power of the cells consists, but we do know that our life is in our own power. We can show forth the light that is in us, or we may extinguish it. Let one man approach the Lyapinsky house in the dusk, when a thousand persons, naked and hungry, are waiting in the bitter cold for admission, and let that one man attempt to help, and his heart will ache till it bleeds, and he will flee thence with despair and anger against men; but let a thousand men approach that other thousand with a desire to help, and the task will prove easy and delightful. Let the mechanicians invent a machine for lifting the weight that is crushing us--that is a good thing; but until they shall have invented it, let us bear down upon the people, like fools, like _muzhiki_, like peasants, like Christians, and see whether we cannot raise them. And now, brothers, all together, and away it goes! 
4212	----	None 
6885	----	Prepared by Jeroen Hellingman THE INDOLENCE OF THE FILIPINO BY JOSE RIZAL ("LA INDOLENCIA DE LOS FILIPINOS" IN ENGLISH.) EDITOR'S EXPLANATION Mr. Charles Derbyshire, who put Rizal's great novel Noli me tangere and its sequel El Filibusterismo into English (as The Social Cancer and The Reign of Greed), besides many minor writings of the "Greatest Man of the Brown Race", has rendered a similar service for La Indolencia de los Filipinos in the following pages, and with that same fidelity and sympathetic comprehension of the author's meaning which has made possible an understanding of the real Rizal by English readers. Notes by Dr. James A. Robertson (Librarian of the Philippine Library and co-editor of the 55-volume series of historical reprints well called The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, so comprehensive are they) show the breadth of Rizal's historical scholarship, and that the only error mentioned is due to using a faulty reprint where the original was not available indicates the conscientiousness of the pioneer worker. An appropriate setting has been attempted by page decorations whose scenes are taken from Philippine textbooks of the World Book Company and whose borders were made in the Drawing Department of the Philippine School of Arts and Trades. The frontispiece shows a hurried pencil sketch of himself which Rizal made in Berlin in the Spring of 1887 that Prof. Blumentritt, whom then he knew only through correspondence, might recognize him at the Leitmeritz railway station when he should arrive for a proposed visit. The photograph from which the engraving was reproduced came one year ago with the Christmas greetings of the Austrian professor whose recent death the Philippine Islands, who knew him as their friend and Rizal's, is mourning. The picture perhaps deserves a couple of comments. As a child Rizal had been trained to rapid work, an expertness kept up by practice, and the copying of his own countenance from a convenient near-by mirror was but a moment's task. Yet the incident suggests that he did not keep photographs of himself about, and that he had the Cromwellian desire to see himself as he really was, for the Filipino features are more prominent than in any photograph of his extant. The essay itself originally appeared in the Filipino forthrightly review, La Solidaridad, of Madrid, in five installments, running from July 15 to September 15, 1890. It was a continuation of Rizal's campaign of education in which he sought by blunt truths to awaken his countrymen to their own faults at the same time that he was arousing the Spaniards to the defects in Spain's colonial system that caused and continued such shortcomings. To-day there seems a place in Manila for just suets, missionary work as The Indolence of the Filipino aimed at. It may help on the present improving understanding between Continental Americans and their countrymen of these "Far Off Eden Isles", for the writer submits as his mature opinion, based on ten years' acquaintance among Filipinos through studies which enlisted their interest, that the political problem would have been greatly simplified had it been understood in Dewey's day that among intelligent Americans the much-talked-of lack of "capacity" referred to the mass of the people's want of political experience and not to any alleged racial inferiority. To wounded pride has the discontent been due rather than to withholding of political privileges. Spanish Philippine history has curiously repeated itself during the fifteen years of America's administration of this archipelago. Just as some colonial Spaniards seemed to the Filipinos less creditable representatives of the metropolis than the average of those who remained in the Peninsula, so not all who now pass for Americans in the Philippines are believed here to measure up to the highest homestandard. Sitters in swivel-chairs underneath electric fans hold hopeless the future of the land where men do not desire to be drudges just as did their predecessors who in wide armed lazy seats, beneath punkahs, talked of Filipino indolence. Ingratitude, to-day as then, is the regular rejoinder to the progressing people's protest against paternalism, and altruistic regard for their real welfare is still represented as the reason why special legislation should be provided when Filipinos prefer the same laws as govern the sovereign people. Though those who claim to champion the Philippines' cause apparently are unaware of it, these Islands have a population strangely alike in its make up to the people of America; their history is full of American associations; Americans developed their leading resources, and American ideas have inspired their political aspirations. It betrays blindness somewhere that ever since 1898 Filipinos have been trying to get loose from America in order to set up here an American form of government, There seems now a, prospect that insular legislation may make available to the individual the guarantees of personal liberty upon which America at home prides itself, that municipal self-government and provincial autonomy may become realities in the Philippines, and possibly even that both Filipinos and Americans may realize before it is too late how our elastic territorial government could be made to exact from them much less of their independence than the sacrifice of sovereignty necessary in Neutralization or internationalization. Unwillingness to work when there is nothing in it for them is common to Filipinos and Americans, for Thomas Jefferson admitted that extravagance and indolence were the chief faults of his countrymen. Labor-saving machinery has made the fruits of Americans' labors in their land of abundance afford a luxury in living not elsewhere existing. But the Filipino, in his rich and not over-populated home, shutting out, as we do, oriental cheap labor, may employ American machinery and attain the same standard. The possibilities for the prosperity of the population put the Philippines in the New World, just as their discovery and their history group them with the Western Hemisphere. Austin Craig, University of the Philippines, Manila, December 20th, 1913. ------ I DOCTOR Sancianco, in his Progreso de Filipinas, (1), has taken up this question, agitated, as he calls it, and, relying upon facts and reports furnished by the very same Spanish authorities that rule the Philippines, has demonstrated that such indolence does not exist, and that all said about it does not deserve reply or even passing notice. Nevertheless, as discussion of it has been continued, not only by government employees who make it responsible for their own shortcomings, not only by the friars who regard it as necessary in order that they may continue to represent, themselves as indispensable, but also by serious and disinterested persons; and as evidence of greater or less weight may be adduced in opposition to that which Dr. Sancianco cites, it seems expedient, to us to study this question thoroughly, without superciliousness or sensitiveness, without prejudice, without pessimism. And as we can only serve our country by telling the truth, however bit, tee it be, just as a flat and skilful negation cannot refute a real and positive fact, in spite of the brilliance of the arguments; as a mere affirmation is not sufficient to create something impossible, let us calmly examine the facts, using on our part all the impartiality of which a man is capable who is convinced that there is no redemption except upon solid bases of virtue. The word indolence has been greatly misused in the sense of little love for work and lack of energy, while ridicule has concealed the misuse. This much-discussed question has met with the same fate as certain panaceas and specifies of the quacks who by ascribing to them impossible virtues have discredited them. In the Middle Ages, and even in some Catholic countries now, the devil is blamed for everything that superstitious folk cannot understand or the perversity of mankind is loath to confess. In the Philippines one's own and another's faults, the shortcomings of one, the misdeeds of another, are attributed to indolence. And just as in the Middle Ages he who sought the explanation of phenomena outside of infernal influences was persecuted, so in the Philippines worse happens to him who seeks the origin of the trouble outside of accepted beliefs. The consequence of this misuse is that there are some who are interested in stating it as a dogma and others in combating it as a ridiculous superstition, if not a punishable delusion. Yet it is not to be inferred from the misuse of a thing that it does not exist. We think that there must be something behind all this outcry, for it is incredible that so many should err, among whom we have said there are a lot of serious and disinterested persons. Some act in bad faith, through levity, through want of sound judgment, through limitation in reasoning power, ignorance of the past, or other cause. Some repeat what they have heard, without, examination or reflection; others speak through pessimism or are impelled by that human characteristic which paints as perfect everything that belongs to oneself and defective whatever belongs to another. But it cannot be denied that there are some who worship truth, or if not truth itself at least the semblance thereof, which is truth in the mind of the crowd. Examining well, then, all the scenes and all the men that we have known from Childhood, and the life of our country, we believe that indolence does exist there. The Filipinos, who can measure up with the most active peoples in the world, will doubtless not repudiate this admission, for it is true that there one works and struggles against the climate, against nature and against men. But we must not take the exception for the general rule, and should rather seek the good of our country by stating what we believe to be true. We must confess that indolence does actually and positively exist there; only that, instead of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as the effect of the trouble and the backwardness, by fostering the development of a lamentable predisposition. Those who have as yet treated of indolence, with the exception of Dr. Sancianco, have been content to deny or affirm it. We know of no one who has studied its causes. Nevertheless, those who admit its existence and exaggerate it more or less have not therefore failed to advise remedies taken from here and there, from Java, from India, from other English or Dutch colonies, like the quack who saw a fever cured with a dozen sardines and afterwards always prescribed these fish at every rise in temperature that he discovered in his patients. We shall proceed otherwise. Before proposing a remedy we shall examine the causes, and even though strictly speaking a predisposition is not a cause, let us, however, study at its true value this predisposition due to nature. The predisposition exists? Why shouldn't it? A hot, climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold incites to labor and action. For this reason the Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman; the Frenchman more so than the German. The Europeans themselves who reproach the residents of the colonies so much (and I am not now speaking of the Spaniards but of the Germans and English themselves), how do they live in tropical countries? Surrounded by a numerous train of servants, never going afoot but riding in a carriage, needing servants not only to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them! And yet they live and eat better, they work for themselves to get rich, with the hope of a future, free and respected, while the poor colonist, the indolent colonist, is badly nourished, has no hope, toils for others, and works under force and compulsion! Perhaps the reply to this will be that white men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. A mistake! A man can live in any climate, if he will only adapt himself to its requirements and conditions. What kills the European in hot countries is the abuse of liquors, the attempt to live according to the nature of his own country under another sky and another sun. We inhabitants of hot countries live well in northern Europe whenever we take the precautions the people there do. Europeans can also stand the torrid zone, if only they would get rid of their prejudices. (2) The fact is that in tropical countries violent work is not a good thing as it is in cold countries, there it is death, destruction, annihilation. Nature knows this and like a just mother has therefore made the earth more fertile, more productive, as a compensation. An hour's work under that burning sun, in the midst of pernicious influences springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day's work in a temperate climate; it is, then, just that the earth yield a hundred fold! Moreover, do we not see the active European, who has gained strength during the winter, who feels the fresh blood of spring boil in his veins, do we not see him abandon his labors during the few days of his variable summer, close his office--where the work is not violent and amounts for many to talking and gesticulating in the shade and beside a lunch-stand,--flee to watering places, sit in the cafés or stroll about? What wonder then that the inhabitant of tropical countries, worm out and with his blood thinned by the continuous and excessive heat, is reduced to inaction? Who is the indolent one in the Manila offices? Is it the poor clerk who comes in at eight in the morning and leaves at, one in the afternoon with only his parasol, who copies and writes and works for himself and for his chief, or is it the chief, who comes in a carriage at ten o'clock, leaves before twelve, reads his newspaper while smoking and with is feet cocked up on a chair or a table, or gossiping about all his friends? Which is indolent, the native coadjutor, poorly paid and badly treated, who has to visit all the indigent sick living in the country, or the friar curate who gets fabulously rich, goes about in a carriage, eats and drinks well, and does not put himself to any trouble without collecting excessive fees? [3] Without speaking further of the Europeans, in what violent labor does the Chinaman engage in tropical countries, the industrious Chinaman, who flees from his own country driven by hunger and want, and whose whole ambition is to amass a small fortune? With the exception of some porters, an occupation that the natives also follow, he nearly always engages in trade, in commerce; so rarely does he take up agriculture that we do not know of a single case. The Chinaman who in other colonies cultivates the soil does so only for a certain number of years and then retires. [4] We find, then, the tendency to indolence very natural, and have to admit and bless it, for we cannot alter natural laws, and without it the race would have disappeared. Man is not a brute, he is not a, machine; his object is not merely to produce, in spite of the pretensions of some Christian whites who would make of the colored Christian a kind of motive power somewhat more intelligent and less costly than steam. Man's object is not to satisfy tile passions of another man, his object is to seek happiness for himself and his kind by traveling along the road of progress and perfection. The evil is not that indolence exists more or less latently but that it is fostered and magnified. Among men, as well as among nations, there exist not only aptitudes but also tendencies toward good and evil. To foster the good ones and aid them, as well as correct the evil and repress them, would be the duty of society and governments, if less noble thoughts did not occupy their attention. The evil is that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence, an indolence of the snowball type, if we may be permitted the expression, an evil that increases in direct proportion to the square of the periods of time, an effect of misgovernment and of backwardness, as we said, and not a cause thereof. Others will hold the contrary opinion, especially those who have a hand in the misgovernment, but we do not care; we have made an assertion and are going to prove it. II When in consequence of a long chronic illness the condition of the patient is examined, the question may arise whether the weakening of the fibers and the debility of the organs are the cause of the malady's continuing or the effect of the bad treatment that prolongs its action. The attending physician attributes the entire failure of his skill to the poor constitution of the patient, to the climate, to the surroundings, and so on. On the other hand, the patient attributes the aggravation of the evil to the system of treatment followed. Only the common crowd, the inquisitive populace, shakes its head and cannot reach a decision. Something like this happens in the case of the Philippines. Instead of physician, read government, that is, friars, employees, etc. Instead of patient, Philippines; instead of malady, indolence. And, just as happens in similar cases then the patient gets worse, everybody loses his head, each one dodges the responsibility to place it upon somebody else, and instead of seeking the causes in order to combat the evil in them, devotes himself at best to attacking the symptoms: here a blood-letting, a tax; there a plaster, forced labor; further on a sedative, a trifling reform. Every new arrival proposes a new remedy: one, seasons of prayer, the relics of a saint, the viaticum, the friars; another, a shower-bath; still another, with pretensions to modern ideas, a transfusion of blood. "It's nothing, only the patient has eight million indolent red corpuscles: some few white corpuscles in the form of an agricultural colony will get us out of the trouble." So, on all sides there are groans, gnawing of lips, clenching of fists, many hollow words, great ignorance, a deal of talk, a lot of fear. The patient is near his finish! Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! New life, new vitality! Yes, the new white corpuscles that you are going to inject into its veins, the new white corpuscles that were a cancer in another organism will withstand all the depravity of the system, will withstand the blood-lettings that it suffers every day, will have more stamina than all the eight million red corpuscles, will cure all the disorders, all the degeneration, all the trouble in the principal organs. Be thankful if they do not become coagulations and produce gangrene, be thankful if they do not reproduce the cancer! While the patient breathes, we must not lose hope, and however late we be, a judicious examination is never superfluous; at least the cause of death may be known. We are not trying to put all the blame on the physician, and still less on the patient, for we have already spoken of a predisposition due to the climate, a reasonable and natural predisposition, in the absence of which the race would disappear, sacrificed to excessive labor in a tropical country. Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic malady, but not a hereditary one. The Filipinos have not always been what they are, witnesses whereto are all the historians of the first years after the discovery of the Islands. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Malayan Filipinos carried on an active trade, not only among themselves but also with all the neighboring countries. A Chinese manuscript of the 13th century, translated by Dr. Hirth (Globus, Sept. 1889), which we will take up at another time, speaks of China's relations with the islands, relations purely commercial, in which mention is made of the activity and honesty of the traders of Luzon, who took the Chinese products and distributed them throughout all the islands, traveling for nine months, and then returned to pay religiously even for the merchandise that the Chinamen did not remember to have given them. The products which they in exchange exported from the islands were crude wax, cotton, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, dry-goods, etc. [5] The first thing noticed by Pigafetta, who came with Magellan in 1521, on arriving at the first island of the Philippines, Samar, was the courtesy and kindness of the inhabitants and their commerce. "To honor our captain," he says, "they conducted him to their boats where they had their merchandise, which consisted of cloves, cinnamon, pepper, nutmegs, mace, gold and other things; and they made us understand by gestures that such articles were to be found in the islands to which we were going." [6] Further on he speaks of the vessels and utensils of solid gold that he found in Butuan, where the people worked mines. He describes the silk dresses, the daggers with long gold hilts and scabbards of carved wood, the gold, sets of teeth, etc. Among cereals and fruits he mentions rice, millet, oranges, lemons, panicum, etc. That the islands maintained relations with neighboring countries and even with distant ones is proven by the ships from Siam, laden with gold and slaves, that Magellan found in Cebu. These ships paid certain duties to the King of the island. In the same year, 1521, the survivors of Magellan's expedition met the son of the Rajah of Luzon, who, as captain-general of the Sultan of Borneo and admiral of his fleet, had conquered for him the great city of Lave (Sarawak?). Might this captain, who was greatly feared by all his foes, have been the Rajah Matanda whom the Spaniards afterwards encountered in Tondo in 1570? In 1539 the warriors of Luzon took part in the formidable contests of Sumatra, and under the orders of Angi Siry Timor, Rajah of Batta, conquered and overthrew the terrible Alzadin, Sultan of Atchin, renowned in the historical annals of the Far East. (Marsden, Hist. of Sumatra, Chap. XX.) (7) At that time, that sea where float the islands like a set of emeralds on a paten of bright glass, that sea was everywhere traversed by junks, paraus, barangays, vintas, vessels swift as shuttles, so large that they could maintain a hundred rowers on a side (Morga;) that sea bore everywhere commerce, industry, agriculture, by the force of the oars moved to the sound of warlike songs (8) of the genealogies and achievements of the Philippine divinities. (Colin, Chap. XV.) (9) Wealth abounded in the islands. Pigafetta tells us of the abundance of foodstuffs in Paragua and of its inhabitants, who nearly all tilled their own fields. At this island the survivors of Magellan's expedition were well received and provisioned. A little later, these same survivors captured a vessel, plundered and sacked it, add took prisoner in it the chief of the Island of Paragua (!) with his son and brother. (10) In this same vessel they captured bronze lombards, and this is the first mention of artillery of the Filipinos, for these lombards were useful to the chief of Paragua against the savages of the interior. They let him ransom himself within seven days, demanding 400 measures (cavanes?) of rice, 20 pigs, 20 goats, and 450 chickens. This is the first act of piracy recorded in Philippine history. The chief of Paragua paid everything, and moreover voluntarily added coconuts, bananas, and sugar-cane jars filled with palm-wine. When Caesar was taken prisoner by the corsairs and required to pay twenty five talents ransom, he replied; "I'll give you fifty, but later I'll have you all crucified!" The chief of Paragua was more generous: he forgot. His conduct, while it may reveal weakness, also demonstrates that the islands were abundantly provisioned. This chief was named Tuan Mahamud; his brother, Guantil, and his son, Tuan Mahamed. (Martin Mendez, Purser of the ship Victoria: Archivos de Indias.) A very extraordinary thing, and one that shows the facility with which the natives learned Spanish, is that fifty years before the arrival of the Spaniards in Luzon, in that very year 1521 when they first came to the islands, there were already natives of Luzon who understood Castilian. In the treaties of peace that the survivors of Magellan's expedition made with the chief of Paragua, when the servant-interpreter died they communicated with one another through a Moro who had been captured in the island of the King of Luzon and who understood some Spanish. (Martin Mendez, op, cit ) Where did this extemporaneous interpreter learn Castilian? In the Moluccas? In Malacca, with the Portuguese? Spaniards did not reach Luzon until 1571. Legazpi's expedition met in Butuan various traders of Luzon with their boats laden with iron, wax cloths, porcelain, etc. (Gaspar de San Agustin,) plenty of provisions, activity, trade, movement in all the southern islands. (11) They arrived at the Island of Cebu, "abounding in provisions, with mines and washings of gold, and peopled with natives," as Morga says; "very populous, and at a port frequented by many ships that came from the islands and kingdoms near India," as Colin says; and even though they were peacefully received discord soon arose. The city was taken by force and burned. The fire destroyed the food supplies and naturally famine broke out in that town of a hundred thousand people, (12) as the historians say, and among the members of the expedition, but the neighboring islands quickly relieved the need, thanks to the abundance they enjoyed. All the histories of those first years, in short, abound in long accounts about the industry and agriculture of the natives: mines, gold-washings, looms, farms, barter, naval construction, raising of poultry and stock, weaving of silk and cotton, distilleries, manufactures of arms, pearl fisheries, the civet industry, the horn and hide industry, etc., are things encountered at every step, and, considering the time and the conditions in the islands, prove that there was life, there was activity, there was movement. And if this, which is deduction, does not convince any minds imbued with unfair prejudices, perhaps of some avail may be the testimony of the oft-quoted Dr. Morga, who was Lieutenant-Governor of Manila for seven years and after rendering great service in the Archipelago was appointed criminal judge of the Audiencia of Mexico and Counsellor of the Inquisition. His testimony, we say, is highly credible, not only because all his contemporaries have spoken of him in terms that border on veneration but also because his work, from which we take these citations, is written with great circumspection and care, as well with reference to the authorities in the Philippines as to the errors they committed. "The natives," says Morga, in chapter VII, speaking of the occupations of the Chinese, "are very far from exercising those trades and have even forgotten much about farming, raising poultry, stock and cotton, and weaving cloth AS THEY USED TO DO IN THEIR PAGANISM AND FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THE COUNTRY WAS CONQUERED." (13) The whole of chapter VIII of his work deals with this moribund activity, this much-forgotten industry, and yet in spite of that, how long is his eighth chapter! And not only Morga, not only Chirino, Colin, Argensola, Gaspar de San Agustin and others agree in this matter, but modern travelers, after two hundred and fifty years, examining the decadence and misery, assert the same thing. Dr. Hans Meyer, when he saw the unsubdued tribes cultivating beautiful fields and working energetically, asked if they would not become indolent when they in turn should accept Christianity and a paternal government. Accordingly, the Filipinos, in spite of the climate, in spite of their few needs (they were less then than now), were not the indolent creatures of our time, and, as we shall see later on, their ethics and their mode of life were not what is now complacently attributed to them. How then, and in what way, was that active and enterprising infidel native of ancient times converted into the lazy and indolent Christian, as our contemporary writer's say? We have already spoken of the more or less latent predisposition which exists in the Philippines toward indolence, and which must exist everywhere, in the whole world, in all men, because we all hate work more or less, as it may be more or less hard, more or less unproductive. The dolce far niente of the Italian, the rascarse la barriga of the Spaniard, the supreme aspiration of the bourgeois to live on his income in peace and tranquility, attest this. What causes operated to awake this terrible predisposition from its lethargy? How is it that the Filipino people, so fond of its customs as to border on routine, has given up its ancient habits of work, of trade, of navigation, etc., even to the extent of completely forgetting its past? III A fatal combination of circumstances, some independent of the will in spite of men's efforts, others the offspring of stupidity and ignorance, others the inevitable corollaries of false principles, and still others the result of more or less base passions has induced the decline of labor, an evil which instead of being remedied by prudence, mature reflection and recognition of the mistakes made, through deplorable policy, through regret, table blindness and obstinacy, has gone from bad to worse until it has reached the condition in which we now see it. (14). First came the wars, the internal disorders which the new change of affairs naturally brought with it. It was necessary to subject the people either by cajolery or force; there were fights, there was slaughter; those who had submitted peacefully seemed to repent of it; insurrections were suspected, and some occurred; naturally there were executions, and many capable laborers perished. Add to this condition of disorder the invasion of Limahong, add the continual wars into which the inhabitants of the Philippines were plunged to maintain the honor of Spain, to extend the sway of her flag in Borneo, in the Moluccas and in Indo-China; to repel the Dutch foe: costly wars, fruitless expeditions, in which each time thousands and thousands of native archers and rowers were recorded to have embarked, but whether they returned to their homes was never stated. Like the tribute that once upon a time Greece sent to the Minotaur of Crete, the Philippine youth embarked for the expedition, saying good-by to their country forever: on their horizon were the stormy sea, the interminable wars, the rash expeditions. Wherefore, Gaspar de San Agustin says: "Although anciently there were in this town of Dumangas many people, in the course of time they have very greatly diminished because the natives are the best sailors and most skillful rowers on the whole coast, and so the governors in the port of Iloilo take most of the people from this town for the ships that they send abroad ............. When the Spaniards reached this island (Panay) it is said that there were on it more than fifty thousand families; but these diminished greatly; ........... and at present they may amount to some fourteen thousand tributaries." From fifty thousand families to fourteen thousand tributaries in little over half a century! We would never get through, had we to quote all the evidence of the authors regarding the frightful diminution of the inhabitants of the Philippines in the first years after the discovery. In the time of their first bishop, that is, ten years after Legazpi, Philip II said that they had been reduced to less than two thirds. Add to these fatal expeditions that wasted all the moral and material energies of the country, the frightful inroads of the terrible pirates from the south, instigated and encouraged by the government, first in order to get complaint and afterwards disarm the islands subjected to it, inroads that reached the very shores of Manila, even Malate itself, and during which were seen to set out for captivity and slavery, in the baleful glow of burning villages, strings of wretches who had been unable to defend themselves, leaving behind them the ashes of their homes and the corpses of their parents and children. Morga, who recounts the first piratical invasion, says: "The boldness of these people of Mindanao did great damage to the Visayan Islands, as much by what they did in them as by the fear and fright which the native acquired, because the latter were in the power of the Spaniards, who held them subject and tributary and unarmed, in such manner that they did not protect them from their enemies or leave them means with which to defend themselves, AS THEY DID WHEN THERE WERE NO SPANIARDS IN THE COUNTRY." These piratical attacks continually reduced the number of the inhabitants of the Philippines, since the independent Malays were especially notorious for their atrocities and murders, sometimes because they believed that to preserve their independence it was necessary to weaken the Spaniard by reducing the number of his subjects, sometimes because a greater hatred and a deeper resentment inspired them against the Christian Filipinos who, being of the their own race, served the stranger in order to deprive them of their precious liberty. These expeditions lasted about three centuries, being repeated five and ten times a year, and each expedition cost the islands over eight hundred prisoners. "With the invasions of the pirates from Sulu and Mindanao," says Padre Gaspar de San Agustin, [the island of Bantayan, near Cebu] "has been greatly reduced, because they easily captured the people there, since the latter had no place to fortify themselves and were far from help from Cebu. The hostile Sulu did great damage in this island in 1608, leaving it almost depopulated." (Page 380). These rough attacks, coming from without, produced a counter effect, in the interior, which, carrying out medical comparisons, was like a purge or diet in an individual who has just lost a great deal of blood. In order to make headway against so many calamities, to secure their sovereignty and take the offensive in these disastrous contests, to isolate the warlike Sulus from their neighbors in the south, to care for the needs of the empire of the Indies (for one of the reasons why the Philippines were kept, as contemporary documents prove, was their strategic position between New Spain and the Indies), to wrest from the Dutch their growing colonies of the Moluccas and get rid of some troublesome neighbors, to maintain, in short, the trade of China with New Spain. it was necessary to construct new and large ships which, as we have seen, costly as they were to the country for their equipment and the rowers they required, were not less so because of the manner in which they were constructed. (16) Fernando de los Rios Coronel, who fought in these wars and later turned priest, speaking of these King's ships, said: "As they were so large, the timber needed was scarcely to be found in the forests (of the Philippines!), and thus it was necessary to seek it with great difficulty in the most remote of them, where, once found, in order to haul and convey it to the shipyard the towns of the surrounding country had to be depopulated of natives, who get it out with immense labor, damage, and cost to them. The natives furnished the masts for a galleon, according to the assertion of the Franciscans, and I heard the governor of the province where they were cut, which is Lacuna de Bay, say that to haul them seven leagues over very broken mountains 6,000 natives were engaged three months, without furnishing them food, which the wretched native had to seek for himself!" And Gaspar de San Agustin says: "In those times (1690), Bacolor has not the people that it had in the past, because of the uprising in that province when Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lava was Governor of these islands and because of the continual labor of cutting timber for his Majesty's shipyards, WHICH HINDERS THEM FROM CULTIVATING THE VERY FERTILE PLAIN THEY HAVE." (17) If this is not sufficient to explain the depopulation of the islands and the abandonment of industry, agriculture and commerce, then add "the natives who wore executed, those who loft their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them," as Fernando de los Rios Coronel says; add to all this what Philip II said in reprimanding Bishos Salazar about "natives sold by some encomendoros to others, those flogged to death, the women who are crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those who sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many who are executed and left to die of hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs ............ and the mothers who kill their children in bearing them," and you will understand how in less than thirty years the population of the Philippines was reduced one-third. We are not saying this: it was said by Gaspar de San Agustin, the preeminently anti-Filipino Augustinian, and he confirms it throughout the rest of his work by speaking every moment of the state of neglect in which lay the farms and fields once so flourishing and so well cultivated, the towns thinned that had formerly been inhabited by many leading families! How is it strange, then, that discouragement may have been infused into the spirit of the inhabitants of the Philippines, when in the midst of so many calamities they did not know whether they would see sprout the seed they were planting, whether their field was going to be their grave or their crop would go to feed their executioner? What is there strange in it, when we see the pious but impotent friars of that time trying to free their poor parishioners from the tyranny of the encomenderos by advising them to stop work in the mines, to abandon their commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out to them heaven for their whole hope, preparing them for death as their only consolation? (18) Man works for an object. Remove the object and you reduce him to inaction The most active man in the world will fold his arms from the instant he understands that it is madness to bestir himself, that this work will be the cause of his trouble, that for him it will be the cause of vexations at home and of the pirate's greed abroad. It seems that these thoughts have never entered the minds of those who cry out against the indolence of the Filipinos. Even were the Filipino not a man like the rest; even were we to suppose that zeal in him for work was as essential as the movement of a wheel caught in the gearing of others in motion; even were we to deny him foresight and the judgment that the past and the present form, there would still be left us another reason to explain the attack of the evil. The abandonment of the fields by their cultivators, whom the wars and piratical attacks dragged from their homes was sufficient to reduce to nothing the hard labor of so many generations. In the Philippines abandon for a year the land most beautifully tended and you will see how you will have to begin all over again: the rain will wipe out the furrows, the floods will drown the seeds, plants and bushes will grow up everywhere, and on seeing so much useless labor the hand will drop the hoe, the laborer will desert his plow. Isn't there left the fine life of the pirate? Thus is understood that sad discouragement which we find in the friar writers of the 17th century, speaking of once very fertile plains submerged, of provinces and towns depopulated, of products that have disappeared from trade, of leading families exterminated. These pages resemble a sad and monotonous scene in the night after a lively day. Of Cagayan Padre San Agustin speaks with mournful brevity: "A great deal of cotton, of which they made good cloth that the Chinese and Japanese every year bought and carried away." In the historian's time, the industry and the trade had come to an end! It seems that these are causes more thorn sufficient to breed indolence even in the midst of beehive. Thus is explained why, after thirty-two years of the system, the circumspect and prudent Morga said that the natives "have forgotten much about farming, raising poultry, stock and cotton, and weaving cloth, as they used to do in their paganism and FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THE COUNTRY HAD BEEN CONQUERED!" Still they struggled a long time against indolence, yes: but their enemies were so numerous that at last they gave up! IV We recognize the causes that, awoke the predisposition and provoked the evil: now let us see what foster and sustain it. In this connection, government and governed have to bow our heads and say: we deserve our fate. We have already truly said that when a house becomes disturbed and disordered, we should not accuse the youngest, child or the servants, but the head of it, especially if his authority is unlimited, he who does not act freely is not responsible for his actions; and the Filipino people, not being master of its liberty, is not responsible for either its misfortunes or its woes. We says this, it is true, but, as will be seen later on, we also have a large part, in the continuation of such a disorder. The following, among other causes, contributed to foster the evil and aggravate it: the constantly lessening encouragement that labor has met with in the Philippines. Fearing to have the Filipinos deal frequently with other individuals of their own race, who were free and independent, as the Borneans, the Siamese, the Cambodians, and the Japanese, people who in their customs and feeling's differ greatly from the Chinese, the Government acted toward these others with great mistrust and great severity, as Morga testifies in the last pages of his work, until they finally ceased to come to the country. In fact, it seems that once an uprising' planned by the Borneans was suspected: we say suspected, for there was not even an attempt, although there were many executions. (19) And, as these nations were the very ones that, consumed Philippine products, when all communication with them had been cut off, consumption of these products also ceased. The only two countries with which the Philippines continued to have relations were China and Mexico, or New Spain, and from this trade only China and a few private individuals in Manila got any benefit. It, fact, the Celestial Empire sent, her junks laden with merchandise, that merchandise which shut down the factories of Seville and ruined the Spanish industry, and returned laden in exchange with the silver that was every year sent from Mexico. Nothing from the Philippines at that time went to China, not even gold, for in those years the Chinese traders would accept no payment but silver coin. (20) To Mexico went little more: some cloth and dry goods which the encomendoros took by force or bought from the natives at, a paltry price, wax, amber, gold, civet, etc, but nothing more, and not even in great quantity, as is stated by Admiral Don Jerónimo de Bañuelos y Carrillo, when he begged the King that "the inhabitants of the Manilas be permitted (!) to load as many ships as they could with native products, such as wax, gold, perfumes, ivory, cotton cloths, which they would have to buy from the natives of the country ............... Thus the friendship of those peoples would be gained, they would furnish New Spain with their merchandise and the money that is brought to Manila, would not leave this place," (21) The coastwise trade, so active in other times, had to die out, thanks to the piratical attacks of the Malays of the south; and trade in the interior of the islands almost entirely disappeared, owing to restrictions, passports and other administrative requirements. Of no little importance were the hindrances and obstacles that from the beginning were thrown in the farmers's way by the rulers, who were influenced by childish fear and saw everywhere signs of conspiracies and uprisings. The natives were not allowed to go to their labors, that is, their farms, without permission of the governor, or of his agents and officers, and even of the priests as Morga says. Those who know the administrative slackness and confusion in a country where the officials work scarcely two hours a day; those who know the cost of going to and returning from the capital to obtain a permit; those who are aware of the petty retaliations of the little tyrants will well understand how with this crude arrangement it is possible to have the most absurd agriculture. True it is that for some time this absurdity, which would be ludicrous had it not been so serious, has disappeared; but even if the words have gone out of use other facts and other provisions have replaced them. The Moro pirate has disappeared but there remains the outlaw who infests the fields and waylays the farmer to hold him for ransom. Now then, the government, which has a constant fear of the people, denies to the farmers even the use of a shotgun, or if it does allow it does so very grudgingly and withdraws it at pleasure; whence it results with the laborer, who, thanks to his means of defense, plants his crops and invests his meager fortune in the furrows that he has so laboriously opened, that when his crop matures, it occurs to the government, which is impotent to suppress brigandage, to deprive him of his weapon; and then, without defense and without security he is reduced to inaction and abandons his field, his work, and takes to gambling as the best means of securing a livelihood. The green cloth is under the protection of the government, it is safer! A mournful counselor is fear, for it not only causes weakness but also in casting aside the weapons strengthens the very persecutor! The sordid return the native gets from his work has the effect of discouraging him. We know from history that the encomenderos, after reducing many to slavery and forcing them to work for their benefit, made others give up their merchandise for a trifle or nothing at all, or cheated them with false measures. Speaking of Ipion, in Panay, Padre Gaspar de San Agustin says: "It was in ancient times very rich in gold, ............... but provoked by the annoyances they suffered from some governors they have ceased to get it out, preferring to live in poverty than to suffer such hardships." (Page 378). Further on, speaking of other towns, he says: "Goaded by the ill treatment of the encomenderos who in administering justice have treated the natives as their slaves and not as their children, and have only looked after their own interests at the expense of the wretched fortunes and lives of their charges ..............." (Page 422) Further on: "In Leyte, where they tried to kill an encomendero of the town of Dagami on account of the great hardships he made them suffer by exacting tribute of wax from them with a steelyard which he had made twice as long as the others" This state of affairs lasted a long time and still lasts, in spite of the fact, that the breed of encomenderos has become extinct. A term passes away but the evil and the passions engendered do not pass away so long as reforms are devoted solely to changing the names. The wars with the Dutch, the inroads and piratical attacks of the people of Sulu and Mindanao disappeared; the people have been transformed; new towns have grown up while others have become impoverished; but the frauds subsist as much as or worse than they did in those early years. We will not cite our own experiences, for aside from the fact that, we do not know which to select, critical persons may reproach us with partiality; neither will we cite those of other Filipinos who write in the newspapers; but we shall confine ourselves to translating the words of a modern French traveler who was in the Philippines for a long time: "The good curate," he says with reference to the rosy picture a friar had given him of the Philippines, "had not told me about the governor, the foremost official of the district, who was too much taken up with the ideal of getting rich to have time to tyrannize over his docile subjects; the governor, charged with ruling the country and collecting the various taxes in the government's name, devoted himself almost wholly to trade; in his hands the high and noble functions he performs are nothing more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all the business and instead of developing on his part the love of work, instead of stimulating the too natural indolence of the natives, he with abuse of his powers thinks only of destroying all competition that may trouble him or attempt to participate in his profits. It matters little to him that the country is impoverished, without cultivation, without commerce, without, industry, just so the governor is quickly enriched!" Yet the traveler has been unfair in picking out the governor especially: Why only the governor? We do not cite passages from other authors, because we have not their works at hand and do not wish to quote from memory. The great difficulty that every enterprise encountered with the administration contributed not a little to kill off all commercial and industrial movement. All the Filipinos, as well as all those who have tried to engage in business in the Philippines, know how many documents, what comings, how many stamped papers, how much patience is needed to secure from the government a permit for an enterprise. One must count upon the good will of this one, on the influence of that one, on a good bribe to another in order that the application be not pigeonholed, a present to the one further on so that he may pass it on to his chief; one must pray to God to give him good humor and time to see and examine it; to another, talent to recognize its expediency; to one further on sufficient stupidity not to scent behind the enterprise an insurrectionary purpose; and that they may not all spend the time taking baths, hunting or playing cards with the reverend friars in their convents or country houses. And above all, great patience, great knowledge of how to get along, plenty of money, a great deal of politics, many salutations, great influence, plenty of presents and complete resignation! How is it strange that, the Philippines remain poor in spite of their very fertile soil, when history tells us that the countries now the most flourishing date their development from the day of their liberty and civil rights? The most commercial and most industrious countries have been the freest countries: France, England and the United States prove this. Hongkong, which is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all the islands together, because it is free and is well governed. The trade with China, which was the whole occupation of the colonizers of the Philippines, was not only prejudicial to Spain but also to the life of her colonies; in fact, when the officials and private persons at Manila found an easy method of getting rich they neglected everything. They paid no attention either to cultivating the soil or to fostering industry; and wherefore? China furnished the trade, and they had only to take advantage of it and pick up the gold that dropped out on its way from Mexico toward the interior of China, the gulf whence it never returned. The pernicious example of the dominators in surrounding themselves with servants and despising manual or corporal labor as a thing unbecoming the nobility and chivalrous pride of the heroes of so many centuries; those lordly airs, which the natives have translated into tila ka castila, and the desire of the dominated to be the equal of the dominators, if not essentially, at least in their manners: all this had naturally to produce aversion to activity and fear or hatred of work. Moreover, 'Why work?' asked many natives. The curate says that the rich man will not go to heaven The rich man on earth is liable to all kinds of trouble, to be appointed a cabeza de barangay, to be deported if an uprising occurs, to be forced banker of the military chief of the town, who to reward him for favors received seizes his laborers and his stock, in order to force him to beg for mercy, and thus easily pays up. Why be rich? So that all the officers of justice may have a lynx eye on your actions, so that at the least slip enemies may be raised up against you, you may be indicted, a whole complicated and labyrinthine story may be concocted against you, for which you can only get away, not by the thread of Ariadne but by Danae's shower of gold, and still give thanks that you are not kept in reserve for some needy occasion? The native, whom they pretend to regard as an imbecile, is not so much so that he does not understand that it is ridiculous to work himself to death to become worse off. A proverb of his says that the pig is cooked in its own lard, and as among his bad qualities he has the good one of applying to himself all the criticisms and censures he prefers to live miserable and indolent, rather than play the part of the wretched beast of burden. Add to this the introduction of gambling. We do not mean to san that before the coming of the Spaniards the natives did not gamble: the passion for grumbling is innate in adventuresome and excitable races, and such is the Malay. Pigafetta tells us of cock-fights and of bets in the Island of Paragua. Cock-fighting must also have existed in Luzon and in all the islands, for in the terminology of the game are two Tagalog words: sabong, and tari (cockpit and gaff). But there is not the least doubt that the fostering of this game is due to the government, as well as the perfecting of it. Although Pigafetta tells us of it, he mentions it only in Paragua, and not in Cebu nor in any other island of the south, where he stayed long time. Morga does not speak of it, in spite of his having spent seven years in Manila, and yet he does describe the kinds of fowl, the jungle hens and cocks. Neither does Morga, speak of gambling, when he talks about vices and other defects, more or less concealed, more or less insignificant. Moreover, excepting the two Tagalog words sabong and tari, the others are of Spanish origin, as soltada (setting the cocks to fight, then the fight itself), presto, (apuesta, bet), logro (winnings), pago (payment), sentenciador (referee), case (to cover the bets), etc. We say the same about gambling: the word sugal (jugar, to gamble), like kumpisal (confesar, to confess to a priest), indicates that gambling was unknown in the Philippines before the Spaniards. The word laró (Tagalog, to play) is not the equivalent of the word sunni. The word balasa (baraja, playing-card) proves that the introduction of playing-cards was not due to the Chinese, who have a kind of playing-cards also, because in that case they would have taken the Chinese name. Is not this enough? The word tayá (taltar, to bet), paris-paris (Spanish pares, pairs of cards), politana (napolitana, a winning sequence of cards), sapore (to stack the cards), kapote (to slam), monte, and so on, all prove the foreign origin of this terrible plant, which only produces vice, and which has found in the character of the native a fit soil, cultivated by circumstances. Along with gambling, which breeds dislike for steady and difficult toil by its promise of sudden wealth and its appeal to the emotions, with the lotteries, with the prodigality and hospitality of the Filipinos, went also, to swell this train of misfortunes, the religious functions, the great number of fiestas, the long masses for the women to spend their mornings and the novenaries to spend their afternoons, and the night, for the processions and rosaries. Remember that lack of capital and absence of means paralyze all movement, and you will see how the native has perforce to be indolent for if any money might remain to him from the trials, imposts and exactions, he would have to give it to the curate for bulls, scapularies, candles, novenaries, etc. And if this does not suffice to form an indolent character, if the climate and nature are not enough in themselves to daze him and deprive him of all energy, recall then that the doctrines of his religion teach him to irrigate his fields in the dry season, not by means of canals but with masses and prayers; to preserve his stock during an epizootic with holy water, exorcisms and benedictions that cost five dollars an animal; to drive away the locusts by a procession with the image of St. Augustine, etc. It is well, undoubtedly, to trust greatly in God; but it is better to do what one can and not trouble the Creator every moment, even when these appeals redound to the benefit of His ministers. We have noticed that the countries which believe most in miracles are the laziest, just, as spoiled children are the most ill-mannered. Whether they believe in miracles to palliate their laziness or they are lazy because they believe in miracles, we cannot say; but the fact is the Filipinos were much less lazy before the word miracle was introduced into their language. The facility with which individual liberty is curtailed, that continual alarm of all from the knowledge that they are liable to secret report, a governmental ukase, and to the accusation of rebel or suspect, an accusation which, to be effective, does not need proof or the production of the accuser. With that lack of confidence in the future, that uncertainty of reaping the reward of labor, as in a city stricken with the plague, everybody yields to fate, shuts himself in his house or goes about amusing himself in the attempt to spend the few days that remain to him in the least disagreeable way possible. The apathy of the government itself toward everything in commerce and agriculture contributes not a little to foster indolence. There is no encouragement, at all for the manufacturer or for the farmer; the government furnishes no aid either when poor crop comes, when the locusts (23) sweep over the fields, or when a cyclone destroys in its passage the wealth of the soil; nor does it take any trouble to seek a market for the products of its colonies. Why should it do so when these same products are burdened with taxes and imposts and have not free entry into the ports, of the mother country, nor is their consumption there encouraged? While we see all the walls of London covered with advertisements of the products of its colonies, while the English make heroic efforts to substitute Ceylon for Chinese tea, beginning with the sacrifice of their taste and their stomach, in Spain, with the exception of tobacco, nothing from the Philippines is known: neither its sugar, coffee, hemp, fine cloths, nor its Ilocano blankets. The name of Manila is known only from those cloths of China or Indo-China which at one time reached Spain by way of Manila, heavy silk shawls, fantastically but coarsely embroidered, which no one has thought of imitating in Manila, since they are so easily made; but the government has other cares, and the Filipinos do not know that such objects are more highly esteemed in the Peninsula than their delicate piña, embroideries and their very fine jusi fabrics. Thus disappeared our trade in indigo, thanks to the trickery of the Chinese, which the government could not guard against, occupied as it was with other thoughts; thus die now the other industries; the fine manufactures of the Visayas are gradually disappearing from trade and even from use; the people, continually getting poorer, cannot afford the costly cloths and have to be content with calico or the imitations of the Germans, who produce imitations even of the work of our silversmiths. The fact that the best plantations, the best tracts of land in some provinces, those that from their easy access are more profitable than others, are in the hands of the religious corporations, whose desideratum is ignorance and a condition of semi-starvation for the native, so that they may continue to govern him and make themselves necessary to his wretched existence, is one of the reasons why many towns do not progress in spite of the efforts of their inhabitants. We will be met with the objections, as an argument on the other side, that the towns which belong to the friars are comparatively richer than those which do not belong to them. They surely are! Just as their brethren in Europe, in founding their convents, knew how to select the best valleys, the best uplands for the cultivation of the vine or the production of beer, so also the Philippine monks (25) have known how to select the best towns, the beautiful plains, the well-watered fields, to make of them rich plantations. For some time the friars have deceived many by making them believe that if these plantations were prospering, it was because they were under their care, and the indolence of the native was thus emphasized; but they forget that in same provinces where they have not been able for some reason to get possession of the best tracts of land, their plantations, like Baurand and Liang, are inferior to Taal, Balayan and Lipa, regions cultivated entirely by the natives without any monkish interference whatsoever. Add to this lack of material inducement the absentee of moral stimulus, and you will see how he who is not indolent in that country must needs be a madman or at least a fool. What future awaits him who distinguishes himself, him who studies, who rises above the crowd? At the cost of study and sacrifice a young man becomes a great chemist, and after a long course of training, wherein neither the government nor anybody has given him the least help, he concludes his long stay in the University. A competitive examination is held to fill a certain position. The young man wins this through knowledge and perseverance, and after he has won it, it is abolished, because ......... we do not care to give the reason, but when a municipal laboratory is closed in order to abolish the position of director, who got his place by competitive examination, while other officers, such as the press censor, are preserved, it is because the belief exists that the light of progress may injure the people more than all the adulterated foods (26). In the same way, another young man won a prize in a literary competition, and as long as his origin was unknown his work was discussed, the newspapers praised it and it was regarded as a masterpiece, but the sealed envelopes were opened, the winner proved to be a native, while among the losers there were Peninsulars; then all the newspapers hastened to extol the losers! Not one word from the government, nor from anybody, to encourage the native who with so much affection was cultivating the language and letters of the mother country! (27) Finally, passing over many other more or less insignificant reasons, the enumeration of which would be interminable, let us close this dreary list with the principal and most terrible of all: the education of the native. From his birth until he sinks into his grave, the training of the native is brutalizing, depressive and antihuman (the word 'inhuman' is not sufficiently explanatory: whether or not the Academy admit it, let it go). There is no doubt that the government, some priests like the Jesuits and some Dominicans like Padre Benavides, have done a great deal by founding colleges, schools of primary instruction, and the like. But this is not enough; their effect is neutralized. They amount to five or ten years (years of a hundred and fifty days at most) during which the youth comes in contact with books selected by those very priests who boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian, that the native should not be separated from his carabao, that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years during which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves perhaps; and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native's neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast--a labor aided by some persons, with or without the ability to write, which if it does not produce in some individuals the desired effect, in others it has the opposite effect, like the breaking of a cord that is stretched too tightly. Thus, while they attempt to make of the native a kind of animal, vet in exchange they demand of him divine actions. And we say divine actions, because he must be a god who does not become indolent in that climate, surrounded by the circumstances mentioned. Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those who wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its mainspring: man's is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he who seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms. Thus is explained how the natives of the present time are no longer the same as those of the time of the discovery, neither morally nor physically. The ancient writers, like Chirino, Morga and Colin, take pleasure in describing them as well-featured, with good aptitudes for any thing they take up, keen and susceptible and of resolute will, very clean and neat in their persons and clothing, and of good mien and bearing. (Morga). Others delight in minute accounts of their intelligence and pleasant manners, of their aptitude for music, the drama, dancing and singing; of the facility with which they learned, not only Spanish but also Latin, which they acquired almost by themselves (Colin); others, of their exquisite politeness in their dealings and in their social life; others, like the first Augustinians, whose accounts Gaspar de San Augustin copies, found them more gallant and better mannered than the inhabitants of the Moluccas. "All live off their husbandry," adds Morga, "their farms, fisheries and enterprises, for they travel from island to island by sea and from province to province by land." In exchange, the writers of the present time, without being better than those of former times, neither as men nor as historians, without being more gallant than Hernan Cortez and Salcedo, nor more prudent than Legazpi, nor more manly than Morga, nor more studious than Colin and Gaspar de San Agustin, our contemporary writers, we say, find that the native is a creature something more than a monkey but much less than a man, an anthropoid, dull-witted, stupid, timid, dirty, cringing, grinning, ill-clothed, indolent, lazy, brainless, immoral, etc., etc. To what is this retrogression due? Is it the delectable civilization, the religion of salvation of the friars, called of Jesus Christ by a euphemism, that has produced this miracle, that has atrophied his brain, paralyzed his heart and made of the man this sort of vicious animal that the writers depict? Alas! The whole misfortune of the present Filipinos consists in that they have become only half-way brutes. The Filipino is convinced that to get happiness it is necessary for him to lay aside his dignity as a rational creature, to attend mass, to believe what is told him, to pay what is demanded of him, to pay and forever to pay; to work, suffer and be silent, without aspiring to anything, without aspiring to know or even to understand Spanish, without separating himself from his carabao, as the priests shamelessly say, without protesting against any injustice, against any arbitrary action, against an assault, against an insult; that is, not to have heart, brain or spirit: a creature with arms and a purse full of gold ............ there's the ideal native! Unfortunately, or because the brutalization is not yet complete and because the nature of man is inherent in his being in spite of his condition, the native protests; he still has aspirations, he thinks and strives to rise, and there's the trouble! V In the preceding chapter we set forth the causes that proceed from the government in fostering and maintaining the evil we are discussing. Now it falls to us to analyze those that emanate from the people. Peoples and governments are correlated and complementary: a fatuous government would be an anomaly among righteous people, just as a corrupt people cannot exist under just rulers and wise laws. Like people, like government, we will say in paraphrase of a popular adage. We can reduce all these causes to two classes: to defects of training and lack of national sentiment. Of the influence of climate we spoke at the beginning, so we will not treat of the effects arising from it. The very limited training in the home, the tyrannical and sterile education of the rare centers of learning, that blind subordination of the youth to one of greater age, influence the mind so that a man may not aspire to excel those who preceded him but must merely be content to go along with or march behind them. Stagnation forcibly results from this, and as he who devotes himself merely to copying divests himself of other qualities suited to his own nature, he naturally becomes sterile; hence decadence. Indolence is a corollary derived from the lack of stimulus and of vitality. That modesty infused into the convictions of every one, or, to speak more clearly, that insinuated inferiority, a sort of daily and constant depreciation of the mind so that, it may not be raised to the regions of light, deadens the energies, paralyzes all tendency toward advancement, and at the least struggle a man gives up without fighting. If by one of those rare accidents, some wild spirit, that is, some active one, excels, instead of his example stimulating, it only causes others to persist in their inaction. 'There's one who will work for us: let's sleep on!' say his relatives and friends. True it is that the spirit of rivalry is sometimes awakened, only that then it awakens with bad humor in the guise of envy, and instead of being a lever for helping, it is an obstacle that produces discouragement. Nurtured by the example of anchorites of a contemplative and lazy life, the natives spend theirs in giving their gold to the Church in the hope of miracles and other wonderful things. Their will is hypnotized: from childhood they learn to act mechanically, without knowledge of the object, thanks to the exercises imposed upon them from the tenderest years of praying for whole hours in an unknown tongue, of venerating things that they do not understand, of accepting beliefs that are not explained to them to having absurdities imposed upon them, while the protests of reason are repressed. Is it any wonder that with this vicious dressage of intelligence and will the native, of old logical and consistent--as the analysis of his past and of his language demonstrates--should now be a mass of dismal contradictions? That continual struggle between reason and duty, between his organism and his new ideals, that civil war which disturbs the peace of his conscience all his life, has the result, of paralyzing all his energies, and aided by the severity of the climate, makes of that eternal vacillation, of the doubts in his brain, the origin of his indolent disposition. "You can't know more than this or that old man!" "Don't aspire to be greater than the curate!" "You belong to an inferior race!" "You haven't any energy!" This is what they tell the child, and as they repeat it so often, it has perforce to become engraved on his mind and thence mould and pervade all his actions. The child or youth who tries to be anything else is blamed with vanity and presumption; the curate ridicules him with cruel sarcasm, his relatives look upon him with fear, strangers regard him with great compassion. No forward movement! Get back in the ranks and keep in line! With his spirit thus moulded the native falls into the most pernicious of all routines: routine not planned, but imposed and forced. Note that the native himself is not, naturally inclined to routine, but his mind is disposed to accept all truths, just as his house is open to all strangers. The good and the beautiful attract him, seduce and captivate him, although, like the Japanese, he often exchanges the good for the evil, if it appears to him garnished and gilded. What he lacks is in the first place liberty to allow expansion to his adventuresome spirit, and good examples, beautiful prospects for the future. It is necessary that his spirit, although it may be dismayed and cowed by the elements and the fearful manifestation of their mighty forces, store up energy, seek high purposes, in order to struggle against obstacles in the midst of unfavorable natural conditions. In order that he may progress it is necessary that a revolutionary spirit, so to speak, should boil in his veins, since progress necessarily requires change; it implies the overthrow of the past, there deified, by the present; the victory of new ideas over the ancient and accepted ones. It will not be sufficient to speak to his fancy, to talk nicely to him, nor that the light illuminate him like the ignis fatuus that leads travelers astray at night; all the flattering promises of the fairest hopes will not suffice, so long as his spirit is not free, his intelligence not respected. The reasons that originate in the lack of national sentiment are still more lamentable and more transcendental. Convinced by the insinuation of his inferiority, his spirit harassed by his education, if that brutalization of which we spoke above can be called education, in that exchange of usages and sentiments among different nations, the Filipino, to whom remain only his susceptibility and his poetical imagination, allows himself to be guided by his fancy and his self-love. It is sufficient that the foreigner praise to him the imported merchandise and run down the native product for him to hasten to make the change, without reflecting that everything has its weak side and the most sensible custom is ridiculous in the eyes of those who do not follow it. They have dazzled him with tinsel, with strings, of colored glass beads, with noisy rattles, shining mirrors and other trinkets, and he has given in return his gold, his conscience, and even his liberty. He changed his religion for the external practices of another cult; the convictions and usages derived from his climate and needs, for other usages and other convictions that developed under another sky and another inspiration. His spirit, well-disposed toward everything that looks good to him, was then transformed, at the pleasure of the nation that forced upon him its God and its laws, and as the trader with whom he dealt did not bring a cargo of useful implements of iron, hoes to till the fields, but stamped papers, crucifixes, bulls and prayer-books; as he did not have for ideal and prototype the tanned and vigorous laborer, but the aristocratic lord, carried in a luxurious litter, the result was that the imitative people became bookish, devout, prayerful; it acquired ideas of luxury and ostentation, without thereby improving the means of its subsistence to a corresponding degree. The lack of national sentiment brings another evil, moreover, which is the absence of all opposition to measures prejudicial to the people and the absence of any initiative in whatever may redound to its good. A man in the Philippines is only an individual, he is not a member of a nation. He is forbidden and denied the right of association, and is therefore weak and sluggish. The Philippines are an organism whose cells seem to have no arterial system to irrigate it or nervous system to communicate its impressions; these cells must, nevertheless, yield their product, get it where they can: if they perish, let them perish. In the view of some this is expedient so that a colony may be a colony; perhaps they are right, but not to the effect that a colony may flourish. The result of this is that if a prejudicial measure is ordered, no one protests; all goes well apparently until later the evils are felt. Another blood-letting, and as the organism has neither nerves nor voice the physician proceeds in the belief that the treatment is not injuring it. It needs a reform, but as it must not speak, it keeps silent and remains with the need. The patient wants to eat, it wants to breathe the fresh air, but as such desires may offend the susceptibility of the physician who thinks that he has already provided everything necessary, it suffers and pines away from fear of receiving scolding, of getting another plaster and a new blood-letting, and so on indefinitely. In addition to this, love of peace and the horror many have of accepting the few administrative positions which fall to the Filipinos on account of the trouble and annoyance these cause them places at the head of the people the most stupid and incapable men, those who submit to everything, those who can endure all the caprices and exactions of the curate and of the officials. With this inefficiency in the lower spheres of power and ignorance and indifference in the upper, with the frequent changes and the eternal apprenticeships, with great fear and many administrative obstacles, with a voiceless people that has neither initiative nor cohesion, with employees who nearly all strive to amass a fortune and return home, with inhabit, ants who live in great hardship from the instant they begin to breathe, create prosperity, agriculture and industry, found enterprises and companies, things that still hardly prosper in free and well-organized communities. Yes, all attempt is useless that does not spring from a profound study of the evil that afflicts us. To combat this indolence, some have proposed increasing the native's needs and raising the taxes. What has happened? Criminals have multiplied, penury has been aggravated. Why? Because the native already has enough needs with his functions of the Church, with his fiestas, with the public offices forced on him, the donations and bribes that he has to make so that he may drag out his wretched existence. The cord is already too taut. We have heard many complaints, and every day we read in the papers about the efforts the government is making to rescue the country from its condition of indolence. Weighing its plans, its illusions and its difficulties, we are reminded of the gardener who tried to raise a tree planted in a small flower-pot. The gardener spent his days tending and watering the handful of earth, he trimmed the plant frequently, he pulled at it to lengthen it and hasten its growth, he grafted on it cedars and oaks, until one day the little tree died, leaving the man convinced that it belonged to a degenerate species, attributing the failure of his experiment to everything except the lack of soil and his own ineffable folly. Without education and liberty, that soil and that sun of mankind, no reform is possible, no measure can give the result desired. This does not mean that we should ask first for the native the instruction of a sage and all imaginable liberties, in order then to put a hoe in his hand or place him in a workshop; such a pretension would be an absurdity and vain folly. What we wish is that obstacles be not put in his way, that the many his climate and the situation of the islands afford be not augmented, that instruction be not begrudged him for fear that when he becomes intelligent he may separate from the colonizing nation or ask for the rights of which he makes himself worthy. Since some day or other he will become enlightened, whether the government wishes it or not, let his enlightenment be as a gift received and not as conquered plunder. We desire that the policy be at once frank and consistent, that is, highly civilizing, without sordid reservations, without distrust, without fear or jealousy, wishing the good for the sake of the good, civilization for the sake of civilization, without ulterior thoughts of gratitude, or else boldly exploiting, tyrannical and selfish without hypocrisy or deception, with a whole system well-planned and studied out for dominating by compelling obedience, for commanding to get rich, for getting rich to be happy. If the former, the government may act with the security that some day or other it will reap the harvest and will find a people its own in heart and interest; there is nothing like a favor for securing the friendship or enmity of man, according to whether it be conferred with good will or hurled into his face and bestowed upon him in spite of himself. If the logical and regulated system of exploitation be chosen, stifling with the jingle of gold and the sheen of opulence the sentiments of independence in the colonies, paying with its wealth for its lack of liberty, as the English do in India, who moreover leave the government to native rulers, then build roads, lay out highways, foster the freedom of trade; let the government heed material interests more than the interests of four orders of friars; let it send out intelligent employees to foster industry; just judges, all well paid, so that they be not venal pilferers, and lay aside all religious pretext. This policy has the advantage in that while it may not lull the instincts of liberty wholly to sleep, yet the day when the mother country loses her colonies she will at least have the gold amassed and not the regret of having reared ungrateful children. 1. Sancianco y Goson, Gregorio: El progreso de Filipinas. Estudios económicos, administrativos y políticos. Parte económica. Madrid, Imp. de la Vda. de J M. Perez, 1881 Pp XIV-260. An eminent student of Philippine life and history, James A. LeRoy in his "The Philippines, 1860-1898--Some comment and bibliographical notes" published in volume 52 of Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands 1493-1898, praises this book (p. 141) as "especially valuable on administrative matters just prior to the revision of the fiscal regime in connection with the abolition of the government tobacco monopoly", and for its "data on land, commerce, and industry" 2. Before 1590, one of the Spanish officers in the Philippines, commenting on the climate of the Islands, declared, with considerable acumen, that Europeans could stand life and work here if they observed continence in regard to the use of alcoholic beverages. 3. See Morga's "Report of conditions in the Philippines (June 8, 1598)" in Blair and Robertson vol. 10. pp. 75-80, in which various abuses of the friars are set forth. This should be compared with the following pages of the same relation (pp. 89-90) on secular affairs, from which it will be recognized that the condition was not so much the resultant of one class as of Spanish national character. Cf. also, Anda y Salazar B. and R, vol. 50, pp. 137-190; and Le Gentil, Voyage (Paris, 1779-81), vol. 1, pp. 183-191. It would be hardly fair not to call to mind that the Filipinos are debtors to the friars in many ways, and the Filipinos themselves should be the last to forget this. For a good exposition from the friar point of view, see Zamora, Las Corporaciones-Religiosas en Filipinas: Valladolid, 1901. See also Mallat, Les Philippines (Paris, 1846), vol. 1, pp. 374-389. 4. The history of the Philippines is full of references to Chinese who came here for the reasons assigned by Rizal. The antiquarian will be interested in consulting a small work entitled Notes on the Malay Archipelago and Malacca, compiled from Chinese sources, by W. P. Groeneveldt. 5 See B. and R., vol 34, pp. 183-191 for a description of the early Chinese trade in the Philippines, also translated by Hirth from Chinese sources, but evidently not the same as referred to by Rizal, 6. This citation is translated directly from the original Italian Ms. Rizal's account is seen to be slightly different and arises from the fact that he made use of Amoretti's printed version of the Ms., which is wrong in many particulars. Amoretti attempted to change the original Ms. into modern Italian, with disastrous result. It is to be regretted that Walls y Merino followed the same garbled text, in his Primer viaje alrededor del Mundo (Madrid, 1899). Dr. Antonio de Morga's book is perhaps the most famous of all the early books treating of the Philippines. Its full title is as follows: "Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas: Dirigido á Don Cristoval Gomez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duque de Cea, Mexico, En casa de Geronymo Balli, 1609." The original edition is very rare, and is worth almost its weight in gold. The manuscript circulated for some years before the date of publication. The second Spanish edition of the work was published by Rizal himself, who was always a sincere admirer of the book. It bears the following title-page: "Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas por el Doctor Antonio de Morga. Obra publicada en Mejico el año de 1609 nuevamente sacada á luz y anotada por José Rizal y precedida de un prólogo del Prof. Fernando Blumentritt. Paris, Libreria de Garnier Hermanos, 1890." Shortly before Rizal began work on his edition, a Spanish scholar, Justo Zaragoza, began the publication of a new edition of Morga. The book was reprinted, but the notes, prologue, and life of Morga which Zargoza had intended to insert, were never completed because of that editor's death. Only two copies of this edition, so far as known, were ever bound, one of which belongs to the Ayer collection in Chicago, and the other by the Tabacalera purchase to the Philippine Library, in Manila. Still one other Spanish edition has appeared, namely: "Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas por el Dr. Antonio de Morga. Nueva edición enriquecida con los escritos inéditos del mismo autor ilustrada con numerosas notas que amplian el texto y prologada extensamente por W. E. Retana, Madrid, Libreria General de Victoriano Suarez, Editor, 1909." Retana adds a life of Morga and numerous documents written by him. An English edition was published as follows: "The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China. at the close of the sixteenth century. By Antonio de Morga. Translated from the Spanish, with notes and a preface, and a letter from Luis Vaez de Torres, describing his voyage through the Torres Straits, by the Hen. Henry E. J. Stanley, London, Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1868". However, Stanley's translation is poor, and parts of passages are not translated at all. [It was this edition then in preparation by the Hakluyt Society, which Sir John Bowring, a director of the society, mentioned on his visit to Rizal's uncle in Biñan, so that to make the book available to Spaniards and Filipinos became an ambition from childhood with Rizal.-C.] A second English translation appears in B. and R. vols. 15 and 16. A separate copy of this translation was also published in a very limited edition, with the title: "History of the Philippine Islands from their discovery by Magellan in 1521 to the beginning of the XVII century; with descriptions of Japan, China and adjacent countries, by Dr. Antonio de Morga, alcalde of criminal causes, in the Royal Audiencia of Nueva España, and counsel for the Holy Office of the inquisition. Completely translated into English, edited and annotated by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson. Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1907." See B. and R. vols. 9-12 for other documents by Morga, and vol. 53 (or Robertson's Bibliography of the Philippine Islands, Cleveland, 1908), for bibliographical details regarding Morga and titles to documents. Perhaps the most famous of all his writings outside of his book is his relation mentioned ante, note 3. 7. Published at London in 1783. See p. 346. 8. See B. and R., vol. 4, pp. 221, 222, for an old boatsong. 9. Colin's Labor evangelica, published in Madrid, 1663; a new edition, in three volumes, and greatly enriched by notes and was published by Pablo Pastells, S. J. (Barcelona, 1900-1902). 10. See B. and R., vol. 33, pp. 233-235. The original says the ransom included 150 chickens; hence 450, an error due again to Amoretti. 11, Conquistas do las Islas Fillpinas (Madrid, 1698). There is no doubt of the frequency of inter-island trade among the peoples of the Philippines at an early period. Trade was stimulated by the very fact that the Malay peoples, except those who have been driven into the mountainous interiors, are by their very nature a seafaring people. The fact of an inter-island traffic is indicative of a culture above that possessed by a people in the barbarian stage of culture. Of course, there was considerable Chinese trade as well throughout the islands. 12. This estimate is somewhat high. A writer in speaking of the population of Manila, the metropolis of the Philippines then as now, about 1570 says that its population scarcely reached 80,000, instead of the 200,000 reported. 13 Licentiate Pedro de Rojas, of the Manila Audiencia, in a letter to Felipe II, June 30, 1586--Vol.6, pp. 265-274 says (p. 270): "If there were no trade with China, the citizens of these islands, would be richer; for the natives if they had not so many tostons, would pay their tributes in the articles which they produce, and which are current, that is, cloths, lampotes, cotton, and gold.--all of which have great value in Nueva España. These they cease to produce because of the abundance of silver; and what is worse and entails more loss upon your Majesty, is that they do not, as formerly, work the mines and take out gold". The old records contains numerous references to the decline of the native industries of the Philippines after the arrival of the Spaniards and the increase of Chinese trade. 14. See ante, note 13. 15. The decrease of population among native people in the Philippines after the arrival of the Spaniards compares in no degree with what occurred in America. A most distressing picture of conditions in the Philippines is given by Bishop Domingo de Salazar in his relation written about 1583 (see B. & R., vol 5, pp. 210-255. See especially p. 212.) It is well to balance Salazar's account with those of others (A "tributary" was generally reckoned as five persons, one "tribute" being required for each adult male. Hence "tributaries" and "families" may here be taken to mean about the same number,--D.) 16. The forced labor required by the Spaniards in shipbuilding formed one of the legitimate causes of complaint among the people almost from the beginning. 17. See ante, note 15, also note 16. 18. The early friars, although many of them fell into some of the very faults which they condemned, inveighed boldly against the cruelty of the Spaniards. Doubtless their attitude did encourage their converts to withdraw from industry to a certain degree. 19. See B. & R, vol. 4, pp. 148-303. 20 See B & R., vol. 6, for early accounts of Chinese trade and Spanish measures affecting it The hostility between Spaniards and Portuguese enters largely into the question. The effects of the deplorably bad economics of Spain in its trade relations are still felt in the Peninsula. 21. See ante, note 20. 22. See ante, note 20. The arrival and departure of the annual galleon were times of activity, but otherwise Manila was a dull town, with little industry. The Chinese usurped all the petty trade. 23 It is to the credit, of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del Pais de Filipinas, founded by the energetic governor Basco y Vargas in 1781, that it extended its many-sided interests to the destruction of the devastating hordes of locusts that visit the Philippines so frequently. 24 The Spanish policy remained to the end one of exclusion, and the privileges granted were almost all because of coercion, and the penetrating force of modern ideas. 25. A loose use of the word "monk", which is properly used of a cloistered ecclesiastic who does not leave his convent. "Friar" would be a more exact term. The Benedictines are monks; the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Recollects, are friars. 26. This was the Filipino chemist Anacleto del Rosario, whom Rizal rightly praises. 27. This refers doubtless to Rizal himself, who competed in an open contest for Spaniards and Indians, of the Liceo Artistico-Literario de Manila, and of whom such an occurrence is related. He was awarded first prose prize for a production entitled "El Consejo de los Dioses", which see in the "Revista del Liceo Artistico-Literario de Manila, No. 4, 1880, pd. 45. This production, which bears neither signature nor sign of authorship, is dated April 13, 1880. 
36014	----	WORKS BY DR. JOHN BROWN. Horæ Subsecivæ. Sixth Edition. 1 Volume, Extra Foolscap 8vo, Price 7s. 6d. Locke and Sydenham. New Edition. Extra Foolscap 8vo, Price 7s. 6d. Letter to the Rev. John Cairns, D.D. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, Sewed, Price 2s. Arthur H. Hallam; Extracted from 'Horæ Subsecivæ.' Foolscap, Sewed, Price 2s.; Cloth, Price 2s. 6d. Rab and his Friends; Extracted from 'Horæ Subsecivæ.' Forty-fifth Thousand. Foolscap, Sewed, Price 6d. Marjorie Fleming: A Sketch. Fifteenth Thousand. Foolscap, Sewed, Price 6d. Our Dogs; Extracted from 'Horæ Subsecivæ.' Nineteenth Thousand. Foolscap, Sewed, Price 6d. Rab and his Friends. With Illustrations by Sir GEORGE HARVEY, R.S.A., Sir J. NOEL PATON, R.S.A., and J. B. Cheap Edition. In One Volume, Cloth, Price 3s. 6d. 'With Brains, Sir;' Extracted from 'Horæ Subsecivæ.' Foolscap, Sewed, Price 6d. Minchmoor. Price 6d. Jeems the Door-keeper. A Lay Sermon. Price 6d. EDINBURGH: EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. NOTES ON OLD EDINBURGH BY THE AUTHOR OF 'THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN AMERICA.' [Illustration: INSCRIPTION OVER DOORWAY IN BLACKFRIARS WYND. _English Visitor._--'So this is Blackfriars Wynd!' _Woman._--'No, it's hell's mouth.'] EDINBURGH EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS 1869. PREFATORY NOTE BY THE REV. DR. HANNA. Was ever a more vivid picture of more revolting scenes offered to the reader's eye than that which the following pages present? If any doubt creep into his mind as to the accuracy of its details, he has but to read the reports of Dr. LITTLEJOHN and Dr. ALEXANDER WOOD, in which everything here stated, not vouched for by the writer herself, is authenticated. Can nothing be done, shall nothing be done, to wipe out such foul blots from the face of our fair city? One effort among others is being made in this direction by the Association recently organized for improving the condition of the poor. It is in the hope of winning for this Association the support of all the humane among us that these "Notes" are published. It would be a happy, and not surely hopeless issue, if, by the combined and concentrated endeavours of all interested in the welfare of the poor, such a change were effected that, fifty years hence, it were doubted or denied that ever such a state of things existed as is here so graphically portrayed. W. H. 6, CASTLE TERRACE, _Jan. 20, 1869_. NOTES ON OLD EDINBURGH. CHAPTER I. It has been my fortune to see the worst slums of the Thames district of London, of Birmingham, and other English and foreign cities, the "water-side" of Quebec, and the Five Points and mud huts of New York, and a short time ago a motive stronger than curiosity induced me to explore some of the worst parts of Edinburgh--not the very worst, however. Honest men can have no desire to blink facts, and no apology is necessary for stating the plain truth, as it appears to me, that there are strata of misery and moral degradation under the shadow of St. Giles's crown and within sight of Knox's house, more concentrated and unbroken than are to be met with elsewhere, even in a huge city which, by reason of a district often supposed to have no match for vice and abjectness, is continually held up to public reprobation. The Rev. R. Maguire, rector of St. James's, Clerkenwell, accompanied me through a portion only of the district visited, and he expressed his opinion then, and since more formally in print, that more dirt, degradation, overcrowding, and consequent shamelessness and unutterable wretchedness, exist in Edinburgh than in any town of twice its size, or in any area of similar extent to the one explored, taken from the worst part of London. With this opinion my own convictions cordially concur. We have plenty of awful guilt-centres in London--as, for instance, the alleys leading out of Liquorpond Street and the New Cut, but even the worst are broken in upon by healthy neighbourhoods. Here there is a loathsome infectious sore, occupying a larger area than anywhere else--a district given up in great measure to moral degradation, which extends from the Lawnmarket to Holyrood, from Holyrood along the parallel streets of the Cowgate, the Grassmarket, and the West Port, including most of the adjacent wynds and closes, and only terminating with Cowfeeder Row. My object was to compare a certain section of Edinburgh, both by day and night, with a similar area in the city before alluded to. In company with two philanthropic gentlemen, who did not hesitate to expose these social plague-spots, and guided in one mysterious locality by one of the lieutenants of police, I explored at various times several closes in the High Street, Cowgate, and West Port, going by "house-row." In all cases the people were civil and willing to admit us, and few allowed us to depart without expressing a hope that some good would come out of the efforts proposed to be made for them. In many houses only the children were at home, but they answered our questions with such quick comprehension and painfully precocious intelligence that we were not left in doubt as to the circumstances of their parents. It was a dry, warm morning. No rain had fallen for some weeks. There was a rumour of cholera on the Rhine, and under its salutary influence various sanitary precautions, such as lime-washing closes and stairs, had been recently resorted to. The district might have looked cheerful had cheerfulness been possible, so great was the contrast between its aspect now and its look on a wet, murky, autumn day. The appearance of the lower part of the High Street was as little pleasant as usual. Knots of men who never seem to "move on" stared at the passers-by on the South Bridge, bold girls lounged about and chaffed the soldiers, careworn women, and little girls hardly less careworn, stood round the well with their pails--some of the last, we learned, having stood there for two and three hours. There were dirty little children as usual rolling in the gutter or sitting stolidly on the kerb-stone; as usual, haggard, wrinkled, vicious faces were looking out of the dusty windows above, and an air of joylessness, weariness, and struggle hung over all. Truly has this street been named the _Via Dolorosa_. The above-named well, close by John Knox's house, is a sign of one of the standing grievances of this district of Edinburgh. It is the "water supply" of the large population living in those many-storeyed houses which give the immediate neighbourhood its picturesqueness. If it could tell the tale of one day, we should have plenty of the sensational element, but it would be the true tragedy of the real, suffering, everyday life of the poor. From six in the morning till nearly midnight, it is the centre of a throng, feminine mainly, but often essentially unwomanly in its language and manners. As a horde of thirsty pilgrims struggles for the first draught of the water of the bright oasis of the desert, so this crowd often struggles for the first turn at the tap. In its more usual condition, it is sad rather than belligerent, feeble in its scuffling, loud-voiced in its abuse. Here the weakest go to the wall. Here children carrying buckets nearly as big as themselves are sometimes known to wait from one to five hours for the water which is to wash the faces, cook the food, and quench the thirst of the family for the day. Here they wait, losing time and gaining a precocious familiarity with evil from the profanity and depravity of the talk and chaffing around them. To this well the aged widow, who struggles hard to keep up appearances, with her white mutch and neatly-pinned black shawl, totters with her pail down her dark stair of 150 steps, up the steep close, and down the street, waiting with the patience born of necessity in the heat, or rain, or snow, as the case may be, till the younger and stronger have got their "turn," and then stumbles with failing breath up her stair, the water, which is precious as that of the well of Bethlehem, spilling as she goes. At what a cost does she buy the whiteness of her mutch! Hither comes the young, weary-looking mother, having locked up her young family in her eyrie. Heavily burdened with care she looks. We may trust she forgets the perils of fire and window at home; she scuffles feebly; street brawling is a new and uncongenial thing to her, and she usually ends by losing the best part of the morning. She is slowly dropping out of her cleanly habits. Can we wonder? She thinks twice at least about scrubbing the floor, and it isn't much use to wash her children's clothes when they have no place to play in but the gutter. Here also come the small children with jugs, and hang about for a frolic, learning to curse and swear and imitate the vices of their elders, if they have not learned them before. It is a pitiful sight in the street, but followed to the homes this lack of water helps to degrade, pity for the sufferers mingles with indignant surprise that proprietors of the _best paying property_ to be found (for so the closes are) have not been compelled ere this to have at least a pipe and tap in every close. Outside the great Reformer's house is the well of pure water, difficult of access for most, nearly inaccessible at times to the feeble, the diffident, and the old. Under the same house is the whisky-shop, easy enough to reach, and the whisky all too easy to procure--only the laying down a few pence, and the fluid which makes life brighter for an hour is at the lips without waiting or scuffling. How can our sad and sorely-tempted ones escape the snare? Limited water and unlimited whisky, crowded dens and unwholesome air; we need nothing more to make a city full of drunkards. We followed this water grievance into thirty-seven houses that day, and there was scarcely one in which it was not enlarged upon. Did our eyes wander round a room ever so stealthily, its occupier was ready to forestall the glance by saying, "Ah, sirs, it's the dirt ye're looking at, but how's puir folk like us to be clean as has to haul every drop of water from that well?" Did we shrink ever so slightly from a child whose head and clothing were one mass of dirt, the movement was perceived, and the want of water, the distance from the well, and the long long stair, were the apologies offered. I merely give one instance, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely, of the distress arising from this comparatively little thought-of cause. In a wretched den on the seventh storey, none the brighter or lighter for being nearer the skies, for it had no direct light, a family, consisting of father, mother, and child of three years old, were fighting a hard battle for life. On the floor, on a straw bed, the husband had been "down with fever" for six weeks. He was wandering and murmuring incessantly, "Drink! drink!" clutching all the time at a tin pitcher by his side which contained water. He was too weak to lift it, and his wife, who expected shortly to become a mother, was helping him to it every three or four minutes. The bairn was crippled and mentally deficient, and kept crawling into the ashes, so that between it and her husband the poor woman had not a moment's rest. On a line across the room a half-washed sheet was hanging, steaming as it dried. The atmosphere in the room was poisonous. The woman said, "Ah, you are feeling the smell. Sometimes I think he'd get better if we could have things clean about us. He's got bed-sores, and you see they run a good deal, and I'm such a weak body, I can't haul water enough to wash it out of the sheets. He drinks nearly all I bring--quarts a day. He was always so fond of the water, he never tasted the whisky in his life. He's been a good husband to me; and since we've come here I can't get the water to keep him clean." In answer to inquiry, she said she had waited half an hour at the well the night before, and in coming up the long dark stair a drunk man had pushed against her and upset the whole pailful. On our expressing some sympathy, she burst into tears, sobbing out, "Oh, God only knows what it is to _slave_ after the water--it's killing me and him too, _and in the glen we came from the bonnie burn ran by the door_." In that moment, some cruel memory contrasted that foul steaming sheet, whose poisonous fumes nearly overcame the strong, with the linen washed on the grass by the burn, over which the birch and harebell trembled, and bleached afterwards by the sun to the whiteness of snow. They were evicted crofters from Perthshire, and misfortune, not drink or vice, had brought them so low. Our sanitary reforms are too late for them, for both went shortly afterwards to the land where "they shall thirst no more." Travellers have often enlarged upon the hardships suffered by the fellaheen of Egypt in carrying water for irrigating purposes. It is from the free, pure Nile they draw it at will, and over the pure alluvial soil they carry it. But this water grievance, which exists not only in the Canongate and High Street, but in the Cowgate, the Grassmarket, the West Port, and elsewhere, involves _female slavery_ in Edinburgh of the most grinding description, and consequences from which the moralist and the philanthropist may well shrink. This want of water involves not alone a slavery which in many cases knows no Sabbath, and dirt which is a help to degradation, but an absence of all arrangements for decency. Looking at this subject from a stranger's stand-point, it seems perfectly credible that the lack of all proper water supply in these crowded districts, the impossibility which it creates of preserving physical self-respect, and the evil influence on the young of the "wait" at the wells, is one among the many causes of the lapsing of the masses in Edinburgh. The subject of the water supply is beset with difficulties, but there is a possibility of grappling with and overcoming them. The matter is more closely connected with moral reform than we might think at first sight. In England we have a proverb, "Cleanliness is next to godliness," and without indorsing it fully, we may agree that physically filthy habits and moral impurity, among the poor at least, are intimately associated. _It is impossible for these people to be clean in their dwellings, clothes, or persons under present circumstances._ It is inevitable that infectious diseases of the most fatal kind must be generated and diffused. It is certain that the spirit of murmuring against God is fostered by this lack of an element which these female water-carriers suppose should be free to them as light and air. The evil is becoming worse and worse as a larger and larger population crowds into these subdivided dwellings, there, perforce almost, to fall into habits lower than those of the beasts. It is well known that drunkenness, disease, and degradation are the results of a deficient water supply. It is more difficult to estimate statistically the broken health and hearts of the female water-carriers. There is an economy of water and a most prodigal expenditure of human suffering. CHAPTER II. In the Old Town, where the population of a village or a fashionable square is constantly crammed into the six or seven storeys of one house, _room-to-room_ visitation, for it is nothing else, affords a visitor in one morning a glimpse of a state of things without a parallel. In no other city could tenements be found without gas, without water-pipes, water-closet, or sink, or temporary receptacle for ashes, and entered only by one long dark stone stair, which return such enormous profits to their owners as from 45 to 60 per cent. Scarcely elsewhere does one roof cover a population of 290, 248, 240 persons, living in dens, honeycombed out of larger rooms, without ventilation, without privacy, and often without direct light. In no other city is the respectable mechanic compelled, for want of house accommodation of a proper kind, to bring up his family in a tenement which deserves indictment as a nuisance, or to pay £5, £6, or £8 a year for a den swarming with vermin, with only a wooden partition to keep off the sights and admit all the sounds of haunts of the most degraded vice. In Edinburgh, which, in more respects than one, is set on a hill and cannot be hid, there are 13,209 families, comprising not only the vicious and abject, but large numbers of the poorer labouring class, living in houses of but one room, and of these single rooms, 1530 are inhabited by from six to fifteen persons! Further, by the last census, 120 of these _shelters_, for they are not houses, were reported as without windows, and 900 were cellars, nearly all of them dark, and many damp. _These_ figures give the astounding result that the families living in one room, and often herding together in closer proximity than animals would endure, comprehend 66,000 persons, or considerably more than one-third of the population of Edinburgh![1] The notes which follow are merely a commentary upon the above facts. My room-to-room visitation on a single day included thirty-seven families residing in a close south of the High Street and ten families in a close south of the Cowgate. I do not give the names of either, in deference to the feelings of respectable persons who are compelled by various causes to reside in them. The entrance of the close which we selected is long and narrow, and so low as to compel a man of average height to stoop. It is paved with round stones, and from the slime in which they were embedded, and from a grating on one side almost choked up with fish heads and insides, and other offal, a pungent and disgusting effluvium was emitted. The width of this close is four feet at the bottom, but the projecting storeys of the upper houses leave only a narrow strip of quiet sky to give light below. A gutter ran along one side of the close against the wall, and this, though so early in the day, was in a state of loathsomeness not to be described. Very ragged children, infinitely more ragged and dirty than those which offend our eyes in the open street, were sitting on the edge of this gutter, sitting as if they meant to sit there all day; not playing, not even quarrelling, just _stupefying_. Foul air, little light, and bad food had already done their work on most of them. Blear eyes, sore faces, and sore feet were almost universal. Their matted hair and filthy rags were full of vermin. Their faces were thin, pinched, and precocious. Many of them had been locked out in the morning when their mothers went to their hawking, washing, and other occupations, and might be locked out till midnight, or later, as we found on the following night. There they sat, letting the slow, vile stream in the gutter run over their feet, and there they were sitting three hours later. They were from three to ten years old. It is all the same if the rain or snow is falling, except that they leave the gutters to huddle together in the foul shelter of the stair-foot. Some of these will die, many will be educated into the hardened criminality of the often-imprisoned street boy, many will slide naturally into a life of shame, and a fortunate few will be sentenced to reformatories, from whence they come out decent members of society at the rate of 70 per cent. "God help them!" exclaimed a mother, so drunk that her own babe seemed in peril in her arms. Ay, God help them! But our Father which is in heaven charges the responsibility of their destiny on the respectable men and women of Edinburgh. We entered the first room by descending two steps. It seemed to be an old coal-cellar, with an earthen floor, shining in many places from damp, and from a greenish ooze which drained through the wall from a noxious collection of garbage outside, upon which a small window could have looked had it not been filled up with brown paper and rags. There was no grate, but a small fire smouldered on the floor, surrounded by heaps of ashes. The roof was unceiled, the walls were rough and broken, the only light came in from the open door, which let in unwholesome smells and sounds. No cow or horse could thrive in such a hole. It was abominable. It measured eleven feet by six feet, and the rent was 10d. per week, paid in advance. It was nearly dark at noon, even with the door open; but as my eyes became accustomed to the dimness, I saw that the plenishings consisted of an old bed, a barrel with a flagstone on the top of it for a table, a three-legged stool, and an iron pot. A very ragged girl, sorely afflicted with ophthalmia, stood among the ashes doing nothing. She had never been inside a school or church. She did not know how to do anything, but "did for her father and brother." On a heap of straw, partly covered with sacking, which was the bed in which father, son, and daughter slept, the brother, ill with rheumatism and sore legs, was lying moaning from under a heap of filthy rags. He had been a baker "over in the New Town," but seemed not very likely to recover. It looked as if the sick man had crept into his dark, damp lair, just to die of hopelessness. The father was past work, but "sometimes got an odd job to do." The sick man had supported the three. It was hard to be godly, impossible to be cleanly, impossible to be healthy in such circumstances. The next room was entered by a low, dark, impeded passage about twelve feet long, too filthy to be traversed without a light. At the extremity of this was a dark winding stair which led up to four superincumbent storeys of crowded subdivided rooms; and beyond this, to the right, a pitch-dark passage with a "room" on either side. It was not possible to believe that the most grinding greed could extort money from human beings for the tenancy of such dens as those to which this passage led. They were lairs into which a starving dog might creep to die, but nothing more. Opening a dilapidated door, we found ourselves in a recess nearly 6 feet high, and 9 feet in length by 5 in breadth. It was not absolutely dark, yet matches aided our investigations even at noon-day. There was an earthen floor full of holes, in some of which water had collected. The walls were black and rotten, and alive with wood-lice. There was no grate. The rent paid for this evil den, which was only ventilated by the chimney, is 1s. per week, or £2, 12s. annually! The occupier was a mason's labourer, with a wife and three children. He had come to Edinburgh in search of work, and could not afford a "higher rent." The wife said that her husband took the "wee drap." So would the President of the Temperance League himself if he were hidden away in such a hole. The contents of this lair on our first visit were a great heap of ashes and other refuse in one corner, some damp musty straw in another, a broken box in the third, with a battered tin pannikin upon it, and nothing else of any kind, saving two small children, nearly nude, covered with running sores, and pitiable from some eye disease. Their hair was not long, but felted into wisps, and alive with vermin. When we went in they were sitting among the ashes of an extinct fire, and blinked at the light from our matches. Here a neighbour said they sat all day, unless their mother was merciful enough to turn them into the gutter. We were there at eleven the following night, and found the mother, a decent, tidy body, at "_hame_." There was a small fire then, but no other light. She complained of little besides the darkness of the house, and said, in a tone of dull discontent, she supposed it was "as good as such as they could expect in Edinburgh." The two children we had seen before were crouching near the embers, blinking at a light we carried, and on the musty straw in the corner a third, about ten years old, was doubled up. This child had not a particle of clothing, but was partially covered with a rag of carpet. She was ill of scrofula, and the straw she lay on seemed to be considered a luxury. Three adults (including a respectable-looking grandmother) and three children slept on that unwholesome floor, in a room, be it remembered, 9 by 5, and under 6 feet high. We allow each convict 500 cubic feet of air in his cell. "We consider him as one to be washed, clothed, covered, ventilated; secularly, technically, and religiously taught, regularly exercised, and profitably employed. We do not fling him into a dark hole, even when he misbehaves himself, and we do not leave him there for years to fester in filth."--_Daily Telegraph_, April 3, 1868. This reads like a bitter satire on what we do to such families as these. On the other side of the dark passage there was a room somewhat larger, for which _a rent of 1s. 6d. per week was obtained_. This had no window or outer wall, and its sole ventilation was by means of a hole in the door. These two lairs were the worst specimens of basement-storey rooms in that close, but the rest were not much better, and their occupiers (all Scotch) were equally poor. Medical men, with that noble spirit of philanthropy which adorns the profession in Edinburgh, know these dens, and the city and parochial missionaries, wearied and discouraged, still speak to the dwellers in them of One who is mighty to save. But they have long cried to the rich, to the men and women of leisure, to the Churches, "Come over and help us." They ask people to throw aside their theories, to cease wrangling over the cause, and try a rational cure; to give the poor not what the rich and benevolent _like_, but what the poor _know they need_--and that is, houses to dwell in, not dens to rot and perish in, morally and physically. Blissful ignorance of the abyss of preventible misery which exists in Edinburgh is impossible now. There are many divers at work, and not one returns to the surface without bringing some cumulative proof of the wreck and ruin below. No person, stranger or citizen, who believes the facts can shirk an individual responsibility concerning them. If sanitary reforms and city improvement schemes come too late to save a lapsed generation of adults, kindly contact with the rich, discriminating charity, houses in which cleanliness and decency are possible, may redeem the children. It was with a little hope for them, at least, that we turned from the close that day; a _little_ hope, I say, for the dawn of the day which is to save them has not yet appeared. After the many diseased dismal infants crouching in their dark dens on the sunny day, the children of the gutters seemed almost happy, for they could see above the lofty houses a blue strip of sky, beyond which, they might have heard, dwells their Father. But hideous blasphemies all around came forth from infant lips, and of that stinted, joyless, loveless, misused childhood, if left to itself, an impure, unholy manhood and womanhood can be the only end. Did the Master declare of these, and the legion of these, "of such is the kingdom of heaven?" What then? Leaving these basement dens we entered another close, whose lofty houses, with overhanging wooden fronts, give a certain amount of picturesqueness, while they exclude light to such a degree that it is never much more than twilight below, even on a sunny day. It is said that these projecting fronts were built of wood from Boroughmuir, presented by a devout King wherewith to provide oratories for the inhabitants of this close--so that every one of them might be in circumstances to obey the command, "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret." If the tradition be true, it renders the use to which these oratories are now applied, and the condition of the occupants of these dwellings, more sad and revolting by contrast. Though the light in the close was little better than twilight, several women were standing outside the houses mending and patching. They said they could not see to do a stitch indoors. There were many children sitting in the gutters, very dirty, ragged, and sore-eyed. These, the women said, were the children of parents too poor to provide them with clothes fit to go into the street. Out of sixty-two children of families visited in this close, twenty only are reported as attending school. This statement, probably, is above the real number, as among the thirty-two families visited by myself, there was only one child reported as attending school. So these children, who don't go to school, and are too ragged to be sent to disport themselves in the street, spend their time between their crowded dens upstairs and the narrow, filthy close--for filthy it was, even at midday, although it was paved, and the scavengers had not finished their work more than five hours before. These children have never known cleanliness or decency. The happiness which comes from chasing butterflies, rooting up pig-nuts, and making daisy wreaths, has never come their way; or even the less Arcadian jollities of trundling hoops, playing at marbles, and making dirt-pies, in which city children delight themselves elsewhere. But these are "cribbed, cabined, and confined" by the high black walls, and, as a mother said, "they are learning the devil's lessons well." It is no exaggeration to add that many of them are as absolutely ignorant of _love_ as they are of cleanliness, decency, and happiness. Locked out into the cold or wet, scantily clad, meanly fed, kicked about in the morning, kicked about at night, cursed instead of kissed, utterly neglected in body and soul, they grow up attaching no meaning whatever to the words _love_ and _home_. The wynds and closes are swarming with them, the ragged and industrial schools, when they get hold of them, are fain to withdraw them by night as well as by day from what in mockery are called their homes, if they are to do anything with them. As long as these are suffered to be born and reared in _dens_, so long must we build prisons, reformatories, and Magdalene asylums to teach them, at enormous cost, the decencies they have never known. In going through this close, and several of the poorer districts, I have become aware that a very large number of the parents of these forlorn infants are literally and consciously "_lapsed_." By their willing and frequently regretful admission they were "well-doing before they came to Edinburgh," or they were once better off in Edinburgh, and "have come down in the world;" they were Church members, and had the friendly recognition of ministers and elders; they "paid their way," etc. etc. From one and all of these they have "lapsed," some by drink, others by misfortune; and this was the case with a large proportion of the inhabitants of this "land," in whose deep wretchedness and degradation they are wallowing, and on whose threshold the reader is being detained. But be it solemnly remembered, the children who "are learning the devil's lessons" in the gutter _start not from the platform of well-doing_ from which many of the parents fell, _but from the platform of vice, intemperance, godlessness, recklessness, and filth to which the parents have fallen_. Of such as these, one who claims a hearing for their woes and their helplessness (Dr. Guthrie), writes--"I know the lapsed and wretched classes well. I believe if I was as poor as they I should be as deceitful. Circumstances make people what they are much more than many suppose. There is not a wretched child in this town but if my children had been born and bred up in its unhappy circumstances they might have been as bad." The smell of this close was intolerable. How can it be otherwise when all the solid and liquid refuse which has been accumulating in the densely packed habitations during the day, lies in the narrow close from ten at night, in such quantities that the scavengers not unfrequently remove nearly a ton of it at seven in the morning, and the ground and the foundations of the houses are saturated with the liquid refuse and drainage?[2] I only give a sketch of the general conformation and circumstances of the lands in this close, premising that the description--often very much darkened in tint, however--applies to a majority of the Old Town abodes which, in Edinburgh, are considered good property, and fit for the stowage of human beings, in Murdoch's Close, Hume's Close, Skinner's Close, Hyndford's Close, South Foulis' Close, Cant's Close, Blackfriars Wynd, Todrick's Wynd, Plainstone Close, Campbell's Close, Brown's Close, etc., to which citizens who take an interest in this painful subject can add various other closes on both sides of the High Street and Canongate, many stairs in the Cowgate, and various entries and closes in the Grassmarket and West Port. It is supposed that not fewer than 40,000 people live in habitations not superior to, and often much inferior to, the lands hereafter described. The entrance to the first "land" visited was by a very long, narrow, winding stair, with steps so worn as to be unsafe. The stair was as dark by day as by night until near the top, and there was nothing to assist an unsteady walker in his ascent or descent. The wall was broken, and, as we found on striking a light, the cracks swarmed with bugs and other vermin, as, indeed, does every fissure and cranny of the dilapidated tenements above. We had not gone far before the stench which assailed us was worse than that from the worst-kept pigstye, and we found the state of the stair too disgusting for description. It is disgraceful, degrading, shameful; and who is to blame? A stranger at once supposes that it is due partly to the filthy habits of the people, and also to the crime of the landlords in not lighting the stairs. This last is a criminal act as regards cleanliness, morals, and safety, and its continuance ought not to be permitted for another month. The regulation concerning the cleaning of stairs cannot be carried out in the dark, even if the people had brooms, which most of them have not, and if they had a "spigot" in the close instead of having to haul every drop of water from a public well at some distance. There is an infinite injustice and degradation in such a mode of access and egress for frail old age, and infancy scarcely less frail, for females heavily laden with water or refuse-buckets, for young girls, and for men savagely or boisterously drunk, in many cases for a population over 200. On each landing there was a passage branching into several smaller ones, very much like the galleries in a coal-pit, burrowing in and out among endlessly subdivided rooms, measuring from 18 feet by 10 feet to 9 feet by 5 feet, separated by skeleton partitions filled up with plaster, through which any man can put his foot. In this case the long passage was _outside_ the congeries of habitations, and was lighted on two floors by the windows of the recesses before alluded to as having been the oratories of past generations. They had served the greed of late proprietors, for a great number of the rooms partitioned off from the passage were dimly lighted by windows looking upon it. Ventilated they could not be, for the smell in this passage was poisonous. Nothing shows more forcibly the lapsing of houses, as well as of human beings, than the fact that these recesses, once prized as places for prayer, are now highly valued for another purpose, being receptacles during the day for multitudes of battered pails, containing the ashes and refuse hourly accumulating in the rooms. Those persons consider themselves well off who have any such public recesses or corners which can be used for this purpose. In general, in these tenements, the inhabitants are compelled to keep the pail and "backet," containing the unwholesome accumulations of the day, under the bed, if there be one, and, failing that, in any corner, from seven in the morning till ten at night. In large young families, and in sickness and old age, the result may be imagined, when these accumulations of refuse of all descriptions are shut up in rooms without ventilation, along with the steam of half-washed clothes, in air contaminated by the respiration of several persons. In this land the average size of the rooms is 12 feet by 7 feet. If, on the one hand, drink brings people into these abodes, on the other, the foul, vile, depressing air, joined to the want of light and water, drives them in thousands to the dram-shop. There was scarcely a woman whose face did not testify, by its depression, yellowness, and emaciation, to the air she is compelled to breathe by day and night. Besides that the absence of temporary receptacles for refuse is utterly disgusting and injurious to health, it inflicts sore toil on the women, who are more than sufficiently burdened with drawing water from the public wells. It is not a small thing for the mother of a family, or a frail old wife, to come down the dark filthy stair late at night with the "ashbacket," even if there be a window half-way down from which she may discharge the contents on the pavement below. All along the passages there were thin partitions stuffed with rags, where the plaster had fallen out, or had been kicked through in some drunken frenzy--doors so broken all round that privacy even from the gaze of passing strangers is impossible--a roof, in part, nothing better than old boards, strengthened with pieces of iron and tin, which, like everything else here, had "seen better days"--floors rotten--so rotten as to require big stones to fill up holes larger than a man's head--windows with hardly any glass left in them--wind and rain coming in in many places--the whole pile apparently little more than just holding together by sheer force of habit, utterly unfit for human habitation _as it is_--a disgrace which public opinion ought to be strong enough to condemn. But it is one of a legion of similar disgraces; it is a lucrative sin, a paying shame; in politer language, it is "a good investment!" Ay, a good investment! For these cabins, which, by a pernicious fiction, are called "houses," are rack-rented at from £2, 10s. to £5 each, and pay the _fortunate_ proprietors from 40 to 60 per cent. Here are "vested interests" with a vengeance! CHAPTER III. This rickety "land" is not by any means in one of the worst closes in Edinburgh. It is not a haunt of the criminal classes. Vice and virtue live side by side, though the virtuous are in a miserable minority, and their children are in grievous peril of vice. I was given to understand, by those well acquainted with the city, that it was a good representative specimen of an average "land" in a High Street close. On that and another occasion we visited thirty-two families, going by room-row. I propose to give the circumstances of a few families, taken after this fashion. All the rooms were in themselves wretched, few more than half-lighted, scarcely any capable of ventilation, some on the second-floor requiring candles at mid-day, floors and partitions in a shameful condition, the former in many instances containing holes as big as a man's head, stuffed with stones; the latter very thin and dilapidated, mended with rags, bits of canvas, tin, and paper. The doors were usually made of odds and ends of old boards, so rudely put together that in some rooms the people had nailed canvas over them to prevent strangers from looking in. The windows were nearly all bad, and patched with brown paper; no gas or water. The landlord had never repaired anything within the memory of the "oldest inhabitant." Among all the people visited the complaints were the same--rapacious landlords charging from £2, 10s. to £5; no repairs executed; borrowed light, involving an addition to the rent in the shape of 1s. per week for candles; want of privacy; distance of water supply; dark stairs; increasing subdivision of rooms, involving, in some cases, the intense hardship of a right of way through the outer room. It is due to all these people to say, that while they readily answered all our questions, they never begged of us, or even hinted that charity would be acceptable. It is due to some of them also to say, that their attempts to keep their wretched dwellings clean were most praiseworthy. First room, 11 feet by 5 feet. A box-bed took up a third of it. No grate; fire burning on a stone. The furniture consisted of the bed, a table with three legs, and a "creepie." The room had direct light from a small patched window, which was not made to open. The walls were broken, and almost to pieces. There was a hole in the floor filled up with a large stone. The occupier, a mason's labourer, was out seeking work, and his wife was at the well. These two adults and five children between three and fourteen years old slept on the floor, the eldest child said. "But don't your father and mother sleep on the bed?" we asked. "No, they can't for the bugs; we just lies on the floor, all of a heap." "In your clothes?" "No; we takes them off." "Do you put anything on?" "No; we's just naked." Truly, they had nothing to put on if they did succeed in getting out of the wonderful aggregation of rags which hung on to them. For there were no blankets, or any covering but an old piece of carpet. The rent was £3, 10s. a year. The girl who made this frank revelation was extremely pretty and intelligent. Her young brother and sisters were beautiful, but absolutely filthy; their arms and legs were covered with sores, and their matted hair alive with vermin. The father was the only one of the family who could read. The girl said that her father's leg had gone through the floor up to the knee, and then they put the stone in the hole. From this account it appears that, after deducting the space occupied by the bed, seven individuals huddle together all of a heap in an area 6 feet by 5 feet. The room was damp and draughty. The next room was 18 feet by 10 feet; shamefully out of repair, the wooden partition falling to pieces. Some of the holes in it were carefully patched with paper, but the neighbours constantly tear this off to look in. One of the so-called panels of the door had been kicked in by a drunken man; the landlord would not repair it, so the occupant had nailed a piece of canvas over it. The window-glass was mostly gone, and though the window had originally been made to open, the sash was too rotten to be touched. The floor was in holes in several places. The rain came in along one wall. The rent is £4. The family consisted of an elderly father and mother, and two sons, plumbers. The father and eldest son had been out of work for some time, and the youngest was only getting better from a fever. They were very reticent about their circumstances, but we gathered that two daughters in service were supporting them. Both father and mother were rheumatic from the damp of the house, they said. There were two beds, but they "can't sleep on either,--alive with bugs from the walls," so take refuge on the floor. The woman pulled aside a patch of canvas, and showed the wall swarming with these pests. They had taken every means of destroying them, but in vain. The room was scrupulously clean. The next measured 11 feet by 5, and 6 feet at the highest part. A single pane of glass in a corner under the roof let in as much light as made objects discernible. The plenishings consisted of a filthy straw bed, a bit of carpet, and an iron pot. The floor was almost covered with cinders, and mended in three places with stones. The room was loathsome, the smell overpowering, the look of abject and uncared-for misery sickening. The occupants were a widow, a cinder-picker, and her two children, very poor. The children were "learning the devil's lessons" in the close below. A neighbour told us that the mother often locks them into the room from five o'clock in the morning till ten or eleven at night. The rent is £2, 12s. The next room was a house of ill-fame, with seven occupants, very disorderly, and much complained of by the neighbours on each side, who were separated from it only by a wretched partition. The next room was almost dark; 11 feet by 5 feet; rent, 1s. per week. Its sole occupant was a frightful-looking hag, apparently more than seventy years old, a mass of rags and filth, with an uncovered hoary head, whose long locks were tangled with neglect and dirt. She was sleeping off the effects of a drunken debauch on some old straw, but woke up sufficiently to mutter a curse, and glower upon us a moment with her bloodshot eyes. She had received the parish allowance the day before, and this was the result--a whisky-bottle, without a cork, but not quite empty, was lying beside her. There was no other sign of human habitation, and in the wretched object lying on the straw we could hardly recognise humanity. Our next visit was of a different kind. Reaching the topmost floor, we came upon a passage, very dilapidated, but lighted by a large projecting window. A very respectable artisan was lime-washing the passage, the roof, and the top of the stair. He said it was the best he could do, and he did it once a fortnight. He had two rooms, only one of which had direct light. They were like all the rest, in utter disrepair. He leant against the outer partition, which swerved considerably from the perpendicular as he did so, and said, "The weight of two men would bring it down." He came to a situation in Edinburgh, has good wages, and could meet with nothing better than this at the term. The rent is £9 a year. He gave a revolting account of the immorality of the stair. He had three young children, he said; if he couldn't get into a decent neighbourhood he'd rather see them in their graves than grow up there. "What can I hope for my bairns," he added, "when they can't get a breath of fresh air without seeing such as yon?" Looking out, we saw in a window, not a pistol-shot off, three debased women, sitting in the broad daylight, absolutely nude, as far as we could see of them. The worthy citizens who were with me blushed for the city called so fair, in which an honest artisan, with money in his pocket, was compelled to shelter his family where all sights and sounds were polluting, feeling, as he did, the abhorrent shame. The top of the stair was much broken, and destitute of any protection. A fall would have been into about forty feet of darkness. On our alluding to this as a great peril for the young children, the man said, with a bitter smile, "Bairns reared in such places are like lambs born among precipices--they early learn to take care of themselves." This is true, or the juvenile population of these closes would be decimated. Of the sad sights we saw that morning, that was about the saddest--the honest man and his shame, and the helplessness of his circumstances. It was enough to make even "polite indifference" put forth some redeeming effort. First room on fifth floor, 12 by 14 feet. Rent £2, 10s. Very cold; roof out of repair, and admitting rain; the partitions much broken. The occupiers were a very decent-looking man, seventy-six years old, by trade a shoemaker, his wife, aged seventy-three, and a dumb grandson, who was mending a shoe on the stool on which his grandfather "had sat for sixty-two years." They had parish relief. The woman had been in bed twelve months with paralysis, and suffered much from being removed. The dirt and vermin were perfectly awful. She was a miserable object; apparently she had no bed-gown, and her skeleton chest and ribs, which were exposed to view, might have served as a model for death. Both she and her husband had the speech and air of having seen better days. They had lived in this attic for twenty years, and had had typhus fever twice during the last ten. The rent had been raised £1 during the same period. They had five children, scattered in Australia and America, but letters addressed to them were returned with the notice "Not found." They seemed very poor, but made no complaint of anything but the wretched condition of the room, the cold and damp, the want of privacy, and the distance from which the old man had to bring the water up the long dark stair. The room was clean, with the exception of the bed, but the cracks in the partitions there, as everywhere else, were "alive with bugs." The old man _said_ he was a church-member, and paid 2s. 6d. a year for a seat at a U.P. church. This was their own account of themselves, and the general appearance of things bore it out. Such are the cases in which much may be done, by systematic visitation, in the way of arresting a downward course. These people are now in the Poor-house, the dram-shop having proved too much for the old man. Next room, 8 feet by 9 feet. A most wretched place, only fit to be pulled down; borrowed light. A joiner, in very bad health, and consequently out of work for two years, with his wife and four children, and a daughter by a former marriage, with an illegitimate child, were the occupants. The wife and grown-up daughter earn 7s. 6d. per week by washing. The rent is £2 a year. A most miserable family, utterly gone to wreck. Next room.--A blind labourer, very frail, with a wife, who supports the family and four children. After an illness, were ordered into the Poor-house, then out again, and were quite broken up by it. This room was wretched in every respect--9 feet by 10 feet, very low, and rented at £2. In the next room there was a very sad case--a compositor, with a wife and two children, living in a room, requiring a candle at mid-day, 12 feet by 8 feet; roof mended with tin, letting in the rain; floor broken and mended with stones, so rotten that a walking-stick went through it in two places. The man's joints were stiff with rheumatism, caught in the damp cold of the room. Work had slackened, and after having had a good room in Carrubbers Close, they had come here. The man had had no work for a long time, and they had pledged everything, till they had only "the clothes they stood in." They had had good furniture, but it "was all gone to keep life in them." They spoke of their poverty very reluctantly, and very warmly of the kindness of the missionary. Both man and wife were steady. Her earnings supported them; but she was expecting her confinement shortly. The next room was 14 feet by 8 feet, and the remains of a cornice held on to the outer wall. The side walls were skeleton partitions, dilapidated and swarming with bugs. There were three doors. The occupant was a fish-hawker, an Irishwoman--cheery and self-asserting, voluble as to herself and her neighbours. Had she been of smaller size and milder tongue the hardship of which she complained would have had more pathos about it; but even as it is, a more infamous injustice could scarcely be perpetrated by the proprietors of these ruinous fabrics: her room had been subdivided since she came; she continued to pay the old rent--£4. The occupants of the inner room were a man and woman, with two lodgers, apparently of most irregular habits, who came through her room with a passkey, drunk and sober, at all hours of day and night. This is one of eleven instances of passage-rooms that I have seen in Edinburgh. In the Cowgate this infamous system flourishes, and occasionally to such an extent that the outer room is the only mode of ingress and egress for three or four others. The insult and hardship this plan entails upon the virtuous, and the facilities for immorality that it affords to the vicious cannot be recited here. Outside this woman's room there was a perfect labyrinth of passages, all dark, but on opening a door we entered a room 12 feet square, with direct light, but with rotten partitions, like all the rest, and so pervious to sound that we heard every word of a narrative of our visit which the "decent widder" before mentioned was giving to an incomer. This room was miserable. Ashes, the accumulation of days, heaped the floor round the fire. There was no other furniture than a bedstead with a straw mattress upon it, a table, and a stool; but it was the occupants, rather than the apparent poverty, who claimed our attention. A girl about eighteen, very poorly dressed, was sitting on the stool; two others, older and very much undressed, were sitting on the floor, and the three were eating, in most swinish fashion, out of a large black pot containing fish. I have shared a similar meal, in a similar primitive fashion, in an Indian wigwam in the Hudson's Bay Territory, but there the women who worshipped the Great Spirit were modest in their dress and manner, and looked _human_, which these "Christian" young women did not. An infant of about a month old, perfect in its beauty, and smiling in its sleep, "as though heaven lay about it," was on the bed, not dressed, but partly covered with a rug. What better could be desired for it than that the angels might take it speedily away from that shameful birth-chamber to behold its Father's face in heaven? Easier by far to trust it in death to His mercy, than in life to the zeal of the Christianity of Edinburgh. Death for these is better than life; and, in many cases, drugs and neglect soon bring it about. "Where are you from?" one of my philanthropic companions asked of the girl of eighteen, the mother. "Dundee; mother and I came here five weeks ago. I was a mill-worker." "Will the father of your child marry you?" "No, sir." "Have you got work here?" "No, sir; I can't get any." "What are you going to do, then?" "I suppose I must do as the others." She gave this answer without shame, and without effrontery. An upbringing in a Dundee "pend" had not acquainted her with shame as an attendant upon sin. Alas for the hundreds of girl-children growing up among the debasing circumstances of the crowded "lands" of our wynds and closes, without even the instincts of virtue! The next room, though miserable in itself, was clean and well furnished, with pictures hanging upon the partitions. A mother and daughter, both widows, but earning a good living by needlework, were the occupants. They complained bitterly of the gross viciousness of the stair, and of the "awful riot" kept up all night by those newcomers. They told us that the wretched old hag who had come from Dundee had five female lodgers, with only two gowns among them all, and that they were of the poorest and most degraded class. These respectable widows, both elderly women, had lived in that room for seven years, and in the main had had quiet neighbours. They now found themselves in this close proximity to a den of vice, unable to exclude the sounds which came through the thin partition, and too terrified at night by the drinking and uproar to be able to sleep. The term was lately passed, so they were compelled to bear it. A few sentences more will take us through the remaining rooms on the two floors we are investigating. There follow a widow, who binds shoes, with two children, sleeping in a large bed in a room 11 feet by 9 feet, with a small window, letting in air too impure to breathe; rent, £2, 12s. A widow, with a brother seventy-two years old, poor, but clean, chiefly dependent on a daughter in service. A mason's labourer, who once farmed six acres of land, now earns 12s. per week; wife with bad eyes, and health too delicate for work, having fretted herself into decline for two children who had died of the cholera; room, 12 feet by 8 feet, rented at 1s. 2d. per week. Three adults and six children in a room 12 feet by 10 feet, without direct light. Drunken labourer, earning 15s. per week--two sons in prison; two daughters living with him, with three illegitimate children; room, 14 feet by 15 feet; rent, £3, 18s. a year. Pauper widow, with one child and two unregistered lodgers. Married labourer, with two children, earning 15s. per week; three lodgers (prostitutes) in the same room, 14 feet by 12 feet; rent, £3, 18s.; borrowed light; no furniture; all drunken together. Then follow five families, all wretched; and we have completed our room-to-room visitation of two floors in an average land in an average close in the High Street. As seen thus, in broad daylight, except for the filth, dilapidation, vermin, darkness, and poverty, combined with the suggestions of immoral conduct on the part of most of the people, there was nothing peculiarly startling to any one at all acquainted with the Old Town of Edinburgh. I have taken this particular close, for the especial reason that what is said of it and its inhabitants applies to dwellings and circumstances in which possibly 40,000 people pass their days. I have given the impression made by it upon a stranger, in preference to depicting entries in a part of the town with which I am well acquainted, and which, in many of their aspects, are far worse. There are cellar-dwellings, damp and dark, old byres with open drains still running through them, let for human beings; garrets, damp and draughty, in which a man can scarcely stand upright; and cabins, of which stairs, roofs, and walls are mainly of wood. There are rooms as small as any I have mentioned, occupied by one, two, and three families, only reached by passage-rooms as small and crowded as themselves; and in these dens the whole round of human life goes on--agonies of birth and death, miseries of sickness and sorrow, marriage jollifications, funeral revels, the cold remains of mortality lying on the same straw with the living; the miserable meal on the table, the unshrouded corpse on the floor. Are such woes as these, such absolute savage degradation, the inevitable deposit of the highest Christian civilisation? Is there, indeed, no balm in Gilead--is there no physician there? Is it the curse of God's indignation, or the curse of man's selfishness, avarice, and neglect, under which those thousands are lying? Is this the "good ground" on which the gospel seed is to spring up and bear fruit one hundredfold? Are the rich and godly to send missionaries and Bible-women among these masses, and save their own souls by giving the necessary funds? Shall they not rather go down themselves among the lost, as Christ went, and learn their needs, and find from themselves that foremost among these are decent dwellings in which it might be possible to live and die otherwise than as swine. We might then hear less of money lying at two per cent. in the banks, or lost in insolvent railroads, and more of 8, 10, and 12 per cent. as a certain return. Talk of the risk of house property! Is it greater than the risks people have contentedly run for years in railroads, mines, and cotton? Possibly every £100 spent on improving the dwellings of the poor might do something towards accumulating a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, or moth corrupteth. The walls of the Old Town houses are generally strong. Such a "land" as that which I have described, gutted from cellar to roof, and supplied with water, gas, and a temporary receptacle for rubbish, would make a good substantial house at a comparatively small cost, with a certain return of from 8 to 10 per cent. The removal of the subdividing partitions, new floors, doors, and windows would be a necessity. The good result of such an undertaking in every close and wynd would not be only the placing of sixteen or eighteen families in a position in which, if they were so minded, they could be moral and religious, but the insertion of a _wedge_ into this hardened stratum of viciousness and poverty. The bad could not be so bad in close proximity to the virtuous. The filthy would aspire to be something better. The landlords, the hardest class of all to deal with, would be compelled, by competition and opinion, to amend their property and their ways. Decent houses in St. Bernard's or St. Leonard's have no more influence over the manners and morals of Hume's Close or Todrick's Wynd than decent houses in Moray Place or Chester Street; but decent lands put down in Cant's Close or Skinner's Close, with rooms rented from £2, 10s. to £4, would do a better work of reformation around them than all the agencies which are at work. It is only necessary to refer to the complete renovation of Warden's Close, Grassmarket, by Dr. Foulis, as a proof of what is to be done by energetic individual action. The restored fabric, as arranged for _human beings_, pays 14 per cent. Of course, the still greater overcrowding of other dens during the renovation of even one "land" requires to be carefully provided against. It has been frequently stated that a third of the inhabitants of Edinburgh are not in connexion with any Christian Church. In the thirty-two families visited in ---- Close, two women were the only persons who professed to attend any place of worship. In another small close which we visited none but a Catholic family professed to attend any church. Eight years ago, in two populous stairs in another part of the town with which I was well acquainted, there was a total of nine persons attending church out of an adult population of forty. At the present time this number is reduced to one woman, who, "when she goes anywhere, goes to Lady Yester's." Of the thirty-two families before spoken of, most of the women and some of the men had formerly been church-goers. Where is this "lapsing" to end? CHAPTER IV. I have given the aspect of the houses and population of a particular district by daylight, avoiding all sensational details. The "night side" of the same is well known from description--the High Street filled with a densely compacted, loitering, brawling, buying, selling, singing, cursing, quarrelsome crowd--every fifth man and woman the worse for drink so early as ten at night--a nocturnal market vigorously proceeds under difficulties--men and women puff their wares with stentorian tones and coarse wit--barrows with flaring lights, from which the poorest of the poor are buying the unwholesome refuse of the shops, stale fish, and stale vegetables--boys vending laces, nuts, whistles--women hawking tin and crockery ware, all eager, pushing, poor. Add to these, the exhibitors of penny-shows and penny cheats, the singers of low and improper songs, the vendors of popular melodies and penny narrations of crime, and an idea may be formed of the noisy traffic of the High Street. As the night goes on, the crowd becomes more drunk and criminal until the legal hour of closing the spirit-shops, when hundreds of pallid, ragged wretches are vomited forth upon the street to carry terrors into their dark, crowded homes. The majority are half-mad, and almost wholly desperate. Men and women, savage with drink, are biting, scratching, mauling each other; the air is laden with blasphemies, brutal shouts from the strong; cries from the weak; blows are dealt aimlessly; infants at midnight cry in the wet street for mothers drunk in the gutters or police cells; young girls and boys are locked out for the night by parents frantic with drink, viragos storm, policemen here and there drag an offender out of the crowd amidst the chaffing and coarse laughter of young girls bearing the outward marks of a life of degradation; mothers with infants in their arms lie helpless in the gutters, to be trundled off to the final ignominy of the police cell, wretches scarcely clothed, whom the daylight knows not, slink stealthily to some foul cellar lair,--and all this, and worse than this, from the Tron down the Canongate, and along the Cowgate, and in the Grassmarket, and in numbers of the lanes and alleys, broad and narrow, which border upon them. The district we visited by day we visited also by night, to find that at 11 P.M. the whole population of the lands previously described was astir, mostly from evil, partly from the impossibility of quiet; that small children were still out among the influences of the closes and the street, and that there was no sign that the night had come, except the darkness and the increased overcrowding of many of the rooms. The dark, narrow passages were in several places almost impassable, owing to the dead-drunk men who lay across them; the rooms were thronged and stifling, and sick and well, drunk and sober, vicious and virtuous, were all huddled together with only a pretence of separation. Whole families were sitting in the dark, or cowering round fires which only rendered the darkness visible. "A horror of great darkness" rested on all the houses. The noise was hideous. Decent people might well be afraid of going to bed. Half the inmates were under the influence of drink. Drunkards tumbled up the long dark stairs, and reeled down the dark passages, with shouts and imprecations, destitute even of the instinct which teaches a wild beast the way to its own den. Sounds of brawling, fighting, and revelry came from many of the rooms. Here a drunkard was kicking through the panels of a neighbour's door; there two dead-drunk women lay on a heap of straw; here a half-tipsy virago protested to us, with the air of a tragedy queen, that she "took in none but respectable lodgers;" there a man mad with drink tore his wife's throat with his nails. One room presented a scene of disgusting revelry and vice. In the next a feeble woman was stilling the moans of a dying child. "And that day was the preparation." It was the Edinburgh Saturday night, and over the din and discord of city sins, and over the wail of city sorrows, came the sweet sound of St. Giles's bells announcing that the Sabbath had begun. Of that Saturday night in Edinburgh the Rev. R. Maguire, rector of Clerkenwell, who was one of our party, writes, in the _Church of England Temperance Magazine_--"We can but say that all we saw that night has left upon our mind the painful feeling, that of all the dark and desolate places of the earth the Old Town is about the darkest and the most desolate." He adds, in the same paper, after a description of some of the dwellings in Hume's Close--"We can scarcely feel surprised to know that the condition of these thousands is far past all hope." Clerkenwell itself, Whitechapel, and Lambeth can furnish enough of misery and crime, but it is not believed that any city in Europe contains an area of wretchedness so large and unbroken as Edinburgh. In other cities the miserable dwellings and their inhabitants hide themselves out of sight in obscure purlieus, scarcely known to the rich by name, much less by observation. Here the very core of all is the High Street of the city, with a royal palace at one end and a royal castle at the other, and studded down the whole of its picturesque length with public buildings. Here are the Courts of Law, the Parliament House, the City Chambers, the Assembly Halls of the Established and Free Churches, the Cathedral, numerous places of worship, some of which at least are, or were, fashionable, newspaper offices, printing establishments, and one of the most frequented shops in the city, the wholesale and retail establishment of Duncan M'Laren and Son. Thus, instead of being hidden away, the wretchedness and vice of the High Street and Canongate obtrude themselves on all passers-by, from the representative of royalty who in semi-regal state passes up and down the whole extent of this _Via Dolorosa_, several times annually, to the summer swarm of tourists from all parts of the world, who return to their own cities rejoicing that they are not as the metropolis of Scotland. But it is not from such casual visitors that the amelioration of the condition of the poor is to be expected--not on them that the responsibility rests. It is on the gentlemen who cross the High Street daily to lounge in the Parliament House, on the _literati_ who frequent one of the finest libraries in Britain, on the antiquarians who explore the wynds and closes in search of an ancient inscription or a remnant of a cornice, on the hundreds, both of ladies and gentlemen, whose avocations continually carry them to the various public offices in the High Street, on all who see and all who hear. Can it be that the feelings of all these are blunted by familiarity with sights which shock a stranger; or that the upper classes in Edinburgh are steeped in an unwholesome indifferentism; or that the Christianity of the city is waxing feeble and old? Without admitting one or all of these defects, it is difficult to account for the extreme complacency with which the majority of the upper classes are acting out the creed, "Forget the painful, suppress the disagreeable, banish the ugly;" content to add luxury to luxury, and to throw away money on ill-considered alms, while the poor are perishing from neglect. It is difficult to comprehend such intense apathy, after all that has been written by the daily press, private individuals, and lastly by the "Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor," to show the thinly-crusted abyss over which people are disporting themselves. It might have been supposed that when facts similar to those stated in these Notes have been reiterated from various quarters, so that no adult in Edinburgh can plead ignorance concerning the state of the poor, that the appeal for visitors made by the Society aforesaid would have met a tremendous and immediate response, and that the gentlemen of Edinburgh would have come forward, as those of other and busier cities have done, to offer willing aid. If there be another thing more mournful than the poverty and immorality of the poor, it is the vicious selfishness of the rich. It is observable in Edinburgh, as well as elsewhere, that the upper classes indulge very freely in the expression of opinion on the "dirt, vice, and improvidence of the poor," but the lapsed masses of the Old Town have a "public opinion" also regarding the selfishness, heartlessness, and indifference of the rich, and express it without much reticence of phraseology. Indeed, it is doubtful whether there is a man or woman who looks across the green ravine which separates the Old Town from the New, who has not a very decided opinion, right or wrong, that the negative and positive delinquencies of the best-instructed class have a great deal to do with the lapsing of the masses in this city. Almost the first steps have yet to be taken towards removing this baneful hostility of class, and promoting a healthy feeling on each side. In "house-to-house visitation" in Edinburgh, I have observed with much surprise that among 145 families visited 143 were _Scotch_. In almost the whole of these the influence of a decent upbringing, and the restraints which connexion with a church imposes, had been thrown away, and the people, utterly debased and pauperized, had not a rag of Scottish pride left. It appears from all that can be observed that the mere existence of these unbroken masses of poverty, overcrowding, and vice, has a tendency to _denationalize_ the people, and to produce a population which shall be absolutely barren of those virtues which have been considered peculiarly Scotch--a population, in fact, knowing nothing of truthfulness, modesty, reverence for parents and old age, independence, Sabbath observance, and thrift. These masses, which are sinking lower and lower, in spite of existing agencies, have little to distinguish them from the "dangerous classes" of London, Paris, or New York, except that they are more drunken and dirty. Their mere existence, to say nothing of their increase, is sapping the foundations of "Scottish nationality." Another thing which impresses a stranger is a peculiar habit of speech common to nearly all these people, and is possibly nearly the only relic of their more religious days. "God-forgotten" was the phrase they nearly all used, an expression which gives occasion to the question, "Have Christians, who are the representatives of God upon earth, misrepresented Him to these people by their neglect?" A grudge against God, an idea as if He were the author of evil and not good to them, seemed general. Many of the phrases used showed a sort of reckless belief, which, under the circumstances, was worse than unbelief. Coming down a long dark stair late at night, from an overcrowded land, a frightful hag clutched my arm with her skinny hand, and hissed into my ear, "_Is it God's elect you are seeking here? It's the devil's elect you'll find_," laughing fiendishly at her own wit. "So this is Blackfriars Wynd," remarked one of our party, as we passed down the crowded alley. "_No, it's hell's mouth_," exclaimed a forlorn woman, who was dragging a drunken man to his joyless home. "Do you think the missionary would dare to mock me by telling me of God's love? Could he have the face to do it _here_?" a poor woman exclaimed, whose three fatherless children lay ill on some straw, which served for a bed in a cellar, of which it and a kettle were the only "furniture." It is one thing to hear unpleasant facts stated by unwelcome speakers, or to meet with them fossilized in statistical tables, but altogether another to confront them in beings clothed in kindred flesh and blood, in men, women, and children claiming a common Fatherhood, and asserting their right to be heard. These our brethren, haggard, hopeless, hardened, vicious, on whose faces sin has graved deeper lines than either sorrow or poverty; this old age which is not venerable, this infancy which is not loveable, these childish faces, or faces which should have been childish, peering from amidst elvish locks, and telling of a precocious familiarity with sin,--these glowering upon us from the tottering West Bow, with its patched and dirty windows, from the still picturesque Lawnmarket, from the many-storeyed houses of the High Street,--these are spectres not easily to be laid to rest, and "polite society," which has become perfect in the polite art of indifference, must encounter them, sooner or later, in one way or another. Surely it is possible to raise these our brethren, who are living and dying like brutes, to a platform on which the gospel of Him who came to preach glad tidings to the poor would not be met by nearly insuperable obstacles. Though more wretches have been pulled out of the mire by mission churches than by any other agency, the masses are "lapsed," "gone under," sunk on the whole to lower depths than the ministerial plummet can sound, and the ministers, most of whom are hampered by the existing necessities of large congregations, are not _directly_ responsible for a condition of things which is a disgrace to Scottish Christianity. My own experience leads me to believe that these lapsed masses must be raised out of the "Slough of Despond" before they can hear or see; that these miserable thousands must have at least as much light, air, and space as we give our brutes, before a ministerial visit can be aught but a mockery,--before they can rise to manhood and womanhood in Christ. The ministers are not to be altogether blamed for failing to carry the tidings of peace to those who are too deaf, from drink and demoralization, to hear them. Condemn them if they fail to thunder into ears scarcely less dull, that the blood of those who are going down alive into the pit will be required of a church-membership which is bound to aim at no lesser measure of devotion than His who laid down His life for the brethren. Let them demand the lives of these godless ones from the respectable who enjoy the Sabbath luxury of sermons; let them declare a crusade against the Christlessness and apathy of those who sit at ease at communion-tables, content to leave those to the outer darkness for whom that same body and blood were broken and shed, and they will be guiltless. It was by a life of sacrifice and a death of shame that the redemption of this world was wrought; and it is by a life of sacrifice alone--if loving search after the lost, if personal sympathy with the wretched, if stooping to raise and aid the poor are to be called sacrifice--that the Master's steps can be followed and His work on the earth be completed. I. L. B. EDINBURGH: T. CONSTABLE, PRINTER TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY. FOOTNOTES: [1] Report on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Edinburgh, 1868, p. 19. [2] Report on the Condition of the Poorer Classes of Edinburgh, 1868, p. 49. Now ready, Sixth Edition, in One Vol., Extra Foolscap 8vo, 7s. 6d. HORÆ SUBSECIVÆ. BY JOHN BROWN, M.D., F.R.S.E. FELLOW OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS, EDINBURGH. CONTENTS. LETTER TO JOHN CAIRNS, D.D. DR. CHALMERS. DR. GEORGE WILSON. HER LAST HALF-CROWN. QUEEN MARY'S CHILD-GARDEN. OUR DOGS. NOTES ON ART. "OH, I'M WAT, WAT!" EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES. [Greek: AGCHINOIA]--NEARNESS OF THE [Greek: NOTS]--PRESENCE OF MIND--[Greek: EUSTOCHIA]: HAPPY GUESSING. THE BLACK DWARF'S BONES. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. "WITH BRAINS, SIR!" ARTHUR H. HALLAM. Of all the John Browns, commend as to Dr. John Brown, the physician, the man of genius, the humorist, the student of men, women, and dogs. By means of two beautiful volumes, he has given the public a share of his by-hours, and more pleasant hours it would be difficult to find in any life. Dr. Brown's master-piece is the story of a dog called 'Rab.' The tale moves from the most tragic pathos to the most reckless humour, and could not have been written but by a man of genius. Whether it moves to laughter or tears, it is perfect in its way, and immortalizes its author. The contents of these _Horæ Subsecivæ_ are very miscellaneous. From stories of dogs, biographies of doctors and ministers, hints on medical education and practice, we turn to criticisms on poetry and art. One of the volumes contains the best account of Arthur Hallam, the hero of Mr. Tennyson's _Elegiacs_, that is anywhere to be found. In the other, there is a very curious and racy criticism on the poems of Henry Vaughan.--_Times._ There is a pleasant article on the Arthur Henry Hallam of '_In Memoriam_.'... The story of "Rab and his Friends" is a veritable gem. It is true, simple, pathetic, and touched with an antique grace, which, in such vicinity, charms and surprises. If any pre-Raphaelite aspirant would learn how Doric homeliness may be united with the utmost perfection and symmetry of form, let him read this beautiful episode.... A book of much wisdom and beauty, and we most heartily recommend it--its cause as well as its execution.--_Fraser's Mag._ ODDS AND ENDS. Now Ready, Vol. I., in Cloth, price 4s. 6d., containing Nos. 1-10: 1. Sketches of Highland Character.--SHEEP FARMERS AND DROVERS. 2. Convicts. By a PRACTICAL HAND. 3. Wayside Thoughts of an Asophophilosopher. By D'ARCY W. THOMPSON. No. 1. RAINY WEATHER; or, the Philosophy of Sorrow. GOOSESKIN; or, the Philosophy of Horror. TE DEUM LAUDAMUS; Or, the Philosophy of Joy. 4. The Enterkin. By JOHN BROWN, M.D. 5. Wayside Thoughts of an Asophophilosopher. By D'ARCY W. THOMPSON. No. 2. ASSES--HISTORY--PLAGUES. 6. Penitentiaries and Reformatories. 7. Notes from Paris; or, Why are Frenchmen and Englishmen different? 8. Essays by an Old Man. No. 1. IN MEMORIAM--VANITAS VANITATUM--FRIENDS. 9. Wayside Thoughts of an Asophophilosopher. By D'ARCY W. THOMPSON. No. 3. NOT GODLESS, BUT GODLY; A TRIANGULAR TREATISE ON EDUCATION. 10. The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character. By J. A. FROUDE, Author of the 'History of England.' Now Ready, Vol. II., in Cloth, price 4s. 6d., containing Nos. 11-19: 11. The Cattle Plague. By LYON PLAYFAIR, C.B., LL.D, F.R.S., ETC. 12. Rough Nights' Quarters. By ONE OF THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE ROUGHED IT. 13. Letters on the Education of Young Children. By S. G. O. 14. The Stormontfield Piscicultural Experiments. 1853-1866. By ROBERT BUIST. 15. A Tract for the Times. 16. Spain in 1866. 17. The Highland Shepherd. By the Author of 'The Two Queys.' 18. The Doctrine of the Correlation of Forces: its Development and Evidence. By the Rev. JAMES CRANBROOK, Edinburgh. 19. 'Bibliomania.' 20. A Tract on Twigs, and on the Best Way to Bend them. EDINBURGH: EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. Transcriber's Notes: Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. One advertisement in the original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. 
28315	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | This e-text contains dialect and unusual spelling. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * ONE WAY OUT A MIDDLE-CLASS NEW-ENGLANDER EMIGRATES TO AMERICA ONE WAY OUT A MIDDLE-CLASS NEW-ENGLANDER EMIGRATES TO AMERICA BY WILLIAM CARLETON BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1911 BY SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) _Entered at Stationers' Hall_ Published January 28, 1911; second printing January _Presswork by Geo. H. Ellis Co., Boston, U.S.A._ TO HER WHO WASN'T AFRAID CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER 1 II THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK 18 III THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL 37 IV WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA 53 V WE PROSPECT 67 VI I BECOME A DAY LABORER 82 VII NINE DOLLARS A WEEK 94 VIII SUNDAY 112 IX PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 125 X THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT 146 XI NEW OPPORTUNITIES 165 XII OUR FIRST WINTER 183 XIII I BECOME A CITIZEN 200 XIV FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK 216 XV THE GANG 234 XVI DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO 252 XVII THE SECOND YEAR 266 XVIII MATURING PLANS 283 XIX ONCE AGAIN A NEW ENGLANDER 298 ONE WAY OUT ONE WAY OUT CHAPTER I A BORN AND BRED NEW ENGLANDER My great-grandfather was killed in the Revolution; my grandfather fought in the War of 1812; my father sacrificed his health in the Civil War; but I, though born in New England, am the first of my family to emigrate to this country--the United States of America. That sounds like a riddle or a paradox. It isn't; it's a plain statement of fact. As a matter of convenience let me call myself Carleton. I've no desire to make public my life for the sake of notoriety. My only idea in writing these personal details is the hope that they may help some poor devil out of the same hole in which I found myself mired. They are of too sacred a nature to share except impersonally. Even behind the disguise of an assumed name I passed some mighty uncomfortable hours a few months ago when I sketched out for a magazine and saw in cold print what I'm now going to give in full. It made me feel as though I had pulled down the walls of my house and was living my life open to the view of the street. For a man whose home means what it does to me, there's nothing pleasant about that. However, I received some letters following that brief article which made the discomfort seem worth while. My wife and I read them over with something like awe. They came from Maine and they came from Texas; they came from the north, they came from the south, until we numbered our unseen friends by the hundred. Running through these letters was the racking cry that had once rended our own hearts--"How to get out!" As we read some of them our throats grew lumpy. "God help them," said my wife over and over again. As we read others, we felt very glad that our lives had been in some way an inspiration to them. After talking the whole matter over we decided that if it helped any to let people know how we ourselves pulled out, why it was our duty to do so. For that purpose, which is the purpose of this book, Carleton is as good a name as any. My people were all honest, plodding, middle-class Americans. They stuck where they were born, accepted their duties as they came, earned a respectable living and died without having money enough left to make a will worth while. They were all privates in the ranks. But they were the best type of private--honest, intelligent, and loyal unto death. They were faithful to their families and unswerving in their duty to their country. The records of their lives aren't interesting, but they are as open as daylight. My father seems to have had at first a bit more ambition stirring within him than his ancestors. He started in the lumber business for himself in a small way but with the first call for troops sold out and enlisted. He did not distinguish himself but he fought in more battles than many a man who came out a captain. He didn't quit until the war was over. Then he crawled back home subdued and sick. He refused ever to draw a pension because he felt it was as much a man's duty to fight for his country as for his wife. He secured a position as head clerk and confidential man with an old established lumber firm and here he stuck the rest of his life. He earned a decent living and in the course of time married and occupied a comfortable home. My mother died when I was ten and after that father sold his house and we boarded. It was a dreary enough life for both of us. Mother was the sort of mother who lives her whole life in caring for her men folks so that her going left us as helpless as babies. For a long while we didn't even know when to change our stockings. But obeying the family tradition, father accepted his lot stoically and as final. No one in our family ever married twice. With the death of the wife and mother the home ceased and that was the end of it. I remember my father with some pride. He was a tall, old-fashioned looking man with a great deal of quiet dignity. I came to know him much better in the next few years after mother died than ever before for we lived together in one room and had few friends. I can see him now sitting by a small kerosene lamp after I had gone to bed clumsily trying to mend some rent in my clothes. I thought it an odd occupation for a man but I know now what he was about. I think his love for my mother must have been deep for he talked to me a great deal of her and seemed much more concerned about my future on her account than on either his own or mine. I think it was she--she was a woman of some spirit--who persuaded him to consider sending me to college. This accounted partly for the mending although there was some sentiment about it too. I think he liked to feel that he was carrying out her work for me even in such a small matter as this. How much he was earning and how much he saved I never knew. I went to school and had all the common things of the ordinary boy and I don't remember that I ever asked him for any pocket money but what he gave it to me. It was towards the end of my senior year in the high school that I began to notice a change in him. He was at times strangely excited and at other times strangely blue. He asked me a great many questions about my preference in the matter of a college and bade me keep well up in my studies. He began to skimp a little and I found out afterwards that one reason he grew so thin was because he did away with his noon meal. It makes my blood boil now when I remember where the fruit of this self-sacrifice went. I wouldn't recall it here except as a humble tribute to his memory. One night I came back to the room and though it was not yet dark I was surprised to see a crack of yellow light creeping out from beneath the sill. Suspecting something was wrong, I pushed open the door and saw my father seated by the lamp with a pair of trousers I had worn when a kid in his hands. His head was bent and he was trying to sew. I went to his side and asked him what the trouble was. He looked up but he didn't know me. He never knew me again. He died a few days afterwards. I found then that he had invested all his savings in a wild-cat mining scheme. They had been swept away. So at eighteen I was left alone with the only capital that succeeding generations of my family ever inherited--a common school education and a big, sound physique. My father's tragic death was a heavy blow but the mere fact that I was thrown on my own resources did not dishearten me. In fact the prospect rather roused me. I had soaked in the humdrum atmosphere of the boarding house so long that the idea of having to earn my own living came rather as an adventure. While dependent on my father, I had been chained to this one room and this one city, but now I felt as though the whole wide world had suddenly been opened up to me. I had no particular ambition beyond earning a comfortable living and I was sure enough at eighteen of being able to do this. If I chose, I could go to sea--there wasn't a vessel but what would take so husky a youngster; if I wished, I could go into railroading--here again there was a demand for youth and brawn. I could go into a factory and learn manufacturing or I could go into an office and learn a business. I was young, I was strong, I was unfettered. There is no one on earth so free as such a young man. I could settle in New York or work my way west and settle in Seattle or go north into Canada. My legs were stout and I could walk if necessary. And wherever I was, I had only to stop and offer the use of my back and arms in return for food and clothes. Most men feel like this only once in their lives. In a few years they become fettered again--this time for good. Having no inclination towards the one thing or the other, I took the first opportunity that offered. A chum of mine had entered the employ of the United Woollen Company and seeing another vacancy there in the clerical department, he persuaded me to join him. I began at five dollars a week. I was put at work adding up columns of figures that had no more meaning to me than the problems in the school arithmetic. But it wasn't hard work and my hours were short and my associates pleasant. After a while I took a certain pride in being part of this vast enterprise. My chum and I hired a room together and we both felt like pretty important business men as we bought our paper on the car every morning and went down town. It took close figuring to do anything but live that first year and yet we pushed our way with the crowd into the nigger heavens and saw most of the good shows. I had never been to the theatre before and I liked it. Next year I received a raise of five dollars and watched the shows from the rear of the first balcony. That is the only change the raise made that I can remember except that I renewed my stock of clothes. The only thing I'm sure of is that at the end of the second year I didn't have anything left over. That is true of the next six years. My salary was advanced steadily to twenty dollars and at that time it took just twenty dollars a week for me to live. I wasn't extravagant and I wasn't dissipated but every raise found a new demand. It seemed to work automatically. You might almost say that our salaries were not raised at all but that we were promoted from a ten dollar plane of life to a fifteen dollar plane and then to a twenty. And we all went together--that is the men who started together. Each advance meant unconsciously the wearing of better clothes, rooming at better houses, eating at better restaurants, smoking better tobacco, and more frequent amusements. This left us better satisfied of course but after all it left us just where we began. Life didn't mean much to any of us at this time and if we were inclined to look ahead why there were the big salaried jobs before us to dream about. But even if a man had been forehanded and of a saving nature, he couldn't have done much without sacrificing the only friends most of us had--his office associates. For instance--to save five dollars a week at this time I would have had to drop back into the fifteen dollars a week crowd and I'd have been as much out of place there as a boy dropped into a lower grade at school. I remember that when I was finally advanced another five dollars I half-heartedly resolved to put that amount in the bank weekly. But at this point the crowd all joined a small country club and I had either to follow or drop out of their lives. Of course in looking back I can see where I might have done differently but I wasn't looking back then--nor very far ahead either. If it would have prevented my joining the country club I'm glad I didn't. It was out there that I met the girl who became my wife. My best reason for remaining anonymous is the opportunity it will give me to tell about Ruth. I want to feel free to rave about her if I wish. She objected in the magazine article and she objects even more strongly now but, as before, I must have an uncramped hand in this. The chances are that I shall talk more about her than I did the first time. The whole scheme of my life, beginning, middle and end, swings around her. Without her inspiration I don't like to think what the end of me might have been. And it's just as true to-day as it was in the stress of the fight. I was twenty-six when I met Ruth and she was eighteen. She came out to the club one Saturday afternoon to watch some tennis. It happened that I had worked into the finals of the tournament but that day I wasn't playing very well. I was beaten in the first set, six-two. What was worse I didn't care a hang if I was. I had found myself feeling like this about a lot of things during those last few months. Then as I made ready to serve the second set I happened to see in the front row of the crowd to the right of the court a slight girl with blue eyes. She was leaning forward looking at me with her mouth tense and her fists tight closed. Somehow I had an idea that she wanted me to win. I don't know why, because I was sure I'd never seen her before; but I thought that perhaps she had bet a pair of gloves or a box of candy on me. If she had, I made up my mind that she'd get them. I started in and they said, afterwards, I never played better tennis in my life. At any rate I beat my man. After the game I found someone to introduce me to her and from that moment on there was nothing else of so great consequence in my life. I learned all about her in the course of the next few weeks. Her family, too, was distinctly middle-class, in the sense that none of them had ever done anything to distinguish themselves either for good or bad. Her parents lived on a small New Hampshire farm and she had just been graduated from the village academy and had come to town to visit her aunt. The latter was a tall, lean woman, who, after the death of her husband had been forced to keep lodgers to eke out a living. Ruth showed me pictures of her mother and father, and they might have been relatives of mine as far as looks went. The father had caught an expression from the granite hills which most New England farmers get--a rugged, strained look; the mother was lean and kind and worried. I met them later and liked them. Ruth was such a woman as my mother would have taken to; clear and laughing on the surface, but with great depths hidden among the golden shallows. Her experience had all been among the meadows and mountains so that she was simple and direct and fearless in her thoughts and acts. You never had to wonder what she meant when she spoke and when you came to know her you didn't even have to wonder what she was dreaming about. And yet she was never the same because she was always growing. But the thing that woke me up most of all from the first day I met her was the interest she took in everyone and everything. A fellow couldn't bore Ruth if he tried. She would have the time of her life sitting on a bench in the park or walking down the street or just staring out the window of her aunt's front room. And that street looked like Sunday afternoon all the week long. I began to do some figuring when I was alone but there wasn't much satisfaction in it. I had the clothes in my room, a good collection of pipes, and ten dollars of my last week's salary. A man couldn't get married on that even to a girl like Ruth who wouldn't want much. I cut down here and there but I naturally wanted to appear well before Ruth and so the savings went into new ties and shoes. In this way I fretted along for a few months until I screwed my courage up to ask for another raise. Those were prosperous days for the United Woollen and everyone from the president to the office boy was in good humor. I went to Morse, head of the department, and told him frankly that I wished to get married and needed more money. That wasn't a business reason for an increase but those of us who had worked there some years had come to feel like one of the family and it wasn't unusual for the company to raise a man at such a time. He said he'd see what he could do about it and when I opened my pay envelope the next week I found an extra five in it. I went direct from the office to Ruth and asked her to marry me. She didn't hang her head nor stammer but she looked me straight in the eyes a moment longer than usual and answered: "All right, Billy." "Then let's go out this afternoon and see about getting a house," I said. I don't think a Carleton ever boarded when first married. To me it wouldn't have seemed like getting married. I knew a suburb where some of the men I had met at the country club lived and we went out there. It was a beautiful June day and everything looked clean and fresh. We found a little house of eight rooms that we knew we wanted as soon as we saw it. It was one of a group of ten or fifteen that were all very much alike. There was a piazza on the front and a little bit of lawn that looked as though it had been squeezed in afterwards. In the rear there was another strip of land where we thought we might raise some garden stuff if we put it in boxes. The house itself had a front hall out of which stairs led to the next floor. To the right there was a large room separated by folding doors with another good-sized room next to it which would naturally be used as a dining room. In the rear of this was the kitchen and besides the door there was a slide through which to pass the food. Upstairs there were four big rooms stretching the whole width of the house. Above these there was a servant's room. The whole house was prettily finished and in the two rooms down stairs there were fireplaces which took my eye, although they weren't bigger than coal hods. It was heated by a furnace and lighted by electricity and there were stained glass panels either side of the front door. The rent was forty dollars a month and I signed a three years' lease before I left. The next week was a busy one for us both. We bought almost a thousand dollars' worth of furniture on the installment plan and even then we didn't seem to get more than the bare necessities. I hadn't any idea that house furnishings cost so much. But if the bill had come to five times that I wouldn't have cared. The installments didn't amount to very much a week and I already saw Morse promoted and myself filling his position at twenty-five hundred. I hadn't yet got over the feeling I had at eighteen that life was a big adventure and that a man with strong legs and a good back _couldn't_ lose. With Ruth at my side I bought like a king. Though I never liked the idea of running into debt this didn't seem like a debt. I had only to look into her dear blue eyes to feel myself safe in buying the store itself. Ruth herself sometimes hesitated but, as I told her, we might as well start right and once for all as to go at it half heartedly. The following Saturday we were married. My vacation wasn't due for another month so we decided not to wait. The old folks came down from the farm and we just called in a clergyman and were married in the front parlor of the aunt's house. It was both very simple and very solemn. For us both the ceremony meant the taking of a sacred oath of so serious a nature as to forbid much lightheartedness. And yet I did wish that the father and mother and aunt had not dressed in black and cried during it all. Ruth wore a white dress and looked very beautiful and didn't seem afraid. As for me, my knees trembled and I was chalk white. I think it was the old people and the room, for when it was over and we came out into the sunshine again I felt all right except a bit light-headed. I remember that the street and the houses and the cars seemed like very small matters. CHAPTER II THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK When, with Ruth on my arm, I walked up the steps of the house and unlocked the front door, I entered upon a new life. It was my first taste of home since my mother died and added to that was this new love which was finer than anything I had ever dreamed about. It seemed hard to have to leave every morning at half past six and not get back until after five at night, but to offset this we used to get up as early as four o'clock during the long summer days. Many the time even in June Ruth and I ate our breakfast by lamp-light. It gave us an extra hour and she was bred in the country where getting up in the morning is no great hardship. We couldn't afford a servant and we didn't want one. Ruth was a fine cook and I certainly did justice to her dishes after ten years of restaurants and boarding-houses. On rainy days when we couldn't get out, she used to do her cooking early so that I might watch her. It seemed a lot more like her cooking when I saw her pat out the dough and put it in the oven instead of coming home and finding it all done. I used to fill up my pipe and sit by the kitchen stove until I had just time to catch the train by sprinting. But when the morning was fine we'd either take a long walk through the big park reservation which was near the house or we'd fuss over the garden. We had twenty-two inches of radishes, thirty-eight inches of lettuce, four tomato plants, two hills of corn, three hills of beans and about four yards of early peas. In addition to this Ruth had squeezed a geranium into one corner and a fern into another and planted sweet alyssum around the whole business. Everyone out here planned to raise his own vegetables. It was supposed to cut down expenses but I noticed the market man always did a good business. I had met two or three of the men at the country club and they introduced me to the others. We were all earning about the same salaries and living in about the same type of house. Still there were differences and you could tell more by the wives than the husbands those whose salaries went over two thousand. Two or three of the men were in banks, one was in a leather firm, one was an agent for an insurance company, another was with the telegraph company, another was with the Standard Oil, and two or three others were with firms like mine. Most of them had been settled out here three or four years and had children. In a general way they looked comfortable and happy enough but you heard a good deal of talk among them about the high cost of living and you couldn't help noticing that those who dressed the best had the fewest children. One or two of them owned horses but even they felt obliged to explain that they saved the cost of them in car fares. They all called and left their cards but that first year we didn't see much of them. There wasn't room in my life for anyone but Ruth at that time. I didn't see even the old office gang except during business hours and at lunch. The rent scaled my salary down to one thousand and eighty dollars at one swoop. Then we had to save out at least five dollars a week to pay on the furniture. This left eight hundred and twenty, or fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents a week, to cover running expenses. We paid cash for everything and though we never had much left over at the end of the week and never anything at the end of the month, we had about everything we wanted. For one thing our tastes were not extravagant and we did no entertaining. Our grocery and meat bill amounted to from five to seven dollars a week. Of course I had my lunches in town but I got out of those for twenty cents. My daily car fare was twenty cents more which brought my total weekly expenses up to about three dollars. This left a comfortable margin of from five to seven dollars for light, coal, clothes and amusements. In the summer the first three items didn't amount to much so some weeks we put most of this into the furniture. But the city was new to Ruth, especially at night, so we were in town a good deal. She used to meet me at the office and we'd walk about the city and then take dinner at some little French restaurant and then maybe go to a concert or the theatre. She made everything new to me again. At the theatre she used to perch on the edge of her seat so breathless, so responsive that I often saw the old timers watch her instead of the show. I often did myself. And sometimes it seemed as though the whole company acted to her alone. Those days were perfect. The only incident to mar them was the death of Ruth's parents. They died suddenly and left an estate of six or seven hundred dollars. Ruth insisted upon putting that into the furniture. But in our own lives every day was as fair as the first. My salary came as regularly as an annuity and there was every prospect for advancement. The garden did well and Ruth became acquainted with most of the women in a sociable way. She joined a sewing circle which met twice a month chiefly I guess for the purpose of finding out about one another's husbands. At any rate she told me more about them than I would have learned in ten years. Still, during the fall and winter we kept pretty much by ourselves, not deliberately but because neither of us cared particularly about whist parties and such things but preferred to spend together what time we had. And then I guess Ruth was a little shy about her clothes. She dressed mighty well to my eye but she made most of her things herself and didn't care much about style. She didn't notice the difference at home but when she was out among others, they made her feel it. However spring came around again and we forgot all about those details. We didn't go in town so much that summer and used to spend more time on our piazza. I saw more of the men in this way and found them a pleasant, companionable lot. They asked me to join the Neighborhood Club and I did, more to meet them half way than because I wanted to. There we played billiards and discussed the stock market and furnaces. All of them had schemes for making fortunes if only they had a few thousand dollars capital. Now and then you'd find a group of them in one corner discussing a rumor that so and so had lost his job. They spoke of this as they would of a death. But none of those subjects interested me especially in view of what I was looking forward to in my own family. In the afternoons of the early fall the women sent over jellies and such stuff to Ruth and dropped in upon her with whispered advice. She used to repeat it to me at night with a gay little laugh and her eyes sparkling like diamonds. She was happier now than I had ever seen her and so was I myself. When I went in town in the morning I felt very important. I thought I had touched the climax of life when I married Ruth but when the boy came he lifted me a notch higher. And with him he brought me a new wife in Ruth, without taking one whit from the old. Sweetheart, wife and mother now, she revealed to me new depths of womanhood. She taught me, too, what real courage is. I was the coward when the time came. I had taken a day off but the doctor ordered me out of the house. I went down to the club and I felt more one of the neighborhood that day than I ever did before or afterwards. It was Saturday and during the afternoon a number of the men came in and just silently gripped my hand. The women, too, seemed to take a new interest in us. When Ruth was able to sit up they brought in numberless little things. But you'd have thought it was their house and not mine, the way they treated me. When any of them came I felt as though I didn't belong there and ought to tip-toe out. We'd been saving up during the summer for this emergency so that we had enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse but that was only the beginning of the new expenses. In the first place we had to have a servant now. I secured a girl who knew how to cook after a fashion, for four dollars a week. But that wasn't by any means what she cost us. In spite of Ruth's supervision the girl wasted as much as she used so that our provision bill was nearly doubled. If we hadn't succeeded in paying for the furniture before this I don't know what we would have done. As it was I found my salary pretty well strained. I hadn't any idea that so small a thing as a baby could cost so much. Ruth had made most of his things but I know that some of his shirts cost as much as mine. When the boy was older Ruth insisted upon getting along without a girl again. I didn't approve of this but I saw that it would make her happier to try anyway. How in the world she managed to do it I don't know but she did. This gave her an excuse for not going out--though it was an excuse that made me half ashamed of myself--and so we saved in another way. Even with this we just made both ends meet and that was all. The boy grew like a weed and before I knew it he was five years old. Until he began to walk and talk I didn't think of him as a possible man. He didn't seem like anything in particular. He was just soft and round and warm. But when he began to wear knickerbockers he set me to thinking hard. He wasn't going to remain always a baby; he was going to grow into a boy and then a young man and before I knew it he would be facing the very same problem that now confronted me. And that problem was how to get enough ahead of the game to give him a fair start in life. I realized, too, that I wanted him to do something better than I had done. When I stopped to think of it I had accomplished mighty little. I had lived and that was about all. That I had lived happily was due to Ruth. But if I was finding difficulty in keeping even with the game now, what was I going to do when the youngster would prove a decidedly more serious item of expense? I talked this over with Ruth and we both decided that somehow, in some way, we must save some money every year. We started in by reducing our household expenses still further. But it seemed as though fate were against us for prices rose just enough to absorb all our little economies. Flour went up and sugar went up, and though we had done away with meat almost wholly now, vegetables went up. So, too, did coal. Not only that but we had long since found it impossible to keep to ourselves as we had that first year. Little by little we had been drawn into the social life of the neighborhood. Not a month went by but what there was a dinner or two or a whist party or a dance. Personally I didn't care about such things but as Ruth had become a matron and in consequence had been thrown more in contact with the women, she had lost her shyness and grown more sociable. She often suggested declining an invitation but we couldn't decline one without declining all. I saw clearly enough that I had no right to do this. She did more work than I and did not have the daily change. To have made a social exile of her would have been to make her little better than a slave. But it cost money. It cost a lot of money. We had to do our part in return and though Ruth accomplished this by careful buying and all sorts of clever devices, the item became a big one in the year's expenses. I began to look forward with some anxiety for the next raise. At the office I hunted for extra work with an eye upon the place above; but though I found the work nothing came of it but extra hours. In fact I began to think myself lucky to hold the job I had for a gradual change of methods had been slowly going on in the office. Mechanical adding machines had cost a dozen men their jobs; a card system of bookkeeping had made it possible to discharge another dozen, while an off year in woollens sent two or three more flying, among them the man who had found me the position in the first place. But he hadn't married and he went out west somewhere. Occasionally when work picked up again a young man was taken on to fill the place of one of the discharged men. The company always saved a few hundred dollars by such a shift for the lad never got the salary of the old employee, and so far as anyone could see the work went on just as well. While these moves were ominous, as I can see now in looking back, they didn't disturb me very much at the time. I filled a little niche in the office that was all my own. At every opportunity I had familiarized myself with the work of the man above me and was on very good terms with him. I waited patiently and confidently for the day when Morse should call me in and announce his own advance and leave me to fill his place. I might have to begin on two thousand but it was a sure twenty-five hundred eventually to say nothing of what it led to. The president of the company had begun as I had and had moved up the same steps that now lay ahead of me. In the meanwhile the life at home ran smoothly in spite of everything. Neither the wife, the boy nor I was sick a day for we all had sound bodies to start with. Our country-bred ancestors didn't need a will to leave us those. If at times we felt a trifle pinched especially in the matter of clothes, it was wonderful how rich Ruth contrived to make us feel. She knew how to take care of things and though I didn't spend half what some of the men spent on their suits, I went in town every morning looking better than two-thirds of them. I was inspected from head to foot before I started and there wasn't a wrinkle or a spot so small that it could last twenty-four hours. I shined my own shoes and pressed my own trousers and Ruth looked to it that this was done well. Moreover she could turn a tie, clean and press it so that it looked brand new. I think some of the neighbors even thought I was extravagant in my dressing. She did the same for herself and had caught the knack of seeming to dress stylishly without really doing so. She had beautiful hair and this in itself made her look well dressed. As for the boy he was a model for them all. In the meanwhile the boy had grown into short trousers and before we knew it he was in school. It made it lonesome for her during the day when he began to trudge off every morning at nine o'clock. She began to look forward to Saturdays as eagerly as the boy did. Then the next thing we knew he'd start off even earlier on that day to join his playmates. Sunday was the only day either of us had him to ourselves. After he began to go to school, Ruth and I seemed to begin another life. In a way we felt all by ourselves once more. I didn't get home until half past seven now and Dick was then abed. He was abed too when I left in the morning. Of course he was never off my mind and if he hadn't been asleep upstairs I guess I'd have known a difference. But at the same time he was, in a small way, living his own life now which left Ruth and me to ourselves once more. She used to go over for me all the details of his day from the time she took him up in the morning until she tucked him away in bed again at night and then there would come a pause. It seemed as though there ought to be something more, but there wasn't. The next few months it seemed almost as though she was waiting. For what, I didn't know and yet I too felt there was a lapse in our lives. I never loved her more. There was never a time when she was so truly my wife and yet in our combined lives there was something lacking. After a while I began to notice a wistful expression in her eyes. It always came after she had said, "So Dicky said, 'God bless father and mother,' and then he went to sleep." Then one night it dawned on me. Hers was the same heart hunger that had been eating at me. Dick was a boy now and there was no baby to take his place. But, good Lord, as it was I hadn't been able to save a dollar. I knew that we were simply holding on tight and drifting. The boat was loaded to the gunwales even now. And yet that expression in her eyes had a right to be answered. But I couldn't answer it. I didn't dare open my mouth. I didn't dare speak even one night when she said, "He's all we have, Billy--just one." I gripped her hand and sat staring into the little coal hod fireplace which we didn't light more than once a month now. Even as I watched the flames I saw them licking up pennies. Just one! And I too wanted a houseful like Dick. I had to see that look night after night and I had to go to town knowing I was leaving her all alone with the one away at school. And what a mother she was! She ought to have had a baby by her side all the time. As the one grew, his expenses increased. The only way to meet them was by cutting down our own expenses still more. I cut out smoking and made my old clothes do an extra year. Ruth spent half her time in bargain hunting and saved still more by taking it out of herself. Poor little woman, she worked harder for a quarter than I did and I was working harder for that sum than I used to work for a dollar. But we were not alone in the struggle. As we came to know more about the people in that group of snug little houses we knew that the same grim fight was going on in all of them. Some of them were not so lucky as we and ran into debt while a few of them were luckier and were helped out with legacies or by well-to-do relatives. We were as much alike as peas in a pod. We were living on the future and bluffing out the present. You'd have thought it would have cast a gloom over the neighborhood--you'd have thought it would have done away with some of the parties and dances. But it didn't. In the first place this was, to most of us, just life. In the second place there didn't seem to be any alternative. There was no other way of living. The conditions seemed to be fixed; we had to eat, we had to wear a certain type of dress; and unless we wished to exist as exiles we had to meet on a certain plane of social intercourse. The conventions were as iron clad here as among the nobility of England. No one thought of violating them; no one thought it was possible. You had to live as the others did or die and be done with it. If anyone of us had thought we might have seen the foolishness of this but it was all so manifest that no one did think. The only method of escape was a raise and that meant moving into another sphere which would cover that. A new complication came when the boy grew old enough to have social functions of his own. He had made many new friends and he wanted to join a tennis club, a dancing class and contribute towards the support of the athletic teams of the school. Moreover he was invited to parties and had to give parties himself. Once again I tried to see some way out of this social business. It seemed such a pitiful waste of ammunition under the circumstances. I wanted to save the money if it was possible in any way to eke it out, for his education. But what could I do? The boy had to live as his friends lived or give them up. He wasn't asked to do any more than the other boys of the neighborhood but he was rightly asked to do as much. If he couldn't it would be at the sacrifice of his pride that he associated with them at all. And a just pride in a boy is something you can't safely tamper with. He had to have the money and we managed it somehow. But it brought home the old grim fact that I hadn't as yet saved a dollar. I clung more than ever now to the one ray of hope--the job ahead. It was the only comfort Ruth and I had and whenever I felt especially downhearted she'd start in and plan how we'd spend it. It took the edge off the immediate thought of danger. In the meanwhile I resigned even from the Neighborhood Club and let the boy join the tennis club. I noticed at once a change in the attitude of the men towards me. But I was reaching a point now where I didn't care. In this way, then, we lived until I was thirty-eight and Ruth was thirty, and the boy was eleven. For the last few months I had been doing night work without extra pay and so was practically exiled from the boy except on Sundays. He was not developing the way I wanted. The local grammar school was almost a private school for the neighborhood. I should have preferred to have it more cosmopolitan. The boy was rubbing up against only his own kind and this was making him soft, both physically and mentally. He was also getting querulous and autocratic. Ruth saw it, but with only one.... Well, on Sundays I took the boy with me on long cross-country jaunts and did a good deal of talking to him. But all I said rolled off like water off a duck. He lacked energy and initiative. He was becoming distinctly more middle-class than either of us, with some of the faults of the so-called upper class thrown in. He chattered about Harvard, not as an opportunity, but as a class privilege. I didn't like it. But before I had time to worry much about this the crash came that I had not been wise enough to foresee. CHAPTER III THE MIDDLE CLASS HELL One Saturday afternoon, after we had been paid off, Morse, the head of the department, whose job I had been eyeing enviously for five years now, called me into his office. For three minutes I saw all my hopes realized; for three minutes I walked dizzily with my whole life justified. I could hardly catch my breath as I followed him. I didn't realize until then how big a load I had been carrying. As a drowning man is said to see visions of his whole past life, I saw visions of my whole future. I saw Ruth's eager face lifted to mine as I told her the good news; I saw the boy taken from his commonplace surroundings and doing himself proud in some big preparatory school where he brushed up against a variety of other boys; I saw--God pity me for the fool I was--other children at home to take his place. I can say that for three minutes I have lived. Morse seated himself in the chair before his desk and, bending over his papers, talked without looking at me. He was a small fellow. I don't suppose a beefy man ever quite gets over a certain feeling of superiority before a small man. I could have picked up Morse in one hand. "Carleton," he began, "I've got to cut down your salary five hundred dollars." It came like a blow in the face. I don't think I answered. "Sorry," he added, "but Evans says he can double up on your work and offers to do it for two hundred dollars more." I repeated that name Evans over and over. He was the man under me. Then I saw my mistake. While watching the man ahead of me I had neglected to watch the man behind me. Evans and I had been good friends. I liked him. He was about twenty, and a hard worker. "Well?" said Morse. I recovered my wind. "Good God," I cried; "I can't live on any less than I'm getting now!" "Then you resign?" he asked quickly. For a second I saw red. I wanted to take this pigmy by the throat. I wanted to shake him. He didn't give me time before exclaiming: "Very well, Carleton. I'll give you an order for two weeks' pay in advance." The next thing I knew I was in the outer office with the order in my hand. I saw Evans at his desk. I guess I must have looked queer, for at first he shrank away from me. Then he came to my side. "Carleton," he said, "what's the matter?" "I guess you know," I answered. "You aren't fired?" I bucked up at this. I tried to speak naturally. "Yes," I said, "I'm fired." "But that isn't right, Carleton," he protested. "I didn't think it would come to that. I went to Morse and told him I wanted to get married and needed more money. He asked me if I thought I could do your work. I said yes. I'd have said yes if he'd asked me if I could do the president's work. But--come back and let me explain it to Morse." It was white of him, wasn't it? But I saw clearly enough that he was only fighting for his right to love as I was fighting for mine. I don't know that I should have been as generous as he was--ten years before. He had started toward the door when I called him back. "Don't go in there," I warned. "The first thing you know you'll be doing my work without your two hundred." "That's so," he answered. "But what are you going to do now?" "Get another job," I answered. One of the great blessings of my life is the fact that it has always been easy to report bad news to Ruth. I never had to break things gently to her. She always took a blow standing up, like a man. So now I boarded my train and went straight to the house and told her. She listened quietly and then took my hand, patting it for a moment without saying anything. Finally she smiled at me. "Well, Billy," she said, "it can't be helped, can it? So good luck to Evans and his bride." When a woman is as brave as that it stirs up all the fighting blood in a man. Looking into her steady blue eyes I felt that I had exaggerated my misfortune. Thirty-eight is not old and I was able-bodied. I might land something even better than that which I had lost. So instead of a night of misery I actually felt almost glad. I started in town on Monday in high hope. But when I got off the train I began to wonder just where I was bound. What sort of a job was I going to apply for? What was my profession, anyway? I sat down in the station to think the problem over. For twenty years now I had been a cog in the clerical machinery of the United Woollen Company. I was known as a United Woollen man. But just what else had this experience made of me? I was not a bookkeeper. I knew no more about keeping a full set of books than my boy. I had handled only strings of United Woollen figures; those meant nothing outside that particular office. I was not a stenographer, or an accountant, or a secretary. I had been called a clerk in the directory. But what did that mean? What the devil was I, after twenty years of hard work? The question started the sweat to my forehead. But I pulled myself together again. At least I was an able-bodied man. I was willing to work, had a record of honesty and faithfulness, and was intelligent as men go. I didn't care what I did, so long as it gave me a living wage. Surely, then, there must be some place for me in this alert, hustling city. I bought a paper and turned to "Help Wanted." I felt encouraged at sight of the long column. I read it through carefully. Half of the positions demanded technical training; a fourth of them demanded special experience; the rest asked for young men. I couldn't answer the requirements of one of them. Again and again the question was forced in upon me--what the devil was I? I didn't know which way to turn. I had no relatives to help me--from the days of my great-grandfather no Carleton had ever quit the game more than even. My business associates were as badly off as I was and so were my neighbors. My relations with the latter were peculiar, now that I came to think of it. In these last dozen years I had come to know the details of their lives as intimately as my own. In a way we had been like one big family. We knew each other as Frank, and Joe, and Bill, and Josh, and were familiar with one another's physical ailments when any of us had any. If any of the children had whooping cough or the measles every man and woman in the neighborhood watched at the bedside, in a sense, until the youngster was well, again. We knew to a dollar what each man was earning and what each was spending. We borrowed one another's garden tools and the women borrowed from each other's kitchens. On the surface we were just about as intimate as it's possible for a community to be. And yet what did it amount to? There wasn't a man-son of them to whom I would have dared go and confess the fact I'd lost my job. They'd know it soon enough, be sure of that; but it mustn't come from me. There wasn't one of them to whom I felt free to go and ask their help to interest their own firms to secure another position for me. Their respect for me depended upon my ability to maintain my social position. They were like steamer friends. On the voyage they clung to one another closer than bark to a tree, but once the gang plank was lowered the intimacy vanished. If I wished to keep them as friends I must stick to the boat. I knew they couldn't do anything if they had wanted to, but at the same time I felt there was something wrong in a situation that would not allow me to ask even for a letter of introduction without feeling like a beggar. I felt there was something wrong when they made me feel not like a brother in hard luck but like a criminal. I began to wonder what of sterling worth I had got out of this life during the past decade. However that was an incidental matter. The only time I did such thinking as this was towards the early morning after I had lain awake all night and exhausted all other resources. I tackled the problem in the only way I could think of and that was to visit the houses with whom I had learned the United Woollen did business. I remembered the names of about a dozen of them and made the rounds of these for a starter. It seemed like a poor chance and I myself did not know exactly what they could do with me but it would keep me busy for a while. With waits and delays this took me two weeks. Without letters it was almost impossible to reach the managers but I hung on in every case until I succeeded. Here again I didn't feel like an honest man offering to do a fair return of work for pay, so much as I did a beggar. This may have been my fault; but after you've sat around in offices and corridors and been scowled at as an intruder for three or four hours and then been greeted with a surly "What do you want?" you can't help having a grouch. There wasn't a man who treated my offer as a business proposition. At the end of that time two questions were burned into my brain: "What can you do?" and "How old are you?" The latter question came as a revelation. It seems that from a business point of view I was considered an old man. My good strong body counted for nothing; my willingness to undertake any task counted for nothing. I was too old. No one wanted to bother with a beginner over eighteen or twenty. The market demanded youth--youth with the years ahead that I had already sold. Wherever I stumbled by chance upon a vacant position I found waiting there half a dozen stalwart youngsters. They looked as I had looked when I joined the United Woollen Company. I offered to do the same work at the same wages as the youngsters, but the managers didn't want me. They didn't want a man around with wrinkles in his face. Moreover, they were looking to the future. They didn't intend to adjust a man into their machinery only to have him die in a dozen years. I wasn't a good risk. Moreover, I wouldn't be so easily trained, and with a wider experience might prove more bothersome. At thirty-eight I was too old to make a beginning. The verdict was unanimous. And yet I had a physique like an ox and there wasn't a gray hair in my head. I came out of the last of those offices with my fists clenched. In the meanwhile I had used up my advance salary and was, for the first time in my life, running into debt. Having always paid my bills weekly I had no credit whatever. Even at the end of the third week I knew that the grocery man and butcher were beginning to fidget. The neighbors had by this time learned of my plight and were gossiping. And yet in the midst of all this I had some of the finest hours with my wife I had ever known. She sent me away every morning with fresh hope and greeted me at night with a cheerfulness that was like wine. And she did this without any show of false optimism. She was not blind to the seriousness of our present position, but she exhibited a confidence in me that did not admit of doubt or fear. There was something almost awesomely beautiful about standing by her side and facing the approaching storm. She used to place her small hands upon my back and exclaim: "Why, Billy, there's work for shoulders like those." It made me feel like a giant. So another month passed. I subscribed to an employment bureau, but the only offer I received was to act as a sort of bouncer in a barroom. I suppose my height and weight and reputation for sobriety recommended me there. There was five dollars a week in it, and as far as I alone was concerned I would have taken it. That sum would at least buy bread, and though it may sound incredible the problem of getting enough to eat was fast becoming acute. The provision men became daily more suspicious. We cut down on everything, but I knew it was only a question of time when they would refuse to extend our credit for the little we _had_ to have. And all around me my neighbors went their cheerful ways and waited for me to work it out. But whenever I thought of the barroom job and the money it would bring I could see them shake their heads. It was hell. It was the deepest of all deep hells--the middle-class hell. There was nothing theatrical about it--no fireworks or red lights. It was plain, dull, sodden. Here was my position: work in my own class I couldn't get; work as a young man I was too old to get; work as just plain physical labor these same middle-class neighbors refused to allow me to undertake. I couldn't black my neighbors' boots without social ostracism, though Pasquale, who kept the stand in the United Woollen building, once confided to me that he cleared some twenty-five dollars a week. I couldn't mow my neighbors' front lawns or deliver milk at their doors, though there was food in it. That was honest work--clean work; but if I attempted it would they play golf with me? Personally I didn't care. I would have taken a job that day. But there were the wife and boy. They were held in ransom. It's all very well to talk about scorning the conventions, to philosophize about the dignity of honest work, to quote "a man's a man for a' that"; but associates of their own kind mean more to a woman and a growing boy than they do to a man. At least I thought so at that time. When I saw my wife surrounded by well-bred, well-dressed women, they seemed to me an essential part of her life. What else did living mean for her? When my boy brought home with him other boys of his age and kind--though to me they did not represent the highest type--I felt under obligations to retain those friends for him. I had begot him into this set. It seemed barbarous to do anything that would allow them to point the finger at him. I felt a yearning for some primeval employment. I hungered to join the army or go to sea. But here again were the wife and boy. I felt like going into the Northwest and preempting a homestead. That was a saner idea, but it took capital and I didn't have enough. I was tied hand and foot. It was like one of those nightmares where in the face of danger you are suddenly struck dumb and immovable. I was beginning to look wild-eyed. Ruth and I were living on bread, without butter, and canned soup. I sneaked in town with a few books and sold them for enough to keep the boy supplied with meat. My shoes were worn out at the bottom and my clothes were getting decidedly seedy. The men with whom I was in the habit of riding to town in the morning gave me as wide a berth as though I had the leprosy. I guess they were afraid my hard luck was catching. God pity them, many of them were dangerously near the rim of this same hell themselves. One morning my wife came to me reluctantly, but with her usual courage, and said: "Billy, the grocery man didn't bring our order last night." It was like a sword-thrust. It made me desperate. But the worst of the middle-class hell is that there is nothing to fight back at. There you are. I couldn't say anything. There was no answer. My eyes must have looked queer, for Ruth came nearer and whispered: "Don't go in town to-day, Billy." I had on my hat and had gathered up two or three more volumes in my green bag. I looked at the trim little house that had been my home for so long. The rent would be due next month. I looked at the other trim little houses around me. Was it actually possible that a man could starve in such a community? It seemed like a satanic joke. Why, every year this country was absorbing immigrants by the thousand. They did not go hungry. They waxed fat and prosperous. There was Pasquale, the bootblack, who was earning nearly as much as I ever did. We were standing on the porch. I took Ruth in my arms and kissed her. She drew back with a modest protest that the neighbors might see. The word neighbors goaded me. I shook my fist at their trim little houses and voiced a passion that had slowly been gathering strength. "Damn the neighbors!" I cried. Ruth was startled. I don't often swear. "Have they been talking about you?" she asked suddenly, her mouth hardening. "I don't know. I don't care. But they hold you in ransom like bloody Moroccan pirates." "How do they, Billy?" "They won't let me work without taking it out of you and the boy." Her head dropped for a second at mention of the boy, but it was soon lifted. "Let's get away from them," she gasped. "Let's go where there are no neighbors." "Would you?" I asked. "I'd go to the ends of the earth with you, Billy," she answered quietly. How plucky she was! I couldn't help but smile as I answered, more to myself: "We haven't even the carfare to go to the ends of the earth, Ruth. It will take all we have to pay our bills." "All we have?" she asked. No, not that. They could get only a little of what she and I had. They could take our belongings, that's all. And they hadn't got those yet. But I had begun to hate those neighbors with a fierce, unreasoning hatred. In silence they dictated, without assisting. For a dozen years I had lived with them, played with them, been an integral part of their lives, and now they were worse than useless to me. There wasn't one of them big enough to receive me into his home for myself alone, apart from the work I did. There wasn't a true brother among them. Our lives turn upon little things. They turn swiftly. Within fifteen minutes I had solved my problem in a fashion as unexpected as it was radical. CHAPTER IV WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA Going down the path to town bitterly and blindly, I met Murphy. He was a man with not a gray hair in his head who was a sort of man-of-all-work for the neighborhood. He took care of my furnace and fussed about the grounds when I was tied up at the office with night work. He stopped me with rather a shamefaced air. "Beg pardon, sor," he began, "but I've got a bill comin' due on the new house--" I remembered that I owed him some fifteen dollars. I had in my pocket just ten cents over my carfare. But what arrested my attention was the mention of a new house. "You mean to tell me that you're putting up a house?" "The bit of a rint, sor, in ---- Street." The contrast was dramatic. The man who emptied my ashes was erecting tenements and I was looking for work that would bring me in food. My people had lived in this country some two hundred years or more, and Murphy had probably not been here over thirty. There was something wrong about this, but I seemed to be getting hold of an idea. "How old are you, Murphy?" I asked. "Goin' on sixty, sor." "You came to America broke?" "Dead broke, sor." "You have a wife and children?" "A woman and six childer." Six! Think of it! And I had one. "Children in school?" I asked it almost in hope that here at least I would hold the advantage. "Two of them in college, sor." He spoke it proudly. Well he might. But to me it was confusing. "And you have enough left over to put up a house?" I stammered. "It's better than the bank," Murphy said apologetically. "And you aren't an old man yet," I murmured. "Old, sor?" "Why you're young and strong and independent, Murphy. You're----" But I guess I talked a bit wild. I don't know what I said. I was breathless--lightheaded. I wanted to get back to Ruth. "Pat," I said, seizing his hand--"Pat, you shall have the money within a week. I'm going to sell out and emigrate." "Emigrate?" he gasped. "Where to?" I laughed. The solution now seemed so easy. "Why, to America, Pat. To America where you came thirty years ago." I left him staring at me. I hurried into the house with my heart in my throat. I found Ruth in the sitting-room with her chin in her hands and her white forehead knotted in a frown. She didn't hear me come in, but when I touched her arm she jumped up, ashamed to think I had caught her looking even puzzled. But at sight of my face her expression changed in a flash. "Oh, Billy," she cried, "it's good news?" "It's a way out--if you approve," I answered. "I do, Billy," she answered, without waiting to hear. "Then listen," I said. "If we were living in England or Ireland or France or Germany and found life as hard as this and some one left us five hundred dollars what would you advise doing?" "Why, we'd emigrate, Billy," she said instantly. "Exactly. Where to?" "To America." "Right," I cried. "And we'd be one out of a thousand if we didn't make good, wouldn't we?" "Why, every one succeeds who comes here from somewhere else," she exclaimed. "And why do they?" I demanded, getting excited with my idea. "Why do they? There are a dozen reasons. One is because they come as pioneers--with all the enthusiasm and eagerness of adventurers. Life is fresh and romantic to them over here. Hardships only add zest to the game. Another reason is that it is all a fine big gamble to them. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose. It's the same spirit that drives young New Englanders out west to try their luck, to preëmpt homesteads in the Northwest, to till the prairies. Another reason is that they come over here free--unbound by conventions. They can work as they please, live as they please. They haven't any caste to hamper them. Another reason is that, being on the same great adventure, they are all brothers. They pull together. Still another reason is that as emigrants the whole United States stands ready to help them with schools and playgrounds and hospitals and parks." I paused for breath. She cut in excitedly: "Then we're going out west?" "No; we haven't the capital for that. By selling all our things we can pay our debts and have a few dollars over, but that wouldn't take us to Chicago. I'm not going ten miles from home." "Where then, Billy?" "You've seen the big ships come in along the water-front? They are bringing over hundreds of emigrants every year and landing them right on those docks. These people have had to cross the ocean to reach that point, but our ancestors made the voyage for you and me two hundred years ago. We're within ten miles of the wharf now." She couldn't make out what I meant. "Why, wife o' mine," I ran on, "all we need to do is to pack up, go down to the dock and start from there. We must join the emigrants and follow them into the city. These are the only people who are finding America to-day. We must take up life among them; work as they work; live as they live. Why, I feel my back muscles straining even now; I feel the tingle of coming down the gangplank with our fortunes yet to make in this land of opportunity. Pasquale has done it; Murphy has done it. Don't you think I can do it?" She looked up at me. I had never seen her face more beautiful. It was flushed and eager. She clutched my arm. Then she whispered: "My man--my wonderful, good man!" The primitive appellation was in itself like a whiff of salt air. It bore me back to the days when a husband's chief function was just that--being a man to his own good woman. We looked for a moment into each other's eyes. Then the same question was born to both of us in a moment. "What of the boy?" It was a more serious question to her, I think, than it was to me. I knew that the sons of other fathers and mothers had wrestled with that life and come out strong. There were Murphy's boys, for instance. Of course the life would be new to my boy, but the keen competition ought to drive him to his best. His present life was not doing that. As for the coarser details from which he had been so sheltered--well, a man has to learn sooner or later, and I wasn't sure but that it was better for him to learn at an age when such things would offer no real temptations. With Ruth back of him I didn't worry much about that. Besides, the boy had let drop a phrase or two that made me suspect that even among his present associates that same ground was being explored. "Ruth," I said, "I'm not worrying about Dick." "He has been kept so fresh," she murmured. "It isn't the fresh things that keep longest," I said. "That's true, Billy," she answered. Then she thought a moment, and as though with new inspiration answered me using again that same tender, primitive expression: "I don't fear for my man-child." When the boy came home from school that night I had a long talk with him. I told him frankly how I had been forced out of my position, how I had tried for another, how at length I had resolved to go pioneering just as his great-grandfather had done among the Indians. As I thought, the naked adventure of it appealed to him. That was all I wished; it was enough to work on. The next day I brought out a second-hand furniture dealer and made as good a bargain as I could with him for the contents of the house. We saved nothing but the sheer essentials for light housekeeping. These consisted of most of the cooking utensils, a half dozen plates, cups and saucers and about a dozen other pieces for the table, four tablecloths, all the bed linen, all our clothes, including some old clothes we had been upon the point of throwing away, a few personal gimcracks, and for furniture the following articles: the folding wooden kitchen table, a half dozen chairs, the cot bed in the boy's room, the iron bed in our room, the long mirror I gave Ruth on her birthday, and a sort of china closet that stood in the dining-room. To this we added bowls, pitchers, and lamps. All the rest, which included a full dining-room set, a full dinner set of china, the furnishings of the front room, including books and book case, chairs, rugs, pictures and two or three good chairs, a full bed-room set in our room and a cheaper one in the boy's room, piazza furnishings, garden tools, and forty odds and ends all of which had cost me first and last something like two thousand dollars, I told the dealer to lump together. He looked it over and bid six hundred dollars. I saw Ruth swallow hard, for she had taken good care of everything so that to us it was worth as much to-day as we had paid for it. But I accepted the offer without dickering, for it was large enough to serve my ends. It would pay off all our debts and leave us a hundred dollars to the good. It was the first time since I married that I had been that much ahead. That afternoon I saw Murphy and hired of him the top tenement of his new house. It was in the Italian quarter of the city and my flat consisted of four rooms. The rent was three dollars a week. Murphy looked surprised enough at the change in my affairs and I made him promise not to gossip to the neighbors about where I'd gone. "Faith, sor," he said, "and they wouldn't believe it if I told them." This wasn't all I accomplished that day. I bought a pair of overalls and presented myself at the office of a contractor's agent. I didn't have any trouble in getting in there and I didn't feel like a beggar as I took my place in line with about a dozen foreigners. I looked them over with a certain amount of self-confidence. Most of them were undersized men with sagging shoulders and primitive faces. With their big eyes they made me think of shaggy Shetland ponies. Lined up man for man with my late associates they certainly looked like an inferior lot. I studied them with curiosity; there must be more in them than showed on the surface to bring them over here--there must be something that wasn't in the rest of us for them to make good the way they did. In the next six months I meant to find out what that was. In the meantime just sitting there among them I felt as though I had more elbow room than I had had since I was eighteen. Before me as before them a continent stretched its great length and breadth. They laughed and joked among themselves and stared about at everything with eager, curious eyes. They were ready for anything, and everything was ready for them--the ditch, the mines, the railroads, the wheat fields. Wherever things were growing and needed men to help them grow, they would play their part. They say there's plenty of room at the top, but there's plenty of room at the bottom, too. It's in the middle that men get pinched. I worked my way up to the window where a sallow, pale-faced clerk sat in front of a big book. He gave me a start, he was such a contrast to the others. In my new enthusiasm I wanted to ask him why he didn't come out and get in line the other side of the window. He yawned as he wrote down my name. I didn't have to answer more than half a dozen questions before he told me to report for work Monday at such and such a place. I asked him what the work was and he looked up. "Subway," he answered. I asked him how much the pay was. He looked me over at this. I don't know what he thought I was. "Dollar and a half--nine hours." "All right," I answered. He gave me a slip of paper and I hurried out. It hadn't taken ten minutes. And a dollar and a half a day was nine dollars a week! It was almost twice as much as I had started on with the United; it was over a third of what I had been getting after my first ten years of hard work with them. It seemed too good to be true. Taking out the rent, this left me six dollars for food. That was as much as it had cost Ruth and me the first year we were married. There was no need of going hungry on that. I came back home jubilant. Ruth at first took the prospect of my digging in a ditch a bit hard, but that was only because she contrasted it with my former genteel employment. "Why, girl," I explained, "it's no more than I would have to do if we took a homestead out west. I'd as soon dig in Massachusetts as Montana." She felt of my arm. It's a big arm. Then she smiled. It was the last time she mentioned the subject. We didn't say anything to the neighbors until the furniture began to go out. Then the women flocked in and Ruth was hard pressed to keep our secret. I sat upstairs and chuckled as I heard her replies. She says it's the only time I ever failed to stand by her, but it didn't seem to me like anything but a joke. "We shall want to keep track of you," said little Mrs. Grover. "Where shall we address you?" "Oh, I can't tell," answered Ruth, truthfully enough. "Are you going far?" "Yes. Oh--a long, long way." That was true enough too. We couldn't have gone farther out of their lives if we'd sailed for Australia. And so they kept it up. That night we made a round of the houses and everyone was very much surprised and very much grieved and very curious. To all their inquiries, I made the same reply; that I was going to emigrate. Some of them looked wistful. "Jove," said Brown, who was with the insurance company, "but I wish I had the nerve to do that. I suppose you're going west?" "We're going west first," I answered. The road to the station was almost due west. "They say there are great chances out in that country," he said. "It isn't so overcrowded as here." "I don't know about that," I answered, "but there are chances enough." Some of the women cried and all the men shook hands cordially and wished us good luck. But it didn't mean much to me. The time I needed their handshakes was gone. I learned later that as a result of our secrecy I was variously credited with having lost my reason with my job; with having inherited a fortune, with having gambled in the market, with, thrown in for good measure, a darker hint about having misappropriated funds of the United Woollen. But somehow their nastiest gossip did not disturb me. It had no power to harm either me or mine. I was already beyond their reach. Before I left I wished them all Godspeed on the dainty journey they were making in their cockleshell. Then so far as they were concerned I dropped off into the sea with my wife and boy. CHAPTER V WE PROSPECT We were lucky in getting into a new tenement and lucky in securing the top floor. This gave us easy access to the flat roof five stories above the street. From here we not only had a magnificent view of the harbor, but even on the hottest days felt something of a sea breeze. Coming down here in June we appreciated that before the summer was over. The street was located half a dozen blocks from the waterfront and was inhabited almost wholly by Italians, save for a Frenchman on the corner who ran a bake-shop. The street itself was narrow and dirty enough, but it opened into a public square which was decidedly picturesque. This was surrounded by tiny shops and foreign banks, and was always alive with color and incident. The vegetables displayed on the sidewalk stands, the gay hues of the women's gowns, the gaudy kerchiefs of the men, gave it a kaleidoscopic effect that made it as fascinating to us as a trip abroad. The section was known as Little Italy, and so far as we were concerned was as interesting as Italy itself. There were four other families in the house, but the only things we used in common were the narrow iron stairway leading upstairs and the roof. The other tenants, however, seldom used the latter at all except to hang out their occasional washings. For the first month or so we saw little of these people. We were far too busy to make overtures, and as for them they let us severely alone. They were not noisy, and except for a sick baby on the first floor we heard little of them above the clamor of the street below. We had four rooms. The front room we gave to the boy, the next room we ourselves occupied, the third room we used for a sitting-and dining-room, while the fourth was a small kitchen with running water. As compared with our house the quarters at first seemed cramped, but we had cut down our furniture to what was absolutely essential, and as soon as our eyes ceased making the comparison we were surprised to find how comfortable we were. In the dining-room, for instance, we had nothing but three chairs, a folding table and a closet for the dishes. Lounging chairs and so forth we did away with altogether. Nor was there any need of making provision for possible guests. Here throughout the whole house was the greatest saving. I took a fierce pleasure at first in thus caring for my own alone. The boy's room contained a cot, a chair, a rug and a few of his personal treasures; our own room contained just the bed, chair and washstand. Ruth added a few touches with pictures and odds and ends that took off the bare aspect without cluttering up. In two weeks these scant quarters were every whit as much home as our tidy little house had been. That was Ruth's part in it. She'd make a home out of a prison. On the second day we were fairly settled, and that night after the boy had gone to bed Ruth sat down at my side with a pad and pencil in her hand. "Billy," she said, "there's one thing we're going to do in this new beginning: we're going to save--if it's only ten cents a week." I shook my head doubtfully. "I'm afraid you can't until I get a raise," I said. "We tried waiting for raises before," she answered. "I know, but--" "There aren't going to be any buts," she answered decidedly. "But six dollars a week--" "Is six dollars a week," she broke in. "We must live on five-fifty, that's all." "With steak thirty cents a pound?" "We won't have steak. That's the point. Our neighbors around here don't look starved, and they have larger families than ours. And they don't even buy intelligently." "How do you know that?" "I've been watching them at the little stores in the square. They pay there as much for half-decayed stuff as they'd have to pay for fresh odds and ends at the big market." She rested her pad upon her knee. "Now in the first place, Billy, we're going to live much more simply." "We've never been extravagant," I said. "Not in a way," she answered slowly, "but in another way we have. I've been doing a lot of thinking in the last few days and I see now where we've had a great many unnecessary things." "Not for the last few weeks, anyhow," I said. "Those don't count. But before that I mean. For instance there's coffee. It's a luxury. Why we spent almost thirty cents a week on that alone." "I know but--" "There's another but. There's no nourishment in coffee and we can't afford it. We'll spend that money for milk. We must have good milk and you must get it for me somewhere up town. I don't like the looks of the milk around here. That will be eight cents a day." "Better have two quarts," I suggested. She thought a moment. "Yes," she agreed, "two quarts, because that's going to be the basis of our food. That's a dollar twelve cents a week." She made up a little face at this. I smiled grandly. "Now for breakfast we must have oatmeal every morning. And we'll get it in bulk. I've priced it and it's only a little over three cents a pound at some of the stores." "And the kind we've always had?" "About twelve when it's done up in packages. That's about the proportion by which I expect to cut down everything. But you'll have to eat milk on it instead of cream. Then we'll use a lot of potatoes. They are very good baked for breakfast. And with them you may have salt fish--oh, there are a dozen nice ways of fixing that. And you may have griddle cakes and--you wait and see the things I'll give you for breakfast. You'll have to have a good luncheon of course, but we'll have our principal meal when you get back from work at night. But you won't get steak. When we do get meat we'll buy soup bones and meat we can boil. And instead of pies and cakes we'll have nourishing puddings of cornstarch and rice. There's another good point--rice. It's cheap and we'll have a lot of it. Look at how the Japanese live on it day after day and keep fat and strong. Then there's cheap fish; rock cod and such to make good chowders of or to fry in pork fat like the bass and trout I used to have back home. Then there's baked beans. We ought to have them at least twice a week in the winter. But this summer we'll live mostly on fish and vegetables. I can get them fresh at the market." "It sounds good," I said. "Just you wait," she cried excitedly. "I'll fatten up both you and the boy." "And yourself, little woman," I reminded her. "I'm not going to take the saving out of you." "Don't you worry about me," she answered. "This will be easier than the other life. I shan't have to worry about clothes or dinners or parties for the boy. And it isn't going to take any time at all to keep these four rooms clean and sweet." I took the rest of the week as a sort of vacation and used it to get acquainted with my new surroundings. It's a fact that this section of the city which for twenty years had been within a short walk of my office was as foreign to me as Europe. I had never before been down here and all I knew about it was through the occasional head-lines in the papers in connection with stabbing affrays. For the first day or two I felt as though I ought to carry a revolver. Whenever I was forced to leave Ruth alone in the house I instructed her upon no circumstances to open the door. The boy and I arranged a secret rap--an idea that pleased him mightily--and until she heard the single knock followed by two quick sharp ones, she was not to answer. But in wandering around among these people it was difficult to think of them as vicious. The Italian element was a laughing, indolent-appearing group; the scattered Jewish folk were almost timid and kept very much to themselves. I didn't find a really tough face until I came to the water front where they spoke English. On the third morning after a breakfast of oatmeal and hot biscuit--and, by the way, Ruth effected a fifty per cent. saving right here by using the old-fashioned formula of soda and cream of tartar instead of baking powder--and baked potatoes, Ruth and the boy and myself started on an exploring trip. Our idea was to get a line on just what our opportunities were down here and to nose out the best and cheapest places to buy. The thing that impressed us right off was the big advantage we had in being within easy access of the big provision centres. We were within ten minutes' walk of the market, within fifteen of the water front, within three of the square and within twenty of the department stores. At all of these places we found special bargains for the day made to attract in town those from a distance. If one rose early and reached them about as soon as they were opened one could often buy things almost at cost and sometimes below cost. For instance, we went up town to one of the largest but cheaper grade department stores--we had heard its name for years but had never been inside the building--and we found that in their grocery department they had special mark-downs every day in the week for a limited supply of goods. We bought sugar this day at a cent a pound less than the market price and good beans for two cents a quart less. It sounds at first like rather picayune saving but it counts up at the end of the year. Then every stall in the market had its bargain of meats--wholesome bits but unattractive to the careless buyer. We bought here for fifty cents enough round steak for several good meals of hash. We couldn't have bought it for less than a dollar in the suburbs and even at that we wouldn't have known anything about it for the store was too far for Ruth to make a personal visit and the butcher himself would never have mentioned such an odd end to a member of our neighborhood. We enjoyed wandering around this big market which in itself was like a trip to another land. Later one of our favorite amusements was to come down here at night and watch the hustling crowds and the lights and the pretty colors and confusion. It reminded Ruth, she said, of a country fair. She always carried a pad and pencil and made notes of good places to buy. I still have those and am referring to them now as I write this. "Blanks," she writes (I omit the name), "nice clean store with pleasant salesman. Has good soup bones." Again, "Blank and Blank--good place to buy sausage." Here too the market gardeners gathered as early as four o'clock with their vegetables fresh from the suburbs. They did mostly a wholesale business but if one knew how it was always possible to buy of them a cabbage or a head of lettuce or a few apples or a peck of potatoes. They were a genial, ruddy-cheeked lot and after a while they came to know Ruth. Often I'd go up there with her before work and she with a basket on her arm would buy for the day. It was always, "Good morning, miss," in answer to her smile. They were respectful whether I was along or not. But for that matter I never knew anyone who wasn't respectful to Ruth. They used to like to see her come, I think, for she stood out in rather marked contrast to the bowed figures of the other women. Later on they used to save out for her any particularly choice vegetable they might have. She insisted however in paying them an extra penny for such things. From the market we went down a series of narrow streets which led to the water front. Here the vessels from the Banks come in to unload. The air was salty and though to us at first the wharves seemed dirty we got used to them, after a while, and enjoyed the smell of the fish fresh from the water. Seeing whole push carts full of fish and watching them handled with a pitch fork as a man tosses hay didn't whet our appetites any, but when we remembered that it was these same fish--a day or two older,--for which we had been paying double the price charged for them here the difference overcame our scruples. The men here interested me. I found that while the crew of every schooner numbered a goodly per cent. of foreigners, still the greater part were American born. The new comers as a rule bought small launches of their own and went into business for themselves. The English speaking portion of the crews were also as a rule the rougher element. The loafers and hangers-on about the wharves were also English speaking. This was a fact that later on I found to be rather significant and to hold true in a general way in all branches of the lower class of labor. The barrooms about here--always a pretty sure index of the men of any community--were more numerous and of decidedly a rougher character than those about the square. A man would be a good deal better justified in carrying a revolver on this street than he would in Little Italy. I never allowed Ruth to come down here alone. From here we wandered back and I found a public playground and bathhouse by the water's edge. This attracted me at once. I investigated this and found it offered a fine opportunity for bathing. Little dressing-rooms were provided and for a penny a man could get a clean towel and for five cents a bathing suit. There was no reason that I could see, however, why we shouldn't provide our own. It was within an easy ten minutes of the flat and I saw right then where I would get a dip every day. It would be a great thing for the boy, too. I had always wanted him to learn to swim. On the way home we passed through the Jewish quarter and I made a note of the clothing offered for sale here. The street was lined with second hand stores with coats and trousers swinging over the sidewalk, and the windows were filled with odd lots of shoes. Then too there were the pawnshops. I'd always thought of a pawnshop as not being exactly respectable and had the feeling that anyone who secured anything from one of them was in a way a receiver of stolen goods. But as I passed them now, I received a new impression. They seemed, down here, as legitimate a business as the second hand stores. The windows offered an assortment of everything from watches to banjoes and guns but among them I also noticed many carpenter's tools and so forth. That might be a useful thing to remember. It was odd how in a day our point of view had changed. If I had brought Ruth and the boy down through here a month before, we would all, I think, have been more impressed by the congestion and the picturesque details of the squalor than anything else. We would have picked our way gingerly and Ruth would have sighed often in pity and, comparing the lives of these people with our own, would probably have made an extra generous contribution to the Salvation Army the next time they came round. I'm not saying now that there isn't misery enough there and in every like section of every city, but I'll say that in a great many cases the same people who grovel in the filth here would grovel in a different kind of filth if they had ten thousand a year. At that you can't blame them greatly for they don't know any better. But when you learn, as I learned later, that some of the proprietors of these second hand stores and fly-blown butcher shops have sons in Harvard and daughters in Wellesley, it makes you think. But I'm running ahead. The point was that now that we felt ourselves in a way one of these people and viewed the street not from the superior height of native-born Americans but just as emigrants, neither the soiled clothes of the inhabitants nor the cluttered street swarming with laughing youngsters impressed us unfavorably at all. The impassive men smoking cigarettes at their doors looked contented enough, the women were not such as to excite pity, and if you noticed, there were as many children around the local soda water fountains as you'd find in a suburban drug store. They all had clothes enough and appeared well fed and if some of them looked pasty, the sweet stuff in the stores was enough to account for that. At any rate we came back to our flat that day neither depressed nor discouraged but decidedly in better spirits. Of course we had seen only the surface and I suspected that when we really got into these lives we'd find a bad condition of things. It must be so, for that was the burden of all we read. But we would have time enough to worry about that when we discovered it for ourselves. CHAPTER VI I BECOME A DAY LABORER That night Ruth and I had a talk about the boy. We both came back from our walk, with him more on our minds than anything else. He had been interested in everything and had asked about a thousand questions and gone to bed eager to be out on the street again the next day. We knew we couldn't keep him cooped up in the flat all the time and of course both Ruth and I were going to be too busy to go out with him every time he went. As for letting him run loose around these streets with nothing to do, that would be sheer foolhardiness. It was too late in the season to enroll him in the public schools and even that would have left him idle during the long summer months. We talked some at first of sending him off into the country to a farm. There were two or three families back where Ruth had lived who might be willing to take him for three or four dollars a week and we had the money left over from the sale of our household goods to cover that. But this would mean the sacrifice of our emergency fund which we wished to preserve more for the boy's sake than our own and it would mean leaving Ruth very much alone. "I'll do it, Billy," she said bravely, "but can't we wait a day or two before deciding? And I think I can _make_ time to get out with him. I'll get up earlier in the morning and I'll leave my work at night until after he's gone to bed." So she would. She'd have worked all night to keep him at home and then gone out with him all day if it had been possible. I saw it would be dragging the heart out of her to send the boy away and made up my mind right then and there that some other solution must be found for the problem. Good Lord, after I'd led her down here the least I could do was to let her keep the one. And to tell the truth I found my own heart sink at the suggestion. "What do the boys round here do in the summer?" she asked. I didn't know and I made up my mind to find out. The next day I went down to a settlement house which I remembered passing at some time or other. I didn't know what it was but it sounded like some sort of philanthropic enterprise for the neighborhood and if so they ought to be able to answer my questions there. The outside of the building was not particularly attractive but upon entering I was pleasantly surprised at the air of cleanliness and comfort which prevailed. There were a number of small boys around and in one room I saw them reading and playing checkers. I sought out the secretary and found him a pleasant young fellow though with something of the professional pleasantness which men in this work seem to acquire. He smiled too much and held my hand a bit too long to suit me. He took me into his office and offered me a chair. I told him briefly that I had just moved down here and had a boy of ten whom I wished to keep off the streets and keep occupied. I asked him what the boys around here did during the summer. "Most of them work," he answered. I hadn't thought of this. "What do they do?" "A good many sell papers, some of them serve as errand boys and others help their parents." Dick was certainly too inexperienced for the first two jobs and there was nothing in my work he could do to help. Then the man began to ask me questions. He was evidently struck by the fact that I didn't seem to be in place here. I answered briefly that I had been a clerk all my life, had lost my position and was now a common day laborer. The boy, I explained, was not yet used to his life down here and I wanted to keep him occupied until he got his strength. "You're right," he answered. "Why don't you bring him in here?" "What would he do here?" "It's a good loafing place for him and we have some evening classes." "I want him at home nights," I answered. "The Y.M.C.A. has summer classes which begin a little later on. Why don't you put him into some of those?" I had always heard of the Y.M.C.A., but I had never got into touch with it, for I thought it was purely a religious organization. But that proposition sounded good. I'd passed the building a thousand times but had never been inside. I thanked him and started to leave. "I hope this won't be your last visit," he said cordially. "Come down and see what we're doing. You'll find a lot of boys here at night." "Thanks," I answered. I went direct to the Y.M.C.A. building. Here again I was surprised to find a most attractive interior. It looked like the inside of a prosperous club house. I don't know what I expected but I wouldn't have been startled if I'd found a hall filled with wooden settees and a prayer meeting going on. I had a lot of such preconceived notions knocked out of my head in the next few years. In response to my questions I received replies that made me feel I'd strayed by mistake into some university. For that matter it _was_ a university. There was nothing from the primary class in English to a professional education in the law that a man couldn't acquire here for a sum that was astonishingly small. The most of the classes cost nothing after payment of the membership fee of ten dollars. The instructors were, many of them, the same men who gave similar courses at a neighboring college. Not only that, but the hours were so arranged as to accommodate workers of all classes. If you couldn't attend in the daytime, you could at night. I was astonished to think that this opportunity had always been at my hand and I had never suspected it. In the ten years before I was married I could have qualified as a lawyer or almost anything else. This was not all; a young man took me over the building and showed me the library, the reading-room, rooms where the young men gathered for games, and then down stairs to the well equipped gymnasium with its shower baths. Here a boy could take a regular course in gymnasium work under a skilled instructor or if he showed any skill devote himself to such sports as basketball, running, baseball or swimming. In addition to these advantages amusements were provided through the year in the form of lectures, amateur shows and music. In the summer, special opportunities were offered for out-door sports. Moreover the Association managed summer camps where for a nominal fee the boys could enjoy the life of the woods. A boy must be poor indeed who could not afford most of these opportunities. And if he was out of work the employment bureau conducted here would help him to a position. I came back to the main office wondering still more how in the world I'd ever missed such chances all these years. It was a question I asked myself many times during the next few months. And the answer seemed to lie in the dead level of that other life. We never lifted our eyes; we never looked around us. If we were hard pressed either we accepted our lot resignedly or cursed our luck, and let it go at that. These opportunities were for a class which had no lot and didn't know the meaning of luck. The others could have had them, too--can have them--for the taking, but neither by education nor temperament are they qualified to do so. There's a good field for missionary work there for someone. Before I came out of the building I had enrolled Dick as a member and picked out for him a summer course in English in which he was a bit backward. I also determined to start him in some regular gymnasium work. He needed hardening up. I came home and announced my success to Ruth and she was delighted. I suspected by the look in her eyes that she had been worrying all day for fear there would be no alternative but to send the boy off. "I knew you would find a way," she said excitedly. "I wish I'd found it twenty years ago," I said regretfully. "Then you'd have a lawyer for a husband instead of a--." "Hush," she answered putting her hand over my mouth. "I've a man for a husband and that's all I care about." The way she said it made me feel that after all being a man was what counted and that if I could live up to that day by day, no matter what happened, then I could be well satisfied. I guess the city directory was right when before now it couldn't define me any more definitely than, "clerk." And there is about as much man in a clerk as in a valet. They are both shadows. The boy fell in with my plans eagerly, for the gymnasium work made him forget the study part of the programme. The next day I took him up there and saw him introduced to the various department heads. I paid his membership fee and they gave him a card which made him feel like a real club man. I tell you it took a weight off my mind. On the Monday following our arrival in our new quarters, I rose at five-thirty, put on my overalls and had breakfast. I ate a large bowl of oatmeal, a generous supply of flapjacks, made of some milk that had soured, sprinkled with molasses, and a cup of hot black coffee--the last of a can we had brought down with us among the left-over kitchen supplies. For lunch Ruth had packed my box with cold cream-of-tartar biscuit, well buttered, a bit of cheese, a little bowl of rice pudding, two hard-boiled eggs and a pint bottle of cold coffee. I kissed her goodby and started out on foot for the street where I was to take up my work. The foreman demanded my name, registered me, told me where to find a shovel and assigned me to a gang under another foreman. At seven o'clock I took my place with a dozen Italians and began to shovel. My muscles were decidedly flabby, and by noon I began to find it hard work. I was glad to stop and eat my lunch. I couldn't remember a meal in five years that tasted as good as that did. My companions watched me curiously--perhaps a bit suspiciously--but they chattered in a foreign tongue among themselves and rather shied away from me. On that first day I made up my mind to one thing--I would learn Italian before the year was done, and know something more about these people and their ways. They were the key to the contractor's problem and it would pay a man to know how to handle them. As I watched the boss over us that day it did not seem to me that he understood very well. From one to five the work became an increasing strain. Even with my athletic training I wasn't used to such a prolonged test of one set of muscles. My legs became heavy, my back ached, and my shoulders finally refused to obey me except under the sheer command of my will. I knew, however, that time would remedy this. I might be sore and lame for a day or two, but I had twice the natural strength of these short, close-knit foreigners. The excitement and novelty of the employment helped me through those first few days. I felt the joy of the pioneer--felt the sweet sense of delving in the mother earth. It touched in me some responsive chord that harked back to my ancestors who broke the rocky soil of New England. Of the life of my fellows bustling by on the earth-crust overhead--those fellows of whom so lately I had been one--I was not at all conscious. I might have been at work on some new planet for all they touched my new life. I could see them peering over the wooden rail around our excavation as they stopped to stare down at us, but I did not connect them with myself. And yet I felt closer to this old city than ever before. I thrilled with the joy of the constructor, the builder, even in this humble capacity. I felt superior to those for whom I was building. In a coarse way I suppose it was a reflection of some artistic sense--something akin to the creative impulse. I can say truthfully that at the end of that first day I came home--begrimed and sore as I was--with a sense of fuller life than so far I had ever experienced. I found Ruth waiting for me with some anxiety. She came into my soil-stained arms as eagerly as a bride. It was good. It took all the soreness out of me. Before supper I took the boy and we went down to the public baths on the waterfront and there I dived and splashed and swam like a young whale. The sting of the cold salt water was all the further balm I needed. I came out tingling and fit right then for another nine-hour day. But when I came back I threatened our first week's savings at the supper-table. Ruth had made more hot griddle-cakes and I kept her at the stove until I was ashamed to do it longer. The boy, too, after his plunge, showed a better appetite than for weeks. CHAPTER VII NINE DOLLARS A WEEK The second day, I woke up lame and stiff but I gave myself a good brisk rub down and kneaded my arm and leg muscles until they were pretty well limbered up. The thing that pleased me was the way I felt towards my new work that second morning. I'd been a bit afraid of a reaction--of waking up with all the romance gone. That, I knew, would be deadly. Once let me dwell on the naked material facts of my condition and I'd be lost. That's true of course in any occupation. The man who works without an inspiration of some sort is not only discontented but a poor workman. I remember distinctly that when I opened my eyes and realized my surroundings and traced back the incidents of yesterday to the ditch, I was concerned principally with the problem of a stone in our path upon which we had been working. I wanted to get back to it. We had worked upon it for an hour without fully uncovering it and I was as eager as the foreman to learn whether it was a ledge rock or just a fragment. This interest was not associated with the elevated road for whom the work was being done, nor the contractor who had undertaken the job, nor the foreman who was supervising it. It was a question which concerned only me and Mother Earth who seemed to be doing her best to balk us at every turn. I forgot the sticky, wet clay in which I had floundered for nine hours, forgot the noisome stench which at times we were forced to breathe, forgot my lame hands and back. I recalled only the problem itself and the skill with which the man they called Anton' handled his crow bar. He was a master of it. In removing the smaller slabs which lay around the big one he astonished me with his knowledge of how to place the bar. He'd come to my side where I was prying with all my strength and with a wave of his hand for me to stand back, would adjust two or three smaller rocks as a fulcrum and then, with the gentlest of movements, work the half-ton weight inch by inch to where he wanted it. He could swing the rock to the right or left, raise or lower it, at will, and always he made the weight of the rock, against which I had striven so vainly, do the work. That was something worth learning. I wanted to get back and study him. I wanted to get back and finish uncovering that rock. I wanted to get back and bring the job as a whole to a finish so as to have a new one to tackle. Even at the end of that first day I felt I had learned enough to make myself a man of greater power than I was the day before. And always in the background was the unknown goal to which this toil was to lead. I hadn't yet stopped to figure out what the goal was but that it was worth while I had no doubt for I was no longer stationary. I was a constructor. I was in touch with a big enterprise of development. I don't know that I've made myself clear. I wasn't very clear in my own mind then but I know that I had a very conscious impression of the sort which I've tried to put into words. And I know that it filled me with a great big joy. I never woke up with any such feeling when with the United Woollen. My only thought in the morning then was how much time I must give myself to catch the six-thirty. When I reached the office I hung up my hat and coat and sat down to the impersonal figures like an automaton. There was nothing of me in the work; there couldn't be. How petty it seemed now! I suppose the company, as an industrial enterprise, was in the line of development, but that idea never penetrated as far as the clerical department. We didn't feel it any more than the adding machines do. Ruth had a good breakfast for me and when I came into the kitchen she was trying to brush the dried clay off my overalls. "Good Heavens!" I said, "don't waste your strength doing that." She looked up from her task with a smile. "I'm not going to let you get slack down here" she said. "But those things will look just as bad again five minutes after I've gone down the ladder." "But I don't intend they shall look like this on your way to the ladder," she answered. "All right," I said "then let me have them. I'll do it myself." "Have you shaved?" she asked. I rubbed my hand over my chin. It wasn't very bad and I'd made up my mind I wouldn't shave every day now. "No," I said. "But twice or three times a week--" "Billy!" she broke in, "that will never do. You're going down to your new business looking just as ship-shape as you went to the old. You don't belong to that contractor; you belong to me." In the meanwhile the boy came in with my heavy boots which he had brushed clean and oiled. There was nothing left for me to do but to shave and I'll admit I felt better for it. "Do you want me to put on a high collar?" I asked. "Didn't you find the things I laid out for you?" I hadn't looked about. I'd put on the things I took off. She led me back into the bed room, and over a chair I saw a clean change of underclothing and a new grey flannel shirt. "Where did you get this?" I asked. "I bought it for a dollar," she answered. "It's too much to pay. I can make one for fifty cents as soon as I get time to sew." That's the way Ruth was. Every day after this she made me change, after I came back from my swim, into the business suit I wore when I came down here, and which now by contrast looked almost new. She even made me wear a tie with my flannel shirt. Every morning I started out clean shaven and with my work clothes as fresh as though I were a contractor myself. I objected at first because it seemed too much for her to do to wash the things every day, but she said it was a good deal easier than washing them once a week. Incidentally that was one of her own little schemes for saving trouble and it seemed to me a good one; instead of collecting her soiled clothes for seven days and then tearing herself all to pieces with a whole hard forenoon's work, she washed a little every day. By this plan it took her only about an hour each morning to keep all the linen in the house clean and sweet. We had the roof to dry it on and she never ironed anything except perhaps the tablecloths and handkerchiefs. We had no company to cater to and as long as we knew things were clean that's all we cared. We got around the rock all right. It proved not to be a ledge after all. I myself, however, didn't accomplish as much as I did the first day, for I was slower in my movements. On the other hand, I think I improved a little in my handling of the crowbar. At the noon hour I tried to start a conversation with Anton', but he understood little English and I knew no Italian, so we didn't get far. As he sat in a group of his fellow countrymen laughing and jabbering he made me feel distinctly like an outsider. There were one or two English-speaking workmen besides myself, but somehow they didn't interest me as much as these Italians. It may have been my imagination but they seemed to me a decidedly inferior lot. As a rule they were men who took the job only to keep themselves from starving and quit at the end of a week or two only to come back when they needed more money. I must make an exception of an Irishman I will call Dan Rafferty. He was a big blue-eyed fellow, full of fun and fight, with a good natured contempt of the Dagoes, and was a born leader. I noticed, the first day, that he came nearer being the boss of the gang than the foreman, and I suspect the latter himself noticed it, for he seemed to have it in for Dan. There never was an especially dirty job to be done but what Dan was sent. He always obeyed but he used to slouch off with his big red fist doubled up, muttering curses that brought out his brogue at its best. Later on he confided in me what he was going to do to that boss. If he had carried out his threats he would long since have been electrocuted and I would have lost a good friend. Several times I thought the two men were coming to blows but though Dan would have dearly loved a fight and could have handled a dozen men like the foreman, he always managed to control himself in time to avoid it. "I don't wanter be after losin' me job for the dirthy spalpeen," he growled to me. But he came near it in a way he wasn't looking for later in the week. It was Friday and half a dozen of us had been sent down to work on the second level. It was damp and suffocating down there, fifty feet below the street. I felt as though I had gone into the mines. I didn't like it but I knew that there was just as much to learn here as above and that it must all be learned eventually. The sides were braced with heavy timbers like a mine shaft to prevent the dirt from falling in and there was the constant danger that in spite of this it might cave in. We went down by rough ladders made by nailing strips of board across two pieces of joist and the work down there was back-breaking and monotonous. We heaved the dirt into a big iron bucket lowered by the hoisting engine above. It was heavy, wet soil that weighed like lead. From the beginning the men complained of headaches and one by one they crawled up the ladder again for fresh air. Others were sent down but at the end of an hour they too retreated. Dan and I stuck it out for a while. Then I began to get dizzy myself. I didn't know what the trouble was but when I began to wobble a bit Dan placed his hand on my shoulder. "Betther climb out o' here," he said. "I'm thinkin' it's gas." At that time I didn't know what sewer gas was. I couldn't smell anything and thought he must be mistaken. "You'd better come too," I answered, making for the ladder. He wasn't coming but I couldn't get up very well without him so he followed along behind. At the top we found the foreman fighting mad and trying to spur on another gang to go down. They wouldn't move. When he saw us come up he turned upon Dan. "Who ordered you out of there?" he growled. "The gas," answered Dan. "Gas be damned," shouted the foreman. "You're a bunch of white livered cowards--all of you." I saw Dan double up his fists and start towards the man. The latter checked him with a command. "Go back down there or you're fired," he said to him. Dan turned red. Then I saw his jaws come together. "Begod!" he answered. "_You_ shan't fire me, anyhow." Without another word he started down the ladder again. I saw the Italians crowd together and watch him. By that time my head was clearer but my legs were weak. I sat down a moment uncertain what to do. Then I heard someone shout: "By God, he's right! He's lying there at the bottom." I started towards the ladder but some one shoved me back. Then I thought of the bucket. It was above ground and I staggered towards it gaining strength at each step. I jumped in and shouted to the engineer to lower me. He obeyed from instinct. I went down, down, down to what seemed like the center of the earth. When the bucket struck the ground I was dizzy again but I managed to get out, heave the unconscious Dan in and pile on top of him myself. When I came to, I was in an ambulance on my way to the hospital but by the time I had reached the emergency room I had taken a grip on myself. I knew that if ever Ruth heard of this she would never again be comfortable. When they took us out I was able to walk a little. The doctors wanted to put me to bed but I refused to go. I sat there for about an hour while they worked over Dan. When I found that he would be all right by morning I insisted upon going out. I had a bad headache, but I knew the fresh air would drive this away and so it did, though it left me weak. One of the hardest day's work I ever did in my life was killing time from then until five o'clock. Of course the papers got hold of it and that gave me another scare but luckily the nearest they came to my name was Darlinton, so no harm was done. And they didn't come within a mile of getting the real story. When in a later edition one of them published my photograph I felt absolutely safe for they had me in a full beard and thinner than I've ever been in my life. When I came home at my usual time looking a bit white perhaps but otherwise normal enough, the first question Ruth asked me was: "What have you done with your dinner pail, Billy?" Isn't a man always sure to do some such fool thing as that, when he's trying to keep something quiet from the wife? I had to explain that I had forgotten it and that was enough to excite suspicion at any time. She kept me uneasy for ten minutes and the best I could do was to admit finally that I wasn't feeling very well. Whereupon she made me go to bed and fussed over me all the evening and worried all the next day. I reported for work as usual in the morning and found we had a new foreman. It was a relief because I guess if Dan hadn't knocked down the other one, someone else would have done it sooner or later. At that the man had taught me something about sewer gas and that is when you begin to feel dizzy fifty feet below the street, it's time to go up the ladder about as fast as your wobbly legs will let you, even if you don't smell anything. Rafferty didn't turn up for two or three days. When he did appear it was with a simple: "Mawnin, mon." It wasn't until several days later I learned that the late foreman had left town nursing a black eye and a cut on one cheek such as might have been made by a set of red knuckles backed by an arm the size of a small ham. On Saturday night of that first week I came home with nine dollars in my pocket. I'll never be prouder again than I was when I handed them over to Ruth. And Ruth will never again be prouder than she was when, after she had laid aside three of them for the rent and five for current expenses, she picked out a one-dollar bill and, crossing the room, placed it in the ginger jar. This was a little blue affair in which we had always dropped what pennies and nickels we could spare. "There's our nest-egg," she announced. "You don't mean to tell me you're that much ahead of the game the first week?" "Look here, Billy," she answered. She brought out an itemized list of everything she had bought from last Monday, including Sunday's dinner. I've kept that list. Many of the things she had bought were not yet used up but she had computed the cost of the amount actually used. Here it is as I copied it off: Flour, .25 Lard, .15 Cream of tartar and soda, .05 Oat meal, .04 Molasses, .05 Sugar, .12 Potatoes, .20 Rice, .06 Milk, 1.12 Eggs, .24 Rye bread, .10 Sausages, .22 Lettuce, .03 Beans, .12 Salt pork, .15 Corn meal, .06 Graham meal, .05 Butter, .45 Cheese, .06 Shin of beef, .39 Fish, .22 Oil, .28 Soap, .09 Vinegar, salt and pepper, about .05 Can of corn, .07 Onions, .06 Total $4.68 In this account, too, Ruth was liberal in her margins. She did better than this later on. A fairer estimate could have been made at the end of the month and a still fairer even than that, at the end of the year. It sounded almost too good to be true but it was a fact. We had lived, and lived well on this amount and as yet Ruth was inexperienced. She hadn't learned all she learned later. For the benefit of those who may think we went hungry I have asked Ruth to write out the bill of fare for this week as nearly as she can remember it. One thing you must keep in mind is that of everything we had, we had enough. Neither Ruth, the boy, nor myself ever left the table or dinner pail unsatisfied. Here's what we had and it was better even than it sounds for whatever Ruth made, she made well. I copy it as she wrote it out. Monday. Breakfast: oatmeal, griddle-cakes with molasses, cream of tartar biscuits, milk. Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, two hard-boiled eggs, bowl of rice, cold coffee; for Dick and me: cold biscuits, milk, rice. Dinner: baked potatoes, griddle-cakes, milk. Tuesday. Breakfast: baked potatoes, graham muffins, oatmeal, milk. Luncheon: for Billy: cold muffins, two hard-boiled eggs, rice, milk; for Dick and me: cold muffins, rice and milk. Dinner: boiled potatoes, pork scraps, hot biscuits, milk. Wednesday. Breakfast: oatmeal, fried potatoes, warmed over biscuits. Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, two hard-boiled eggs, bread pudding; for Dick and me: baked potatoes, cold biscuits, bread pudding. Dinner: beef stew with dumplings, hot biscuits, milk. Thursday. Breakfast: fried sausages, baked potatoes, graham muffins, milk. Luncheon: for Billy: cold muffins, cold sausage and rice; for Dick and me: the same. Dinner: warmed over stew, lettuce, hot biscuits, milk. Friday. Breakfast: oatmeal, fried rock cod, baked potatoes, rye bread, milk. Luncheon: for Billy: rye bread, potato salad, rice; for Dick and me: the same. Dinner: soup made from stock of beef, left over fish, boiled potatoes, rice, milk. Saturday. Breakfast: oatmeal, fried corn mush with molasses, milk. Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, two hard-boiled eggs, cheese, rice; for Dick and me: German toast. Dinner: baked beans, hot biscuits. Sunday. Breakfast: baked beans, graham muffins. Dinner: boiled potatoes, pork scraps, canned corn, corn cake, bread pudding. A word about that bread pudding. Ruth tells me she puts in an extra quart of milk and then bakes it all day when she bakes her beans, stirring it every now and then. I never knew before how the trick was done but it comes out a rich brown and tastes like plum pudding without the raisins. She says that if you put in raisins it tastes exactly like a plum pudding. So at the end of the first week I found myself with eighty dollars left over from the old home, one dollar saved in the new, all my bills paid, and Ruth, Dick and myself all fit as a fiddle. CHAPTER VIII SUNDAY That first dollar saved was the germ of a new idea. It is a further confession of a middle-class mind that in coming down here I had not looked forward beyond the immediate present. With the horror of that last week still on me I had considered only the opportunity I had for earning a livelihood. To be sure I had seen no reason why an intelligent man should not in time be advanced to foreman, and why he should not then be able to save enough to ward off the poorhouse before old age came on. But now--with that first dollar tucked away in the ginger jar--I felt within me the stirring of a new ambition, an ambition born of this quick young country into which I had plunged. Why, in time, should I not become the employer? Why should I not take the initiative in some of these progressive enterprises? Why should I not learn this business of contracting and building and some day contract and build for myself? With that first dollar saved I was already at heart a capitalist. I said nothing of this to Ruth. For six months I let the idea grow. If it did nothing else it added zest to my new work. I shoveled as though I were digging for diamonds. It made me a young man again. It made me a young American again. It brought me out of bed every morning with visions; it sent me to sleep at night with dreams. But I'm running ahead of my story. I thought I had appreciated Sunday when it meant a release for one day from the office of the United Woollen, but as with all the other things I felt as though it had been but the shadow and that only now had I found the substance. In the first place I had not been able completely to shake the office in the last few years. I brought it home with me and on Sundays it furnished half the subject of conversation. Every little incident, every bit of conversation, every expression on Morse's face was analyzed in the attempt to see what it counted, for or against, the possible future raise. Even when out walking with the boy the latter was a constant reminder. It was as though he were merely a ward of the United Woollen Company. But when I put away my shovel at five o'clock on Saturday that was the end of my ditch digging. I came home after that and I was at home until I reported for work on Monday morning. There was neither work nor worry left hanging over. It meant complete relaxation--complete rest. And the body, I found, rests better than the mind. Later in my work I didn't experience this so perfectly as I now did because then I accepted new responsibilities, but for the first few months I lived in lazy content on this one day. For the most part those who lived around me did all the time. On fair summer days half the population of the little square basked in the sun with eyes half closed from morning until night. Those who didn't, went to the neighboring beaches many of which they could reach for a nickel or visited such public buildings as were open. But wherever they went or whatever they did, they loafed about it. And a man can't truly loaf until he's done a hard week's work which ends with the week. As for us we had our choice of any number of pleasant occupations. I insisted that Ruth should make the meals as simple as possible on that day and both the boy and myself helped her about them. We always washed the dishes and swept the floor. First of all there was the roof. I early saw the possibility of this much neglected spot. It was flat and had a fence around it for it was meant to be used for the hanging out of clothes. Being a new building it had been built a story higher than its older neighbors so that we overlooked the other roofs. There was a generous space through which we saw the harbor. I picked up a strip of old canvas for a trifle in one of the shore-front junk-shops which deal in second-hand ship supplies and arranged it over one corner like a canopy. Then I brought home with me some bits of board that were left over from the wood construction at the ditch and nailed these together to make a rude sort of window box. It was harder to get dirt than it was wood but little by little I brought home enough finally to fill the boxes. In these we planted radishes and lettuce and a few flower seeds. We had almost as good a garden as we used to have in our back yard. At any rate it was just as much fun to watch the things grow, and though the lettuce never amounted to much we actually raised some very good radishes. The flowers did well, too. We brought up an old blanket and spread it out beneath the canopy and that, with a chair or two, made our roof garden. A local branch of the Public Library was not far distant so that we had all the reading matter we wanted and here we used to sit all day Sunday when we didn't feel like doing anything else. Here, too, we used to sit evenings. On several hot nights Ruth, the boy and I brought up our blankets and slept out. The boy liked it so well that finally he came to sleep up here most of the summer. It was fine for him. The harbor breeze swept the air clean of smoke so that it was as good for him as being at the sea-shore. To us the sights from this roof were marvelous. They appealed strongly because they were unlike anything we had ever seen or for that matter unlike anything our friends had ever seen. I think that a man's friends often take away the freshness from sights that otherwise might move him. I've never been to Europe but what with magazine pictures and snap shots and Mrs. Grover, who never forgot that before she married Grover she had travelled for a whole year, I haven't any special desire to visit London or Paris. I suppose it would be different if I ever went but even then I don't think there would be the novelty to it we found from our roof. And it was just that novelty and the ability to appreciate it that made our whole emigrant life possible. It was for us the Great Adventure again. I suppose there are men who will growl that it's all bosh to say there is any real romance in living in four rooms in a tenement district, eating what we ate, digging in a ditch and mooning over a view from a roof top. I want to say right here that for such men there wouldn't be any romance or beauty in such a life. They'd be miserable. There are plenty of men living down there now and they never miss a chance to air their opinions. Some of them have big bodies but I wouldn't give them fifty cents a day to work for me. Luckily however, there are not many of them in proportion to the others, even though they make more noise. But when you stop to think about it what else is it but romance that leads men to spend their lives fishing off the Banks when they could remain safely ashore and get better pay driving a team? Or what drives them into the army or to work on railroads when they neither expect nor hope to be advanced? The men themselves can't tell you. They take up the work unthinkingly but there is something in the very hardships they suffer which lends a sting to the life and holds them. The only thing I know of that will do this and turn the grind into an inspiration is romance. It's what the new-comers have and it's what our ancestors had and it's what a lot of us who have stayed over here too long out of the current have lost. On the lazy summer mornings we could hear the church bells and now and then a set of chimes. Because we were above the street and next to the sky they sounded as drowsily musical as in a country village. They made me a bit conscience-stricken to think that for the boy's sake I didn't make an effort and go to some church. But for a while it was church enough to devote the seventh day to what the Bible says it was made for. Ruth used to read out loud to us and we planned to make our book suit the day after a fashion. Sometimes it was Emerson, sometimes Tennyson--I was very fond of the Idylls--and sometimes a book of sermons. Later on we had a call from a young minister who had a little mission chapel not far from our flat and who looked in upon us at the suggestion of the secretary of the settlement house. We went to a service at his chapel one Sunday and before we ourselves realized it we were attending regularly with a zest and interest which we had never felt in our suburban church-going. Later still we each of us found a share in the work ourselves and came to have a great satisfaction and contentment in it. But I am running ahead of my story. We'd have dinner this first summer at about half past one and then perhaps we'd go for a walk. There wasn't a street in the city that didn't interest us but as a rule we'd plan to visit one of the parks. I didn't know there were so many of them or that they were so different. We had our choice of the ocean or a river or the woods. If we had wished to spend say thirty cents in car fare we could have had a further choice of the beach, the mountains, or a taste of the country which in places had not changed in the last hundred years. This would have given us a two hours' ride. Occasionally we did this but at present there was too much to see within walking distance. For one thing it suddenly occurred to me that though I had lived in this city over thirty years I had not yet seen such places of interest as always attracted visitors from out of town. My attention was brought to this first by the need of limiting ourselves to amusements that didn't cost anything, but chiefly by learning where the better element down here spent their Sundays. You have only to follow this crowd to find out where the objects of national pride are located. An old battle flag will attract twenty foreigners to one American. And incidentally I wish to confess it was they who made me ashamed of my ignorance of the country's history. Beyond a memory of the Revolution, the Civil War and a few names of men and battles connected therewith, I'd forgotten all I ever learned at school on this subject. But here the many patriotic celebrations arranged by the local schools in the endeavor to instill patriotism and the frequent visits of the boys to the museums, kept the subject fresh. Not only Dick but Ruth and myself soon turned to it as a vital part of our education. Inspired by the old trophies that ought to stand for so much to us of to-day we took from the library the first volume of Fiske's fine series and in the course of time read them all. As we traced the fortunes of those early adventurers who dreamed and sailed towards an unknown continent, pictured to ourselves the lives of the tribes who wandered about in the big tangle of forest growth between the Atlantic and the Pacific, as we landed on the bleak New England shores with the early Pilgrims, then fought with Washington, then studied the perilous internal struggle culminating with Lincoln and the Civil War, then the dangerous period of reconstruction with the breathless progress following--why it left us all better Americans than we had ever been in our lives. It gave new meaning to my present surroundings and helped me better to understand the new-comers. Somehow all those things of the past didn't seem to concern Grover and the rest of them in the trim little houses. They had no history and they were a part of no history. Perhaps that's because they were making no history themselves. As for myself, I know that I was just beginning to get acquainted with my ancestors--that for the first time in my life, I was really conscious of being a citizen of the United States of America. But I soon discovered that not only the historic but the beautiful attracted these people. They introduced me to the Art Museum. In the winter following our first summer here, when the out of door attractions were considerably narrowed down, Ruth and I used to go there about every other Sunday with the boy. We came to feel as familiar with our favorite pictures as though they hung in our own house. The Museum ceased to be a public building; it was our own. We went in with a nod to the old doorkeeper who came to know us and felt as unconstrained there as at home. We had our favorite nooks, our favorite seats and we lounged about in the soft lights of the rooms for hours at a time. The more we looked at the beautiful paintings, the old tapestries, the treasures of stone and china, the more we enjoyed them. We were sure to meet some of our neighbors there and a young artist who lived on the second floor of our house and whom later I came to know very well, pointed out to us new beauties in the old masters. He was selling plaster casts at that time and studying art in the night school. In the old life, an art museum had meant nothing to me more than that it seemed a necessary institution in every city. It was a mark of good breeding in a town, like the library in a good many homes. But it had never occurred to me to visit it and I know it hadn't to any of my former associates. The women occasionally went to a special exhibition that was likely to be discussed at the little dinners, but a week later they couldn't have told you what they had seen. Perhaps our neighborhood was the exception and a bit more ignorant than the average about such things, but I'll venture to say there isn't a middle-class community in this country where the paintings play the part in the lives of the people that they do among the foreign-born. A class better than they does the work; a class lower enjoys it. Where the middle-class comes in, I don't know. After being gone all the afternoon we'd be glad to get home again and maybe we'd have a lunch of cold beans and biscuits or some of the pudding that was left over. Then during the summer months we'd go back to the roof for a restful evening. At night the view was as different from the day as you could imagine. Behind us the city proper was in a bluish haze made by the electric lights. Then we could see the yellow lights of the upper windows in all the neighboring houses and beyond these, over the roof tops which seemed now to huddle closer together, we saw the passing red and green lights of moving vessels. Overhead were the same clean stars which were at the same time shining down upon the woods and the mountain tops. There was something about it that made me feel a man and a free man. There was twenty years of slavery back of me to make me appreciate this. And Ruth reading my thoughts in my eyes used to nestle closer to me and the boy with his chin in his hands would stare out at sea and dream his own dreams. CHAPTER IX PLANS FOR THE FUTURE As I said, with that first dollar in the ginger jar representing the first actual saving I had ever effected in my whole life, my imagination became fired with new plans. I saw no reason why I myself should not become an employer. As in the next few weeks I enlarged my circle of acquaintances and pushed my inquiries in every possible direction I found this idea was in the air down here. The ambition of all these people was towards complete independence. Either they hoped to set up in business for themselves in this country or they looked forward to saving enough to return to the land of their birth and live there as small land owners. I speak more especially of the Italians because just now I was thrown more in contact with them than the others. In my city they, with the Irish, seemed peculiarly of real emigrant stuff. The Jews were so clannish that they were a problem in themselves; the Germans assimilated a little better and yet they too were like one large family. They did not get into the city life very much and even in their business stuck pretty closely to one line. For a good many years they remained essentially Germans. But the Irish were citizens from the time they landed and the Italians eventually became such if by a slower process. The former went into everything. They are a tremendously adaptable people. But whatever they tackled they looked forward to independence and generally won it. Even a man of so humble an ambition as Murphy had accomplished this. The Italians either went into the fruit business for which they seem to have a knack or served as day laborers and saved. There was a man down here who was always ready to stake them to a cart and a supply of fruit, at an exorbitant price to be sure, but they pushed their carts patiently mile upon mile until in the end they saved enough to buy one of their own. The next step was a small fruit store. The laborers, once they had acquired a working capital, took up many things--a lot of them going into the country and buying deserted farms. It was wonderful what they did with this land upon which the old stock New Englander had not been able to live. But of course in part explanation of this, you must remember that these New England villages have long been drained of their best. In many cases only the maim, the halt, and the blind are left and these stand no more chance against the modern pioneer than they would against one of their own sturdy forefathers. Another occupation which the Italians seemed to preëmpt was the boot-blacking business. It may seem odd to dignify so menial an employment as a business but there is many a head of such an establishment who could show a fatter bank account than two-thirds of his clients. The next time you go into a little nook containing say fifteen chairs, figure out for yourself how many nickels are left there in a day. The rent is often high--it is some proof of a business worth thought when you consider that they are able to pay for positions on the leading business streets--but the labor is cheap and the furnishings and cost of raw material slight. Pasquale had set me to thinking long before, when I learned that he was earning almost as much a week as I. It is no unusual thing for a man who owns his "emporium" to draw ten dollars a day in profits and not show himself until he empties the cash register at night. But the fact that impressed me in these people--and this holds peculiarly true of the Jews--was that they all shied away from the salaried jobs. In making such generalizations I may be running a risk because I'm only giving the results of my own limited observation and experience. But I want it understood that from the beginning to the end of these recollections I'm trying to do nothing more. I'm not a student. I'm not a sociologist. The conditions which I observed may not hold elsewhere for all I know. From a different point of view, they might not to another seem to hold even in my own city. I won't argue with anyone about it. I set down what I myself saw and let it go at that. Going back to the small group among whom I lived when I was with the United Woollen, it seems to me that every man clung to a salary as though it were his only possible hope. I know men among them who even refused to work on a commission basis although they were practically sure of earning in this way double what they were being paid by the year. They considered a salary as a form of insurance and once in the grip of this idea they had nothing to look forward to except an increase. I was no better myself. I didn't really expect to be head of the firm. Nor did the other men. We weren't working and holding on with any notion of winning independence along that line. The most we hoped for was a bigger salary. Some men didn't anticipate more than twenty-five hundred like me, and others--the younger men--talked about five thousand and even ten thousand. I didn't hear them discuss what they were going to do when they were general managers or vice-presidents but always what they could enjoy when they drew the larger annuity. And save those who saw in professional work a way out, this was the career they were choosing for their sons. They wanted to get them into banks and the big companies where the assurance of lazy routine advancement up to a certain point was the reward for industry, sobriety and honesty. A salary with an old, strongly established company seemed to them about as big a stroke of luck for a young man as a legacy. I myself had hoped to find a place for Dick with one of the big trust companies. Of course down here these people did not have the same opportunities. Most of the old firms preferred the "bright young American" and I guess they secured most of them. I pity the "bright young American" but I can't help congratulating the bright young Italians and the bright young Irishmen. They are forced as a result to make business for themselves and they are given every opportunity in the world for doing it. And they _are_ doing it. And I, breathing in this atmosphere, made up my mind that I would do it, too. With this in mind I outlined for myself a systematic course of procedure. It was evident that in this as in any other business I must master thoroughly the details before taking up the larger problems. The details of this as of any other business lay at the bottom and so for these at least I was at present in the best possible position. The two most important factors to the success of a contractor seemed to me to be, roughly speaking, the securing and handling of men and the purchase and use of materials. Of the two, the former appeared to be the more important. Even in the few weeks I had been at work here I had observed a big difference in the amount of labor accomplished by different men individually. I could have picked out a half dozen that were worth more than all the others put together. And in the two foremen I had noticed another big difference in the varying capacity of a boss to get work out of the men collectively. In work where labor counted for so much in the final cost as here, it appeared as though this involved almost the whole question of profit and loss. With a hundred men employed at a dollar and a half a day, the saving of a single hour meant the saving of a good many dollars. It may seem odd that so obvious a fact was not taken advantage of by the present contractors. Doubtless it was realized but my later experience showed me that the obvious is very often neglected. In this business as in many others, the details fall into a rut and often a newcomer with a fresh point of view will detect waste that has been going on unnoticed for years. I was almost forty years old, fairly intelligent, and I had everything at stake. So I was distinctly more alert than those who retained their positions merely by letting things run along as well as they always had been going. But however you may explain it, I knew that the foreman didn't get as much work out of me as he might have done. In spite of all the control I exercised over myself I often quit work realizing that half my strength during the day had gone for nothing. And though it may sound like boasting to say it, I think I worked both more conscientiously and intelligently than most of the men. In the first place the foreman was a bully. He believed in driving his men. He swore at them and goaded them as an ignorant countryman often tries to drive oxen. The result was a good deal the same as it is with oxen--the men worked excitedly when under the sting and loafed the rest of the time. In a crisis the boss was able to spur them on to their best--though even then they wasted strength in frantic endeavor--but he could not keep them up to a consistent level of steady work. And that's what counts. As in a Marathon race the men who maintain a steady plugging pace from start to finish are the ones who accomplish. The question may be asked how such a boss could keep his job. I myself did not understand that at first but later as I worked with different men and under different bosses I saw that it was because their methods were much alike and that the results were much alike. A certain standard had been established as to the amount of work that should be done by a hundred men and this was maintained. The boss had figured out loosely how much the men would work and the men had figured out to a minute how much they could loaf. Neither man nor boss took any special interest in the work itself. The men were allowed to waste just so much time in getting water, in filling their pipes, in spitting on their hands, in resting on their shovels, in lazy chatter, and so long as they did not exceed this nothing was said. The trouble was that the standard was low and this was because the men had nothing to gain by steady conscientious work and also because the boss did not understand them nor distinguish between them. For instance the foreman ought to have got the work of two men out of me but he wouldn't have, if I hadn't chosen to give it. That held true also of Rafferty and one or two others. Now my idea was this: that if a man made a study of these men who, in this city at any rate, were the key to the contractor's problem, and learned their little peculiarities, their standards of justice, their ambitions, their weakness and their strength, he ought to be able to increase their working capacity. Certainly an intelligent teamster does this with horses and it seemed as though it ought to be possible to accomplish still finer results with men. To go a little farther in my ambition, it also seemed possible to pick and select the best of these men instead of taking them at random. For instance in the present gang there were at least a half dozen who stood out as more intelligent and stronger physically than all the others. Why couldn't a man in time gather about him say a hundred such men and by better treatment, possibly better pay, possibly a guarantee of continuous work, make of them a loyal, hard working machine with a capacity for double the work of the ordinary gang? Such organization as this was going on in other lines of business, why not in this? With such a machine at his command, a man ought to make himself a formidable competitor with even the long established firms. At any rate this was my theory and it gave a fresh inspiration to my work. Whether anything came of it or not it was something to hope for, something to toil for, something which raised this digging to the plane of the pioneer who joyfully clears his field of stumps and rocks. It swung me from the present into the future. It was a different future from that which had weighed me down when with the United Woollen. This was no waiting game. Neither your pioneer nor your true emigrant sits down and waits. Here was something which depended solely upon my own efforts for its success or failure. And I knew that it wasn't possible to fail so dismally but what the joy of the struggle would always be mine. In the meanwhile I carried with me to my work a note book and during the noon hour I set down everything which I thought might be of any possible use to me. I missed no opportunity for learning even the most trivial details. A great deal of the information was superficial and a great deal of it was incorrect but down it went in the note book to be revised later when I became better informed. I watched my fellow workmen as much as possible and plied them with questions. I wanted to know where the cement came from and in what proportion it was mixed with sand and gravel and stone for different work. I wanted to know where the sand and gravel and stone came from and how it was graded. Wherever it was possible I secured rough prices for different materials. I wanted to know where the lumber was bought and I wanted to know how the staging was built and why it was built. Understand that I did not flatter myself that I was fast becoming a mason, a carpenter, an engineer and a contractor all in one and all at once. I knew that the most of my information was vague and loose. Half the men who were doing the work didn't know why they were doing it and a lot of them didn't know how they were doing it. They worked by instinct and habit. Then, too, they were a clannish lot and a jealous lot. They resented my questioning however delicately I might do it and often refused to answer me. But in spite of this I found myself surprised later with the fund of really valuable knowledge I acquired. In addition to this I acquired _sources_ of information. I found out where to go for the real facts. I learned for instance who for this particular job was supplying for the contractor his cement and gravel and crushed stone--though as it happened this contractor himself either owned or controlled his own plant for the production of most of his material. However I learned something when I learned that. For a man who had apparently been in business all his life, I was densely ignorant of even the fundamentals of business. This idea of running the business back to the sources of the raw material was a new idea to me. I had not thought of the contractor as owning his own quarries and gravel pits, obvious as the advantage was. I wanted to know where the tools were bought and how much they cost--from the engines and hoisting cranes and carrying system down to pick-axes, crowbars and shovels. I made a note of the fact that many of the smaller implements were not cared for properly and even tried to estimate how with proper attention the life of a pick-axe could be prolonged. I joyed particularly in every such opportunity as this no matter how trivial it appeared later. It was just such details as these which gave reality to my dream. I figured out how many cubic feet of earth per day per man was being handled here and how this varied under different bosses. I pried and listened and questioned and figured even when digging. I worked with my eyes and ears wide open. It was wonderful how quickly in this way the hours flew. A day now didn't seem more than four hours long. Many the time I've felt actually sorry when the signal to quit work was given at night and have hung around for half an hour while the engineer fixed his boiler for the night and the old man lighted his lanterns to string along the excavation. I don't know what they all thought of me, but I know some of them set me down for a college man doing the work for experience. This to say the least was flattering to my years. As I say, a lot of this work was wasted energy in the sense that I acquired anything worth while, but none of it was wasted when I recall the joy of it. If I had actually been a college boy in the first flush of youthful enthusiasm I could not have gone at my work more enthusiastically or dreamed wilder or bigger dreams. Even after many of these bubbles were pricked and had vanished, the mood which made them did not vanish. I have never forgotten and never can forget the sheer delight of those months. I was eighteen again with a lot besides that I didn't have at eighteen. My work along another line was more practical and more successful. What I learned about the men and the best way to handle them was genuine capital. In the first place I lost no opportunity to make myself as solid as possible with Dan Rafferty. This was not altogether from a purely selfish motive either. I liked the man. In a way I think he was the most lovable man I ever met, although that seems a lady-like term to apply to so rugged a fellow. But below his beef and brawn, below his aggressiveness, below his coarseness, below even a peculiar moral bluntness about a good many things, there was a strain of something fine about Dan Rafferty. I had a glimpse of it when he preferred going back to the sewer gas rather than let a man like the old foreman force him into a position where the latter could fire him. But that was only one side of him. He had a heart as big as a woman's and one as keen to respond to sympathy. This in its turn inspired in others a feeling towards him that to save my life I can only describe as love--love in its big sense. He'd swear like a pirate at the Dagoes and they'd only grin back at him where'd they'd feel like knifing any other man. And when Dan learned that Anton' had lost his boy he sent down to the house a wreath of flowers half as big as a cart wheel. There was scarcely a day when some old lady didn't manage to see Dan at the noon hour and draw him aside with a mumbled plea that always made him dig into his pockets. He caught me watching him one day and said in explanation, "She's me grandmither." After I'd seen at least a dozen different ones approach him I asked him if they were all his grandmothers. "Sure," he said. "Ivery ould woman in the ward is me grandmither." Those same grandmothers stood him in good stead later in his life, for every single grandmother had some forty grandchildren and half of these had votes. But Dan wasn't looking that far ahead then. Two facts rather distinguished him at the start; he didn't either drink or smoke. He didn't have any opinions upon the subject but he was one of the rare Irishmen born that way. Now and then you'll find one and as likely as not he'll prove one of the good fellows you'd expect to see in the other crowd. However, beyond exciting my interest and leading me to score him some fifty points in my estimate of him as a good workman, I was indifferent to this side of his character. The thing that impressed me most was a quality of leadership he seemed to possess. There was nothing masterful about it. You didn't look to see him lead in any especially good or great cause, but you could see readily enough that whatever cause he chose, it would be possible for him to gather about him a large personal following. I was attracted to this side of him in considering him as having about all the good raw material for a great boss. Put twenty men on a rope with Dan at the head of them and just let him say, "Now, biys--altogither," and you'd see every man's neck grow taut with the strain. I know because I've been one of the twenty and felt as though I wanted to drag every muscle out of my body. And when it was over I'd ask myself why in the devil I pulled that way. When I told myself that it was because I was pulling with Dan Rafferty I said all I knew about it. It seemed to me that any man who secured Dan as a boss would already have the backbone of his gang. I didn't ever expect to use him in this way but I wanted the man for a friend and I wanted to learn the secret of his power if I could. But I may as well confess right now that I never fully fathomed that. In the meanwhile I had not neglected the other men. At every opportunity I talked with them. At the beginning I made it a point to learn their names and addresses which I jotted down in my book. I learned something from them of the padrone system and the unfair contracts into which they were trapped. I learned their likes and dislikes, their ambitions, and as much as possible about their families. It all came hard at first but little by little as I worked with them I found them trusting me more with their confidences. In this way then the first summer passed. Both Ruth and the boy in the meanwhile were just as busy about their respective tasks as I was. The latter took to the gymnasium work like a duck to water and in his enthusiasm for this tackled his lessons with renewed interest. He put on five pounds of weight and what with the daily ocean swim which we both enjoyed, his cheeks took on color and he became as brown as an Indian. If he had passed the summer at the White Mountains he could not have looked any hardier. He made many friends at the Y.M.C.A. They were all ambitious boys and they woke him up wonderfully. I was careful to follow him closely in this new life and made it a point to see the boys myself and to make him tell me at the end of each day just what he had been about. Dick was a boy I could trust to tell me every detail. He was absolutely truthful and he wasn't afraid to open his heart to me with whatever new questions might be bothering him. As far as possible I tried to point out to him what to me seemed the good points in his new friends and to warn him against any little weaknesses among them which from time to time I might detect. Ruth did the rest. A father, however much a comrade he may be with his boy, can go only so far. There is always plenty left which belongs to the mother--if she is such a mother as Ruth. As for Ruth herself I watched her anxiously in fear lest the new life might wear her down but honestly as far as the house was concerned she didn't seem to have as much to bother her as she had before. She was slowly getting the buying and the cooking down to a science. Many a week now our food bill went as low as a little over three dollars. We bought in larger quantities and this always effected a saving. We bought a barrel of flour and half a barrel of sugar for one thing. Then as the new potatoes came into the market we bought half a barrel of those and half a barrel of apples. She did wonders with those apples and they added a big variety to our menus. Another saving was effected by buying suet which cost but a few cents a pound, trying this out and mixing it with the lard for shortening. As the weather became cooler we had baked beans twice a week instead of once. These made for us four and sometimes five or six meals. We figured out that we could bake a quart pot of beans, using half a pound of pork to a pot, for less than twenty cents. This gave the three of us two meals with some left over for lunch, making the cost per man about three cents. And they made a hearty meal, too. That was a trick she had learned in the country where baked beans are a staple article of diet. I liked them cold for my lunch. As for clothes neither Ruth nor myself needed much more than we had. I bought nothing but one pair of heavy boots which Ruth picked up at a bankrupt sale for two dollars. On herself she didn't spend a cent. She brought down here with her a winter and a summer street suit, several house dresses and three or four petticoats and a goodly supply of under things. She knew how to care for them and they lasted her. I brought down, in addition to my business suit, a Sunday suit of blue serge and a dress suit and a Prince Albert. I sold the last two to a second hand dealer for eleven dollars and this helped towards the boy's outfit in the fall. She bought for him a pair of three dollar shoes for a dollar and a half at this same "Sold Out" sale, a dollar's worth of stockings and about a dollar's worth of underclothes. He had a winter overcoat and hat, though I could have picked up these in either a pawnshop or second hand store for a couple of dollars. It was wonderful what you could get at these places, especially if anyone had the knack which Ruth had of making over things. CHAPTER X THE EMIGRANT SPIRIT That fall the boy passed his entrance examinations and entered the finest school in the state--the city high school. If he had been worth a million he couldn't have had better advantages. I was told that the graduates of this school entered college with a higher average than the graduates of most of the big preparatory schools. Certainly they had just as good instruction and if anything better discipline. There was more competition here and a real competition. Many of the pupils were foreign born and a much larger per cent of them children of foreign born. Their parents had been over here long enough to realize what an advantage an education was and the children went at their work with the feeling that their future depended upon their application here. The boy's associates might have been more carefully selected at some fashionable school but I was already beginning to realize that selected associates aren't always select associates and that even if they are this is more of a disadvantage than an advantage. The fact that the boy's fellows were all of a kind was what had disturbed me even in the little suburban grammar school. For that matter I can see now that even for Ruth and me this sameness was a handicap for both us and our neighbors. There was no clash. There was a dead level. I don't believe that's good for either boys or men or for women. Supposing this open door policy did admit a few worthless youngsters into the school and supposing again that the private school didn't admit such of a different order (which I very much doubt)--along with these Dick was going to find here the men--the past had proved this and the present was proving it--who eventually would become our statesmen, our progressive business men, our lawyers and doctors--if not our conservative bankers. For one graduate of such a school as my former surroundings had made me think essential for the boy, I could count now a dozen graduates of this very high school who were distinguishing themselves in the city. The boy was going to meet here the same spirit I was getting in touch with among my emigrant friends--a zeal for life, a belief in the possibilities of life, an optimistic determination to use these possibilities, which somehow the blue-blooded Americans were losing. It seemed to me that life was getting stale for the fourth and fifth generation. I tried to make the boy see this point of view. I went back again with him to the pioneer idea. "Dick," I said in substance, "your great-great-grandfather pulled up stakes and came over to this country when there was nothing here but trees, rocks and Indians. It was a hard fight but a good fight and he left a son to carry on the fight. So generation after generation they fought but somehow they grew a bit weaker as they fought. Now," I said, "you and I are going to try to recover that lost ground. Let's think of ourselves as like our great-great-grandfathers. We've just come over here. So have about a million others. The fight is a different fight to-day but it's no less a fight and we're going to win. We have a good many advantages that these newcomers haven't. You see them making good on every side of you but I'll bet they can't lick a good American--when he isn't asleep. You and I are going to make good too." "You bet we are, Dad," he said, with his eyes grown bright. "Then," I said, "you must work the way the newcomers work. I don't want you to think you're any better than they are. You aren't. But you're just as good and these two hundred years we've lived here ought to count for something." The boy lifted his head at this. "You make me feel as though we'd just landed with the Pilgrims," he said. "So we have," I said. "June seventh of this very year we landed on Plymouth Rock just as our ancestors did two centuries ago. They've been all this time paving the way for you and me. They've built roads and schools and factories and it's up to us now to use them. You and I have just landed from England. Let's see what we can do as pioneers." I wanted to get at the young American in him. I wanted him to realize that he was something more than the son of his parents; something more than just an average English-speaking boy. I wanted him to feel the impetus of the big history back of him and the big history yet to be made ahead of him. He had known nothing of that before. The word American had no meaning to him except when a regiment of soldiers was marching by. I wanted him to feel all the time as he did when his throat grew lumpy with the band playing and the stars and stripes flying on Fourth of July or Decoration Day. I urged him to study hard as the first essential towards success but I also told him to get into the school life. I didn't want him to stand back as his tendency was and watch the other fellows. I didn't want him to sit in the bleachers--at least not until he had proved that this was the place for him. Even then I wanted him to lead the cheering. I wanted him to test himself in the literary societies, the dramatic clubs, on the athletic field. In other words, instead of remaining passive I wanted him to take an aggressive attitude towards life. In still other words instead of being a middle-classer I wanted him to get something of the emigrant spirit. And I had the satisfaction of seeing him begin his work with the germ of that idea in his brain. In the meanwhile with the approach of cold weather I saw a new item of expense loom up in the form of coal. We had used kerosene all summer but now it became necessary for the sake of heat to get a stove. For a week I took what time I could spare and wandered around among the junk shops looking for a second hand stove and finally found just what I wanted. I paid three dollars for it and it cost me another dollar to have some small repairs made. I set it up myself in the living room which we decided to use as a kitchen for the winter. But when I came to look into the matter of getting coal down here I found I was facing a pretty serious problem. Coal had been a big item in the suburbs but the way people around me were buying it, made it a still bigger one. No cellar accommodations came with the tenement and so each one was forced to buy his coal by the basket or bag. A basket of anthracite was costing them at this time about forty cents. This was for about eighty pounds of coal, which made the total cost per ton eleven dollars--at least three dollars and a half over the regular price. Even with economy a person would use at least a bag a week. This, to leave a liberal margin, would amount to about a ton and a half of coal during the winter months. I didn't like the idea of absorbing the half dollar or so a week that Ruth was squeezing out towards what few clothes we had to buy, in this way--at least the over-charge part of it. With the first basket I brought home, I said, "I see where you'll have to dig down into the ginger jar this winter, little woman." She looked as startled as though I had told her someone had stolen the savings. "What do you mean?" she asked. I pointed to the basket. "Coal costs about eleven dollars a ton, down here." When she found out that this was all that caused my remark, she didn't seem to be disturbed. "Billy," she said, "before we touch the ginger jar it will have to cost twenty dollars a ton. We'll live on pea soup and rice three times a day before I touch that." "All right," I said, "but it does seem a pity that the burden of such prices as these should fall on the poor." "Why do they?" she asked. "Because in this case," I said, "the dealers seem to have us where the wool is short." "How have they?" she insisted. "We can't buy coal by the ton because we haven't any place to put it." She thought a moment and then she said: "We could take care of a fifth of a ton, Billy. That's only five baskets." "They won't sell five any cheaper than one." "And every family in this house could take care of five," she went on. "That would make a ton." I began to see what she meant and as I thought of it I didn't see why it wasn't a practical scheme. "I believe that's a good idea," I said. "And if there were more women like you in the world I don't believe there'd be any trusts at all." "Nonsense," she said. "You leave it to me now and I'll see the other women in the house. They are the ones who'll appreciate a good saving like that." She saw them and after a good deal of talk they agreed, so I told Ruth to tell them to save out of next Saturday night's pay a dollar and a half apiece. I was a bit afraid that if I didn't get the cash when the coal was delivered I might get stuck on the deal. The next Monday I ordered the coal and asked to have it delivered late in the day. When I came home I found the wagon waiting and it created about as much excitement on the street as an ambulance. I guess it was the first time in the history of Little Italy that a coal team had ever stopped before a tenement. The driver had brought baskets with him and I filled up one and took it to a store nearby and weighed into it eighty pounds of coal. With that for my guide I gathered the other men of the families about me and made them carry the coal in while I measured it out. The driver who at first was inclined to object to the whole proceeding was content to let things go on when he found himself relieved of all the carrying. We emptied the wagon in no time and the other men insisted upon carrying up my coal for me. I collected every cent of my money and incidentally established myself on a firm footing with every family in the house. Several other tenements later adopted the plan but the idea didn't take hold the way you'd have thought it would. I guess it was because there weren't any more Ruths around there to oversee the job. Then, too, while these people are far-sighted in a good many ways, they are short-sighted in others. Neither the wholesale nor co-operative plans appeal to them. For one thing they are suspicious and for another they don't like to spend any more than they have to day by day. Later on through Ruth's influence we carried our scheme a little farther with just the people in the house and bought flour and sugar that way but it was made possible only through their absolute trust in her. We always insisted on carrying out every such little operation on a cash basis and they never failed us. Ruth's influence had been gradually spreading through the neighborhood. She had found time to meet the other families in the house and through them had met a dozen more. The first floor was occupied by Michele, an Italian laborer, his wife, his wife's sister and two children. On the second floor there was Giuseppe, the young sculptor, and his father and mother. The father was an invalid and the lad supported the three. On the third floor lived a fruit peddler, his wife and his wife's mother--rather a commonplace family, while the fourth floor was occupied by Pietro, a young fellow who sold cut flowers on the street and hoped some day to have a garden of his own. He had two children and a grandmother to care for. It certainly afforded a contrast to visit those other flats and then Ruth's. Right here is where her superior intelligence came in, of course. The foreign-born women do not so quickly adapt themselves to the standards of this country as the men do. Most of them as I learned, come from the country districts of Italy where they live very rudely. Once here they make their new quarters little better than their old. The younger ones however who are going to school are doing better. But taken by and large it was difficult to persuade them that cleanliness offered any especial advantages. It wasn't as though they minded the dirt and were chained to it by circumstances from which they couldn't escape--as I used to think. They simply didn't object to it. So long as they were warm and had food enough they were content. They didn't suffer in any way that they themselves could see. But when Ruth first went into their quarters she was horrified. She thought that at length she was face to face with all the misery and squalor of the slums of which she had read. I remember her chalk-white face as she met me at the door upon my return home one night. She nearly drove the color out of my own cheeks for I thought surely that something had happened to the boy. But it wasn't that; she had heard that the baby on the first floor was ill and had gone down there to see if there was anything she might do for it. Until then she had seen nothing but the outside of the other doors from the hall and they looked no different from our own. But once inside--well I guess that's where the two hundred years if not the four hundred years back of us native Americans counts. "Why, Billy," she cried, "it was awful. I'll never get that picture out of mind if I live to be a hundred." "What's the matter?" I asked. "Why the poor little thing--" "What poor little thing?" I interrupted. "Michele's baby. It lay there in dirty rags with its pinched white face staring up at me as though just begging for a clean bed." "What's the matter with it?" "Matter with it? It's a wonder it isn't dead and buried. The district nurse came in while I was there and told me,"--she shuddered--"that they'd been feeding it on macaroni cooked in greasy gravy. And it isn't six months old yet." "No wonder it looked white," I said, remembering how we had discussed for a week the wisdom of giving Dick the coddled white of an egg at that age. "Why the conditions down there are terrible," cried Ruth. "Michele must be very, very poor. The floor wasn't washed, you couldn't see out of the windows, and the clothes--" She held up her hands unable to find words. "That _does_ sound bad," I said. "It's criminal. Billy--we can't allow a family in the same house with us to suffer like that, can we?" I shook my head. "Then go down and see what you can do. I guess we can squeeze out fifty cents for them, can't we, Billy?" "I guess you could squeeze fifty cents out of a stone for a sick baby," I said. The upshot of it was that I went down and saw Michele. As Ruth had said his quarters were anything but clean but they didn't impress me as being in so bad a condition as she had described them. Perhaps my work in the ditch had made me a little more used to dirt. I found Michele a healthy, temperate, able-bodied man and I learned that he was earning as much as I. Not only that but the women took in garments to finish and picked up the matter of two or three dollars a week extra. There were five in the family but they were far from being in want. In fact Michele had a good bank account. They had all they wanted to eat, were warm and really prosperous. There was absolutely no need of the dirt. It was there because they didn't mind it. A five cent cake of soap would have made the rooms clean as a whistle and there were two women to do the scrubbing. I didn't leave my fifty cents but I came back upstairs with a better appreciation, if that were possible, of what such a woman as Ruth means to a man. Even the baby began to get better as soon as the district nurse drove into the parent's head a few facts about sensible infant feeding. I don't want to make out that life is all beer and skittles for the tenement dwellers. It isn't. But I ran across any number of such cases as this where conditions were not nearly so bad as they appeared on the surface. Taking into account the number of people who were gathered together here in a small area I didn't see among the temperate and able-bodied any worse examples of hard luck than I saw among my former associates. In fact of sheer abstract hard luck I didn't see as much. In seventy-five per cent of the cases the conditions were of their own making--either the man was a drunkard or the women slovenly or the whole family was just naturally vicious. Ignorance may excuse some of this but not all of it. Perhaps I'm not what you'd call sympathetic but I've heard a lot of men talk about these people in a way that sounds to me like twaddle. I never ran across a family down here in such misery as that which Steve Bonnington's wife endured for years without a whimper. Bonnington was a clerk with a big insurance company. He lived four houses below us on our street. I suppose he was earning about eighteen hundred dollars a year when he died. He left five children and he never had money enough even to insure in his own company. He didn't leave a cent. When Helen Bonnington came back from the grave it was to face the problem of supporting unaided, either by experience or relatives, five children ranging from twelve to one. She was a shy, retiring little body who had sapped her strength in just bringing the children into the world and caring for them in the privacy of her home. She had neither the temperament nor the training to face the world. But she bucked up to it. She sold out of the house what things she could spare, secured cheap rooms on the outskirts of the neighborhood and announced that she would do sewing. What it cost her to come back among her old friends and do that is a particularly choice type of agony that it would be impossible for a tenement widow to appreciate. And this same self-respect which both Helen's education and her environment forced her to maintain, handicapped her in other ways. You couldn't give Mrs. Bonnington scraps from your table; you couldn't give her old clothes or old shoes or money. It wasn't her fault because this was so; it wasn't your fault. When her children were sick she couldn't send them off to the public wards of the hospitals. In the first place half the hospitals wouldn't take them as charity patients simply because she maintained a certain dignity, and in the second place the idea, by education, was so repugnant to her that it never entered her head to try. So she stayed at home and sewed from daylight until she couldn't hold open her eyes at night. That's where you get your true "Song of the Shirt." She not only sewed her fingers to the bone but while doing it she suffered a very fine kind of torture wondering what would happen to the five if she broke down. Asylums and homes and hospitals don't imply any great disgrace to most of the tenement dwellers but to a woman of that type they mean Hell. God knows how she did it but she kept the five alive and clothed and in school until the boy was about fifteen and went to work. When I hear of the lone widows of the tenements, who are apt to be very husky, and who work out with no great mental struggle and who have clothes and food given them and who set the children to work as soon as they are able to walk, I feel like getting up in my seat and telling about Helen Bonnington--a plain middle-classer. And she was no exception either. I seem to have rambled off a bit here but this was only one of many contrasts which I made in these years which seemed to me to be all in favor of my new neighbors. The point is that at the bottom you not only see advantages you didn't see before but you're in a position to use them. You aren't shackled by conventions; you aren't cramped by caste. The world stands ready to help the under dog but before it will lift a finger it wants to see the dog stretched out on its back with all four legs sticking up in prayer. Of the middle-class dog who fights on and on, even after he's wobbly and can't see, it doesn't seem to take much notice. However Ruth started in with a few reforms of her own. She made it a point to go down and see young Michele every day and watch that he didn't get any more macaroni and gravy. The youngster himself resented this interference but the parents took it in good part. Then in time she ventured further and suggested that the baby would be better off if the windows were washed to let in the sunshine and the floor scrubbed a bit. Finally she became bold enough to hint that it might be well to wash some of the bed clothing. The district nurse appreciated the change, if Michele himself didn't and I found that it wasn't long before Miss Colver was making use of this new influence in the house. She made a call on Ruth and discussed her cases with her until in the end she made of her a sort of first assistant. This was the beginning of a new field of activity for Ruth which finally won for her the name of Little Mother. It was wonderful how quickly these people discovered the sweet qualities in Ruth that had passed all unnoticed in the old life. It made me very proud. CHAPTER XI NEW OPPORTUNITIES I had found that I was badly handicapped in all intercourse with my Italian fellow workers by the fact that I knew nothing of their language and that they knew but little English. The handicap did not lie so much in the fact that we couldn't make ourselves understood--we could after a rough fashion--as it did in the fact that this made a barrier which kept our two nationalities sharply defined. I was always an American talking to an Italian. The boss was always an American talking to a Dago. This seemed to me a great disadvantage. It ought to be just a foreman to his man or one man to another. The chance to acquire a new language I thought had passed with my high school days, but down here everyone was learning English and so I resolved to study Italian. I made a bargain with Giuseppe, the young sculptor, who was now a frequent visitor at our flat, to teach me his language in return for instruction in mine. He agreed though he had long been getting good instruction at the night school. But the lad had found an appreciative friend in Ruth who not only sincerely admired the work he was doing but who admired his enthusiasm and his knowledge of art. I liked him myself for he was dreaming bigger things than I. To watch his thin cheeks grow red and his big brown eyes flash as he talked of some old painting gave me a realization that there was something else to be thought of even down here than mere money success. It was good for me. The poor fellow was driven almost mad by having to offer for sale some of the casts which his master made him carry. He would have liked to sell only busts of Michael Angelo and Dante and worthy reproductions of the old masters. "There are so many beautiful things," he used to exclaim excitedly in broken English; "why should they want to make anything that is not beautiful?" He sputtered time and time again over the pity of gilding the casts. You'd have thought it was a crime which ought to be punished by hanging. "Even Dante," he groaned one night, "that wonderful, white sad face of Dante covered all over with gilt!" "It has to look like gold before an American will buy it," I suggested. "Yes," he nodded. "They would even gild the Christ." Ruth said she wanted to learn Italian with me, and so the three of us used to get together every night right after dinner. I bought a grammar at a second hand bookstore but we used to spend most of our time in memorizing the common every day things a man would be likely to use in ordinary conversation. Giuseppe would say, "Ha Ella il mio cappello?" And I would say, "Si, Signore, ho il di Lei cappello." "Ha Ella il di Lei pane?" "Si, Signore, ho il mio pane." "Ha Ella il mio zucchero?" "Si, Signore, ho il di Lei zucchero." There wasn't much use in going over such simple things in English for Giuseppe and so instead of this Ruth would read aloud something from Tennyson. After explaining to him just what every new word meant, she would let him read aloud to her the same passage. He soon became very enthusiastic over the text itself and would often stop her with the exclamation, "Ah, there is a study!" Then he would tell us just how he would model whatever the picture happened to be that he saw in his mind. It was wonderful how clearly he saw these pictures. He could tell you even down to how the folds of the women's dresses should fall just as though he were actually looking at living people. After a week or two when we had learned some of the simpler phrases Ruth and I used to practise them as much as possible every day. We felt quite proud when we could ask one another for "quel libro" or "quell' abito" or "il cotello" or "il cucchiaio." I was surprised at how soon we were able to carry on quite a long talk. This new idea--that even though I was approaching forty I wasn't too old to resume my studies--took root in another direction. As I had become accustomed to the daily physical exercise and no longer returned home exhausted I felt as though I had no right to loaf through my evenings, much as the privilege of spending them with Ruth meant to me. My muscles had become as hard and tireless as those of a well-trained athlete so that at night I was as alert mentally as in the morning. It made me feel lazy to sit around the house after an hour's lesson in Italian and watch Ruth busy with her sewing and see the boy bending over his books. Still I couldn't think of anything that was practicable until I heard Giuseppe talk one evening about the night school. I had thought this was a sort of grammar school with clay modeling thrown in for amusement. "No, Signore," he said. "You can learn anything there. And there is another school where you can learn other things." I went out that very evening and found that the school he attended taught among other subjects, book keeping and stenography--two things which appealed to me strongly. But in talking to the principal he suggested that before I decided I look into the night trade school which was run in connection with a manual training school. I took his advice and there I found so many things I wanted that I didn't know what to choose. I was amazed at the opportunity. A man could learn here about any trade he cared to take up. Both tools and material were furnished him. And all this was within ten minutes' walk of the house. I could still have my early evenings with Ruth and the boy even on the three nights I would be in school until a quarter past seven, spend two hours at learning my trade, and get back to the house again before ten. I don't see how a man could ask for anything better than this. Even then I wouldn't be away from home as much as I often was in my old life. There were many dreary stretches towards the end of my service with the United Woollen when I didn't get home until midnight. And the only extra pay we salaried men received for that was a brighter hope for the job ahead. This was always dangled before our eyes by Morse as a bait when he wished to drive us harder than usual. I had my choice of a course in carpentry, bricklaying, sheet metal work, plumbing, electricity, drawing and pattern draughting. The work covered from one to three years and assured a man at the end of this time of a position among the skilled workmen who make in wages as much as many a professional man. Not only this but a man with such training as this and with ambition could look forward without any great stretch of the imagination to becoming a foreman in his trade and eventually winning independence. All this he could accomplish while earning his daily wages as an apprentice or a common laborer. The class in masonry seemed to be more in line with my present plans than any of the other subjects. It ought to prove of value, I thought, to a man in the general contracting business and certainly to a man who undertook the contracting of building construction. At any rate it was a trade in which I was told there was a steady demand for good men and at which many men were earning from three to five dollars a day. I must admit that at first I didn't understand how brick-laying could be taught for I thought it merely a matter of practice but a glance at the outline of the course showed me my error. It looked as complicated as many of the university courses. The work included first the laying of a brick to line. A man was given actual practice with bricks and mortar under an expert mason. From this a man was advanced, when he had acquired sufficient skill, to the laying out of the American bond; then the building of square piers of different sizes; then the building of square and pigeon hole corners, then the laying out of brick footings. The second year included rowlock and bonded segmental arches; blocking, toothing, and corbeling; building and bonding of vaulted walls; polygonal and circular walls, piers and chimneys; fire-places and flues. The third year advanced a man to the nice points of the trade such as the foreign bonds--Flemish, Dutch, Roman and Old English; cutting and turning of arches of all kinds,--straight, cambered, semi-circular, three centred elliptical, and many forms of Gothic and Moorish arches; also brick panels and cornices. Finally it gave practice in the laying out of plans and work from these plans. Whatever time was left was devoted to speed in all these things as far as it was consistent with accurate and careful workmanship. I enrolled at once and also entered a class in architectural drawing which was given in connection with this. I came back and told Ruth and though of course she was afraid it might be too hard work for me she admitted that in the end it might save me many months of still harder work. If it hadn't been for the boy I think she would have liked to follow me even in these studies. Whatever new thing I took up, she wanted to take up too. But as I told her, it was she who was making the whole business possible and that was enough for one woman to do. The school didn't open for a week and during that time I saw something of Rafferty. He surprised me by coming around to the flat one night--for what I couldn't imagine. I was glad to see him but I suspected that he had some purpose in making such an effort. I introduced him to Ruth and we all sat down in the kitchen and I told him what I was planning to do this winter and asked him why he didn't join me. I was rather surprised that the idea didn't appeal to him but I soon found out that he had another interest which took all his spare time. This interest was nothing else than politics. And Rafferty hadn't been over here long enough yet to qualify as a voter. In spite of this he was already on speaking terms with the state representative from our district, the local alderman, and was an active lieutenant of Sweeney's--the ward boss. At present he was interesting himself in the candidacy of this same Sweeney who was the Democratic machine candidate for Congress. Owing to some local row he was in danger of being knifed. Dan had come round to make sure I was registered and to swing me over if possible to the ranks of the faithful. The names of which he spoke so familiarly meant nothing to me. I had heard a few of them from reading the papers but I hadn't read a paper for three months now and knew nothing at all about the present campaign. As a matter of fact I never voted except for the regular Republican candidate for governor and the regular Republican candidate for president. And I did that much only from habit. My father had been a Republican and I was a Republican after him and I felt that in a general way this party stood for honesty as against Tammanyism. But with councillors, and senators and aldermen, or even with congressmen I never bothered my head. Their election seemed to be all prearranged and I figured that one vote more or less wouldn't make much difference. I don't know as I even thought that much about it; I ignored the whole matter. What was true of me was true largely of the other men in our old neighborhood. Politics, except perhaps for an abstract discussion of the tariff, was not a vital issue with any of us. Now here I found an emigrant who couldn't as yet qualify as a citizen knowing all the local politicians by their first names and spending his nights working for a candidate for congress. Evidently my arrival down here had been noted by those keen eyes which look after every single vote as a miser does his pennies. A man had been found who had at least a speaking acquaintance with me, and plans already set on foot to round me up. I was inclined at first to treat this new development as a joke. But as Rafferty talked on he set me to thinking. I didn't know anything about the merits of the two present candidates but was strongly prejudiced to believe that the Democratic candidate, on general principles, was the worst one. However quite apart from this, wasn't Rafferty to-day a better citizen than I? Even admitting for the sake of argument that Sweeney was a crook, wasn't Rafferty who was trying his humble best to get him elected a better American than I who was willing to sit down passively and allow him to be elected? Rafferty at any rate was getting into the fight. His motive may have been selfish but I think his interest really sprang first from an instinctive desire to get into the game. Here he had come to a new country where every man had not only the chance to mix with the affairs of the ward, the city, the state, the nation, but also a good chance to make himself a leader in them. Sweeney himself was an example. For twenty-five years or more Rafferty's countrymen had appreciated this opportunity for power and gone after it. The result everyone knows. Their victory in city politics at least had been so decisive year after year that the native born had practically laid down his arms as I had. And the reason for this perennial victory lay in just this fact that men like Rafferty were busy from the time they landed and men like me were lazily indifferent. Three months before, a dozen speakers couldn't have made me see this. I had no American spirit back of me then to make me appreciate it. You might better have talked to a sleepy Russian Jew a week off the steamer. He at least would have sensed the sacred power for liberty which the voting privilege bestows. I began to ask questions of Rafferty about the two men. He didn't know much about the other fellow except that he was "agin honest labor and a tool of the thrusts." But on Sweeney he grew eloquent. "Sure," he said. "There's a mon after ye own heart, me biy. Faith he's dug in ditches himself an he knows wot a full dinner pail manes." "What's his business?" I asked. "A contracthor," he said. "He does big jobs for the city." He let himself loose on what Sweeney proposed to do for the ward if elected. He would have the government undertake the dredging of the harbor thereby giving hundreds of jobs to the local men. He would do this thing and that--all of which had for their object apparently just that one goal. It was a direct personal appeal to every man toiler. In addition to this, Rafferty let drop a hint or two that Sweeney had jobs in his own business which he filled discreetly from the ranks of the wavering. It wasn't more than a month later, by the way, that Rafferty himself was appointed a foreman in the firm of Sweeney Brothers. But apart from the merits of the question, the thing that impressed me was Rafferty's earnestness, the delight he took in the contest itself, and his activity. He was very much disappointed when I told him I wasn't even registered in the ward but he made me promise to look after that as soon as the lists were again opened and made an appointment for the next evening to take me round to a rally to meet the boys. I went and was escorted to the home of the Sweeney Club. It was a good sized hall up a long flight of stairs. Through the heavy blue smoke which filled the room I saw the walls decorated with American flags and the framed crayon portraits of Sweeney and other local politicians. Large duck banners proclaimed in black ink the current catch lines of the campaign. At one end there was a raised platform, the rest of the room was filled with wooden settees. My first impression of it all was anything but favorable. It looked rather tawdry and cheap. The men themselves who filled the room were pretty tough-looking specimens. I noticed a few Italians of the fat class and one or two sharp-faced Jews, but for the most part these men were the cheaper element of the second and third generation. They were the loafers--the ward heelers. I certainly felt out of place among them and to me even Rafferty looked out of place. There was a freshness, a bulk about him, that his fellows here didn't have. As he shoved his big body through the crowd, they greeted him by his first name with an oath or a joke and he beamed back at them all with a broad wave of his hand. It was evident that he was a man of some importance here. He worked a passage for me to the front of the hall and didn't stop until he reached a group of about a dozen men who were all puffing away at cigars. In the midst of them stood a man of about Rafferty's size in frame but fully fifty pounds heavier. He had a quiet, good-natured face. On the whole it was a strong face though a bit heavy. His eyes were everywhere. He was the first to notice Rafferty. He nodded with a familiar, "Hello, Dan." Dan seized my arm and dragged me forward: "I want ye to meet me frind, Mister Carleton," he said. Sweeney rested his grey eyes on me a second, saw that I was a stranger here, and stepped forward instantly with his big hand outstretched. He spoke without a trace of brogue. "I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Carleton," he said. I don't know that I'm easily impressed and I flattered myself that I could recognize a politician when I saw one, but I want to confess that there was something in the way he grasped my hand that instantly gave me a distinctly friendly feeling towards Sweeney. I should have said right then and there that the man wasn't as black as he was painted. He was neither oily nor sleek in his manner. We chatted a minute and I think he was a bit surprised in me. He wanted to know where I lived, where I was working, and how much of a family I had. He put these questions in so frank and fatherly a fashion that they didn't seem so impertinent to me at the time as they did later. Some one called him and as he turned away, he said to Rafferty, "See me before you go, Dan." Then he said to me, "I hope I'll see you down here often, Carleton." With that Dan took me around and introduced me to Tom, Dick and Harry or rather to Tim, Denny and Larry. This crowd came nearer to the notion I had of ward politicians. They were a noisy, husky-throated lot, but they didn't leave you in doubt for a minute but what every mother's son of them was working for Sweeney as though they were one big family with Daddy Sweeney at the head. You could overhear bits of plots and counter plots on every side. I was offered a dozen cigars in as many minutes and though some of the men rather shied away from me at first a whispered endorsement from Dan was all that was needed to bring them back. There was something contagious about it and when later the meeting itself opened and Sweeney rose to speak I cheered him as heartily as anyone. By this time a hundred or more other men had come in who looked more outside the inner circle. Sweeney spoke simply and directly. It was a personal appeal he made, based on promises. I listened with interest and though it seemed to me that many of his pledges were extravagant he showed such a good spirit back of them that his speech on a whole produced a favorable effect. At any rate I came away from the meeting with a stronger personal interest in politics than I had ever felt in my life. Instead of seeming like an abstruse or vague issue it seemed to me pretty concrete and pretty vital. It concerned me and my immediate neighbors. Here was a man who was going to Congress not as a figurehead of his party but to make laws for Rafferty and for me. He was to be my congressman if I chose to help make him such. He knew my name, knew my occupation, knew that I had a wife and one child, knew my address. And I want to say that he didn't forget them either. As I walked back through the brightly lighted streets which were still as much alive as at high noon, I felt that after all this was my ward and my city. I wasn't a mere dummy, I was a member of a vast corporation. I had been to a rally and had shaken hands with Sweeney. Ruth's only comment was a disgusted grunt as she smelled the rank tobacco in my clothes. She kept them out on the roof all the next day. CHAPTER XII OUR FIRST WINTER This first winter was filled with just about as much interest as it was possible for three people to crowd into six or seven months. And even then there was so much left over which we wanted to do that we fairly groaned as we saw opportunity after opportunity slip by which we simply didn't have the time to improve. To begin with the boy, he went at his studies with a zest that placed him among the first ten of his class. Dick wasn't a quick boy at his books and so this stood for sheer hard plugging. To me this made his success all the more noteworthy. Furthermore it wasn't the result of goading either from Ruth or myself. I kept after him about the details of his school life and about the boys he met, but I let him go his own gait in his studies. I wanted to see just how the new point of view would work out in him. The result as I saw it was that every night after supper he went at his problems not as a mere school boy but man-fashion. He sailed in to learn. He had to. There was no prestige in that school coming from what the fathers did. No one knew what the fathers did. It didn't matter. With half a dozen nationalities in the race the school was too cosmopolitan to admit such local issues. A few boys might chum together feeling they were better than the others, but the school as a whole didn't recognize them. Each boy counted for what he did--what he was. Of the other nine boys in the first ten, four were of Jewish origin, three were Irish, one was Italian, and the other was American born but of Irish descent. Half of them hoped to go through college on scholarships and the others had equally ambitious plans for business. The Jews were easily the most brilliant students but they didn't attempt anything else. The Italian showed some literary ability and wrote a little for the school paper. The American born Irish boy was made manager of the Freshman football team. The other four were natural athletes--two of them played on the school eleven and the others were just built for track athletics and basket ball. Dick tried for the eleven but he wasn't heavy enough for one thing and so didn't make anything but a substitute's position with the freshmen. I was just as well satisfied. I didn't mind the preliminary training but I felt I would as soon he added a couple more years to his age before he really played football, even if it was in him to play. My point had been won when he went out and tried. At the end of the first four months in the school I thought I saw a general improvement in him. He held himself better for one thing--with his head higher and his shoulders well back. This wasn't due to his physical training either. It meant a changed mental attitude. Ruth says she didn't notice any difference and she thinks this is nothing but my imagination. But she's wrong. I was looking for something she couldn't see that the boy lacked before. Dick to her was always all right. Of course I knew myself that the boy couldn't go far wrong whatever his training, but I knew also that his former indifferent attitude was going to make his path just so much harder for him. Dick, when he read over this manuscript, said he thought the whole business was foolish and that even if I wanted to tell the story of my own life, the least I could do was to leave out him. But his life was more largely my life than he realizes even now. And his case was in many ways a better example of the true emigrant spirit than my own. He joined the indoor track squad this winter, too, but here again he didn't distinguish himself. He fought his way into the finals at the interscholastic meet but that was all. However this, too, was good training for him. I saw that race myself and I watched his mouth instead of his legs. I liked the way his jaws came together on the last lap though it hurt to see the look in his eyes when he fell so far behind after trying so hard. But he crossed the finish line. In the meanwhile Ruth was just about the busiest little woman in the city. And yet strangely enough this instead of dragging her down, built her up. She took on weight, her cheeks grew rosier than I had seen them for five years and she seemed altogether happier. I watched her closely because I made up my mind that ginger jar or no ginger jar the moment I saw a trace of heaviness in her eyes, she would have to quit some of her bargain hunting. I didn't mean to barter her good health for a few hundred dollars even if I had to remain a day laborer the rest of my life. That possibility didn't seem to me now half so terrifying as did the old bogey of not getting a raise. I suppose for one thing this was because we neither of us felt so keenly the responsibility of the boy. In the old days we had both thought that he was doomed if we didn't save enough to send him through college and give him, at the end of his course, capital enough to start in business for himself. In other words, Dick seemed then utterly dependent upon us. It was as terrible a thought to think of leaving him penniless at twenty-one as leaving him an orphan at five months. The burden of his whole career rested on our shoulders. But now as I saw him take his place among fellows who were born dependent upon themselves, as I learned about youngsters at the school who at ten earned their own living selling newspapers and even went through college on their earnings, as I watched him grow strong physically and tackle his work aggressively, I realized that even if anything should happen to either Ruth or myself the boy would be able to stand on his own feet. He had the whole world before him down here. If worst came to worst he could easily support himself daytimes, and at night learn either a trade or a profession. This was not a dream on my part; I saw men who were actually doing it. I was doing it myself for that matter. Personally I felt as easy about Dick's future by the middle of that first winter as though I had established an annuity for him which would assure him all the advantages I had ever hoped he might receive. So did Ruth. I remember some horrible hours I passed in that little suburban house towards the end of my life there. Ruth would sit huddled up in a chair and try to turn my thoughts to other things but I could only pace the floor when I thought what would happen to her and the boy if anything should happen to me; or what would happen to the boy alone if anything should happen to the both of us. The case of Mrs. Bonnington hung over me like a nightmare and the other possibility was even worse. Why, when Cummings came down with pneumonia and it looked for a while as though he might die, I guess I suffered, by applying his case to mine, as much as ever he himself did on his sick bed. I used to inquire for his temperature every night as though it were my own. So did every man in the neighborhood. Sickness was a wicked misfortune to that little crowd. When death did pick one of us, the whole structure of that family came tumbling down like a house of cards. If by the grace of God the man escaped, he was left hopelessly in debt by doctor's bills if in the meanwhile he hadn't lost his job. Sickness meant disaster, swift and terrible whatever its outcome. We ourselves escaped it, to be sure, but I've sweat blood over the mere thought of it. Now if our thoughts ever took so grim a turn, we could speak quite calmly about it. It was impossible for me ever to think of Ruth as sick. My mind couldn't grasp that. But occasionally when I have come home wet and Ruth has said something about my getting pneumonia if I didn't look out, I've asked myself what this would mean. In the first place I now could secure admission to the best hospitals in the country free of cost. I had only to report my case to the city physician and if I were sick enough to warrant it, he would notify the hospital and they would send down an ambulance for me. I would be carried to a clean bed in a clean room and would receive such medical attention as before I could have had only as a millionaire. Physicians of national reputation would attend me, medicines would be supplied me, and I'd have a night and day nurse for whom outside I would have had to pay some forty dollars a week. Not only this but if I recovered I would be supplied the most nourishing foods in the market and after that sent out of town to one of the quiet convalescent hospitals if my condition warranted it. I don't suppose a thousand dollars would cover what here would be given me for nothing. And I wouldn't either be considered or treated like a charity patient. This was all my due as a citizen--as a toiler. Of course this would be done also for Dick as well as for Ruth. I don't mean to say that such thoughts took up much of my time. I'm not morbid and we never did have any sickness--we lived too sanely for that. But just as our new viewpoint on Dick relieved us of a tension which before had sapped our strength, so it was a great relief to have such insurance as this in the background of our minds. It took all the curse off sickness that it's possible to take off. In three or four such ways as these a load of responsibility was removed from us and we were left free to apply all our energy to the task of upbuilding which we had in hand. This may account somewhat for the reserve strength which Ruth as well as myself seemed to tap. Then of course the situation as a whole was such as to make any woman with imagination buoyant. Ruth had an active part in making a big rosy dream come true. She was now not merely a passive agent. She wasn't economizing merely to make the salary cover the current expenses. Her task was really the vital one of the whole undertaking; she was accumulating capital. When you stop to think of it she was the brains of the business; I was only the machine. I dug the money out of the ground but that wouldn't have amounted to much if it had all gone for nothing except to keep the machine moving from day to day. The dollar she saved was worth more than a hundred dollars earned and spent again. It was the only dollar which counted. They say a penny saved is a penny earned. To my mind a penny saved was worth to us at this time every cent of a dollar. So Ruth was not only an active partner but there was another side to the game that appealed to her. "The thing I like about our life down here," she said to me one night, "is the chance it gives me to get something of myself into every single detail of the home." I didn't know what she meant because it seemed to me that was just what she had always done. But she shook her head when I said so. "No," she said. "Not the way I can now." "Well, you didn't have a servant and must have done whatever was done," I said. "I didn't have time to pick out the food for the table," she said. "I had to order it of the grocery man. I didn't have time to make as many of your clothes as I wanted. Why I didn't even have time to plan." "If anyone had told me that a woman could do any more than you then were doing, I should have laughed at them," I said. "You and the boy weren't all my own then," she said. "I had to waste a great deal of time on things outside the house. Sometimes it used to make me feel as though you were just one of the neighbors, Billy." I began to see what she meant. But she certainly found now just as much time if not more to spare on the women and babies all around us. "They aren't neighbors," she said. "They are friends." I suppose she felt like that because what she did for them wasn't just wasted energy like an evening at cards. But she went back again and again, as though it were a song, to this notion that our new home was all her own. "You may think me a pig, Billy," she said. "But I like it. I like to pick out all myself, every single potato you and the boy eat; I like to pick out every leaf of lettuce, every apple. It makes me feel as though I was doing something for you." "Good land--" I said. But she wouldn't let me finish. "No, Billy," she said. "You don't understand what all that means to me--how it makes me a part of you and Dick as I never was before. And I like to think that in everything you wear there's a stitch of mine right close to you. And that when you and the boy lie down at night I'm touching you because I made everything clean for you with my own hands." It makes my throat grow lumpy even now when I remember the eager, half-ashamed way she looked up into my eyes as she said this. Lord, sometimes she made me feel like a little child and other times she made me feel like a giant. But whichever way she made me feel at the moment, she always left me wishing that I had in me every good thing a man can have so that I might be half way worthy of her. There are times when a fellow knows that as a man he doesn't count for much as compared with any woman. And with such a woman as Ruth--well, God knows I tried to do my best in those days and have tried to do that ever since, but it makes me ache to think how little I've been able to give her of all she deserves. In her housework Ruth had developed a system that would have made a fortune for any man if applied in the same degree to his business. I learned a lot from her. Instead of going at her tasks in the haphazard fashion of most women or doing things just because her grandmother and her mother did them a certain way, she used her head. I've already told how she did her washing little by little every day instead of waiting for Monday and then tearing herself all to pieces, and that's a fair example of her method. When she was cooking breakfast and had a good fire, she'd have half her dinner on at the same time. Anything that was just as good warmed up, she'd do then. She'd make her stews and soups while waiting for the biscuits to bake and boil her rice or make her cold puddings while we were eating. When that stove was working in the morning you couldn't find a square inch of it that wasn't working. As a result, she planned never to spend over half an hour on her dinner at night and by the time the breakfast dishes were washed she was through with her cooking until then. She used her head even in little things; she'd make one dish do the work of three. She never washed this dish until she was through with it for good. And she'd find the time at odd moments during her cooking to wash these dishes as they came along. If she spilled anything on the floor she stopped right then and there and cleaned it up, with the result that when breakfast was served, the kitchen looked as ship-shape as when she began. When she _was_ busy, she was the busiest woman you ever saw. She worked with her head, both hands, and her feet. As a result instead of fiddling around all day, when she was through she was through. When she got up in the morning she knew exactly what she had to do for the day, just how she was going to do it and just when she was going to do it. And you could bank that the things at night would be done, and be done just as she had planned. She thought ahead. That's a great thing to master in any business. In my own work, the plan I had outlined for myself I developed day by day. At the end of three months I found that even what little Italian I had then learned was a help to me. The mere fact that I was studying their language placed me on a better footing with my fellows. They seemed to receive it as a compliment and to feel that I was taking a personal interest in them as a race. My desire to practise my few phrases was always a letter of introduction to a newcomer. I talked with them about everything--where they came from, what made them come, what they did before they came, how long they worked and what pay they got in Italy, how they saved to get over here, how they secured their jobs, what they hoped to do eventually, where they lived, how large their families were, how much it cost them to live and what they ate. I inquired as to what they liked and what they disliked about their work; what they considered fair and what unfair about the labor and the pay; what they liked and didn't like about the foreman. Often I couldn't get any opinion at all out of them on these subjects; often it wasn't honest and often it wasn't intelligent. But as with my other questioning when I sifted it all down and thought it over, I was surprised at how much information I did get. If I didn't learn facts which could be put into words, I was left with a very definite impression and a very wide general knowledge. In the meanwhile my note book was always busy. I kept jotting down names and addresses with enough running comment to help me to recall the men individually. I wasn't able to locate one out of ten of these men later but the tenth man was worth all the trouble. As the winter advanced and the air grew frosty and the snow and ice came, the work in a good many ways was harder. And yet everything considered I don't know but what I'd rather work outdoors at zero than at eighty-five. Except that my hands got numb and everything was more difficult to handle I didn't mind the cold. There was generally exercise enough to keep the blood moving. We had a variety of work before spring. After the subway job I shifted to a big house foundation and there met another group of skilled workmen from whom I learned much. The work was easier and the surroundings pleasanter if you can speak of pleasant surroundings about a hole in the ground. The soil was easier to handle and we went to no great depth. Here too I met a new gang of laborers. I missed many familiar faces out of the old crowd and found some interesting new men. Rafferty had gone and I was sorry. I saw more or less of him however during the winter for he dropped around now and then on Sunday evenings. I don't think he ever forgot the incident of the sewer gas. I enjoyed too every hour in my night school. I found here a very large per cent. of foreigners and they were naturally of the more ambitious type. I found I had a great deal to learn even in the matter of spreading mortar and using a trowel. It was really fascinating work and in the instructor I made an invaluable friend. Through him I was able to arrange my scattered fragments of information into larger groups. Little by little I told him something of my plan and he was very much interested in it. He gave me many valuable suggestions and later proved of substantial help in more ways than one. CHAPTER XIII I BECOME A CITIZEN As I said, there were still many opportunities which I didn't have time to improve. The three of us seemed to have breathed in down here some spirit which left us almost feverish in our desire to learn. Whether it was the opportunity which bred the desire or the desire as expressed by all these newcomers, fresh from the shackles of their old lives, which created the opportunity, I leave to the students of such matters. All I know is that we were offered the best in practical information, such as the trade schools and the night high schools; the best in art, the best in music, the best in the drama. I am speaking always of the newcomer--the emigrant. Sprinkled in with these was the cheaper element of the native-born, whether of foreign or of American descent, who spent their evenings on the street or at the cheap theatres or in the barrooms. This class despised the whole business. Incidentally these were the men who haunted the bread line, the Salvation Army barracks, and were the first to join in any public demonstration against the rich. The women, not always so much by their own fault, were the type which keeps the charitable associations busy. I'm not saying that among these there were not often cases of sheer hard luck. Now and then sickness played the devil with a family and more often the cussedness of some one member dragged down a half dozen innocent ones with him, but I do say that when misfortune did come to this particular class they didn't buck up to it as Helen Bonnington did or use such means as were at their disposal to pull out of it. They just caved in. Even in their daily lives, when things were going well with them, they lost in the glitter and glare of the city that spark which my middle-class friends lost by stagnation. Because there was no poetic romance left in their own lives, they despised it in the lives of others and laughed at it in art. Whatever went back into the past, they looked upon scornfully as "ancient." They lived each day as it came with a pride in being up-to-date. As a result, they preferred musical comedy of the horse play kind to real music; they preferred cheap melodrama to Shakespere. They lived and breathed the spirit of the yellow journals. I don't know what sort of an education it is the Italians come over here with, but they were a constant surprise to me in their appreciation of the best in art. And it was genuine--it was simple. I've heard a good many jokes about the foolishness of giving them a diet of Shakespere and Beethoven, of Mæterlinck and Mascagni, but that sort of talk comes either from the outsiders or from the Great White Way crowd. When you've seen Italians not only crowd in to the free productions down here but have seen them put up good money to attend the best theatres; when you've heard them whistle grand opera at their work and save hard earned dollars to spend on it down town; when you've seen them crowd the art museums on free days and spend a half dollar to look at some private exhibition of a fellow countryman's, you begin to think, if you're honest, that the laugh is on you. They made me feel ashamed not only because I was ignorant but because after I became more familiar with the works of the masters I was slower than they to appreciate them. In many cases I couldn't. I didn't flatter myself either that this was because of my superior frankness or up-to-dateness. I knew well enough that it was because of a lack in me and my ancestors. Scarcely a week passed when there wasn't something worth seeing or hearing presented to these people. It came either through a settlement house or through the generosity of some interested private patron. However it came, it was always through the medium of a class which until now had been only a name to me. This was the independently well-to-do American class--the Americans who had partly made and partly inherited their fortunes and had not yet come to misuse them. It is a class still active in American life, running however more to the professions than to business. Many of their family names have been familiar in history to succeeding generations since the early settlement of New England. They were intellectual leaders then and they are intellectual leaders now. If I could with propriety I'd like to give here a list of half a dozen of these men and women who came, in time, to revive for me my belief that after all there still is left in this country the backbone of a worthy old stock. But they don't need any such trivial tribute as I might give them. The thing that struck me at once about them was that they were still finding an outlet for their pioneer instinct not only in their professions and their business, but in the interest they took in the new pioneer. Shoulder to shoulder with the modern Pilgrims they were pushing forward their investigations in medicine, in science, in economics. They were adapting old laws to new conditions; they were developing the new West; they were the new thinkers and the new politicians. I don't suppose that if I had lived for fifty years under the old conditions I would have met one of them. There was no meeting ground for us, for we had nothing in common. I couldn't possibly interest them and I'm sure I was too busy with my own troubles to take any interest in them even if I had known of their existence. Even down here I resented at first their presence as an intrusion. Whenever I met them I was inclined to play the cad and there's no bigger cad on the face of the earth than a workingman who is beginning to feel his oats. But as I watched them and saw how earnest they were and how really valuable their efforts were I was able to distinguish them from still another crowd who flaunted their silly charities in the newspapers. But these other quiet men and women were of different calibre; they were the ones who established pure milk stations, who encouraged the young men of real talent like Giuseppe, and who headed all the real work for good done down here. They came into my life when I needed them; when perhaps I was swinging too far in my belief that the emigrant was the only force for progress in our nation. I know they checked me in some wild thinking in which I was beginning to indulge. I find I have been wandering a little. But what we thought, counted for as much towards the goal as what we did and even if the thinking is only that of one man--and an ordinary man at that--why, so for that matter was the whole venture. I want to say again that all I'm trying to do is to put down as well as I can remember and as well as I am able, my own acts and thoughts and nothing but my own. Of course that means Ruth's and Dick's too as far as I understood them, for they were a part of my own. I don't want what I write to be taken as the report of an investigation but just as the diary of one man's experience. If I had had the time I could have seen at least two of Shakespere's plays--presented by amateurs, to be sure, but amateurs with talent and enthusiasm and guided by professionals. I could have heard at least a half dozen good readers read from the more modern classics. I could have listened to as many concerts by musicians of good standing. I could have heard lectures on a dozen subjects of vital interest. Then there were entertainments designed confessedly to entertain. In addition to these there were many more lectures in the city itself open free to the public and which I now for the first time learned about. There was one series in particular which was addressed once a week by men of international renown. It was a liberal education in itself. Many of my neighbors attended. But as for Dick he was too busy with his studies and Ruth was too glad to sit at home and watch him, to go out at night. What spare time I myself had I began to devote to a new interest. Rafferty had first roused me to my duty as a citizen in the matter of local politics and through the winter called often enough to keep my interest whetted. But even without him I couldn't have escaped the question. Politics was a live issue down here every day in the year. One campaign was no sooner ended than another was begun. Sweeney was no sooner elected than he began to lay wires for his fellows in the coming city election who in their turn would sustain him in whatever further political ambitions he might have. If the hold the boss had on a ward or a city was a mystery to me at first, it didn't long remain so. The secret of his power lay in the fact that he never let go. He was at work every day in the year and he had an organization with which he could keep in touch through his lieutenants whether he was in Washington or at home. Sweeney's personality was always right there in his ward wherever his body might be. The Sweeney Club rooms were always open. Night after night you could find his trusted men there. Here the man out of a job came and from here was recommended to one contractor or another or to the "city"; here the man with the sick wife came to have her sent to some hospital which perhaps for some reason would not ordinarily receive her; here the men in court sent their friends for bail; here came those with bigger plans afoot in the matter of special contracts. If Sweeney couldn't get them what they wanted, he at least sent them away with a feeling of deep obligation to him. Naturally then when election time came around these people obeyed Sweeney's order. It wasn't reasonable to suppose that a campaign speech or two could affect their loyalty. Of course the rival party followed much the same methods but the man in power had a tremendous advantage. The only danger he needed to fear was a split in his own faction as some young man loomed up with ambitions that moved faster than Sweeney's own for him. Such a man I began to suspect--though it was looking a long way into the future--was Rafferty. That winter he took out his naturalization papers and soon afterwards he began an active campaign for the Common Council. It was partly my interest in him and partly a new sense of duty I felt towards the whole game that made me resolve to have a hand in this. I owed that much to the ward in which I lived and which was doing so much for me. In talking with some of the active settlement workers down here, I found them as strongly prejudiced against the party in power as I had been and when I spoke to them of Rafferty I found him damned in their eyes as soon as I mentioned his party. "The whole system is corrupt from top to bottom," said the head of one settlement house to me. "Are you doing anything to remedy it?" I asked. "What _can_ you do?" he said. "We are doing the only thing possible--we're trying to get hold of the youngsters and give them a higher sense of civic virtue." "That's good," I said, "but you don't get hold of one in ten of the coming voters. And you don't get hold of one in a hundred of the coming politicians. Why don't you take hold of a man like Dan who is bound to get power some day and talk a little civic virtue into him." "You said he was a Democrat and a machine man," said he, as though that settled it. "I don't see any harm in either fact," I said, "if you get at the good in him. A good Democrat is a good citizen and a good machine is a good power," I said. The man smiled. "You don't know," he said. "Do _you_ know?" I asked. "Have you been to the rallies and met the men and studied their methods?" "All you have to do is to read the papers," he answered. "I don't think so," I said. "To beat an enemy you ought to study him at first hand. You ought to find out the good as well as the bad in him. You ought to find out where he gets his power." "Graft and patronage," he answered. "What about the other party?" I said. "Just as bad." "Then what are you going to do about it?" I asked. "Our only hope is education," he said. "Then," I said, "why not educate the young politicians? Get to know Rafferty--he's young and simple and honest now. Help him to advance honestly and keep him that way." He shook his head doubtfully but he agreed to have a talk with Dan. In the meanwhile I had a talk with Dan myself. I told him what my scheme was. "Dan," I said, "you must decide right at the beginning of your career whether you're going to be just a tool of Sweeney's or whether you're going to stand on your own feet." "Phot's the mather with Sweeney, now?" he asked. "In some ways he's all right," I said. "And in other ways he isn't. But anyhow he's your boss and you have to do what he tells you to do just as though he was your landlord back in Ireland and you nothing but a tenant." "Eh?" he said looking up quick. I thought I'd strike a sore spot there and I made the most of it. I talked along like this for a half hour and I saw his lips come together. "He'd knife me," he said finally. "He's sore now 'cause I'm afther wantin' to run for the council this year." I had heard the rumor. "Then," I said, "why don't you pull free and make a little machine of your own. Some of the boys will stand by you, won't they?" "Will they?" he grinned. With that I took him around to the settlement house. Dan listened good naturedly to a lot of talk he didn't understand but he listened with more interest to a lot of talk about the needs of the district which it was now getting cheated out of, which he did understand. And incidentally the man who at first did all the talking in the end listened to Dan. After the latter had gone, he turned to me and said: "I like that fellow Rafferty." That seemed to me the really important thing and right there and then we sat down and worked out the basis of the "Young American Political Club." Our object was to reach the young voter first of all and through him to reach the older ones. To this end we had a "Committee on Boys" and a "Committee on Naturalization." I insisted from the beginning that we must have an organization as perfect as that of any political machine. Until we felt our strength a little however, I suggested it was best to limit our efforts to the districts alone. We took a map of the city and we cut up the districts into blocks with a young man at the head of each block. He was to make a list of all the young voters and keep as closely in touch as possible with the political gossip of both parties. Over him there was to be a street captain and over him a district captain and finally a president. All this was the result of slow and careful study. All the workers down here fell in with the plan eagerly and one of them agreed to pay the expenses of a hall any time we wished to use one for campaign purposes. At first our efforts passed unnoticed by either political party. It was thought to be just another fanciful civic dream. We were glad of it. It gave us time to perfect our organization without interference. This business took up all the time I could spare during the winter. But instead of finding it a drag I found it an inspiration. They insisted upon making me president of the Club and though I would rather have had a younger man at its head I accepted the honor with a feeling of some pride. It was the first public office I had ever held and it gave me a new sense of responsibility and a better sense of citizenship. In the meanwhile Dan made no open break with Sweeney but it soon became clear that he was not in such good favor as before. Although we had not yet openly endorsed his candidacy we were doing a good deal of talking for him. I received several visits from Sweeney's lieutenants who tried to find out just what we were about. My answer invariably was "No partisanship but clean politics." When it came time to register I was forced to register with one of the two parties in order to take any part in the primaries. I registered as a Democrat for the first time in my life. I also attended a primary for the first time in my life. I also felt a new power back of me for the first time in my life. Little by little Dan had come to be an issue. Sweeney did not openly declare himself but it was soon evident that he had come to the primaries prepared to knife Rafferty if it were possible. Back of Dan stood his large personal following; back of me stood the balance of power. Sweeney saw it, gave the nod, and Dan was nominated. Six weeks later he was elected, too. You'd have thought he had been elected mayor by the noise the small boys made. Rafferty came to me with his big paw outstretched, "Carleton," he said, "the only thing I've got agin ye is thot ye ain't an Irishmon. Faith, ye'd make a domd foine Irishmon." "It's up to you now," I said, "to make a damned fine American." It wasn't more than two months later that Dan came to me to ask my opinion on a request of Sweeney's. It looked a bit off color and I said so. "You can't do it, Dan," I said. "It manes throuble," he said. "Let it come. We're back of you with both feet." Dan followed my advice and the trouble came. He was fired from his job as foreman under Sweeney. But you can't keep down as good a foreman as Dan was and he had another job within a week. A few months later I had another job myself. I was made foreman with my own firm at a wage of two dollars and a half a day. When I went back and announced this to Ruth, she cried a little. Truly our cup seemed full and running over. CHAPTER XIV FIFTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK My first thought when I received my advance in pay was that I could now relieve Ruth of some of her burdens. There was no longer any need of her spending so much time in trotting around the markets and the department stores. Nor was there any need of her doing so much plotting and planning in her endeavor to save a penny. Furthermore I was determined that she should now enjoy some of the little luxuries of life in the way of better things to wear and better things to eat. But that idea was taken out of me in short order. "No," she said, as soon as she recovered from the good news. "We mustn't spend one cent more than we've been spending." "But look here," I said; "what's the good of a raise if we don't use it?" "What's the good of a raise if we spend it?" she asked me. "We'll use it, Billy, but we'll use it wisely. How many times have you told me that if you had your life to live over again you wouldn't spend one cent over the first salary you received, if it was only three dollars a week, until you had a bank account?" "I know that," I said. "But when a man has a wife and boy like you and Dick--" "He doesn't want to turn them into burdens that will hold him down all his life," she broke in. "It isn't fair to the wife and boy," she said. I couldn't quite follow her reasoning but I didn't have to. When I came home the next Saturday night with fifteen dollars in my pocket instead of nine she calmly took out three for the rent, five for household expenses and put seven in the ginger jar. I suggested that at least we have one celebration and with the boy go to the little French restaurant we used to visit, but she held up her hands in horror. "Do you think I'd spend two dollars and a half for--why, Billy, you wouldn't!" "I'd like to spend ten," I said. "I'd like to go there to dinner and buy you a half dozen roses and get the three best seats in the best theater in town," I said. She came to my side and patted my arm. "Thank you, Billy," she said. "But honest--it's just as much fun to have you want to do those things as really do them." I believe she meant it. I wouldn't believe it of anyone else but for a week she talked about that dinner and those flowers and the theater until she had me wondering if we hadn't actually gone. Dick thought we were crazy. And so, just as usual, after this she'd take her basket and start out two or three mornings a week and walk with me as far as the market. She'd spend an hour here and then if she needed anything more she'd go down town to the big stores and wander around here for another hour. But Saturday nights was her great bargain opportunity. If I couldn't go with her she'd take Dick and the two would plan to get there at about nine o'clock. From this time on she often picked up for a song odd ends of meat and good vegetables which the market men didn't want to carry over to Monday. In fact they _had_ to sell out these things as their stock at the beginning of the week had to be fresh. I suppose marketing at this time of day would be a good deal of a hardship for those living in the suburbs but it was a regular lark for her. Most everyone is good natured on Saturday night if on no other night. The week's work is done and people have enough money from their pay envelopes to feel rich for a few hours anyway. Then there were the lights and the crowd and the shouting so that it was like twenty country fairs rolled into one. After the excitement of coming home Saturdays with so much money wore off, I began to forget that I _was_ earning fifteen instead of nine. If Ruth had spent it on the table I'm sure I'd have forgotten it even more quickly. I was getting all I wanted to eat, was warm and had a good clean bed to sleep in and what more can a man have even if he's earning a hundred a week? I think people are very apt to forget that after all a millionaire can spend only about so much on himself. And after the newness of fresh toys has worn off--like steam yachts and private cars--he is forced to be satisfied with just what I had, no matter how much more money he makes. He has only his five senses and once these are satisfied he's no better off than a man who satisfies these same senses on eight dollars a week. Generally he's worse off because in a year or so he has probably dulled them all. Rockefeller himself probably never in his life got half the fun out of anything that I did in just crawling into my clean bed at night with every tired muscle purring contentedly and my mind at rest about the next day. I doubt if he knows the joy of waking up in the morning rested and hungry. The only advantage he had over me that I can see is the power he had to help others. In a way I don't believe he found any greater opportunity even for that than Ruth found right here. For those interested in the details I'm going to give another quotation from Ruth's note book. But to my mind these details aren't the important part of our venture. The thing that counted was the spirit back of them. It isn't the fact that we lived on from six to eight dollars a week or the statistics of how we lived on that which makes my life worth telling about if it _is_ worth telling about. In the first place prices vary in different localities and shift from year to year. In fact since we began they have almost doubled. In the second place people have lived and are living to-day on less than we did. I give our figures simply to satisfy the curious and to show how Ruth planned. But no one could do as she did or do as we did merely by aping her little economies, or accepting the result of them. Either they would find the task impossible or look upon it as a privation and endure it as martyrs. In this mood they wouldn't last a week. I know that people who read this without at least a germ of the pioneer in them will either smile or shrug their shoulders. I've met plenty of this sort. I met them by the dozen down here. As I said, you can find them in every bread line, in every Salvation Army barracks or the Associated Charities will furnish you a list of as many as you want. You'll find them in the suburbs or you'll find them marching in line the next time there is a procession of the unemployed. But give me true pioneers such as our own forefathers were, such as the young men out West are to-day, such as every steamer lands here by the hundreds from foreign countries every week and I say you can't down that kind, you can't kill them. I don't say that it's right to raise the price of necessities. I don't think it is, though I don't know much about it. But I do say that if you double the cost of food stuffs and then double it again, though you may cruelly starve out the weaklings, you'll find the pioneers still on their feet, still fighting. It seems strange to me that men will go to Alaska and contentedly freeze and dig all day in a mine--not of their own, but for wages--and not feel so greatly abused or unhappy; that they will swing an axe all day in a forest and live on baked beans and bread without feeling like martyrs; that they will go to sea and grub on hard tack and salt pork and fish without complaint and then will turn Anarchists on the same fare in the East. It seems strange too that these men keep strong and healthy, and that our ancestors kept strong and healthy on even a still simpler diet. Why, my father fought battles--and the mental strain must have been terrific--and did more actual labor every day in carrying a rifle and marching than I do in a week, and slept out doors under a blanket--all on a diet that the average tramp of to-day would spurn. He did this for four years and if the sanitary conditions had been decent would have returned well and strong as many a man did who didn't run afoul typhoid fever and malaria. Men who do such things have something in them that the men back East have lost. I call it the romantic spirit or the pioneer spirit and I say that a man who has it won't care whether he's living in Maine or California and that whatever the conditions are he will overcome them. I know that we three would have lived on almost rice alone as the Japanese do before we'd have cried quit. That was because we were tackling this problem not as Easterners but as Westerners; not as poor whites but as emigrants. Men on a ranch stand for worse things than we had and have less of a future to dream about. So I repeat that to my mind the house details don't count here for any more than they did in the lives of the original New England settlers, or the forty-niners, or those on homesteads or in Alaska to-day. However, I'll put them in and I'll take the month of May as an example--the first month after I was made foreman. It's fairer to give the items for a month. They are as follows: Oatmeal, .17 Corn meal, .10 About one tenth barrel flour, .65 Potatoes, .35 Rice, .08 Sugar, .40 White beans, .16 Pork, .20 Molasses, .10 Onions, .23 Lard, .50 Apples, .36 Soda, etc., .14 Soap, .20 Cornstarch, .10 Cocoa shells, .05 Eggs, .75 Butter, 1.12 Milk, 4.48 Meats, 1.60 Fish, .60 Oil, .20 Yeast cakes, .06 Macaroni, .09 Crackers, .06 Total $12.75 This makes an average of three dollars and nineteen cents a week. With a fluctuation of perhaps twenty-five cents either way Ruth maintained this pretty much throughout the year now. It fell off a little in the summer and increased a little in the winter. It's impossible to give any closer estimate than this. Even this month many things were used which were left over from the week preceding and, on the other hand, some things on this list like molasses and sugar and cornstarch went towards reducing the total of the month following. This left say a dollar and seventy-five cents a week for such small incidentals as are not accounted for here but chiefly for sewing material, bargains in cloth remnants and such things as were needed towards the repair of our clothes as well as for such new clothes as we had to buy from time to time. I think we spent more on shoes than we did clothes but Ruth by patronizing the sample shoe shops always came home with a three or four dollar pair for which she never paid over two dollars and sometimes as low as a dollar and a half. The boy and I bought our shoes at the same reduction at bankrupt sales. We gave our neighbors this tip and saw them save a good many dollars in this way. On the whole these people were not good buyers; they never looked ahead but bought only when they were in urgent need and then bought at the cheapest price regardless of quality. They would pay two and two and a half for shoes that wouldn't last them any time at all. Whatever Ruth bought she considered the quality first and the price afterwards. Then, too, she often ran across something she didn't need at the time but which was a good bargain; she would buy this and put it away. She was able to buy many things which were out of season for half what the same things would cost six months later. It was very difficult to make our neighbors see the advantage of this practice and their blindness cost them many a good dollar. We also had the advantage of our neighbors in knowing how to take good care of our clothes. The average man was careless and slovenly. In a week a new suit would be spotted with grease, wrinkled, and all out of shape. He never thought of pressing it, cleaning it or of putting it away carefully when through wearing it. The women were no better about their own clothes. This was also true of their shoes. They might shine them once a month but generally they let them go until they dried up and cracked. In this way their new clothes soon became workday clothes, their new shoes, old shoes, and as such they lasted a very few months. Dick and I might have done a little better than our neighbors even without Ruth to watch us, but we certainly would not have had the training we did have. Shoes had to be cleaned and either oiled or shined before going to bed. If it rained we wore our old pairs whether it was Sunday or not or else we stayed at home. Every time Dick or I put on our good clothes we were as carefully inspected as troops on parade. If a grease spot was found, it was removed then and there. If a button was missing or a bit of fringe showed or a hole the size of a pin head was found we had to wait until the defect was remedied. Every Sunday morning the boy pressed both his suit and mine and every night we had to hang our coats over a chair and fold our trousers. If we were careless about it, the little woman without a word simply got up and did them over again herself. These may seem like small matters but the result was that we all of us kept looking shipshape and our clothes lasted. When we finally did finish with them they weren't good for anything but old rags and even then Ruth used them about her housework. I figured roughly that Ruth kept us well dressed on about half what it cost most of our neighbors and yet we appeared to be twice as well dressed as any of them. Of course we had a good many things to start with when we came down here but our clothing bill didn't go up much even during the last year when our original stock was very nearly exhausted. She accomplished this result about one-half by long-headed buying, and one-half by her carefulness and her skill with the needle. To go back to the matter of food, I'll copy off a week's bill of fare during this month. Ruth has written it out for me. You'll notice that it doesn't vary very much from the earlier ones. Sunday. Breakfast: fried hasty pudding with molasses; doughnuts, cocoa made from cocoa shells. Dinner: lamb stew with dumplings, boiled potatoes, boiled onions, cornstarch pudding. Monday. Breakfast: oatmeal, baked potatoes, creamed codfish, biscuits. Luncheon: for Billy: brown bread sandwiches, cold beans, doughnuts, milk; for Dick and me: boiled rice, cold biscuits, baked apples, milk. Dinner: warmed over lamb stew, baked apples, cocoa, cold biscuits. Tuesday. Breakfast: oatmeal, milk toast, cocoa. Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, doughnuts; for Dick and me: warmed over beans, biscuits. Dinner: hamburg steak, baked potatoes, graham muffins, apple sauce, milk. Wednesday. Breakfast: oatmeal, griddle-cakes with molasses, cocoa shells. Luncheon: for Billy: sandwiches made of biscuits and left over steak, doughnuts; for Dick and me: crackers and milk, hot gingerbread. Dinner: vegetable hash, hot biscuits, gingerbread, apple sauce, milk. Thursday. Breakfast: oatmeal, fried hasty pudding, doughnuts, cocoa shells. Luncheon: for Billy: hard-boiled eggs, cold biscuits, gingerbread, baked apple; for Dick and me: baked potatoes, apple sauce, cold biscuits, milk. Dinner: lyonnaise potatoes, hot corn bread, Poor man's pudding, milk. Friday. Breakfast: smoked herring, baked potatoes, oatmeal, graham muffins. Luncheon: for Billy: herring, cold muffins, doughnuts; for Dick and me: German toast, apple sauce. Dinner: fish hash, biscuits, Indian pudding, milk. Saturday. Breakfast: oatmeal, German toast, cocoa shells. Luncheon: for Billy: cold biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, bowl of rice; for Dick and me: rice and milk, doughnuts, apple sauce. Dinner: baked beans, new raised bread. To a man accustomed to a beefsteak breakfast, fried hasty pudding may seem a poor substitute and griddle cakes may seem well enough to taper off with but scarcely stuff for a full meal. All I say is, have those things well made, have enough of them and then try it. If a man has a sound digestion and a good body I'll guarantee that such food will not only satisfy him but furnish him fuel for the hardest kind of physical exercise. I know because I've tried it. And though to some my lunches may sound slight, they averaged more in substance and variety than the lunches of my foreign fellow-workmen. A hunk of bread and a bit of cheese was often all they brought with them. Dick thrived on it too. The elimination of pastry from his simple luncheons brought back the color to his cheeks and left him hard as nails. I've read since then many articles on domestic economy and how on a few dollars a week a man can make many fancy dishes which will fool him into the belief that he is getting the same things which before cost him a great many more dollars. Their object appears to be to give such a variety that the man will not notice a change. Now this seems to me all wrong. What's the use of clinging to the notion that a man lives to eat? Why not get down to bed rock at once and face the fact that a man doesn't need the bill of fare of a modern hotel or any substitute for it? A few simple foods and plenty of them is enough. When a man begins to crave a variety he hasn't placed his emphasis right. He hasn't worked up to the right kind of hunger. Compare the old-time country grocery store with the modern provision house and it may help you to understand why our lean sinewy forefathers have given place to the sallow, fat parodies of to-day. A comparison might also help to explain something of the high cost of living. My grandfather kept such a store and I've seen some of his old account books. About all he had to sell in the way of food was flour, rice, potatoes, sugar and molasses, butter, cheese and eggs. These articles weren't put up in packages and they weren't advertised. They were sold in bulk and all you paid for was the raw material. The catalogue of a modern provision house makes a book. The whole object of the change it seems to me is to fill the demand for variety. You have to pay for that. But when you trim your ship to run before a gale you must throw overboard just such freight. Once you do, you'll find it will have to blow harder than it does even to-day to sink you. I am constantly surprised at how few of the things we think we need we actually _do_ need. The pioneer of to-day doesn't need any more than the pioneer of a hundred years ago. To me this talk that a return to the customs of our ancestors involves a lowering of the standard of living is all nonsense; it means nothing but a simplifying of the standard of living. If that's a return to barbarism then I'm glad to be a barbarian and I'll say there never were three happier barbarians than Ruth, the boy and myself. CHAPTER XV THE GANG If I'd been making five dollars a day at this time, I wouldn't have moved from the tenement. In the first place as far as physical comfort went I was never better off. We had all the room we needed. During the winter we had used the living room as a kitchen and dining room just as our forefathers did. We economized fuel in this way and Ruth kept the rooms spotless. We had no fires in our bedrooms and did not want any. We all of us slept with our windows wide open. If we had had ten more rooms we wouldn't have known what to do with them. When we had a visitor we received him in the kitchen. Some of our neighbors took boarders and also slept in the kitchen. I don't know as I should want to do that but at the same time many a family lives in a one room hut in the forest after this fashion. By outsiders it's looked upon as rather romantic. It isn't considered a great hardship by the settlers themselves. Then we had the advantage of our roof and with summer coming on we looked forward to the garden and the joy of the warm starry nights. We had some wonderful winter pictures, too, from that same roof. It was worth going up there to see the house tops after a heavy snow storm. If I had wanted to move I could have done only one of two things; either gone back into the suburbs or taken a more expensive flat up town. I certainly had had enough of the former and as for the latter I could see no comparison. If anything this flat business was worse than the suburbs. I would be surrounded by an ordinary group of people who had all the airs of the latter with none of their good points. I'd be hedged in by conventions with which I was now even in less sympathy than before. I wouldn't have exchanged my present freedom of movement and independence of action for even the best suite in the most expensive apartment house in the city. Not for a hundred dollars a week. Advantages? What were they? Would a higher grade of wall paper, a more expensive set of furniture and steam heat compensate me for the loss of the solid comfort I found here by the side of my little iron stove? Was an electric elevator a fair swap for my roof? Were the gilt, the tinsel and the soft carpets worth the privilege I enjoyed here of dressing as I pleased, eating what I pleased, doing what I pleased? Was their apartment-house friendship, however polished, worth the simple genuine fellowship I enjoyed among my present neighbors? What could such a life offer me for my soul's or my body's good that I didn't have here? I couldn't see how in a single respect I could better my present condition except with the complete independence that might come with a fortune and a country estate. Any middle ground, assuming that I could afford it, meant nothing but the undertaking again of all the old burdens I had just shaken off. Ruth, the boy and myself now knew genuinely more people than we had ever before known in our lives. And most of them were worth knowing and the others worth some endeavor to _make_ worth knowing. We were all pulling together down here--some harder than others, to be sure, but all with a distinct ambition that was dependent for success upon nothing but our own efforts. I was in touch with more opportunities than I had ever dreamed existed. All three of us were enjoying more advantages than we had ever dreamed would be ours. My Italian was improving from day to day. I could handle mortar easily and naturally and point a joint as well as my instructor. I could build a true square pier of any size from one brick to twenty. I could make a square or pigeonhole corner or lay out a brick footing. And I was proud of my accomplishment. But more interesting to me than anything else was the opportunity I now had as a foreman to test the value of the knowledge of my former fellow workmen which I had been slowly acquiring. I was anxious to see if my ideas were pure theory or whether they were practical. They had proven practical at any rate in securing my own advance. This had come about through no such pull as Rafferty's. It was the result of nothing but my intelligent and conscientious work in the ditch and among the men. And this in turn was made possible by the application of the knowledge I picked up and used as I had the chance. It was only because I had shown my employers that I was more valuable as a foreman than a common laborer that I was not still digging. I had been able to do this because having learned from twenty different men how to handle a crowbar for instance, I had from time to time been able to direct the men with whom I was working as at the start I myself had been directed by Anton'. Anton' was still digging because that was all he knew. I had learned other things. I had learned how to handle Anton'. I had no idea that my efforts were being watched. I don't know now how I was picked out. Except of course that it must have been because of the work I did. At any rate I found myself at the head of twenty men--all Italians, all strangers and among them three or four just off the steamer. My first job was on a foundation for an apartment house. Of course my part in it was the very humble one of seeing that the men kept at work digging. The work had all been staked out and the architect's agent was there to give all incidental instructions. He was a young graduate of a technical school and I took the opportunity this offered--for he was a good-natured boy--to use what little I had learned in my night school and study his blue prints. At odd times he explained them to me and aside from what I learned myself from them it helped me to direct the men more intelligently. But it was on the men themselves that I centred my efforts. As soon as possible I learned them by name. At the noon hour I took my lunch with them and talked with them in their own language. I made a note of where they lived and found as I expected that many were from my ward. Incidentally I dropped a word here and there about the "Young American Political Club," and asked them to come around to some of the meetings. I found out where they came from and wherever I could, I associated them with some of their fellows with whom I had worked. I found out about their families. In brief I made myself know every man of them as intimately as was possible. I don't suppose for a minute that I could have done this successfully if I hadn't really been genuinely interested in them. If I had gone at it like a professional hand shaker they would have detected the hypocrisy in no time. Neither did I attempt a chummy attitude nor a fatherly attitude. I made it clearly understood that I was an American first of all and that I was their boss. It was perfectly easy to do this and at the same time treat them like men and like units. I tried to make them feel that instead of being merely a bunch of Dagoes they were Italian workingmen. Your foreign laborer is quick to appreciate such a distinction and quick to respond to it. With the American-born you have to draw a sharper line and hold a steadier rein. I figured out that when you find a member of the second or third generation still digging, you've found a man with something wrong about him. The next thing I did was to learn what each man could do best. Of course I could make only broad classifications. Still there were men better at lifting than others; men better with the crowbar; men better at shoveling; men naturally industrious who would leaven a group of three or four lazy ones. As well as I could I sorted them out in this way. In addition to taking this personal interest in them individually, I based my relations with them collectively on a principle of strict, homely justice. I found there was no quality of such universal appeal as this one of justice. Whether dealing with Italians, Russians, Portuguese, Poles, Irish or Irish-Americans you could always get below their national peculiarities if you reached this common denominator. However browbeaten, however slavish, they had been in their former lives this spark seemed always alive. However cocky or anarchistic they might feel in their new freedom you could pull them up with a sharp turn by an appeal to their sense of justice. And by justice I mean nothing but what ex-president Roosevelt has now made familiar by the phrase "a square deal." Justice in the abstract might not appeal to them but they knew when they were being treated fairly and when they were not. Also they knew when they were treating you fairly and when they were not. I never allowed a man to feel bullied or abused; I never gave a sharp order without an explanation. I never discharged a man without making him feel guilty in his heart no matter how much he protested with his lips. And I never discharged him without making the other men clearly see his guilt. When a man went, he left no sympathizers behind him. On the other hand I made them act justly towards their employer and towards me. I taught them that justice must be on both sides. I tried to make them understand that their part was not to see how little work they could do for their money and that mine was not to see how much they could do, but that it was up to both of us to turn out a full fair day's work. They were not a chain gang but workmen selling their labor. Just as they expected the store-keepers to sell them fair measure and full weight, so I expected them to sell a full day and honest effort. It wasn't always possible to secure a result but when it wasn't I got rid of that man on the first occasion. It was very much easier to handle in this way the freedom-loving foreigners than I looked for; with the American-born it was harder than I expected. On the whole however I was mighty well pleased. I certainly got a lot of work out of them without in any way pushing them. They didn't sweat for me and I didn't want them to--but they kept steadily at their work from morning until night. Then too, I didn't hesitate to do a little work myself now and then. If at any point another man seemed to be needed to help over a difficulty I jumped in. I not only often saved the useless efforts of three or four men in this way but I convinced them that I too had my employers' interests at heart. My object wasn't simply to earn my day's pay, it was to finish the job we were on in the shortest possible time. It makes a big difference whether a man feels he is working by the day or by the job. I tried to make them feel that we were all working by the job. Without boasting I think I can say that we cut down the contractor's estimate by at least a full day. I know they had to do some hustling to get the pile-drivers to the spot on time. On the next job I had to begin all over again with a new gang. It seemed a pity that all my work on the other should be wasted but I didn't say anything. For two months I took each time the men I had and did my best with them. I had my reward in finding myself placed at the head of a constantly increasing force. I also found that I was being sent on all the hurry-up work. I learned something every day. Finally when the time seemed ripe I went to the contractor's agent with the proposition towards which I had all along been working. This was that I should be allowed to hire my own men. The agent was skeptical at first about the wisdom of entrusting such power as this to a subordinate but I put my case to him squarely. I said in brief that I was sure I could pick a gang of fifty men who would do the work of seventy-five. I told him that for a year now I had been making notes on the best workers and I thought I could secure them. But I would have to do it myself. It would be only through my personal influence with them that they could be got. He raised several objections but I finally said: "Let me try it anyhow. The men won't cost you any more than the others and if I don't make good it's easy enough to go back to the old way." It's queer how stubbornly business men cling to routine. They get stuck in a system and hate to change. He finally gave me permission to see the men. I was then to turn them over to the regular paymaster who would engage them. This was all I wanted and with my note book I started out. It was no easy job for me and for a week I had to cut out my night school and give all my time to it. Many of the men had moved and others had gone into other work but I kept at it night after night trotting from one end of the city to the other until I rounded up about thirty of them. This seemed to me enough to form a core. I could pick up others from time to time as I found them. The men remembered me and when I told them something of my plan they all agreed with a grin to report for work as soon as they were free. And this was how Carleton's gang happened to be formed. It took me about three months to put all my fifty men into good working order and it wasn't for a year that I had my machine where I wanted it. But it was a success from the start. At the end of a year I learned that even the contractor himself began to speak with some pride of Carleton's gang. And he used it. He used it hard. In fact he made something of a special feature of it. It began to bring him emergency business. Wherever speed was a big essential, he secured the contract through my gang. He used us altogether for foundation work and his business increased so rapidly that we were never idle. I became proud of my men and my reputation. But of course this success--this proof that my idea was a good one--only whetted my appetite for the big goal still ahead of me. I was eager for the day when this group of men should really be Carleton's gang. It was hard in a way to see the result of my own thought and work turning out big profits for another when all I needed was a little capital to make it my own. Still I knew I must be patient. There were many things yet that I must learn before I should be competent to undertake contracts for myself. In the meanwhile I could satisfy my ambition by constantly strengthening and perfecting the machine. Then, too, I found that the gang was bringing me into closer touch with my superiors. One day I was called to the office of the firm and there I met the two men who until now had been nothing to me but two names. For a year I had stared at these names painted in black on white boards and posted about the grounds of every job upon which I had worked. I had never thought of them as human beings so much as some hidden force--like the unseen dynamo of a power plant. They were both Irish-Americans--strong, prosperous-looking men. Somehow they made me distinctly conscious of my own ancestry. I don't mean that I was over-proud--in a way I don't suppose there was anything to boast of in the Carletons--but as I stood before these men in the position of a minor employee I suppose that unconsciously I looked for something in my past to offset my present humiliating situation. And from a business point of view, it was humiliating. The Carletons had been in this country two hundred years and these men but twenty-five or thirty and yet I was the man who stood while they faced me in their easy chairs before their roll-top desks. It was then that I was glad to remember there hadn't been a war in this country in which a Carleton had not played his part. I held myself a little better for the thought. They were unaffected and business-like but when they spoke it was plain "Carleton" and when I spoke it was "Mr. Corkery," or "Mr. Galvin." That was right and proper enough. They had called me in to consult with me on a big job which they were trying to figure down to the very lowest point. They were willing to get out of it with the smallest possible margin of profit for the advertisement it would give them and in view of future contracts with the same firm which it might bring. The largest item in it was the handling of the dirt. They showed me their blue prints and their rough estimate and then Mr. Corkery said: "How much can you take off that, Carleton?" I told him I would need two or three hours to figure it out. He called a clerk. "Give Carleton a desk," he said. Then he turned to me: "Stay here until you've done it," he said. It took me all the forenoon. I worked carefully because it seemed to me that here was a big chance to prove myself. I worked at those figures as though I had every dollar I ever hoped to have at stake. I didn't trim it as close as I would have done for myself but as it was I took off a fifth--the matter of five thousand dollars. When I came back, Mr. Corkery looked over my figures. "Sure you can do that?" he asked. I could see he was surprised. "Yes, sir," I said. "I'd hate like hell to get stuck," he said. "You won't get stuck," I answered. "It isn't the loss I mind," he said, "but--well there is a firm or two that is waiting to give me the laugh." "They won't laugh," I said. He looked at me a moment and then called in a clerk. "Have those figures put in shape," he said, "and send in this bid." Corkery secured the contract. I picked one hundred men. The morning we began I held a sort of convention. "Men," I said, "I've promised to do this in so many days. They say we can't do it. If we don't, here's where they laugh at the gang." We did it. I never heard from Corkery about it but when we were through I thanked the gang and I found them more truly mine than they had ever been before. Every Saturday night I brought home my fifteen dollars, and Ruth took out three for the rent, five for household expenses, and put seven in the ginger jar. We had one hundred and thirty dollars in the bank before the raise came, and after this it increased rapidly. There wasn't a week we didn't put aside seven dollars, and sometimes eight. The end of my first year as an emigrant found me with the following items to my credit: Ruth, the boy and myself in better health than we had ever been; Ruth's big mother-love finding outlet in the neighborhood; the boy alert and ambitious; myself with the beginning of a good technical education, to say nothing of the rudiments of a new language, with a loyal gang of one hundred men and two hundred dollars in cash. This inventory does not take into account my new friends, my new mental and spiritual outlook upon life, or my enhanced self-respect. Such things cannot be calculated. That first year was, of course, the important year--the big year. It proved what could be done, and nothing remained now but time in which to do it. It established the evident fact that if a raw, uneducated foreigner can come to this country and succeed, a native-born with experience plus intelligence ought to do the same thing more rapidly. But it had taught me that what the native-born must do is to simplify his standard of living, take advantage of the same opportunities, toil with the same spirit, and free himself from the burdensome bonds of caste. The advantage is all with the pioneer, the adventurer, the emigrant. These are the real children of the republic--here in the East, at any rate. Every landing dock is Plymouth Rock to them. They are the real forefathers of the coming century, because they possess all the rugged strength of settlers. They are making their own colonial history. CHAPTER XVI DICK FINDS A WAY OUT, TOO When school closed in June, Dick came to me and said: "Dad, I don't want to loaf all summer." "No need of it," I said. "Take another course in the summer school." "I want to earn some money," he said, "I want to go to work." If the boy had come to me a year ago with that suggestion I should have felt hurt. I would have thought it a reflection upon my ability to support my family. We salaried men used to expect our children to be dependent on us until they completed their educations. For a boy to work during his summer vacation was almost as bad form as for the wife to work for money at any time. It had to be explained that the boy was a prodigy with unusual business ability or that he was merely seeking experience. But Dick did not fall into any of these classes. This was what made his proposal the more remarkable to me. It meant that he was willing to take just a plain every-day plugging job. And underlying this willingness was the spirit that was resurrecting us all. Instead of acting on the defensive, Dick was now eager to play the aggressive game. I hadn't looked for this spirit to show in him so soon, in his life outside of school. I was mighty well pleased. "All right," I said, "what do you think you can do?" "I've talked with some of the fellows," he said, "and the surest thing seems to be selling papers." I gave a gasp at that. I hadn't yet lost the feeling that a newsboy was a sort of cross between an orphan and a beggar. He was to me purely an object of pity. Of course I'd formed this notion like a good many others from the story books and the daily paper. I connected a newsboy with blind fathers and sick mothers if he had any parents at all. "I guess you can get something better than that to do," I said. "What's the matter with selling papers?" he asked. When I stopped to think of the work in that way--as just the buying and selling of papers--I _couldn't_ see anything the matter with it. Why wasn't it like buying and selling anything? You were selling a product in which millions of money was invested, a product which everyone wanted, a product where you gave your customers their money's worth. The only objection I could think of at the moment was that there was so little in it. "It will keep you on the streets five or six hours a day," I said, "and I don't suppose you can make more than a dollar a week." "A dollar a week!" he said. "Do you know what one fellow in our class makes right through the year?" "How much?" I asked. "He makes between six and eight dollars a week," said Dick. "That doesn't sound possible," I said. "He told me he made that. And another fellow he knows about did as well as this even while he was in college. He pretty nearly paid his own way." "What do you make on a paper?" I asked. "About half a cent on the one cent papers, and a cent on the two cent papers." "Then these boys have to sell over two hundred papers a day." "They have about a hundred regular customers," said Dick, "and they sell another hundred papers besides." It seemed to me the boys must have exaggerated because eight dollars a week was pretty nearly the pay of an able-bodied man. It didn't seem possible that these youngsters whom I'd pitied all my life could earn such an income. However if they didn't earn half as much, it wasn't a bad proposition for a lad. I talked the matter over with Ruth and I found she had the same prejudices I had had. She, too, thought selling papers was a branch of begging. I repeated what Dick told me and she shook her head doubtfully. "It doesn't seem as though I could let the boy do that," she said. If there was one thing down here the little woman always worried about deep in her heart, it was lest the boy and myself might get coarsened. She thought, I think, without ever exactly saying so to herself that in our ambition to forge ahead we might lose some of the finer standards of life. She was bucking against that tendency all the time. That's why she made me shave every morning, that's why she made me keep my shoes blacked, that's why she made us both dress up on Sunday whether we went to church or not. She for her part kept herself looking even more trig than when she had the fear that Mrs. Grover might drop in at any time. And every night at dinner she presided with as much form as though she were entertaining a dinner party. I guess she thought we might learn to eat with our knives if she didn't. "Well," I said, "your word is final. But let's look at this first as a straight business proposition." So I went over the scheme just as I had to myself. "These boys aren't beggars," I said. "They are little business men. And as a matter of fact most of them are earning as much as their fathers. The trouble is that they've been given a black eye by well-meaning sympathizers who haven't taken the trouble to find out just what the actual facts are. A group of big-hearted women who see their own chickens safely rounded up at six every night, find the newsboys on the street as they themselves are on their way to the opera and conclude it's a great hardship and that the lads must be homeless and suffering. Maybe they even find a case or two which justifies this theory. But on the whole they are simply comparing the outside of these boys' lives with the lives of their own sheltered boys. They don't stop to consider that these lads are toughened and that they'd probably be on the street anyway. And they don't figure out how much they earn or what that amount stands for down here." Ruth listened and then she said: "But isn't it a pity that the boys _are_ toughened, Billy?" "No," I said, "it would be a pity if they weren't. They wouldn't last a year. We have to have some seasoned fighters in the world." "But Dick--" "Dick has found his feet now. The suggestion was his own. Personally I believe in letting him try it." "All right, Billy," she said. But she said it in such a sad sort of way that I said: "If you're going to worry about him, this ends it. But I'd like to see the boy so well seasoned that you won't have to worry about him no matter where he is, no matter what he's doing." "You're right," she said, "I want to see him like you. I never worry about you, Billy." It pleased me to have her say that. I know a lot of men who wouldn't believe their wives loved them unless they fretted about them all the time. I think a good many fellows even make up things just to see the women worry. I remember that Stevens always used to come home either with a sick headache or a tale of how he thought he might lose his job or something of the sort and poor Dolly Stevens would stay awake half the night comforting him. She'd tell Ruth about it the next day. I may have had a touch of that disease myself before I came down here but I know that ever since then I've tried to lift the worrying load off the wife's shoulders. I've done my best to make Ruth feel I'm strong enough to take care of myself. I've wanted her to trust me so that she'd know I act always just as though she was by my side. Of course I've never been able to do away altogether with her fear of sickness and sudden death, but so far as my own conduct is concerned I've tried to make her feel secure in me. When I stop to think about it, Ruth has really lived three lives. She has lived her own and she has lived it hard. She not only has done her daily tasks as well as she knew how but she has tried to make herself a little better every day. That has been a waste of time because she was just naturally as good as they make them but you couldn't ever make her see that. I don't suppose there's been a day when at night she hasn't thought she might have done something a little better and lain awake to tell me so. Then Ruth has lived my life and done over again every single thing I've done except the actual physical labor. Why every evening when I came back from work she wanted me to begin with seven-thirty A.M. and tell her everything that happened after that. And when I came back from school at night, she'd wake up out of a sound sleep if she had gone to bed and ask me to tell her just what I'd learned. Though she never held a trowel in her hand I'll bet she could go out to-day and build a true brick wall. And though she has never seen half the men I've met, she knows them as well as I do myself. Some of them she knows better and has proved to me time and again that she does. I've often told her about some man I'd just met and about whom I was enthusiastic for the moment and she'd say: "Tell me what he looks like, Billy." I'd tell her and then she'd ask about his eyes and about his mouth and what kind of a voice he had and whether he smiled when he said so and so and whether he looked me in the eyes at that point and so on. Then she'd say: "Better be a little careful about him"; or "I guess you can trust him, Billy." Sometimes she made mistakes but that was because I hadn't reported things to her just right. Generally I'd trust her judgment in the face of my own. Then Ruth led the boy's life. Every ambition he had was her ambition. Besides that she had a dozen ambitions for him that he didn't know anything about. And she thought and worked and schemed to make every single one of them come true. Every trouble he had was her trouble too. If he worried a half hour over something, she worried an hour. Then again there were a whole lot of other troubles in connection with him which bothered her and which he didn't know about. Besides all these things she was busy about dressing us and feeding us and making us comfortable. She was always cleaning our rooms and washing our clothes and mending our socks. Then, too, she looked after the finances and this in itself was enough for one woman to do. Then as though this wasn't plenty she kept light-hearted for our sakes. You'd find her singing about her work whenever you came in and always ready with a smile and a joke. And if she herself had a headache you had to be a doctor and a lawyer rolled in one to find it out. So I say the least I could do was to make her trust me so thoroughly that she'd have one less burden. And I wanted to bring up Dick in the same way. Dick was a good boy and I'll say that he did his best. Ruth says that if I don't tear up these last few pages, people will think I'm silly. I'm willing so long as they believe me honest. Of course, in a way, such details are no one's business but if I couldn't give Ruth the credit which is her due in this undertaking, I wouldn't take the trouble to write it all out. Dick told his school friend what he wanted to do and asked his advice on the best way to go at it. The latter went with him and helped him get his license, took him down to the newspaper offices and showed him where to buy his papers, and introduced him to the other boys. The newsboys hadn't at that time formed a union but there was an agreement among them about the territory each should cover. Some of the boys had worked up a regular trade in certain places and of course it wasn't right for a newcomer to infringe upon this. There was considerable talking and some bargaining and finally Dick was given a stand in the banking district. This was due to Dick's classmate also. The latter realized that a boy of Dick's appearance would do better there than anywhere. So one morning Dick rose early and I staked him to a dollar and he started off in high spirits. He didn't have any of the false pride about the work that at first I myself had felt. He was on my mind pretty much all that day and I came home curious and a little bit anxious to learn the result. He had been back after the morning editions. Ruth reported he had sold fifty papers and had returned more eager than ever. She said he wouldn't probably be home until after seven. He wanted to catch the crowds on their way to the station. I suggested to Ruth that we wait dinner for him and go on up town and watch him. She hesitated at this, fearing the boy wouldn't like it and perhaps not over anxious herself to see him on such a job. But as I said, if the boy wasn't ashamed I didn't think we ought to be. So she put on her things and we started. We found him by the entrance to one of the big buildings with his papers in a strap thrown over his shoulder. He had one paper in his hand and was offering it, perhaps a bit shyly, to each passer-by with a quiet, "Paper, sir?" We watched him a moment and Ruth kept a tight grip on my arm. "Well," I said, "what do you think of him?" "Billy," she said with a little tremble in her voice, "I'm proud of him." "He'll do," I said. Then I said: "Wait here a moment." I took a nickel from my pocket and hurried towards him as though I were one of the crowd hustling for the train. I stopped in front of him and he handed me a paper without looking up. He began to make change and it wasn't until he handed me back my three coppers that he saw who I was. Then he grinned. "Hello, Dad," he said. Then he asked quickly, "Where's mother?" But Ruth couldn't wait any longer and she came hurrying up and placed her hand underneath the papers to see if they were too heavy for him. Dick earned three dollars that first week and he never fell below this during the summer. Sometimes he went as high as five and when it came time for him to go to school again he had about seventy-five regular customers. He had been kept out of doors between six and seven hours a day. The contact with a new type of boy and even the contact with the brisk business men who were his customers had sharpened up his wits all round. In the ten weeks he saved over forty dollars. I wanted him to put this in the bank but he insisted on buying his own winter clothes with it and on the whole I thought he'd feel better if I let him. Then he had another proposition. He wanted to keep his evening customers through the year. I thought it was going to be pretty hard for him to do this with his school work but we finally agreed to let him try it for a while anyway. After all I didn't like to think he couldn't do what other boys were doing. CHAPTER XVII THE SECOND YEAR Now as far as proving to us the truth of my theory that an intelligent able-bodied American ought to succeed where millions of ignorant, half-starved emigrants do right along, this first year had already done it. It had also proved, to our own satisfaction at least, that such success does not mean a return to a lower standard of living but only a return to a simpler standard of living. With soap at five cents a cake it isn't poverty that breeds filth, but ignorance and laziness. When an able-bodied man can earn at the very bottom of the ladder a dollar and a half a day and a boy can earn from three to five dollars a week and still go to school, it isn't a lack of money that makes the bread line; it's a lack of horse sense. We found that we could maintain a higher standard of living down here than we were able to maintain in our old life; we could live more sanely, breathe in higher ideals, and find time to accept more opportunities. The sheer, naked conditions were better for a higher life here than they were in the suburbs. I'm speaking always of the able-bodied man. A sick man is a sick man whether he's worth a million or hasn't a cent. He's to be pitied. With the public hospitals what they are to-day, you can't say that the sick millionaire has any great advantage over the sick pauper. Money makes a bigger difference of course to the sick man's family but at that you'll find for every widow O'Toole, a widow Bonnington and for every widow Bonnington you'll find the heart-broken widow of some millionaire who doesn't consider her dollars any great consolation in such a crisis. Then, too, a man in hard luck is a man in hard luck whether he has a bank account or whether he hasn't. I pity them both. If a rich man's money prevents the necessity of his airing his grief in public, it doesn't help him much when he's alone in his castle. It seems to me that each class has its own peculiar misfortunes and that money breeds about as much trouble as it kills. To my mind once a man earns enough to buy himself a little food, put any sort of a roof over his head, and keep himself warm, he has everything for which money is absolutely essential. This much he can always get at the bottom. And this much is all the ammunition a man needs for as good a fight as it's in him to put up. It gives him a chance for an extra million over his nine dollars a week if he wants it. But the point I learned down here is that the million _is_ extra--it isn't essential. Its possession doesn't make a Paradise free from sickness and worry and hard luck, and the lack of it doesn't make a Hell's Kitchen where there is nothing but sickness and trouble and where happiness cannot enter. As I say, I consider this first year the big year because it taught me these things. In a sense the value of my diary ends here. Once I was able to understand that I had everything and more that the early pioneers had and that all I needed to do to-day was to live as they did and fight as they did, I had all the inspiration a man needs in order to live and in order to _feel_ that he's living. In looking back on the suburban life at the end of this first twelve months, it seemed to me that the thing which made it so ghastly was just this lack of inspiration that comes with the blessed privilege of fighting. That other was a waiting game and no help for it. I was a shadow living in the land of shadows with nothing to hit out at, nothing to feel the sting of my fist against. The fight was going on above me and below me and we in the middle only heard the din of it. It was as though we had climbed half way up a rope leading from a pit to the surface. We had climbed as far as we could and unless they hauled from above we had to stay there. If we let go--poor devils, we thought there was nothing but brimstone below us. So we couldn't do much but hold on and kick--at nothing. But down here if a man had any kick in him, he had something to kick against. When he struck out with his feet they met something; when he shot a blow from the shoulder he felt an impact. If he didn't like one trade he could learn another. It took no capital. If he didn't like his house, he could move; he wasn't tearing up anything by the roots. If he didn't like his foreman, he could work under another. It didn't mean the sacrifice of any past. If he found a chance to black boots or sell papers, he could use it. His neighbors wouldn't exile him. He was as free as the winds and what he didn't like he could change. I don't suppose there is any human being on earth so independent as an able-bodied working-man. The record of the next three years only traces a slow, steady strengthening of my position. Not one of us had any set-back through sickness because I considered our health as so much capital and guarded it as carefully as a banker does his money. I was afraid at first of the city water but I found it was as pure as spring water. It was protected from its very source and was stored in a carefully guarded reservoir. It was frequently analyzed and there wasn't a case of typhoid in the ward which could be traced to the water. The milk was the great danger down here. At the small shops it was often carelessly stored and carelessly handled. From the beginning, I bought our milk up town though I had to pay a cent a quart more for it. Ruth picked out all the fish and meat and of course nothing tainted in this line could be sold to her. We ate few canned goods and then nothing but canned vegetables. Many of our neighbors used canned meats. I don't know whether any sickness resulted from this or not but I know that they often left the stuff for hours in an opened tin. Many of the tenements swarmed with flies in the summer although it was a small matter to keep them out of four rooms. So if the canned stuff _didn't_ get infected it was a wonder. The sanitary arrangements in the flat were good, though here again many families proceeded to make them bad about as fast as they could. These people didn't seem to mind dirt in any form. It was a perfectly simple and inexpensive matter to keep themselves and their surroundings clean if they cared to take the trouble. Then the roof contributed largely towards our good health. Ruth spent a great deal of time up there during the day and the boy slept there during the summer. Our simple food and exercise also helped, while for me nothing could have been better than my daily plunge in the salt water. I kept this up as long as the bath house was open and in the winter took a cold sponge and rub-down every night. So, too, did the boy. For the rest, we all took sensible precautions against exposure. We dressed warmly and kept our feet dry. Here again our neighbors were insanely foolish. They never changed their clothes until bed time, didn't keep them clean or fresh at any time, and they lived in a temperature of eighty-five with the air foul from many breaths and tobacco smoke. Even the children had to breathe this. Then both men and women went out from this into the cold air either over-dressed or under-dressed. The result of such foolishness very naturally was tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid and about everything else that contributes to a high death rate. Not only this but one person suffering from any of these things infected a whole family. Such conditions were not due to a lack of money but to a lack of education. The new generation was making some changes however. Often a girl or boy in the public schools would come home and transform the three or four rooms though always under protest from the elders. Clean surroundings and fresh air troubled the old folks. Ruth, too, was responsible for many changes for the better in the lives of these people. Her very presence in a room was an inspiration for cleanliness. Her clothes were no better than theirs but she stood out among them like a vestal virgin. She came into their quarters and made the women ashamed that the rooms were not better fitted to receive so pure a being. You would scarcely have recognized Michele's rooms at the end of the first year. The windows were cleaned, the floors scrubbed, and even the bed linen was washed occasionally. The baby gained in weight and Michele when he wanted to smoke either sat outside on the door step or by an open window. But Michele was an exception. Ruth's efforts were not confined to our own building either. Her influence spread down the street and through the whole district. The district nurse was a frequent visitor and kept her informed of all her cases. Wherever Ruth could do anything she did it. Her first object was always to awaken the women to the value of cleanliness and after that she tried her best to teach them little ways of preparing their food more economically. Few of them knew the value of oatmeal for instance though of course their macaroni and spaghetti was a pretty good substitute. In fact Ruth picked up many new dishes of this sort for herself from among them. Some families spent as much for beer as for milk. Ruth couldn't change that practice but she did make them more careful where they bought their milk--especially when there was a baby in the house. Then, too, she shared all her secrets of where and how to buy cheaply. Sometimes advantage was taken of these hints, but more often not. They didn't pay much more for many articles than she did but they didn't get as good quality. However as long as the food tasted good and satisfied their hunger you couldn't make them take an extra effort and get stuff because it was more nutritious or more healthful. They couldn't think ahead except in the matter of saving dollars and cents. These people of course were of the lower class. There was another element of decidedly finer quality. Giuseppe for example was one of these and there were hundreds of others. It was among these that Ruth's influence counted for the most. They not only took advantage of her superior intelligence in conducting their households but they breathed in something of the soul of her. When I saw them send for her in their grief and in their joy, when I heard them ask her advice with almost the confidence with which they prayed, when I heard them give her such names as "the angel mother," "the blessed American saint," I felt very proud and very humble. Such things made me glad in another way for the change which had taken her out of the old life where such qualities were lost and brought her down here where they counted for so much. These people stripped of convention live with their hearts very near the surface. They don't try to conceal their emotions and so you are brought very quickly into close touch with them. Ruth herself was a good deal like that and so her influence for a day among them counted for as much as a year with the old crowd. In the meanwhile I resumed my night school at the end of the summer vacation and was glad to get back to it. I had missed the work and went at it this next winter with increased eagerness to perfect myself in my trade. During this second year, too, I never relaxed my efforts to keep my gang up to standard and whenever possible to better it by the addition of new men. Every month I thought I increased the respect of the men for me by my fair dealing with them. I don't mean to say I fully realized the expectations of which I had dreamed. I suppose that at first I dreamed a bit wildly. There was very little sentiment in the relation of the men to me, although there was some. Still I don't want to give the impression that I made of them a gang of blind personal followers such as some religious cranks get together. It was necessary to make them see that it was for their interest to work for me and with me and that I did do. I made them see also that in order to work for me they had to work a little more faithfully than they worked for others. So it was a straight business proposition. What sentiment there was came through the personal interest I took in them outside of their work. It was this which made them loyal instead of merely hard working. It was this which made them my gang instead of Corkery's gang--a thing that counted for a good deal later on. The personal reputation I had won gave me new opportunities of which I took every advantage this second year. It put me in touch with the responsible heads of departments. Through them I was able to acquire a much broader and more accurate knowledge of the business as a whole. I asked as many questions here as I had below. I received more intelligent answers and was able to understand them more intelligently. I not only learned prices but where to get authoritative prices. As far as possible I made myself acquainted with the men working for the building constructors and for those working for firms whose specialty was the tearing down of buildings. I used my note-book as usual and entered the names of every man who, in his line, seemed to me especially valuable. And everywhere, I found that my experiment with the gang was well known. I found also that my tendency for asking questions was even better known. It passed as a joke in a good many cases. But better than this I found that I had established a reputation for sobriety, industry and level-headedness. I can't help smiling how little those things counted for me with the United Woollen or when I sought work after leaving that company. Here they counted for a lot. I realized that when it came time for me to seek credit. In the meanwhile I didn't neglect the fight for clean politics in my ward. I resigned from the presidency of the young men's club at the end of a year and we elected a young lawyer who was taking a great interest in the work down here to fill the vacancy. That was a fine selection. The man was fresh from the law school and was full of ideals which dated back to the _Mayflower_. He hadn't been long enough in the world to have them dimmed and was full of energy. He took hold of the original idea and developed it until the organization included every ward in this section of the city. He held rallies every month and brought down big speakers and kept the sentiment of the youngsters red hot. This had its effect upon the older men and before we knew it we had a machine that looked like a real power in the whole city. Sweeney saw it and so did the bigger bosses of both parties. But the president kept clear of alliances with any of them. He stood pat with what promised to be a balance of power, ready to swing it to the cleanest man of either party who came up for office. I made several speeches myself though it was hard work for me. I don't run to that sort of thing. I did it however just because I didn't like it and because I felt it was the duty of a citizen to do something now and then he doesn't like for his city and his country. The old excuse with me had been that politics was a dirty business at best and that it ought to be left to the lawyers and such who had something to gain from it. The only men I ever knew who went into it at all were those who had a talent for it and who liked it. Of course that's dead wrong. A man who won't take the trouble to find out about the men up for office and who won't bother himself to get out and hustle for the best of them isn't a good citizen or a good American. He deserves to be governed by the newcomers and deserves all they hand out to him. And the time to do the work isn't when a man is up for president of the United States, it's when the man is up for the common council. The higher up a politician gets, the less the influence of the single voter counts. It was in the spring that some of my ideals received a set back. The alderman from our ward died suddenly and Rafferty was naturally hot after the vacancy. He came to see me about it, but before he broached this subject he laid another before me that took away my breath. It was nothing else than that I should go into partnership with him under the firm name of "Carleton and Rafferty." I couldn't believe it possible that he was in a position to take such a step within a couple of years of digging in the ditch. But when he explained the scheme to me, it was as simple as rolling off a log. A firm of liquor dealers had agreed to back him--form a stock company and give him a third interest to manage it. He had spoken to them of me and said he'd do it if they would make it a half interest and give us each a quarter. "But good Lord, Dan," I said, "we'd have to swing a lot of business to make it go." "Never you worry about thot, mon," he said. "I'll fix thot all right if I'm elicted to the boord." "You mean city contracts?" I said. "Sure." I began to see. The liquor house was looking for more licenses and would get their pay out of Dan even if the firm didn't make a cent. But Dan with such capital back of him as well as his aldermanic power was sure to get the contracts. He would leave the actual work to me and my men. I sat down and for two hours tried to make Dan realize how this crowd wanted to use him. I couldn't. In addition to being blinded by his overwhelming ambition, he actually couldn't see anything crooked in what they wanted. He couldn't understand why he should let such an opportunity drop for someone else to pick up. He had slipped out of my hands completely. This was where the difference between five or six years in America as against two hundred showed itself. And yet what was the old stock doing to offset such personal ambition and energy as Rafferty stood for? "No, Dan," I said, "I can't do it. And what's more I won't let you do it if I can help it." "Phot do yez mane?" he asked. "That I'm going to fight you tooth and nail," I said. He turned red. Then he grinned. "Well," he said, "it'll be a foine fight anyhow." I went to the president of the club and told him that here was where we had to stop Rafferty. He listened and then he said, "Well, here's where we do stop him." We went at the job in whirlwind fashion. I spoke a half dozen times but to save my life I couldn't say what I wanted to say. Every time I stood up I seemed to see Dan's big round face and I remembered the kindly things he used to do for the old ladies. And I knew that Dan's offer to take me into partnership wasn't prompted altogether by selfish motives. He could have found other men who would have served his purpose better. In the meanwhile Dan had organized "Social Clubs" in half a dozen sections. For the first few weeks of the campaign I never heard of him except as leading grand marches. But the last week he waded in. There's no use going into details. He beat us. He rolled up a tremendous majority. The president of the club couldn't understand it. He was discouraged. "I had every boy in the ward out working," he said. "Yes," I said, "but Dan had every grandmother and every daughter and every granddaughter out working." Dan came around to the flat one night after the election. He was as happy as a boy over his victory. "Carleton," he said, again, "it's too domd bad ye ain't an Irishmon." After he had gone, Ruth said to me: "I don't think Mr. Rafferty will make a bad alderman at all." CHAPTER XVIII MATURING PLANS I received several offers from other firms and as a result of these my wages were advanced first to three dollars a day and then to three and a half. Still Ruth refused to take things easier by increasing the household expenses. During the third year we lived exactly as we had lived during the first year. In a way it was easier to do this now that we knew there was no actual necessity for it. Of course it was easier, too, now that we had fallen into a familiar routine. The things which had seemed to us like necessities when we came down here now seemed like luxuries. And we none of us had either the craving for luxuries or the time to enjoy them had we wished to spend the money on them. In the matter of clothes we cared for nothing except to be warmly and cleanly dressed. Strip the problem of clothes down to this and it's not a very serious one. To realize that you've only to remember how the average farmer dresses or how the homesteader dresses. It's only when you introduce style and the conventions that the matter becomes complicated. Perhaps it was easier for me to dress as I pleased than for the boy or Ruth but even they got right down to bed rock. The boy wore grey flannel shirts and so at a stroke did away with collars and cuffs. For the rest a simple blue suit, a cap, stockings and shoes were all he needed outside his under clothes which Ruth made for him. Ruth herself dressed in plain gowns that she could do up herself. For the street, she still had the costumes she came down here with. None of us kept any extra clothes for parade. We carried out the same idea in our food, as I've tried to show; we insisted that it must be wholesome and that there must be enough of it. Those were the only two things that counted. Variety except of the humblest kind, we didn't strive for. I've seen cook books which contain five hundred pages; if Ruth compiled one it wouldn't have twenty. Here again the farmer and the pioneer were our models. If anyone in the country had lived the way we were living, it wouldn't have seemed worth telling about. I find the fact which amazes people in our experiment was that we should have tried the same standard in the city. Everyone seems to think this was a most dangerous thing to attempt. The men who on a camping trip consider themselves well fed on such food as we had to eat expect to starve to death if placed on the same diet once within sound of the trolley cars. And on the camping trip they do ten times the physical labor and do it month after month in air that whets the appetite. Then they come back and boast how strong they've grown, and begin to eat like hogs again and wonder why they get sick. We camped out in the city--that's all we did. And we did just what every man in camp does; we stripped down to essentials. We could have lived on pork scraps and potatoes if that had been necessary. We could have worried along on hard tack and jerked beef if we'd been pressed hard enough. Men chase moose, and climb mountains and prospect for gold on such food. Why in Heaven's name can't they shovel dirt on the same diet? So, too, about amusements. When a man is trying to clear thirty acres of pine stumps, he doesn't fret at the end of the day because he can't go to the theatre. He doesn't want to go. Bed and his dreams are amusement enough for him. And he isn't called a low-browed savage because he's satisfied with this. He's called a hero. The world at large doesn't say that he has lowered the standard of living; it boasts about him for a true American. Why can't a man lay bricks without the theatre? As a matter of fact however we could have had even the amusements if we'd wanted them. For those who needed such things in order to preserve a high standard of living they were here. And I don't say they didn't serve a useful purpose. What I do say is that they aren't absolutely necessary; that a high standard of living isn't altogether dependent on sirloin steaks, starched collars and music halls as I've heard a good many people claim. This third year finished my course in masonry. I came out in June with a trade at which I could earn from three dollars to five dollars a day according to my skill. It was a trade, too, where there was pretty generally steady employment. A good mason is more in demand than a good lawyer. Not only that but a good mason can find work in any city in this country. Wherever he lands, he's sure of a comfortable living. I was told that out west some men were making as high as ten dollars a day. I had also qualified in a more modest way as a mechanical draftsman. I could draw my own plans for work and what was more useful still, do my work from the plans of others. By now I had also become a fairly proficient Italian scholar. I could speak the language fluently and read it fairly well. It wasn't the fault of Giuseppe if my pronunciation was sometimes queer and if very often I used the jargon of the provinces. My object was served as long as I could make myself understood to the men. And I could do that perfectly. This year I watched Rafferty's progress with something like envy. The firm was "D. Rafferty and Co." Within two months I began to see the name on his dump carts whenever I went to work. Within six months he secured a big contract for repaving a long stretch of street in our ward. I knew our firm had put in a bid on it and knew they must have been in a position to put in a mighty low bid. I didn't wonder so much about how Dan got this away from us as I did how he got it away from Sweeney. That was explained to me later when I found that Sweeney was in reality back of the liquor dealers. Sweeney owned about half their stores and had taken this method to bring Dan back to the fold, once he found he couldn't check his progress. During this year Dan bought a new house and married. We went to the wedding and it was a grand affair with half the ward there. Mrs. Rafferty was a nice looking girl, daughter of a well-to-do Irishman in the real estate business. She had received a good education in a convent and was altogether a girl Dan could be proud of. The house was an old-fashioned structure built by one of the old families who had been forced to move by the foreign invasion. Mrs. Rafferty had furnished it somewhat lavishly but comfortably. As Ruth and I came back that night I said: "I suppose if it had been 'Carleton and Rafferty' I might have had a house myself by now." "I guess it's better as it is, Billy," she said, with a smile. Of course it was better but I began to feel discontented with my present position. I felt uncomfortable at still being merely a foreman. When we reached the house Ruth and I took the bank book and figured out just what our capital in money was. Including the boy's savings which we could use in an emergency it amounted to fourteen hundred dollars. During the first year we saved one hundred and twenty dollars, which added to the eighty we came down here with, made two hundred dollars. During the second year we saved three hundred and ninety dollars. During the third year we saved six hundred dollars. This made a total of eleven hundred and ninety dollars in the bank. The boy had saved more than two hundred dollars over his clothes in the last two years. It was Rafferty who helped me turn this over in a real estate deal in which he was interested. I made six hundred dollars by that. Everything Rafferty touched now seemed to turn to money. One reason was that he was thrown in contact with money-makers all of whom were anxious to help him. He received any number of tips from those eager to win his favor. Among the tips were many that were legitimate enough like the one he shared with me but there were also many that were not quite so above-board. But to Dan all was fair in business and politics. Yet I don't know a man I'd sooner trust upon his honor in a purely personal matter. He wouldn't graft from his friends however much he might from the city. In fact his whole code as far as I could see was based upon this unswerving loyalty to his friends and scrupulous honesty in dealing with them. It was only when honesty became abstract that he couldn't see it. You could put a thousand dollars in gold in his keeping without security and come back twenty years later and find it safe. But he'd scheme a week to frame up a deal to cheat the city out of a hundred dollars. And he'd do it with his head in the air and a grin on his face. I've seen the same thing done by educated men who knew better. I wouldn't trust the latter with a ten cent piece without first consulting a lawyer. The money I had saved didn't represent all my capital. I had as my chief asset the gang of men I had drilled. Everything else being equal they stood ready to work for me in preference to any other man in the city. In fact their value as a machine depended on me. If I had been discharged and another man put in my place the gang would have resolved itself again into merely one hundred day laborers. Nor was this my only other asset. I had established myself as a reliable man in the eyes of a large group of business men. This meant credit. Nor must I leave out Dan and his influence. He stood ready to back me not only financially but personally. And he knew me well enough to know this would not involve anything but a business obligation on my part. With these things in mind then I felt ready to take a radical departure from the routine of my life when the opportunity came. But I made up my mind I would wait for the opportunity. I must have a chance which would not involve too much capital and in which my chief asset would be the gang. Furthermore it must be a chance that I could use without resorting to pull. Not only that but it must be something on which I could prove myself to such good advantage that other business would be sure to follow. I couldn't cut loose with my men and leave them stranded at the end of a single job. I watched every public proposal and analyzed them all. I found that they very quickly resolved themselves into Dan's crowd. I kept my ears wide open for private contracts but by the time I heard of any I was too late. So I waited for perhaps three months. Then I saw in the daily paper what seemed to me my opportunity. It was an open bid for some park construction which was under the guardianship of a commission. It was a grading job and so would require nothing but the simplest equipment. I looked over the ground and figured out the gang's part in it first. Then I went to Rafferty and told him what I wanted in the way of teams. I wanted only the carts and horses--I would put my own men to work with them. I asked him to take my note for the cost. "I'll take your word, Carleton," he said. "Thot's enough." But I insisted on the note. He finally agreed and offered to secure for me anything I wanted for the work. I went back to Ruth and we sat down and figured the matter all over once again. We stripped it down to a figure so low that my chief profit would come on the time I could save with my machine. I allowed for the scantiest profit on dirt and rock though I had secured a good option on what I needed of this. I was lucky in finding a short haul though I had had my eye on this for some time. Of one thing I was extremely careful--to make my estimate large enough so that I couldn't possibly lose anything but my profit. Even if I wasn't able to carry out my hope of being able to speed up the gang I should be able to pay my bills and come out of the venture even. Ruth and I worked for a week on it and when I saw the grand total it took away my breath. I wasn't used to dealing in big figures. They frightened me. I've learned since then that it's a good deal easier in some ways to deal in thousands than it is in ones. You have wider margins, for one thing. But I must confess that now I was scared. I was ready to back out. When I turned to Ruth for the final decision, she looked into my eyes a second just as she did when I asked her to marry me and said, "Go after it, Billy. You can do it." That night I sent in my estimate endorsed by Dan and a friend of his and for a month I waited. I didn't sleep as well as usual but Ruth didn't seem to be bothered. Then one night when I came home I found Ruth at the outside door waiting for me. I knew the thing had been decided. She came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder and patted me. "It's yours, Billy," she said. My heart stopped beating for a moment and then it went on again beating a dozen ticks to the second. The next day I closed up my options. I went to Corkery, gave my notice and told him what I was going to do. He was madder than a hornet. I listened to what he had to say and went off without a word in reply. He was so unreasonable that it didn't seem worth it. That noon I rounded up the men and told them frankly that I was going to start in business for myself and needed a hundred men. I told them also that this first job might last only four or five weeks and that while I had nothing definite in mind after that I was in hopes to secure in the meanwhile other contracts. I said this would be largely up to them. I told them that I didn't want a man to come who wasn't willing to take the chance. Of course it was something of a chance because Corkery had been giving them steady employment. Still it wasn't a very big chance because there was always work for such men. I watched anxiously to see how they would take it. I felt that the truth of my theories were having their hardest test. When they let out a cheer and started towards me in a mass I saw blurry. I'll never forget the feeling I had when I started out in the morning that first day as an independent contractor; I'll never forget my feeling as I reached the work an hour ahead of my men and waited for them to come straggling up. I seemed closer than ever to my ancestors. I felt as my great-great-grandfather must have felt when he cut loose from the Massachusetts colony and went off down into the unknown Connecticut. I was full enough of confidence but I knew that a month might drive me back again. Deeper than this trivial fear however there was something bigger--something finer. I was a free man in a larger way than I had ever been before. It made me feel an American to the very core of my marrow. The work was all staked out but before the men began I called them all together. I didn't make a speech; I just said: "Men--I've estimated that this can be done by an ordinary bunch of men in forty days; I've banked that you can do it in thirty. If you succeed, it gives me profit enough to take another contract. Do the best you can." There wasn't a mother's son among them who didn't appreciate my position. There were a good many who knew Ruth and knew her through what she had done for their families, and these understood it even better. The dirt began to fly and it was a pretty sight to watch. I never spoke again to the men. I simply directed their efforts. I spent about half the time with a shovel in my hands myself. There was scarcely a day when Ruth didn't come out to watch the work with an anxious eye but after the first week there was little need for anxiety. I think she would have liked to take a shovel herself. One Saturday Dick came out and actually insisted upon being allowed to do this. The men knew him and liked to see such spirit. Well, we clipped ten days from my estimate, which left me with all my bills paid and with a handsome profit. Better still I had secured on the strength of Carleton's gang another contract. The night I deposited my profit in the bank, Ruth quite unconsciously took her pad and pencil and sat down by my side as usual to figure up the household expenses for the week. We had been a bit extravagant that week because she had been away from the house a good deal. The total came to four dollars and sixty-seven cents. When Ruth had finished I took the pad and pencil away from her and put it in my pocket. "There's no use bothering your head any more over these details," I said. She looked at me almost sadly. "No, Billy," she said, with a sigh, "there isn't, is there?" CHAPTER XIX ONCE AGAIN A NEW ENGLANDER During all those years we had never seen or heard of any of our old neighbors. They had hardly ever entered our thoughts except as very occasionally the boy ran across one of his former playmates. Shortly after this, however, business took me out into the old neighborhood and I was curious enough to make a few inquiries. There was no change. My trim little house stood just as it then stood and around it were the other trim little houses. There were a few new houses and a few new-comers, but all the old-timers were still there. I met Grover, who was just recovering from a long sickness. He didn't recognize me at first. I was tanned and had filled out a good deal. "Why, yes," he said, after I had told my name. "Let me see, you went off to Australia or somewhere, didn't you, Carleton?" "I emigrated," I answered. He looked up eagerly. "I remember now. It seems to have agreed with you." "You're still with the leather firm?" I inquired. He almost started at this unexpected question. "Yes," he answered. His eyes turned back to his trim little house, then to me as though he feared I was bringing him bad news. "But I've been laid up for six weeks," he faltered. I knew what was troubling him. He was wondering whether he would find his job when he got back. Poor devil! If he didn't what would become of his trim little house? Grover was older by five years than I had been when the axe fell. I talked with him a few minutes. There had been a death or two in the neighborhood and the children had grown up. That was the only change. The sight of Grover made me uncomfortable, so I hurried about my business, eager to get home again. God pity the poor? Bah! The poor are all right if by poor you mean the tenement dwellers. When you pray again pray God to pity the middle-class American on a salary. Pray that he may not lose his job; pray that if he does it shall be when he is very young; pray that he may find the route to America. The tenement dwellers are safe enough. Pray--and pray hard--for the dwellers in the trim little houses of the suburbs. I've had my ups and downs, my profits and losses since I entered business for myself but I've come out at the end of each year well ahead of the game. I never made again as much in so short a time as I made on that first job. One reason is that as soon as I was solidly on my feet I started a profit sharing scheme, dividing with the men what was made on every job over a certain per cent. Many of the original gang have left and gone into business for themselves of one sort and another but each one when he went, picked a good man to take his place and handed down to him the spirit of the gang. Dick went through college and is now in my office. He's a hustler and is going to make a good business man. But thank God he has a heart in him as well as brains. He hopes to make "Carleton and Son" a big firm some day and he will. If he does, every man who faithfully and honestly handles his shovel will be part of the big firm. His idea isn't to make things easy for the men; it's to preserve the spirit they come over with and give them a share of the success due to that spirit. We didn't move away from our dear, true friends until the other boy came. Then I bought two or three deserted farms outside the city--fifty acres in all. I bought them on time and at a bargain. I'm trying another experiment here. I want to see if the pioneer spirit won't bring even these worn out acres to life. I find that some of my foreign neighbors have made their old farms pay even though the good Americans who left them nearly starved to death. I have some cows and chickens and pigs and am using every square foot of the soil for one purpose or another. We pretty nearly get our living from the farm now. We entertain a good deal but we don't entertain our new neighbors. There isn't a week summer or winter that I don't have one or more families of Carleton's gang out here for a half holiday. It's the only way I can reconcile myself to having moved away from among them. Ruth keeps very closely in touch with them all and has any number of schemes to help them. Her pet one just now is for us to raise enough cows so that we can sell fresh milk at cost to those families which have kiddies. Dan comes out to see us every now and then. He's making ten dollars to my one. He says he's going to be mayor of the city some day. I told him I'd do my best to prevent it. That didn't seem to worry him. "If ye was an Irishmon, now," he said, "I'd be after sittin' up nights in fear of ye. But ye ain't." I'm almost done. This has been a hard job for me. And yet it's been a pleasant job. It's always pleasant to talk about Ruth. I found that even by taking away her pad and pencil I didn't accomplish much in the way of making her less busy. Even with three children to look after instead of one she does just as much planning about the housework. And we don't have sirloin steaks even now. We don't want them. Our daily fare doesn't vary much from what it was in the tenement. Ruth just came in with Billy, Jr., in her arms and read over these last few paragraphs. She says she's glad I'm getting through with this because she doesn't know what I might tell about next. But there's nothing more to tell about except that to-day as at the beginning Ruth is the biggest thing in my life. I can't wish any better luck for those trying to fight their way out than they may find for a partner half as good a wife as Ruth. I wouldn't be afraid to start all over again to-day with her by my side. THE END * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page 129: semed replaced with seemed | | Page 219: exitement replaced with excitement | | Page 231: beafsteak replaced with beefsteak | | Page 252: dependdent replaced with dependent | | | | The following words are legitimate alternate spelling, | | and left as found: | | | | Shakespere | | goodby | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
20936	----	file made using scans of public domain works at the University of Georgia.) THE NEW SOCIETY BY WALTHER RATHENAU AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY ARTHUR WINDHAM NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 1921 PREFACE Walther Rathenau, author of _Die neue Gesellschaft_ and other studies of economic and social conditions in modern Germany, was born in 1867. His father, Emil Rathenau, was one of the most distinguished figures in the great era of German industrial development, and his son was brought up in the atmosphere of hard work, of enterprise, and of public affairs. After his school days at a _Gymnasium_, or classical school, he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the Universities of Berlin and of Strassburg, taking his degree at the age of twenty-two. Certain discoveries made by him in chemistry and electrolysis led to the establishment of independent manufacturing works, which he controlled with success, and eventually to his connexion with the world-famous A.E.G.--_Allgemeine Electrizitätsgesellschaft_--at the head of which he now stands. During the war he scored a very remarkable and exceptional success as controller of the organization for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not merely a scholar and thinker, but one who has lived and more than held his own in the thick of commercial and industrial life, and who knows by actual experience the subject-matter with which he deals. The present study, with its wide outlook and its resolute determination to see facts as they are, should have much value for all students of latter-day politics and economics in Europe; for though Rathenau is mainly concerned with conditions in his own land the same conditions affect all countries to a greater or less degree, and he deals with general principles of human psychology and of economic law which prevail everywhere in the world. It is not too much to say that "The New Society" constitutes a landmark in the history of economic and social thought, and contains matter for discussion, for sifting, for experiment and for propaganda which should occupy serious thinkers and reformers for many a day to come. His suggestions and conclusions may not be all accepted, or all acceptable, but few will deny that they constitute a distinct advance in the effort to bring serious and disinterested thought to the solution of our social problems, and in this conviction we offer the present complete and authorized translation to English readers. THE NEW SOCIETY I Is there any sign or criterion by which we can tell that a human society has been completely socialized? There is one and one only: it is when no one can have an income without working for it. That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal. In itself it is not decisive. If every one had enough to live on, it would not matter for what he received money or goods, or even whether he got them for nothing. And relics of the system of income which is not worked for will always remain--for instance, provision for old age. The goal is not any kind of division of income or allotment of property. Nor is it equality, reduction of toil, or increase of the enjoyment of life. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition; abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name; the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as slavery was of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations, all our joys. Nor is even this the final goal--no economy, no society can talk of a final goal--the only full and final object of all endeavour upon earth is the development of the human soul. A final goal, however, points out the direction, though not the path, of politics. The political object which I have described as the abolition of the proletarian condition may, as I have shown in _Things that are to Come_,[1] be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of production but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities, and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which, at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern; thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their orators, the polling-booth for elections. But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of the workless income will show the downfall of the last of class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy. It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief period like the present Russian régime, or a passing phase as in Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond all possibility. The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only decide for each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should be guided not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without troubling ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what we are seeking. This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East Slavonic peasantry. At best we know--and even that not always--what oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to blame"--all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it, our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for a political ideal. We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say: "The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of blood for the Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe." Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not knowing enough of the alternative possibilities. When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance. But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity, while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be. We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence and belief in authority have their share in it. But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are, with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline, the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the cheapest variety. Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy; it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the Kaiser, a plébiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only through the rod." And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a _pis aller_. "Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but _how_ it is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to make everybody well off--and which would yield all round, as I have elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases--a land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes. If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we should get the answer, timid and naïve but at the same time the deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land where there are no longer any rich. A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will be _only_ poor, only very poor, people. Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future. Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow, is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim; though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and decide to put up with the _pis aller_; the responsible thinker is under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no rich people and where no one can have an income without working for it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able to shape it aright. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _Von Kommenden Dingen_, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S. Fischer.] [Footnote 2: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.] II The question is not very urgent. As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world. The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small, accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one day be blown up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire. From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather suffered it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid movement--think, for instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The intellectual war profiteers, who are all for radicalism to-day, will soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their button-holes. For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naïve shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the right tip. The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases, expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy, was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the "great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be smiled at by those of the third. But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or the professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the centre moves upon its way, quietly as the stars. We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them. What is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and the æsthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger, precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind. But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers or to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total of interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The People are the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or gushing well of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the present and in the future, as it runs its course into the sea of humanity, that we have here to do. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 3: The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.] [Footnote 4: The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus value. See pp. 13, 14.] III The criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a confession of faith in materialism? We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it in outline here. The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in these things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws which determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life reflect themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations; we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but within these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To observe a man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is to know the man. From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it in human experience--a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its own destinies. The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on the people but have been willed by themselves. A people _wills_ to have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough, to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and perish. It is the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture, or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea. There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a question of character--and with us it was a question of indolence, of political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising England--England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports! To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did not prove controllable, and His naïve blasphemers must silently and with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they, in their turn, appeal to the same judgment to justify, without limit, everything they desire to do. After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make it the starting-point of our discussion. IV All civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one. It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures as a substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing. It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey; only now are they about to cross the boundaries of the human order. Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of absolute necessaries. The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow on each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new, ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed. The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however, be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in order that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or Paris for an architect. Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself. Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been trained at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That will not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a trained army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign market as well--in short, the technical atmosphere--in order to keep up the standard of manufacture and production. A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one; it has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating to sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in France these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated with silly adornments, while on the other hand French products of luxury and art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares were considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and brought about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique, production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits, finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism, habits of life and a sense of comparative values. But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but to create anew these elements of life is beyond its powers. Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All these excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is all the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and eye-glasses; their every word and argument, their forms of thought, their range of knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are an inheritance from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute to what they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be respected when it understands the connexion of things and is not afraid of consequences. It must understand--and I shall make it clear--that its rapid advance will kill culture; and the proper conclusion is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on it. The early Christians abolished all the heathen rubbish and abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the first instance, to pick out the plums. Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence, cultivation, disposition, the right kind of nursery--an atmosphere. One who stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully with his virgin strength than one who is accustomed to it--but he must be carried along and animated by the breath of the same atmosphere. Culture and civilization require a rich soil. But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture must be based upon, and increased by, contrast. Wealth must have at its disposal great numbers of men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise shall the outlay of culture be met? One man must have many at his disposal; but how can he, if they are all his equals? The outlay will be large, but it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of thousands is not cheap? The few, the exalted, must develop power and splendour, they must offer types for imitation: how can they do that without a retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A land of well-being, that is to say, of equally distributed well-being, remains petty and provincial. When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of a Mæcenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their objections, their control, then we get things that look like war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons. It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was kings who were the patrons. But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be destroyed. Our sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to dawn. And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do! No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the poisoned garment from our body? Or--is there then an "or"? Let us see. We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will be no income without working for it and no rich people any more. If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment for twenty millions[5] have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the soundest hand-work--for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern knitting-machine--then people will reply to us: in the first place we don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as unsaleable. A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon the basis of high technical accomplishment, but this height of accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: By this figure the author seems to be referring to the population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.] V For some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power and the will for mischief of others--who hate us. However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore try to keep step so far as we can. Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German. Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks in our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own automobiles. If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of competition with such a country, which in one generation will be twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never occur to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings. Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about "surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means about a pound of butter extra per head of the population. The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing, a victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will work gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement from Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while we, it seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening stage. And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations forward and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance may fall short. If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only justified capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary stage in the development of a denser population. This was the enrichment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory restoration of equilibrium between the growing population and the indispensable increase in the means of production; in other words, general well-being. The unbroken progress of America, and the almost unbroken progress of England will demonstrate that in one, or at most two, generations the power of work and the output of mechanism would have risen to such a pitch that we could have done anything we liked in the direction of lightening human labour and reconciling social antagonisms. Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the bourgeoisie; they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of their existence. Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top: they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be false prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the beginning at all events, witness a great and passionate uprising of imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did not understand that a policy based on hopes of other peoples' bankruptcy is the most flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might well have learned it from the war. Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances at the good or ill fortune of others. Had time only been given us to pass naturally from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate recovery would be assured. But we have to accomplish in months what ought to be the evolution of decades; our national training has left us without convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries of rights, claims and responsibilities, and we hesitate as to how far we must or ought to go. Unprepared, weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required, at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new and unprecedented order of life. Before even the educated classes are capable of forming a judgment on the question, the most incapable masses of the rawest youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let loose, and sit upon the judgment-seat. It is not only that we have been rich and have become very poor, but we were always politically immature, and are so still. If the order of Society is to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean the proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long time to come. There is no use in flattering ourselves and painting the future better than it is; the truth must be spoken with all plainness. If we work hard, and under capable guidance, each of us will at most have an effective income of 500 marks in pre-war values, or, say, 2000 marks for the family. This average will be higher if we proceed on the principles of the New Economy,[7] but again will be reduced by the necessity for allowing extra pay for work of higher value. If to-day the average income available is markedly higher than the above, the reason is that we are living on our capital; we are living on the products of work which ought to be reserved for the maintenance and renewal of the means of production; in other words we are exhausting the soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consuming what foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on borrowed money. It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal of the average architect, art-craftsman and art-reformer if expressed in dry figures would, "at the lowest estimate" as they say, demand about fivefold the capacity for production attainable by the utmost exertions and with a ten hours' day _before the war_--before the downfall of our economy and our exploitation by the enemy. To place one-third of our working-class in decent, freehold dwellings would alone, if the material and means of production sufficed, require the whole working-capacity of the country for two years. Even after the last manufacturer's villa-residence, the last palace-hotel, have long been turned into tenements, the solution of the most urgent part of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic be multiplied tenfold--on paper it can be done with ease--or unless the production value (not turnover), which an adult working-man can with the utmost exertion bring into being in the course of a year does not many times exceed the average value of 2000 marks. No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise themselves a merry time for six weeks when they have got power, the shops, the wardrobes and the wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it may last a little longer than for the rank-and-file. And then, for those of the former who have any sense of honesty, will come a question of conscience, which may be delayed by printing paper-money, but cannot be solved by any appeal to the people. If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is--if it were a success, a thing not absolutely impossible in a peasant-State, we might understand the self-assurance of those who, in opposition to our forecast, expect everything from the will of the people, the Soviet system and the inspirations of the future. We do understand it in the case of the drawing-room communists, and the profiteer-extremists who are out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only for material objects. I know that by these observations I am favouring the cause of those sorry dignitaries of a day, the Majority Socialists, but I cannot help that. The truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is falsehood truth because it harms the other. The Socialism now in power is doing the right thing, although it is doing it out of ignorance and helplessness--it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is better to do the right thing out of error than to do the wrong thing out of wisdom. Out of error: for besides omitting to do what ought not to be done it also omits the things it ought to do--among others, the introduction of the New Economy.[8] It is like mankind before the Fall; it does not know good from evil, what is useful and what is noxious, what can be done and what cannot. Well--let it take its time; it shall have time enough. This time must be turned to good account. When we have come to the end of these observations we shall understand what a huge task lies between us and the realization of the new social order. In this case the longest way round is the shortest way home. And even if Germany should choose the mountain road with its broad loops and windings, we shall stray often enough, and go backward now and then; while if, in impatient revolt, we try to climb straight up, we shall slip down lower than where we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously our social and political immaturity seems to be bound up with our once lofty and even now remarkable intellectuality and morality.[9] We have not won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps; it was by the general breakdown, by a strike, by a flight, that Germany and her former rulers have parted company. These liberties, social and political, are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to be prized among the treasures of life, it is not their ideal, but their material side which attracts us. Those who used to shout Hurrah! now cry "All power to the Soviets!" and the day will come when they will again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of interests and speculations. In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary, the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it _may_ look like, what it _ought_ to look like, and what it _will_ look like. We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap Utopianism will grow dumb--those phrases which offer us entrance into the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and gaudy, standardized enjoyments--phrases which assure us that when we have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts, the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the rise of an era of humility and philanthropy. In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this, at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity. That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the invitation of fools to a Christmas party--fools who will make the welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a pride which disdains to be consoled by illusions. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 6: By surplus-value (_Mehrwert_) the author means all that is produced above and beyond the bare necessities of life.] [Footnote 7: _Die Neue Wirtschaft_, by Walther Rathenau (S. Fischer). In this brief study, Rathenau urges (1) the unification and standardization of the whole of German industry and commerce in one great Trust, working under a State charter, and armed with very extensive powers; and (2) a great intensification of the application of science and mechanism to production.] [Footnote 8: See p. 37, _note_.] [Footnote 9: Morality, _Sittlichkeit_, a word of broader meaning than "morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as expressed in social life.] VI In order to throw some light into the obscurity of that social dreamland which no one seriously discusses because no one honestly believes in it, let us, as it were, cut out and examine a section from the fully socialized Germany of the future. Let us suppose that certain economic and social conditions have lasted for a generation or so, and have therefore become more or less stabilized. At a normal rate of progress this state of things should be reached about the end of this century. To begin with, let us make two very optimistic assumptions--first, that technical progress in Germany shall have developed to a point at which we are no longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-reaching reform of education and culture (the lowest cost of which must be set down at about three milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisation may be averted. This reform is one which must be taken in hand very early, for _after_ the event its adoption is improbable. A third, less optimistic but on that account more probable assumption may be added to this--namely, that the Western countries shall have progressed towards Socialism more steadily and therefore more slowly, and that at the period of our comparison America shall find itself at the stage of State-Socialism, not of full socialization. We know that in making this assumption we are smoothing the way for attack to our professional opponents, uncritical and self-interested, who with one blast of the fanfare of world-revolution can scatter our further observations to the winds. Full Socialism is characterized, as we have seen, by the abolition of all incomes that are not worked for, and the fact that there are no more rich. But this criterion must be limited in its application, for it can never be fully realized. According to the theory and the laws every one must hold some appointment and be paid for his work, or for not working. What he is paid, however, he can at will utilize, or waste, or hoard up, or give, or gamble away, or destroy. He cannot invest it, or get interest on it or turn into capital, because these private undertakings or means of production will no longer exist. Now each of these assumptions is so shaky that not only must trifling divergences and shortcomings be winked at, but the meshes of the system are so wide that only a rough approximation to the ideal is possible. It is true that every one can be made to hold some appointment and be paid for some minimum of work, but no one can be prevented from devoting his leisure hours to some work of rare quality and turning it into value for his own purposes. He can make himself useful by subsidiary employment of an artistic, scientific or technical character, by rendering services or assistance of various kinds, by advising, or entertaining, or acting as a guide to strangers, or going on employment abroad, and no law can prevent him from turning his services into income even if he was merely paid in kind. Gaming and betting will flourish and many will grow rich by them. A man who has lost his money and who has exhausted his rights to an advance from the public institutions for that object will have recourse to lenders who will supply him with bread and meat and clothes, and who will make money by it. Similarly with people who are tempted to make acquisitions beyond their standard remuneration. On every side we shall see private stores of goods of all kinds, which will take the place of property as formerly understood. There will be an enormous temptation to smuggling and profiteering which will reach a height far surpassing all scandals of the war and revolution periods. Foreigners and their agents, who look after the export trade "from Government to Government," will help hoarders and savers to turn their goods to account. Suppose citizens are attacked because their senseless expenditure is a mockery of their legal remuneration, they will say: I got this from friends--that I got by exchange--this came from abroad--my relatives in America sent me that. Law, control, terrorism, are effective just so long as there is not a blade of grass in the land--once remove the fear of hunger and they are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing interest both abroad and at home, and they will grow by evasions and bribery. The profiteer, the true child of the "great days," will not perish from the land, on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and he will form a constant political danger if he and his fellows combine. So long as we have not acquired an entirely new mentality, one which detaches men from possessions, which points them towards the Law, which binds the passions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will the principle of "No rich people and no workless income" have to be contracted into the formula, "There ought to be none." Without this profound alteration of mentality, even the legally prescribed incomes will exhibit quite grotesque variations, and will adapt themselves to the rarity-value of special gifts, to indispensable qualities, to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown to-day. A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor's nourishment, and soldiers' supplies, will then as now be met according to the law of supply and demand. Consider what ten years' practice in the war for wages and strike-management, with the public in it as partisans, will bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities, and indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful surgeons, managers of sports' clubs, tenors, demimondaines, farce-writers and champion athletes could, even to-day, if they were class-conscious and joined together to exploit their opportunities, demand any income they liked. Even as a matter of practical political economy, the cinema-star (or whatever may succeed her) will be able to prescribe to the Government what amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art, are necessary for her calling, and what standard of life she must maintain in order to keep herself in the proper mood. Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will announce and enforce their demands to the full limit of their rarity-value. At a considerable distance below these come the acquired and more or less transferable powers and talents. The Russians for the first few months believed in a three-fold order of allowances, rising within a limit of about one to two. If the ideas now prevailing have not undergone a radical change, then we may, in the society of the future, look for divergences of income in the limit of one to a thousand. Therefore the principle that there shall be no more rich people must again be substantially limited. We must say, "There will be people receiving extraordinary incomes in kind to which must be added the claims to personal service which these favoured persons will lay down as conditions of their work." In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric of life and its requirements in the new order will resemble that of to-day far more closely than most of us imagine--on the other hand, the inward and personal constitution of man will be far more different. Already we can observe the direction of the movement. Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and those who practise it will be, as they are to-day, and more than to-day, the profiteers, the lucky ones, and the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less valued depends upon the state of public ethics, a topic which we shall have to consider later. It is probable that in defiance of all legislation wealth will turn itself into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and more recklessly than to-day. But the relics of middle-class well-being will by that time have been consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their modest possessions are taxed away or consumed they will melt into the general mass of needy people who will form the economic average of the future. The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and houses will have a dubious air; every one will know that there is something wrong with it, people will spy and denounce, and find to their disgust that nothing can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised, partly envied; the question how to suppress evasions of the law will take up a good half of all public discussions, just as that of capitalism does now. The hateful sight of others' prosperity cannot, even at home, not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn from the eyes of the needy masses; capitalism will have merely acquired another name and other representatives. The fact that the average of more or less cultivated and responsible folk are plunged in poverty will not be accepted as the consequence of an unalterable natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it will be set down to bad government, and the rising revolutionary forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh classes will nourish the prevailing discontent in favour of a new revolt. For the greater uniformity of the average way of life and its general neediness will not in itself abolish the division of classes. I have already often enough pointed out that no mechanical arrangements can avail us here. At first there will be three, or more probably four classes who, in spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the masses, and who, through their coherence and their intellectual heritage are by no means without power. The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will not be possible in Germany, they are relatively too numerous; persecution will weld them closer together, and their traditional experiences, habits of mind, and capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse to them and employ them again and again. The first of these classes is that of the feudal nobility. Their ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany, and even in their poverty the bearers of these names will be respected--all the more if, as we may certainly assume, they maintain the effects of their bodily discipline, and the visible tradition of certain forms of life and thought. They will be strengthened by their mutual association, their relationship with foreign nobility will give them important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their inclination and aptitude for the calling of arms and for administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success, now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the class will be fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the romantic values of life will make a connexion with names of ancient lineage desirable to the leading classes, and especially to the aristocracy of officialism. This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of the new strata which will come to light. The first office-bearers of the new era, be their achievements great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their descendants are respected as the bearers of well-known names; in their families the practice of politics, the knowledge of persons and connexions are perpetuated; fathers, in their lifetime, look after the interests of sons and daughters and launch them on the same path. From these, and from the first stratum, the representatives of Germany in foreign lands are chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with international life and society will be maintained. They will have the provision necessary for their position abroad, and will also find ways and means to keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer a great deal to establish connexions with these circles, which control so many levers in the machine of State. The third group consists of the descendants of what was once the leading class in culture and in economics. Here we find a spirit similar to that of the refugees, _émigrés_ and Huguenots of the past. The lower they sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold to their memories. Every family knows every other and cherishes the lustre of its name, a lustre augmented by legendary recollections, all the more when the achievements of their class are ostentatiously ignored in the new social order. People spare and save to the last extremity in order to preserve and hand down some heirloom--a musical instrument, a library, a manuscript, a picture or two. A puritanical thrift is exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain education, culture and intellectuality on the old level; to this class culture, refinement of life as an end in itself, the practice of religion, classical music, and artistic feeling will fly for refuge. No other class understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks different from the rest in its occupations, its habits, its garb and its forms of life. It supplies the new order with its scholars, its clergy, its higher teaching power, its representatives of the most disinterested and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its influence rises and falls periodically, according to the current ideas of the time, but its position is assured by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge and by the purity of its motives. A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will in all probability be formed by the middle-class landowners and the substantial peasants. Even though the socialization of the land should be radically carried through--which is not likely to be the case--it will remain on paper. A class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated as a political force, and forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy of the towns. Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage. The single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by conflicts, and society by the strife of classes. A very different picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-ground for lions and sheep! We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the State-machine. The _émigrés_ of culture find themselves looked askance at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and they insist that the country cannot get on without them. The agriculturalists are feared, when they show a tendency to revolt against the towns. The ruling class, that is to say the more or less educated masses of the city-democracy, looks in impatient discontent for the state of general well-being which refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and fights now this group now that, for better conditions of living. But the conditions of living do not improve--they get worse. The level of the nation's output has been sinking from the first day of the Revolution onwards. The absolute productivity of work, the relative efficacy and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated. With a smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-off in the excellence of the goods, in research-work, and in finish. Industrial plant has been worked to death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary industries, accessories and raw materials have fallen back. High-quality workmanship has suffered from defective schooling, youthful indiscipline and the loss of manual dexterity. The new social order has lost a generation of leaders in technique, scholarship and economics. Universities, with all institutions of research and education, have suffered from this blank. Technical leadership is gone, and the deterioration in quality has reacted detrimentally on output. We can now turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and what can be produced without traditional skill of hand, without serious calculation and research. For all innovations, all work of superior quality, Germany is dependent on the foreigner. The atmosphere of technique has vanished, and the stamp of cheap hireling labour is on the whole output of the country. In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used to tell us that five hundred Russian professors had signed a statement that the level of culture had never been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin believed them! To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them--not to speak of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture. The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot be annihilated at one blow, nor can it grow up save in decades and centuries. The maintenance of the structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken tradition; the breach that has been made in it in Germany can only be healed by the application in manifold forms of work, intellect and will; and this hope we cannot entertain.[10] But we have not yet done with the question of social strata and inward cleavage. Revolutionary threats are causing strife every day. Revolution against revolution--how is this possible? We are not speaking of a reactionary revolution but of the "activist." In an earlier work I discussed the theory of continuous revolution.[11] Behind every successful revolutionary movement there stands another, representing one negation more than its predecessor. Behind the revolt of the aristocracy stood that of the bourgeoisie, behind that of the bourgeoisie stood Socialism. Behind the now ruling fourth class[12] rises the fifth, and a sixth is coming into sight. If a ninth should represent pure Anarchism, we may see an eleventh proclaiming a dictatorship, and a twelfth standing for absolute monarchy. To-day the Majority Socialists are in power, that is to say the Right section of the fourth class. This is composed of the older, trained and work-willing Trade Unionists, who are amazed at the Revolution, who do not regard it as quite legitimate, but who are determined to defend the _status quo_ in so far as a certain degree of self-determination and elbow-room in the material conditions of life still remain to them. The Left section consists of youths and of persons disgusted with militarism, ignorant of affairs but cherishing a certain independence of judgment; still ready for work but equally so for politics. To these, as a "forward" party, the doctrinaire theorists have allied themselves. The designation of the party "The Independents" is characteristic; its goal, "All power to the Soviets," is a catchword from Russia. A fifth class is now emerging--the work-shy. The others call them the tramp-proletariat, the disgruntled, the declassed, who set their hopes on disorder. Their goal is still undetermined--their favourite expression is "bloodhound," when those in power, or Government troops, are referred to. Then comes the sixth class, still partly identified with the Left of the fourth and embryonically attached to the fifth. These are the indomitable loafers and shirkers, physically and mentally unsound, aliens in the social order, excluded by their sufferings, their punishments, their vices and passions; self-excluded, repudiators of law and morality, born of the cruelty of the city, pitiable beings, not so much cast out of society as cast up against it, as a living reproach to its mechanical organization. If these ever come into the light in politics, they will demand a kind of syndicalistic communism. That is as far as we can see at present into the as yet unopened germs of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported; and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays and converts, above all, the disappointed and ambitious, from those that went before. But the number of revolutions will grow till we lose count of them, and each, however strenuously it may profess its horror of bloodshed, will have only one hope and possibility: that of defending itself by armed force against its successor. The game is a grotesquely dishonest one, because every aspirant movement will cast against its forerunner the charge of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already preparing its armed forces for the conflict. It is therefore wholly vain to hope that an advanced social organization implies stability, that a brotherhood mechanically decreed will exclude further revolutions, and will establish eternally an empire of righteousness and justice according to any preconceived pattern. The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who are most closely associated--for instance, between handworkers and brainworkers, between leaders and followers; and this hate will be all the more inappeasable when it is open to every one to rise in the world, and none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim of a social system of overwhelming power. To-day this hatred is masked by the general class-hatred--hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and of capital. At the bottom of it, however, lies even to-day the more universal hatred of the defeated for the victor, and when those three monopolies have fallen, it will emerge in its original Cain-like form. It cannot be appeased by any mechanical device. Human inequality can never be abolished, human accomplishment and work will always vary, and the human passion for success will always assert itself. We have discussed the material foundation and the stratification of the German people when full socialization has been realized. Let us now forecast the manner of their existence. The future community is poor; the individual is poor. The average standard of well-being corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one would expect from an income of 3000 marks.[13] But the requirements of the population are not mediævally simplified--they could not be, in view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial and professional vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of Marie Antoinette. All things of common use are standardized into typical forms. It must not be supposed, however, that they are based on pure designs and models. The taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and since the former has no authority to back him he will have to compromise. The compromise, however, consists in cheap imitation of foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and no legislation can prevent its products from finding their way (in reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail, and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be constantly changed. How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of men and women and to purify their taste? Probably very little, for good models will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors, are to satisfy the desires of the soul. Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but these things are disconnected specimens; all they can do is occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure some object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books, musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside the prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's own are legendary things. Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigoration has dried up; all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly proletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the popular mind has, as it were by universal agreement, resolved to conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as great as it can possibly be. The leaders and office-holders of the proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture. Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to give them, and imagine that the loans they take up from the civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social gains of the future. The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by its building. In the new order, little is being built. Apart from certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for decades have to content ourselves with new subdivisions and exploitation of the old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement. For a long time it used to be believed that the passion of the landscape painters of the seventeenth century for introducing ruins with hovels nestling among them arose from a feeling for romance. This is not so--they only painted what they saw around them after the ravages of the Thirty Years' War. It must not be supposed, however, that the forecast in these pages is based on the consequences of the war; these no doubt must darken our picture of the future; but the shadows, which I have put in as sparingly as I could, are essentially the expression of a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with the uniformity produced by the general proletarianization of life with the absence of any correcting factor in individual effort of a rational character and of the influence of higher types. A brighter trait in the material conditions of life will be formed by effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it thereby becomes, the more completely will life be forced into publicity. Private claims and aspirations, which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the public. Men will gather in the streets and places of public resort, and have more mutual intercourse than before, since every transaction of life, even the most insignificant, will have to be a subject of discussion, agreement and understanding. In all the arrangements of social life, _e.g._ for news, communications, supplies, discussion and entertainment, and demands will be made and complied with for greater convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular æsthetics and popular representation. In these arrangements and in these alone Art will have to find its functions and its home. Public buildings, gardens, sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibitions will be established at great cost. All the demands of the spirit and of the senses will seek their satisfaction in public. There will be no lack of popular performances, excursions, tours and conducted visits to collections; of clubs, libraries, athletic meetings and displays. The aspect of this tendency from the point of view of culture and ethics we have still to consider; in its social aspect (apart from the fact that it causes a vacuum in the home and forces young people to the surface of life, and in spite of its mechanical effect) it will act as a comforting reminiscence of the civic commonalty and solidarity of mediæval times. In considering the spiritual and cultural life of a fully socialized society, we have to start with the assumption that any one man's opinion and decision are as good as another's. Authority, even in matters of the highest intellectual or spiritual character, only exists in so far as it is established, acknowledged and confirmed either by direct action of the people's will, or indirectly through their representatives. Every one's education and way of life are much the same; there are no secrecies, no vague authority attaching to special vocations; no one permits himself to feel impressed by any person or thing. Every one votes, whether it be for an office, a memorial, a law, or a drama, or does it through delegates or the delegates of delegates. Every one is determined to know the how and where and why of everything--just as to-day in America--and demands a plausible reason for it. The reply, "This is a matter you don't understand," is impossible. Everything is referred to one's own conscience, one's own intelligence, one's own taste, and no one admits any innate or acquired superiority in others. In debate, the boundaries between the ideal and the practicable are obliterated; for on the one hand every one is too much preoccupied with material needs, and on the other, too confident, too unaccustomed to submit himself to what in former days was called a deeper insight, too loosely brought up to let himself be taught. We never, therefore, hear such judgments as: This, although it is difficult, is a book to be read; this drama ought to have been produced although it is not sensational; I don't myself care for this memorial, but it must remain because a great artist made it; this is a necessary branch of study, although it has no practical application; I will vote for this man on account of his character and ability, although he has made no election-promises. On the other hand, the following kind of argument will have weight: This historic building must be demolished, for it interferes with traffic; this collection must be sold, for we need money; we need no chair of philosophy, but we do need one for cinema-technique; these ornamental grounds are the very place for a merry-go-round; tragedies are depressing, they must not be performed in the State theatres. Let us recall certain oversea legislation--carried out, be it noted in countries still swayed by the traditional influence of culture--and these examples will not seem exaggerated. Where there is no appeal to authority, where none need fear disapproval or ridicule, where convenience is prized and thrift rules supreme, there thought and decision will be short-breathed, and will never look beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care for far-off deductions, for wide arcs of thought? Calculation comes to the front, everything unpractical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion, everyday reading and propaganda. Men demand proofs, success, visible returns. The fewer the aims, the stronger will be their attraction. People are tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the water-cure to Tâoism; but the only opinion of any influence is that whose followers are many. Public opinion settles everything. The champions of absolute values have to accommodate themselves to the law of competition. Religious teaching has to seek the favour of the times by the same methods as a new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes. Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts. And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has the hornier hand. Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers. Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal aims--in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions, arts, appointments, professorships, churches. Art has for the third time changed its master--after the princes, Mæcenas, the middle-class market; after Mæcenas, the plebs, and export trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research, learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has given way to actuality.[14] Certain reactions based on practical experience are not excluded; the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken, though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can result. The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success, watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile to all superiority. Through the constant secession of elements to which this tone is antipathetic a kind of natural selection is constantly taking place, and the political defencelessness of the transition period favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin. The carving away of ancient German territories works in the same direction. Apart from the varying influence of the four strata already referred to, the general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower classes of Middle and North Germany, who have brought about and who control the existing conditions, and by the other elements which have been assimilated to these. In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state of things of which a foretaste already exists in parts of America and of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and mentality, has created its own form of civilization. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 10: Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on the hypothesis of the profound _inward_ change, which is to be discussed later on.] [Footnote 11: _Kritik der dreifachen Revolution._ S. Fischer.] [Footnote 12: The classes referred to are (1) the old aristocracy, (2) the aristocracy of officialism, (3) that of traditional middle-class culture; (4) the mass of what is called Socialism.] [Footnote 13: £150 in pre-war values. By thrift, by co-operation, and by the cheapness of the public services generally, a surprisingly high standard of life could be maintained on this kind of income in pre-war Germany.] [Footnote 14: Aktualität; as, for instance, reference to current topics.] VII Thoughtful and competent judges to whom I have submitted the foregoing section of my work have said to me: This is Hell. That is perhaps going too far, since those who will live in that generation and who have themselves helped it into being will have become more or less adapted to their circumstances. A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin to German culture remains to be seen. Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends, preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour, titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters, freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the helplessness of hours. If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does, too late. What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything that is historically presented and accomplished--from Michael Angelo to working samplers. Fearing the ugly present and the anxious future, the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish; life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young. True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete, pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this very dreaming, this very life, owes its charm to the fact that we are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood--but to want to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a house embowered in vines--there will be room enough for that!--Ah, you thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to nothing but the one dread monosyllable--Die! Are you so wicked as that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not? Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no right to growl: Leave me out--I am the salt of the earth! The first thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools, beggars and cripples. We ourselves have cast down Authority, and there will be a crush, and many things will look very different from what the sages would wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is going to be hell for people like you and me, we must only accept it in the name of justice, and think of Dante's terrible inscription: "I was made by the Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the primal Love."[16] But is it hell? That depends on ourselves. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 15: In 1913 all Germany was celebrating with great pomp and warlike display the centenary of the liberation of the country from Napoleon, and also paying a huge property tax for the coming war.] [Footnote 16: _Fecemi la divina Potestate La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore._ This is part of the inscription over the gates of Hell in the _Inferno_, Canto III.] VIII Our description of the future order of society was tacitly based on the assumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook, would remain as they are at present. This assumption is a probable one, but it is not irrevocably certain. What we have endeavoured to demonstrate is simply the obvious fact--the fact which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918, uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten--that our salvation is not to be found in any kind of mechanical apparatus or institutions. Institutions do not mean evolution. If institutions run too far ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When evolution runs too far, there is revolution. At this point both groups of our opponents will start up against us. The Radicals cry: Ha! only give us food, give "all power to the Soviets," let us have free-thought lectures, and mentality, insight, experience and culture will come of themselves. The Reactionaries smile: Ho! this man has never learned that there is no such thing as evolution; that human character never changes. I shall not answer either of these. They know, both of them, that they are saying what is not true. Something of unprecedented greatness can and must take place; something that in the life of a people corresponds to the awakening of manhood in the individual. In every conscious existence there comes a moment when the living being is no longer determined but begins to determine himself; when he takes over responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order to shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment, this opportunity, has now arrived--or is for ever lost. We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from us--persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle, are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained: mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths will grow up of themselves. We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it. A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce, plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and some still believe them to be everlasting. A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring life with no other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described, the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles? Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class, the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the Continent came into being. Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No--we have to build from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the changing needs of the seasons, according to the casual balance of forces, or according to an idea and a symbol--that is the question! Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations; it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a spiritual faith--the latter are, as the language of the market has it, "thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to any mission for humanity, it does not lead. What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as we have said, that a people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to isolate and intensify it. What is unprecedented is just this: that the process should take place as a deliberate act of will, in democratic freedom, without pressure and compulsion of authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on our own responsibility. Germany is not at present growing leaders and prophets, we are not in a formative stage, all authority has been scattered to the winds. It is true that we have one stratum of society which is capable of understanding the meaning of the task, but it is deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests of its parties make them more each other's enemies than the people's. And yet it is this very class--not as possessor of means but as possessor of the tradition, which is capable, which is indispensable, and which is summoned to take in hand the transformation of the German spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism, of capitalism, of militarism, and to lead it to its true destinies. It cannot do this for itself alone, amid the blind bitterness of the war of classes; it cannot do it as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for its and every other prestige has gone by the board; it can only do it by the way of service and sacrifice--it can only do it if the service and the sacrifice are approved and accepted. The masses will not understand this sacrifice of service; but the more responsible of their leaders will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow; but on the day when experience has shown them that I am telling the truth. At first they will do as in Russia; when want becomes acute, they will seek to buy experience and tradition at a high price from individuals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought--only labour and dexterity. Then gradually men will come to understand that the highest things are not marketable commodities, they are only given away. And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule in order to serve, will separate themselves from those of the Cataline type, who serve in order to rule. So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the understanding of the lower classes prevailed--through our fault--a reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind--all mankind, the outcast as well as the weak--every man and all men. But the masses are not quite the same thing as mankind. The masses who congregate in the streets and at public meetings are not communities consisting of whole men, but assemblages in which each man takes a part and is present, indeed, with his whole body, but by no means with his whole being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence of mind only comes to them when through the lips of some true prophet the Spirit descends upon them. But when that happens, they take no decisions; they do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator, with his extravagant promises, the masses become merely a driven crowd eager for gain, not human souls. They are the concave reflector of passions and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker's rostrum; they return in concentrated form the rays that dazzle them. He who puts the masses in the judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision at their hands, has neither reverence nor love for man. Sooner or later the truth of this will be realized by all honourable men among their leaders. The day is also far when the upper classes will come to their senses. They have never understood what the world is, nor what Germany is, nor what has happened to themselves. They see houses and fields, streets and trees very much as they were; they think, if they only play the game a little craftily at the beginning, everything will remain as it used to be, and they will come out all right in the end. It is just as when some merchant goes bankrupt for a million; for the first fortnight the servants wait at table as usual and the family eat off silver plate; the ruin is still on paper. But in a year's time everything is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed along with their utensils. When one sees for what trivialities people are fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and what is worth saving. IX Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom, spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions. There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began. The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our babble about it. The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties, the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the affair of the heart's blood shelved. We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free--the others are merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we have only to fall-to. In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20] there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre, all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our festal oratory. It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of hate and commercial travellers must go overboard. We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the Jews were a race of prophets, the French and Dutch a race of painters, or Königsberg a city of Pure Reason.[21] The old German upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent, practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful, and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity. The important question as to what relations exist between the number, quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by the quite unjustified name of national psychology. While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact--in accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius--that genius belongs _par excellence_ to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment. We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to national character--to the character of the mind, not that of the will, which must be considered apart--as the blossom to the plant or the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions, while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates its sense of will. Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of nationalities and civilizations. It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again, there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a richer and more living content than those who first discovered it. For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does not force things--out of respect for creation. But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms, however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is naïve, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and conscious, but in action naïve, because he does not know the meaning of doubt. Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and moon as the style of Louis Quatorze. The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence, whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India. The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover--Germany, the earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything--every land, every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated, if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with our elbow-room. We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving and turbulent people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a German _Irredenta_, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing or propagandist. From this side we are able to understand the German history of the past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the position externally; self-government was not granted, because the military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the catastrophe came. For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it leaves--nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by the mediæval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and compulsory association, with a constitutional façade, the interested nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased to call _Kultur_, undertook to bring blessing to the world. It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge between the old Germany and the new--armoured cruisers and giant guns appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word _Kultur_, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty years to come, masked the confusion of thought. To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful example of _esprit d'escalier_. It is true that it was our right, and even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries. In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848 Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side, which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true; although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise. And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by the magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880, which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great capitalists. A self-administered and a self-determining nation--such as the nations of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the whole, at the turn of the century--would have been able to carry on a sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale, given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated. That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character, but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive--and survive they will--then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer blind. It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of will that we should grope our way slowly--very slowly--back to the old problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there, the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew, to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to serve the world. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 17: Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of spirit ([Greek: oiou pneumatos]) ye are of."] [Footnote 18: Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, _Händler und Helden_.] [Footnote 19: _Cf._ Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real significance of the war: _Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen_ (1918).] [Footnote 20: Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly £1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has expelled him.] [Footnote 21: Where Kant lived and taught, and published his _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_.] [Footnote 22: As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual character.] [Footnote 23: Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.] X On balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out as follows:-- High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal. Originative will-power and independent activity, weak. We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon us. Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share it. We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us. We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life, and are politically unripe. We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did not keep pace with the other nations in internal political development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power. It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists. But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with ourselves alone, but with our dæmon, our God. We still hear within ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them with ours. "And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and bemiring that we experience--the profiteering and gormandizing, the abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?" Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black, red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners. What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony, unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West has no inkling of what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people from the depths is to it invisible. No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed. That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not. Even if it were not for our life's sake--even if it were against our life--still we must obey. But it _is_ for our life's sake, as we have seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by fulfilling the purpose of its being. And now we have got to a very dangerous place--a place where the usual moral peroration lies in wait for us--that German peroration which announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note, closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour, Courage, Confidence--we all know how it goes, the writer has written something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both sides, little conviction on either. It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we to think about it? Softly--there is worse to come! The next word is still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact--the word Culture.[26] I cannot help it--we must pass on by way of these everyday conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end. Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture. It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27] one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs, foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man, or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago, as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for culture. The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which they called _Kalokagathia_.[28] From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning. How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary is that it should be willed. Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation, lie so far behind us, have no idea at all. When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself. The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age. Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which already possess something resembling it--such as training, education, experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding--must pour out with both hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments, conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet, self-sacrificing, personal service. All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the other side. The devoted attempts which have been made, especially in England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to. The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata. We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 24: Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with the addition of red.] [Footnote 25: Geist.] [Footnote 26: Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of. In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.] [Footnote 27: Ausbildung.] [Footnote 28: A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and goodness.] [Footnote 29: Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent later.] XI Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement, which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers, the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself to be. It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission. It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected. The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained unchanged. So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it loses its unconsciousness--men know it for wrong, and do not amend it. For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School movement should depart from its original conception, that of a temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution, then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than unculture, and is more properly described as misculture. No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means our goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no, we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout. But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic depopulation which shall restore the mediæval relation between the area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will complete his job from start to finish--he will only do a section of it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man, thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker--for what else does it mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker, the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who calls himself _par excellence_ a "worker," it can never be too short. The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even, it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour, with the one longing that it might die more quickly--he knows how the shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has become for the factory artisan a goal of existence. But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all wearinesses--the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music, edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again under the next day's toil. The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable streets. The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science, turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning æsthetes who live in rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it. The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them, in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or political appointment. The others may console themselves with the thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on any other ill--toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this _pons asinorum_ of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf. Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from mouth to mouth and never tested by examination. The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30] which is the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy, no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form _ad nauseam_ the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs, can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put into practice the principle which I have called that of the Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline, endeavour to explain. The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It demands--since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a certain degree fixed by technical conditions--that the day's work as a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to forced labour, and destroys culture. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 30: Bildungsstaat.] XII There is a way by which the day's work can be ennobled, and even have mind brought into it,[31] on capitalistic lines. Before the War we were just about to enter on this path--America is treading it now. Its fundamental condition is a huge increase in general well-being. The daily wages of the American working-man have risen, as we have already remarked, to seven or even ten dollars, corresponding to a purchasing power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to so radical a removal of all restrictions in domestic economy that one can no longer speak of the proletarian condition as existing in the United States. A man who drives to his work in his own automobile can satisfy all his reasonable needs in the way of recreation and of extending his education, he looks at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the case in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye, he forms his own judgment of its place in the whole, he improves the processes, and amuses himself by being both workman and engineer. (Consider in the light of this fact the value of the prophecy that America is standing on the brink of Bolshevism!) In a country whose wealth at this moment--in consequence of war-profits and depreciation of money--is almost equal to that of the rest of the world put together, the process of abolishing proletarianism can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans, since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest of the peoples, and must begin afresh, and live for the future--we shall renounce without envy the broad path of the old way of thought, the way of riches, in order to clear with hard work the new path on which, one day, all will have to follow us. The way of Culture is the way to which we are pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all, represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant a clearly defined political procedure. By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is required that every employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his day's work in intellectual employment; and that every brainworker shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labour. There are, of course, fixed limits to the application of this principle, on the one side in intellectual, on the other in bodily incapacity, as well as in those rare cases where it is recognized that the interrupted hours of intellectual work cannot be made good. We would also establish a year of Labour-Service, to be devoted by the whole youth of Germany, of both sexes, to bodily training and work. The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned as "cultured" is not to consist in examinations but in proof of work. Any one who can offer some show of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we shall be taking seriously the question of the ascent to higher grades, which, so long as it depends on a particular age, or on school certificates, must remain on paper. Let no one say that this testing system is a mere mechanical method, that it degrades Culture from its intellectual dignity, and is equivalent to the Chinese literary tests for office. True culture is distinguished from mere sybaritic æstheticism in that in some sense or other it makes for production. Where there is no talent for art or for creative thought, then there remain to be developed the educational forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of life, which must have their influence. Different categories of Culture will arise of themselves; not ranks or castes or classes, but grades of society, each of which may be attained by any one. No one must be able to say that any monopoly of culture has barred his way, or that training and testing have been denied him. If the culture be genuine it will never look down in intellectual arrogance on the stages below it; if it have duties associated with it, then he who has rejected the path of ascent, or has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those duties. Any one who has no faculty but that of a glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of callings some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker, backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us. At this point we may hear a voice from the average heart of Socialism exclaim: "How is this? Do you call that having no castes? We have just begun to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are we expected to put the cultured in command? This is pure reaction!" Softly! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we shall clear it up. If any scruples still remain, we shall consider them further. Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is apparently forgotten that capitalism ruled by hereditary power. Any one who belonged to that circle ruled along with it, whether he were competent to rule or not. But culture is not a heritable possession; no one can win it save by virtue of a higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and this will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit for higher responsibilities. Is the voice from the average heart answered? No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do we care? We are out for equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy." Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I, so we are quits. For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind, in will and in heart--let him begin by altering Nature! In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or remission of work. Work of the highest class, creative and intellectual work--the most self-sacrificing that is known to man because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life, including his hours of leisure and recreation--this work demands extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different. Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be graded two stages upward, one for the output,[32] and one for the grade of culture implied. Women will also be subject to this system of grading whether they exercise any vocation outside their homes or not, for society has a deep interest in the culture of its mothers, and in external incentives to culture women must share equally with men. An intimate sense of association will grow up within each grade of culture. This, however, will not impair the general solidarity of the people, since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This sense of association, renewed with elements that vary from generation to generation, and corresponding very much to the relations between contemporary artists who spring from different classes or territories, will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary sentiment and absorb into itself whatever traditional values the latter may possess. Between the separate grades there will not only be the connexion afforded by the living possibilities of free ascent from one to the other, but the system of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at the same work will in itself promote culture, tradition, and the consciousness of union. We need only recall the old gilds and military associations in order to realize what a high degree of manly civic consciousness can arise from the visible community of duty and achievement. The mechanical worker will become the instructor of his temporary comrade and guest, and the latter will in turn widen the other's outlook, and emulate him in the development of the processes of production. The manual worker will bring to the desk and the board-room his freedom from prepossessions and the practical experience of his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstractions and general ideas; he will gain a respect for intellectual work, and will feel the impulse to win new knowledge and faculty, or to make good what he has neglected. * * * * * Two objections remain to be considered and confuted. First: there are far more places to be filled in mechanical than in intellectual employment. Is it possible so to organize the interchange of work that every one who desires intellectual employment can find it? The answer is: that, whether we like it or not, all work tends more and more to take on an administrative character. Just as in industry there is ever more talk and less production, so our economic life is working itself out through thousands upon thousands of new organizations. Industrial Councils, Councils of Workers, Gild-Councils, are forming themselves in among the existing agencies of administration; and the immediate consequence of this is a tremendous drop in production, to be followed later by a more highly articulated and more remunerative system of work. It is as if a marble statue came to life, and then had to be internally equipped with bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up, drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it remains a comfortless and dismal waste. But the administrative side of our future economic and national life demands the creation of so many posts of intellectual work that at present there is not the trained _personnel_ to fill it. If the Year of Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still more defections and gaps to be filled. The rush for intellectual work is more likely to be too small than too great. Let us come to the second objection. Will not confusion be worse confounded if there are many who have to fill two jobs, if, in these jobs constant exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work are brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if time and work are lost through never-ending rearrangement? Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea of the old high-strung work done, as it were, under military discipline, any one who cherishes the remotest idea that this system can ever return, in spite of the fact that its clamps and springs have been dashed to pieces, may well lament these unsettlements. One who starts from the fluctuating conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour will take organic unsettlements as part of the price to be paid, if they only lead in the end to systematic production. But one who weighs the fact that the make-believe life of our present economy has not even yet reached its final form, will discern in every new transition-form, however tedious, the final redemption; in so far, at least, as any equilibrium is capable of being restored at all. The essence of the interchange of labour will, therefore, consist in this, that while the distinction between physical and intellectual work will still exist, there will be no distinction between a physical and intellectual calling. Until advanced age may forbid, it will be open to every man not merely to acquire some ornamental branches of knowledge but seriously and with both feet to take his footing in the opposite calling to his own. The different callings will learn to know and respect each other, and to understand their respective difficulties. This applies particularly to those who call themselves the operative workers. As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end and loafing has been trampled out, then many a one, who now thinks that mental work is mere chattering, will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to this kneading and rummaging of the brain, he will go back with relief to his workshop; he will neither envy nor despise those who are operative workers with the brain, and will understand, or at least unconsciously feel, the oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life, and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive resignation to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose its charm. Any man will be respected who contents himself with the lowest prescribed measure of culture, who modestly renounces further study, and goes back to manual work. But there will be no excuse for those who know nothing and can do nothing, but pretend to set everybody right; for there will be no monopoly of culture to keep them down, and all genuine faculty must come to the test of action. * * * * * To-day there are three classes of social swindlers. First, those who live on the community without returning it any service. These are the people who live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against these social legislation must be framed. Secondly, those who deliberately practise "ca' canny," and therefore live on the surplus work of their fellows. These are the champions of the principle: Every one according to his need, no one according to his deed; the _saboteurs_ of labour. Against these the remedy lies in the spread of intelligence and a just system of remuneration. Thirdly, there are those who simulate thought and brain-work while they have nothing to give but hack phrases uttered with a glib tongue. Against these worst of all swindlers, these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is culture. And this, in the new Order, is open to every one, young or old, who can maintain his foothold in the exercise of intellect, when the chance is offered him. He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal standard of accomplishment can demand that he shall not be sent back to manual work, but continue to be employed in the same occupation, and be further cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At every further stage of development a corresponding sphere of activity is to be opened to him, up to the point at which the limits of his capacity come into sight. Let no one object that the rush for intellectual work will become uncontrollable. Would that it might! For then the country would be so highly developed and its methods of work so perfected that there would be quite a new relation between the demand for head-work and for hand-work. For a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice if the rising forces are set free, and the laggard are tranquillized. But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed one-year examination[33] is abrogated, and now are we again to be condemned according to this so-called standard of culture? Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few years we shall feel the deeply depressing effects which will arise from the domination of the uncultured. But the transition period will come to an end. Then every one who likes will be able to learn and to execute, and every one who is able will wish to do so. "But supposing one does not wish? May not he be the very one who is most capable of achievement? We don't want model pupils." Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has learnt nothing may make his trial as a man when culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he does not care to rack his brains he will be thought none the less of; he will merely be offered ordinary work according to his choice. But those who wish to see responsibility and the destiny of the country placed in the hands of men who do not care to rack their brains, must not entrench themselves behind social principles, but plainly admit that they want for all time to establish the rule of demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect. It is not for such a one to pass judgment on the mission of Germany. The way to the German mission, to German culture, which is to be no more a culture of the classes but of the people, stands open to all by means of the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as it were a single ship's crew; the issues are the same for all. The manual worker is no longer kept down by over-fatigue, and the brainworker is no longer cut off from the rest of the people. The manual worker no longer regards the territory of culture as a sort of inaccessible island, but rather as a district which he can visit every day and in which he is quite at home. Every one in future will start even in school training, and the degree to which his further culture may be carried will not be limited by want of money or of time, or, above all, of opportunity. He will continually have intercourse with men of culture, and in that intercourse he will at once give and receive; the habits of thought, the methods and the range of intellectual work which are now only the heritage of a few will be his own; and the twofold language of the country, the language of conceptions and the language of things, will for him be one. There will be no permanent system of stratification; the energies of the people, rising and falling, will be in constant movement and their elements will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting and unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and the destiny they have shaped for themselves--these aberrations will never cease so long as men are men--but there will be no more hatred of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary association of artists or of athletes. And since culture is to be at once the recognized social aim of the country and the personal goal and standard of each individual, the struggle for possessions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by public opinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the background. But the spirit of the land will not resemble any that we know at present. As in the Middle Ages, a spiritual power will rule, but it will not be imposed from without or above, it will be a creation from within. The competition of all will be like that of the best in the time of the Renaissance, but it will not be a competition for conventional values but for the furthering of life. The country will become, as it was in former days, a generous giver, not, however, from the lofty eminence of a class set apart, but out of the whole strength of the people. Again, for the first time, the convinced and conscious will of a people will be seen to direct itself to a common and recognized goal. This is a fact of immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise of forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-peaks of history, and of which the last example was the French Revolution. But those dangers of which we have spoken, that hell of a mechanical socialism, of institutions and arrangements without sentiment or spirit, are done away with, for production has ceased to be merely material and formal, it has acquired absolute value and substance. Spirit is the only end that sanctifies all means; and it sanctifies not by justifying them but by purifying them. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 31: Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.] [Footnote 32: Assuming that the highest output is reached in the particular instance which of course will not be the case with every worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of culture (Bildungsstufe).] [Footnote 33: Referring to the shortening of military service which used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.] XIII As the kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves in the death-chamber with every little droop in the curve of temperature, although they know in their hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter themselves with the idea that in the end all will come right, if not by itself at least with trifling exertion. But it is not so: except by the greatest exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for the piles on which it is built are decayed. It is true that it still stands, and will be standing for an hour or so, and life goes on in it very much as in the days when it was sound. We can choose either to leave it alone, and await the downfall of the city, among whose ruins life will never bloom again, or we can begin the underpinning of the tottering edifice, a process which will last for decades, which will allow no peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and dangerous, and will end almost imperceptibly, when the ancient city has been transformed into the new. Let us have no doubt about it: something tremendous and unprecedented has to be accomplished here. Does any thinking man believe that when the social order of the world has collapsed, when a country of the importance of Germany has lost the very basis of its existence, when the development of centuries is broken off, its faculties and its traditions emptied of value and repudiated--does any man really believe that by means of certain clauses in a Constitution a few confiscations, socializations and rises in wages, a nation of sixty millions can be endowed with a new historical reason for existence? Why is not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us? Our character is weak on the side of will, and our former lords say that we are good for nothing except under strict discipline administered by dynasts and hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is all over with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us and give us a modest place among the nations with a great past and a small future. If we are worthy of our name we must be born again of the Spirit. Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement for a people; to carry it out, to embody the conception in a new order of society, is at once a test and an achievement. Our social ethics must take up a new position. Hitherto--stripping off the usual rhetorical phrases--it has taken its stand on two effective and really driving principles, those of Duty and of Success; two side-views of Individualism. All else, including love of one's neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith, spiritual cultivation, feeling for Nature, was (apart from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary; means to an end, convention or falsehood. There were few whose careers were not influenced by these estimates; the majority of the upper classes was wholly under their dominion. The two goals of our wishes, to have something and to be something, were expressed by the whole outward aspect of society. The great object was not to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had less, or was less, than others. There were grades of being, grades of human being: it was possible to be something, to be much, to be little, or to be nothing at all. From the white collar to the pearl necklace, from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at the ordinary to the title of Excellency, everything was a proof of what one had, or was, or believed oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must not speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow a hundred marks from him, but one must not ask him for a penny. Whoever had wealth displayed it in order to be admired; whoever had a social position displayed his unapproachability and the weight of his dignity, as, for instance, when with an absent look and lost in the burden of his own existence he entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded a degrading attitude and forms of speech, and presented to them a face of stone; towards those in higher position one came to life and displayed an attentive civility. It was--or shall we say is?--permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly income of a poor family. "One had it to spend" and "what business was it of theirs?" In the lower ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these abuses and also much envy and malice, much open imitation, and much of secret admiration. Every silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the suburb and the village made a display which in quality, indeed, fell below the model, but in quantity not at all. It may be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal interests and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand for service and the claim to command. If anything can explain the eagerness with which we Germans flung ourselves into a war whose origins we did not know and did not want to know, then besides the conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and renown, we must also take into account the obscure impulse of the national conscience which in the midst of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion. Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in human nature, that it has been there from time immemorial, and it is impossible to alter it at one stroke? Pedantic drivel! Many things lie deep in human nature, and it depends on which of these the will chooses to develop. And who talked of altering things at one stroke? Our judgment of values is to be transformed, and if human nature never changed, much that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would be creeping in the shade. This transformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness, frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the November days[34] and proselytes of every description: you can see that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too closely--unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion. All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the collective judgment of mankind; even in the mediæval bloom of Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of courage. The Churches never made any serious effort to shape an ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world. The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes, and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness, the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed. We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean by "esprit gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy," while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically created no character of which we can say that it embodies the collective spirit of Germany. The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth and the empire of the soul has been laid down by us, but there are as yet few into whose consciousness it has penetrated; the transformation of thought and feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold of the masses directly, but will filter continually from one social stratum to another. The recognized values of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this after we have shattered the visible, and are living in the midst of intellectual anarchy and moral Nihilism! And yet moral valuations, simple, binding, and on the level of social judgment, are near enough to be within our grasp. Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day talking about Democracy? Have not we ourselves got tired of this word, forbidden till a year ago--tired, even in circles where the modest word "Liberal" was never pronounced without a frown? And what does Democracy mean? Do we take it in the merely negative sense, that one is no longer obliged to put up with things? Or in the meagre sense, that responsibility goes by favour, and that the majority must decide? Or the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our way through a sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic? It is not the form of government, it is the form of society, that determines the spirit of a land. There is no democratic form of society, for democracy can be in league with capitalism, with socialism, or even with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken fundamental conception which gives significance and stability both to the forms of a democratic constitution and to those of an organic society is called Solidarity--that is to say, cohesion and the sense of community. Solidarity means that each man does not come first in his own eyes, but before God and State and himself each man must stand and be answerable for all, and all for each. In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the majority over the minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided; the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which, under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every occupation must be open to him, except that he must not encroach on the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib tongue, but again, by spirit and by will. To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of syntax. When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment. Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by separate interests; by ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered body--ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility. Any one who does not accept this self-created and self-renewing order, and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary, an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy. An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity, or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture, resting upon spirit, character, and education. This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this order we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock on which it foundered. The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness--all this is clearly mechanization seen from the political side. The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized, and burdened with the relics of mediævalism, Cæsarism and clericalism, seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers in the department of mechanization. For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success; elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then came Napoleon. He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same time he was something mightier than that: he was the heir of the French idea of spiritual and popular liberty. Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England, they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have lately seen France conquer with the help of America. But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit. Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being the uprising economic movement. Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so. Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized victories. As in Frederick's time the slovenly Continent had to give way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany. And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the professors were political realists, success followed the side of mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the hope of gain. Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever. One was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts, another had no battle-cruisers, another was lacking in cannon, or in recruits, or in railways, or in finances; the trains never came in up to time, everywhere one found public opinion or the Press interfering in process of law or in the administration, everywhere there were scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was everything up to the mark. Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we say now, to militarize them. And this could be done with even more life and vigour than in Prussia, whose organization was there believed to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism was, as it were, stored up in tins and in some places was obviously getting mouldy. In the matter of Freedom, however, the other peoples were ahead of us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual isolation was now added. In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic developments there was not a single statesman who recognized that Prussian principles had ceased to be a monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a conception of genius. This lack of perception was the political cause of the war. Instead of renewing ourselves inwardly through freedom and the spirit, and carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly, and inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming and hurrahing. Worse than any playing of false notes was the mistake we made in key and in tempo: D major, _Allegro_, _Marcia_, _Fortissimo_, with cymbals and trumpets! To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a decision. The period of mechanical Prussianization is over for us, the period of the mechanical policy of Force is over for all the world, although the heliographs of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon. It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the international police which has now begun; it is the social epoch. In this epoch the people will live and will range themselves according to the strength of the ideas which they stand for. It is not enough for us to become Germans instead of Prussians; not even if, as it were to be desired, we should succeed in rescuing from the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough--no, it will lead us to destruction quicker than any one believes--to blunder along with the disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief: Well, something's got done; all will come right. No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do you want to stake _our_ existence, on ships, soldiers, mines, trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your thought? Where is the thought of Germany? We can and must live only by becoming what we were designed to be, what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought of Germany. This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground in the new epoch, and which fulfils it. This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things. For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror, not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a thinking nation among the nations. But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live? With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation? No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little work and little production. For the next decade the question will be, not where is the demand but where is the supply? The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years' War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we do not notice the decline. Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more than valuable production or cheap production; it is something exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking. It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected. The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us which we have not known for a century, and the scope of which we cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in their internationalism. There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will be something more than a bond of interest. The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one. In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself but every one can redeem another. Class for class, man for man: thus is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in each there must be good-will. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 34: 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.] THE END THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY Edited by J. E. SPINGARN This series is intended to introduce foreign authors whose works are not accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the best books," if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays creative power or a new outlook or more than ordinary interest or charm will be eligible for inclusion. Nor will the attempt be made to select books that merely confirm American standards of taste or morals, since the series is intended to serve as a mirror of European culture and not as a glass through which it may be seen darkly. Fiction will predominate, but belles lettres, poetry, philosophy, social and economic discussion, history, biography, and other fields will be represented. "The first organized effort to bring into English a series of the really significant figures in contemporary European literature.... An undertaking as creditable and as ambitious as any of its kind on the other side of the Atlantic."--_New York Evening Post._ THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By J. WASSERMANN. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. Two volumes. (Second printing.) One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age yet finds them wanting. The first volume depicts the life of the upper classes of European society, the second is a very Inferno of the Slums; and the whole mirrors, with extraordinary insight, the beauty and sorrow, the power and weakness of our social and spiritual world. "A human comedy in the great sense, which no modern can afford not to hear."--H. W. Boynton, in the _Weekly Review_. PEOPLE. By PIERRE HAMP. Translated by James Whitall. With an Introduction by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Introducing one of the most significant writers of France, himself a working man, who in these stories of the French underworld expresses the new self-consciousness of the worker's outlook. THE NEW SOCIETY. By WALTER RATHENAU. Translated by Arthur Windham. One of Germany's most influential thinkers and men of action presents his vision of the new society emerging out of the War. DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS. By REMY DE GOURMONT. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. The first authorized version of the critical work of one of the great aesthetic thinkers of France. IN PREPARATION THE PATRIOT. By HEINRICH MANN. Translated by Ernest A. Boyd. The career of a typical product of militarism, in school, university, business, patriotism, and love, told with a biting incisiveness and irony. THE REFORM OF EDUCATION. By GIOVANNI GENTILE. With an Introduction by BENEDETTO CROCE. Translated by Dino Bigongiari. A new interpretation of the meaning of education, by one who shares with Croce the leadership of Italian thought to-day. A POET'S LOVES: FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS OF VICTOR HUGO. By LOUIS BARTHOU. Translated by Daniel Créhange Rosenthal. A striking, not to say sensational, revelation of the intimate private life of a great poet, by an ex-Premier of France. HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY Publishers New York 
15759	----	Proofreading Team. CROWDS A MOVING-PICTURE OF DEMOCRACY BY GERALD STANLEY LEE _Editor of "Mount Tom"_ IN FIVE BOOKS CROWDS AND MACHINES LETTING THE CROWD BE GOOD LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL CROWDS AND HEROES GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY _Copyright, 1913, by_ DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY _All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian_ COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY CO. COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY, INCORPORATED BOOKS By GERALD STANLEY LEE THE LOST ART OF READING _A Sketch of Civilization_ THE CHILD AND THE BOOK _A Constructive Criticism of Education_ THE SHADOW CHRIST _A Study of the Hebrew Men of Genius_ THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES _An Introduction to the Twentieth Century_ INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES _A Study of the Man of Genius in Business_ CROWDS _A Moving Picture of Democracy_ _Gratefully inscribed to a little Mountain, a great Meadow, and a Woman. To the Mountain for the sense of time, to the Meadow for the sense of space, and to the Woman for the sense of everything._ TABLE OF CONTENTS BOOK ONE CROWDS AND MACHINES I. WHERE ARE WE GOING? 3 II. THE CROWD SCARE 19 III. THE MACHINE SCARE 34 IV. THE STRIKE--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS THINK 49 V. THE CROWD-MAN--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE 58 VI. THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS 65 VII. IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN 66 VIII. THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE 69 IX. THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE 74 X. A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE 76 XI. DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS 80 XII. NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN 86 BOOK TWO LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD I. SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD 93 II. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT? 96 III. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTING? 103 IV. PROSPECTS OF THE LIAR 107 V. PROSPECTS OF THE BULLY 111 VI. GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS 114 VII. THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY OTHER PEOPLE 116 VIII. MAKING GOODNESS HURRY 125 IX. TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS 128 X. THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS AND THE SUCCESSFUL 142 XI. THE SUCCESSFUL 146 XII. THE NECKS OF THE WICKED 154 XIII. IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? 163 XIV. IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? 167 XV. THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT 173 XVI. THE MEN AHEAD PULL 178 XVII. THE CROWDS PUSH 184 XVIII. THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW 186 XIX. AND THE MACHINE STARTS! 194 BOOK THREE LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL PART I. WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES I. MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP 205 II. MR. CARNEGIE TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE READ 208 III. MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE 211 IV. PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS 221 V. THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE 227 PART II. IRON MACHINES I. STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS 236 II. BELLS AND WHEELS 240 III. DEW AND ENGINES 243 IV. DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL! 245 V. AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON 248 VI. THE MACHINES' MACHINES 250 VII. THE MEN'S MACHINES 252 VIII. THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD 256 IX. THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS 262 X. THE MACHINE-TRAINERS 266 XI. MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS 269 PART III. PEOPLE-MACHINES I. NOW! 280 II. COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES 288 III. THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN 286 IV. LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT 290 BOOK FOUR CROWDS AND HEROES I. THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO 297 II. THE CROWD AND THE HERO 301 III. THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON 303 IV. THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN 307 V. THE CROWD AND TOM MANN 313 VI. AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT PIERPONT MORGAN 323 VII. AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT TOM MANN 327 VIII. THE MEN WHO LOOK 331 IX. WHO IS AFRAID? 337 X. RULES FOR TELLING A HERO--WHEN ONE SEES ONE 343 XI. THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE 346 XII. THE MEN WHO WANT THINGS 349 XIII. MEN WHO GET THINGS 356 XIV. SOURCES OF COURAGE FOR OTHERS--TOLERATION 364 XV. CONVERSION 371 XVI. EXCEPTION 380 XVII. INVENTION 383 XVIII. THE MAN WHO PULLS THE WORLD TOGETHER 397 XIX. THE MAN WHO STANDS BY 400 XX. THE STRIKE OF THE SAVIOURS 402 XXI. THE LEAGUE OF THE MEN WHO ARE NOT AFRAID 404 BOOK FIVE GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK PART I. NEWS AND LABOUR 413 PART II. NEWS AND MONEY 422 PART III. NEWS AND GOVERNMENT I. OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 431 II. OXFORD STREET HUMS, THE HOUSE HEMS 440 III. PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES 449 IV. THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO 455 V. THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!" 463 VI. THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE YOU?" 469 VII. THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE WE?" 472 VIII. NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT 474 IX. NEWS-MEN 476 X. AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND GOVERNMENT 483 XI-XII. NEWS-BOOKS 505-513 XIII. NEWS-PAPERS 517 XIV. NEWS-MACHINES 524 XV. NEWS-CROWDS 527 XVI. CROWD-MEN 550 EPILOGUE 539 BOOK ONE CROWDS AND MACHINES TO CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS _"A battered, wrecked old man Thrown on this savage shore far, far from home, Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows twelve dreary months ... The end I know not, it is all in Thee, Or small or great I know not--haply what broad fields, what lands!... And these things I see suddenly, what mean they As if some miracle, some hand divine unsealed my eyes, Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky, And on the distant waves sail countless ships, And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me."_ CHAPTER I WHERE ARE WE GOING? The best picture I know of my religion is Ludgate Hill as one sees it going down the foot of Fleet Street. It would seem to many perhaps like a rather strange half-heathen altar, but it has in it the three things with which I worship most my Maker in this present world--the three things which it would be the breath of religion to me to offer to a God together--Cathedrals, Crowds, and Machines. With the railway bridge reaching over, all the little still locomotives in the din whispering across the street; with the wide black crowd streaming up and streaming down, and the big, faraway, other-worldly church above, I am strangely glad. It is like having a picture of one's whole world taken up deftly, and done in miniature and hung up for one against the sky--the white steam which is the breath of modern life, the vast hurrying of our feet, and that Great Finger pointing toward heaven day and night for us all.... I never tire of walking out a moment from my nook in Clifford's Inn and stealing a glimpse and coming back to my fireplace. I sit still a moment before going to work and look in the flames and think. The great roar outside the Court gathers it all up--that huge, boundless, tiny, summed-up world out there; flings it faintly against my quiet windows while I sit and think. And when one thinks of it a minute, it sends one half-fearfully, half-triumphantly back to one's work--the very thought of it. The Crowd hurrying, the Crowd's flurrying Machines, and the Crowd's God, send one back to one's work! In the afternoon I go out again, slip my way through the crowds along the Strand, toward Charing Cross. I never tire of watching the drays, the horses, the streaming taxis, all these little, fearful, gliding crowds of men and women, when a little space of street is left, flowing swiftly, flowing like globules, like mercury, between the cabs. But most of all I like looking up at that vast second story of the street, coming in over one like waves, like seas--all these happy, curious tops of 'buses; these dear, funny, way-up people on benches; these world-worshippers, sight-worshippers, and Americans--all these little scurrying congregations, hundreds of them, rolling past. I sit on the front seat of a horse 'bus elbow to elbow with the driver, staring down over the brink of the abyss upon ears and necks--that low, distant space where the horses look so tiny and so ineffectual and so gone-by below. The street is the true path of the spirit. To walk through it, or roll or swing on top of a 'bus through it--the miles of faces, all these tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stomachs; and on all sides of you, and in the windows and along the walks, the things they wear, and the things they eat, and the things they pour down their little throats, and the things they pray to and curse and worship and swindle in! It is like being out in the middle of a great ocean of living, or like climbing up some great mountain-height of people, their abysses and their clouds about them, their precipices and jungles and heavens, the great high roads of their souls reaching off.... I can never say why, but so strange is it, so full of awe is it, and of splendour and pity, that there are times when, rolling and swinging along on top of a 'bus, with all this strange, fearful joy of life about me, within me ... it is as if on top of my 'bus I had been far away in some infinite place, and had felt Heaven and Hell sweep past. One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips over from New York, and finds himself, almost before he had thought of it--walking down the Strand, suddenly, instead of Broadway, is the way things--thousands of things at once; begin happening to him. Of course, with all the things that are happening to him--the 'buses, the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new sights in the streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to his ears, to his feet and his hands, and to his body lunging through the ground and swimming up in space on top of a 'bus through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of people ... there are all the things besides that begin happening to his mind. In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in a kind of tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and drives on to his point, and New York does not--at least it does not very often--make things happen to his mind. He is not in London five minutes before he begins to notice how London does his thinking for him. The streets of the city set him to thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles of expecting. And above the streets that he walks through and drives through he finds in London another complete set of streets that interest him: the greater, silenter streets of England--the streets of people's thoughts. And he reads the great newspapers, those huge highways on which the English people are really going somewhere.... "_Where are they going?_" He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news, "_Where are the English people going?_" * * * * * An American thinks of the English people in the third person--at first, of course. After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping over every now and then into what seems to be a vague, loose first person plural. Then the first person plural grows. He finds at last that his thinking has settled down into a kind of happy, easy-going, international, editorial "We." New York and London, Chicago and Sheffield, go drifting together through his thoughts, and even Paris, glimmering faintly over there, and a dim round world, and he asks, as the people of a world stream by, "_Where are WE going?_" Thus it is that London, looming, teeming, world-suggesting, gets its grip upon a man, a fresh American, and stretches him, stretches him before his own eyes, makes him cosmopolitan, does his thinking for him. * * * * * There was a great sea to still his soul and lay down upon his spirit that big, quiet roundness of the earth. Nothing is quite the same after that wide strip of sea--sleeping out there alone night by night--the gentle round earth sloping away down from under one on both sides, in the midst of space.... Then, suddenly, almost before one knows, that quiet Space still lingering round one, perhaps one finds oneself thrust up out of the ground in the night into that big yellow roar of Trafalgar Square. And here are the swift sudden crowds of people, one's own fellow-men hurrying past. One looks into the faces of the people hurrying past: "_Where are we going?_" One looks at the stars: "WHERE ARE WE GOING?" * * * * * That night, when I was thrust up out of the ground and stood dazed in the Square, I was told in a minute that this London where I was was a besieged and conquered city. Some men had risen up in a day and said to London: "No one shall go in. No one shall go out." I was in the great proud city at last, the capital of the world, her big, new, self-assured inventions all about her, all around her, and soldiers camping out with her locomotives! With her long trains for endless belts of people going in and coming out, with her air-brakes, electric lights, and motor-cars and aerial mails, it seemed passing strange to be told that her great stations were all choked up with a queer, funny, old, gone-by, clanky piece of machinery, an invention for making people good, like soldiers! And I stood in the middle of the roar of Trafalgar Square and asked, as all England was asking that night: "Where are we going?" And I looked in the faces of the people hurrying past. And nobody knew. And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the city, the great crowded dailies where all the world troops through, and then the more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies, more dignified and like private parks; and the quarterlies, too, thoughtful, high-minded, a little absent, now and then a footfall passing through. And I found them all full of the same strange questioning: "Where are we going?" And nobody knew. It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all about me, out of the skyscrapers. New York did not know. Now London did not know. * * * * * And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of books. I could not but look about--how could I do otherwise than look about?--a lonely American walking at last past all these nobly haunted doorways and windows--for your idealists or interpreters, your men who bring in the sea upon your streets and the mountains on your roof-tops; who still see the wide, still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint and tiny roar of London. I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets; for the men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of nations because they mould their thoughts. I do not like to say it. How shall an American, coming to you out of his long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it?... Here, where Shakespeare played mightily, and like a great boy with the world; where Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives and refreshed the hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets, going past these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even made one--lifted over his London forever into the hearts of men.... I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days: John Galsworthy out with his camera--his beautiful, sad, foggy camera; Arnold Bennett stitching and stitching faithfully twenty-four hours a day--big, curious tapestries of little things; H.G. Wells, with his retorts, his experiments about him, his pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew of steam, half-hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer messes of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G.K. Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contradicting, rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His Own Mind; and Bernard Shaw (all civilization trooping by), the eternal boy, on the eternal curbstone of the world, threw stones; and the Bishop of Birmingham preached a fine, helpless sermon.... * * * * * When a new American, coming from his own big, hurried, formless, speechless country, finds himself in what he had always supposed to be this trim, arranged, grown-up, articulate England, and when, thrust up out of the ground in Trafalgar Square, he finds himself looking at that vast yellow mist of people, that vast bewilderment of faces, of the poor, of the rich, coming and going they cannot say where--he naturally thinks at first it must be because they cannot speak; and when he looks to those who speak for them, to their writers or interpreters, and when he finds that they are bewildered, that they are asking the same question over and over that we in America are asking too, "Where are we going?" he is brought abruptly up, front to front with the great broadside of modern life. London, his last resort, is as bewildered as New York; and so, at last, here it is. It has to be faced now and here, as if it were some great scare-head or billboard on the world, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?" * * * * * The most stupendous feat for the artist or man of imagination in modern times is to conceive a picture or vision for our Society--our present machine-civilization--a common expectation for people which will make them want to live. If Leonardo were living now, he would probably slight for the time being his building bridges, and skimp his work on Mona Lisa, and write a book--an exultant book about common people. He would focus and express democracy as only the great and true aristocrat or genius or artist will ever do it. A great society must be expressed as a vision or expectation before men can see it together, and go to work on it together, and make it a fact. What makes a society great is that it is full of people who have something to live for and who know what it is. It is because nobody knows, now, that our present society is not great. The different kinds of people in it have not made up their minds what they are for, and some kinds have particularly failed to make up their minds what the other kinds are for. We are all making our particular contribution to the common vision, and some of us are able to say in one way and some in another what this vision is; but it is going to take a supreme catholic, summing-up individualist, a great man or artist--a man who is all of us in one--to express for Crowds, and for all of us together, where we want to go, what we think we are for, and what kind of a world we want. This will have to be done first in a book. The modern world is collecting its thoughts. It is trying to write its bible. The Bible of the Hebrews (which had to be borrowed by the rest of the world if they were to have one) is the one great outstanding fact and result of the Hebrew genius. They did not produce a civilization, but they produced a book for the rest of the world to make civilizations out of, a book which has made all other nations the moral passengers of the Hebrews for two thousand years. And the whole spirit and aim of this book, the thing about it that made it great, was that it was the sublimest, most persistent, most colossal, masterful attempt ever made by men to look forth upon the earth, to see all the men in it, like spirits hurrying past, and to answer the question, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?" I would not have any one suppose that in these present tracings and outlines of thought I am making an attempt to look upon the world and say where the people are going, and where they think they are going, and where they want to go. I have attempted to find out, and put down what might seem at first sight (at least it did to me) the answer to a very small and unimportant question--"Where is it that I really want to go myself?" "What kind of a world is it, all the facts about me being duly considered, I really want to be in?" No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it. If Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Wells had been so good as to write a book for me in which they had given the answer to my question, in which they had said more or less authoritatively for me what kind of a world it is that I want to be in, this book would never have been written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or even as an argument. The one thing that any one can fairly claim for this book is that one man's life has been saved with it. It is the record of one man fighting up through story after story of crowds and of crowds' machines to the great steel and iron floor on the top of the world, until he had found the manhole in it, and broken through and caught a breath of air and looked at the light. The book is merely a life-preserver--that is all; and one man's life-preserver. Perhaps the man is representative, and perhaps he is not. At all events, here it is. Anybody else who can use it is welcome to it. * * * * * The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists in wanting it still harder and still harder until one can express it. This is particularly true when the thing one wants is a new world. Here are all these other people who have to be asked. And until one wants it hard enough to say it, to get it outside one's self, possibly make it catching, nothing happens. If one were to point out one trait rather than another that makes Bernard Shaw, for so brilliant a man, so ineffective as a leader, or literary statesman, or social reformer, it would be his modesty. He has never wanted anything. If I could have found a book by Bernard Shaw in which Mr. Shaw had merely said what he wanted himself, it is quite possible this book would not have been written. Even if Mr. Shaw, without saying what he wanted, had ever shown in any corner of any book that one man's wanting something in this world amounted to anything, or could make any one else want it, or could make any difference in him, or in the world around him, perhaps I would not have written this book. Everywhere, as I have looked about me among the bookmen in America, in England, I have found, not the things that they wanted in their books, but always these same deadly lists or bleak inventories--these prairies of things that they did not want. Now, as a matter of fact, I knew already, with an almost despairing distinctness, nearly all these things I did not want and it has not helped me (with all due courtesy and admiration) having John Galsworthy out photographing them day after day, so that I merely did not want them harder. And Mr. Wells's measles and children's diseases, too. I knew already that I did not want them. And Mr. Shaw's entire, heroic, almost noble collection of things he does not want does not supply me--nor could it supply any other man with furniture to make a world with--even if it were not this real, big world, with rain and sunshine and wind and people in it, and were only that little, wonderful world a man lives within his own heart. There have been times, and there will be more of them, when I could not otherwise than speak as the champion of Bernard Shaw; but, after all, what single piece of furniture is there that George Bernard Shaw, living with his great attic of not-things all around him, is able to offer to furnish me for me single, little, warm, lighted room to keep my thoughts in? Nor has he furnished me with one thing with which I would care to sit down in my little room and think--looking into the cold, perfect hygienic ashes he has left upon my hearth. Even if I were a revolutionist, and not a mere, plain human being, loving life and wanting to live more abundantly, I am bound to say I do not see what there is in Mr. Galsworthy's photographs, or in Mr. Wells's rich, bottomless murk of humanity to make a revolution for. And Mr. Bernard Shaw, with all his bottles of disinfectants and shelves of sterilized truths, his hard well-being and his glittering comforts, has presented the vision of a world in which at the very best--even if it all comes out as he says it will--a man would merely have things without wanting them, and without wanting anything. * * * * * And so it has seemed to me that even if he is quite unimportant, any man to-day who, in some public place, like a book, shall paint the picture of his heart's desire, who shall throw up, as upon a screen, where all men may see them, his most immediate and most pressing ideals, would perform an important service. If a man's sole interest were to find out what all men in the world want, the best way to do it would be for him to say quite definitely, so that we could all compare notes, what he wanted himself. Speaking for a planet has gone by, but possibly, if a few of us but speak for ourselves, the planet will talk back, and we shall find out at last what it really is that it wants. The thing that many of us want most in the present grayness and din of the world is some one to play with, or if the word "play" is not quite the right word, some one with whom we can work with freedom and self-expressiveness and joy. Nine men out of ten one meets to-day talk with one as it were with their watches in their hands. The people who are rich one sees everywhere, being run away with by their motor-cars; and the people who are poor one sees struggling pitifully and for their very souls, under great wheels and beneath machines. Of course, I can only speak for myself. I do not deny that a little while at a time I can sit by a brook in the woods and be happy; but if, as it happens, I would rather have other people about me--people who do not spoil things, I find that the machines about me everywhere have made most people very strange and pathetic in the woods. They cannot sit by brooks, many of them; and when they come out to the sky, it looks to them like some mere, big, blue lead roof up over their lives. Perhaps I am selfish about it, but I cannot bear to see people looking at the sky in this way.... * * * * * So, as I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to want most of all in this world is the inspired employer--or what I have called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the man who can take the machines off the backs of the people and take the machines out of their wits, and make the machines free their bodies and serve their souls. If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made by the social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the masses of the people. I believe that the time has come when the world is to make its last stand for idealism, great men, and crowds. I believe that great men can be really great, that they can represent crowds. I believe that crowds can be really great, that they can know great men. The most natural kind of great man for crowds to know first will probably be a kind of everyday great man or business statesman, the man who represents all classes, and who proves it in the way he conducts his business. I have called this man the Crowdman. I do not say that I have met precisely the type of inspired millionaire I have in mind, but I have known scores of men who have reminded me of him and of what he is going to be, and I am prepared to say that in spirit, or latent at least, he is all about me in the world to-day. If it is proved to me that no such man exists, I am here to say there will be one. If it is proved to me that there cannot be one, _I will make one_. If it is proved to me that by lifting up Desire in the faces of young men and of boys, and in the faces of true fathers and young mothers, and by ringing up my challenge on the great doors of the schools, I cannot make one, then I will invoke the men that shall write the books, that shall sing the songs that shall make one! I say this with all reverence for other men's desires and with all respect for natural prejudgments. As I have conceived it, the one business of the world to-day is to find out what we are for and to find out what men in the world--on the whole--really want. When men know what they want they get it. Every wrong thing we have to face in modern industrial life is due to men who know what they want, and who therefore get it, due to the passions and the dreams of men; and the one single way in which these wrong things will ever be overcome is with more passions and with more and mightier dreams of men. Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are so largely allowed to run it. In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be reckoned with is Desire. The next move in economics is going to be the statement of a shrewd, dogged, realizable ideal. It is only ideals that have aroused the wrong passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse the right ones. It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere statement of principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-picture, a portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man's heart to himself. What we want is a vast white canvas, spread, as it were, over the end of the world, before which we shall all sit together, the audience of the nations, of the poor, of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful place--all of us together; and then we will throw up before us on the vast white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires, flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and the grim, silent wills of men. _"What do we want?" "Where are we going?"_ In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to the literature of Desire. This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over him, has desired, and of what, God helping him, he will have. There is a certain sense in which merely praying to God has gone by. In the present desperate crisis of a world plunging on in the dark to a catastrophe or a glory that we cannot guess, it is a time for men to pray a prayer, a standing-up prayer, to one another. I believe that it is going to be this huge gathering-in of public desire, this imperious challenge of what men want, this standing-up prayer of men to one another, which alone shall make men go forth with faith and singing once more into the battle of life. Sometimes it has seemed to me I have already heard it--this song of men's desires about me--faintly. But I have seen that the time is at hand when it shall come as a vast chorus of cities, of fields, of men's voices, filling the dome of the world--a chorus in the glory and the shame of which no millionaire who merely wants to make money, no artist who is not expressing the souls and freeing the bodies of men, no statesman who is not gathering up the desires of crowds, and going daily through the world hewing out the will of the people, shall dare to live. * * * * * But while this is the vision of my belief, I would not have any one suppose that I am the bearer of easy and gracious tidings. It is rather of a great daily adventure one has with the world. There have been times when it seemed as if it had to begin all over again every morning. Day by day I walk down Fleet Street toward Ludgate Hill. I look once more every morning at that great picture of any religion; I look at the quiet, soaring, hopeful dome--that little touch of singing or praying that men have lifted up against heaven. "Will the Dome bring the Man to me?" I look up at the machines, strange and eager, hurrying across the bridge. "Will the Machines bring the Man to me?" I look in the faces of the crowd hurrying past. "Will the Crowd bring the Man to me?" With the picture of my religion--or perhaps three religions or three stories of religion--I walk on and on through the crowd, past the railway, past the Cathedral, past the Mansion House, and over the Tower Bridge. I walk fast and eagerly and blindly, as though a man would walk away from the world. Suddenly I find myself, throngs of voices all about me, standing half-unconsciously by a high iron fence in Bermondsey watching that smooth asphalt playground where one sees the very dead (for once) crowded by the living--pushed over to the edges--their gravestones tilted calmly up against the walls. I stand and look through the pickets and watch the children run and shout--the little funny, mockingly dressed, frowzily frumpily happy children, the stored-up sunshine of a thousand years all shining faintly out through the dirt, out through the generations in their little faces--"Will the Man come to me out of these?" The tombstones lean against the wall and the children run and shout. As I watch them with my hopes and fears and the tombstones tilted against the walls--as I peer through the railings at the children, I face my three religions. What will the three religions do with the children? What will the children do with the three religions? And now I will tell the truth. I will not cheat nor run away as sometimes I seem to have tried to do for years. I will no longer let myself be tricked by the mere glamour and bigness of our modern life nor swooned into good-will by the roll and liturgy of revolution, "of the people," "for the people," "by the people," nor will I be longer awed by those huge phrase-idols, constitutions, routines, that have roared around me "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"--those imperious, thoughtless, stupid tra-la-las of the People. Do the People see truth? Can the People see truth? Can all the crowd, and can all the machines, and all the cathedrals piled up together produce the Man, the Crowd-man or great man who sees truth? And so with my three religions, I have three fears, one for each of them. There is the Machine fear, lest the crowd should be overswept by its machines and become like them; and the Crowd fear, lest the crowd should overlook its mighty innumerable and personal need of great men; and there is also the daily fear for the Church, lest the Church should not understand crowds and machines and grapple with crowds and machines, interpret them and glory in them and appropriate them for her own use and for God's--lest the Church should turn away from the crowds and the machines and graciously and idly bow down to Herself. And now I am going to try to express these three fears that go with the three religions as well as I can, so that I can turn on them and face them and, God helping me, look them out of countenance. CHAPTER II THE CROWD SCARE Time was when a man was born upon this planet in a somewhat lonely fashion. A few human beings out of all infinity stood by to care for him. He was brought up with hills and stars and a neighbour or so, until he grew to man's estate. He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and there, on the rim of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and earth that had always been the edge of life to him before, he looked forth upon the freedom of the world, and said in his soul, "What shall I be in this world I see, and whither shall I go in it?" And the sky and the earth and the rivers and the seas and the nights and the days beckoned to him, and the voices of life rose around him, and they all said, "Come!" On a corner in New York, around a Street Department wagon, not so very long ago, five thousand men were fighting for shovels, fifty men to a shovel--a tool for living a little longer. The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world has been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds. Civilization is a list of cities. Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured to-day by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for--the centre of mass. The crowd principle is the first principle of production. The producer who can get the most men together and the most dollars together controls the market; and when he once controls the market, instead of merely getting the most men and the most dollars, he can get all the men and all the dollars. Hence the corporation in production. The crowd principle is the first principle of distribution. The man who can get the most men to buy a particular thing from him can buy the most of it, and therefore buy it the cheapest, and therefore get more men to buy from him; and having bought this particular thing cheaper than all men could buy it, it is only a step to selling it to all men; and then, having all the men on one thing and all the dollars on one thing, he is able to buy other things for nothing, for everybody, and sell them for a little more than nothing to everybody. Hence the department store--the syndicate of department stores--the crowd principle in commerce. The value of a piece of land is the number of footsteps passing by it in twenty-four hours. The value of a railroad is the number of people near it who cannot keep still. If there are a great many of these people, the railroad runs its trains for them. If there are only a few, though they be heroes and prophets, Dantes, Savonarolas, and George Washingtons, trains shall not be run for them. The railroad is the characteristic property and symbol of property in this modern age, and the entire value of a railroad depends upon its getting control of a crowd--either a crowd that wants to be where some other crowd is, or a crowd that wants a great many tons of something that some other crowd has. When we turn from commerce to philosophy, we find the same principle running through them both. The main thing in the philosophy of to-day is the extraordinary emphasis of environment and heredity. A man's destiny is the way the crowd of his ancestors ballot for his life. His soul--if he has a soul--is an atom acted upon by a majority of other atoms. When we turn to religion in its different phases, we find the same emphasis upon them all--the emphasis of mass, of majority. Not that the church exists for the masses--no one claims this--but that, such as it is, it is a mass church. While the promise of Scripture, as a last resort, is often heard in the church about two or three gathered together in God's name, the Church is run on the working conviction that unless the minister and the elders can gather two or three hundred in God's name, He will not pay any particular attention to them, or, if He does, He will not pay the bills. The church of our forefathers, founded on personality, is exchanged for the church of democracy, founded on crowds; and the church of the moment is the institutional church, in which the standing of the clergyman is exchanged for the standing of the congregation. The inevitable result, the crowd clergyman, is seen on every hand amongst us--the agent of an audience, who, instead of telling an audience what they ought to do, runs errands for them morning and noon and night. With coddling for majorities and tact for whims, he carefully picks his way. He does his people as much good as they will let him, tells them as much truth as they will hear, until he dies at last, and goes to take his place with Puritan parsons who mastered majorities, with martyrs who would not live and be mastered by majorities, and with apostles who managed to make a new world without the help of majorities at all. Theology reveals the same tendency. The measuring by numbers is found in all belief, the same cringing before masses of little facts instead of conceiving the few immeasurable ones. Helpless individuals mastered by crowds are bound to believe in a kind of infinitely helpless God. He stands in the midst of the crowds of His laws and the systems of His worlds: to those who are not religious, a pale First Cause; and to those who are, a Great Sentimentality far away in the heavens, who, in a kind of vast weak-mindedness (a Puritan would say), seems to want everybody to be good and hopes they will, but does not quite know what to do about it if they are not. Every age has its typical idea of heaven and its typical idea of hell (in some of them it would be hard to tell which is which), and every civilization, has its typical idea of God. A civilization with sovereign men in it has a sovereign God; and a crowd civilization, reflecting its mood on the heavens, is inclined to a pleasant, large-minded God, eternally considering everybody and considering everything, but inefficient withal, a kind of legislature of Deity, typical of representative institutions at their best and at their worst. If we pass from our theology to our social science we come to the most characteristic result of the crowd principle that the times afford. We are brought face to face with Socialism, the millennium machine, the Corliss engine of progress. It were idle to deny to the Socialist that he is right--and more right, indeed, than most of us, in seeing that there is a great wrong somewhere; but it would be impossible beyond this point to make any claim for him, except that he is honestly trying to create in the world a wrong we do not have as yet, that shall be large enough to swallow the wrong we have. The term "Socialism" stands for many things, in its present state; but so far as the average Socialist is concerned, he may be defined as an idealist who turns to materialism, that is, to mass, to carry his idealism out. The world having discovered two great ideals in the New Testament, the service of all men by all other men, and the infinite value of the individual, the Socialist expects to carry out one of these ideals by destroying the other. The principle that an infinitely helpful society can be produced by setting up a row of infinitely helpless individuals is Socialism, as the average Socialist practises it. The average Socialist is the type of the eager but effeminate reformer of all ages, because he seeks to gain by machinery things nine tenths of the value of which to men is in gaining them for themselves. Socialism is the attempt to invent conveniences for heroes, to pass a law that will make being a man unnecessary, to do away with sin by framing a world in which it would be worthless to do right because it would be impossible to do wrong. It is a philosophy of helplessness, which, even if it succeeds in helplessly carrying its helplessness out--in doing away with suffering, for instance--can only do it by bringing to pass a man not alive enough to be capable of suffering, and putting him in a world where suffering and joy alike would be a bore to him. But the main importance of Socialism in this connection lies in the fact that it does not confine itself to sociology. It has become a complete philosophy of life, and can be seen penetrating with its subtle satire on human nature almost everything about us. We have the cash register to educate our clerks into pure and honest character, and the souls of conductors can be seen being nurtured, mile after mile, by fare-recorders. Corporations buy consciences by the gross. They are hung over the door of every street car. Consciences are worked by pulling a strap. Liverymen have cyclometres to help customers to tell the truth, and the Australian ballot is invented to help men to be manly enough to vote the way they think. And when, in the course of human events, we came to the essentially moral and spiritual reform of a woman's right to dress in good taste--that is, appropriately for what she is doing, what did we proceed to do to bring it about? Conventions were held year after year, and over and over, to get women to dress as they wanted to; dress reform associations were founded, syndicates of courage were established all over the land--all in vain; and finally,--Heaven help us!--how was this great moral and spiritual reform accomplished? By an invention of two wheels, one in front of the other. It was brought about by the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut in two short years. Everything is brought about by manufacturing companies. It is the socialist spirit; the idea that, if we can only find it, there is some machine that can surely be invented that will take the place of men: not only of hands and feet, but of all the old-fashioned and lumbering virtues, courage, patience, vision, common sense, and religion itself, out of which they are made. But we depend upon machinery not only for the things that we want, but for the brains with which we decide what we want. If a man wants to know what he thinks, he starts a club; and if he wants to be very sure, he calls a convention. From the National Undertakers' Association and the Launderers' League to the Christian Endeavour Tournament and the World's Congress--the Midway Pleasance of Piety--the Convention strides the world with vociferousness. The silence that descends from the hills is filled with its ceaseless din. The smallest hamlet in the land has learned to listen reverent from afar to the vast insistent roar of It, as the Voice of the Spirit of the Times. Every idea we have is run into a constitution. We cannot think without a chairman. Our whims have secretaries; our fads have by-laws. Literature is a club. Philosophy is a society. Our reforms are mass meetings. Our culture is a summer school. We cannot mourn our mighty dead without Carnegie hall and forty vice-presidents. We remember our poets with trustees, and the immortality of a genius is watched by a standing committee. Charity is an Association. Theology is a set of resolutions. Religion is an endeavour to be numerous and communicative. We awe the impenitent with crowds, convert the world with boards, and save the lost with delegates; and how Jesus of Nazareth could have done so great a work without being on a committee is beyond our ken. What Socrates and Solomon would have come to if they had only had the advantage of conventions it would be hard to say; but in these days, when the excursion train is applied to wisdom; when, having little enough, we try to make it more by pulling it about; when secretaries urge us, treasurers dun us, programs unfold out of every mail--where is the man who, guileless-eyed, can look in his brother's face; can declare upon his honour that he has never been a delegate, never belonged to anything, never been nominated, elected, imposed on, in his life? Everything convenes, revolves, petitions, adjourns. Nothing stays adjourned. We have reports that think for us, committees that do right for us, and platforms that spread their wooden lengths over all the things we love, until there is hardly an inch of the dear old earth to stand on, where, fresh and sweet and from day to day, we can live our lives ourselves, pick the flowers, look at the stars, guess at God, garner our grain, and die. Every new and fresh human being that comes upon the earth is manufactured into a coward or crowded into a machine as soon as we get at him. We have already come to the point where we do not expect to interest anybody in anything without a constitution. And the Eugenic Society is busy now on by-laws for falling in love. What this means with regard to the typical modern man is, not that he does not think, but that it takes ten thousand men to make him think. He has a crowd soul, a crowd creed. Charged with convictions, galvanized from one convention to another, he contrives to live, and with a sense of multitude, applause, and cheers he warms his thoughts. When they have been warmed enough he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and thither on the crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch on the world, and pries on it, if perchance it may be stirred to something. To the bigotry of the man who knows because he speaks for himself has been added a new bigotry on the earth--the bigotry of the man who speaks for the nation; who, with a more colossal prejudice than he had before, returns from a mass meeting of himself, and, with the effrontery that only a crowd can give, backs his opinions with forty states, and walks the streets of his native town in the uniform of all humanity. This is a kind of fool that has never been possible until these latter days. Only a very great many people, all of them working on him at once, and all of them watching every one else working at once, can produce this kind. Indeed, the crowd habit has become so strong upon us, has so mastered the mood of the hour, that even you and I, gentle reader, have found ourselves for one brief moment, perhaps, in a certain sheepish feeling at being caught in a small audience. Being caught in a small audience at a lecture is no insignificant experience. You will see people looking furtively about, counting one another. You will make comparisons. You will recall the self-congratulatory air of the last large audience you had the honour to belong to, sitting in the same seats, buzzing confidently to itself before the lecture began. The hush of disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the mutual shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through the room, every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired to warm through--all these are signs of the times. People look at the empty chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair there were some great personality saying to each and all of us: "Why are you here? Did you not make a mistake? Are you not ashamed to be a party to--to--as small a crowd as this?" Thus do we sit, poor mortals, doing obeisance to Empty Chairs--we who are to be lectured to--until the poor lecturer who is to lecture to us comes in, and the struggle with the Chairs begins. When we turn to education as it stands to-day, the same self-satisfied, inflexible smile of the crowd is upon it all. We see little but the massing of machinery, the crowding together of numbers of teachers and numbers of courses and numbers of students, and the practical total submergence of personality, except by accident, in all educated life. The infinite value of the individual, the innumerable consequences of one single great teaching man, penetrating every pupil who knows him, becoming a part of the universe, a part of the fibre of thought and existence to every pupil who knows him--this is a thing that belongs to the past and to the inevitable future. With all our great institutions, the crowds of men who teach in them, the crowds of men who learn in them, we are still unable to produce out of all the men they graduate enough college presidents to go around. The fact that at almost any given time there may be seen, in this American land of ours, half a score of colleges standing and waiting, wondering if they will ever find a president again, is the climax of what the universities have failed to do. The university will be justified only when a man with a university in him, a whole campus in his soul, comes out of it, to preside over it, and the soul that has room for more than one chair in it comes out of it to teach in it. When we turn from education to journalism, the pressure of the crowd is still more in evidence. To have the largest circulation is to have the most advertising, and to have the most advertising means to have the most money, and to have the most money means to be able to buy the most ability, and to have the most ability means to keep all that one gains and get more. The degradation of many of our great journals in the last twenty years is but the inevitable carrying out of the syndicate method in letters--a mass of contributors, a mass of subscribers, and a mass of advertisers. So long as it gives itself over to the circulation idea, the worse a newspaper is, the more logical it is. There may be a certain point where it is bound to stop some time, because there will not be enough bad people who are bad enough to go around; but we have not come to it yet, and in the meantime about everything that can be thought of is being printed to make bad people. If it be asserted that there are not enough bad people to go around even now, it may be added that there are plenty of good people to take their places as fast as they fail to be bad enough, and that the good people who take the bad papers to find fault with them are the ones who make such papers possible. The result of the crowd principle is the inevitable result. Our journals have fallen off as a matter of course, not only in moral ideals (which everybody realizes), but in brain force, power of expression, imagination, and foresight--the things that give distinction and results to utterance and that make a journal worth while. The editorial page has been practically abandoned by most journals, because most journals have been abandoned by their editors: they have become printed counting-rooms. With all their greatness, their crowds of writers, and masses of readers, and piles of cablegrams, they are not able to produce the kind of man who is able to say a thing the kind of way that will make everybody stop and listen to him, cablegrams and all. Horace Greeley and Samuel Bowles and Charles A. Dana have passed from the press, and the march of the crowd through the miles of their columns every day is trampling on their graves. The newspaper is the mass machine, the crowd thinker. To and fro, from week to week and from year to year, its flaming headlines sway, now hither and now thither, where the greatest numbers go, or the best guess of where they are going to go; and Personality, creative, triumphant, masterful, imperious Personality--is it not at an end? It were a dazzling sight, perhaps, to gaze at night upon a huge building, thinking with telegraph under the wide sky around the world, the hurrying of its hundred pens upon the desks, and the trembling of its floors with the mighty coming of a Day out of the grip of the press; but even this huge bewildering pile of power, this aggregation, this corporation of forces, machines of souls, glittering down the Night--does any one suppose It stands by Itself, that It is its own master, that It can do its own will in the world? In all its splendour It stands, weaving the thoughts of the world in the dark; but that very night, that very moment, It lies in the power of a little ticking-thing behind its doors. It belongs to that legislature of information and telegraph, that owner of what happens in a day, called the Associated Press. If the One who called Himself a man and a God had not been born in a crowd, if he had not loved and grappled with it, and been crucified and worshipped by it, He might have been a Redeemer for the silent, stately, ancient world that was before He came, but He would have failed to be a Redeemer for this modern world--a world where the main inspiration and the main discouragement is the crowd, where every great problem and every great hope is one that deals with crowds. It is a world where, from the first day a man looks forth to move, he finds his feet and hands held by crowds. The sun rises over crowds for him, and sets over crowds; and having presumed to be born, when he presumes to die at last, in a crowd of graves he is left not even alone with God. Ten human lives deep they have them--the graves in Paris; and whether men live their lives piled upon other men's lives, in blocks in cities or in the apparent loneliness of town or country what they shall do or shall not do, or shall have or shall not have--is it not determined by crowds, by the movement of crowds? The farmer is lonely enough, one would say, as he rests by his fire in the plains, his barns bursting with wheat; but the murmur of the telegraph almost any moment is the voice of the crowd to him, thousands of miles away, shouting in the Stock Exchange: "You shall not sell your wheat! Let it lie! Let it rot in your barns!" And yet, if a man were to go around the earth with a surveyor's chain, there would seem to be plenty of room for all who are born upon it. The fact that there are enough square miles of the planet for every human being on it to have several square miles to himself does not prove that a man can avoid the crowd--that it is not a crowded world. If what a man could be were determined by the square mile, it would indeed be a gentle and graceful earth to live on. But an acre of Nowhere satisfies no one; and how many square miles does a man want to be a nobody in? He can do it better in a crowd, where every one else is doing it. In the ancient world, when a human being found something in the wrong place and wanted to put it where it belonged, he found himself face to face with a few men. He found he had to deal with these few men. To-day, if he wants anything put where it belongs, he finds himself face to face with a crowd. He finds that he has to deal with a crowd. The world has telephones and newspapers now, and it has railroads; and if a man proposes to do a certain thing in it, the telephones tell the few, and the newspapers tell the crowd, and the crowd gets on to the railroad; and before he rises from his sleep, behold the crowd in his front yard; and if he can get as far as his own front gate in the thing he is going for, he must be--either a statesman? a hero? or a great genius? None of these. Let him be a corporation--of ideas or of dollars; let him be some complex, solid, crowded thing, would he do anything for himself, or for anybody else, or for everybody else, in a world too crowded to tell the truth without breaking something, or to find room for it, when it is told, without breaking something. This is the Crowd's World. * * * * * What I have written I have written. I have been sitting and reading it. It is a mood. But there is an implacable truth in it, I believe, that must be gotten out and used. As I have been reading I have looked up. I see the quiet little mountain through my window standing out there in the sun. It looks around the world as if nothing had happened; and the bobolinks out in the great meadow are all flying and singing in the same breath and rowing through the air, thousands of them, miles of them. They do not stop a minute. A moment ago while I was writing I heard the Child outside on the piazza, four years old, going by my window back and forth, listening to the crunch of her new shoes as if it were the music of the spheres. Why should not I do as well? I thought. The Child is merely seeing her shoes as they are with as many senses and as many thoughts and desires at once as she can muster, and with all her might. What if I were to see the world like the Child? Yesterday I went to Robert's Meadow. I saw three small city boys, with their splendid shining rubber boots and their beautiful bamboo poles. They were on their way home. They had only the one trout between them, and that had been fondled, examined, and poked over and bragged about until it was fairly stiff and brown with those boys--looked as if it had been stolen out of a dried-herring box. They put it reverently back, when I saw it, into their big basket. I smiled a little as I walked on and thought how they felt about it. Then suddenly it was as if I had forgotten something. I turned and looked back; saw those three boys--a little retinue to that solitary fish--trudging down the road in the yellow sun. And I stood there and wanted to be in it! Then I saw them going round the bend in the road thirty years away. I still want to be one of those boys. And I am going to try. Perhaps, Heaven helping me, I will yet grow up to them! I know that the way those three boys felt about the fish--the way they folded it around with something, the way they made the most of it, is the way to feel about the world. I side with the three boys. I am ready to admit that as regards technical and comparatively unimportant details or as regards perspective on the fish the boys may not have been right. It is possible that they had not taken a point of view, measured in inches or volts or foot-pounds, that was right and could last forever; but I know that the spirit of their point of view was right--the spirit that hovered around the three boys and around the fish that day was right and could last forever. It is the spirit in which the world was made, and the spirit in which new worlds in all ages, and even before our eyes by Boys and Girls and--God, are being made. It is only the boys and the girls (all sizes) who know about worlds. And it is only boys and girls who are right. I heard a robin in the apple tree this morning out in the rain singing, _"I believe! I believe!"_ * * * * * At the same time, I am glad that I have known and faced, and that I shall have to know and face, the Crowd Fear. I know in some dogged, submerged, and speechless way that it is not a true fear. And yet I want to move along the sheer edge of it all my life. I want it. I want all men to have it, and to keep having it, and to keep conquering it. I have seen that no man who has not felt it, who does not know this huge numbing, numberless fear before the crowd, and who may not know it again almost any moment, will ever be able to lead the crowd, glory in it, die for it, or help it. Nor will any man who has not defied it, and lifted his soul up naked and alone before it and cried to God, ever interpret the crowd or express the will of the crowd, or hew out of earth and heaven what the crowd wants. We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel--the great crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those who live and struggle with crowds. We want to face, and face grimly, implacably, the main facts, the main emotions men are having to-day. And the main emotion men are having to-day about our modern world is that it is a crowded world, that in the nature of the case its civilization is a crowd civilization. Every other important thing for this present age to know must be worked out from this one. It is the main thing with which our religion has to deal, the thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts will be obliged to express. Any man who makes the attempt to consider or interpret anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance. * * * * * After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine fear. Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds. As the crowds grow the machines grow; grasping at the little strip of sky over us, at the little patch of ground beneath our feet, they swing out before us and beckon daily to us new hells and new heavens in our eyes. CHAPTER III THE MACHINE SCARE I have had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks to pass by an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London. Most of the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by long-vanished hands. As I stand and watch them, with the yews and cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and of joy, of devotion, of the very singing of the dead and of those who loved them. When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and new addition to the churchyard, and look about me at the stones, I find myself suddenly in quite a new company. So far as one could observe, looking at the gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much. Of course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim, capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness and reverence before their dead as the others were--but the lines on the stones give no sign. One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them; one knows it would not be interesting, or really whisper to one the strange, happy, human things of another world--even of this world, that make the old tombstones such good company and so friendly to us. One gives a glance at the stone and passes on. It was made by machinery, apparently; a machine might have designed it, a machine might have died and been buried under it. One looks beyond it at all the others like it--all the glib, competent-looking white stones. Were the silenced people all machines under them, all mechanical, all made to a pattern like their stones, like these strangely hard, brief tombstones standing here at their heads, summing up their lives before us curtly, heartlessly, on this gentle old hillside? I wondered. I looked back to the old eloquent cemetery that almost seemed to be breathing things, and looked once more at the new. And as I stood and thought, they seemed to me to be two worlds--one the world the people all about me are always saying sadly is going by, and the other--well, the one we will have to have. * * * * * As I look off from the hilltop at the great sloping countryside about me, which stretches miles and miles, with its green fields, and bushy treetops, its red roofs, its banners of steam from twenty railways, its huge, grim, furious chimneys, its still, sleepy steeples, I also see two worlds, the same two worlds over again that I saw in the churchyard, except that they are all jumbled together--the complacent, capable, cut-out, homeless-looking houses, the little snuggled-down old ones with their happy trees about them and trails of cooking smoke. I see the same two worlds standing and facing each other before me whichever way I turn. And when I slip out of the churchyard from those two little separate worlds of the dead, and move slowly down the long bustling village street, and look into the faces of the living, the same two worlds that were in the churchyard and on the hills seem to look at me out of the faces of the living too. The faces go hurrying past me, worlds apart. Most people, I imagine, who read these pages must have noticed the people's faces in the streets nowadays--how they seem to have come out of separate worlds into the street a moment, and hurry past, and seem to be going back in a moment more to separate worlds. There is hardly even a village footway left anywhere to-day where one cannot see these two worlds, or the spirit of these two worlds, flitting past one through the streets in people's faces, and nightly before our eyes, struggling with each other to possess, to swallow away into itself human souls, to master the fate of man upon the earth. One of these is the World of the Hand-made; the other is the Machine-made World. * * * * * As day by day I watch these two worlds with all their people in them flocking past me, I have come to have certain momentary but recurrent resentments and attractions, unaccountable strong emotions; and when I try afterward to rationalize my emotions, as a man should, and give an account of them to myself, and get them ready to use and face my age with, and make myself strong and fit to live in an age, I find myself with a great task before me. And yet one must do it; one cannot live in an age strongly and fitly if one would rather be living in some other age, or if it is an age with two worlds in it and one cannot make up one's mind which is the world one wants and settle down quietly and live in it. Then a strange thing happens, and always happens the moment I begin to try to decide which of the two--the Hand-made World or the Machine-made World--I will choose. I find that in an odd, confused, groping, obstinate way I am bound to choose them both. In spite of all its ugly ways--a kind of vast indifference it has to me, to everybody, its magnificent heartlessness--I find I have come to take in the Machine-made World a kind of boundless, half-secret pride and joy, for a terrible and strange beauty there is in it. And then, too, even if I wanted to give it up, I could not: neither I nor any man, nor all the world combined, could unthink to-day a hundred years, fold up a hundred thousand miles of railway, tuck modern life all neatly up again in a little, old, snug, safe, lovable Hand-made World. There must be some way out, some connecting link between the Hand-made and the Machine-made. We have merely lost it for a moment. Which way shall we turn? And so at last to the little Thing through which the whole world whispers to me on my desk, to the mighty railways that beckon past my door, to the airships that cannot be stilled, and to the rolling mills that will not be silenced, I turn at last! I turn to the Machines Themselves. Half-singing and half-cursing, I have faced them. There is some way in which they can answer and can be made to answer--can be made to give me and the men about me the kind of world we want. I try to analyze it and think it out. What is the thing, the real thing in the Hand-made World, that fills me with pride and joy, and that I cannot and will not give up? Is not the real thing that is in it something that can be or might be freed from it, exhaled from it, something that might be in some new form saved, made an atmosphere or a spirit and passed on? And what is it in the new Machine-made World which, in spite of the splendid joy, a rough new, wild religion there is in it, keeps daily filling me as I go past machines with this contradictory obstinate dread of them? After a time I have made a little cleared space in my mind, a little breathing room. It has come to me from thinking that what is beautiful in the Hand-made World perhaps is not these particular Hand-made things themselves at which I so delight, but the Hand-made spirit of the men who made them which the men put into the things. And perhaps what is full of death and fear in the Machine-made World is not the machines themselves, but the Machine-made spirit in which the men who run the machines have made the machines work. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is pervasive, eternal. Perhaps it can escape like a spirit, and can live where it will live, and do what it will do, like a spirit, and possess the body that it wills to possess. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is still living around me to-day, and is not only living, but is living in a more unspeakable, unbounded body than any spirit has ever lived in before, and is to-day before our eyes, laying its huge iron fingers around our little earth, and holding the oceans in its hand, and brushing away mountains with a breath, until we have Man at last playing all night through the sky, with visions and airships and telescopes. His very words walk on the air with soft and unseen feet. It is the Hand-made spirit that creates machines. The machines themselves are still the mighty children of the men who move and work in the Hand-made spirit; and the men who glory in them, the men who bring them forth, who think them out, and who create them, and who do the great and mighty things with them, are still the Hand-made men. * * * * * This leads us up to the question we are all asking ourselves every day. "How can a machine-made world be run in the spirit of a hand-made world?" The particular form in which the question has been put, which is taken from "Inspired Millionaires" is as follows: "The idea that there is something in a machine simply as a machine which makes it inherently unspiritual is based upon the experience of the world; but it is, after all, a rather amateur and juvenile world with machines as yet. Its ideas are in their first stages, and are based for the most part upon the world's experience with second-rate men, working in second-rate factories--men who have been bullied, and could be bullied, by the machines they worked with into being machines themselves. No one would think of denying that men who let machines get the better of them, either in their minds or their bodies, in any walk of life, grow unspiritual and mechanical. But it does not take a machine to make a machine out of a man. Anything will do it if the man will let it. Even the farmer who is out under the great free dome of heaven, and working in wonder every day of his life, grows like a clod if he buries his soul alive in the soil. But farming has been tried many thousands of years, and the other kind of farmer is known by everybody--the farmer who is master over the soil; who, instead of becoming an expression of the soil himself, makes the soil express him. The next thing that is going to happen is that every one is going to know the other kind of mechanic. It is cheerfully admitted that the kind of mechanic we largely have now, who allows himself to be a watcher of a machine, a turner-of-something for forty years, can hardly be classed as vegetable life. He is not even organic matter except in a very small part of himself. "But it is not the mechanical machine which makes the man unspiritual. It is the mechanical man beside the machine. A master at a piano (which is a machine) makes it a spiritual thing; and a master at a printing-press, like William Morris, makes it a free and artistic and self-expressive thing." I spent a day a little while ago in walking through a factory. I went past miles of machines--great glass roofs of sunshine over them--and looked in the faces of thousands of men. As I went through the machines I kept looking to and fro between the machines and the men who stood beside them, and sometimes I came back and looked again at the machines and the men beside them; and every machine, or nearly every machine, I saw (any one could see it in that factory) was making a man of somebody. One could see the spirit of the man who invented the machine, and the spirit of the man who worked with it, and the spirit of the man who owned it and who placed it there with the man, all softly, powerfully running together. There were exceptions, and every now and then one came, of course, upon the man who seemed to be simply another and somewhat different contrivance or attachment to his machine--some part that had been left over and thought of last, and had not been done as well as the others; but the factory, taken as a whole, from the manager's offices and the great counting-room, and from the tall chimneys to the dump, seemed to me to have something fresh and human and unwonted about it. It seemed to be a factory that had a look, a look of its own. It was like a vast countenance. It had features, an expression. It had an air--well, one must say it, of course, if one is driven to it: the factory had a soul, and was humming it. Any one could have seen why by going into his office and talking a little while with the owner, or by even not talking to him--by seeing him look up from his desk. After walking through several miles of his personality, and up and down and down and up the corridors of his mind, one did not really need to meet him except as a matter of form and as a finishing touch. One had been visiting with him all along: to look in his face was merely to sum it up, to see it all, the whole place, over again in one look. One did not need to be surprised; one might have known what such a man would be like--that such a factory could only be conceived and wrought by a man of genius, a kind of lighted-up man. A man who had put not only skylights in his buildings, but skylights in his men, would have to have a skylight in himself (a skylight with a motor attachment, of course). If one were to try to think in nature or in art of something that would be like him--well, some kind of transcendental engine, I should say, running softly, smoothly outdoors in a great sunshine, would have given one a good idea of him. But, however this may be, it certainly would have been quite impossible to go through his factory and ever say again that machines do not and could not have souls, or at least over-souls, and that men who worked with machines did not and could not have souls as fast as they were allowed to. A few days later I went through another factory, and I came out weary and spent at night, feeling as unreasonable and almost as hateful about machines, and as discouraged about the people who had to work with them as John Ruskin did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney first lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great cities into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted nations, and began making for us--all around us, before our eyes, as though in a kind of jeer at us, and at our queer, pretty, helpless little religions--the hell we had ceased to believe in. The hell is here, and is going to be here apparently as long as may be necessary for us to see it and believe in it once more. If a hell on our own premises, shut down hard over our lives here and now, is what is necessary to make us religious and human once more, if we are reduced to it, and if having a hard, literal hell--one of our own--is our only way of seeing things, of fighting our way through to the truth, and of getting once more decisive, manful, commanding ideas of good and evil, I for one can only be glad we have Pittsburgs and Sheffields to hurry us along and soon have it over with. But while, like Ruskin, any one can look about the machines and see hell, he can see hell to-day, unlike Ruskin, with heaven lined up close beside it. The machines have come to have souls. The machines we can see all about us have taken sides. We can all of us see the machines about us to-day like vast looms, weaving in and weaving out the fate of the world, the fate of the churches, the fate of the women and the little children, and the very fate of God; and everything about us we can see turning at last on what we are doing with the machines that are about us, and what we are letting our machines do with us. * * * * * It has cleared my mind, and at least helped me to live side by side with machines better from day to day, to consider what these two souls or spirits in the machines are, and what they are doing and likely to do. If one knows them and one sees them, and sees how they are working, it is easier to take sides and join in and help. It would seem to me that there are two spirits in machinery--the spirit of weariness, weakness, of inventing ways of getting out of work; and there is the spirit in the machines, too, of moving mountains, conquering the sea and air, of working harder and lifting one's work over to more heroic, to more splendid and difficult, and almost impossible things. It is these two spirits that are fighting for the possession and control of our machine civilization. I watch the machines and the men beside them and see which side they are on. The labourer who is doing as little work as he dares for his wages and the capitalist who is giving as little service as he dares for his money are on the one side (the vast, lazy, mean majority of employers and employees), and there may be seen standing on the other side against them, battling for our world, another small but mighty group made up of the labourer who loves his work more than his wages, and the capitalist who loves the thing he makes more than the profit. In other words, the fate of our modern civilization, with all its marvellous machines on it, its art galleries and its churches, is all hanging to-day on the battle between the spirit of achievement, the spirit of creating things, and the spirit of weariness or the spirit of thinking of ways of getting out of things. It does not take very long to see which one prefers when one considers the problem of living in one world or the other. If we are to take our choice between living in a world run by tired men and a world run by inspired ones, most of us will have little difficulty in deciding which we would prefer, and which one we are bound to have. I have been moved to come forward with the idea of inspired employers--or, as I have called it, "Inspired Millionaires"--because it would seem to me inspired employers are the very least we can ask for; for certainly if even our employers cannot be inspired or rested and strong, we cannot expect their overworked workmen to be. There is no hope for us but to write our books and to live our lives in such a way as to help put the world in the hands of the Strong, and to help keep its institutions and customs out of the hands of the overworked. Overworked mechanical employers and overworked labourers are the last men to solve the problem of the overworked, except in a small, tired, mean, resentful, temporary way. And so, as I look about me and watch the machines and the men who are working with the machines, or owning them, it is on this principle that I find myself taking sides. I will not live, if I can help it, in a world that is conceived and arranged and managed by tired and overworked and mechanical men. Have I not seen tired, mechanical men, whole generations of them, vast mobs of them, the men who have let the machines mow down their souls? The first thing I have come to ask of a man, if he is to be at the head of a machine--whether it is a machine called a factory, or a machine called a Government or a city, or a machine called a nation--is, _Is he tired?_ I have cast my lot once for all--and as it seems to me, too, the lot of the world--with those men who are rested, with the surplus men, the men who want to work more not less, who are still and gentle and strong in their hearts, steady in their imaginations, great men--men who are not driven to being self-centred or driven to being class-centred, who can be world-centred and inspired. * * * * * When one has made this decision, that one will work for a world in control of men who are strong, one suddenly is brought face to face with a fact in our machine civilization which probably is quite new, and which the spirit of man has never had to face in any age before. For the first time in the history of the world, machinery has made it possible for the world to get into the hands of the weak. The Gun began it--the gun in a coward's hands may side with the weak, and the machine in the hands of the weak may temporarily give the world a list or a trend, and leave it leaning on the wrong side. The Trust, for instance, which is really an extremely valuable invention, and perhaps, on the whole, the most important machine of modern times when it is used to defend the rights of the people, is a very different thing when it is pointed at them. We have to-day, not unnaturally, the spectacle of perhaps nine people out of ten getting up and saying in chorus all through the world that Trusts ought to be abolished; and yet it cannot honestly be said that there is really anything about the trust-machine--any more than any other machine--that is inherently wicked, or mechanical and heartless. Our real objection to the trust-machines is not to the machines themselves, but to the fact that they are, or happen to be (judging each Trust by itself), in the hands of the weak and of the tired--of men, that is, who have no spirit, no imagination about people; mechanical-minded men, who, at least in the past, have taken the easiest and laziest course in business--that of making all the money they can. The moment we see the Trusts in the hands of the strong men, the men who are unwilling to slump back into mere money-making, and who face daily with hardihood and with joy the feat of weaving into business several strands of value at once, making things and making money and making men together, the Trust will become a vast machine of human happiness, lifting up and pulling on the world for all of us day and night. If our labouring men to-day are to be got out from under the machines, we can only bring it to pass by doing everything we can in directors' meetings or in labor unions or as buyers or as journalists--whatever we may be--to keep the trust-machines in this world out of the hands of the tired, weak, and mechanical-minded men. And the things that have been happening to the trust-machines, or are about to happen to them, have happened and are beginning to happen before our eyes to the machines themselves. The machines of flame and iron wheels and men in monstrous factories which the philosophers and the poets and the very preachers have doomed our world with are passing through the same evolution as the trust-machines, and shall be seen at last through the dim struggle yielding themselves, bending their iron wills to the same indomitable human spirit, the same slow, stern, implacable will of the soul of man. They shall be inspired machines. Now for a long time we have seen (for the most part) the weak and mechanical-minded employer, the man who takes the line of least resistance in business, on every hand about us, making his employees mechanical-minded. The men have not been able to work without machines to work with, and as they have been obliged to come to him to get the machines, he has adopted the policy of letting himself fall into the weakest and easiest way of keeping his men under his own control. He takes the machines the men have come to him to get, and turns them back against them, points them at their lives, stops their minds with them, their intelligence and manhood, the very hope and religion with which they live; and of course, when men have had machines pointed at them long enough, one sees them on every hand being mowed down in rows into machines themselves--as deadly and as hopeless to make a civilization out of, or a nation out of, or to give votes to, or to have for fathers as machines would be, as iron or leather or wood. In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing--partly by competition and partly by combination and by experience--employers who are not mechanical-minded, who have spirit themselves, and who believe in it and can use it in others; who find ways of adjusting the hours, the wages, and the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most valuable in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly good-will, can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as the most important part of the working equipment of the factory. These employers have found (by believing it long enough to try it) that live men can do better and more marketable work than dead ones. If the great slow-moving majority of our modern machine employers were not mechanical-minded, it would not be necessary to prove to them categorically the little platitude (which even people who have observed cab-horses know) that the living is more valuable than the half-dead, and that live men can do better and more marketable work than half-dead ones. But, of course, if they are not convinced by imagination or by arguments or by figures, they may have to be convinced by losing their business; for the most spirited employers, those who take the more difficult and creative course of making money and men together, are sure to be the employers who will get and keep the most spirited men, and are sure to crowd out of the market in their own special line employers who can only get and keep mechanical-minded ones. * * * * * It would be hard to overstate the importance of the battle now going on among the trades unions between the spirited labourers and the tired ones, and among the manufacturers between the inspired employers and the mechanical-minded ones. For the time being, at least, it is the inspired employers who have most power to change the conditions of labour and to free the mechanical-minded slaves. It is they who are standing to-day on the great strategical ground of our time. They hold the pass of human life. People cannot expect to be inspired in crowds. Crowds are too unwieldy and too inconvenient to act quickly. The people can only concentrate their energies on getting and demanding inspired employers, on insisting that the men who for eight or nine hours a day are pouring in with their wages their thoughts, and their motives, the very hope with which they live, into their lives, shall be the champions of the people, shall represent them and act for them, as they are not placed to act for themselves, and with more imagination than they can yet expect to have for themselves. If our labouring men of to-day are going to struggle out from under the machines, they can only do it by doing all that they can in labour unions and in the press and at the polls to keep the machines in this world out of the hands of tired and mechanical-minded owners. But probably the more immediate rescue from the evil or mechanicalness in machines is not going to come from the employers on the one hand or the employees on the other, but from having the employees in the Trades Unions and the employers in the directors' meetings combining together to keep in subordinate places where they cannot hurt others all men, whether directors or employees, who do not work harder than they have to, and who have not the brains to do their work for something besides money. The men who are like this will of course be pitied and duly considered, but they will be kept where they will not have power to control other men, or where by force of position or by mere majority they will be able to bully other men to work as mechanically as they do. Workmen who do not want to become machines can only better conditions by combination with so-called inspired employers--employers who work harder than they have to, who dote on the great human difficulties of work, who choose not the easiest but the most perfect way of doing things, who are never mechanical themselves, and will not let their men be if they can help it. I have liked to call these employers inspired millionaires. I would rather have the machine owner or employer a millionaire, because the more machines an inspired employer can own, the more he can buy and get away from the uninspired ones, the sooner will the right of labour and the will of the people be accomplished. When the machines are in the hands of inspired and strong and spirited men--men of real competence or genius for business, the machines will be seen on every hand around us as the engines of war against evil, against slavery, the whirling weapons of the Spirit. Even now, in dreams have I stood and watched them--the will of the people like a flail in their mighty hands--this vast army of machines--go thundering past, driving the uninspired and mechanical off the face of the earth. CHAPTER IV THE STRIKE--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS THINK When I was arranging to slip over from New York and get something I very much wanted in England last spring, I found myself held up suddenly in all my plans because some men on the docks had decided that there was something that they wanted too. They decided that I and thousands of other people in New York would have to wait over on the shores of America until they got it. After postponing my plans until things had settled down, I took passage, and in due time found myself standing on English soil, only to be informed that, while I might be allowed perhaps at least to stand on English soil, that was really as much as I could expect. I could not go anywhere because a number of men on the railways had decided that there was something they wanted and that I would have to wait till they got it. I could go down and look at the silent, cold locomotives on the rails, and I could be as wistful and hopeful as I liked about getting up to London, but these men had decided that there was something that they wanted and I must wait. I could not think of anything I had ever done to these men, and what had Liverpool and London done to them? After I was duly settled in London, and had begun to get into its little ways, and was busily driving about and attending to my business as I had planned, 6,000 more men suddenly wanted something, brought me up to a full stop one rainy day, and said that they had decided that if I wanted to ride I would have to walk, or that I would have to poke dismally about in a 'bus, or worm my way through under the ground. As I understood it, there was something that they wanted and something that they were going to get; and while of course in a way, they recognized that there might be something that I wanted too, I would have to wait till they got theirs. I could not think of anything I had ever done to them, nor could I see what the thousands of other good people in London that I saw walking and puddling about, or watched waiting twenty minutes or so with long, hopeful, dogged whistles for cabs, had done to them. A few days more, and my morning paper tells me suddenly of some more men who wanted something--this time up in Lancashire. They had decided that they wouldn't let some two or three hundred thousand other men go to their work until they got it. They hushed cities to have their own way. Day by day I watched them throwing the silence of the cities in their employers' faces, closing shops, closing up railroads, telling the world it must pay more for the clothes on its back, and all because--a certain Mr. and Mrs. Riley of Accrington, North Lancashire did not like or did not think that they liked, the North Lancashire Trades Union. (The general idea seemed to be to have all the others join in, everywhere--fifty-four million spindles, and four hundred and forty thousand looms--and wait and keep perfectly still until Mr. and Mrs. Riley could make up their minds.) And now this present week, morning after morning I take up my paper and read that 500,000 miners want something. I look in my fire dubiously day by day. I may have to go home to America in a few weeks to get warm. Of course it is only fair to say at the outset that this little series of impressions, or sketches, as one may say, of Civilization as I have seen it since arriving in England are of such a nature that I need not have come over to England to observe them. I would be the last to deny that the same conveniences for being disagreeable and for getting in the way and for making a general muss of Life can be offered almost any time in my own hopeful and blundering country. What more immediately concerns me in these things is that, having happened, there can be no doubt that they have some valuable and worthy meaning for me and for other people that I ought to get out of them. One cannot stand by and see a great civilization like our English-speaking civilization, with its ocean liners, cathedrals, and aeroplanes, being undignified and inefficient before one's eyes and even a little ridiculous, without trying to see if it does not serve some purpose. There must be something beyond, something further and deeper, something newborn about it, which shall be worth our while. Strikes seem to be common people's way of thinking things out. If they had more imagination, they would know what they were going to think beforehand, without so much trouble perhaps; but so long as they have not, and so long as it is really true perhaps that all these millions of levers and wheels and engines will have to be stopped, so that the rich mechanical-minded people who own them and the poor mechanical-minded people who work with them can think better, we will have to be glad at least that they are thinking, and we will have to hope that they are thinking fast, and will soon have it over with. In the meantime, while they are thinking, we can think too. It is never fair to lump people together, and there are always exceptions and special reasons to consider; but, speaking roughly, it is fair to lay it down as a general principle that it is apt to be the more common kind of employers and employees who find it difficult to think, and who need strikes to think with. When we see 175,000 weavers striking in Lancashire, and the Trades Unions insisting on the discharge of Non-Union men, and employers being willing to recognize the Unions but being unwilling to be controlled by them, most of us find ourselves taking sides very quickly. We are often amazed to see how quickly we take sides, and what amazes some of us most is our apparent inconsistency. We find ourselves now on the Union side and now on the employer side in the dispute between Capital and Labour. We never know when we take up the morning paper, some of us, which side will be our next; and very often, if we were suddenly asked why, on reading quietly about a new dispute in the morning paper, we had taken promptly one side rather than the other, almost unconsciously, before we knew it we would not perhaps be able to say at once. The other day I became a little alarmed at myself at what looked at first like a kind of moral weakness, and inability to stand still on one side or the other in the contest between Labour and Capital; and I tried to think my way sternly through, and decide why it was my mind seemed to waver from one side to the other, and seemed so inconsistent and inefficient. It seems to me I have just discovered a certain thread of consistency, as I look back over many disputes. As near as I can remember, I find the side that uses force, or that uses the most force, invariably turns me against it. If, as I read, I find that both sides are using force, I find myself against both sides. I find myself wishing, in spite of my dislike of Socialism, that the nation had the power, when a quarrelsome industry turns to the people in the street and stops them in what they are doing, and tells the people in the street that they cannot ride, or that they shall not sleep, or that they cannot eat--when a quarrelsome industry insists on keeping the whole world up all night because it has a Stomach Ache, I feel suddenly that the people ought to be able to take the industry away and put it into such hands that the people in the streets will be protected; into hands that will make the industry behave so that it won't have a stomach ache. An industry with a stomach ache always has it because somebody in it has been over-eating and getting more than their share, and is incompetent and unfit; and obviously it should have its freedom, its privilege of selecting its food, taken away from it until it behaves. Always allowing for exceptions, we may put it down as a general truth that, when we find a cause using force or mere advantage of position, it is because there is incompetence or lack of brains in those who conduct it, and the cure lies, not in more force, but in more brains. One cannot help being angered by force, because one knows that it is not only not a remedy, but is itself the cause of all incompetence and blindness in business. Force merely heaps the incompetence and blindness up, postpones coöperation, defeats the mutual interest which is the very substance of business efficiency in a nation. Force is itself the injury mounting up more and more, which it seeks to cure. The most likely way to prevent industrial trouble would seem to be to have employers and managers and foremen who have a genius for getting men to trust and believe in them. We are getting smoke-consumers, computing machines, and the next contrivance is going to be the employer who has the understanding spirit, and who sees the cash value of human genius, the value in the market of genius for being fair and getting on with people. Arbitration boards are at best (as they themselves would say) stupid and negative things, and though better than nothing, as a rule merely postpone evil or change symptoms. No one can ever really arbitrate for any one else either in industry or marriage except for a moment. The trouble lies deep down inside the people who keep needing arbitration. As long as these people are still there, and as long as incompetent employers or employees are there, there is bound to be trouble. Turning out incompetent employers and incompetent labourers is the only way. We are getting rid of them as rapidly as possible. All business in the last resort turns on brains for being human and understanding people. Business, as people say, is partly business and business is partly economics, but more than anything else, in modern times, business is psychology. Success is the science of being believed in. Incompetent employers and incompetent labourers are already being turned out, and are bound to be turned out implacably more and more, by the competitive nature of modern business. Under present conditions, if we have in each industry one single competent employing firm, with brains for being fair and brains for being far-sighted, and for being thoughtful of others--in short, with brains for being believed in--the control of that industry soon falls into their hands. People who use force instead of brains are second-rate, are out of the spirit of the times, and are going by. And this seems to be the spirit, too, which is to govern the more efficient Labour Unions as well as the more efficient Trusts. If it were possible to collect the names in England and America of the men in each industry where brains were being personally believed in, we would have a list of the leaders of England and America for the next fifty years. Having a soul in business pays, not because it affords a fine motive power, but because it affords a practical and conclusive method of driving the devil out of business. He is being driven out of industry, one industry at a time, by men who get on better without him; and this is going to go on until the ability to do this--to crowd out the devil, to get the devil out of machines and factories, out of the machinery of organization--the power to keep the devil out of things and out of people, is recognized by everybody as the greatest, most subtle, most victorious and universal market-value in the world. The men who can be believed in most will get the most business, and, what is still more important, the men who can make men believe in them most will be able to hire the employees who can be believed in most, and will get a monopoly of the efficiency of the world; and though the men who can be believed in less may be able to continue for a time to do their work and go through all their old motions as well as they can, with all their old lumbering, pathetic machinery of watching each other and suspecting each other and fighting each other humped up on their backs, they can never hope to compete with free-moving, honest men, who deal directly and openly and in a few words for their employees, jobbers, consumers, and the public, without any vast machinery of suspicion to bother with. It is a most curious, local, temporary, back-county idea, the idea that, for sheer industrial economy, for simple cheap conclusive finance, there is anything on earth in business that will take the place of old-fashioned human personal prestige--the prestige of the man who has a genius for being believed in. In a way, perhaps the recent strike among the London cabmen is an instance of what is really the essential issue in every strike. The bottom fact about the taxi chauffeurs, stated simply, was that they did not believe in their employers. They believed that, if the precise figures were known, their employers were getting more than their share. On the other hand, the bottom fact about the employers was that they did not and could not believe that, if the precise figures were known, the cabmen were not getting more than their share. They insisted that the cabmen should publish, or make known, the precise figures of their extras. The cabmen declined to do it, and it made them look for the moment perhaps as if they were wrong. But were they necessarily wrong? Was it really true that they had any more reason to trust their employers than their employers had to trust them? The cabmen might quite honestly and justly have said to the owners: "What we want is an honest, impeccable little dividend-recorder fastened on the back of every owner, as well as on our machines and on us. Then we will publish our extras." The determining and important fact of economics in the last analysis always turns out to be some human fact, some fact about people. It is really true that just now, in the present half-stage of machine-industry, employers should nearly all be compelled to go about in this world with fare-recorders on their backs. Employees too. This would be the logical thing to do; and as it is impracticable, and as every business must have certain elements of secrecy in it in order to be competent, the only alternative is to have in charge men with enough genius for being believed in and for taking measures to be believed in--to keep employees believing in them, in spite of secrecy. Under these conditions, it cannot be long before we will see in every business the men being put forward on both sides who have a genius for being believed in. Managers and superintendents will be put in office everywhere who see the cash value, the economy, of the simple, old-fashioned power in a man of a genius for being believed in; employers with the power of inspiring more and better work from their workmen; Labour men with the power of inspiring employers to believe in them, of inspiring their employers to put up money, stock, or profits on their belief--on the belief that workmen are capable of the highest qualities of manhood: hard work, loyalty, persistence, and faith toward a common end. I have preferred to have this inspired employer a millionaire, because the more capital he has the more men he can employ, and the more rapidly the other kind of millionaire, the blind, old-fashioned butter of Labour, will be driven out of business. Little can be done with one book, but at this special juncture, this psychological moment for copartnership and the spirit of copartnership, when all the world is touched to the quick by great strikes--at a time when one can sit still and almost hear the nations think--there are some of us who hope that the case we are trying to make out for copartnership between Capital and Labour will be of use to those who are trying to do things, and who for the moment find themselves foiled at every point by men who have given up believing in human nature. We wish to put ourselves on record, and to say that we do believe in human nature, and that we believe not only that the inspired employer is going to be evolved by the Crowd, but that the Crowd is going to recognize him and is going to take sides with him, and that the Crowd is going to justify him, make him succeed, is going to make his success its own success. In other words, we believe in heroes, crowds, and goodness; in men of heroic gifts--who are fit and meet to interpret the wills and desires of crowds--who are great men or Crowd-Men, crowds in spirit themselves. I would like to try to express the type of modern man who, as it seems to me, is about to prove himself the real ruler of our modern world, the silent master of what the crowds shall think. It has seemed to me that it is going to be a man of a marked type, and of a particular temperament, to whom we will have to look in our new and crowded world for the crowd-interpreter, or man who touches the imagination of crowds. As our whole labour problem to-day turns on our being able to touch the imagination of Crowds, it may not be uninteresting in the next chapter to consider what a man who can do this will probably be like and the spirit in which he will do it. CHAPTER V THE CROWD-MAN--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS SEE When Wilbur Wright flew around the Statue of Liberty in New York the other day, his doing it was a big event; but a still bigger event, as it seems to some of us, was the way he felt about New York when he did it. All New York could not make him show off. Hundreds of thousands of people on roofs could look up at the sky over New York, for him to go by, all that they liked. He slipped down to Washington without saying anything, on the 3:25 train, to attend to flying as part of the serious business of the world. Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your bright wings in the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for fun, when you are reconstructing civilization, and binding a whole planet together, and wrapping the heavens close down around the earth, and making railroads everywhere out of the air? New York is always a little superficial and funny about itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap its fingers at a man of genius anywhere on this broad world, whisper to him pleasantly, and he will trot promptly up, of course, and do his little turn for it. But not Wilbur Wright. Wilbur Wright would not give two million people an encore, or even come back to bow. As one looked over from Mount Tom one could see all New York black and solid on the tops of its roofs and houses looking up into a great hole of air for him, and Wilbur Wright slipping quietly off down to Washington and leaving them there, a whole great city under the sky, with its heads up! A little experience like this has been what New York has needed for a long time. It takes a scientist to do these things. I wish there were some poet who would do as well. Even a prophet up above New York--or seer of men and of years--glinting his wings in the light, the New York _Sun_ and the _World_ and the _Times_ down below, all their opera-glasses trained on him, and all those little funny reporters running helplessly about, all the people pouring out from Doctor Parkhurst's church to look up.... It would be something. Probably there are very few capitals in the world--Paris, Berlin, or London--that would not be profoundly stirred and possibly much improved by having some man suddenly appear up over them, who would be so interested in what he was doing that he would forget to notice whether anybody was looking--who would be capable of slipping off quietly and leaving an entire city with its heads up, and going on and attending to business. There have been times when we would have been relieved, some of us, if the North Pole could have been discovered in this way and without large audiences tagging. There are some of us who will never cease to regret as long as we live that the North Pole could not have waited a little. We would rather have had Wilbur Wright discover it. One can imagine how he would do it: fly gracefully up to it all by himself, and discover it some pleasant evening, and have it over with, and slip back on his soft wings in the night, and not say anything about it. It is this Wilbur Wright spirit that I would like to dwell on in these pages. It seems to me it is a true modern spirit, the spirit which alone could make our civilization great, and the spirit which alone could make crowds great. It was the crowd that spoiled the way the Pole was discovered--all the millions of people, vast, thoughtless audiences piling in and making a show of it. Many people in America, all the vast crowds reading about it, seemed to feel that they were more important than the Pole; and when Captain Peary came back, vast crowds of these same people paid as much as five dollars apiece for the privilege of being in the same room with him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his attitude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. All the while as he went about the country holding his little exhibits of the tip of the planet we could not help wishing, many of us who were in the Audience, that this man who sat there before us, the man who had the Thing in his hand, who had collected the North Pole, would not notice us, would snub us if need be a little, and would leave these people, these millions of people, with their heads up and go quietly on to the South Pole and collect that. It is because there are thousands of men who understand just how Wilbur Wright felt when he slipped away the other day in New York and left the entire city with its heads up that we have every reason to expect that the crowd is to produce great leaders, and is to become a great crowd, great and humble in spirit before God, before the stars, and the atoms, and the microbes, and before Itself. In the meantime, however, we see all about us in the world countless would-be leaders of the crowd, who would perhaps not quite understand the way Wilbur Wright felt that day when he slipped away from New York and left the entire city with its heads up. Most newspaper men--men who are in the habit of writing for a crowd and regarding a crowd quite respectfully--will have wondered a little why Wilbur Wright could have let such a crowd go by. Most actors and theatrical people would have stayed over a train or so and given one more little performance with all those wistful people on the roof-tops. There are only a very few clergymen in England or America to-day who, with a great audience like that and so many men in it, would ever have thought of slipping off on the 3:25 train in the way Wilbur Wright did. The ministers and the politicians of all countries are still wondering a little--if they ever thought of it--how Wright did it. Most of the other people in the world wonder a little, too, but I imagine that the great inventors of the world who read about it the next morning did not wonder. The true scientists, in this country and in Germany and in France, all understood just how Wilbur Wright felt when he left New York with its heads up. The great artists of the world, in literature, in painting, and architecture; the great railroad builders, the city builders, the nation builders, the great statesmen, the great biologists, and chemists, understood. James J. Hill, with his face toward the Pacific, understood. Alexander Graham Bell, out abroad doing the listening and talking and thinking the thoughts of eighty million people, understood. Marconi, making the ships whisper across the sea, and William G. McAdoo, shooting a hundred and seventy thousand people a day through a hole under the Hudson--understood. And God, when He made the world. And Columbus when he discovered America. And Jesus Christ when He was so happy and so preoccupied over His vision of a new world, over inventing Christianity, that it seemed a very small and incidental thing to die on the Cross--He understood. Wilbur Wright's secret was that he had a vision. His vision was that a human being could be greater and more powerful than the world had ever believed before. Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one of those admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the first still alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the sky. Wilbur Wright made the most ordinary man a genius a minute. He made him wonder softly who he was--and the people all about him--who were they? and what would they think, and what would they do next? The first flash of light on the wings was a thousand years. It was as if almost for a moment he saw at last the whole earth about him. History, churches, factories on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last--its little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air--sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible--out to the Sun.... * * * * * Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few minutes the other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that Wilbur Wright had a new vision in the presence of all those men of something that they could do. He touched the imagination of men about themselves. They were profoundly moved because they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and new size of human being. He raised the standard of impossibility, and built an annex on to the planet while they looked; took a great strip off of space three miles wide and folded it softly on to the planet all the way round before their eyes. For three miles more--three miles farther up above the ground--there was a space where human beings would have to stop saying, "I can't," and "You can't," and "We can't." If people want to say "I can't," and "You can't," they will have to say it farther and farther away from this planet now. Let them try Mars. The modern imagination takes to impossibilities naturally with Wilbur Wright against the horizon. The thing we next cannot believe is the next thing to expect. Nobody would have believed ten years ago that an architect could be invented who would tell a man that his house would cost him thirty thousand dollars, and then hand him back two thousand dollars when he had finished it. But the man had been invented--he invented himself. He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done by if he did it himself--if he had the technical knowledge and the time to do it. Nobody would have believed a few years ago that a railway president, when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several thousand employees 10 per cent., would begin by reducing his own salary 30 per cent., and the salary of all the officials all the way down 15 per cent., or 20 per cent. Nobody would have believed some time ago that an organizing inventor would be evolved who would meet his directors and tell them that, if they would have their work done in their mills in three shifts instead of two, the men would work so much better that it would not cost the Company more than 10 per cent. more to offer the better conditions. But such an organizing inventor has been invented, and has proved his case. Luther Burbank has made a chestnut tree eighteen months old bear chestnuts; and it has always taken from ten to twenty-five years to make a tree furnish its first chestnut before. About the same time that Luther Burbank had succeeded in doing this with chestnuts a similar type of man, who was not particularly interested in chestnuts and wanted to do something with human nature, who believed that human nature could really be made to work, found a certain staple article that everybody needs every day in a state of anarchy in the market. The producers were not making anything on it. The wholesalers dealt in it without a profit, and the retailers sold it without a profit, and merely because the other things they sold were worthless without it. ----, who was the leading wholesale dealer and in the best position to act, pointed out that, if the business was organized and everybody in it would combine with everybody else and make it a monopoly, the price could be made lower, and everybody would make money. Of course this was a platitude. It was also a platitude that human nature was not good enough, and could not be trusted to work properly in a monopoly. ---- then proceeded to invent a monopoly--a kind of monopoly in which human nature could be trusted. He used a very simple device. He began by being trusted himself. Having personally and directly proved that human nature in a monopoly could be trusted by being trusted himself, all he had to do was to capitalize his knowledge of human nature, use the enormous market value of the trust people had in him to gather people about him in the business who had a good practical business genius for being trusted too and for keeping trusted: everybody else was shut out. The letter with which the monopoly was started (after dealing duly with the technical details of the business) ended like this: "... the soundest lines of business--_viz._, fair prices, fair profits, fair division of profits, fair recognition of service, do as you would be done by, money back where it is practicable, one's profit so small as to make competition not worth while, open dealing, and open books." He had invented a monopoly which shared its profits with the people, and which the people trusted. He was a Luther Burbank in money and people instead of chestnuts. He raised the standard of impossibility in people, and invented a new way for human nature to work. CHAPTER VI THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic forms: 1. Imagination about the unseen or intangible--the spiritual--as especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the aeroplane: a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with. 2. Imagination about the future--a new and extraordinary sense of what is going to happen next in the world. 3. Imagination about people. We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler and wider motives. Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree the mastery of the spirit over matter. Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years an organic part of every man's life to-day. The imagination of men about themselves and other people is going to give us a race of men with new motives; or, to put it differently, it is going to give us not only new sizes but new kinds of men. People are going to achieve impossibilities in goodness, and our inventions in human nature are going to keep up with our other inventions. CHAPTER VII IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven. Before that, power had always been dug up, or scraped off the ground. The more power you wanted the more you had to get hold of the ground and dig for it; and the more solid you were, the more heavy, solid things you could get, the more you could pull solid, heavy things round in this world where you wanted them. Franklin turned to the sky, and turned power on from above, and decided that the real and the solid and the substantial in this world was to be pulled about by the Invisible. Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into space, and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. It grieved people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it. The idea that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing--the big, final, and important thing--and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking Up, and looking the other way for power. Very soon afterward Columbus enlarged upon the same idea by starting the world toward very far things, on the ground; and he bored through the skylines, a thousand skylines, and spread the nations upon the sea. Columbus was the typical modern man led by the invisible, the intangible; and on the great waters somewhere between Spain and New York, between the old and the new, Columbus discovered the Future Tense, the centrifugal tense, the tense that sweeps in the unknown, and gathers in, out of space, out of hope, out of faith, the lives of men. The mere fastened-down stable things, the mere actual facts, stopped being the world with Columbus, and the air and the sky began to be swung in, and to be swept through the thoughts and acts of men and of women.... Then miners, mariners, explorers, inventors--the impossible steamship, the railway, the impossible cotton-gin and sewing-machine and reaper, Hoosac tunnels and Atlantic cables. The impossible became one of the habits of modern life. Of course the sky and the air and the unknown and the future had been recognized before, but only a little and in a rather patronizing way. But when a world has made a great, solid continent by following a horizon line, it begins to take things just beyond very seriously. And so our Time has been fulfilled. We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's visions, towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts. * * * * * Not long ago, as I was coming away from New York in the Springfield Express, which was running at fifty-five miles an hour, I saw suddenly some smoke coming up apparently out of a satchel on the floor, belonging to the man in the chair in front of me. I moved the satchel away, and the smoke came up through the carpet. I spoke to the Pullman conductor who was passing through, and in a second the train had stopped, and the great wild roaring Thing had ceased, and we stood in a long, wide, white silence in the fields. We got off the car--some of us--to see what had happened, and to see if there was a hot box on the wheels. We found that the entire underside of the floor of the car was on fire, and what had happened? Nothing except a new impossibility; nothing except that a human being had invented an electrical locomotive so powerful that it was pulling that train fifty-five miles an hour while the brakes on the car were set--twelve brakes all grinding twenty miles on those twelve wheels; and the locomotive paid no more attention to the brakes of that heavy Pullman than it would to a feather or to a small boy, all the way from New York to Stamford, hanging on behind. As I came in I looked again at the train--the long dull train that had been pulled along by the Invisible, by the kingdom of the air and the sky--the long, dull, heavy Train! And the spirit of the far-off sun was in it! In Count Zeppelin's new airship the new social spirit has a symbol, and in the gyroscopic train the inspired millionaire is on a firm foundation. The power of the new kind and new size of capitalist is his power of keeping an equilibrium with the people, and the men of real genius in modern affairs are men who have motor genius and light genius over other men's wills. They are allied to the X-ray and the airship, and gain their pre-eminence by their power of forecast and invention--their power of riding upon the unseen, upon the thoughts of men and the spirit of the time. Even the painters have caught this spirit. The plein air painters are painting the light, and the sculptors are carving shadows and haloes, and we have not an art left which does not lean out into the Invisible. And religion is full of this spirit and theosophy and Christian Science. The playwrights are touched by it; and the action, instead of being all on the stage, is thrown out into the spirit of the audience. The play in a modern theatre is not on the stage but in the stalls. Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, merely use the stage as a kind of magic-lantern or suggestion-centre for the real things that, out behind us in the dark, are happening in the audience. CHAPTER VIII THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE I remember looking over with H.G. Wells one night some time ago a set of pictures or photographs of the future in America, which he had brought home with him. They were largely skyscrapers, big bridges, Niagaras, and things; and I could not help thinking, as I came home that night, how much more Mr. Wells had of the future of America in his own mind than he could possibly buy in his photographs. What funny little films they were after all, how faint and pathetic, how almost tragically dull, those pictures of the future of my country were! H.G. Wells himself, standing in his own doorway, was more like America, and more like the future of America, than the pictures were. The future in America cannot be pictured. The only place it can be seen is in people's faces. Go out into the street, in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Seattle; look eagerly as you go into the faces of the men who pass, and you feel hundreds of years--the next hundred years--like a breath, swept past. America, with all its forty-story buildings, its little Play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the unseen country. It can only as yet be seen in people's eyes. Some days, flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn, like sunshine around me. This feeling America gives one in the streets is the real America. The solidity, the finality, the substantial fact in America, is the daily sense in the streets of the future. And it has seemed to me that this fact--whether one observes it in Americans in America, in Americans in England and in other nations--is what one might call, for lack of a better name, the American temperament in all peoples is the most outstanding typical and important fact with which our modern world and our philosophy about the world have now to reckon. Nothing can be seen as it really is if this amazing pervasive hourly sense of the future is left out of it. All power is rapidly coming to be based on news--news about human nature, and about what is soon to be done by people. This news travels by express in boxes, by newspapers, by telephone, by word of mouth, and by wireless telegraph. Most of the wireless news is not only wireless, but it is in cipher--hence prophets, or men who have great sensitiveness; men whose souls and bodies are films for the future, platinum plates for the lights and shadows of events; men who are world-poets, sensitive to the air-waves and the light-waves of truth, to the faintest vibrations from To-morrow, or from the next hundred years hovering just ahead. As a matter of course, it is already coming to be true that the most practical man to-day is the prophet. In the older days, men used to look back for wisdom, and the practical man was the man who spoke from experience, and they crucified the prophet. But to-day, the practical man is the man who can make the best guess on to-morrow. The cross has gone by; at least, the cross is being pushed farther along. A prophet in business or politics gets a large salary now; he is a recognized force. Being a prophet is getting to be almost smug and respectable. We live so in the future in our modern life, and our rewards are so great for men who can live in the future, that a man who can be a ten-year prophet, or a twenty-five-year prophet, like James J. Hill, is put on a pedestal, or rather is not wasted on a pedestal, and is made President of a railroad. He swings the country as if it were his hat. We see great cities tagging Wilbur Wright, and emperors clinging to the skirts of Count Zeppelin. We only crucify a prophet now if he is a hundred, or two hundred or five hundred years ahead. Even then, we would not be apt to crucify; we would merely not use him much, except the first twenty-five years of him. The theory is no longer tenable that prophets must be necessarily crucified. As a matter of history, most prophets have been crucified by people; but it was not so much because of their prophecy as because their prophecy did not have any first twenty-five years in it. They were crucified because of a blank place or hiatus, not necessarily in their own minds, but at least in other people's. People would have been very glad to have their first twenty-five years' worth if they could have got it. It is this first twenty-five years, or joining-on part, which is most important in prophecy, and which has become our specialty in the Western World. One might say, in a general way, that the idea of having a first twenty-five years' section in truth for a prophet is a modern, an almost American, invention. We are temperamentally a country of the future, and think instinctively in futures; and perhaps it is not too much to say (considering all the faults that go with it for which we are criticized) that we have led the way in futures as a specialty, as a national habit of mind; and though with terrific blunders perhaps have been really the first people _en masse_ to put being a prophet on a practical basis--that is, to supply the first twenty-five years' section, or the next-thing-to-do section to Truth, to put in a kind of coupling between this world and the next. This is what America is for, perhaps--to put in the coupling between this world and the next. In the former days, the strength of a man, or of an estate, or a business, was its stability. In the new world, instead of stability, we have the idea of persistence, and power lies not so much in solid brittle foundation quality as in conductivity. Socially, men can be divided into conductors--men who connect powers--and non-conductors--men who do not; and power lies in persistence, in dogged flexibility, adaptableness, and impressionableness. The set conservative class of people, in three hundred years, are going to be the dreamers, inventors--those who demonstrate their capacity to dream true, and who hit shrewdly upon probabilities and trends and futures; and the power of a man is coming to be the power of observing atmospheres, of being sensitive to the intangible and the unknown. People are more likely to be crucified two thousand years from now for wanting to stay as they are. There used to be the inertia of rest; and now in its place, working reciprocally in a new astonishing equilibrium, we step up calmly on our vast moving sidewalk of civilization and swing into the inertia of motion. The inertia of men, instead of being that of foundations, conventions, customs, facts, sogginess, and heaviness, is getting to be an inertia now toward the future, or the next-thing-to-do. Most of us can prove this by simply looking inward and taking a glimpse of our own consciousness. Let a man draw up before his own mind the contents of his own consciousness (if he has a motor consciousness), and we find that the future in his life looms up, both in its motives and its character, and takes about three quarters of the room of his consciousness; and when it is not looming up, it is woven into everything he does. Even if all the future were for was to help one understand the present and act this immediate moment as one should, nine tenths of the power of seeing a thing as it is, turns out to be one's power of seeing it as it is going to be. In any normal man's life, it is really the future and his sense of the future that make his present what it is. History is losing its monopoly. It is only absorbed in men's minds--in the minds of those who are making more of it--in parts or rather in elements of all its parts. The trouble with history seems to have been, thus far, that people have been under the illusion that history should be taken as a solid. They seem to think it should be taken in bulk. They take it, some of them, a solid hundred years of it or so, and gulp it down. The advantage of prophecy is that it cannot be taken as a solid by people who would take everything so if they could. Prophecy is protected. People have to breathe it, assimilate it, and get it into their circulation and make a solid out of it personally, and do it all themselves. It is this process which is making our modern men spiritual, interpretative, and powerful toward the present and toward the past, and which is giving a body and soul to knowledge, and is making knowledge lively and human, the kind of knowledge (when men get it) that makes things happen. CHAPTER IX THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE I would like to propose, as a basis for the judgment of men and events, and as a basis for forecasting the next men and next events, and arriving at a vision of action, a Theory of the World. Every man has one. Every man one knows can be seen doing his work in this world on a great background, a kind of panorama or stage setting in his mind, made up of history and books, newspapers, people, and experiences, which might be called his Theory of the World. It is his theory of the world which makes him what he is--his personal judgment or personal interpretation of what the world is like, and what works in it, and what does not work. A man's theory as to why people do or do not do wrong is not a theory he might in some brief disinterested moment, possibly at luncheon, take time to discuss. His theory of what is wrong and of what is right, and of how they work, touches the efficiency with which he works intimately and permanently at every point every minute of his business day. If he does not know, in the middle of his business day, what his theory of the world--of human nature--is, let him stop and find out. A man's theory of the world is the skylight or manhole over his work. It becomes his hell or heaven--his day and night. He breathes his theory of the world and breathes his idea of the people in it; and everything he does may be made or may be marred by what, for instance, he thinks in the long-run about what I am saying now on this next page. Whether he is writing for people, or doing business with them over a counter, or launching books at them, everything he does will be steeped in what he believes about what I am saying now--it shall be the colour of the world to him, the sound or timbre of his voice--what he thinks or can make up his mind to think, of what I am saying--on this next page. CHAPTER X A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE If the men who were crucifying Jesus could have been suddenly stopped at the last moment, and if they could have been kept perfectly still for ten minutes and could have thought about it, some of them would have refused to go on with the crucifixion when the ten minutes were over. If they could have been stopped for twenty minutes, there would have been still more of them who would have refused to have gone on with it. They would have stolen away and wondered about The Man in their hearts. There were others who were there who would have needed twenty days of being still and of thinking. There were some who would have had to have twenty years to see what they really wanted, in all the circumstances, to do. People crucified Christ because they were in a hurry. They did what they wanted to do at the moment. So far as we know, there were only two men who did what they would have wished they had done in twenty years: there was the thief on the other cross, who showed The Man he knew who He was; and there was the disciple John, who kept as close as he could. John perhaps was thinking of the past--of all the things that Christ had said to him; and the man on the other cross was thinking what was going to happen next. The other people who had to do with the crucifixion were all thinking about the thing they were doing at the moment and the way they felt about it. But the Man was Thinking, not of His suffering, but of the men in front of Him, and of what they could be thinking about, and what they would be thinking about afterward--in ten minutes, in twenty minutes, in twenty days, or in twenty years; and suddenly His heart was flooded with pity at what they would be thinking about afterward, and in the midst of the pain in His arms and the pain in His feet He made that great cry to Heaven: "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do!" It is because Christians have never quite believed that The Man really meant this when He said it that they have persecuted the Jews for two thousand years. It is because they do not believe it now that they blame Mr. Rockefeller for doing what most of them twenty years ago would have done themselves. It was one of the hardest things to do and say that any one ever said in the world, and it was said at the hardest possible time to say it. It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has ever been said since the world began. It has seemed to me the most literal, and perhaps the most practical, truth that has been said since the world began. It goes straight to the point about people. It gives one one's definition of goodness both for one's self and for others. It gives one a program for action. Except in our more joyous and free moments, we assume that when people do us a wrong, they know what they are about. They look at the right thing to do and they look at the wrong one, and they choose the wrong one because they like it better. Nine people out of ten one meets in the streets coming out of church on Sunday morning, if one asked them the question plainly, "Do you ever do wrong when you know it is wrong?" would say that they did. If you ask them what a sin is, they will tell you that it is something you do when you know you ought not to do it. But The Man Himself, in speaking of the most colossal sin that has ever been committed, seemed to think that when men committed a sin, it was because they did not really see what it was that they were doing. They did what they wanted to do at the moment. They did not do what they would have wished they had done in twenty years. I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had done in twenty years--twenty years, twenty days, twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, according to the time the action takes to get ripe. It would be far more true and more to the point instead of scolding or admiring Mr. Rockefeller's skilled labour at getting too rich, to point out mildly that he has done something that in the long-run he would not have wanted to do; that he has lacked the social imagination for a great permanently successful business. His sin has consisted in his not taking pains to act accurately and permanently, in his not concentrating his mind and finding out what he really wanted to do. It would seem to be better and truer and more accurate in the tremendous crisis of our modern life to judge Mr. Rockefeller, not as monster of wickedness, but merely as an inefficient, morally underwitted man. There are things that he has not thought of that every one else has. We see that in all those qualities that really go to make a great business house in a great nation John D. Rockefeller stands as the most colossal failure as yet that our American business life has produced. To point his incompetence out quietly and calmly and without scolding would seem to be the only fair way to deal with Mr. Rockefeller. He merely has not done what he would have wished he had done in twenty, well, possibly two hundred years, or as long a time as it would be necessary to allow for Mr. Rockefeller to see. The one thing that the world could accept gracefully from Mr. Rockefeller now would be the establishment of a great endowment of research and education to help other people to see in time how they can keep from being like him. If Mr. Rockefeller leads in this great work and sees it soon enough, perhaps he will stop suddenly being the world's most lonely man. Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few fellow human beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation--eighty million people; to feel a whole human race standing there outside of your life and softly wondering about you, staring at you in the showcase of your money, peering in as out of a thousand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral curiosity under glass, studying you as the man who has performed the most athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he really looked in all the world--this has been Mr. Rockefeller's experience. He has not done what he would wish he had done in twenty years. Goodness may be defined as getting one's own attention, as boning down to find the best and most efficient way of finding out what one wants to do. Any man who will make adequate arrangements with himself at suitable times for getting his own attention will be good. Any one else from outside who can make such arrangements for him, such arrangements of expression or--of advertising goodness as to get his attention, will make him good. CHAPTER XI DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE IN TWENTY YEARS If two great shops could stand side by side on the Main Street of the World, and all the vices could be put in the show window of one of them and all the virtues in the show windows the other, and all the people could go by all day, all night, and see the windowful of virtues as they were, and the windowful of vices as they were, all the world would be good in the morning. It would stay good as long as people remembered how the windows looked. Or if they could not remember, all they would need to do, most people, when a vice tempted them would be to step out, look at it in its window a minute--possibly take a look too at the other window--and they would be good. If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice, and would take a step up to The Window, and take one firm look at it in The Window--see it lying there, its twenty years' evil, its twenty days', its twenty minutes' evil, all branching up out of it--he would be good. When we see the wrong on one side and the right on the other and really see the right as vividly as we do the wrong, we do right automatically. Wild horses cannot drag a man away from doing right if he sees what the right is. A little while ago in a New England city where the grade crossings had just been abolished, and where the railroad wound its way on a huge yellow sandbank through the most beautiful part of the town, a prominent, public-spirited citizen wrote a letter to the President of the Company suggesting that the railroad (for a comparatively small sum, which he mentioned) plant its sandbanks with trees and shrubs. A letter came the next day saying that the railroad was unwilling to do it. He might quite justifiably have been indignant and flung himself into print and made a little scene in the papers, which would have been the regular and conventional thing to do under the circumstances. But it occurred to him instead, being a man of a curious and practical mind, that possibly he did not know how to express himself to railroad presidents, and that his letter had not said what he meant. He thought he would try again, and see what would happen if he expressed himself more fully and adequately. He took for it this second time a box seven feet long. The box contained two long rolls of paper, one a picture by a landscape gardener of the embankment as it would look when planted with trees and with shrubs, and the other a photograph--a long panorama of the same embankment as it then stood with its two great broadsides of yellowness trailing through the city. The box containing the rolls was sent without comment and with photographs and estimates of cost on the bottom of the pictures. A letter from the railroad came next day thanking him for his suggestion, and promising to have the embankment made into a park at once. If God had arranged from the beginning, slides of the virtues, and had furnished every man with a stereopticon inside, and if all a man had to do at any particular time of temptation was to take out just the right slide or possibly try three or four up there on his canvas a second, no one would ever have any trouble in doing right. * * * * * It is not too much to say that this way of looking at evil and good--at the latent capacities of evil and good in men, if a man once believes it, and if a man once practises it as a part of his daily practical interpretation and mastery of men, will soon put a new face for him on nearly every great human problem with which he finds his time confronted. We shall watch the men in the world about us--each for their little day--trying their funny, pathetic, curious little moral experiments, and we shall see the men--all of the men and all of the good and the evil in the men this moment--daily before our eyes working out with an implacable hopefulness the fate of the world. We know that, in spite of self-deceived syndicalism and self-deceived trusts, in spite of coal strikes and all the vain, comic little troops of warships around the earth, peace and righteousness in a vast overtone are singing toward us. We are not only going to have new and better motives in our modern men, but the new and better motives are going to be thrust upon us. Every man who reads these pages is having, at the present moment, motives in his life which he would not have been capable of at first. Why should not a human race have motives which it was not capable of at first? If one takes up two or three motives of one's own--the small motives and the large ones--and holds them up in one's hand and looks at them quietly from the point of view of what one would wish one had done in twenty years, there is scarcely one of us who would choose the small ones. People who are really modern, that is, who look beyond themselves in what they do to others, who live their lives as one might say six people away, or sixty people farther out from themselves, or sixty million people farther, are becoming more common everywhere; and people who look beyond the moment in what they do to another day, who are getting more and more to live their lives twenty years ahead, and to have motives that will last twenty years, are driven to better and more permanent motives. Thinking of more people when we act for ourselves means ethical consciousness or goodness, and better and more permanent motives. In the last analysis, the men who permanently succeed in business will have to see farther than the other people do. Men like John D. Rockefeller, who have made failures of their lives, and have not been able to conduct a business so as to keep it out of the courts, have failed because they have had imagination about Things but not imagination about people. The man who is just at hand will not do over again what Mr. Rockefeller has done. He will at least have made some advance in imagination over Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller became rich by coöperating with other rich men to exploit the public. The man of the immediate future is going to get rich, as rich as he cares to be, by coöperating not merely with his competitors--which is as far as Rockefeller got--but by coöperating with the people. It is a mere matter of social imagination, of seeing what succeeds most permanently, and honourably, of putting what has been called "goodness" and what is going to be called "Business" together. In other words, social imagination is going to make a man gravitate toward mutual interest or coöperation, which is the new and inevitable level of efficiency and success in business. Success is being transferred from men of millionaire genius to men of social and human genius. The men who are going to compete most successfully in modern competitive business are competing by knowing how to coöperate better than their competitors do. Employers, employees, consumers, partners, become irresistible by coöperation; only employers, employees, consumers, and partners who coöperate better than they do can hope to compete with them. The Trusts have already crowded out many small rivals because, while their coöperation has been one-sided, they have coöperated with more people than their rivals could; and the good Trusts, in the same way are going to crowd out the bad Trusts, because the good ones will know how to coöperate with more people than the bad ones do. They will have the human genius to see how they can coöperate with the people instead of against them. They are going to invent ways of winning and keeping the confidence of the people, of taking to this end a smaller and more just share of profits. And they are going to gain their leadership through the wisdom and power that goes with their money, and not through the money itself. It is the spiritual power of their money that is going to count; and wealth, instead of being a millionaire disease, is going to become a great social energy in democracy. We are going to let men be rich because they represent us, not because they hold us up, and because the hold-up has gone by, that is: getting all one can, and service--getting what we have earned--has come in. The new kind and new size of politician will win his power by his faith, like U. Ren of Oregon; the new kind and new size of editor is going to hire with brains a millionaire to help him run his paper; and the new kind and new size of author, instead of tagging a publisher, will be paid royalties for supplying him with new ideas and creating for him new publics. Power in modern life is to be light and heat and motion, and not a gift of being heavy and solid. Even Money shall lose its inertia. We are in this way being driven into having new kinds and new sizes of men; and some of them will be rich ones, and some of them will be poor, and no one will care. We will simply look at the man and at what size he is. If our preachers are not saving us, our business men will. Sometimes one suspects that the reason goodness is not more popular in modern life is that it has been taken hold of the wrong way. Perhaps when we stop teasing people, and take goodness seriously and calmly, and see that goodness is essentially imagination, that it is brains, that it is thinking down through to what one really wants, goodness will begin to be more coveted. Except among people with almost no brains or imagination at all, it will be popular. Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of possibility, and the present strength of manhood. But I can only hope that these objections that people make will turn out like mine. I have been making objections all my life, as all idealists must--only to watch with dismay and joy the old-time, happy obdurate way objections have of going by. People began by saying they would never use automobiles because they were so noisy and ill-odoured and ugly. Presto! The automobile becomes silent and shapes itself in lines of beauty. Some of us had decided against balloons. "Even if the balloon succeeds," we said, "there will be no way of going just where and when you want to." And then, presto! regular channels of wind are discovered, and the balloon goes on. "Aeroplanes," we said, "may be successful, but the more successful they are, the more dangerous, and the more danger there will be of collisions--collisions in the dark and up in the great sky at night." And, presto! man invents the wireless telegraph, and the entire sky can be full of whispers telling every airship where all the other airships are. Some of us have decided that we will never have anything to do with monopoly. Presto! there is suddenly evolved an entirely new type of monopolist--the man who can be rich and good; the millionaire who has invented a monopoly that serves the owners, the producers and employees, the distributors and the consumers alike. An American railway President has been saying lately that America would not have enough to eat in 2050, but it would not do to try to prove this just yet. Some one, almost any day, will invent a food that is as highly concentrated as dynamite, and the whole food supply of New York--who knows?--shall be carried around in one railway President's vest pocket. CHAPTER XII NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN It would be hard to overestimate the weariness and cynicism and despair that have been caused in the world by its more recklessly hopeful men--the men who plump down happily anywhere and hope, the optimists who are merely slovenly in their minds about evil. But the optimism that consists in putting evil facts up into a kind of outdoors in our minds and in giving them room to exercise in our thoughts and feelings, the optimism that consists in having one's brain move vigorously through disagreeable facts--organize them into the other facts with which they belong and with which they work--is worthy of consideration. Many of us, who have tried optimism and pessimism both, have noticed certain things. When one is being pessimistic, one almost always has the feeling of being rather clever. It is forced upon one a little, of course, having all those other people about one stodgily standing up for people and not really seeing through them! So, though one ought not to, one does feel a little superior--even with the best intentions--when one is being discouraged. But the trouble with pessimism is that it is only at the moment when one is having it that one really enjoys it, or feels in this way about it. Perhaps I should not undertake to speak for others, and should only speak for myself; but I can only bear witness, for one, that every time in my life that I have broken through the surface a little, and seen through to the evil, and found myself suddenly and astutely discouraged, I have found afterward that all I had to do was to see the same thing a little farther over, set it in the light beyond it, and look at it in larger or more full relations, and I was no longer astutely discouraged. So I have come to believe slowly and grimly that feeling discouraged about the world is not quite clever. I have noticed it, too, in watching other people--men I know. If I could take all the men I know who are living and acting as if they believed big things about people to-day, men who are daily taking for granted great things in human nature, and put them in one group by themselves all together, and if I could then take all the men I know who are taking little things for granted in one another and in human nature, I do not believe very many people would find it hard to tell which group would be more clever. Possibly the reason more of us do not spend more time in being hopeful about the world is that it takes more brains usually than we happen to have at the moment. Hope may be said to be an act of the brain in which it sees facts in relations large enough to see what they are for, an act in which it insists in a given case upon giving the facts room enough to turn around and to relate themselves to one another, and settle down where they belong in one's mind, the way they would in real time. So now, at last, Gentle Reader, having looked back and having looked forward, I know the way I am going. I am going to hope. It is the only way to see through things. The only way to dare to see through ones' self; the only way to see through other people and to see past them, and to see with them and for them--is to hope. So I am putting the challenge to the reader, in this book, as I have put it to myself. There are four questions with which day by day we stand face to face: 1. Does human nature change? 2. Does it change toward a larger and longer vision? 3. Will not a larger and longer vision mean new kinds and new sizes of men? 4. Will not new sizes of men make new-sized ethics practical and make a new world? Everything depends for every man upon this planet, at this moment, on how he decides these questions. If he says Yes, he will live one kind of life, he will live up to his world. If he says No, he will have a mean world, smaller-minded than he is himself, and he will live down to it. This is what the common run of men about us--the men of less creative type in literature, in business, and in politics--are doing. They do not believe human nature is changing. They are living down to a world that is going by. They are living down to a world that is smaller than they are themselves. They are trying to make others do it. They answer the question "Does human nature change?" by "No!" Wilbur Wright, when he flew around over the heads of the people in New York a few years ago, a black speck above a whole city with its heads up, answered "Yes!" But the real importance of the flying machine has not stopped short with a little delicate, graceful thing like walking on the air instead of the ground. The big and really revolutionary thing about Wilbur Wright's flying was that he changed the minds of the whole human race in a few minutes about one thing. There was one particular thing that for forty thousand years they knew they could not do. And now they knew they could. It naturally follows--and it lies in the mind of every man who lives--that there must be other particular things. And as nine men out of ten are in business, most of these particular things are going to be done in business. The Wilbur Wright spirit is catching. It is as if a Lid had been lifted off the world. One sees everywhere business men going about the street expecting new things of themselves. They expect things of the very ground, and of the air, and of one another they had not dared expect before. The other day in a New England city I saw a man, who had been the president of an Electric Light Company for twenty years, who had invented a public service corporation that worked. Since he took office and dictated the policy of the Company, every single overture for more expensive equipment in the electric lighting of the city has come from the Company, and every single overture for reducing the rate to consumers has come from the company. The consumption of electricity in the city is the largest _per capita_ in the world, and the rate is the cheapest in the country; and, incidentally, the Company so trusts the people that they let them have electricity without metres, and the people so trust the Company that they save its electricity as they would their own. Even the man without a conscience, who would be mean if he could, is brought to terms, and knows that if he refrains from leaving his lights burning all night when he goes to bed he is not merely saving the Company's electricity but his own. He knows that he is reducing his own and everybody's price for electricity, and not merely increasing the profits of the Company. It makes another kind of man slowly out of thousands of men every day, every night, turning on and turning off their lights. The Electric Light Company has come to have a daily, an almost hourly, influence on the way men do business and go about their work in that city--the motives and assumptions with which they bargain with one another--that might be envied by twenty churches. All that had happened was that a man with a powerful, quietly wilful personality--the kind that went on crusades and took cities in other ages--had appeared at last, and proposed to do the same sort of thing in business. He proposed to express his soul, just as it was, in business the way other people had expressed theirs for a few hundred years in poetry or more easy and conventional ways. If he could not have made the electric light business say the things about people and about himself that he liked and that he believed, he would have had to make some other business say them. One of the things he had most wanted to say and prove in business was the economic value of being human, the enormous business saving that could be effected by being believed in. He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he knew other people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as people said, "being believed in did not pay," it must be because ways of inventing faith in people, the technique of trust, had not been invented. He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light Company at a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with the people, and he took the Corporation in hand on the specific understanding that he should be allowed to put his soul into it, that he should be allowed his own way for three years--in believing in people, and in inventing ways of getting believed in as much as he liked. The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind, and while as he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there was a great light in his face. He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and conquered a hundred thousand men by believing in them more than they could. By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing that belief, he had invented a Corporation--a Public Service Corporation--that had a soul, and consequently worked. BOOK TWO LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN They stay not in their hold These stokers, Stooping to hell To feed a ship. Below the ocean floors. Before their awful doors Bathed in flame, I hear their human lives Drip--drip. Through the lolling aisles of comrades In and out of sleep, Troops of faces To and fro of happy feet, They haunt my eyes. Their murky faces beckon me From the spaces of the coolness of the sea Their fitful bodies away against the skies. CHAPTER I SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD It is a little awkward to say what I am going to say now. Probably it will be still more awkward afterward. But I find as I go up and down the world and look in the faces of the crowds in it, that it is true, and I can only tell as it is. _I want to be good._ And I do not want to go up on a mountain to do it, or to slink off and live all alone on an island in the sea. I go a step further. I believe that the crowds want to be good. But I cannot prove that people want to be good in crowds, and so for the sake of the argument, and to make the case as simple as possible, I am going to give up speaking for crowds, and speak for myself as one member of the crowd and for Lim. Lim and I (and Lim is a business man and not a mere author) have had long talks in which we have confided to each other what we think this world, in spite of appearances, is really like, and we have come to a kind of provisional program and to a definite agreement on our two main points. 1. We want to be good. 2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of convenience for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want to be in a kind of world where what is good in us works. The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an awkward and exposed thing to say out loud to people in general, but 3. Lim and I want to make over the earth. 4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing in a world hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is this particular planet just as it is that interests us, in its present hopeful, squirming state. It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some brand new, clean, slick planet up in space, with crowds of perfect and convenient people on it, and then expect to lay it down in the night like a great, soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this one. We want to take this heavy, inconvenient, cumbersome, real planet that we have, and see what can be done with it, and by the people on it, what can be done by these same people, whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith, Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W.H. Riley & Co., Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are really doing. The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had to begin with ourselves. We did. We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it. But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide into talking to people about goodness. We have made up our minds to lie low and keep still and show them some. Of course one ought to have some of one's own to show. But the trouble always is, if it is really good, one is sure not to know it, or at least one does not know which it is. The best we can do with goodness, some of us, if we want it to show more quickly or to hurry people along in goodness more, is to show them other people's. I sometimes think that if everybody in the world could know my plumber or pay a bill to him, the world would soon begin slowly but surely to be a very different place. My plumber is a genius. CHAPTER II IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT? Perhaps it will seem a pity to spoil a book--one that might have been really rather interesting--by putting the word "goodness" down flatly in this way in the middle of it. And in a book which deals with crowds, too, and with business. I would not yield first place to any one in being tired of the word. I think, for one, that unless there is something we can do to it, and something we can do to it now, it had better be dropped. But I have sometimes discovered when I had thought I was tired of a word, that what I was really tired of was somebody who was using it. I do not mind it when my plumber uses it. I have heard him use it (and swearing softly, I regret to say) when it affected me like a Hymn Tune. And there is Non, too. I first made Non's acquaintance as our train pulled out of New York, and we found ourselves going down together on Friday afternoon to spend Sunday with M---- in North Carolina. The first thing he said was, when we were seated in the Pullman comfortably watching that big, still world under glass roll by outside, that he had broken an engagement with his wife to come. She was giving a Tea, he said, that afternoon, and he had faithfully promised to be there. But a weekend in North Carolina appealed to him, and afternoon tea--well, he explained to me, crossing his legs and beaming at me all over as if he were a whole genial, successful afternoon tea all by himself--afternoon tea did not appeal to him. He thought probably he was a Non-Gregarious Person. As he was the gusto of our little party and fairly reeked with sociability, and was in a kind of orgy of gregariousness every minute all the way to Wilmington (even when he was asleep we heard from him), we called him the Non-Gregarious Person, and every time he piled on one more story, we reminded him how non-gregarious he was. We called him Non-Gregarious all the way after that--Non for short. This is the way I became acquainted with Non. It has been Non ever since. * * * * * I found in the course of the next three days that when Non was not being the life of the party or the party did not need any more life for a while, and we had gone off by ourselves, he became, like most people who let themselves go, a very serious person. When he talked about his business, he was even religious. Not that he had any particular vocabulary for being religious, but there was something about him when he spoke of business--his own business--that almost startled me at first. He always seemed to be regarding his business when he spoke of it as being, for all practical purposes, a kind of little religion by itself. Now Non is a builder or contractor. * * * * * For many years now the best way to make a pessimist or a confirmed infidel out of anybody has been to get him to build a house. No better arrangement for not believing in more people, and for not believing in more kinds of people at once and for life, has ever been invented probably than building a house. No man has been educated, or has been really tested in this world, until he has built a house. I submit this proposition to anybody who has tried it, or to any one who is going to try it. There is not a single kind or type of man who sooner or later will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter with him, into your house. The house becomes a kind of miniature model (such as they have in expositions) of what is the matter with people. You enter the door, you walk inside and brood over them. Everything you come upon, from the white cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on in the roof, reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what is the matter with them. It is the new houses that are haunted now. Any man who is sensitive to houses and to people and who would sit down in his house when it is finished and look about in it seriously, and think of all the people that have been built, in solid wood and stone, into it, would get up softly and steal out of it, out of the front door of it, and never enter that house again. This is what Non saw. He saw how people felt about their houses, and how they lived in them helplessly and angrily year after year, and felt hateful about the world. I gradually drew out of him the way he felt about it. I found he was not as good as some people are at talking about himself, but the subject was interesting. He began his career building houses for people, as nearly every one does. The general idea is that everybody is expected to exact commissions from everybody else, and the owner is expected to pay each man his own commission and then pay all the commissions that each man has charged the other man. Every house that got built in this way seemed to be a kind of network or conspiracy of not doing as you would be done by. Non did not see any way out at first, just for one man. He merely noticed how things were going, and he noticed that nearly every person that he had dealings with, from the bottom to the top of the house, seemed to make him feel that he either was, or would be, or ought to be, a grafter. He could not so much as look at a house he had built, through the trees when he was going by, without wishing he could be a better man, and studying on how it could be managed. His own first houses made him see things. They proved to be the making of him, and if similar houses have not made similar men, it is their fault. It might not be reassuring to the men who are now living in these first houses to dwell too much on this (and I might say he did not build them alone), but it seems to be necessary to bring out the most striking thing about Non in his first stage as a business man, _viz._: He hated his business. He made up his mind he either would make the business the kind of business he liked or get out of it. I did not gather from the way he talked about it that he had any idea of being an uplifter. He merely had, apparently, an obstinate, doggedly comfortable idea about himself, and about what a thing would have to be, in this world, if he was connected with it. He proposed to enjoy his business. He was spending most of his time at it. Other people have had this same happy thought, but they seem to manage to keep on being patient. Non could not fall back on being patient, and it made him think harder. The first thing he thought of was that doing his business as he thought he ought to, if he once worked his idea out, and worked it down through and organized it, might pay. He almost had the belief that people might pay a man a little extra, perhaps, for enjoying his business. It cannot be said that he believed this immediately. He merely wanted to, and worked toward it, and merely contrived new shrewd ways at first of being able to afford it. Gradually he began to notice that the more he enjoyed his business, the more he enjoyed it with his whole soul and body, enjoyed it down to the very toes of his conscience, the more people there were who stepped into his office and wanted him to enjoy his business on their houses. It was what they had been looking for for years--for some builder who was really enjoying his business. And the more he enjoyed his business in his own particular way--that of building a house for a man in less time than he said he would, and for less money, not infrequently sending him a check at the end of it--the more his business grew. I do not know that there would be any special harm in speaking of Non's idea--of just doing as you would be done by--in more moral or religious language, but it is not necessary. And I find I take an almost religious joy in looking at the Golden Rule at last as a plain business proposition. All that happened was that Non was original, saw something that everybody thought they knew, and acted as if it were so. Theoretically one would not have said that it would be original to take an old platitudinous law like the law of supply and demand, and act as if it were so; but it was. At the time Non was beginning his career there was nothing in the building-market people found harder to hire than honesty. Here was something, he saw at last, that thousands of busy and important men who did not have time to be detectives, wanted. There did not seem to be any one very actively supplying the demand. A big market, a small supply, and almost no competition. Non stepped in and proposed to represent a man's interest who is building a house as literally as the man would represent his interests himself, if he knew all about houses. Everything has followed from this. What Non's business is now, when a man is building a house, is to step quietly into the man's shoes, let him put on another pair, and go about his business. It is not necessary to go into the details. Any reader who has ever built a house knows the details. Just take them and turn them around. What those of us who know Non best like about him is that he is a plain business man, and that he has acted in this particular matter without any fine moral frills or remarks. He has done the thing because he liked it and believed in it. But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way he is making money out of saving money for other people, but the way the fact that he can do it makes people feel about the world. Whenever I have a little space of discouragement or of impatience about the world because it does not hurry more, I fall to thinking of Non. "Perhaps next week"--I say to myself cheerfully--"I can go down to New York and slip into Non's office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on. Or he will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop scolding or idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I will take a good long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental face of his while he tells me across the little corner table at Delmonico's for three hours how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how it works." Sometimes when I have just been in New York, and have come home and am sitting in my still study, with the big idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and all the world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself, lying out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he is working in wood and stone inside of people's houses, and inside of their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people at a thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights and shadows and little visions of words fall together just so, seems, suddenly a very trivial occupation--like amusing one's self with a pretty little safe kaleidoscope, holding it up, aiming it and shaking softly one's coloured bits of phrases at a world! Of course, it need not be so. But there are moments when I think of Non when it seems so. In our regular Sunday religion we do not seem to be quite at our best just now. At least (perhaps I should speak for one) I know I am not. Being a saint of late is getting to be a kind of homely, modest, informal, almost menial everyday thing. It makes one more hopeful about religion. Perhaps people who once get the habit, and who are being good all the week, can even be good on Sunday. There are many ways of resting or leaning back upon one's instincts and getting over to one's religion or perspective about the world. Mount Tom (which is in my front yard, in Massachusetts) helps sometimes--with a single look. When I go down to New York, I look at the Metropolitan Tower, the Pennsylvania Station, the McAdoo Tunnels, and at Non. If I wanted to make anybody religious, I would try to get him to work in Non's office, or work with anybody who ever worked with him, or who ever saw him; or I would have him live in a house built by him, or pay a bill made out by him. It has seemed to me that his succeeding and making himself succeed in this way is a great spiritual adventure, a pure religion, a difficult, fresh, and stupendous religion. Now these many days have I watched him going up and down through all the empty reputations, the unmeaning noises of the world, living his life like some low, old-fashioned, modest Hymn Tune he keeps whistling--and I have seen him in fear, and in danger, and in gladness being shrewder and shrewder for God, now grimly, now radiantly, hour by hour, day by day getting rich with the Holy Ghost! CHAPTER III IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTING? People are acquiring automobiles, Oriental rugs, five-hundred-dollar gowns, more rapidly just now than they are goodness, because advertisements in this present generation are more readable than sermons, and because the shop windows on Fifth Avenue can attract more attention than the churches. The shop windows make people covetous. If the goodness that one sees, hears about, or goes by does not make other people covetous, does not make them wish they had it or some just like it, it must be because there is something the matter with it, or something the matter with the way it is displayed. If the church shop windows, for instance, were to make displays of goodness up and down the great Moral Fifth Avenue of the world--well, one does not know; but there are some of us who would rather expect to see the Goodness Display in the windows consisting largely of Things People Ought Not to Want. There would be rows and tiers of Not-Things piled up--Things for People Not to Be, and Things for People Not to Do. Goodness displayed in this way is not interesting. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the word Goodness spoils a thing for people--so many people--when it is allowed in it. Possibly it is because we are apt to think of the good people, and of the people who are being good, as largely keeping from doing something, or as keeping other people from doing something--as negative. Their goodness seems to consist in being morally accurate, and in being very particular just in time, and in a kind of general holding in. We do not naturally or off-hand--any of us--think of goodness as having much of a lunge to it. It is tired-looking and discouraged, and pulls back kindly and gently. Or it teases and says, "Please"--God knows how helpless it is, and I for one am frank to say that, as far as I have observed, He has not been paying very much attention to good people of late. I do not believe I am alone in this. There must be thousands of others who have this same half-guilty, half-defiant feeling of suspiciousness toward what people seem to think should be called goodness. Not that we say anything. We merely keep wondering--we cannot see what it is, exactly, about goodness that should make it so depressing. In the meantime we hold on. We do not propose to give up believing in it. Perhaps, after all, all that is the matter with goodness in the United States is the people who have taken hold of it. They do not seem to be the kind of people who can make it interesting. We cannot help thinking, if these same bad people about us, or people who are called bad, would only take up goodness awhile, how they would make it hum! I can only speak for one, but I do not deny that when I have been sitting (in some churches), or associating, owing to circumstances, with very good people a little longer than usual, and come out into the street, I feel like stepping up sometimes to the first fine, brisk, businesslike man I see going by, and saying, "My dear sir, I do wish that _you_ would take up goodness awhile and see if, after all, something cannot really be done. I keep on trying to be hopeful, but these dear good people in here, it seems to me, are making a terrible mess of it!" And, to make a long story short, Lim happened to be going by one day, and this practically is what I did. I had done it before with other business men in spirit or in a general way, but with him I was more particular. I went straight to the point. "Here are at least sixteen valuable efficient brands of goodness in America," I said, "all worth their weight in gold for a big business career, that no one is really using, that no one quite believes in or can get on the market, and yet I believe with my whole soul in them all, and I believe thousands of other men do, or are ready to, the moment some one makes a start." I pulled out a little list of items which I had made out and put down on a piece of paper, and handed them over to him, and said I wished he would take a few of them--the first five or six or so--and make them work. He already had, I found, made two or three of the harder ones work. I would not have any one suppose for a moment that I am presenting Lim as a kind of business angel. No one who knows Lim thinks of him, or would let anybody else think of him, as being a Select Person, as being particularly or egregiously what he ought to be. This is one reason I have picked him out. Being good in a small private way, just as a small private end in itself, may be practicable perhaps without dragging in people who are not quite what they ought to be. But the moment one tries to make goodness work, one comes to the fact that it must be made to work with what we have. We have a great crowd of unselected people, people both good and bad, and the first principle in making goodness work (instead of being merely good) seems to be to believe that goodness is not too good for anybody. Anybody who can make it work can have it, and what goodness seems to need, especially in America and England just now, is people who do not feel that they must at all hazards look good. Whatever happens, whatever else we do in any general investment or movement we may be making with goodness, we must let these people in. If there is one thing rather than another that those of us who know Lim all rely on and like, it is that nothing can ever make him slump down into looking good. We often find him hard to make out--everything is left open and loose and unlabelled in Lim's moral nature. The only really sure way any one can tell when Lim is being good is, that whenever he is being good he becomes suddenly and unexpectedly interesting. His goodness is daring, unexpected, and original. One has the feeling that it may break out anywhere. It is always doing things that everybody said could not be done before. It is true that some people are dazed, and no one can ever seem to feel sure he knows what it is that is going on in Lim when he is being good, or that it is goodness. He merely keeps watching it. There is a certain element of news, of freshness, of gentle sensation, in his goodness. It leads to consequences. And there always seems to be something about Lim's goodness which attracts the attention of people, and makes people who see it want it. So when I speak of goodness in this book, and put it down as the basis of the power of getting men to do as one likes, I do not deny that I am taking the word away and moving it over from its usual associations. I do not mean by a good act, a good-looking act, but an act so constituted that it makes good. For the purpose of this book I would define goodness as efficiency. Goodness is the quality in a thing that makes the thing go, and that makes it go so that it will not run down, and that nothing can stop it. There is the inefficiency of lying, for instance, and the inefficiency of force, or bullying. CHAPTER IV PROSPECTS OF THE LIAR My theory about the Liar is that it is of no use to scold him or blame him. It merely makes him feel superior. He should be looked upon quietly and without saying anything as a case of arrested development. What has happened to him is that he merely is not quite bright about himself, and has failed to see how bright (in the long run) other people are. When a man lies or does any other wrong thing, his real failure consists not in the wrongdoing itself, but in his failure to take pains to focus his mind on the facts in himself, and in the people about him, and see what it really is that he would wish he had done, say in twenty years. It seems to be possible, after a clumsy fashion, to find out by a study of ourselves, and of our own lives and of other men's lives, what we would wish we had done afterward. Everything we have learned so far we have learned by guessing wrong on what we have thought we would want afterward. We have gradually guessed what we wanted better. We began our lives as children with all sorts of interesting sins or moral guesses and experiments. We find there are certain sins or moral experiments we almost never use any more because we found that they never worked. We had been deceived about them. Most of us have tried lying. Since we were very small we have tried in every possible fashion--now in one way, now in another--to see if lying could not be made to work. By far the majority of us, and all of us who are the most intelligent, are not deceived now by our desire to tell lies. Perhaps we have not learned that all lies do not pay. A child tells a lie at first as if a lie had never been thought of before. It is as if lying had just been invented, and he had just thought what a great convenience it was, and how many things there were that he could do in that way. He discovers that the particular thing he wants at the moment, he gets very often by lying. But the next time he lies, he cannot get anything. If he keeps on lying for a long time, he learns that while, after a fashion, he is getting things, he is losing people. Finally, he finds he cannot even get things. Nobody believes in him or trusts him. He cannot be efficient. He then decides that being trusted, and having people who feel safe to associate with him and to do business with him, is the thing he really wants most; and that he must have first, even if it is only a way to get the other things he wants. It need not be wondered that the Trusts, those huge raw youngsters of the modern spirit, have had to go through with most of the things other boys have. The Trusts have had to go through, one after the other, all their children's diseases, and try their funny little moral experiments on the world. They thought they could lie at first. They thought it would be cunning, and that it would work. They did not realize at once that the bigger a boy you were, even if you were anonymous, the more your lie showed and the more people there were who suffered from it who would be bound sooner or later to call you to account for it. The Trusts have been guessing wrong on what they would wish they had done in twenty years, and the best of them now are trying to guess better. They are trying to acquire prestige by being far-sighted for themselves and far-sighted for the people who deal with them, and are resting their policy on winning confidence and on keeping faith with the people. They not only tried lying, like all young children, but they tried stealing. For years the big corporations could be seen going around from one big innocent city in this country to another, and standing by quietly and without saying a word, putting the streets in their pockets. But no big corporation of the first class to-day would begin its connection with a city in this fashion. Beginning a permanent business relation with a customer by making him sorry afterward he has had any dealings with you, has gone by as a method of getting business in England and America. One of our big American magazines not long ago, which had gained especially high rates from its advertisers because they believed in it, lied about its circulation. The man who was responsible was not precisely sure, gave nominal figures in round numbers, and did what magazines very commonly did under the circumstances; but when the magazine owner looked up details afterward and learned precisely what the circulation was for the particular issue concerned, he sent out announcements to every firm in the country that had anything in the columns of that issue, saying that the firm had lied, and enclosing a check for the difference in value represented. Of course it was a good stroke of business, eating national humble pie so, and it was a cheap stroke of business too, doing some one, sudden, striking thing that no one would forget. Not an advertisement could be inserted and paid for in the magazine for years without having that action, and the prestige of that action, back of it. Every shred of virtue there was in the action could have been set one side, and was set one side by many people, because it paid so well. Every one saw suddenly, and with a faint breath of astonishment, how honesty worked. But the main point about the magazine in distinction from its competitors seems to have been that it not merely saw how honesty worked, but it saw it first and it had the originality, the moral shrewdness and courage, to put up money on it. It believed in honesty so hard that suddenly one morning, before all the world, it risked its entire fortune on it. Now that it has been done once, the new level or standard of candour may be said to have been established which others will have to follow. But it does not seem to me that the kind of man who has the moral originality to dare do a thing like this first need ever have any serious trouble with competitors. In the last analysis, in the competition of modern business to get the crowd, the big success is bound to come to men in the one region of competition where competition still has some give in it--the region of moral originality. Other things in competition nowadays have all been thought of except being good. Any man who can and will to-day think out new and unlooked-for ways of being good can get ahead, in the United States of practically everybody. CHAPTER V PROSPECTS OF THE BULLY The stage properties that go with a bully change as we grow older. When one thinks of a bully, one usually sees a picture at once in one's mind. It is a big boy lording it over a little one, or getting him down and sitting on him. Everybody recognizes what is going on immediately, pitches in nobly and beautifully, and licks the big boy. The trouble with the bully in business has been that he is not so simple and easy to recognize. He is apt to be more or less anonymous and impersonal, and it is harder to hit him in the right place. But when one thinks of it perhaps this pleasant and inspiring duty is not so impracticable as it looks, and is presently to be attended to. Any man who relies, in getting what he wants, on being big instead of being right, is a bully. Modern business is done over a wide area, with thousands of persons looking on, and for a long time and with thousands of people coming back. The man who relies on being big instead of being right, and who takes advantage of his position instead of his inherent superiority, is soon seen through. His customers go over to the enemy. A show of force or a hold-up works very well at the moment. Being bigger may be more showy than being right, and it may down the Little Boy, but the Little Boy wins the crowd. Business to-day consists in persuading crowds. The Little Boy can prove he is right. All the bully can prove is that he is bigger. The Liar in Business is already going by. Now it is the turn of the bully. Not long ago a few advertisers in a big American city wanted unfairly low rates for advertisements and tried to use force with the newspapers. Three or four of the biggest shops combined and gave notice that they would take their advertising away unless the rates came down. After a little, they drew in a few other lines of business with them, and suddenly one morning five or six full pages of advertisements were withdrawn from every newspaper in the city. The newspapers went on publishing all the news of the city except news as to what people could buy in department stores, and waited. They made no counter-move of any kind, and said nothing and seven days slipped past. They held to the claim that the service they performed in connecting the great stores with the people of the city was a real service, that it represented market value which could be proved and paid for. They kept on for another week publishing for the people all the news of the city except the news as to how they could spend their money. They wondered how long it would take the great shops with acres of things to sell to see how it would work not to let anybody know what the things were. The great shops tried other ways of letting people know. They tried handbills, a huge helpless patter of them over all the city. They used billboards, and posted huge lists of items for people to stop and read in the streets, if they wanted to, while they rushed by. For three whole weeks they held on tight to the idea that the newspapers were striking employees of department stores. One would have thought that they would have seen that the newspapers were the representatives of the people--almost the homes of the people--and that it would pay to treat them respectfully. One would have thought they would have seen that if they wanted space in the homes of the people--places at their very breakfast tables--space that the newspapers had earned and acquired there, they would have to pay their share of what it had cost the newspapers to get it. One would have thought that the department shops would have seen that the more they could make the newspapers prosper, the more influence the newspapers would have in the homes of the people, and the more business they could get through them. But it was not until the shopowners had come down and gazed day after day on the big, white, lonely floors of their shops that they saw the truth. Crowds stayed away, and proved it to them. Namely: a store, if it uses a great newspaper, instead of having a few feet of show windows on a street for people to walk by, gets practically miles of show windows for people--in their own houses--sells its goods almost any morning to the people--to a whole city--before anybody gets up from breakfast--has its duties as well as its rights. Of course, when the shopkeepers really saw that this was what the newspapers had been doing for them, they wanted to do what was right, and wanted to pay for it. One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that the department stores in any city would have imagination enough to see, without practically having to shut their stores up for three weeks, what advertising was worth. But if great department stores do not have imagination to see what they would wish they had done in twenty years, in one year, or three weeks, and have to spell out the experience morning by morning and see what works, word by word, they do learn in the end that being right works, and that bullying does not. Gradually the level or standard of right in business is bound to rise, until people have generally come to take the Golden Rule with the literalness and seriousness that the best and biggest men are already taking it. Department stores that have the moral originality and imagination to guess what people would wish they had bought of them and what they would wish they had sold to them afterward are going to win. Department stores that deal with their customers three or four years ahead are the ones that win first. CHAPTER VI GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS The basis of successful business is imagination about other people. The best way to train one's imagination about other people is to try different ways of being of service to them. Trying different ways of merely getting money out of them does not train the imagination. It is too easy. Business is going to be before long among the noblest of the professions, because it takes the highest order of imagination to succeed in it. Goodness is no longer a Sunday school. The whole world, in a rough way, is its own Sunday school. To have the most brains render the most service--render services people had never dreamed of before. Why bother to tell people to be good? It bores us. It bores them. Presently we will tell them over our shoulders, as we go by, to use their brains. Goodness is a by-product of efficiency. Being good every day in business stands in no need of being stood up for, or apologized for, or even helped. All of these things may be expedient and human and natural, because one cannot help being interested in particular people and in a particular generation; but they are not really necessary to goodness. It is only when we are tired, or when we only half believe in it, that we feel to-day that goodness needs to be stood up for. In a day when men make vast crowds of things, so that the things are seen everywhere, and when the things are made to stand the test of crowds--crowds of days, or crowds of years--and when they make them for crowds of people, goodness does not need scared and helpful people defending it. I have seen that goodness is a thing to be sung about like a sunset. I have seen that goodness is organic, and grounded in the nature of things and in the nature of man. I have seen that being good is the one great adventure of the world, the huge daily passionate moral experiment of the human heart--that all men are at work on it, that goodness is an implacable crowd process, and that nothing can stop it. CHAPTER VII THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY OTHER PEOPLE But Fate has so arranged our lives that we all have to live cooped up in one particular generation. Living in all of them, especially the ages just ahead, and seeing as one looks out upon them how goodness wins, may be well enough when one is tired or discouraged and is driven to it, but in the meantime all the while we are living in this one. The faces of the people we know flit past us; the gaunt, grim face of the crowd haunts us--the crowd that will slip softly off the earth very soon and drop into the Darkness--a whole generation of it, without seeing how things are coming out; and there is something about the streets, about the look of women as they go by, something about the faces of the little children, that makes one wish goodness would hurry. One cannot think with any real pleasure of goodness as a huge, slow, implacable moral glacier, a kind of human force of gravity, grinding out truths and grinding under people, generation after generation, down toward some vast, beautiful, happy valley with flowers and children in it and majestic old men thousands of years away. One wishes goodness would hurry. We are not content, some of us, with having the good people climb over the so-called evil ones and gain the supremacy of the world, and all because the evil people do not see what they really want to do or would have wished they had done afterward. We want the evil ones, so called, to see what they really want now. We cannot help believing that there is some way of attracting their attention to what they really want now. I have seen, or seemed to see, in my time that there is almost no limit to what people can do if they can get their own attention, or if some person or some event will happen by that can get their attention for them. Paralytics jumped from their beds at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and ran for blocks. The whole earth had to shake them in order to get their attention; but it did it, and they saw what it was they wanted, and they ran for it at once, whether they were paralytics or not. In the fire that followed the earthquake, people that had been sick in bed for weeks were seen, scores of them, dragging their trunks through the streets. I have seen, too, in my time scores of people doing great feats of goodness in this way, things that they knew they could not do, dragging huge moral trunks after them, or swinging them up on their shoulders. I have seen men who thought they were old in their hearts, and who thought they were wicked, running like boys, with shouts and cheers, to do right. It was all a matter of attention. The question with most of us would seem to be: How can one get one's attention to what one would wish one had done in twenty years, and how can one get other people's--all the people with whom we are living and working--to do with us what they would wish they had done, in twenty minutes, twenty days, or twenty years? Letting the Crowd be Good, all turns in the long run upon touching the imagination of Crowds. In the last analysis, the coming of the kingdom of heaven, as it has been called, is going to be the coming slowly, and from unsuspected quarters, of a new piety and of new kinds of saints into the forefront of modern life--saints who can attract attention, saints who can make crowds think what they really want. Using the word in its more special sense, the time has come when it is being keenly realized that if goodness is to be properly appreciated by crowds, it must be properly advertised. How can goodness be advertised to Crowds? Who are the people that can touch the imagination of Crowds? The best and most suggestive truths that most of us could come to with regard to doing right, would come from a study of the people who have tried to make us do it. Most of us, if we were asked to name the people most prominently connected with the virtues that we have studied and wondered about most, would mention, probably, either our parents or our preachers. Many of us feel quite expert about parents. We have studied vividly, and sometimes with almost a breathless interest, all their little ways of getting us to be good, and there is hardly any one who has not come to quite definite conclusions of how he should be preached to. I have thought it would be not unfruitful to consider in this connection either our parents or our preachers. I have decided to consider the preachers who try to make me good, because they are a little less complicated than parents. Preachers can only be put into classes in a general way. They often overlap, and many of them change over from one class into another every now and then on some special subject, or on some special line of experience which they have had. But for the most part, at least as regards emphasis, preachers may be said to divide off into three classes: Those who tease us to do right. Those who make us see that doing right, if any one wants to do it, is really an excellent thing. Those who make us want to do it. * * * * * I never go to hear a second time, if I can help it, a preacher who has teased me to do right. I used to hope at first that perhaps a clergyman who was teasing people might incidentally slip off the track a minute, and say something or see something interesting and alive. But, apparently, preachers who do not see that people should not be teased to do right, do not see other things, and I have gradually given up having hopeful moments about them. Why, in a world like this, with the right and the wrong in it all lying so eloquent and plain and beautiful in the lives of the people about us, and just waiting to be uncovered a little, waiting to be looked at hard a minute, should audiences be gathered together and teased to do right? If the right were merely to be had in sermons or on paper, it might be different. My own experience with the right has been, if I may speak for one, that when I get out of the way of the people who are doing it, and let the right they are doing be seen by people, everybody wants it. When people who are doing right are quietly revealed, uncovered a little further by a preacher, everybody envies them, and teasing becomes superfluous. People sit in their seats and think of them, and become covetous to be like them. If, this very day, all the ministers of the world were to agree that, on next Sunday morning at half-past ten o'clock, they all with one accord would preach a sermon teasing people to be rich, it would not be more absurd, or more pathetic, or more away from the point, than it would be to preach a sermon teasing people to be good. They want to be good now; they envy the people that they see going about the world not leaning on others to be good--self-poised, independent, free, rich, spiritually self-supporting persons. The men and women that we know may be more or less muddled in their minds with philosophy or with theology, or perhaps they are being deceived by expediency or being bullied by their environment, but they are not wicked; they are out of focus, and what they desire when they go to church on Sunday morning is to get a good look at beautiful and refreshing things that they want, and for an hour and a half, if possible, with slow steadied thought see their own lives in perspective. It is a criminal waste of time to get hundreds of people to come into church on a Sunday morning and seat them all together in a great room where they cannot get out, and then tease them and tell them they ought to be good. They knew it before they came. They are already agreed, all of them, that they want to be good. They even want to be good in business--as good as they can afford to. The question is how to manage to do it. The thing that is troubling them is the technique. How can they be good in their business--more good than their employers want them to be, for instance--and keep their positions? Doing as one would wish one had done afterward, or knowing what one is about, or "being good" as it is sometimes called, is a thing that all really clever people have agreed upon. They simply cannot manage some of the details--details like time and place, a detail like being good now, for instance, or like being good here. It is the more practical things like these that trouble people, or they grow mixed in their thoughts about the big goods and the little ones--which shall be first in order of importance or which in the order of time. And when one sees that people are really like this in their hearts, and when one sees them, all these poor, helpless people, sitting cooped up in a church for an hour and a half being teased to be good, it is small wonder that it seems, or is coming to seem, to the clean-cut morally businesslike men and women we have to-day, a pitiful waste of time. * * * * * I come to the second class of preachers I had in mind with more diffidence. My feelings about them are not so simple and rudimentary as my feelings about those who have teased me to be good. Any man who travels about, or who drops into churches wherever he happens to be from Sunday to Sunday, is almost sure to find in every city of considerable size at least one imperious capable baffling clergyman. If one is strictly honest and fair toward him, to say nothing of being a well-meant and hopeful human being who is living in the same world with him and who feels very imperfect too, finding any serious and honest fault with the sermon, or at least laying one's finger upon what the fault is, seems to be almost impossible. One simply comes out of the church in a nice, neat little glow of good-will and admiration, and with a strange, soothing, happy sense of new, fresh, convenient wisdom. The only fair way to criticise the preacher who belongs in this class seems to be to take ten years for it, go in regularly and get a little practice every Sunday. There are preachers who preach so well that the only way one can ever find what is the matter with their sermons is to sit quietly while they are preaching them, and look around at the people. One thinks as one looks around, "These people are what this man has done." They are the same people they were ten years ago. I often hear other sermons that are far easier to criticise. They are one-sided or narrow, but they make new people. I might not always like to be in a congregation when a man is preaching a sermon that makes new people, because he may be making people or kinds of people that at the time at least I do not need to be. But I naturally prefer, at least part of the time, a preacher who puts in, before he is through, some good work on me. There is a preacher in B---- who always arouses in me, whenever I am in the city, the same old, curious, hopeful feeling about him that this next one more time he is going to get to me, that I am going to be attended to. I cannot say how many times I have dropped in upon him in his big plain church, seen him with his hushed congregation all about him, all listening to him up to the last minute, each of them sitting all alone with his own soul, and with him, and with the ticking of the clock. And the sermon is always about the same. You see him narrowing the truth down wonderfully, ruthlessly, to You. You begin to see everything--to see all the arguments, all the circumstances, all the principles. You see them narrowing you down grimly, closing in upon you, converging you and all your little, mean life, driving you apparently at last into one helpless beautiful corner of doing right. You feel while you listen the old sermon-thrill you have felt before, a kind of intellectual joy in God, in the very brains of God; you think of how He has arranged right and wrong so cunningly, laid them all out so plain and so close beside each other for you to choose to be good. Then the benediction is pronounced over you, the sevenfold amen dies away over you, and you go home and do as you like. One sees the sermon for days afterward lying out there in calm and orderly memory, all so complete and perfect by itself. There does not really seem to be any need of doing anything more to it. It is what people mean probably by a "finished sermon." It is as if goodness had been put under a glass globe in a parlour. You go home proud to think of it, and proud of course to have such a sermon by you. But you would never think of touching such a complete and perfect thing during the week the way you would a poorer sermon, disturbing it hopefully or mussing it over, trying to work some of it into your own life. * * * * * So much for the first two types of preachers: the preachers who stand before us Sunday morning with goodness placed beside them in a dense darkness while they talk, and who tease us to look at it in the darkness and to take some; and those who stand, a cold white light all about them, and use pointers and blackboards and things--maps of goodness, great charts of what people ought to be like--and who make one see each virtue just where it belongs as a kind of dot, like cities in a geography, and who leave us with the pleasant feeling of how sweet and reasonable God is, or rather would be if anybody would pay any attention to Him. * * * * * I have already hinted at the qualities of the third class of preachers--those who make me want to be good. They seem to throw goodness as upon a screen, some vast screen of the world, of this real world about me. They turn their souls, like still stereopticons, upon the faces of men--men who are like the men and women I know. I go about afterward all the week seeing their sermons in the street. Everybody I see, everything that comes up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the very patterns of the days and nights, of my duties and failures, keep coming up, reminding me to be good. I may start in--I often do--with such a preacher, criticising him, but he soon gets me so occupied criticising myself and so lost in wondering how this something that he has and sees just beyond us, just beyond him, just beyond me, can be had for other people, and how I can have some of it for myself, that I forget to criticise. He searches my soul, makes me a new being in my presence before my eyes--that is, a new being toward some one subject, or some one possibility in the world. He helps me while in his presence to accomplish the supreme thing that one man can ever do for another. He helps me to get my own attention. He makes me see a set of particular things that I immediately, before his next sentence, am trying to find means to do. He does not attract my attention toward what he wants, like a preacher who teases; nor does he attract my attention to what God wants, like the preacher with the charts of goodness. He succeeds in attracting and holding down my attention to what I really want for myself or others, and to what I propose to get. The imagination of crowds is convinced only by men who have real genius for expression, for making word-pictures of real things, men who have what might be called moving-picture minds, and who are so picturesque and vivid that when they talk to people about goodness they have seen, everybody feels as if they had been there. It has to be admitted that this type of preacher, who has a kind of genius, and has developed an art form for expressing goodness in words, is necessarily an exceptional man. And it is unreasonable and unfair in the public to expect a man to get up in the pulpit and, with no costume and no accessories, merely with a kind of shrewd holiness or divination into human nature, present goodness so that we seem to be there. It is small wonder that a man who finds he is expected to be a kind of combination of biograph, brother, spiritual detective, and angel all in one, in order to do his work successfully has days of feeling that he has joined the ranks of The Impossible Profession. CHAPTER VIII MAKING GOODNESS HURRY Perhaps it has leaked out to those who have been following these pages thus far, that I am merely at best, if the truth were known, a kind of reformed preacher. I admit it. Many other people are. We began, owing to circumstances, with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it. But we have grown discouraged in talking to people about goodness. More and more, year by year, we have made up our minds, as I have hinted, to lie low and to keep still and show them some. And I can only say it again, as I have said it before, if everybody in the world could know my plumber or pay a bill to him, the world would soon begin, slowly but surely, to be a very different place. The first time I saw B---- I had asked him to come over to arrange with regard to putting in new waterpipes from the street to my house. The old ones had been put in no one could remember how many years before, and the pressure of water in the house, apparently from rust in the pipes, had become very weak. After a minute's conversation I at once engaged B---- to put in the new and larger pipes, and he agreed to dig open the trench (about two hundred feet long, and three feet deep) and put the pipes in the next day for thirty-five dollars. The next morning he appeared as promised, but, instead of going to work, he came into my study, stood there a moment before my eyes, and quietly but firmly threw himself out of his job! There was no use in spending thirty-five dollars, he said. He had gone to the City Water Works Office and told them to look into the matter and see if the connection they had put in at the junction of my pipe with the main in the street did not need attention. They had found that a new connection was necessary. They would see that a new one was put in at once. They were obliged to do it for nothing, he said; and then, slipping (figuratively speaking) thirty-five dollars into my pocket, he bowed gravely and was gone. B---- knew absolutely and conclusively (as any one would with a look) that I was not the sort of person who would ever have heard of that blessed little joint out in the street, or who ever would hear of it or who would know what to do with it if he did. * * * * * Sometimes I sit and think of B---- in church, or at least I used to, especially when his bill had just come in. It was always a pleasure to think of paying one of B----'s bills--even if it was sometimes a postponed one. You always knew, with B----, that he had made that bill out to you as if he had been making out a bill to himself. Not such a bad thing to think about during a sermon. I do not deny that I do lose a sentence now and then in sermons; and while, as every one knows, the sermons I have been provided with in the old stone church have been of a rare and high order, there have, I do acknowledge, been bad moments--little sudden bare spots or streaks of abstraction--and I do not deny that there have been times when I could not help feeling, as I sat listening, like sending around Monday morning to the parsonage--my plumber. One could not help thinking what Dr. ---- if he once got started on a plumber like B---- (had had him around working all the week during a sermon) could do with him. I have a shoemaker, too, who would help most ministers. I imagine he would point up their sermons a good deal--if they had his shoes on. Perhaps shoes and pipes and things like these will be looked upon soon to-day as constituting the great, slow, modest, implacable spiritual forces of our time. At all events, this is the most economical, sensible, thorough way (when one thinks of it) that goodness can be advertised. CHAPTER IX TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS A man's success in business to-day turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want. Success in business, in the last analysis, turns upon touching the imagination of crowds. The reason that preachers in this present generation are less successful in getting people to want goodness than business men are in getting them to want motor-cars, hats, and pianolas, is that business men as a class are more close and desperate students of human nature, and have boned down harder to the art of touching the imaginations of crowds. When one considers what it is that touches a crowd's imagination and how it does it, one is bound is admit that there is not a city anywhere which has not hundreds of men in it who could do more to touch the imagination of crowds with goodness than any clergyman could. A man of very great gifts in the pulpit, a man of genius, even an immortal clergyman, could be outwitted in the art of touching the imagination of crowds with goodness by a comparatively ordinary man in any one of several hundred of our modern business occupations. There is a certain nation I have in mind as I write, which I do not like to call by name, because it is struggling with its faults as the rest of us are with ours. But I do not think it would be too much to say that this particular nation I have in mind--and I leave the reader to fill in one for himself, has been determined in its national character for hundreds of years, and is being determined to-day--every day, nearly every minute of every day, except when all the people are asleep--by a certain personal habit that the people have. I am persuaded that this habit of itself alone would have been enough to determine the fate of the nation as a third-rate power, that it would have made it always do things with small pullings and haulings, in short breaths, and hand-to-mouth insights--a little jerk of idealism one day, and a little jerk of materialism the next--a kind of national palavering, and see-sawing and gesturing, and talking excitedly and with little flourishes. It is a nation that is always shrugging its shoulders, that almost never seems to be capable of doing a thing with fine directness, with long rhythms of purpose or sustained feeling; and all because every man, woman, and child in the country--scores of generations of them for hundreds of years--has been taught that the great spiritual truth or principle at the bottom of correctly and beautifully buying a turnip is to begin by saying that you do not want a turnip at all, that you never eat turnips, and none of your family, and that they never would. The other man begins by pointing out that he is never going to sell another turnip as long as he lives, if he can help it. Gradually the facts are allowed to edge in until at last, and when each man has taken off God knows how much from the value of his soul, and spent two shillings' worth of time on keeping a halfpenny in his pocket, both parties separate courteously, only to carry out the same spiritual truth on a radish perhaps or a spool of thread, or it may be even a house and lot, or a battleship, or a war, or a rumour of a war, with somebody. The United States, speaking broadly, is not like this. But it might have been. In the United States some forty years ago, being a new country, and being a country where everything a man did was in the nature of things, felt to be a first experiment, everybody felt democratic and independent, and as if he were making the laws of the universe just for himself as he went along. There was a period of ten years or so in which every spool of thread and bit of dress goods--everything that people wore on their bodies or put in their months, and everything that they read, came up and had to be considered as an original first proposition, as if there never had been a spool of thread before, as if each bit of dress goods was, or was capable of being, a new fresh experiment, with an adventurous price on it; and before we knew it a moral nagging and edging and hitching had set in, and was fast becoming in America an American trait, and fixing itself by daily repetition upon the imagination of the people. The shopping of a country is, on the whole, from a psychologist's point of view, the most spiritual energy, the most irrevocable, most implacable meter there can ever be of the religion a country really has. There was no clergyman in America who could have made the slightest impression on this great national list or trend of always getting things for less than they were worth--this rut of never doing as one would be done by. What was there that could be done with an obstinate, pervasive, unceasing habit of the people like this? What was there that could be done to touch the imagination of the crowd? Six thousand women a day were going in and out of A.T. Stewart's great store on Broadway at that time. A.T. Stewart announced to New York suddenly in huge letters one day, that from that day forward there should be one price for everything sold in his store, and that that price would be paid for it by everybody. A.T. Stewart's store was the largest, most successful, original, and most closely watched store in America. The six thousand women became one thousand. Then two thousand. Some of them had found that they finished their shopping sooner; the better class of women, those whose time was worth the most, and whose custom was the largest, gradually found they did not want to shop anywhere else. The two thousand became three thousand, four thousand, six thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand. Other department stores wanted the twelve thousand to come to them. They announced the one price. Hardware stores did it. Groceries announced one price. Then everybody. Not all the clergymen in America, preaching every Sunday for months, could have done very much in the way of seriously touching the imagination of the crowd on the moral unworthiness, the intellectual degradation, the national danger of picking out the one thing that nearly all the people all do, and had to do, all day, every day, and making that thing mean, incompetent, and small. No one had thought out what it would lead to, and how monstrous and absurd it was and would always be to have a nation have all its people taking every little thing all day, every day, that they were buying, or that they were selling--taking a spool of thread, for instance--and packing it, or packing their action with it, as full of adulterated motives and of fresh and original ways of not doing as they would be done by as they could think up--a little innocent spool of thread--wreaking all their sins and kinds of sins on it, breaking every one of the ten commandments on it as an offering.... It was A.T. Stewart, a very ordinary-looking, practical man in a plain, everyday business, who arrested the attention of a nation and changed the habit of thought and trend of mind of a great people, and made them a candid, direct people, a people that went with great sunny prairies and high mountains, a yea and nay people, straightforward, and free from palavering forever. A.T. Stewart was accustomed, in his own personal dealings from day to day, to cut people short when they tried to heckle with him. He liked to take things for granted, drive through to the point, and go on to the next one. This might have ended, of course, in a kind of _cul de sac_ of being a merely personal trait in a clean-cut, manful, straightforward American gentleman; and if Stewart had been a snob or a Puritan, or had felt superior, or if he had thought other people--the great crowds of them who flocked through his store--could never expect to be as good as he was, nothing would ever have come of it. It is not likely that he was conscious of the long train of spiritual results he had set in motion; of the way he had taken the habit of mind, the daily, hourly psychology of a great people, and had wrought it through with his own spirit; or of the way he had saved up, and set where it could be used, everyday religion in America, and had freed the business genius of a nation for its most characteristic and most effective self-expression. He merely was conscious that he could not endure palavering in doing business himself, and that he would not submit to being obliged to endure it, and he believed millions of people in America were as clean-cut and straightforward as he was. And the millions of people stood by him. Perhaps A.T. Stewart touched the imagination of the crowd because he had let the crowd touch his and had seen what crowds, in spite of appearances, were really like. The enterprise of touching the imagination of the crowd with goodness, which is being conducted every day on an enormous scale around us, has to be carried on, like all huge enterprises, by men who are in a large degree unconscious of it. There are few department stores in England or America that would expect to be called pious, but if one is deeply and obstinately interested in the Golden Rule, and in getting crowds of people to believe in it at a time, it is impossible not to think what sweeps of opportunity department stores would have with it--with the Golden Rule. With thousands of people flowing in and out all the week, and with hundreds of clerks to attend to it, eight hours a day, there would hardly seem to be any limit to what such a store could do in making the Golden Rule a direct, a pointed and personal thing, a thing that could not be evaded and could not be forgotten by thousands of people. The same people all going in and out of department stores, vast congregations of them, eight hours a day, which ministers can only get at in small lots, three hundred or so, twenty minutes a week, and can only get at with words even then--all of them being convinced in terms they understand, and in terms they keenly feel, convinced in hats that they will see over and over again, convinced in velvets that they are going to put on and off for years, in laces, in waistcoats, shoes, in dining-room chairs, convinced in the very underclothes next to their skins, the clothes they sleep in all night, in the very plates on which they eat, while all the time they keep remembering, or being reminded, just how the things were bought, and just what was claimed for them and what was not claimed for them, and thinking how the claims came true or how they did not. * * * * * I just saw lying on the table as I came through the hall a moment ago a hat which (out of all the long rows of hats I can see faintly reaching across the years) will always be to me a memorable hat. I am free to say that, after all the ladies it has been taken off to, my great memory of that hat is now and always will be, as long as I live, the department store at which I bought it, and the things the department store, before I got through with it, managed to make the hat say. I had been in the store the day before and selected, in broad daylight, with a big mirror staring me out of countenance, a hat which was a quarter of a size too large. To clinch the matter, I had ordered four ventilating holes to be punched in it, and had it sent to my rooms to be my hat--implacably my hat as I supposed, for better for worse, for richer for poorer--always. The next morning, after standing before a mirror and trying hopefully for a few minutes to see if I could not look more intelligent in the hat, I returned to the store firmly. I had made up my mind that I would keep from looking the way that that hat made me look, at any cost. The store was not responsible according to the letter either for the hat or for the way I looked in it. I had deliberately chosen it, looked at myself in cold blood in it, had those dreadful, irremovable, eternal air-holes dug into it. I would buy a new one. I jumped into a cab, and a moment after I arrived I found myself before the clerk from whom I had bought it, with a new one on my head, and was just reaching into my pocket for my purse when, to my astonishment, I heard, or seemed to hear, the great Department Store Itself, in the gentle accents of a young man with a yellow moustache, saying: "I'm sorry"--all seven storys of it gathering itself up softly, apparently, and saying "I'm sorry!" The young man explained that he was afraid the hat was wrong the day before, and thought he ought to have told me so, that the store would not want me to pay for the mistake. I came home a changed man. I had been hit by the Golden Rule before in department stores, but always rather subtly--never with such a broad, beautiful flourish! I made some faint acknowledgment, I have forgotten what, and rushed out of the store. But I have never gone past the store since, on a 'bus, or in a taxi, or sliding through the walkers on the street, but I have looked up to it--to its big, quiet windows, its broad, honest pillars fronting a world. I take off my hat to it. But it gave me more than a hat. I think what a thousand department stores, stationed in a thousand places on this old planet, could do in touching the imagination of the world--every day, day by day, cityfuls at a time. I had found a department store that had absolutely identified itself with my interests, that could act about a hat the way a wife would--a department store that looked forward to a permanent relation with me--a great live machine that could be glad and sorry--that really took me in, knew how I felt about things, cared how I looked as I walked down the street. Sometimes I think of the poor, wounded, useless thing I took back to them, those pitiless holes punched in it--just where no one else would ever have had them. I am human. I always feel about the store, that great marble and glass Face, when I go by it now as if, in spite of all the difficulties, it wanted me--to be beautiful! I at least feel and know that the people who were the brain, the daily moving consciousness behind the face--wanted me to be a becoming customer to them. They did not want to see me coming in, if it could possibly be helped, in that hat any more! * * * * * I have told this little history of a gray hat, not because it is in any way extraordinary, but because it is not. The same thing, or something quite like it, expressing the same spirit, might have happened in any one of the best hundred department stores in the world. Most people can remember a time, only a very little while ago, when clerks in our huge department stores or selling machines were not expected to be people who would think of things like this to do, or who would know how, or who would think to consider them good business if they did. The department store that based its success on selecting clerks of a high order of human insight, that paid higher wages to its clerks for their power of being believed in, for their personal qualities and their shrewdness in helping people and a gift for discovering mutual interests with everybody and for founding permanent human relations with the public, had not been thought of a little while ago. All that had been thought of was the appearance of these things. It was an employer's business, speaking generally, to get all he could out of his clerks and have them get as little as possible out of him. It was their business in their turn to get as much money out of the public as they could get, and to give the public as little in return as they dared. The type of employer who liked to do business in this way, and who believed in it, crowed over the world nearly everywhere as the Practical Man. And for the time being certainly it has to be admitted that he seemed the most successful. Naturally there came to be a general impression among the people that only certain lower orders of life and character could be employed, or could stand being employed, in the great department stores. I used often to go into ----'s. Everybody remembers it. I went in, as a rule, in a helpless, waiting, married way, and as a mere attaché of the truly wise and good. All I ever did or was expected to do was to stand by and look wise and discriminating a minute about dress goods, when spoken to. I used to put in my time looking behind the counters--all those busy, pale, yellow-lighted people in little holes or stalls trying to be human and natural in that long, low, indoor street of theirs, crowds of women staring by them and picking at things. Always that moving sidewalk of questions--that dull, eager stream of consciousness sweeping by. No sunlight--just the crowds of covetousness and shrewdness. I used to wonder about the clerks, many of them, and what they would be like at home or under an apple tree or each with a bit of blue sky to go with them. They used to seem in those days, as I looked, mostly poor, underground creatures living in a sort of Subway of Things in a hateful, hard, little world of clothes, each with his little study or trick or knack of appearances, standing there and selling people their good looks day after day at so much a yard. To-day, in a hundred cities one can go into department shops where one would get, standing and looking on idly, totally different impressions. There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who have made being a clerk a new thing in the world. The public has already had its imagination touched by them, and is beginning to deal with clerks, as a class, on a different level. This has been brought to pass because the employer has been thought of, or has thought of himself, who engages and pays for in clerks the highest qualities in human nature that he can get. He picks out and puts in power, and persuades to be clerks, people who would have felt superior to it in days gone by--men and women who habitually depend for their efficiency in showing and selling goods upon their more generous emotions and insights, their imaginations about other people. They gather in their new customers, and keep up their long lists of old and regular customers, through shrewd visions of service to people, and through a technical gift for making the Golden Rule work. When one looks at it practically, and from the point of view of all the consequences, a bargain is the most spiritual, conclusive, most self-revealing experience that people can have together. Every bargain is a cross-section in three tenses of a man. A bargain tells everything about people--who they are, and what they are like. It also tells what they are going to be like unless they take pains; and it tells what they are not going to be like too sometimes, and why. The man who comes nearest in modern life to being a Pope, is the man who determines in what spirit and by what method the people under him shall conduct his bargains and deal with his customers. ----, at the head of his department store, has a parish behind his counters of twenty-five hundred men and women. He is in the business of determining their religion, the way they make their religion work, eight hours a day, six days a week. He seems to me to be engaged in the most ceaseless, most penetrating, most powerful, and most spiritual activity of the world. He is really getting at the imaginations of people with his idea of goodness. If he does not work his way through to a man's imagination one minute or one day, he does the next. If he cannot open up a man's imagination with one line of goods, he does it with another. If he cannot make him see things, and do as he would be done by, with one kind of customer, another is moved in front of him presently, and another, and another--the man's inner substance is being attacked and changed nearly every minute every day. There is nothing he can do, or keep from doing, in which his employer's idea of goodness does not surround, besiege, or pursue him. Every officer of the staff, every customer who slips softly up to the counter in front of him makes him think of the Golden Rule in a new way or in some shading of a new way--confronts him with the will, with the expectation, with the religion of his employer. In ----'s store (where I looked in a moment yesterday) one thousand of the two thousand five hundred clerks are men. If I were a minister wondering nearly every day how to work in for my religion a fair chance at men, I should often look wistfully from over the edge of my pulpit, I imagine, to the head of ----'s department store, sitting at that quiet, calm, empty looking desk of his in his little office at the top of his big building in ---- Street, with nothing but those little six or seven buttons he softly puts his thumbs on connecting him with a thousand men. And he does not even need the buttons. Every man knows and feels, personally and intimately, what the man at the desk is asking him to do with a particular customer who stands before him at the moment. As soon as the customer is there, the man at the desk practically is there too. His religion works by wireless, and goes automatically, and as from a huge stored-up reservoir, to all that happens in the place. He makes regularly with his idea of goodness anywhere from twenty to sixty pastoral calls (with every sale they make) on a thousand men a day. He is not dependent, as the ordinary minister often is, on their dying, or on their babies, or on their wives, for a chance to get at men with his religion. If I wanted to take a spiritual census of modern civilization and get at the actual scientific facts, what we would have to call, probably the foot-tons of religion in the world to-day, I would not look for them in the year-books of the churches, I would get them by going about in the great department stores, by moving among the men and women in them day after day, and standing by and looking on invisibly. Like a shadow or a light I would watch them registering their goodness daily, hourly, on their counters, over their counters, measuring out their souls before God in dress goods, shoes, boas, hats, silk, and bread and butter! This may not be true of the Orient, but it is true, and getting to be more true every day, of Europe and America. It is especially true of America. In the things which we borrow in America, we are far behind the rest of the world. It is to the things that we create, that we must look alone, for our larger destiny, and our world-service. Naturally, in so far as civilization is a race of borrowing, nations like England and France and Germany a few hundred miles apart from one another, set the pace for a nation that is three thousand miles away from where it can borrow, like the United States. It is a far cry from the land of the Greeks with their still sunny temples and dreams, and from England with its quiet-singing churches, to New York with its practical sky-scraping hewing prayer! New York--scooping its will out of the very heavens! New York--the World's last, most stern, perhaps most manful prayer of all--half-asking and half-grasping out of the hand of God! Here is America's religion! Half afraid at first, half glad, slowly, solemnly triumphant, as on the edge of an abyss, I have seen America's religion! I have seen my brother Americans hewing it out--day by day, night by night, have I seen them--in these huge steel sub-cellars of the sky! I have accepted the challenge. If it is not a religion, then it shall be to us a religion to make it a religion. The Metropolitan Tower with its big clock dial, with its three stories of telling what time it is, and its great bell singing hymns above the dizzy flocks of the skyscrapers, is the soul of New York, to me. If one could see a soul--if one could see the soul of New York, it would look more like the Metropolitan Tower than anything else. It seems to be trying to speak away up there in the whiteness and the light, the very soul of the young resistless iron-hearted city. I write as an American. To me there is something about it as I come up the harbour that fills my heart with a big ringing, as if all the world were ringing, ringing once more--ringing all over again--up in this white tower of ours in its new bit of blue sky! I glory in England with it, in Greece, in Bethlehem. It is as an outpost on Space and Time, for all of us gathering up all history in it softly--once more and pointing it to God! It is the last, the youngest-minded, the most buoyant tower--the mighty Child among the steeples of the world. The lonely towers of Cologne stretching with that grave and empty nave against the sky, out of that old and faded region of religion, far away, tremulously send greetings to it--to this white tower in the west--to where it goes up with its crowds of people in it, with business and with daily living and hoping and dying in it, and strikes heaven! It may be perhaps only the American blood in me. Perhaps it is raw and new to be so happy. I do not know. I only know that to me the Metropolitan Tower is saying something that has been never quite said before--something that has been given in some special sense to us as a trust from the world. It is to me the steeple of democracy--of our democracy, England's democracy--the world's democracy. The hollow domes of Sts. Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their vague, airy other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so many balloons of religion and goodness, trying to get away from this world--are not to me so splendid, so magnificently wilful as the Metropolitan Tower--as the souls of these modern, heaven-striking men, taking the world itself, at last, its streets of stone, of steel, its very tunnels and lifting them up as blind offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to heaven! I worship my country, my people, my city when I hear the big bell in it and when I look up to where the tower is in that still place like a sea--look up to where that little white country belfry sits in the light, in the dark above the vast and roaring city! To me, the Metropolitan Tower, sweeping up its prayer out of the streets the way it does, and doing it, too, right beside that little safe, tucked-in, trim, Sunday religion of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, lifts itself up as one of the mighty signs and portents of our time. Have I not heard the bell tolling to the people in the midst of business and singing great hymns? A great city lifts itself and prays in it--prays while it sings and clangs so absent-looking below. I like to go out before going to sleep and take a look at it--one more look before I sleep, upon the tower, strong, unyielding, alive, sinewy, imperturbable, lifting up within itself the steel and soul of the world. I am content to go to sleep. It is a kind of steeple of the business of this world. I would rather have said that business needed a steeple before until I saw the Metropolitan Tower and heard it singing above the streets. But I had always wanted (without knowing it), in a modern office building, a great solemn bell to remind us what the common day was. I like to hear it striking a common hour and what can be done in it. I stop in the street to listen--to listen while that great hive of people tolls--tolls not the reveries of monks above the roofs of the skyscrapers, but the religion of business--of the real and daily things, the seriousness of the mighty street and the faces of the men and the women. CHAPTER X THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS, AND THE SUCCESSFUL The imagination of crowds may be said to be touched most successfully when it is appealed to in one of four ways: THE STUPENDOUS. THE UNUSUAL. THE MONOTONOUS. THE SUCCESSFUL. Of these four ways, the stupendous, or the unusual, or the successful are the most in evidence, and have something showy about them, so that we can look at them afterward, and point out at a glance what they have done. But probably the underhold on the crowd, the real grip on its imagination, the one which does the plain, hard, everyday work on a crowd's ideals, which determines what crowds expect and what crowds are like inside--is the Monotonous. The man who tells the most people what they shall be like in this world is not the great man or the unusual man. He is the monotonous man. He is the man, to each of us, who determines the unconscious beat and rhythm with which we live our daily lives. If we wanted to touch the imaginations of crowds, or of any particular crowd, with goodness, the best way to do it would probably be, not to go to the crowd itself, but to the man who is so placed that he determines the crowd's monotony, the daily rhythm with which it lives--the man, if we can find him, who arranges the crowd's heart-beat. It need not take one very long to decide who the man is who determines the crowd's heart-beat. The man who has the most dominion over the imaginations of most of us, who stands up high before us out in front of our lives, the man who, as with a great baton, day after day, night after night, conducts, as some great symphony, the fate of the world above our heads, who determines the deep, unconscious thoughts and motives, the inner music or sing-song, in which we live our lives, is the man to whom we look for our daily bread. It is the men with whom we earn our money who are telling us all relentlessly, silently, what we will have to be like. The men with whom we spend it, who sell things to us, like the department stores, those huge machines of attention, may succeed in getting great sweeps of attention out of crowds at special times, by appealing to men through the unusual and through the stupendous or the successful. But what really counts, and what finally decides what men and what women shall be, what really gets their attention unfathomably, unconsciously, is the way they earn their money. The feeling men come to have about a fact, of its being what it is, helplessly or whether or no--the feeling that they come to have about something, of its being immemorially and innumerably the same everywhere and forever, comes from what they are thinking and the way they think while they are earning their money. It is out of the subconscious and the monotonous that all our little heavens and hells are made. It is our daily work that becomes to us the real floor and roof of living, hugs up under us like the ground, fits itself down over us, and is our earth and sky. The man with whom we earn our money, the man who employs us, his thinking or not thinking, his "I will" and "I won't," are the iron boundaries of the world to us. He is the skylight and the manhole of life. The monotonous, the innumerable and over and over again, one's desk, one's typewriter, one's machine, one's own particular factory window, the tall chimney, the little forever motion with one's hand--it is these, godlike, inscrutable, speechless, out of the depths of our unconsciousness and down through our dreams, that become the very breath and rumble of living to us, domineer over our imaginations and rule our lives. It is decreed that what our Employers think and let us know enough to think shall be a part of the inner substance of our being. It shall be a part of growing of the grass to us, and shall be as water and food and sleep. It shall be to us as the shouts of boys at play in the field and as the crying of our children in the night. To most men Employers are the great doors that creak at the end of the world. It is not the houses that people live in, or the theatres that they go to, or the churches to which they belong, or the street and number--the East End look or the West End look the great city carves on the faces of these men I see in the street--that determines what the men are like. Their daily work lies deeper in them than their faces. One finds one's self as one flashes by being told things in their walk, in the way they hold their hands and swing their feet. And what is it their hands and feet, umbrellas, bundles, and the wrinkles in their clothes tell us about them? They tell us how they earn their money. Their hopes, their sorrow, their fears and curses, their convictions, their very religions are the silent, irrevocable, heavenly minded, diabolical by-products of what their Employers think they can afford to let them know enough to think. "Fight for yourselves. Your masters hate you. They would shoot you down like rabbits, but they need your labour for their huge profits. Don't go in till you get your minimum. No Royal Commission, no promise in the future. Leaders only want your votes; they will sell you. They lie. Parliament lies, and will not help you, but is trying to sell you. Don't touch a tool till you get your minimum. Win, win, win! It is up to all workers to support the miners." If a man happens to be an employer, and happens to know that he is not this sort of man, and finds that he cannot successfully carry on his business unless he can make five hundred men in his factory believe it, what can he do? How can he touch their imaginations? What language is there, either of words or of action, that will lead them to see that he is a really a fair-minded, competent employer, a representative of the interests of all, a fellow-citizen, a Crowdman, and that his men can afford to believe in him and coöperate with them? If they think he would shoot them down like rabbits, it is because they have not the remotest idea what he is really like. They have not noticed him. They have no imagination about him, have not put themselves in his place. How can he get their attention? CHAPTER XI THE SUCCESSFUL A little while ago I saw in Paris an American woman, the President of a Woman's Club (I imagined), who was doing as she should, and was going about in a cab appreciating Paris, drive up to the Louvre. Leaving her cab, though I wondered a little why she did, at the door, she hurried up the steps and swept into the gallery, taking her eleven-year-old boy with her. I came upon her several times. The Louvre did not interest the boy, and he seemed to be bothering and troubling his mother, and of course he kept trying very hard, as any really nice boy would, to get out; but she would not let him, and he wandered about dolefully, looking at his feet and at the floor, or at the guards, and doing the best he could. Finally she came over to him; there was a Murillo he must see--it was the opportunity of his life; she brought him over to it, and stood him up in front of it, and he would not look; she took his small brown head in her hands and steered it to the great masterpiece and held it there--on that poor, silent, helpless Murillo--until.... I observed that she could steer his head; but I could not help thinking how much more she would have done if she had known how to steer it inside. The invention of the Megaphone, of the Cinema, and the _London Times_, and of the Bible, are all a part of the great, happy, hopeful effort of one part of this world to get the attention of the other part of it, and steer heads inside. This art of steering heads inside, which has come to be the secret art of all the other arts, the secret religion of all the religions, is also the secret of building and maintaining a civilization and a successful and permanent business. It is hard to believe how largely, for the last twenty years, it has been overlooked by employers as the real key of the labour problem--this art of steering people's heads inside. We have seen part of the truth. We have put in a good deal of time in finding fault with labouring men for thinking too much about themselves and about their class, and for emphasizing their wages more than their work, and for not having more noble and disinterested characters. Parliaments, clergymen, and employers have all been troubled for years about Labour, and they have been trying very hard on Sundays and through reports of speeches by members of Parliament in the daily press, and through laws, and through employers' associations, and through factory rules and fines, to get the attention of labouring men and lift their thoughts to higher things. A great many wise things have been said to Labour--masterpieces, miles of them as it were, whole Louvres of words have been hung upon their walls. But in vain! And all because we have merely taken the outside of the boy's head in our hands. We have not thought what was really going on in it. We have not tried to steer it inside. We have been superficial. It is superficial for a comfortable man with a bun in his pocket to talk to a starving man about having some higher motive than getting something to eat. Everybody sees that this is superficial, if we mean by it that his body is starving. But if we mean something more real and more terrible than that--that he is starving inside, that his soul is starving, that he has nothing to live for, no real object in getting something to eat--if we mean by it, in other words, that the man's imagination is not touched even by his own life, people take it very lightly. And it is the most important thing in the world. The one thing now necessary to society, to industry, is to get hold of the men who are in it, one by one, and touch their imaginations about themselves. We have millions of men working without their thoughts and expectations being ventilated or passed along, year after year. One sees these men everywhere one goes, in thousands of factories, doing their work without any draught. We already have tall chimneys for our coal furnaces; we have next to see the value of tall chimneys, great flues to the sky, on the lives and thought and the inner energies of men. The most obvious way to get a draught on a man, to get him to glow up and work is to cut through an opening in the top of his life. Just where to cut this opening, and just how to cut it in each man's life--each man considered as a problem by himself--is the Labour problem. There are certain general principles that might be put down in passing. To begin with, we must not feel ashamed to begin implacably with the actual man just as he is, and with the wants and the motives that he actually has. We should feel ashamed rather to begin in any other way. It would not be bright or thoughtful to begin on him with motives he is going to have; and it certainly would not be religious or worthy of us to try to make him begin with ours. Perhaps ours are better--for us. Perhaps, too, ours will be better for him when he is like us (if we can give him any reason to want to be). In the meantime, what is there that can honestly be called base in taking human nature as it is and in allowing a sliding scale of motives in people? Starving people and slaves, or people who are ugly and hateful, _i.e._, not really quite bright toward others, who impute mean, inaccurate motives to them, can only be patiently expected to have a very small area or even mote of unselfishness at first. A cross-section of our society to-day represents the entire geological formation of human nature for 40,000 years. We need but look on the faces of the men about us as we go down the street. All history is here this minute. We wish that Labour had better motives. We wish to get our workmen to understand us better and believe in us more and work for us harder. We agree that we must begin with them, if we propose to do this, where they are. Where are they? There are certain general observations that might seem to the point. 1. If a man is a sane and sound man and works hard, he must feel that everything he does, every minute, is definitely connected with the main through-train purpose in his life. 2. If the main purpose in his life is domestic and consists in having his family live well and giving his children a chance, he must feel and be absolutely sure when he is working better or working worse for his employer that he is working better or worse for himself and for those for whom he lives. 3. In the ordinary labourer this domestic unselfishness or house patriotism is a kind of miniature public spirit. It is the elementary form of his national or human enthusiasm. It is the form of disinterestedness that has to be attended to in men first; and the way for society to get the labouring man to be public-spirited, to have the habit of considering the rights of others, is for society to have the habit of considering his rights in his daily work. An intelligent, live man must be allowed a little margin to practise being unselfish on, if only in the privacy of his own family. Unselfishness begins in small circles. The starving man must be allowed a smaller range of unselfishness than the man who has enough. It is not uncomplimentary or unworthy in human nature to admit that this is so--to demand that the human being who is starving must be allowed to be selfish. If he is not bright enough to be selfish when he is hungry he is dangerous to society. We ought to insist upon his being selfish, and help him in it. Virtue is a surplus. 4. This is the first humble, stuttering speech the competent modern employer who proposes to express himself to his men, and get them to understand him and work with him, is going to make. He is going to pick out one by one every man in his works who has a decent, modest, manly desire to be selfish, and help him in it. He is going to do something or say something that will make the man see, that will make him believe for life, that the most powerful, the most trustworthy, the most far-sighted man he can find in the world to be his partner in being decently, soundly, and respectfully selfish--is his employer. No employer can expect to get the best work out of a man except by working down through to the inner organic desire in the man as a man, except by waking his selfishness up and by making it a larger, fuller, nobler, weightier selfishness, and turning the full weight of it every minute, every hour, on his daily work. The best language an employer can find to express this desire at first to his workmen, is some form of faithful, honest copartnership. 5. The ordinary wage labourer has little imagination about other people because he is not allowed any about himself. The moment he is, and the moment his employer arranges his work so that he sees every minute all day that the work which he does for the firm 30 per cent. better counts. 30 per cent. more on his own main purpose in life, his imagination is touched about himself and he begins to work like a human being. When a man has been allowed to work awhile as a human being he will begin to be human with a wider range. Being a partner touches the imagination and wakes the man's humanness up. He not only works better, but he loves his family better when he sees he can do something for them. He serves his town better and his lodge better when he sees he can do something for them. 6. Being a partner wakes the man's imagination toward those who work with him, and toward the public and the markets and the goods and the cities where the goods go. He reads newspapers with a new eye. He becomes interested in people who buy the goods, and in people who do not. Why do they not? He gropes toward a general interest in human nature, and begins to live. 7. A man who is being paid wages one night in a week, has his imagination touched about his work one night in the week. He is merely being a wage-earner. In being a partner he is being paid, and feels his pay coming in, every thirty seconds, in the better way he moves his hands or does not move his hands. This makes him a man. 8. And, finally, as he knows he is being paid, and that he always will be paid, what he earns, he stops thinking of the sick, tired side of his work--the pay he gets out of it, and begins to love the work itself, and begins to be perfect in it for its own sake. This makes him a gentleman. 9. Being a partner makes a man actively and keenly reasonable and practical, not only about his own labour, but about the superior value of other people with whom he works. He wants the best people in the best places. He begins to have a practical partner's imagination about the men who are over him, and about their knowing more than he does. If he is merely paid wages, he is superstitious, and jealous toward those who know more than he does. If he is paid profits, he is glad that they do, and strikes in and helps. 10. Another complete range of motives is soon offered to the employee who is a partner. He feels the joy of being a part of a big, splendid whole, a disinterested delight and pride in others. He grows young with it, like a boy in school. Here is the factory over him, around him--his own vast hockey team--and over that is the nation, and over that is the world! An employer can touch the imagination of most men, of the rank and file of the people, ninety-nine times where other people can touch it once. And every time he touches it, he touches it to the point. If men in general do not believe to-day in religion and do not want it, it is because they have employers who have not seen any place in their business where they could get their religion in, and have kept the people (in the one place where they could really learn what religion is) from learning anything about it. The moment the more common employers see what the great ones see now, that business is the one particular place in this world where religion really works, works the hardest, the longest, and the best, works as it had never been dreamed a religion could be made to work before--the day school teachers of the world, put the Golden Rule in the Course everybody will know it. It only takes a moment's thought to see what the employers of the world could do with the Golden Rule the moment they take hold of it. One has but to consider what they have done with it already. One has but to consider the astounding way in the last fifteen years they have made everybody not believe in it. The employers of the world have been saying ten hours a day to everybody that the Golden Rule is a foolish, pleasant, inefficient, worsted motto on a parlour wall. Everybody has believed it. And now that the big employers are setting the pace and are saying exactly the opposite thing about the Golden Rule, now that all the employers are trying to get their employees to be efficient (to do by their employers as they would be done by), and now that they are trying to be efficient themselves (are trying to do to their employees as they would have their employees do to them), the Golden Rule is touching the imagination of crowds, and the crowd is seeing that the Golden Rule works. They watch it working every day in the things they know about. Then they believe in it for other things. CHAPTER XII THE NECKS OF THE WICKED A letter lies before me, one out of many others asking me how the author of "The Shadow Christ," which is a study of the religious values in suffering and self-sacrifice in this world, takes the low ground that honesty is the best policy. I know two kinds of men who believe that honesty is the best policy. These two men use exactly the same words "Honesty is the best policy." One man says it. The other man sings it. One man is honest because it pays. The other man is honest because he likes it. "Honesty is the best policy" as a motive cannot be called religious, but "Honesty is the best policy" as a Te Deum, as something a man sings in his heart every day about God, something he sings about human nature is religious, and believing it the way some men believe it, is an act of worship. It is like a great gentle mass. It is like taking softly up one's own planet and offering it to God. Here it is--the planet. Honesty is organized in the rocks on it and in the oak trees on it and in the people. The rivers flow to the sea and the heart of Man flows to God. On this one planet, at least, God is a success. Possibly it is because many other people beside myself have been slow in clearly making this distinction between "Honesty is the best policy" as a motive or a Te Deum, that I have come upon so many religious men and women in the last two or three years, who, in the finest spirit, have seemed to me to be doing all that they could to discourage everybody especially to discourage me, about the Golden Rule. The first objection which they put forward to the Golden Rule is that it is a failure. When I try to deal with this or try to tell them about Non-Gregarious, the second objection that they put forward is, that it is a success. If they cannot discourage me with one of these objections they try to discourage me with the other. They point to the Cross. Some days I cannot help wondering what Christ would think if He were to come back and find people, all these good Christian people everywhere using the Cross--the Cross of all things in the world as an objection to the Golden Rule and to its working properly, or as a general argument against expecting anything of anybody. I do not know that I have any philosophy about it that would be of any value to others. I only know that I am angry all through when I hear a certain sort of man saying, and apparently proving, that the Golden Rule does not work. And I am angry at other people who are listening with me because they are not angry too. Why are people so complacent about crosses? And why are they willing to keep on having and expecting to have in this world all the good people on crosses? Why do they keep on treating these crosses year after year, century after century, in a dull tired way as if they had become a kind of conventionality of God's, a kind of good old church custom, something that He and the Church by this time, after two thousand years, could not really expect to try to get over or improve upon? I do not know that I ought to feel as I do. I only know that the moment I see evil triumphing in this world, there is one thing that that evil comes up against. It comes up against my will. My will, so far as it goes, is a spiritual fact. I do not argue about it, nor do I know that I wish to justify it. I merely accept my will as it is, as one spiritual fact. I propose to know what to do with it next. The first thing that I have done, of course, has been to find out that there are millions of other so-called Christian people who have encountered this same fact that I have encountered. There are at least some of us who stand together. Our wills are set against having any more people die on crosses in this world than can be helped. If there is any kind of skill, craftmanship, technique, psychology, knowledge of human nature which can be brought to bear, which will keep the best people in this world not only from being, but from belonging on crosses in it, we propose to bring these things to bear. We are not willing to believe that crowds are not inclined to Goodness. We are not willing to slump down on any general slovenly assumption about the world that goodness cannot be made to work in it. If goodness is not efficient in this world we will make it efficient. Our reason for saying this is that we honestly glory in this world. We believe that at this moment while we are still on it, it is in the act of being a great world, that it is God's world, and in God's Name we will defend its reputation. We do not deny that it may be better spiritual etiquette, more heroic looking and may have a certain moral grace, so far as a man himself is concerned, if the world makes him suffer for being honest. But after all he is only one man, and whether he dislikes his suffering or likes it and feels fine and spiritual over it, it is only one man's suffering. But why is it that when the world makes a man suffer, everybody should seem always to be thinking of the man? Why does not anybody think of the world? Is not the fact that a whole world, eternal and innumerable, is supposed to be such a mean, dishonest sort of a world that it will make a man suffer for being good a more important fact than the man's suffering is? It seems to me to be taking not lower but higher ground when one insists on believing in the race one belongs to and in believing that it is a human race that can be believed in. After two thousand years of Christ, it is a lazy, tired, anæmic slander on the world to believe that it does not pay to be good in it. The man who believes it, and acts as if he believed it, is to-day and has been from the beginning of time the supreme enemy of us all. He is guilty before heaven and before us all and in all nations of high treason to the human race. One of the next most important things to do in modern religion is going to be to get all these morally dressed-up, noble-looking people who enjoy feeling how good they are because they have failed, to examine their hearts, stop enjoying themselves and think. For hundreds of years we have religiously run after martyrs and we have learned in a way, most of us, to have a kind of cooped-up patriotism for our own nation, but why are there not more people who are patriotic toward the whole human race? One has been used to seeing it now for centuries, good people all over the world hanging their harps on willow trees, or snuggling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their lives, and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when they would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them--in doing something that would make it stop. There was a poet and soldier some thousands of years ago who put more real religion (and put it too, into his imprecatory psalms), than has been put, I believe, into all the sweet whinings and the spiritual droopings of the world in three thousand years. I do not deny that I would quarrel, as a matter of form, with the lack of urbanity, with a certain ill-nature in the imprecatory Psalms; but with the spirit in them, with the motive and mighty desire, with the necessity in the man's heart that was poured into them, I have the profoundest sympathy. David had a manly, downright belief. His belief was that if sin is allowed to get to the top in this world of ours, it is our fault. David felt that it was partly his--and being a king--very much his, and as he was trying to do something about it, he naturally wanted the world to help. What he really meant--what lay in the background of his petition--the real spirit that made him speak out in that naïve bold way before the Lord, and before everybody--that made him ask the great God in heaven all looking so white and so indifferent, to come right down please and jump on the necks of the wicked, was a vivid, live vision of his own for his own use that he was going to make the world more decent. He was spirited about it. If God did not, He would, and naturally when he came to expressing how he felt in prayer, he wanted God to stand by him. To put it in good plain soldier-like Hebrew, He wanted God to jump on the necks of his enemies. Speaking strictly for ourselves, in our more modern spirit of course, we would want to modulate this, we admit that we would not ask God to do a little thing like jumping on the necks of the wicked--just for us--nor would we care to break away from the other things we are doing and attend to it ourselves, nor would we even favour their necks being jumped on by others, but while we do not agree with David's particular request, we do profoundly agree with the way he felt when he made it. We would not make our flank movement on the wicked in quite the same way and according to our more modern and more scientific manner of thought, we would want to do something more practical with the wicked, but we would want to do something with them and we would want to do it now. As we look at it, it ought not to be necessary to jump on the necks of the wicked to make them good, that is, to make them understand what they would wish they had done in twenty years. We live in a more reasoning and precise age and what more particularly concerns us in the wicked is not their necks, but their heads and their hearts. It seems to us that they are not using them very much and that the moment they do and we can get them to, they will be good. Possibly it was a mere matter of language, a concession to the then state of the language--David's wanting their necks to be jumped on so that he could get their attention at first and make them stop and think and understand. More subtle ways of expressing things to the wicked have been thought of to-day than of jumping on their necks, but the principle David had in mind has not changed, the principle of being loyal to the human race, the principle of standing up for people and insisting that they were really meant to be better than they were or than they thought they could be--a kind of holy patriotism David had for this world. The main fact about David seems to be that he believed he belonged to a great human race. Incidentally he believed he belonged to a human race that was really quite bright, bright enough at least to make people sorry for doing wrong in it--a human race that was getting so shrewd and so just and so honest that it took stupider and stupider people every year to be wicked, and when he found, judging from recent events in Judea, that this for the time being was not so, he had a hateful feeling about it, which it seems to some of us, vastly improved him and would improve many of us. We do not claim that the imprecatory Psalms were David's best, but they must have helped him immensely in writing the other ones. * * * * * We may be wrong. But it has come to be an important religious duty to some of us, or rather religious joy, to hate the prosperity of the wicked. We hate the prosperity of the wicked, not because it is their prosperity and not ours, but because their prosperity constitutes a sneer or slander on the world. We have no idea of wanting to go about faithfully jumping upon the necks of the wicked. What we want is to feel that we are in a world where the good people are happy and are making goodness reasonable, successful, profitable and practical in it. We want an earth with crowds on it who see things as they are, and who guess so well on what they want (_i.e._, who are good) that other people who do not know what they want and are not good, will be lonesome. We have made up our minds to live in a world not where the wicked will feel that their necks are going to be jumped on (which is really a rather interesting and prominent feeling on the whole), but a world where the wicked will be made to feel that nobody notices their necks, that they are not worth being jumped on, a world where nobody will have time to go out back and jump on them, a world where the wicked will not be able to think of anything important to do, and where the wicked things that are left to do will be so small and so stupid that nobody will notice. They will be ignored like boys with catcalls in the street. When we can make people who do wrong feel unimportant enough, there is going to be some chance for the good. If we could find some sweet, proper, gentle, Christian-looking way of conveying to these people for a few swift, keen minutes how little difference it makes when they and people like them do wrong, they would steal over in a body and do right. This is our program. We are making preliminary arrangements for a world in which after this, very soon now, righteousness is going to attend strictly to its own business and unrighteousness is going to be crowded out. No one will feel that he has time in two or three hundred years from now to go out of his way into some obscure corner of the world and jump on the necks of the wicked. But this is a matter of form. The main fundamental manful instinct David had--the idea that there should not be any more people dying on crosses than could be helped--that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked. We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a whole. So we believe that Society should proceed to making goodness and honesty pay. If Society will not do it _we_ will do it. The world may be against us at first but we will at least clear off a small place on it--in our own business for instance--where our goodness can command the most shrewdness and the most technique--and we will do what we can slowly--one industry at a time, to remove the slander on goodness that goodness is not inefficient, and the slander on the world that goodness cannot be self-supporting, self-respecting (and without disgrace), even comfortable in it. The old hymn with which many of us are familiar is well and true enough. But it does not seem that standing up for Jesus is the most important point in the world just now. A great many people are doing it. What we need more is people who will stand up for the world. When people who are standing up for the world stand and sing "Stand up for Jesus" it will begin to count. Let four hundred Nons sing it; and we will all go to church. If nine of the people out of ten who are singing "Stand up for Jesus" would stand up for the world, that is, if they would stop trading with their grocer when they find he slides in regularly one bad orange out of twelve and promptly look up a grocer who does not do such things, and trade with him, it would not be necessary for people to do as they so often do nowadays, fall back on a little wistful half discouraged last resort like "standing up for Jesus." Standing up for the world means standing by men who believe in it, standing by men who make everything they do in business a declaration of their faith in God and their faith in the credit of human nature, men who put up money daily in their advertising, their buying and selling, on the loyalty, common sense, brains, courage, goodness, and righteous indignation of the people. The idea that goodness is sweet and helpless and that Jesus was meek and lowly and has to be stood up for is now and always has been a slander. It does not seem to some of us that He would want to be stood up for and we do not like the way some people call Him meek and lowly. It would be more true to say that He merely looks meek and lowly; that is, if most men had done or not done or had said or not said things in the way he did, they would have been considered meek and lowly for it. He had a way of using a soft answer to turn away wrath. But there was not anything really meek and lowly about his giving the soft answer. No meek and lowly man would ever have thought of such a thing as turning away wrath with a soft answer. He would have been afraid of looking weak. He would not have had the energy or the honesty or the spiritual address to know or to think of a soft answer that would do it. The spirit of fighting evil with good--a kind of glorious self-will for goodness, for doing a thing the higher and nobler way and making it work, the spirit of successful implacably efficient righteousness is the last and most modern interpretation of the New Testament, the crowd's latest cry to its God. Crowds will always crucify and crosses will never go by. But we are going to have a higher ideal for crosses. We are not going (out of sheer shame for the world), to think seriously any longer of dying on a cross, or letting any one else die on one for a little rudimentary platitude, a quiet, sensible, everyday business motto for any competent business man like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." CHAPTER XIII IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? We are having and are about to have notably and truly successful men who have the humility and faithfulness, the spiritual distinction of true and great success. I want to interpret, if I can, these men. I would like to put with the great martyrs, with the immortal heroes of failure, these modern silent, unspoken, unsung mighty men, the heroes of success. I look forward to seeing them placed among the trophies of religion, in the heart of mankind at last. I cannot stand by and watch these men being looked upon by good people as men the New Testament made no room for, secretly disapproved of by religious men and women, as being successes, as being little, noisy, disturbing, contradictions of the New Testament as talking back to the Cross. These things I have been trying to say about the Cross as a means of expressing goodness to crowds have brought me as time goes on into close quarters with many men to whom I pay grateful tribute, men of high spirit, who strenuously disagree with me. I am not content unless I can find common ground with men like these. They are wont to tell me when we argue about it that whatever I may be able to say for success as a means of touching the imaginations of crowds with goodness, great or attractive or enthralling characters are not produced by success. Success does not produce great characters. It is now and always has been failure that develops the characters of the men who a truly great. Perhaps failure is not the only way. * * * * * When I was talking with ---- a little while ago about Non-Gregarious's goodness and how it succeeded, he was afraid that if his goodness succeeded there must have been something the matter with it. I could see that he was wondering what it was. Non's success troubled him. He did not think it was exactly religious. "Real religion" he said, "was self-sacrifice. There always had to be something of the Cross about real religion." I said that Non's religion was touched at every point with the Cross. It seemed to me that it was the spirit of eagerness in it that was the great thing about the Cross. If Non would all but have died to make the Golden Rule work in this world, if he daily faced ruin and risked the loss of everything he had in this life to prove that the Golden Rule was a success, that is if he really had a Cross and if he really faced it--dying on it, or not dying on it, could not have made him one whit more religious or less religious than he was. What Non was willing to die for, was his belief in the world, and scores of good Christian people tried in those early days of his business struggle to keep him from believing in the world. There was hardly a day at first but some good Christian would step into Non's office and tell him the world would make him suffer for it if he kept on recklessly believing in it and doing all those unexpected, unconventional, honest things that somehow, apparently, he could not help doing. They all told him he could not succeed. They said he was a failure. He would suffer for it. I would like to express if I can, what seems to be Non's point of view toward success and failure. If Non were trying to express his idea of the suffering of Christ, I imagine he would say that in the hardest time of all when his body was hanging on the Cross, the thing that was really troubling Christ was not that he was being killed. The thing that was troubling him was that the world really seemed, at least for the time being, the sort of world that could do such things. He did not take his own cross too personally or too literally as the world's permanent or fixed attitude toward goodness or every degree of goodness. There was a sense in which he did not believe except temporarily in his own cross. He did not think that the world meant it or that it would ever own up that it meant it. Probably if we had crosses to-day the hard part of dying on one would be, not dying on it, but thinking while one was dying on it that one was in the sort of world that could do such things. It is Non's religion not to believe every morning as he goes down to his office that he is in a mean world, a world that would want to crucify him for doing his work as well as he could. Perhaps this was the spirit of the first Cross, too. We have every reason to believe that if Christ could have come back in the flesh three days after the crucifixion and lived thirty-three years longer in it, he would have occupied himself exclusively in standing up for the world that had crucified him, in saying that it was a small party in a small province that did it, that it was temporary and that they did it because they were in a hurry. It was not Christ, but the comparatively faint-believing, worldly minded saints that have enjoyed dying on crosses since, who have been proud of being martyrs. Among those who have tried the martyr way of doing things Jesus is almost the only one who has not in his heart abused the world. Most martyrs have made a kind of religion out of not expecting anything of it and of trying to get out of it. "And ye, all ye people, are ye suitable or possible people for me to be religious with?" the typical martyr exclaims to all the cities, to all the inventors, to the scientists and to the earth-redeemers, to his neighbours and his fellow men. It was not until science in the person of Galileo came to the rescue of Christianity and began slowly to bring it back to where Christ started it--as a noble, happy enterprise of standing up for this world and of asserting that these men who were in it are good enough to be religious here and to be the sons of God now--that Christianity began to function. Religion has been making apparently a side trip for nearly twelve hundred years, a side trip into space or into the air or into the grave for holiness for the eternal, and for the infinite. Doubtless very often people on crosses really have been holier than the people who knew how to be good without being crucified. Sometimes it has been the other way. It would have been just as holy in Non to make the gospel work in New York as to make a blaze, a show or advertisement of how wicked the world was, and of how inefficient the gospel was--by going into insolvency. He has had his cross, but instead of dying on it, he has taken it up and carried it. Scores of risks and difficulties that he has grappled with would have become crosses at once if equally good, but less resourceful men, had had them. Letting one's self be threatened with the cross a thousand times is quite as brave as dying on one once. The spirit, or at least the shadow, of a cross must always fall daily on any life that is stretching the world, that is freeing the lives of other men against their wills. The whole issue of whether there will be a cross or the threat of a cross turns on a man's insight into human nature and his quiet and practical imagination concentrated upon his work. Not dying on a cross is a matter of technique. One sees how not to, and one does not. It might be said that the world has two kinds of redeemers, its cross-redeemers and its success-redeemers. The very best are on crosses, many of them. Perhaps in the development of the truth the cross-redeemers come first; they are the pioneers. Then come the success-redeemers, then everybody! CHAPTER XIV IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL? Of course the most stupendous success that has ever been made--the world's most successful undertaking from a technical point of view as an adaptation of means to ends was the attempt that was made by a man in Galilee years and years ago to get not only the attention of a whole world, but to get the attention of a whole world for two thousand years. This purpose of arresting the attention of a world and of holding it for two thousand years was accomplished by the use of success and of failure alternately. Christ tried success or failure according to which method (time and place considered) would seem to work best. His first success was with the doctors. His next success was based on His instinct for psychology, His power of divining people's minds, which made possible to Him those extraordinary feats in the way of telling short stories that would arrest and hold the attention of crowds so that they would think and live with them for weeks to come. His next success was a success based on the power of His personality, and His knowledge of the human spirit and his victory over His own spirit--his success in curing people's diseases and His extraordinary roll of miracles. He finally tried failure at the end, or what looked like failure, because the Cross completed what he had had to say. It made His success seem greater. The world had put to death the man who had had such great successes. People thought of His successes when they thought of Him on the Cross, and they have kept thinking of them for thousands of years. But the Cross itself, or the use of failure was a sowing of the seed, a taking the truth out of the light and the sunshine and putting it in the dark ground. The Cross was promptly contradicted with the Resurrection. All this, it seems to some of us, is the most stupendous and successful undertaking from a purely technical point of view that the world has seen. In the last analysis it was not His ideas or His character merely, but it was His technique that made Christ the Son of God and the Master of the Nations of the Earth. * * * * * I think that while Christ would not have understood Frederick Taylor's technique, his tables of figures or foot-tons or logarithms he would have understood Frederick Taylor. Nearly all the time that could be said to have been spent in his life in dealing with other men he spent in doing for them on a nobler scale the thing that Frederick Taylor did. He went up to men--to hundreds of men a day, that he saw humdrumming along, despising themselves and despising their work and expecting nothing of themselves and nothing of any one else and asked them to put their lives in his hands and let him show what could be done with them. This is Frederick Taylor's profession. The Sermon on the Mount began with telling people that they would be successful if they knew how--if they had a vision. It proceeded to give them the vision. It began with giving them a vision for the things that they had, told them how even the very things that they had always thought before were what was the matter with the world they could make a great use of. "Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those that hunger; blessed are the meek." And He then went on to tell them how much finer, and nobler and more free from the cares and weights of this earth they could be if they wanted to be, than they had dared to believe. He told the people who were around Him bigger things about human nature, how successful it was or could be than any one had ever claimed for people in this world before. They put Him up on a Cross at last and crucified Him because they thought He was too hopeful about them, and about human nature or because, as they would have put it, He was blasphemous and said every man was a Son of God. As human nature then was and in the then spirit of the world, no better means than a Cross could have been employed to get the attention of all men, to make a two thousand year advertisement for all nations of what a success human nature was, of what men really could be like. But I think that if Christ were to come to us again and if he were to try to get the attention of the whole world once more to precisely the same ideas and principles that he stood for before, the enterprise would be conducted in a very different manner. There is a picture of Albert Durer's which hangs near my desk, and once more as I write these lines my eyes have fallen on it. It is the familiar one with the lion and the lamb in it, lying down together, and with the big room with the implements of knowledge scattered about in it and at the other end in the window at the table with a book, an old, bent-over scientist with a halo over his head. If Christ were to appear suddenly in this modern world to-morrow, the first thing He would see and would go toward, would be the halo over the scientist's head. There is nothing especially picturesque or religious looking, nothing, at least, that could be put in a stained-glass window in Frederick Taylor's tables and charts and diagrams of the number of foot-tons a pig-iron handler can lift with his arms in a day. But if Christ returned to the world to-morrow and if what He wanted to do to-morrow was to get the universal, profound, convinced attention of all men to the Golden Rule, I believe He would begin the way Frederick Taylor did, by--being concrete. If He wanted to get men in general, men in business, to love one another He would begin by trying to work out some technical, practical way in which certain particular men in a certain particular place could afford to love one another. He would find a practical way for instance for the employers and pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works to come to some sort of common understanding and to work cheerfully and with a free spirit together. I think he would proceed very much in the way that Frederick Taylor did. He would not say much about the Golden Rule. He would give each man a vision for his work, and of the way it lapped over into other men's work and leave the Golden Rule a chance to take care of itself. This is all the Golden Rule, as a truth or as a remark needs just now. For two thousand years men have devoted themselves Sunday day after Sunday to saying over and over again that men should love one another. The idea is a perfectly familiar one. When Christ said it two thousand years ago, it was so original and so sensational that just of itself and as a mere remark it had a carrying power over the whole earth. Everybody believes it now--that it is a true remark--but like a score of other remarks that have been made and some of the noblest Christ made, is it not possible that it has long since in its mere capacity of being a remark, gone by? There is no one who has not heard about our loving one another. The remark we want now is how we can do it. This is the remark that Mr. Frederick Taylor has made. It is not very eloquent. It is a mere statement of fact. It has taken him nearly thirty-three years to make it. The gist of it is that for thirty-three years, the employers and the pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works, Pennsylvania, have been devoted to one another and to one another's interests and acting all day every day as if of course their interests were the same, and it has been found that employees when their employers coöperated with them could lift forty-seven tons instead of twelve and a half a day, and were getting 60 per cent. more wages. Everybody listens. Everybody sees at a glance that when it comes to making remarks about doing as one would be done by, this is the one remark that we have all been waiting to hear some one make for two thousand years. * * * * * The Cross or the last-resort type of religion was as far as St. Augustine or St. Francis in their world could get. It was all that the Middle Ages were ready for or that could be claimed for people who had to live in ages without a printing press, in which no one in the crowd could expect to know anything and in which there were no ways of letting crowds know things. To-day there is no reason why the Cross as a contrivance for attracting the attention of all people to goodness should be exclusively relied upon. Possibly the Cross was intended, at the time, as the best possible way of starting a religion, when there was none, or possibly for keeping it up when there was very little of it. But now that Christianity has been occupied two thousand years in putting in the groundwork, in laying down the principles of success, and in organizing them into the world, has been slowly making it possible with crowds that could not be long deceived for success to be decent. The leaven has worked into human nature and Christianity has produced The Successful Temperament. Success has become a spiritual institution. In other words, the hour of the Scientist, of the man with a technique, of the man who sees how, the man of The Successful Temperament is at hand. Everything we plan for the world, including goodness, from this day--must reckon with him--with the Man Who Sees How. CHAPTER XV THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT I also, Gentle Reader, have despised and do despise "success." I also have stood, like you, perhaps, and I am standing now in that ancient, outer court, where I can keep seeing every day The Little Great Men with all their funny trappings on,--their hoods, and their ribbons, and their train-bearers, drive up before us all and go in to The Great Door. I have gone by in the night and have heard the buzz of their voices there. I have looked, like you, up at the great lighted windows of Prosperity from the street. And in the broad daylight I have seen them too. I have stood on the curb in the public way with all the others and watched silently the parade of The Little Great go by. I have waited like you, Gentle Reader, and smiled or I have turned on my heel sadly, or wearily or bitterly or gayly and walked away down my own side street of the world and with the huzzahs of the crowd echoing faintly in my ears have gone my way. But I keep coming back to the curb again. I keep coming back because, every now and then among all the gilt carriages and the bowing faces in them, or among all the big yellow vans or cages with the great beasts of success in them, the literary foxes, the journalist-juggernauts, the Jack Johnsons of finance, the contented, gurgling, wallowing millionaires--I cannot help standing once more and looking among them, for one, or for possibly two, or three or four who may be truly successful men. Some of them are merely successful-looking. I often find as I see them more closely, that they are undeceived, or humble, or are at least not being any more successful-looking than they can help, and are trying to do better. They are the men who have defied success to succeed and who will defy it again and again. They are the great men. The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand. If success cannot do it, he makes failure do it. If he cannot make success express the greatness or the vision that is in him, he makes failure express it. But this book is not about great men and goodness. It is about touching the imagination of crowds with goodness, about making goodness democratic and making goodness available for common people. * * * * * A stupendous success in goodness will advertise it as well as a stupendous failure. Goodness has had its cross-redeemers to attract the attention of half a world. Possibly it is having now its success-redeemers to attract the attention of the other half. The people the success-redeemers reach would turn out to be, possibly, very much more than half. The Cross, as a means of getting the attention of crowds, or of the more common people in our modern, practical-minded Western world, was apparently adapted to its purpose as long as it was used for church purposes or as long as it was kept dramatic or sensational or remote, or as long as it was a cross for some one else, but as a means of attracting the attention of crowds of ordinary men and women to goodness in common everyday things, it is very doubtful if failure--in the power of steady daily pulling on men's minds, has done as much for goodness as success. It is doubtful if, except as an ideal or conventional symbol the cross has ever been or ever could be what might be called a spiritually middle-class institution. It has been reserved for men of genius, pioneers and world-designers to have those colossal and glorious crosses that have been worshipped in all ages, and must be worshipped in all ages as the great memorials of the human race. But the more common and numerous types of men, the men who do not design worlds, but who execute them, build them, who carry the new designs of goodness out, who work through the details and conceive the technique of goodness are men in whom the spiritual and religious power takes the natural form of success. It seems to be the nature of the modern and the western type of man to challenge fatalism, to defy a cross. He would almost boast that nobody could make him die on it. This spirit in men too is a religious spirit. It is the next hail of goodness. Goodness posts up its next huge notice on the world: [SUCCESS] It is going to make the more rudimentary everyday people notice it, and it is going to make them notice it in everyday things. It does not admit that goodness is merely for the spiritual aristocrats for those greater souls that can search out and appreciate the spiritual values in failure. It believes that goodness is for crowds. It has discovered that crosses, to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical. The common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones. It is not impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to be oriental and aristocratic in appealing to what is really a new type of man in the world--the scientific and practical type as we see it in the western nations all about us to-day. We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as any one and we can do it in crowds too as they do in India, but we propose if crosses are expected of us to know why in crowds. Knowing why makes us think of things and makes us do things. It is the keynote of our temperament. And it is not fair to say of us when we make this distinction that we do not believe in the cross. But there are times when some of us wish that we could get other people to stop believing in it. We would all but die on the cross to get other people to stop dying on one for platitudes, to get them to work their way down to the facts and focus their minds on the practical details of not dying on a cross, of forming a vision of action which will work. It goes without saying that as long as crowds are in the world crosses will not go by, but it is wicked not to make them go by as fast as possible, one by one. They were meant to be moved up higher. We are eager not to die on the same cross for the same thing year after year and century after century. It seems to us that the eagerness that always goes with the cross always was and always will be the essential, powerful and beautiful thing in it. And it is this new eagerness in the modern spirit, a kind of hurrying up of the souls of the world that is inspiring us to employ our western genius in inventing and defending and applying the means of goodness and in finding ways of making goodness work. We will not admit that men were intended to die on crosses from a sheer, beautiful, heavenly shiftlessness, vague-mindedness, mere unwillingness to take pains to express themselves or unwillingness to think things out and to make things plain to crowds. It does not seem to us that it is wicked to employ success as well as failure, to state our religion to people. It seems to us that it goes naturally with the scientific and technical temperament of the people that we should do this. It is not superior and it is not inferior. It is temperamental and it is based upon the study of the psychology of attention, on a knowledge of what impresses a certain kind of man and of what really is conclusive with crowds and with average men and women. It is the distinctive point of view of the pragmatic temperament, of the inductive mind. The modern mind is interested in facts and cannot make a religion out of not knowing them. There was a time once when people used to take their bodily diseases as acts of God. We have made up our minds not to have these same bodily diseases now. We have discovered by hard work and constant study that they are not necessary. The same is true of our moral diseases and of our great social maladies. It is going to be the same with crosses. It is a sin and a slander and affront to human nature and to God to die on a cross if it can be helped by hard work and close thinking, or by touching the imaginations of others. Most of us acting in most things are not good enough to die on crosses. We are not worthy, it would not be humble in us to. Crosses are only reserved for the newest and most rare truths, and for the newest and most rare men. They are still, and they still can be made to be, a means of grace and of perfection to people who have gifts of learning things by suffering, but as a means of making other people and people in crowds see things, the right to use a cross is not for those of us who are merely lumbering spiritually along, trying to catch up to a plain, simple-hearted old platitude, eighteen hundred years late like the Golden Rule. The right to a cross is reserved for those who are up on the higher reaches, those great bleak stretches or moors of truth where men go forth and walk alone with God hundreds of years ahead. CHAPTER XVI THE MEN AHEAD PULL Writing a hopeful book about the human race with the New York _Sun_, Wall Street, Downing Street and Bernard Shaw looking on is uphill work. Sometimes I wish there were another human race I could refer to when I am writing about this one, one every one knows. The one on Mars, for instance, if one could calmly point to it in the middle of an argument, shut people off with a wave of one's hand and say, "Mars this" and "Mars that" would be convenient. The trouble with the human race is that when one is talking to it about itself, it thinks it is It. It is not It yet. The earth and everything on it is a huge Acorn, tumbling softly through the sky. Our boasted Christianity (crosses, and resurrections and cathedrals and all) is a Child crying in the night. * * * * * It is not necessary for me to prove to the satisfaction of the New York _Sun_ and Bernard Shaw that the Golden Rule has not reached the superior moral stage of being taken as a platitude by all of our people who are engaged in business. It is enough to submit that the most creative and forceful business men--the men who set the pace, the foremen of the world, are taking it so, and that others are trying to be as much like them as they can. Wickedness in this world is not going to stop with a jerk. It is merely being better distributed. Possibly this is all there is to the problem, getting sin better distributed. The Devil has never had a very great outfit or any great weight, but he has always known where to throw it, and he has always done an immense business on a small capital and the only way he has managed to get on at all, is by organizing, and by getting the attention of a few people at the top. Now that the moral sense of the world has become quickened, and that rapid transit and newspapers and science and the fact-spirit have gained their hold, the sins of the world are being rapidly distributed, not so much among the men who determine things as among those who cannot. Everything is following the fact-spirit. The modern world and everything in it, is falling into the hands of the men who cannot be cheated about facts, who get the facts first and who get them right. The world cannot help falling, from now on, slowly--a little ponderously perhaps at first--into the hands of good men. To say that the world is falling into the hands of men who cannot be cheated and to say that it is falling into the hands of good men is to say the same thing. The men who get the things that they want, get them by seeing the things as they are. Goodness and efficiency both boil down to the same quality in the modern man, his faculty for not being a romantic person and for not being cheated. A good man may be said to be a man who has formed a habit, an intimate personal habit of not being cheated. Everything he does is full of this habit. The sinful man, as he is usually called, is a man who is off in his facts, a man who does not know what he really wants even for himself. In a matter-of-fact civilization like ours, he cannot hope to keep up. If a man can be cheated, even by himself--of course other people can cheat him and everybody can take advantage of him. He naturally grows more incompetent every day he lives. The men who are slow or inefficient in finding out what they really want and slow in dealing with themselves are necessarily inefficient and behind hand in dealing with other people. They cannot be men who determine what other people shall do. It is true that for the moment, it still seems--now that science has only just come to the rescue of religion, that evil men in a large degree are the men who still are standing in the gate and determining opportunities and letting in and letting out Civilization as they please. But their time is limited. The fact-spirit is in the people. We enjoy facts. Facts are the modern man's hunting, his adventure and sport. The men who are ahead are getting into a kind of two-and-two-are-four habit that is like music, like rhythm. It becomes almost a passion, almost a self-indulgence in their lives. Being honest with things, having a distaste for being cheated by things, having a distaste for being cheated by one's self and for cheating other people, runs in the blood in modern men. The nations can be seen going round and round the earth and looking one another long and earnestly in the eyes. The poet is turning his imagination upon the world about him and upon the fact that really works in it. The scientific man has taken hold of religion and righteousness is being proved, melted down in the laboratory, welded together before us all and riveted on to the every day, on to what really happens, and on to what really works. Goodness in its baser form already pays. Only the biggest men may have found it out, but everybody is watching them. The most important spiritual service that any man can render the present age is to make goodness pay at the top (in the most noticeable place) in some business where nobody has made it pay before. Anybody can see that it almost pays already, that it pays now here, now there. At all events, anybody can see that it is very noticeable that the part of the world that is most spiritual is not merely the part that is whining or hanging on crosses. It is also the part that is successful. One knows scores of saints with ruddy cheeks. It is getting to be a matter of principle almost in a modern saint--to have ruddy cheeks. I submit this fact respectfully to Bernard Shaw, Wall Street, Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and even to the New York _Sun_, that vast machine for laughing at a world down in its snug quarters in Park Row--that the saint with ruddy cheeks is a totally new and disconcerting fact in our modern life. He is the next fact the honest pessimist will have to face. I submit that this saint with ruddy cheeks is here, that he is lovable, imperturbable, imperious, irrepressible, as interesting as sin, as catching as the Devil and that he has come to stay. He stays because he is successful and can afford to stay. He is successful because he is good. Only religion works. I am aware that the New York _Sun_ might quarrel with just exactly this way of putting it. I might put it another way or possibly try to say it again after saying something else first. _Viz._: The man who is successful in business is the man who can get people to do as much as they can do and a great deal more than they think they can do. Only a very lively goodness, almost a religion in a man, can do this. He has to have something in him very like the power of inventing people or of making people over. To be specific: In some big department stores, as one goes down the aisle, one will see over and over again the clerks making fun of customers. One by one the customers find it out and the more permanent ones, those who would keep coming and who have the best trade, go to other stores. How could such a thing be stopped in a department store by a practical employer? Can he stop it successfully by turning on his politeness? Of course he can make his clerks polite-looking by turning on his politeness. But politeness in a department store does not consist in being polite-looking. Being polite-looking does not work, does not grip the customer or strike in and do things and make the customer do things. A machine like a department store, made up of twenty-five hundred human beings, which is carving out its will, its nature, stamping its pattern on a city, on a million men, or on a nation, cannot be made to work without religion. If the clerks are making fun of people, only religion can stop it. Perhaps you have been made fun of yourself, Gentle Reader? You have observed, perhaps, that in making fun of people (making fun of you, for instance), the assumption almost always is, that you are trying to be like the Standard Person, and that this (they look at you pleasantly as you go by) is as near as you can get to it! If an employer wishes to make his clerk an especially valuable clerk, if he wishes to make his clerk an expert in human nature or a good salesman, one who sees a customer when he comes along as he really is, and as he is trying to be, he will only be able to do it by touching something deep down in the clerk's nature, something very like his religion--his power of putting himself in the place of others. He can only do it by making a clerk feel that this power in him of doing as he would be done by, and seeing how to do it, _i.e._, the religion in him, is what he is hired for. It is visionary to try to run a great department store, a great machine of twenty-five hundred souls, a machine of human emotions, of five thousand eyes and ears, a huge loom of enthusiasm, of love, hate, covetousness, sorrow, disappointment, and joy without having it full of clerks who are experts in human nature, putting themselves in the place of crowds of other people, clerks who are essentially religious. So we watch the men who are ahead driving one another into goodness. The man who is not able to create, distribute or turn on, in his business establishment, goodness, social insight, and customer-insight in it, can only hope to-day to keep ahead in business by having competitors as inefficient as he is. The man who is ahead has discovered himself. Everything the man ahead is doing eight hours a day, is seen at last narrowing him down, cornering him into goodness. Of course as long as people looked upon goodness as a Sunday affair, a few hours a week put in on it, we were naturally discouraged about it. It is still a little too fresh looking and it may be still a little too clever for everybody, but slowly, irrevocably, we see it coming. We can look up almost any day and watch some goodness--now--at least one specimen or so, in every branch of business. We watch daily the men who are ahead, pulling on the goodness of the world and the Crowds pushing on it. CHAPTER XVII THE CROWDS PUSH The men who are ahead make goodness start, but it is the crowds that make it irresistible. The final, slow, long, imperious lift on goodness is the one the crowd gives. Of course, for the most part, modern business is largely done with crowds. Crowds are doing it and crowds are nearly always watching it. The factory is slower than the department store in being good because the men in it deal with crowds of things and crowds of wheels and not with crowds of people. All responsible people are forced to be good, with crowds around them, expecting it of them. Crowds at the very least are a kind of vast, insinuating, penetrating, omnipresent, permeating police force of righteousness. In a department store, the crowds, twelve thousand a day, are like some huge coil of hose or vacuum cleaner, lying about the place, sucking up, drawing out, and demanding goodness from the clerks. Clerks develop human insight and powers faster in department stores than machinists do in factories because they are exposed to more people and to larger crowds. The stream clears itself. The last forms of business to yield to the new spirit are to be the lonely ones, the ones where light, air, human emotions, and crowds are shut out. The lonely forms of business will at last be vitalized and socialized by men of organizing genius, who will invent the equivalent of crowds going by, who will contrive ways of putting a few responsible persons in sight or in a position where they will feel crowds going by their souls, looking into them as if they were shop windows. Crowds can keep track of a few. The crowds will see that these few are the kind of men who will keep track of all. Crowds in the end will not accept less than the best. With crowds of people and crowds of places and crowds of times we are good. In all things crowds can see or be made to see we are safe. Progress lies in making crowds see through people, making crowds go past them. While they are going past them, they lure their goodness on. CHAPTER XVIII THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW The people who are worried and discouraged about goodness in this world, one finds when one studies them a little, are almost always worried in a kind of general way. They do not worry about anything in particular. Their religion seems to be a kind of good-hearted, pained vagueness. The religion of the people who never worry at all, the thoughtless optimists, is quite the same too, except that they have a kind of happy, rosy-lighted vagueness instead. For about two thousand years now, goodness has been in the hands of vague people. Some of them have used their vagueness to cry with softly, and some of them have used it to praise God with and to have many fine, brave, general feelings about God. I have tried faithfully, speaking for one, to be religious with both of these sets of people. They make one feel rather lonesome. If one goes about and takes a grim happiness, a kind of iron joy in seeing how successful a locomotive is, or if one watches a great, worshipful ocean liner with delight, or if, down in New York, one looks up and sees a new skyscraper going slowly up, unfolding into the sky before one, lifting up its gigantic, restless, resistless face to God; there comes to seem to be something about churches and about good people and about the way they have of acting and thinking about goodness and doing things with goodness, that makes one unhappy. Perhaps one has just come from it and one's soul is filled with the stern, glad singing of a great foundry, of the religious, victorious praising spirit of man, dipping up steel in mighty spoonfuls--the stuff the inside of the earth is made of, and flinging it together into a great network or crust for the planet--into mighty floors or sidewalks all round the earth for cities to tread on and there comes to seem something so successful, so manlike, so godlike about it, about the way these men who do these things do them and do what they set out to do, that when I find myself suddenly, all in a few minutes on a Sunday morning, thrown out of this atmosphere into a Christian church, find myself sitting all still and waiting, with all these good people about me, and when I find them offering me their religion so gravely, so hopefully, it all comes to me with a great rush sometimes--comes to me as out of great deeps of resentment, that religion could possibly be made in a church to seem something so faint, so beautifully weary, so dreamy, and as if it were humming softly, absently to itself. I wonder in the presence of a Christianity like this whether I am a Christian or not--the quartet choirs, confections, the little, dainty, faintly sweet sermons--it is as if--no I will not say it.... I have this moment crossed the words out before my eyes. It is as if, after all, religion, instead of being as I supposed down at the foundry, the stern and splendid music of man conquering all things for God, were, after all, some huge, sublime and holy vagueness, as if the service and the things I saw about me were not hard true realities--as if going to Church were like sitting in a cloud--some soft musical cloud or floating island of goodness and drifting and drifting.... * * * * * Not all churches are alike, but I am speaking of something that must have happened to many men. I but record this blank space on this page, as a spiritual fact, as a part of the religious experience of a man trying to be good. When this little experience of which the words have to be crossed out after going to Church--finally settles down, there is still a grim truth left in it. The vagueness of the man who is good, who locks himself up in a Church and says, "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" and the vigour and incisiveness of the man who says nothing about it and who goes out of doors and acts like a god all the week--these remain with me as a daily and abiding sense. And when I find myself myself, I, who have gloried in cathedrals since I was a little child, looking ahead for a God upon the earth, and when I see the foundries, the airships, the ocean liners beckoning the soul of man upon the skies, and the victory of the soul over the dust and over the water and over the air and when I see the Cathedrals beside them, those vast, faint, grave, happy, floating islands of the Saved, drifting backward down the years, it does not seem as if I could bear the foundries saying one thing about my God and the cathedrals saying another. I have tried to see a way out. Why should it be so? I have seen that the foundries, the ocean liners, and the airships are in the hands of men who say How. Perhaps we will take goodness and cathedrals, very soon now, and put them for a while in the hands of the men who say how. If St. Francis, for instance, to-day, were to be suddenly more like Bessemer, or if Dr. Henry Van Dyke were more like Edison or if the Reverend R.J. Campbell were more like Sir Joseph Lister or if the Bishop of London were to go at London the way Marconi goes at the sky, what would begin to happen to goodness? One likes to imagine what would happen if that same spirit, the spirit of "how" were brought to bear upon a great engineering enterprise like goodness in this world. Perhaps the spirit of "how" is the spirit of God. Perhaps religion in the twentieth century is Technique. Technique in the twentieth century is the Holy Ghost. Technique is the very last thing that has been thought of in religion. Religion is being converted before our eyes. It is becoming touched with the temper of science, with the thoroughness, the doggedness, the inconsolableness of science until it is seeing how and until it is saying how. When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on goodness in the way that they are getting to work on other things, things will begin to happen to goodness that the vague, sweet saints of two thousand years have never dreamed of yet. In London and New York, in this first quarter of the twentieth century Christianity will not be put off as a spirit. The right of Christianity to be a spirit has lapsed. Christianity is a Method. What Christ meant when He said He was the Truth and the Life, has been understood, on the whole, very well. What He meant by saying He was the Way, we are now beginning, to work out. * * * * * A thousand or two years ago, when two men stood by the roadside and made a bargain, it was their affair. When two men stand on the sidewalk now and make a bargain, say in New York, they have to deal and to deal very thoughtfully and accurately with ninety million people who are not there. They do this as well as they can by imagining what the ninety million people would do and say, and how they would like to be done by, if they were there. The facilities for finding out what the ninety million people would do and say, and what they would want, the general conveniences for assuring the two men on the sidewalk that they will be able to conduct their bargain, and to get the other ninety million in, accurately, that they will be able to do by them as they would be done by--these have scarcely been arranged for yet. In our machine age, with our railroads, and our telephones suddenly heaping our lives up on one another's lives, almost before we have noticed it, our religious machinery to go with our other machinery, our machinery that we are going to be Christians with, has not been invented yet. Religion two-men size, or man and woman size, or one family or two family size or village size has been worked out. Religion as long as it has been concerned with a few people and was a matter of love between neighbours, or of skill in being neighbourly, has had no special or imperative need for science or the scientific man. Now that religion is obliged to be an intimate, a confiding relation between ninety million people, the spiritual genius, devotion, and holiness of the scientific man, of the man who says "how" has come to be the modern man's almost only access to his God. A ninety million man-power religion is an enterprise of spiritual engineering, a feat in national and international statesmanship, a gigantic structural constructive achievement in human nature. Doing as one would be done by, with a few people, is a thing that any man can sit down and read his Bible a few minutes and arrange for himself. He can manage to do as he would be done by, fairly well in the next yard. But how about doing as one would be done by with ninety million people--all sizes, all climates, all religions, Buffalo, New Orleans, Seattle? How about doing as one would be done by three thousand miles? It is an understatement to say, as we look about our modern world, that Christianity has not been tried yet. Christianity has not been invented yet. What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity. Christianity has been for two thousand years a spirit. It is almost like a new religion to me just of itself to think of it. It is like being presented suddenly with a new world to think of it, to think that all we have really done with Christianity as yet is to use it as a breath or spirit. I look at the vision of the earth to-day, of the great cities rushing together at last and running around the world like children running around a house--great cities shouting on the seas, suddenly sliding up and down the globe, playing hopscotch on the equator, scrambling up the poles--all these colossal children!... Here we all are!--a whiff of steam from the Watts's steam kettle and a wave of Marconi across the air and we have crept up from our little separate sunsets, all our little private national bedrooms of light and darkness into the one single same cunning dooryard of a world! Our religion, our politics, our Bibles, kings, millionaires, crowds, bombs, prophets and railroads all hurling, sweeping, crashing our lives together in a kind of vast international collision of intimacy. All the Christianity we can bring to bear or that we can use to run this crash of intimacy with is a spirit, a breath. We do not well to berate one another or to berate one another's motives or to assail human nature or to grow satirical about God with all our little battered helpless Christians about us and our unadjusted religions. We are a new human race grappling with a new world. Our Christianity has not been invented yet and if we want a God, we will work like chemists, like airmen, turn the inside of the earth out, dump the sky, move mountains, face cities, love one another, and find Him! In the meantime until we have done this, until we have worked as chemists and airmen work, Christianity is a spirit. It explains all this eager jumble of the world, brushes away our objections, frees our hearts, gives us our program, makes us know what we are for, to stop and think a moment of this--that Christianity is a spirit. Everything that is passing wonderful is a spirit at first. God begins building a world as a world-spirit, out of a spirit brooding upon the waters. Then for a long while the vague waters, then for a long while a little vague land or spirit-of-planet before a real world. And every real belief that man has had, has begun as a spirit. For two thousand years Man has had the spirit of immortality. Homer had it. Homer had moments when improvising his mighty song all alone, of hearing or seeming to hear, faintly, choruses of men's voices singing his songs after him, a thousand years away. As he groped his way up in his singing, he felt them in spirit, perhaps, the lonely wandering minstrels in little closed-in valleys, or on the vast quiet hills, filling the world with his voice when he was dead, going about with his singing, breaking it in upon the souls of children, of the new boys and girls, and building new worlds and rebuilding old worlds in the hearts of men. Homer had the spirit of hearing his own voice forever, but the technique of it, the important point of seeing how the thing could really be done, of seeing how people, instead of listening to imitations or copies or awkward echoes of Homer, should listen to Homer's voice itself--the timbre, the intimacy, the subtlety, the strength of it--the depth of his heart singing out of it. All this has had to wait to be thought out by Thomas A. Edison. Man has not only for thousands of years had the spirit of immortality, of keeping his voice filed away if any one wanted it on the earth, forever, but he has had all the other spirits or ghosts of his mightier self. He has had the spirit of being imperious and wilful with the sea, of faring forth on a planet and playing with oceans, and now he has worked out the details in ocean liners, in boats that fly up from the water, and in boats which dive and swim beneath the sea. For thousands of years he has had the spirit of the locomotive working through, troops of runners or of dim men groping defiantly with camels through deserts, or sweeping on on horses through the plains, and now with his banners of steam at last he has great public trains of cars carrying cities. For hundreds of years man has had the spirit of the motor-car--of having his own private locomotive or his own special train drive up to his door--the spirit of making every road his railway. For a great many years he has had the spirit of the wireless telegraph and of using the sky. Franklin tried using the sky years ago but all he got was electricity. Marconi knew how better. Marconi has got ghosts of men's voices out of the clouds, has made heaven a sounding board for great congregations of cities, and faraway nations wrapped in darkness and silence whisper round the rolling earth. Man has long had the spirit of defying the seas. Now he has the technique and the motor-boat. He has had the spirit of removing oceans and of building huge, underground cities, the spirit of caves in the ground and mansions in the sky, and now he has subways and skyscrapers. For a thousand years he has had the spirit of Christ and now there is Frederick Taylor, Louis Brandeis, Westfield Pure Food, Doctor Carrel, Jane Addams, and Filene's Store. Vast networks--huge spiritual machines of goodness are crowding and penetrating to-day, fifteen pounds to the square inch, the atmosphere of the gospel into the very core of the matter of the world, into the everyday things, into the solids of the lives of men. It takes two great spirits of humanity to bring a great truth or a new goodness into this world; one spirit creates it, the other conceives it, gathers the earth about it and gives it birth. These two spirits seem to be the spirits of the poet and the scientist. We are taking to-day, many of us, an almost religious delight in them both. We make no comparisons. We note that the poet's inspiration comes first and consists in saying something that is true, that cannot be proved. A few people with imagination, here and there, believe it. The scientist's inspiration comes second and consists in seeing ways of proving it, of making it matter of fact. He proves it by seeing how to do it. Crowds believe it. CHAPTER XIX AND THE MACHINE STARTS One of the things that makes one thoughtful in going about from city to city and dropping into the churches is the way the people do not sing in them and will not pray in them. In every new strange city where one stops on a Sunday morning, one looks hopefully--while one hears the chimes of bells--at the row of steeples down the street. One looks for people going in who seem to go with chimes of bells. And when one goes in, one finds them again and again, inside, all these bolt-up-right, faintly sing-song congregations. One wonders about the churches. What is there that is being said in them that should make any one feel like singing? The one thing that the churches are for is news--news that would be suitable to sing about, and that would naturally make one want to sing and pray after one had heard it. There is very little occasion to sing or to pray over old news. Worship would take care of itself in our churches if people got the latest and biggest news in them. News is the latest faith men have in one another, the last thing they have dared to get from God. It is not impossible that just at the present moment, and for some little time to come, there is really very little worth while that can be said about Christianity, until Christianity has been tried. I cannot conceive of Christ's coming back and saying anything just at the moment. He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not arranged to do anything about what He had said before. He would wonder how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic, visionary, and inefficient. It is in the unconscious recognition of this and of the present spiritual crisis of the world, that our best men, so many of them, instead of going into preaching are going into laboratories and into business where what the gospel really is and what it is really made of, is being at last revealed to people--where news is being created. Perhaps it would not be precisely true--what I have said, about Christ's not saying anything. He probably would. But he would not say these same merely rudimentary things. He would go on to the truths and applications we have never heard or guessed. The rest of his time he would put in in proving that the things that had been merely said two thousand years ago, could be done now. And He would do what He could toward having them dropped forever, taken for granted and acted on as a part of the morally automatic and of-course machinery of the world. The Golden Rule takes or ought to take, very soon now, in real religion, somewhat the same position that table manners take in morals. All good manners are good in proportion as they become automatic. In saying that honesty pays we are merely moving religion on to its more creative and newer levels. We are asserting that the literal belief in honesty, after this, ought to be attended to practically by machinery. People ought to be honest automatically and by assumption, by dismissing it in business in particular, as a thing to be taken for granted. This is what is going to happen. Without the printing press a book would cost about ten thousand dollars, each copy. With the printing press, the first copy of a book costs perhaps about six hundred dollars. The second costs--twenty-nine cents. The same principle holds good under the law of moral automatics. Let the plates be cast. Everything follows. The fire in the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago cost six hundred dead bodies. Within a few months outward opening doors flew open to the streets around a world. Everybody knew about outward opening doors before. They had the spirit of outward opening doors. But the machinery for making everybody know that they knew it--the moral and spiritual machinery for lifting over the doors of a world and making them all swing suddenly generation after generation the other way, had not been set up. Of course it would have been better if there had been three hundred dead bodies or three dead bodies--but the principle holds good--let the moral plates be cast and the huge moral values follow with comparatively little individual moral hand labour. The moral hand labour moves on to more original things. The same principle holds good in letting an American city be good in seeing how to make goodness in a city work. Let the plates be once cast--say Galveston, Texas; or De Moines, Iowa, and goodness after you have your first specimen gets national automatically. Two hundred and five cities have adopted the Galveston or commission government in three years. * * * * * The failure for the time being apparently of the more noble and aggressive kinds of goodness against the forces of evil is a matter of technique. Our failure is not due to our failure to know what evil really is, but due to our wasteful way of tunnelling through it. Our religious inventors have failed to use the most scientific method. We have gone at the matter of butting through evil without thinking enough. Less butting and more thinking is our religion now. We will not try any longer to butt a whole planet when we try to keep one man from doing wrong. We will butt our way through to the man who sees where to butt and how to butt. Then all together! Very few of the wrongs that are done to society by individuals would be done if civilization were supplied with the slightest adequate machinery or conveniences for bringing home to people vividly who the people are they are wronging, how they are wronging them, and how the people feel about it. This machinery for moral and social insight, this intelligence-engine or apparatus of sympathy for a planet to-day, before our eyes is being invented and set up. * * * * * Sometimes I almost think that history as a study or particularly as a habit of mind ought to be partitioned off and not allowed to people in general to-day. Only men of genius have imagination enough for handling history so that it is not a nuisance, a provincialism and an impertinence in the serene presence to-day of what is happening before our eyes. History makes common people stop thinking or makes them think wrong, about nine tenths of the area of human nature, particularly about the next important things that are going to happen to it. Our modern life is not an historian's problem. It is an inventor's problem. The historian can stand by and can be consulted. But things that seem to an historian quite reasonably impossible in human nature are true and we must all of us act every day as if they were true. We but change the temperature of human nature and in one moment new levels and possibilities open up on every side. Things that are true about water stop being true the moment it is heated 212 degrees Fahrenheit. It begins suddenly to act like a cloud and when it is cooled off enough a cloud acts like a stone. Railroad trains are run for hundreds of miles every year in Siberia across clouds that are cold enough. We raise the temperature of human nature and the motives with which men cannot act to-day suddenly around a world are the motives with which they cannot help acting to-morrow. The theory of raised temperatures alone, in human nature, will make possible to us ranges of goodness, of social passion and vision, that only a few men have been capable of before. All the new inventions have new sins, even new manners that go with them, new virtues and new faculties. The telephone, the motor-car, the wireless telegraph, the airship and the motor-boat all make men act with different insights, longer distances, and higher speeds. Men who, like our modern men, have a going consciousness, see things deeper by going faster. They see how more clearly by going faster. They see farther by going faster. If a man is driving a motor-car three miles an hour all he needs to attend to with his imagination is a few feet of the road ahead. If he is driving his car thirty miles an hour and trying to get on by anticipating his road a few feet ahead, he dies. The faster a man goes--if he has the brains for it--the more people and the more things in the way, his mind covers in a minute--the more magnificently he sees how. On a railway train any ordinary man any day in the year (if he goes fast enough) can see through a board fence. It may be made of vertical slats five inches across and half an inch apart. He sees through the slits between the slats the whole country for miles. If he goes fast enough a man can see through a solid freight train. All our modern industrial social problems are problems of gearing people up. Ordinary men are living on trains now--on moral trains. Their social consciousness is being geared up. They are seeing more other people and more other things and more things beyond the Fence. The increased vibration in human nature and in the human brain and heart that go with the motor-car habit, the increased speed of the human motor, the gearing up of the central power house in society everywhere is going to make men capable of unheard-of social technique. The social consciousness is becoming the common man's daily habit. Laws of social technique and laws of human nature which were theories once are habits now. There is a certain sense in which it may be said that the modern man enjoys daily his moral imagination. He is angered and delighted with his social consciousness. He boils with rage or sings when he hears of all the new machines of good and machines of evil that people are setting up in our modern world. There is a sense in which he glories in the Golden Rule. The moral-machinist's joy is in him. He is not content to watch it go round and round like some smooth-running Corliss engine which is not connected up yet--that nobody really uses except as a kind of model under glass or a miniature for theological schools. He cannot bear the Golden Rule under glass. He wants to see it going round and round, look up at it, immense, silent, masterful, running a world. He delights in the Golden Rule as a part of his love of nature. It is as the falling of apples to him. He delights in it as he delights in frost and fire and in the glorious, modest, implacable, hushed way they work! We are in an age in which a Golden Rule can sing. The men around us are in a new temper. They have the passion, almost, the religion of precision that goes with machines. While I have been sitting at my desk and writing these last words, the two half-past-eight trains, at full speed, have met in the meadow. There is something a little impersonal, almost abstracted, about the way the trains meet out here on their lonely sidewalk through the meadow, twenty inches apart--morning after morning. It always seems as if this time--this one next time--they would not do it right. One argues it all out unconsciously that of course there is a kind of understanding between them as they come bearing down on each other and it's all been arranged beforehand when they left their stations; and yet somehow as I watch them flying up out of the distance, those two still, swift thoughts, or shots of cities--dark, monstrous (it's as if Springfield and Northampton had caught some people up and were firing them at each other)--I am always wondering if this particular time there will not be a report, after all, a clang on the landscape, on all the hills, and a long story in the _Republican_ the next morning. Then they softly crash together and pass on--two or three quiet whiffs at each other--as if nothing had happened. I always feel afterward as if something splendid, some great human act of faith, had been done in my presence. Those two looming, mighty engines, bearing down on each other, making an aim so, at twenty inches from death, and nothing to depend on but those two gleaming dainty strips or ribbons of iron--a few eighths of an inch on the edge of a wheel--I never can get used to it: the two great glowing creatures, full of thunder and trust, leaping up the telegraph poles through the still valley, each of them with its little streak of souls behind it; immortal souls, children, fathers, mothers, smiling, chattering along through Infinity--it all keeps on being boundless to me, and full of a glad boyish terror and faith. And under and through it all there is a kind of stern singing. I know well enough, of course, that it is a platitude, this meeting of two trains in a meadow, but it never acts like one. I sometimes stand and watch the engineer afterward. I wonder if he knows he enjoys it. Perhaps he would have to stop to know how happy he was, and not meet trains for a while. Then he would miss something, I think; he would miss his deep joyous daily acts of faith, his daily habits of believing in things--in steam, and in air, and in himself, and in the switchman, and in God. I see him in his cab window, he swings out his blue sleeve at me! I like the way he stakes everything on what he believes. Nothing between him and death but a few telegraph ticks--the flange of a wheel.... Suddenly the swing of his train comes up like the swing and the rhythm of a great creed. It sounds like a chant down between the mountains. I come into the house lifted with it. I have heard a man believing, believing mile after mile down the valley. I have heard a man believing in a Pennsylvania rolling mill, in a white vapour, in compressed air and a whistle, the way Calvin believed in God. BOOK THREE LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL TO WILBUR WRIGHT AND WILLIAM MARCONI _"Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh, Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust Hast thrust Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights, Where are the deeds that needs must be, The dreams, the high delights, That I once more may hear my voice From cloudy door to door rejoice-- May stretch the boundaries of love Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears To the faint-remembered glory of those years-- May lift my soul And reach this Heaven of thine With mine?" "Come up here, dear little Child To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless light!"_ PART ONE WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES CHAPTER I MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP As I was wandering through space the other day--just aeroplaning past on my way over from Mars--I came suddenly upon a neat, snug little property, with a huge sign stuck in the middle of it: THE EARTH: THIS DESIRABLE PROPERTY TO LET. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan & Co. I was just about to pass it by, inferring naturally that it must be a mere bank, or wholesale house, or something, when it occurred to me it might do no harm to stop over on it, and see. I thought I might at least drop in and inquire what kind of a firm it was that was handling it, and what was their idea, and what, if anything, they thought their little planet was for, and what they proposed to do with it. I found, on meeting Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Morgan, to my astonishment, that they did not propose to do anything with it at all. They had merely got it; that was as far as they had thought the thing out apparently--to get it. They seemed to be depending, so far as I could judge, in a vague, pained way, on somebody's happening along who would think perhaps of something that could be done with it. Of course, as Mr. Carnegie (who was the talking member of the firm) pointed out, if they only owned a part of it, and could sell one part of it to the other part there would still be something left that they could do, at least it would be their line; but merely owning all of it, so, as they did, was embarrassing. He had tried, Mr. Carnegie told me, to think of a few things himself, but was discouraged; and he intimated he was devoting his life just now to pulling himself together at the end, and dying a poor man. But that was not much, he admitted, and it was really not a very great service on his part to a world, he thought--his merely dying poor in it. When I asked him if there was anything else he had been able to think of to do for the world-- "No," he said, "nothing really; nothing except chucking down libraries on it--safes for old books." "And Mr. Morgan?" I said. "Oh! He is chucking down old china on it, old pictures, and things." "And Mr. Rockefeller?" "Mussing with colleges, some," he said, "just now. But he doesn't, as a matter of fact, see anything--not of his own--that can really be done with them, except to make them more systematized and businesslike, make them over into sort of Standard Oil Spiritual Refineries, fill them with millions more of little Rockefellers--and they won't let him do that. Of course, as you might see, what they want to do practically is to take the Rockefeller money and leave the Rockefeller out. Nobody will really let him do anything. Everything goes this way when we seriously try to do things. The fact is, it is a pretty small, helpless business, owning a world," sighed Mr. Carnegie. "This is why we are selling out, if anybody happens along. Anybody, that is, who really sees what this piece of property is for and how to develop it, can have it," said Mr. Carnegie, "and have it cheap." Mr. Carnegie spoke these last words very slowly and wearily, and with his most wistful look; and then, recalling himself suddenly, and handing me a glass to look at New York with and see what I thought of it, he asked to be excused for a moment, and saying, "I have fourteen libraries to give away before a quarter past twelve," he hurried out of the room. CHAPTER II MR. CARNEGIE TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE READ I found, as I was studying the general view of New York as seen from the top through Mr. Carnegie's glass, that there appeared to be a great many dots--long rows of dots for the most part--possibly very high buildings, but there was one building, wide and white and low, and more spread-out and important-looking than any of the others, which especially attracted my attention. It looked as if it might be a kind of monument or mausoleum to somebody. On looking again I found that it was filled with books, and was the Carnegie Public Library. There were forty more Libraries for New York Mr. Carnegie was having put up, I was told, and he had dotted them--thousands of them almost everywhere one could look, apparently, on his own particular part of the planet. A few days later, when I began to do things at a closer range, I took a little trip to New York, and visited the Library; and I asked the man who seemed to have it in charge, who there was who was writing books for Mr. Carnegie's Libraries just now, or if there was any really adequate arrangement Mr. Carnegie had made for having a few great books written for all these fine buildings--all these really noble book-racks, he had had put up. The man seemed rather taken aback, and hesitated. Finally, I asked him point blank to give me the name of the supposed greatest living author who had written anything for all these miles of Carnegie Libraries, and he mentioned doubtfully a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. I at once asked for his books, of course, and sat down without delay to find out if he was the greatest living author the planet had, what it was he had to say for it and about it, and more particularly, of course, what he had to to say it was for. I found among his books some beautiful and quite refined interpretations of tigers and serpents, a really noble interpretation or conception of what the beasts were for all the glorious gentlemanly beasts--and of what machines were for--all the young, fresh, mighty, worshipful engines--and what soldiers were for. But when I looked at what he thought men were for, at what the planet was for, there was practically almost nothing. The nearest I came to it was a remark, apparently in a magazine interview which I cannot quote correctly now, but which amounted to something like this: "We will never have a great world until we have some one great artist or poet in it, who sees it as a whole, focuses it, composes it, makes a picture of it, and gives the men who are in it a vision to live for." * * * * * Since then I have been trying to see what Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan could do to produce and arrange what seemed to me the one most important, imperative, and immediate convenience their planet could have, namely, as Mr. Kipling intimated, some man on it, some great creative genius, who would gather it all up in his imagination--the beasts, and the people, and the sciences, and the machines--in short, the planet as a whole, and say what it was for. It is from this point of view that I have been drawn into writing the following pages on the next important improvements--what one might call the spiritual Unreal-Estate Improvements, for Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan's property which will have to be installed. I have been going over the property more or less carefully in my own way since, studying it and noting what had been done by the owners, and what possibly might be done toward arranging authors, inventors, seers, artists, or engineers or other efficient persons who would be able to inquire, to think out for a world, to express for it, some faint idea of what it was for. CHAPTER III MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE Not unnaturally, of course, I turned to see what had already been done by the more powerful men the planet had produced, in the way of arranging for the necessary seers and geniuses to run the world with, and I soon found that by far the most intelligent and far-seeing attempt that had been made yet in this direction had been made by an inspired, or semi-inspired, millionaire in Sweden, named Alfred Nobel, an idealist, who had made a large but unhappy fortune out of an explosive to stop war with. His general idea had been that dynamite would make war so terrible that it would shock people into not fighting any more, and that gradually people, not having to spend their time in thinking of ways of killing one another, would have more time than they had ever had before to think of other and more important things. It was the disappointment of his life that his invention, instead of being used creatively, used to free men from fighting and make men think of things, had been used largely as an arrangement for making people so afraid of war that they could not think of anything else. Whichever way he turned he saw the world in a kind of panic, all the old and gentle-minded nations with their fair fields, their factories and art galleries, all hard at work piling up explosives around themselves until they could hardly see over them. As this was the precise contrary of what he had intended, and he had not managed to do what he had meant to do with making his money, he thought he would try to see if he could not yet do what he had meant to do in spending it. He sat down to write his Will, and in this Will, writing as an inventor and a man of genius, he tried to express, in the terms of money, his five great desires for the world. He wished to spend forty thousand dollars a year, every year forever, after he was dead, on each of these five great desires. There were five great Inventors that he wanted, and he wanted the whole world searched through for them, for each of them, once more every year, to see if they could be found. Mr. Nobel expressed his desire for these five Inventors as people often manage to express things in wills, in such a way that not everybody had been sure what he meant. There seems to have been comparatively little trouble, from year to year, in awarding the prizes to some adequate inventor in the domain of Peace, of Physics, of Chemistry, and of Medicine; but the Nobel Prize Trustees, in trying to pick out an award each year to some man who could be regarded as a true inventor in Literature, have met with considerable difficulty in deciding just what sort of a man Alfred Nobel had in mind, and had set aside his forty thousand dollars for when he directed that it should go--to quote from the Will--"To the person who shall have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealistic tendency." Allen Upward, for instance, an Englishman unknown in Stockholm, invented and published a book four years ago, called the "New Word," which was so idealistic and distinguished a book, and so full of new ideas and of new combinations of old ideas, that there was scarcely a publisher in England who did not instinctively recognize it, who did not see that it would not pay at once, and that therefore it was too strange and original and too important a book for him to publish, and after a long delay the book was finally printed in Geneva. A copy was sent to the Nobel Prize Trustees. One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that here was precisely the sort of situation that Alfred Nobel, who had been the struggling inventor of a great invention that would not pay at once himself, would have been looking for. A book so inventive, so far ahead, that publishers praised it and would not invest in it, one would have imagined to be the one book of all others for which Alfred Nobel stood ready and waiting to put down his forty thousand dollars. But Mr. Nobel's forty thousand dollars did not go to a comparatively obscure and uncapitalized inventor who had written a book to build a world with, or at least a great preliminary design, or sketch, toward a world. The Nobel Prize Trustees, instead of giving the forty thousand dollars to Allen Upward, looked carefully about through all the nations until their eyes fell on a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. And when they saw Mr. Rudyard Kipling, piled high with fame and five dollars a word, they came over quietly to where he was and put softly down on him forty thousand dollars more. I do not know, but it is not inconceivable, that Kipling himself would rather have had Allen Upward have it. I am not quarrelling with the Trustees, and am merely trying to think things out and understand. But it certainly is a question that cannot but keep recurring to one's mind--the unfortunate, and perhaps rather unlooked-for, way in which Mr. Nobel's Will works. And I have been wondering what there is that might be done, the world being the kind of world it is, which would enable the Nobel Prize Trustees to so administer the Will that its practical weight on the side of Idealism, and especially upon the crisis of idealism in young authors, would be where Mr. Nobel meant to have it. One must hasten to admit that Mr. Upward's book is open to question; that, in fact, it is the main trait of Mr. Upward's book that it raises a thousand questions; and that it would be a particularly hard book for most men to give a prize to, quietly go home, and sleep that night. I must hasten to admit also that, judging from their own point of view, the Nobel Prize Trustees have so far done quite well. They have attained a kind of triumph of doing safe things--things that they could not be criticised for; and they could well reply to this present criticism that there was no other course that they could take. Unless they had a large fund for butting through all nations for obscure geniuses, and for turning up stones everywhere to look for embryo authors--unless they had a fund for going about among the great newspapers, the big magazines, and peeping under them through all the world for geniuses--and unless they had still another large fund for guaranteeing their decision when they had found one, a fund for convincing the world that they were right, and that they were not wasting their forty thousand dollars--the Trustees have taken a fairly plausible position. Their position being that, in default of perfectly fresh, brand-new, great men, and in view of the fact, in a world like this that geniuses in it are almost invariably, and, as a matter of course, lost or mislaid until they are dead, much the best and safest thing that Trustees of Idealism could do was to watch the drift of public opinion in the different nations, to adopt the course of noting carefully what the world thought were really its great men, and then (at a discreet and dignified distance, of course) tagging the public, and wherever they saw a crowd, a rather nice crowd, round a man, standing up softly at the last moment and handing him over his forty thousand dollars. This has been the history of the Nobel Trustees of Idealism, thus far. But in a way, we are all the trustees of idealism, and the problem of the Nobel Prize Trustees is more or less the problem of all of us. We are interested as well as they in trying to find out how to recognize and reward men of genius. What would we do ourselves if we were Nobel Prize Trustees? Precisely what was it that Alfred Nobel intended to achieve for Literature when he made this bequest of forty thousand dollars a year in his Will, for a work of Literature of an idealistic tendency? To take a concrete case, I can only record that it has seemed to me that if Alfred Nobel himself could have been on hand that particular year, and could have read Mr. Upward's book, he would have given the prize of forty thousand dollars to Allen Upward. He would not have given the prize to Mr. Kipling--he would have given it twenty years before; but in this particular year of which I am writing, when he saw these two men together, I believe he would have given the prize to Allen Upward, and he would have hurried. I would like to put forward at this point two inquiries. First, why did the Trustees not award the prize to Allen Upward? And second, what would have happened if they had? First, the Trustees could not be sure that Mr. Upward in his work of genius was telling the truth. Second, they could not be sure that the world would approve of his having forty thousand dollars for telling the truth. Perhaps the world would have rather had him paid forty thousand dollars for not telling it. Third, Mr. Kipling was safe. No creative work had to be done on Kipling; all they had to do was to send him the cheque. Great crowds had swept in from all over the world, and nominated Mr. Kipling; the Committee merely had to confirm the nomination. Fourth, Mr. Upward, like all idealists, like all men who have the power of throwing this world into the melting-pot and bringing it out new again partly unrecognizable (which, of course, is the regular historical, almost conventional, thing for an idealist to do with a world), bewildered the Nobel Prize Committee. They could not be sure but that Mr. Upward's next book would be thought in the wrong, and make their having given him forty thousand dollars to write it ridiculous. * * * * * What would have happened if the Trustees had given the prize to Mr. Upward? First, practically no one would have known who he was, and twenty-five nations would have been reading his book in a week, to see why the prize was given to him. The book would have been given the most widespread, highly stimulated, forty-thousand-dollar-power attention that any book in any age has had. Only now and then would a man go over and take down his old Kiplings from the shelf and read them, because he had heard that Mr. Kipling had forty thousand dollars more than he had had before. Secondly, Mr. Upward's new book would have the stimulus of his knowing while he was writing it that every word would be read by everybody. All the draught on the fire of his genius of the whole listening world would result in a work that even Mr. Upward himself perhaps would hardly believe he had written. As events turned out, and Mr. Upward did not get the prize there might be many reasons to believe that his next book might be out of focus, might be a mere petulant, scolding book, his exultation spent or dwindled, because his last tremendous wager--that the world wanted the truth--was lost. Scolding in a book means, as a rule, either juvenility or it means relapse into conscious degeneration of the soul--the focussing and fusing power in a man. I have sometimes wondered if even Christ, if He had not died in His thirty-third year, made His great dare for the world on the cross early, would not have stopped believing so magnificently in other people at about forty or forty-five or so, and would not have spent the rest of His days in railing at them, and in being very bitter and helpless and eloquent about Rome and Jerusalem. I have caught myself once or twice being glad Abraham Lincoln died suddenly just when he did, his great faith and love all warm in him, and his great oath for the world--that it was good--still fresh upon his lips! Writing a book like Allen Upward's for a planet with a vision of a thousand years singing splendidly through it, and then just reading it all alone afterward when he has written it, and going over the score all alone by himself, would seem to be a good deal of a strain. To be contradicted out loud and gloriously by a world might be inspiring, but to be contradicted by a solid phalanx of silent nations, trooping up behind one another, unanimous, impervious, is enough to make any radiant, long-accumulated genius pause in full career, question himself, question his vision as a chimera, as some faintly lighted Northern Lights upon the world, that would never mean anything, that was an illusion, that would just flicker in the great dark once more and go out. I do not say that this is true, or that it would be true of Allen Upward. But I have read his book. I should think it might be true. What Alfred Nobel had in mind, his whole idea in his Will, it seems to some of us, was to put in his forty thousand dollars at the working end of some man's mind, at the end of the man's mind where the forty thousand dollars would itself be creative, where the forty thousand dollars would get into the man, and work out through the man and through his genius into the world. It does not seem to me that he wanted to put his forty thousand dollars at the idle, old remembering end of a man's mind; that he meant it should be used as a mere reward for idealism. I doubt if it even so much as occurred to Alfred Nobel, who was an idealist himself, that idealism, after a man had managed to have some in this world, would be rewarded, or could possibly be paid for, by any one. He knew, if ever a man knew, that idealism was its own reward, and that it was priceless, and that any attempt to reward it with money, to pay a man for it after he had had it, and after it was all over, would make forty thousand dollars look shabby, or at least pathetic and ridiculous. What he wanted to do was to build his forty thousand dollars over into a Man. He wanted to feel that this money that he had made out of dynamite, out of destruction, would be wrought, through this man, into exultation, into life. He had proposed that this forty thousand dollars should become poetry in this man's book, that it should become light and heat, a power-house of thought, of great events. What Alfred Nobel had in mind, I think, with his little forty thousand dollars, was that it should be given a chance to become an intimate part of some man's genius; that it should become perhaps at last a Great Book--that great foundry of men's souls, where the moulds of History are patterned out, and where the hopes of nations and the prayers of women and children and of great men are, and where the ideals of men--those huge drive-wheels of the world--are cast in a strange light and silence. I wondered if they could have thought of this when they voted on Allen Upward's book that day three years ago--those twenty grave, quiet gentlemen in frockcoats in Stockholm! * * * * * I have picked out Mr. Upward's book because it is the most difficult, the most hazardous, and the least fortunate one I know, to make my point with; and because a great many people will get the reaction of disagreeing with me, and feeling about it probably, the way the Nobel Prizes Trustees did. I have wanted to take a book which has the traits in it for which men of genius are persecuted or crucified or ignored--our more modern timid or anonymous form of the cross. If Mr. Upward had been given the Prize by the Nobel Prize Trustees, it will have to be admitted a howl would have gone up round the world that would not have quieted down yet; and it is this howl that Mr. Nobel intended his Prize for, and that he thought a man would need about forty thousand dollars to meet. I might have taken any one of several other books, and they would have illustrated my point snugly and more conveniently; but just that right touch of craziness that Nobel had in mind, and that goes with great experiment of spirit--the chill, Nietzsche-like wildness, that bravado before God and man and before Time, that swinging one's self out on Eternity, which make Upward a typical man of genius, would have been lacking. K---- (whose criticisms of books are the most creative ones I know) said of Upward's book that he felt very happy and strangely emancipated when he read it, but that it was an uncanny experience, as if he had been made of thin air, had become a kind of aerated being, a psychic effect that genius often has; and K---- admitted to me confidentially that he felt that possibly he and Upward were being a little crazy and happy together by themselves, breaking out into infinite space so, and he took the book over to W----, and left it on his desk slinkingly and half-ashamed and without saying anything about it. He said he was enormously relieved next time he saw W----, felt as if he had just been pulled out of Bedlam to find that there was at least one other man in the world apparently in his right mind, who valued the book as he did. This is the precise feeling, it seems to me, that the Nobel Prize was intended to champion and to stand by and temporarily defend in a new author--the feeling he gives us of being in the presence of unseen forces, of incalculableness. It was this way Allen Upward has of taking his reader apart or up into a high place (like the Devil), and dizzying him, taking away his breath with Truth, that Nobel had in mind. He wanted to spend eight thousand pounds a year on providing for the world one more book which would give the ordinary man the personal feeling of being with a genius, cold, lonely, cosmic genius, the sense of a chill wind of All Space Outside blowing through--a book which is a sort of God's Wilderness, in which ordinary men with their ordinary plain senses round them move about dazed a little and as trees walking--a great, gaunt, naked book. Alfred Nobel was the inventor of an explosive, a rearranger of things assumed and things unbedded, and it was this same expansive, half-terrible, half-sublime power in other men and other men's books he wanted to endow--the power to free and mobilize the elements in a world, make it budge over a little toward a new one. He wanted to spend forty thousand dollars a year on the man in literature who had the pent-up power in him to crash the world's mind open once more every year like a Seed, and send groping up out of it once more its hidden thought. I may not be right in anticipating the eventual opinion of Allen Upward's book; but even if I am wrong, it will have helped perhaps to call attention to the essential failure of the Nobel Prize Trustees to side with the darers and experimenters in literature, to take a serious part in those great creative, centrifugal movements in the souls of men in which new worlds and the sense of new worlds are swept in upon us. For the Sciences, which are more matter of fact and tangible, the Nobel Prize is functioning more or less as Mr. Nobel intended, but certainly in Literature it will have to be classed as one more of our humdrum regular millionaire arrangements for patting successful people expensively on the back. It acts twenty years too late, falls into line with our usual worldly ornamental D.D., LL.D. habit, and has become, so far as Literature is concerned, a mere colossal, kindly, doddering Old Age Pension from a few gentlemen in Stockholm. It adds itself as one more futile effort of men of wealth--or world owners to be creative and lively with money, very much on the premises with money, after they are dead. CHAPTER IV PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS I have sometimes wished that Mr. Carnegie would post the following sign up on his Libraries, on the outside where people are passing, and on the inside in the room where people sit and think: A MILLION DOLLARS REWARD. WANTED, A GREAT LIVING AMERICAN AUTHOR FOR MY LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES. AT PRESENT OUR GREAT AUTHOR IN AMERICA APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN LOST OR MISLAID; ANY ONE FINDING HIM, OR ANY ONE THAT MIGHT DO FOR HIM TEMPORARILY, PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH ME. ANDREW CARNEGIE. Mr. Carnegie's Libraries must be a source of constant regret to the author of "Triumphant Democracy." They are generally made up of books written in the Old World. It would be interesting to know what are the real reasons great Libraries are not being written for Mr. Carnegie in America, and what there is that Mr. Carnegie or other people can do about it. They are certainly going to be written in America some time, and certainly, unless the best and greatest part of the Carnegie Library of the future is to be the American part of it, the best our Carnegie Libraries will do for America will be to remind us of what we are not. Unless we can make the American part of Mr. Carnegie's Libraries loom in the world as big as Mr. Carnegie's chimneys, America--which is the last newest experiment station of the world--is a failure. It has occurred to me to try to express, for what it may be worth, a point of view toward Triumphant Democracy Mr. Carnegie may have inadvertently overlooked. If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he has put a Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commission, or what might be called perhaps a Searching Party, in that community, made up of men of inventive and creative temperament, who instinctively know this temperament in others--men in all specialities, in all walks of life, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to work, in one way and another, looking up boys who are like them, boys about the town, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--he would soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would collect in thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array of living great men, of national figures, men who would be monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as compared with which his present libraries, big, thoughtless, innumerable, humdrum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing. Mr. Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture to say that there is at this very moment, running round the streets of the great city, one single boy, who has it in him to conceive, to imagine, and hammer together a new world; and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his fortune, not in buildings or in books, but in buying brains enough to find that boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself for one hour every day for years to searching about and finding that boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the other boys five hours a day to pick him out, it would be--well, all I can say is, all those forty libraries of Mr. Carnegie's, those great proud buildings, would do well if they did not do one thing for six years but find that boy! There is a boy at this very moment with strings and marbles and a nation in his pocket, a system of railroads--a boy with a national cure for tuberculosis, with sun-engines for everybody--there is a boy with cathedrals in him too, no doubt or some boy like young Pinchot, with mountainsful of forests in his heart. This is what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar bodies, their white pillars and things, about the country, unmanned, inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the policemen of the books, all standing about protecting them--with all this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or how would he dare go tramping in through the great gates and hunting about for himself? He could only be hunted out by people all wrought through with human experience, men and women who would give the world to find him, who are on the daily lookout for such a boy--by some special kind of eager librarian, or by disguised teachers, anonymous poets, or by diviners, by expert geniuses in boys. If Mr. Carnegie could go about and look up and buy up wherever he went these men who have this boy-genius in them, deliver them from empty, helpless, mere getting-a-living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them about thickly, among the books in his libraries--those huge anatomies and bones of knowledge he has established everywhere, all his great literary steel-works--men would soon begin to be discovered, to be created, to be built in libraries ... but as it is now.... Gentle Reader, have you ever stood in front of one of them, looked up at the windows, thought of all those great tiers, those moulds and blocks of learning on the shelves; and have you never watched the weary people that dribble in from the streets and wander coldly about, or sit down listless in them--in those mighty, silent empires of the past? have you never thought that somewhere all about them, somewhere in this same library, there must be some white, silent, sunny country of the future, full of children and of singing, full of something very different from these iron walls of wisdom? And have you never thought what it would mean if Mr. Carnegie would spend his money on search parties for people among the books, or what it would mean if the entire library, if all the books in it, became, as it were, wired throughout with live, splendid, delighted men and women, to make connections, to establish the current between the people and the books, to discover the people one by one and follow them to their homes, and follow them in their lives, and take out the latent geniuses, and the listless engineers and poets, and the Kossuths, Cæsars, the Florence Nightingales...? It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely small, invisible, personal, penetrating, and spiritual, that this sort of work can be done. It must be delicate and wonderful workmanship, like the magnet, like the mighty thistledown in the wind, like electricity, like love, like hope--sheer, happy, warm human vision going about and casting itself, casting all its still and tiny might, its boundless seed, upon the earth: but it would pay. The same people too, specialists in detecting and developing inventors, could be supplied also to all other possible callings. They would constitute a universal profession, penetrating all the others. They would go hunting among foremen and in machine shops for the misplaced geniuses, tried by wrong standards, underpaid for having other gifts. They would keep a lookout through all the schools and colleges, looking over the shoulders of scolding teachers and absent professors. They would go about studying the playgrounds and mastering the streets. We do not a little for the Submerged Tenth and the sons of the poor, and we have schools or missions for the sons of the rich, but one of the things we need next to-day is that something should be done for the sons of the great neglected respectable classes. Far more important than one more library--say in Denver, for instance would be a Denver Bureau of Investigation, to be appointed, of high-priced, spirited men, of expert humanists, to study difficulties, and devise methods and missions for putting all society in Denver through filters or placers, and finding out the rich human ore, finding out where everybody really belonged, and what all the clever misplaced people were really for. Of course it would take money to do all this, and flocks of free people who are doing the work they love. But it is not book-racks, nor paper, nor ink, nor stone steps, nor white pillars--it is free men and free women America and England are asking of their Andrew Carnegies to-day. Mr. Carnegie has not touched this human problem in his libraries. If Society were fitted up all through with electric connections, men with a genius for discovering continents in people, Columbuses, boy-geniuses; and if there were established everywhere a current between every boy and the great world, this would be something on which Mr. Carnegie could make a great beginning with the little mite of his fortune. If we were to have even one city fitted up in this way, it would be hard to say how much it would mean--one city with enough people in it who were free to do beautiful things, free to be curious about the others, free to follow clues of greatness, free to go up the streams of Society to the still, faint little springs and beginnings of things. It would soon be a memorable city. A world would watch it, and other cities would grope toward it. Instead of this we have these big, hollow, unmanned libraries of Mr. Carnegie's everywhere, with no people practically to go with them, no great hive of happy living men and women in and out all day cross-fertilizing boys and books. There seems to be something unfinished and stolid and brutal about a Carnegie Library now. The spirit of the garden and the sea, of the spring and the light, and of the child, is not in it. They have come to seem to some of us mere huge Pittsburgs of brains--all these impervious, unwieldy, rolling-mills of knowledge. I should think it would be a terrible prospect to grow old with, just to sit and see them flocking across the country from your window, all these huge smoke-stacks of books in their weary, sordid cities; and the boys who might be great men, the small Lincolns with nations in their pockets, the little Bells with worlds in their ears, the Pinchots with their forests, the McAdoos and Roosevelts, the young Carnegies and Marconis in the streets! CHAPTER V THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE Mr. Israel Zangwill in presiding at the meeting of the Sociological Society the other night remarked, in referring to inspired millionaires, that as a rule in the minds of most people nowadays a millionaire seemed to be a kind of broken-off person, or possibly two persons. There always seemed to have to be a violent change in a millionaire somewhere along the middle of his life. The change seemed to be associated in some way, Mr. Zangwill thought with his money. He reminded one of the patent-medicine advertisements, "Before and After Taking." I have been trying to think why it is that the average millionaire reminds people--as Mr. Zangwill says he does--of a patent-medicine advertisement, "Before and After Taking." I have thought, since Mr. Zangwill made this remark, of getting together a small collection of pictures of millionaires--two pictures of each, one before and the other after taking--and having them mounted in the most approved patent-medicine style, and taking them down to Far End and asking Mr. Zangwill to look them over with me and see if he thought--he, Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-wright, the psychologist--really thought, that millionaires "Before and After" were as different as they looked. I imagine he would say--and practically without looking at the pictures--that of course to him or to me perhaps, or to any especially interested student of human nature, millionaires are not really different at all "Before and After Taking"; that they merely had a slightly different outer look. They would merely look different, Mr. Zangwill would say, to the common run or majority of people--the people one meets in the streets. But would they? One of the most hopeful things that I have been thinking of lately is that the people--the ordinary people one meets in the streets--are beginning quite generally to see through their millionaires, and to see that their money almost never really cures them. Most very rich men, indeed, are having their times now, of even seeing through themselves; and it brings me up abruptly with a shock to think that the ordinary people who pass in the streets would be deceived by these simple little pictures Before and After. They have been deceived until lately, but are they being deceived now? I would like to see the matter tested, and I have thought it would be a good idea to take my small collection of pictures of millionaires--two pictures of each, one Before and the other After Taking--to a millionaire--of course some really reformed or cured one--and ask him to pay the necessary expenses in the columns of the _Times_, and of the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily Chronicle_, and other representative London journals (all on the same morning), of having the pictures published. We could then take what might be called a social, human, economic inventory of London: ask people to send in their honest opinions, on looking at the pictures, as to whether Money, Before and After Taking, does or does not produce these remarkable cures in millionaires. I very much doubt if Mr. Zangwill would be found to be right in his estimate of our common people to-day. I venture to believe that it is precisely because our common people are seeing that millionaires are not changed Before and After Taking that the majority of time millionaires we have to-day have come to be looked upon as one of the charges--one of the great spiritual charges and burdens modern Society has to carry. Society has always had to do what it could for the poor, but in our modern civilization, in a new and big sense, we have to see now what there is, if possibly anything, that can be done for the rich. We have come to have them now almost everywhere about us--these great spiritual orphans, with their pathetic, blind, useless fortunes piled up around them; and Society has to support them, to keep them up morally, keep them doing as little damage as possible, and has to allow day by day besides for the strain and structural weakness they bring upon the girders of the world--the faith of men in men, and the credit of God, which alone can hold a world together. It is not denied that the average millionaire, when he has made his money, does different-looking things, and gathers different-looking objects about him, and is seen in different-looking places. And it is not denied that he changes in more important particulars than things. He quite often changes people, the people he is seen with but he never or almost never changes himself. He is not one man when he is putting money into his pocket and another when he is taking it out. We keep hoping at first with each new mere millionaire that when he gets all the money he has wanted it will change him; but we find it almost never does. Merely reversing the motion with a pocket does not make a man a new and beautiful creature, and one soon sees that the typical millionaire is governed by the same bargain principles, is bullied and domineered over by the same personal limitations, the same old something-for-nothing habits. If he had the habit, while getting money out of people, of getting the better of them, he still insists on getting the better of people when he gives it to them or to their causes. He takes it out of their souls. There never has been a millionaire who runs his business on the old humdrum principle of merely making all the money he can who does not run his very philanthropies afterward on the same general principle of oppressing everybody, of outwitting everybody--and of doing people good in a way that makes them wish they were dead. Philanthropy as a philosophy, and even as an institution, is getting to be nearly futile to-day, for the reason that millionaires--valid, authentic cases of millionaires who are really cured--who are changed either in their motives or their methods with regard to what they do with money, except in rare cases, do not exist. The New Theatre in New York, which was started as a kind of Polar Expedition to discover and rescue Dramatic Art in America, failed because two hundred and forty millionaires tried to help it. If enough millionaires could have been staved off from that enterprise, or if it could have been taken in hand either by fewer or more select millionaires coöperating with the public and with artists of all classes, New Theatre of New York would not have been obliged, as it has been since, to start all over again on a new basis. The blunders in creative public work that men who get rich in the wrong way are always sure to make had to be made first. They nearly always have to be made first. There is hardly a single enterprise of higher social value in which the world is interested to-day which is not being gravely threatened in efficient service by letting in too many millionaires, and by paying too much attention to what they think. If our people were generally alive to the terrific sameness and monotony of a millionaire's life "before and after," and if millionaires were looked over discriminatingly before being allowed to take part in great public enterprises like the cinema, for instance, the newspapers, the hospitals, the theatres, there is hardly any limit to the new things that public enterprises would begin to make happen in the world, and the new men that would begin to function in them. Of course, if what a great vision for the people--_i.e._, a public enterprise is for, is to make money, it would be different. The mere millionaire might understand, and his understanding might help. But if an institution is founded (like a great theatre) to be a superb and noble masterpiece of understanding and changing human nature; if it is founded to be a creative and dominating influence, to build up the ideals and fire the enthusiasm of a city, to lay the foundations of the daily thoughts and the daily motives of a great people, the mere millionaire finds, if he tries to manage it, that he is getting in beyond his depth. A man who has made his money by exploiting and taking advantage of the public can only be expected, in conducting a Theatre, to be an authority on how to exploit a public and take advantage of it still more, and how to make it go to the play that merely looks like the play that it wants. Millionaires as a class, unless they are men who have made their money in the artist's or the inventor's spirit, really ought to be expected by this time, except in the size of their cheques, to be modest and thoughtful, to stand back a little and watch other people. The millionaires themselves, if they thought about it, would be the first to advise us not to pay too much attention to them. They are used to large things, and they know that the only way to do, in conducting great enterprises, is to select and use men (whether millionaires or not) for the particular efficiencies they have developed. If we are conducting what is called a charity, we will not expect that a millionaire can do good things unless he is a good man. He spoils them by picking out the wrong people. And we will not expect him to do artistic things unless he has lived his life and done his business in the spirit and the temperament of the artist. He will not know which the artists are or what the artists are like inside; and he will not like them and they will not like him, nor will they be interested in him or interested in working with him. Everything that artists or men of creative temperament try to do with the common run of millionaires--all these huge, blind, imponderable megatheriums, stamping along through life, ordering people about--ends in the same way--in irksomeness, bewildered vision, fear, compromise, and failure, as seen from the inside. Seen on the outside or before the public, of course, the Institution will have the same old, bland, familiar air of looking successful and of looking intelligent, and yet of being uninteresting, and of not changing the world by a hair's breadth. The only millionaires who should be allowed to have a controlling interest in public enterprises are millionaires who do not need to be different before and after making their money. Everybody is coming to see this, sooner or later. It is already getting very hard to raise money for any public enterprise in which mere millionaires or bewildered, unhappy rich men are known to have a controlling interest. The most efficient and far-sighted men do not expect anything very decided or of marked character from such enterprises, and will no longer lend to them either their brains or their money. Mere millionaires will soon have to conduct their public enterprises quite by themselves, and they will then soon fall of their own weight. The moment men are put in control of public enterprises by the size of their brains instead of the size of their cheques, the whole complexion of what are known as our public enterprises will change, and churches, theatres, hospitals, settlements, art galleries, and all other great public causes, instead of boring everybody and teasing everybody, will be attracting everybody and attracting everybody's money. They will be full of character, courage, and vision. Our present great, vague, helpless, plaintive public enterprises--one third art, one third millionaire, one third deficit--drag along financially because they are listless compromises, because they have no souls or vision, and are not interesting--not even interesting to themselves. Men with creative or imaginative quality, and courage, and insight into ordinary human nature, and far-sightedness of what can be expected of people, do not get on with the ordinary millionaire. It cannot be denied that millionaires and artists get together in time; but the particular point that seems to be interesting to consider is how the millionaires and artists can be got together before the artists are dead, and before the millionaires stop growing and stop being creative and understanding creative men. It might be well to consider the present situation in the concrete--the theatre, for instance--and see how the situation lies, and where one would have to begin, and how one would have to go to work to change it. The present failure of the theatre to encourage what is best in modern art is due to the fact that the public is unimaginative and inartistic. If a public is unimaginative and inartistic, the only way the best things that are offered can succeed with them is by having these best things held before them long and steadily enough for them slowly to compare them with other things, and see that they are better than the other things, and that they are what they want. Unimaginative and inartistic people do not know what they want. If things are tried long enough with them they do. When they have been tried long enough with them they support them themselves. The only way fine things can be tried long enough is with sufficient capital. The only way sufficient capital for fine things can be obtained is by having millionaires who appreciate fine things, and believe in them, and believe the public in time will believe in them. The only way in which a millionaire can recognize and believe in the fine things and in the best artists is by being, in spirit and temperament at least, an artist himself. The only way in which a millionaire can be an artist is to work every day in the spirit in which the artist works. This means the artist in business. (1) The artist in business is the man who makes things people already want enough to make money, and who makes things he is going to make people want enough to make new values and to be of some use. (2) The artist in business is the employer who makes new things and men together. He lets the men who make new things with him become new men; and when the things are made, they go forth in their turn and make new men and make new publics. New publics have had to be made for everything: for the first umbrellas, for the first telephones, the first typewriters. New publics have had to be made for Wagner, for Sunlight Soap, for Bernard Shaw; and it is the men who make new publics--be it for big or little things--who are artists. They are in spirit, prophets, kings, and world-builders. (3) Incidentally, the artist in business--the employer who creates new values and is creative himself--will like creative men in his factory, and will treat them so that they will put their creativeness into his business; he not only will be an artist himself, but he will have, comparatively speaking, a factory full of artists working with him. And when the factories pour out the men at night, and the smoke and the murmur cease, and the windows are dark, they will go to creative and live men's plays. So it has come to pass that the modern business man of the artist sort holds the arts of modern times in the hollow of his hand. He is a past-master of creating new publics. (4) The artist in business is the man who educates and draws out, at every point where his business touches them, every day, all day, the men with whom he works. He educates and develops the men who make the things. He educates and develops the men who buy them. Even the people who wish they had bought them, are educated or secreted, by the artist in business. He is a maker of new publics, a world-builder, whichever way he turns. A business man who merely makes for people what they want, and who does not get the prestige with men of making for them things that they did not know they wanted, is a failure and falls behind in his business. All the big men in business work in future tenses. They are prophets, historians, and they are Now-men, men who work by seeing the truth all round the present moment, the present persons, and the present market, and before it and behind it. Millionaires who are making their money in this spirit will understand and believe in plays that are written in this spirit, and the people who work for such employers will like to go to such plays, and the theatre managers, instead of being the bullies and tyrants of the world of art, will be held in the power of the men who see things and who make things--men who in vast sweeps called audiences, night after night, make new men upon the earth. PART TWO IRON MACHINES CHAPTER I STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS I went to the Durbar the other night in cinema colour and saw the King and Queen through India. I had found my way, with hundreds of others, into the gallery of the Scala Theatre, and out of that big, still rim of watchful darkness where I sat I saw--there must have been thousands of them--crowds of camels running. And crowds of elephants went swinging past. I watched them like a boy, like a boy standing on the edge of a thousand years and looking off at a world. It was stately and strange, and like far music to sit quite still and watch civilizations swinging past. Then suddenly it became near and human--the spirit of playgrounds and of shouting and boyish laughter ran through it. And we watched the elephants, naked and untrimmed, lolling down to the lake and lying down to be scrubbed in it with comfortable low snorting and slow rolling in the water, and the men standing by all the while like little play-nurses and tending them, their big bungling babies, at the bath. A few minutes later we watched the same elephants, hundreds of them, their mighty toilets made, pacing slowly past, swinging their gorgeous trappings in our eyes, rolling their huge hoodahs at us, and all the time still those little funny dots of men beside them, moving them silently, moving them invisibly as by a spirit, as by a kind of awful wireless--those great engines of the flesh! I shall never forget it or live without it, that slow pantomime of those mighty, silent Eastern nations, their religions, their philosophies, their wills, their souls, moving their elephants past--the long panorama of it, of their little awful human wills, all those little black, helpless-looking slits of Human Will astride those mighty necks! I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his airship, or Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives--those unconscious, forbidding, coldly obedient terrible fellows! Have I not lain awake and listened to them storming through the night, heard them out there ahead working our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars, on Space, and on Time while we slept? My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid beasts--the crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants--all being driven along by the little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people was, "Why don't their elephants turn around on them and chase them?" I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute. Our elephants chase us--most of us. Who has not seen locomotives coming quietly out of their roundhouses in New York and begin chasing people, chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry whether or no, speeding up and ordering around by the clock great cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen, hundreds of times, motor cars turning around on their owners and chasing them--chasing them fairly out of their lives. And hundreds of thousands of little wood-and-rubber Things with nickel bells whirring, may be seen ordering around people--who pay them for it--in any city of our modern world. Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone, who is a gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but not often. There are certain questions to be asked and to be settled in any civilization that would be called great. First: Do the elephants chase the men in it? Second: And if--as in our Western civilization--the men have made their own elephants, why should they be chased by them? There are some of us who have wondered a little at the comparative inferiority of organ music. We have come to the conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones that organs can do best--the music that machines like. Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original composer for a machine age because he would not let his imagination be cowed by the mere technical limitations, the narrow-mindedness of brass horns, wooden flutes, and catgut; he made up his mind that he would not sing violins. He made violins sing him. Perhaps this is the whole secret of art in a machine civilization. Perhaps a machine civilization is capable of a greater art than has ever been dreamed in the world before, the moment it stops being chased by its elephants. The question of letting the crowd be beautiful in our world of machines and crowds to-day turns on our producing Machine-Trainers. Men possessed by watches in their vest pockets cannot be inspired, men possessed by churches or religion-machines cannot be prophets, men possessed by school-machines cannot be educators. The reason that we find the poet, or at least the minor poet, discouraged in a machine age probably is, that there is nothing a minor poet can do in it. Why should nightingales, poppies, and dells expect, in a main trial of strength, to compete with machines? And why should human beings running for their souls in a race with locomotives expect to keep very long from losing their souls? The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery to-day is that this is what they think a machine civilization is. They whine at the machines. They blame the locomotive. A better way for a man to do would be to stop blaming the locomotive, and stop running along out of breath beside it, and climb up into the cab. This is the whole issue of art in our modern civilization--climbing up into the cab. First come the Machine-Trainers, or poets who can tame engines. Then the other poets. In the meantime, the less we hear about nightingales and poppies and dells and love and above, the better. Poetry must make a few iron-handed, gentle-hearted, mighty men next. It is because we demand and expect the beautiful that we say that poetry must make men next. The elephants have been running around in the garden long enough. CHAPTER II BELLS AND WHEELS We are living in a day of the great rebellion of the machines. Out of a thousand thousand roundhouses and factories, vast cities and nations of machines on the land and on the sea have risen before the soul of man and said, "We have served you; now, you serve us." A million million vulgar, swaggering Goliaths, one sees them everywhere; they wave their arms at us around the world, they puff their white breath at us, they spit smoke in our eyes, line up in a row before the great cities, before the mighty-hearted nations, and say it again and again, all in chorus, _"We have served you, now, you serve us!"_ It has come to sound to some of us as a kind of chant around our lives. But why should we serve them? I have seen crowds of minor poets running, their little boxes of perfume and poetry, their cologne water, their smelling-salts, in their hands. And, of course, if the world were all minor poets the situation would be serious. And I have seen flocks of faint-hearted temples, of big, sulky, beautiful, absent-minded colleges, looking afraid. Every now and then perhaps one sees a professor run out, throw a book at the machines, and run back again. Oxford still looks at science, at matter itself, tremulously, with that same old, still, dreamy air of dignity, of gentlemanly disappointment. And if the world were all Oxford the situation would be serious. When Oxford with its hundred spires, its little beautiful boy choirs of professors, draws me one side from the Great Western Railway Station, and intones in those still, solemn, lonely spaces the great truth in my ears, that machines and ideals cannot go together, that the only way to deal with ideals is to keep them away from machines, my only reply is that ideals that are so tired that they are merely devoted to defending themselves, ideals that will not and cannot go forth and be the breath of the machines, ideals that cannot and will not master the machines, that will not ride the machines as the wind, overrun matter, and conquer the earth, are not ideals for gentlemen. At least they are not ideals that can keep up the standard of the Oxford gentleman. A gentleman is a man who is engaged in expressing his best and noblest self in every fibre of his mind and every fibre of his body. He makes the very force of gravity pulling on his clothes express him, and the movements of his feet and his hands. He gathers up his rooms into his will and all the appointments of his life and crowds into them the full meaning of his soul. He makes all these things say him. The main attribute of a man who is not a gentleman is that he does not do these things, that he cannot inform his body with his spirit. I go back to the Great Western Railway, ugly as it still is. I go alone, and sadly if I must, and for a little time--without the deep bells and without the stained-glass windows, without all that dear, familiar beauty I have loved in the old and quiet quadrangles--I take my stand beside the Great Western Railway! I claim the Great Western Railway for the spirit of man and for the will of God! With its vast shuttle of steam and shining engines, its little, whispering telegraph office, the Great Western Railway is a part of my body. I lay my will on the heart of London with it, or I sleep in the old house in Lynmouth with it. I am the Great Western Railway, and the Great Western Railway is ME. And from the heart of the roar of London to the slow, sleepy surge of the sea in my window at Lynmouth it is mine! Though it be iron and wood, switches, whistles, and white steam, it is my body, and I inform it with my spirit, or I die. With the will of God I endow it, with the glory of the world, with the desires of my heart, and with the prayers of the hurrying men and women. I declare that that same glory I have known before, and that I will always know, and will never give up, in the old quiet quadrangles of Oxford and in the deep bells and in the still waters, as in some strange, new, and mighty Child, is in the Great Western Railway too. When I am in the train it sings. Strangely and hoarsely It sings! I lie down to rest. It whistles on ahead my ideals down the slope of the world. It roars softly, while I sleep, my religion in my ears. CHAPTER III DEW AND ENGINES When I was small, and wanted suddenly to play tag or duck-on-the-rock I had a little square half-mile of boys near by to play with. My daughter plays tag or plays dolls, any minute she likes, with a whole city. She is not surprised at the telephone; she takes it for granted like sunshine and milk. It is a part of the gray matter in her brain--a whole city, six or seven square miles of it. A little mouthpiece on a desk, a number, and two hundred little girls are hers in a minute, to play dolls with. She thinks in miles when she plays, where I thought in door-yards. The whole city is a part of the daily, hourly furniture of her mind. The little gray molecules in the structure of her brain are different from those in mine. I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and free than he has had before. A few minutes ago, here where I am writing, an engine all in bright, soft, lit-up green with little lines of yellow on it and flashing silver feet, like a vision, swept past--through my still glass window, through the quiet green fields--like a great, swift, gleaming whisper of London. And now, all in six seconds, this great quiet air about me is waked to vast vibrations of the mighty city. Out over the red pines, the lonely gorse fields, I have seen passing the spirit of the Strand. I have seen the great flocking bridges and the roar about St. Paul's in communion with the treetops and with the hedgerows and with the little brooks, all in six seconds, when an engine, with its vision like a cloud of glory swept past. And yet there are people in Oxford who tell me that an engine when it is in the very act of expressing such stupendous and boundless thoughts, of making such mighty and beautiful things happen, is not beautiful, that it has nothing to do with art. They can but watch the machines, the earth black with them, going about everywhere mowing down great nations and rolling under the souls of men. I cannot see it so. I see a thousand thousand engines carrying dew and green fields to the stones of London. I see the desires of the earth hastening. The ships and the wireless telegraph beckon the wills of cities on the seas and on the sky. With the machines I have taken a whole planet to me for my feet and for my hands. I gesture with the earth. I hand up oceans to my God. CHAPTER IV DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL! There are people who say that machines cannot be beautiful, and cannot make for beauty, because machines are dead. I would agree with them if I thought that machines were dead. I have watched in spirit, hundreds of years, the machines grow out of Man like nails, like vast antennæ--a kind of enormous, more unconscious sub-body. They are apparently of less lively and less sensitive tissue than tongues or eyes or flesh; and like all bones they do not renew, of course, as often or as rapidly as flesh. But the difference between live and dead machines is quite as grave and quite as important as the difference between live and dead men. The generally accepted idea a live thing is, that it is a thing that keeps dying and being born again every minute; it is seen to be alive by its responsiveness to the spirit, to the intelligence that created it and that keeps re-creating it. I have known thousands of factories; and every factory I have known that is really strong or efficient has scales like a snake, and casts off its old self. All the people in it, and all the iron and wood in it, month by month are being renewed and shedding themselves. Any live factory can always be seen moulting year after year. A live spirit goes all through the machinery, a kind of nervous tissue of invention, of thought. We already speak of live and dead iron, of live and dead engines or half-dead and half-sick engines, and we have learned that there is such a thing as tired steel. What people do to steel makes a difference to it. Steel is sensitive to people. My human spirit grows my arm and moves it and guides it and expresses itself in it, keeps re-creating it and destroying it; and daily my soul keeps rubbing out and writing in new lines upon my face; and in the same way my typewriter, in a slow, more stolid fashion, responds to my spirit too. Two men changing typewriters or motor-cars are, though more subtly, like two men changing boots. Sewing machines, pianos, and fiddles grow intimate with the people who use them, and they come to express those particular people and the ways in which they are different from others. A Titian-haired typewriter girl makes her machine move differently every day from a blue-eyed one. Typewriters never like to have their people take the liberty of lending them. Steel bars and wooden levers all have little mannerisms, little expressions, small souls of their own, habits of people that they have lived with, which have grasped the little wood and iron levers of their wills and made them what they are. It is somewhere in the region of this fact that we are going to discover the great determining secret of modern life, of the mastery of man over his machines. Man, at the present moment, with all his new machines about him, is engaged in becoming as self-controlled, as self-expressive, with his new machines, with his wireless telegraph arms and his railway legs, as he is with his flesh and blood ones. The force in man that is doing this is the spiritual genius in him that created the machine, the genius of imperious and implacable self-expression, of glorious self-assertion in matter, the genius for being human, for being spiritual, and for overflowing everything we touch and everything we use with our own wills and with the ideals and desires of our souls. The Dutchman has expressed himself in Dutch architecture and in Dutch art; the American has expressed himself in the motor-car; the Englishman has expressed himself, has carved his will and his poetry upon the hills, and made his landscape a masterpiece by a great nation. He has made his walls and winding roads, his rivers, his very treetops express his deep, silent joy in the earth. So the great, fresh young nations to-day, with a kind of new, stern gladness, implacableness, and hope, have appointed to their souls expression through machinery. Our Engines and our radium shall cry to God! Our wheels sing in the sun! Machinery is our new art-form. A man expresses himself first in his hands and feet, then in his clothes, and then in his rooms or in his house, and then on the ground about him; the very hills grow like him, and the ground in the fields becomes his countenance; and now, last and furthest of all, requiring the liveliest and noblest grasp of his soul, the finest circulation of will of all, he begins expressing himself in his vast machines, in his three-thousand-mile railways, in his vast, cold-looking looms and dull steel hammers. With telescopes for Mars-eyes for his spirit, he walks up the skies; he expresses his soul in deep and dark mines, and in mighty foundries melting and re-moulding the world. He is making these things intimate, sensitive, and colossal expressions of his soul. They have become the subconscious body, the abysmal, semi-infinite body of the man, sacred as the body of the man is sacred, and as full of light or of darkness. So I have seen the machines go swinging through the world. Like archangels, like demons, they mount up our desires on the mountains. We do as we will with them. We build Winchester Cathedral all over again, on water. We dive down with our steel wheels and nose for knowledge--like a great Fish--along the bottom of the sea. We beat up our wills through the air. We fling up, with our religion, with our faith, our bodies on the clouds. We fly reverently and strangely, our hearts all still and happy, in the face of God! CHAPTER V AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON The whole process of machine-invention is itself the most colossal, spiritual achievement of history. The bare idea we have had of unravelling all creation, and of doing it up again to express our own souls--the idea of subduing matter, of making our ideals get their way with matter, with radium, ether, antiseptics, is itself a religion, a poetry, a ritual, a cry to heaven. The supreme, spiritual adventure of the world has become this task that man has set himself, of breaking down and casting away forever the idea that there is such a thing as matter belonging to matter--matter that keeps on in a dead, stupid way, just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls, with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the little terrible wills of men and the spirit of God, is already irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million little atoms in it going round and round and round dancing before the Lord? And why should an Oxford man be afraid of a cubic inch of iron, or afraid of becoming like it? I daily thank God that I have been allowed to belong to this generation. I have looked at last a little cubic inch of iron out of countenance. I can sit and watch it, the little cubic inch of iron, in its still coldness, in all its little funny play-deadness, and laugh! I know that to a telescope or a god, or to me, to us, the little cubic inch of iron is all alive inside, that it is whirling with will, that it is sensitive in a rather dead-looking but lively cosmic way, sensitive like another kind of more slowly quivering flesh, sensitive to moons and to stars and to heat and cold, to time and space and to human souls. It is singing every minute low and strange, night and day, in its little grim blackness, of the glory of Things. I am filled with the same feeling, the same sense of kindred, of triumphant companionship, when I go out among them and watch the majestic family of the machines, of the engines, those mighty Innocents, those new awful sons of God, going abroad through all the world, looking back at us when we have made them, unblinking and without sin! Like rain and sunshine, like chemicals, and like all the other innocent, godlike things, and like waves of water and waves of air, rainbows, starlight, they say what we make them say. They are alive with the life that is in us. The first element of power in a man, in getting control of his life in our modern era, is to have spirit enough to know what matter is like. The Machine-Trainer is the man who sees what the machines are like. He is the man who conceives of iron-and-wood machines, in his daily habit of thought, as alive. He has discovered ways in which he can produce an impression upon iron and wood with his desires, and with his will. He goes about making iron-and-wood machines do live things. It is never the machines that are dead. It is only mechanical-minded men that are dead. CHAPTER VI THE MACHINES' MACHINES The fate of civilization is not going to be determined by people who are morbidly like machines on the one hand, or by people who are morbidly unmechanical, on the other. People in a machine civilization who try to live without being automatic and mechanical-minded part of the time and in some things, people who try to make everything they do artistic and self-expressive and hand-made, who attend to all their own thoughts and finish off all their actions by hand themselves, soon wish they were dead. People who do everything they do mechanically, or by machinery, are dead already. It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our lives ourselves--real, true, hand-made individual lives--to have to fight all these machines about us trying daily to roar and roll us down into humdrum and nothingness, without having to fight besides all these dear people we have about us too, who have turned machines, even one's own flesh and blood. Does not one see them--see them everywhere--one's own flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, road-rollers, lifts, lawn-mowers? Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly unmechanical people, modern civilization hangs in the balance. There must be some way of being just mechanical enough, and at the right time and right place, and of being just unmechanical enough at the right time and right place. And there must be some way in which men can be mechanical and unmechanical at will. The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature of machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the machines to their souls, like telephones and wireless telegraph, or to their bodies, like radium and railroads, and who know when and when not and how and how not to use them who are so used to using machines quietly and powerfully, that they do not let the machines outwit them and unman them. Who are these men? How do they do it? They are the Machine-Trainers. The men who understand people-machines, who understand iron machines, and who understand how to make people-machines and iron machines run softly together. CHAPTER VII THE MEN'S MACHINES There was a time once in the old simple individual days when drygoods stores could be human. They expressed, in a quiet, easy way, the souls of the people who owned them. When machinery was invented and when organization was invented--machines of people--drygoods stores became vast selling machines. We then faced the problem of making a drygoods store with twenty-five hundred clerks in it as human as a drygoods store with fifteen. This problem has been essentially and in principle solved. At least we know it is about to be solved. We are ready to admit--most of us--that it is practicable for a department store to be human. Everything the man at the top does expresses his human nature and his personality to his clerks. His clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature. What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department stores work--the thing that passes through their hands, is human, and everything about it is human, or can be made human; and all the while vast currents of human beings, huge Mississippis of human feeling, flow past the clerks--thousands and thousands of souls a day, and pour over their souls, making them and keeping them human. The stream clears itself. But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the ground? And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make himself felt as a human being on the bottom floor of the hole in the ground? In a department store the employer expresses himself to his clerks through every one of the other twenty-five hundred; they mingle and stir their souls and hopes and fears together, and he expresses himself to all of them through them all. But in a mine, two men work all alone down in the dark hole in the ground. Thousands of other men, all in dark holes, are near by, with nothing but the dull sound of picks to come between. In thousands of other holes men work, each with his helper, all alone. The utmost the helper can do is to grow like the man he works with, or like his own pick, or like the coal he chips out, or like the black hole. The utmost the man who mines coal can do, in the way of being human, is with his helper. In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working hours, an employer can express himself and his humanness to his workman is through the steel machine he works with--through its being a new, good, fair machine or a poor one. He can only smile and frown at him with steel, be good to him in wheels and levers, or now and then perhaps through a foreman pacing down the aisles. The question the modern business man in a factory has to face is very largely this: "I have acres of machines all roaring my will at my men. I have leather belts, printed rules, white steam, pistons, roar, air, water and fire and silence to express myself to my workmen in. I have long monotonous swings and sweeps of cold steel, buckets of melted iron, strips of wood, bells, whistles, clocks--to express myself, to express my human spirit to my men. Is there, or is there not, any possible way in which my factory with its machines can be made as human and as expressive of the human as a department store?" This is the question that our machine civilization has set itself to answer. All the men with good honest working imaginations, the geniuses and the freemen of the world, are setting themselves the task of answering it. Some say, "Machines are on the necks of the men. We will take the machines away." Others say, "We will make our men as good as our machines. We will make our inventions in men catch up with our inventions in machines." We naturally turn to the employer first as having the first chance. What is there an employer can do to draw out the latent force in the men, evoke the divine, incalculable passion sleeping beneath in the machine-walled minds, the padlocked wills, the dull unmined desires of men? How can he touch and wake the solar plexus of labour? If any employer desires to get into the inner substance of the most common type of workman, be an artist with him, express himself with him and change the nature of that substance, give it a different colour or light or movement so that he will work three times as fast, ten times as cheerfully and healthfully, and with his whole body and soul, spirit, and how is he going to do it? Most employers wish they could do this. If they could persuade their men to believe in them, to begin to be willing to work with them instead of against them, they would do it. What form of language is there, whether of words or of actions, that an employer can use to make the men who work nine hours a day for him and to whom he has to express himself across acres of machines, believe in him and understand him? The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of his life, with this question. All civilization seems crowding up day by day, seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes out, and asking him--now with despair, now with a kind of grim, implacable hope, "Do you believe, or do you not believe, a factory can be made as human as a department store?" This question is going to be answered first by men who know what iron machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work--who know what people-machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work. They will base all that they do upon certain resemblances and certain differences between people and machines. They will work the machines of iron according to the laws of iron. They will work the machines of men according to the laws of human nature. There are certain facts in human nature, feelings, enthusiasms and general principles concerning the natural working relation between men and machines, that it may be well to consider in the next chapter as a basis for a possible solution. What are our machines after all? How are the machines like us? And on what theory of their relation to us can machines and men expect in a world like this to run softly together? These are the questions men are going to answer next. In the meantime, I venture to believe that no man who is morose to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in our civilization--because they are machines--is likely to be able to do much to save the men in it. CHAPTER VIII THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD Every man has, according to the scientists, a place in the small of his back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the soul of his body. All the little streets of the senses or avenues of knowledge, the spiritual conduits through which he lives in this world, meet in this little mighty brain in the small of a man's back. About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently make their headquarters in this little place in the small of his back. It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is supposed to keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious memory of a whole human race, and it is here that the desires and the delights and labours of thousands of years of other people are turned off and turned on in him. It is the brain that has been given to every man for the heavy everyday hard work of living. The other brain, the one with which he does his thinking and which is kept in an honoured place up in the cupola of his being, is a comparatively light-working organ, merely his own private personal brain--a conscious, small, and supposably controllable affair. He holds on to his own particular identity with it. The great lower brain in the small of his back is merely lent to him, as it were, out of eternity--while he goes by. It is like a great engine which he has been allowed the use of as long as he can keep it connected up properly with his cerebral arrangements. This appears to be mainly what the cerebral brain is for, this keeping the man connected up. It acts as a kind of stopcock for one's infinity, for screwing on or screwing off one's vast race-consciousness, one's all-humanityness, all those unsounded deeps or reservoirs of human energy, of hope and memory, of love, of passionate thought, of earthly and heavenly desire that are lent to each of us as we slip softly by for seventy years, by a whole human race. A human being is a kind of factory. The engine and the works and all the various machines are kept in the basement, and he sends down orders to them from time to time, and they do the work which has been conceived up in the headquarters. He expects the works down below to keep on doing these things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should, with the things that are new and different and special and that his mind alone can do--the things which, at least in their present initial formative or creative stage, no machines as yet have been developed to do, and that can only be worked out by the man up in the headquarters himself personally, by the handiwork of his own thought. The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong, and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all the machines in the basement are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for discriminating, assimilating and classifying material, for pumping up power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away for him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him up in his very dreams new and strange powers to live and know with. The men who have been the most developed of all, in this regard, civilization has always selected and set apart from the others. It calls these men, in their generation, men of genius. Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius. The reason that people set the genius apart and do not try to compete with him is that he has more and better machinery than they have. It is always the first thing one notices about a man of genius--the incredible number of things that he manages to get done for him, apparently the things that he never takes any time off, like the rest of us, to do himself. The subconscious, automatic, mechanical equipment of his senses, the extraordinary intelligence and refinement of his body, the way his senses keep his spirit informed automatically and convey outer knowledge to him, the power he has in return of informing this outer knowledge with his spirit, with his will, with his choices, once for all, so that he is always able afterward to rely on his senses to work out things beautifully for him quite by themselves, and to hand up to him, when he wants them, rare, deep, unconscious knowledge--all the things he wants to use for what his soul is doing at the moment--it is these that make the man of genius what he is. He has a larger and better factory than others, and has developed a huge subconscious service in mind and body. Having all these things done for him, he is naturally more free than others and has more vision and more originality, his spirit is swung free to build new worlds--to take walks with God, until at last we come to look upon him, upon the man of genius, a little superstitiously. We look up every little while from doing the things ourselves that he gets done for him by his subconscious machinery, and we wonder at him, we wonder at the strange, the mighty feats he does, at his thousand-leagued boots, at his apparent everywhereness. His songs and joys, sometimes, to us, his very sorrows, look miraculous. And yet it is all merely because he has a factory, a great automatic equipment, a thousand employee-sense perceptions, down in the basement of his being, doing things for him that the rest of us do, or think we are obliged to do ourselves, and give up all of our time to. He is not held back as we are, and moves freely. So he dives under the sea familiarly, or takes peeps at the farther side of the stars, or he flies in the air, or he builds unspeakable railroads or thinks out ships or sea-cities, or he builds books, or he builds little new still-undreamed-of worlds out of chemistry, or he unravels history out of rocks, or plants new cities and mighty states without seeming to try, or perhaps he proceeds quietly to be interested in men, in all these funny little dots of men about him; and out of the earth and sky, out of the same old earth and sky everybody else had had, he makes new kinds and new sizes of men with a thought like some mighty, serene child playing with dolls! It is generally supposed that the man of genius rules history and dictates the ideals, the activities of the next generation, writes out the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world, and lays the ground-plans of nations because he has an inspired mind. It is really because he has an inspired body, a body that has received its orders once for all, from his spirit. We would never wonder that everything a genius does has that vivid and strange reality it has, if we realized what his body is doing for him, how he has a body which is at work automatically drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking up practicability, art and technique for him into everything he sees and everything he hopes and desires. And every year he keeps on adding a new body, keeps on handing down to his basement new sets, every day, of finer and yet finer things to do automatically. The great spiritual genius becomes great by economizing his consciousness in one direction and letting it fare forth in another. He converts his old inspirations into his new machines. He converts heat into power, and power into light, and comes to live at last as almost any man of genius can really be seen living--in a kind of transfigured or lighted-up body. The poet transmutes his subconscious or machine body into words; and the artist, into colour or sound or into carved stone. The engineer transmutes his subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into stories of thoughtful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative genius is seen, sooner or later, to be the transmuted genius of some man's body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody. It is not as if he had had to work out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself. The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real spiritual life begins where our lives leave off. So the poets who have filled the world with glory and beauty have been free to do it because they have had more perfect, more healthful and improved subconscious senses handing up wonder to them than the rest of us have. And so the engineers, living, as they always live, with that fierce, silent, implacable curiosity of theirs, woven through their bodies and through their senses and through their souls, have tagged the Creator's footsteps under the earth, and along the sky, every now and then throwing up new little worlds to Him like His worlds, saying, "Look, O God, look at THIS!"--the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look poetic have all done what they have done because the unconscious and automatic gifts of their senses, of the powers of their observation, have swung their souls free, given them long still reaches of thought and vast new orbits of desire, like gods. All the great men of the world have always had machinery. Now, everybody is having it. The power to get little things, innumerable, omnipresent, for-ever-and-ever things, tiny just-so things, done for us automatically so that we can go on to our inspirations is no longer to-day the special prerogative of men of genius. It is for all of us. Machinery is the stored-up spirit, the old saved-up inspiration of the world turned on for every man. And as the greatness of a man turns on his command over machinery, on his power to free his soul by making his body work for him, the greatness of a civilization turns upon its getting machines to do its work. The more of our living we can learn to do to-day, automatically, the more inspired and creative and godlike and unmechanical our civilization becomes. Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world. CHAPTER IX THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS I would not have, if I could afford it, a thing in my house that is not hand-made. I have come to believe that machinery is going to make it possible for everybody to have hand-made things in their homes, things that have been made by people who love to make them, and by people who, thinks to the machines, are soon bound to have time to make them. Some will have gifts for hand-made furniture, others for hand-made ideas. Perhaps people will even have time for sitting down to enjoy hand-made ideas, to enjoy hand-made books--and enjoy reading books by hand. We may have time for following an author in a book in the slow, old, deep, loving, happy, hand-made fashion we used to know--when we have enough machines. It looks as if it might be something like this. Every man is going to spend his mornings in the basement of society, taking orders and being a servant and executing automatically, like a machine if need be, the will of the world, making what the world wants in the way it wants it, expressing society and subordinating himself. In the afternoon he shall come up out of the basement, and take his stand on the ground floor of the world, stop being a part of the machinery, and be a man, express himself and give orders to himself and do some work he loves to do in the way he loves to do it, express his soul in his labour, and be an artist. He will not select his work in the morning, or select his employer, or say how the work shall be done. He will himself be selected, like a young tree or like an iron nail, because he is the best made and best fitted thing at hand to be used in a certain place and in a certain way. When the man has been selected for his latent capacities, his employer sets to work on him scientifically and according to the laws of physics, hygiene, conservation of energy, the laws of philosophy, human nature, heredity, psychology, and even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold his hands, how to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to breathe, so that three times as much work can be got out of him as he could get out of himself. A mind of the highest rank and, if necessary, thirty minds of the highest rank, shall be at his disposal, shall be lent him to show him how his work can be done. The accumulated science and genius, the imagination and experience, of hundreds of years, of all climates, of all countries, of all temperaments shall be heaped up by his employers, gathered about the man's mind, wrought through his limbs, and help him to do his work. All labour down in the basement of society shall be skilled labour. The brains of men of genius and of experts shall be pumped into labour from above until every man in the basement shall earn as much money in three hours a day as he formerly had earned in nine. Between the time a man saves by having machinery and the time he saves by having the brains of great men and geniuses to work with, it will be possible for men to do enough work for other people down in the basement of the world in a few hours to shut the whole basement up, if we want to, by three o'clock. Every man who is fit for it shall spend the rest of his time in planning his work himself and in expressing himself, and in creating hand-made and beautiful, inspired and wilful things like an artist, or like a slowed-down genius, or at least like a man or like a human being. Every man owes it to society to spend part of his time in expressing his own soul. The world needs him. Society cannot afford to let him merely give to it his feet and his hands. It wants the joy in him, the creative desire in him, the slow, stupid, hopeful initiative, in him to help run the world. Society wants to use the man's soul too--the man's will. It is going to demand the soul in a man, the essence or good-will in him, if only to protect itself, and to keep the man from being dangerous. Men who have lost or suppressed their souls, and who go about cursing at the world every day they live in it, are not a safe, social investment. But while every man is going to see that he owes it to society to use a part of his time in it in expressing himself, his own desires, in his own way, he is going to see also that he owes it to society to spend part of his time in expressing others and in expressing the desires and the needs of others. The two processes could be best effected at first probably by alternating, by keeping the man in equilibrium, balancing the mechanical and the spiritual in his life. Eventually and ideally, he will manage to have time in a higher state of society to put them together, to express in the same act at the same time, and not alternating or reciprocally, himself and others. And he will succeed in doing what the great and free artist does already. He will make his individual self-expression so great and so generous that it is also the expression of the universal self. Every man will be treated according to his own nature. Doubtless some men have not brains enough in a week to supply them for one hour a day of self-directed work. It would take them five hours a day to think how to do one hour's worth of work. Men who prefer, as many will, not to think, and who like the basement better, can substitute in the basement for their sons, and buy if they like, the freedom of sons who prefer thinking, who would like to work harder than their fathers would care to work, up on the ground floor of the world. But as time goes on, it is to be hoped that every man will climb up slowly, and will belong less and less of his time to the staff that borrows brains, and more and more of his time to the staff that hands brains down, and that directs the machinery of the world. The time of alternation in dealing with different callings will probably be adjusted differently, and might be made weeks instead of days, but the principle would be the same. The forces that are going to help, apparently, in this evolution will be the labour exchange--the centre for the mobilization of labour, the produce exchange, the inventor's spirit in the labour unions and employers' associations, and the gradual organization by inventors of the common vision of all men, and setting it at work on the supreme task of modern life--the task of drawing out, evoking each particular man in the world, and in behalf of all, freeing him for his own particular place. CHAPTER X THE MACHINE-TRAINERS The fundamental failure of humanity so far is in self-assertion. The essential distinctive trait of modern civilization is machinery. Machinery logically and irrevocably involves the coöperative action of individuals. If we make levers and iron wheels work by putting them together according to their nature, we can only make vast masses of men work by putting them together according to their nature. So far we have been trying to make vast masses of men work together in precisely the same way we make levers and iron wheels work together. We have thought we could make diabolically, foolishly, insanely inflexible men-machines which violate at every point the natural qualities and instincts of the materials of which they are made. We have failed to assert ourselves against our iron machines. We have let our iron machines assert themselves against us. We have let our iron machines be models for us. We have overlooked the difference in the nature of the materials in machines of iron and machines of men. A man is a self-reproducing machine, and an iron machine is one that has to be reproduced by somebody else. In a man-machine arrangements must be made so that each man can be allowed to be the father of his own children and the author of his own acts. In society or the man-machine, if it is to work, men are individuals. Society is organically, irrevocably dependent upon each man, and upon what each man chooses according to his own nature to do himself. The result is, the first principle of success in constructing and running a social machine is to ask and to get an answer out of each man who is, as we look him over and take him up, and propose to put him into it, "What are you like?" "What are you especially for?" "What do you want?" "How can you get it?" Our success in getting him properly into our machine turns upon a loyal, patient, imperious attention on our part to what there is inside him, inside the particular individual man, and how we can get him to let us know what is inside, get him to decide voluntarily to let us have it, and let us work it into the common end. In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine civilization which we have been piling up around us for a hundred years we have made machines out of everything, and our one consummate and glaring failure in the machines we have made is the machine we have made out of ourselves. Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and to reproduce themselves. Man-machines are produced by putting up possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find out (and finding out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life they will grow up. Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is based on the profound and special study of individuals: upon drawing out the aptitudes and motives, choices and genius in each man; the passion, if he has any; the creative desire, the self-expressing, self-reproducing, inner manhood; the happy strength there is in him. Trades unions overlook this, and treat all men alike and all employers alike. Employers have very largely overlooked it. It is the industrial, social, and religious secret of our modern machine civilization. We need not be discouraged about machines, because the secret of the machine civilization has as yet barely been noticed. The elephants are running around in the garden. But they have merely taken us by surprise. It is their first and their last chance. The men about us are seeing what to do. We are to get control of the elephants, first, by getting control of ourselves. We are beginning to organize our people-machines as if they were made of people; so that the people in them can keep on being people, and being better ones. And as our people-machines begin to become machines that really work, our iron machines will no longer be feared. They will reach over and help. As we look about us we shall see our iron machines at last, about all the world, all joining in, all hard at work for us, a million, million machines a day making the crowd beautiful. CHAPTER XI MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS A crowd civilization produces, as a matter of course, crowd art and art for crowded conditions. This fact is at once the glory and the weakness of the kind of art a democracy is bound to have. The most natural evidence to turn to first, of the crowd in a crowd age, is such as can be found in its literature, especially in its masterpieces. The significance of shaking hands with a Senator of the United States is that it is a convenient and labour-saving way of shaking hands with two or three million people. The impressiveness of the Senator's Washington voice, the voice on the floor of the Senate, consists in the mystical undertone--the chorus in it--multitudes in smoking cities, men and women, rich and poor, who are speaking when this man speaks, and who are silent when he is silent, in the government of the United States. The typical fact that the Senator stands for in modern life has a corresponding typical fact in modern literature. The typical fact in modern literature is the epigram, the senatorial sentence, the sentence that immeasurably represents what it does not say. The difference between democracy in Washington and democracy in Athens may be said to be that in Washington we have an epigram government, a government in which ninety million people are crowded into two rooms to consider what to do, and in which ninety million people are made to sit in one chair to see that it is done. In Athens every man represented himself. It may be said to be a good working distinction between modern and classic art that in modern art words and colours and sounds stand for things, and in classic art they said them. In the art of the Greek, things were what they seemed, and they were all there. Hence simplicity. It is a quality of the art of to-day that things are not what they seem in it. If they were, we should not call it art at all. Everything stands not only for itself and for what it says, but for an immeasurable something that cannot be said. Every sound in music is the senator of a thousand sounds, thoughts, and associations, and in literature every word that is allowed to appear is the representative in three syllables of three pages of a dictionary. The whistle of the locomotive, and the ring of the telephone, and the still, swift rush of the elevator are making themselves felt in the ideal world. They are proclaiming to the ideal world that the real world is outstripping it. The twelve thousand horsepower steamer does not find itself accurately expressed in iambics on the leisurely fleet of Ulysses. It is seeking new expression. The command has gone forth over all the beauty and over all the art of the present world, crowded for time and crowded for space. "Telegraph!" To the nine Muses the order flies. One can hear it on every side. "Telegraph!" The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of art and "types," the epigrams of human nature, crowding us all into ten or twelve people. The epic is telescoped into the sonnet, and the sonnet is compressed into quatrains or Tabbs of poetry, and couplets are signed as masterpieces. The novel has come into being--several hundred pages of crowded people in crowded sentences, jostling each other to oblivion; and now the novel, jostled into oblivion by the next novel, is becoming the short story. Kipling's short stories sum the situation up. So far as skeleton or plot is concerned, they are built up out of a bit of nothing put with an infinity of Kipling; so far as meat is concerned, they are the Liebig Beef Extract of fiction. A single jar of Kipling contains a whole herd of old-time novels lowing on a hundred hills. The classic of any given world is a work of art that has passed through the same process in being a work of art that that world has passed through in being a world. Mr. Kipling represents a crowd age, because he is crowded with it; because, above all others, he is the man who produces art in the way the age he lives in is producing everything else. This is no mere circumstance of democracy. It is its manifest destiny that it shall produce art for crowded conditions, that it shall have crowd art. The kind of beauty that can be indefinitely multiplied is the kind of beauty in which, in the nature of things, we have made our most characteristic and most important progress. Our most considerable success in pictures could not be otherwise than in black and white. Black-and-white art is printing-press art; and art that can be produced in endless copies, that can be subscribed for by crowds, finds an extraordinary demand, and artists have applied themselves to supplying it. All the improvements, moving on through the use of wood and steel and copper, and the process of etching, to the photogravure, the lithograph, the moving picture, and the latest photograph in colour, whatever else may be said of them from the point of view of Titian or Michael Angelo, constitute a most amazing and triumphant advance from the point of view of making art a democracy, of making the rare and the beautiful minister day and night to crowds. The fact that the mechanical arts are so prominent in their relation to the fine arts may not seem to argue a high ideal amongst us; but as the mechanical arts are the body of beauty, and the fine arts are the soul of it, it is a necessary part of the ideal to keep body and soul together until we can do better. Mourning with Ruskin is not so much to the point as going to work with William Morris. If we have deeper feelings about wall-papers than we have about other things, it is going to the root of the matter to begin with wall-papers, to make machinery say something as beautiful as possible, inasmuch as it is bound to have, for a long time at least, about all the say there is. The photograph does not go about the world doing Murillos everywhere by pressing a button, but the camera habit is doing more in the way of steady daily hydraulic lifting of great masses of men to where they enjoy beauty in the world than Leonardo da Vinci would have dared to dream in his far-off day; and Leonardo's pictures, thanks to the same photograph, and everybody's pictures, films of paper, countless spirits of themselves, pass around the world to every home in Christendom. The printing press made literature a democracy, and machinery is making all the arts democracies. The symphony piano, an invention for making vast numbers of people who can play only a few very poor things play very poorly a great many good ones, is a consummate instance both of the limitation and the value of our contemporary tendency in the arts. The pipe organ, though on a much higher plane, is an equally characteristic contrivance making it possible for a man to be a complete orchestra and a conductor all by himself, playing on a crowd of instruments, to a crowd of people, with two hands and one pair of feet. It is a crowd invention. The orchestra--a most distinctively modern institution, a kind of republic of sound, the unseen spirit of the many in one--is the sublimest expression yet attained of the crowd music, which is, and must be, the supreme music of this modern day, the symphony. Richard Wagner comes to his triumph because his music is the voice of multitudes. The opera, a crowd of sounds accompanied by a crowd of sights, presented by one crowd of people on the stage to another crowd of people in the galleries, stands for the same tendency in art that the syndicate stands for in commerce. It is syndicate music; and in proportion as a musical composition in this present day is an aggregation of multitudinous moods, in proportion as it is suggestive, complex, paradoxical, the way a crowd is complex, suggestive, and paradoxical--provided it be wrought at the same time into some vast and splendid unity--just in this proportion is it modern music. It gives itself to the counterpoints of the spirit, the passion of variety in modern life. The legacy of all the ages, is it not descended upon us?--the spirit of a thousand nations? All our arts are thousand-nation arts, shadows and echoes of dead worlds playing upon our own. Italian music, out of its feudal kingdoms, comes to us as essentially solo music--melody; and the civilization of Greece, being a civilization of heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts, its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming of the crowd to the arts of this groping world. Modern art, inheriting each of these and each of all things, is revealed to us as the struggle to express all things at once. Democracy is democracy for this very reason, and for no other: that all things may be expressed at once in it, and that all things may be given a chance to be expressed at once in it. Being a race of hero-worshippers, the Greeks said the best, perhaps, what could be said in sculpture; but the marbles and bronzes of a democracy, having average men for subjects, and being done by average men, are average marbles and bronzes. We express what we have. We are in a transition stage. It is not without its significance, however, that we have perfected the plaster cast--the establishment of democracy among statues, and mobs of Greek gods mingling with the people can be seen almost any day in every considerable city of the world. The same principle is working itself out in our architecture. It is idle to contend against the principle. The way out is the way through. However eagerly we gaze at Parthenons on their ruined hills, if thirty-one-story blocks are in our souls thirty-one-story blocks will be our masterpieces, whether we like it or not. They will be our masterpieces because they tell the truth about us; and while truth may not be beautiful, it is the thing that must be told first before beauty can begin. The beauty we are to have shall only be worked out from the truth we have. Living as we do in a new era, not to see that the thirty-one-story block is the expression of a new truth is to turn ourselves away from the one way that beauty can ever be found by men, in this era or in any other. What is it that the thirty-one-story block is trying to say about us? The thirty-one-story block is the masterpiece of mass, of immensity, of numbers; with its 2427 windows and its 779 offices, and its crowds of lives piled upon lives, it is expressing the one supreme and characteristic thing that is taking place in the era in which we live. The city is the main fact that modern civilization stands for, and crowding is the logical architectural form of the city idea. The thirty-one-story block is the statue of a crowd. It stands for a spiritual fact, and it will never be beautiful until that fact is beautiful. The only way to make the thirty-one-story block beautiful (the crowd expressed by the crowd) is to make the crowd beautiful. The most artistic, the only artistic, thing the world can do next is to make the crowd beautiful. The typical city blocks, with their garrets in the lower stories of the sky, were not possible in the ancient world, because steel had not been invented; and the invention of steel, which is not the least of our triumphs in the mechanical arts, is in many ways the most characteristic. Steel is republican for stone. Putting whole quarries into a single girder, it makes room for crowds; and what is more significant than this, inasmuch as the steel pillar is an invention that makes it possible to put floors up first, and build the walls around the floors, instead of putting the walls up first and supporting the floors upon the walls, as in the ancient world, it has come to pass that the modern world being the ancient world turned upside down, modern architecture is ancient architecture turned inside out, a symbol of many things. The ancient world was a wall of individuals, supporting floor after floor and stage after stage of society, from the lowest to the highest; and it is a typical fact in this modern democratic world that it grows from the inside, and that it supports itself from the inside. When the mass in the centre has been finished, an ornamental stone facing of great individuals will be built around it and supported by it, and the work will be considered done. The modern spirit has much to boast of in its mechanical arts, and in its fine arts almost nothing, because the mechanical arts are studying what men are needing to-day, and the fine arts are studying what the Greeks needed three thousand years ago. To be a real classic is, first, to be a contemporary of one's own time; second, to be a contemporary of one's own time so deeply and widely as to be a contemporary of all time. The true Greek is a man who is doing with his own age what the Greeks did with theirs, bringing all ages to bear upon it, and interpreting it. As long as the fine arts miss the fundamental principle of this present age--the crowd principle, and the mechanical arts do not, the mechanical arts are bound to have their way with us. And it were vastly better that they should. Sincere and straightforward mechanical arts are not only more beautiful than affected fine ones, but they are more to the point: they are the one sure sign we have of where we are going to be beautiful next. It is impossible to love the fine arts in the year 1913 without studying the mechanical ones; without finding one's self looking for artistic material in the things that people are using, and that they are obliged to use. The determining law of a thing of beauty being, in the nature of things, what it is for, the very essence of the classic attitude in a utilitarian age is to make the beautiful follow the useful and inspire the useful with its spirit. The fine art of the next thousand years shall be the transfiguring of the mechanical arts. The modern hotel, having been made necessary by great natural forces in modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon--a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel--the crowd fireside--being more than any other one thing, perhaps, the thing that this civilization is about, the token of what it loves and of how it lives, is bound to be a masterpiece sooner or later that shall express democracy. The hotel rotunda, the parlour for multitudes, is bound to be made beautiful in ways we do not guess. Why should we guess? Multitudes have never wanted parlours before. The idea of a parlour has been to get out of a multitude. All the inevitable problems that come of having a whole city of families live in one house have yet to be solved by the fine arts as well as by the mechanical ones. We have barely begun. The time is bound to come when the radiator, the crowd's fireplace-in-a-pipe, shall be made beautiful; and when the electric light shall be taught the secret of the candle; and when the especial problem of modern life--of how to make two rooms as good as twelve--shall be mastered æsthetically as well as mathematically; and when even the piano-folding, bed-bookcase-toilet-stand-writing-desk--a crowd invention for living in a crowd--shall either take beauty to itself or lead to beauty that serves the same end. While for the time being it seems to be true that the fine arts are looking to the past, the mechanical arts are producing conditions in the future that will bring the fine arts to terms, whether they want to be brought to terms or not. The mechanical arts hold the situation in their hands. It is decreed that people who cannot begin by making the things they use beautiful shall be allowed no beauty in other things. We may wish that Parthenons and cathedrals were within our souls; but what the cathedral said of an age that had the cathedral mood, that had a cathedral civilization and thrones and popes in it, we are bound to say in some stupendous fashion of our own--something which, when it is built at last, will be left worshipping upon the ground beneath the sky when we are dead, as a memorial that we too have lived. The great cathedrals, with the feet of the huddled and dreary poor upon their floors, and saints and heroes shining on their pillars, and priests behind the chancel with God to themselves, and the vast and vacant nave, symbol of the heaven glimmering above that few could reach--it is not to these that we shall look to get ourselves said to the nations that are now unborn; rather, though it be strange to say it, we shall look to something like the ocean steamship--cathedral of this huge unresting modern world--under the wide heaven, on the infinite seas, with spars for towers and the empty nave reversed filled with human beings' souls--the cathedral of crowds hurrying to crowds. There are hundreds of them throbbing and gleaming in the night--this very moment--lonely cities in the hollow of the stars, bringing together the nations of the earth. When the spirit of our modern way of living, the idea in it, the bare facts about our modern human nature have been noticed at last by our modern artists, masterpieces shall come to us out of every great and living activity in our lives. Art shall tell the things these lives are about. When this is once realized in America as it was in Greece, the fine arts shall cover the other arts as the waters cover the sea. The Brooklyn Bridge, swinging its web for immortal souls across sky and sea, comes nearer to being a work of art than almost anything we possess to-day, because it tells the truth, because it is the material form of a spiritual idea, because it is a sublime and beautiful expression of New York in the way that the Acropolis was a sublime and beautiful expression of Athens. The Acropolis was beautiful because it was the abode of heroes, of great individuals; and the Brooklyn Bridge, because it expresses the bringing together of millions of men. It is the architecture of crowds--this Brooklyn Bridge--with winds and sunsets and the dark and the tides of souls upon it; it is the type and symbol of the kind of thing that our modern genius is bound to make beautiful and immortal before it dies. The very word "bridge" is the symbol of the future of art and of everything else, the bringing together of things that are apart--democracy. The bridge, which makes land across the water, and the boat, which makes land on the water, and the cable, which makes land and water alike--these are the physical forms of the spirit of modern life, the democracy of matter. But the spirit has countless forms. They are all new and they are all waiting to be made beautiful. The dumb crowd waits in them. We have electricity--the life current of the republican idea--characteristically our foremost invention, because it takes all power that belongs to individual places and puts it on a wire and carries it to all places. We have the telephone, an invention which makes it possible for a man to live on a back street and be a next-door neighbour to boulevards; and we have the trolley, the modern reduction of the private carriage to its lowest terms, so that any man for five cents can have as much carriage power as Napoleon with all his chariots. We have the phonograph, an invention which gives a man a thousand voices; which sets him to singing a thousand songs at the same time to a thousand crowds; which makes it possible for the commonest man to hear the whisper of Bismarck or Gladstone, to unwind crowds of great men by the firelight of his own house. We have the elevator, an invention for making the many as well off as the few, an approximate arrangement for giving first floors to everybody, and putting all men on a level at the same price--one more of a thousand instances of the extraordinary manner in which the mechanical arts have devoted themselves from first to last to the Constitution of the United States. While it cannot be said of many of these tools of existence that they are beautiful now, it is enough to affirm that when they are perfected they will be beautiful; and that if we cannot make beautiful the things that we need, we cannot expect to make beautiful the things that we merely want. When the beauty of these things is at last brought out, we shall have attained the most characteristic and original and expressive and beautiful art that is in our power. It will be unprecedented because it will tell unprecedented truths. It was the mission of ancient art to express states of being and individuals, and it may be said to be in a general way the mission of our modern art to express the beautiful in endless change, the movement of masses, coming to its sublimity and immortality at last by revealing the beauty of the things that move and that have to do with motion, the bringing of all things and of all souls together on the earth. The fulfillment of the word that has been written, "Your valleys shall be exalted, and your mountains shall be made low," is by no means a beautiful process. Democracy is the grading principle of the beautiful. The natural tendency the arts have had from the first to rise from the level of the world, to make themselves into Switzerlands in it, is finding itself confronted with the Constitution of the United States--a Constitution which, whatever it may be said to mean in the years to come, has placed itself on record up to the present time, at least, as standing for the tableland. The very least that can be granted to this Constitution is that it is so consummate a political document that it has made itself the creed of our theology, philosophy, and sociology; the principle of our commerce and industry; the law of production, education, and journalism; the method of our life; the controlling characteristic and the significant force in our literature; and the thing our religion and our arts are about. PART THREE PEOPLE-MACHINES CHAPTER I NOW! This outlook or glimmer of vision I have tried to trace, for the art of crowds is something we want, and want daily, in the future. We want daily a future. But, after all, it is a future. I speak in this present chapter as one of the crowd who wants something now. I find myself in a world in which apparently some vast anonymous arrangement was made about me and about my life, before I was born. This arrangement seems to be, as I understand it, that if I want to live while I am on this planet a certain sort of life or be a certain sort of person, I am expected practically to take out a permit for it from the proper authorities. In the previous chapter I made a request of the authorities, as perhaps the reader will remember. I said, "I want to be good now." In this one I have a further request to make of the authorities: "I want to be beautiful." I want to be beautiful now. I find thousands of other people about me on every hand making these same two requests. I find that the authorities do not seem to notice their requests any more than they have noticed mine. Some of us have begun to suspect that we must have made the request in the wrong way. Perhaps we should not ask a world--a great, vague thing like the world in general--to make any slight arrangement we may need for being beautiful. We have come to feel that we must ask somebody in particular, and do something in particular, and find some one in particular with whom we can do it. There is getting to be but one course open to a man if he wants to be beautiful. He must bone down and work hard with his soul, make himself see precisely what it is and who it is standing between him and a beautiful world. He must ask particular persons in particular positions if they do not think he ought to be allowed to be beautiful. He must ask some millionaire probably first--his employer, for instance--to stop getting in his way, and at least to step one side and let him reason with him. And when he cannot ask his millionaire--his own particular humdrum millionaire--to step one side and reason with him, he must ask iron-machines to step one side and reason with him. After this he must ask crowds to please to step one side and reason with him. Whatever happens, he is sure to find always these same three great, imponderable obstructions in the way of his being beautiful--the humdrum millionaires, the iron-machines, and crowds. In the old days when any one wanted to be beautiful he found it more convenient. There was very likely some one who was more beautiful than he was nearby, some one who found him craving the same thing that he had craved, and who recognized it and delighted in it, and who could make room and help. Nowadays, if one wants to be beautiful one must ask everybody. Every man finds it the same. He must ask millions of people to let him be something, one after the other in rows, that they do not want him to be or do not care whether he is or not. He has to ask more people than he could count, before he dies, to let him be beautiful. Many of them that he has to ask, sometimes most of them, are his inferiors. I have tried to deal with how it is going to be possible for a man to break through to being beautiful, past millionaires and past iron-machines. I would like now to deal with the people-machines or crowds, and how perhaps to break past them and be beautiful in behalf of them, in spite of them. CHAPTER II COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES The problem seems to be something like this. One finds one has been born and put here whether or no, and that one is inextricably alive in a state of society in which men are coming to live in a kind of vast disease of being obliged to do everything together. We are still old-fashioned enough to be born one at a time, but we are educated in litters and we do our work in the world in herds and gangs. Even the upper classes do their work in gangs, and with overseers and little crowds called committees. Our latest idea consists in putting parts of a great many different men together to make one great one--forming a committee to make a man of genius. There is no denying that, in a way, a committee does things; but what becomes of the committee? And the lower in the scale of life we go the more committees it takes to do the work of one man and the more impossible it becomes to find anything but parts of men to do things. I put it frankly to the reader. The chances are nine out of ten that when you meet a man nowadays and look at him hard or try to do something with him you find he is not a man at all but is some subsection of a committee. You cannot even talk with such a man without selecting some subsection of some subject which interests him; and if you select any other subsection than his subsection he will think you a bore; and if you select his subsection he will think that you do not know anything. And if you want to get anything done that is different, or that is the least bit interesting, and want to get some one to do it, how will you go about it? You will find yourself being sent from one person to another; and before you know it you find yourself mixed up with nine or ten subdivisions of nine or ten committees; and after you have got your nine or ten subsections of nine or ten committees to get together to consider what it is you want done, they will tell you, after due deliberation, that it is not worth doing, or that you had better do it yourself. Then every subsection of every committee will go home muttering under its breath to every other subsection that a man who wants slightly different and interesting things done in society is a public nuisance; and that the man who does not know what subsection he is in and what subsection of a man he was intended to be, and who tries to do things, carries dismay and anger on every side around him. Drop into your pigeonhole and be filed away, O Gentle Reader! Do you think you are a soul? No; you are Series B. No. 2574, top row on the left. In my morning paper the other day I read that in a factory whose long windows I often pass in the train, they have their machinery so perfected that it takes sixty-four machines to make one shoe. Query--If it takes sixty-four machines run by sixty-four men who do nothing else to make one shoe, how many machines would it take, and how many shoes, to make one man? Query--And when an employer in a shoe factory deals with his employee, can it really be said, after all, that he is dealing with _him_? He is dealing with _It_--with Nine Hours a Day, of one sixty-fourth of a man. The natural effect of crowds and of machines is to make a man feel that he is, and always was, and always will be, immemorially, unanimously, innumerably nobody. Sometimes we are allowed a little faint numeral to dangle up over our oblivion. Not long ago I saw a notice or letter in the _West Bulletin_--probably from a member of something--ending like this: "... I hope the readers of the _Bulletin_ will ponder over this suggestion of _Number_ 29,619.--Sincerely yours, _No._ 11, 175." CHAPTER III THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN I shall never forget one day I spent in New York some years ago--more years than I thought at first. It was a wrong-headed day, but I cannot help remembering it as a symbol of a dread I still feel at times in New York--a feeling of being suddenly lifted, of being swept out under (it is like the undertow of the sea) into a kind of vast deep of impersonality--swept out of myself into a wide, imperious waste or emptiness of people. I had come fresh from my still country meadow and mountain, my own trees and my own bobolinks and my own little island of sky up over me, and in the vast and desolate solitude of men and women I wandered about up and down the streets. Every block I saw, every window, skyline, engine, street-car, every human face, made me feel as if I belonged to another world. Here was a great conspiracy in stone and iron against my own life with myself. Was there a soul in all this huge roar and spectacle of glass and stone and passion that cared for the things that I cared for, or the things that I loved, or that would care one shuffle of all the feet upon the stones for any thought or word or desire of mine? The rain swept in my face, and I spent the day walking up and down the streets looking at stones and glass and people. _"Here we are!"_ say the great buildings crowding on the sky. _"Who are you?"_....all the stone and the glass and the walls, the mighty syndicate of matter everywhere, surrounded me--one little, shivering, foolish mote of being fighting foolishly for its own little foolish mote of identity! And I do not believe that I was all wrong. New York, like some vast, implacable cone of ether, some merciless anæsthetic, was thrust down over me and my breathing, and I still had a kind of left-over prejudice that I wanted to be myself, with my own private self-respect, with my own private, temporarily finished-off, provisionally complete personality. I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the right of being self-contained. It is, and always will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me--the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another. Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action or crowd corrosion on the sense of identity in the human spirit that the man who lives in crowds should grow more dull and more literal about himself every day. He becomes a mere millionth of something. All these other people he sees about him hurrying to and fro are mere millionths too. He grows more and more obliged to live with a vast bulk of people if he is to notice people at all. Unless he sees all the different kinds of people and forms of life with his own eye, and feels human beings with his hands, as it were, he does not know and sympathize with them. The crowd-craving or love of continual city life on the part of many people comes to be a sheer lack of imagination, an inability to live in qualities instead of quantities in men. To live merely in a city is not to know the real flavour of life any more than the daily paper knows it--the daily paper, the huge dull monster of observation, the seer of outsides. The whole effect of crowds on the individual man is to emphasize scareheads and appearances, advertisements, and the huge general showing off. The ride in the train from New Haven to New York is the true portrait of a crowd. Crowds of soaps and patent medicines straining on trees and signboard out of the gentle fields toward crowds of men, culminating at last in Woodlawn Cemetery, where the marble signposts of death flaunt themselves. Oblivion itself is advertised, and the end of the show of a show world is placarded on our graves. Men buy space in papers for cards, and bits of country scenery by the great railroads to put up signboards, and they spend money and make constant efforts to advertise that they are alive, and then they build expensive monuments to advertise that they are dead.... The same craving for piled-up appearances is brought to bear by crowds upon their arts. Even a gentle soul like Paderewski, full of a personal and strange beauty that he could lend to everything he touched, finds himself swept out of himself at last by the huge undertow of crowds. Scarcely a season but his playing has become worn down at the end of it into shrieks and hushes. Have I not watched him at the end of a tour, when, one audience after the other, those huge Svengalis had hypnotized him--thundering his very subtleties at them, hour after hour, in Carnegie Hall? One could only wonder what had happened, sit by helplessly, watch the crowd--thousands of headlong human beings lunging their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping, gasping, huzzaing, and clapping to one another. After every crash of new crescendo, after every precipice of silence, they seemed to be crying, "This is Soul! Oh, this is Soul!" The feeling of a vast audience holding its breath, no matter why it does it or whether it ought to do it or not, seems to have become almost a religious rite of itself. Vistas of faces gallery after gallery hanging on a note, two or three thousand souls suspended in space all on one tiny little ivory lever at the end of one man's forefinger ... dim lights shining on them and soft vibrations floating round them ... going to hear Paderewski play at the end of his season was going to hear a crowd at a piano singing with its own hands and having a kind of orgy with itself. One could only remember that there had been a Paderewski once who hypnotized and possessed his audience by being hypnotized and possessed by his own music. One liked to remember him--the Paderewski who was really an artist and who performed the function of the artist showering imperiously his own visions on the hearts of the people. And what is true in music one finds still truer in the other arts. One keeps coming on it everywhere--the egotism of cities, the self-complacency of the crowds swerving the finer and the truer artists from their functions, making them sing in hoarse crowd-voices instead of singing in their own and giving us themselves. Nearly all our acting has been corroded by crowds. Some of us have been obliged almost to give up going to the theatre except to very little ones, and we are wondering if churches cannot possibly be made small enough to believe great things, or if galleries cannot be arranged with few enough people in them to allow us great paintings, or if there will not be an author so well known to a few men that he will live forever, or if some newspaper will not yet be great enough to advertise that it has a circulation small enough to tell the truth. CHAPTER IV LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT So we face the issue. Nothing beautiful can be accomplished in a crowd civilization, by the crowd for the crowd, unless the crowd is beautiful. No man who is engaged in looking under the lives about him, who wishes to face the facts of these lives as they are lived to-day, will find himself able to avoid this last and most important fact in the history of the world--the fact that, whatever it may mean, or whether it is for better or worse, the world has staked all that it is and has been, and all that it is capable of being, on the one supreme issue, "How can the crowd be made beautiful?" The answer to this question involves two difficulties: (1) A crowd cannot make itself beautiful. (2) A crowd will not let any one else make it beautiful. The men who have been on the whole the most eager democrats of history--the real-idealists--the men who love the crowd and the beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that living in a democratic country, a country where politics and æsthetics can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large part of the time with heavy hearts. We are obliged to admit that it is a country where paintings have little but the Constitution of the United States wrought into them; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the common people; where music is composed for majorities; where poetry is sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled to subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man's forgetfulness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are forgotten, that the world remembers only those who have been his masters. On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the average man (which is what the larger part of our more ambitious literature really is) is not a kind of literature that can do anything to mend matters. The art of finding fault with the average man, with the fact that the world is made convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless art. The world is made convenient for the average man because it has to be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were not made convenient for him, the man of genius would find living with him a great deal more uncomfortable than he does. He would not even be allowed the comfort of saying how uncomfortable. The world belongs to the average man, and, excepting the stars and other things that are too big to belong to him, the moment the average man deserves anything better in it or more beautiful in it than he is getting, some man of genius rises by his side, in spite of him, and claims it for him. Then he slowly claims it for himself. The last thing to do, to make the world a good place for the average man, would be to make it a world with nothing but average men in it. If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall be a slow massive lifting, a grading up of all things at once; that whatever is highest in the true and the beautiful, and whatever is lowest in them shall be graded down and graded up to the middle height of human life, where the greatest numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if the ideal of democracy is tableland--that is--mountains for everybody--a few mountains must be kept on hand to make tableland out of. Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization--having the extraordinary men crowded out of it as a convenience to the average ones, and having the average men crowded out of it as a convenience to the extraordinary ones--are equally impracticable. This brings us to the horns of our dilemma. If the crowd cannot be made beautiful by itself, and if the crowd will not allow itself to be made beautiful by any one else, the crowd can only be made beautiful by a man who lives so great a life in it that he can make a crowd beautiful whether it allows him to or not. When this man is born to us and looks out on the conditions around him, he will find that to be born in a crowd civilization is to be born in a civilization, first, in which every man can do as he pleases; second, in which nobody does. Every man is given by the Government absolute freedom; and when it has given him absolute freedom the Government says to him, "Now if you can get enough other men, with their absolute freedom, to put their absolute freedom with your absolute freedom, you can use your absolute freedom in any way you want." Democracy, seeking to free a man from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the number of masters a man shall have. He is hemmed in with crowds of masters. He cannot see his master's huge amorphous face. He cannot go to his master and reason with him. He cannot even plead with him. You can cry your heart out to one of these modern ballot-boxes. You have but one ballot. They will not count tears. The ultimate question in a crowd civilization becomes, not "What does a thing mean?" or "What is it worth?" but "How much is there of it?" "If thou art a great man," says civilization, "get thou a crowd for thy greatness. Then come with thy crowd and we will deal with thee. It shall be even as thou wilt." The pressure has become so great, as is obvious on every side, that men who are of small or ordinary calibre can only be more pressed by it. They are pressed smaller and smaller--the more they are civilized, the smaller they are pressed; and we are being daily brought face to face with the fact that the one solution a crowd civilization can have for the evil of being a crowd civilization is the man in the crowd who can withstand the pressure of the crowd; that is to say, the one solution of a crowd civilization is the great-man solution--a solution which is none the less true because by name, at least, it leaves most of us out or because it is so familiar that we have forgotten it. The one method by which a crowd can be freed and can be made to realize itself is the great-man method--the method of crucifying and worshipping great men, until by crucifying and worshipping great men enough, inch by inch, and era by era, it is lifted to greatness itself. Not very many years ago, certain great and good men, who, at the cost of infinite pains, were standing at the time on a safe and lofty rock protected from the fury of their kind by the fury of the sea, contrived to say to the older nations of the earth, "All men are created equal." It is a thing to be borne in mind, that if these men, who declared that all men were created equal, had not been some several hundred per cent. better men than the men they said they were created equal to, it would not have made any difference to us or to any one else whether they had said that all men were created equal or not, or whether the Republic had ever been started or not, in which every man, for hundreds of years, should look up to these men and worship them as the kind of men that every man in America was free to try to be equal to. A civilization by numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes, could never have been started at all. Shall this civilization attempt to live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the hero principle? On our answer to this question hangs the question whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall among the civilizations of the earth. The main difference between the heroes of Plymouth Rock, the heroes who proclaimed freedom in 1776, and the heroes who must contrive to proclaim freedom now, is that tyranny now is crowding around the Rock, and climbing up on the Rock, eighty-seven million strong, and that tyranny then was a half-idiot king three thousand miles away. * * * * * We know or think we know, some of us--at least we have taken a certain joy in working it out in our minds, and live with it every day--how people in crowds are going to be beautiful by and by. The difficulty of being beautiful now, I have tried to express. It seems better to express, if possible, what a difficulty is before trying to meet it. And now we would like to try to meet it. How can we determine what is the most practical and natural way for crowds of people to try to be beautiful now? It would seem to be a matter of crowd psychology, of crowd technique, and of determining how human nature works. All thoughtful people are agreed as to the aim. Everything turns on the method. In the following chapters we will try to consider the technique of being beautiful in crowds. BOOK FOUR CROWDS AND HEROES TO WALT WHITMAN _"And I saw the free souls of poets, The loftiest bards of all ages strode before me Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me ... O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not! ... I will not be outfaced by irrational things, I will penetrate what is sarcastic upon me, I will make cities and civilizations defer to me This is what I have learnt from America-- I will confront these shows of the day and night I will know if I am to be less than they, I will see if I am not as majestic as they, I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they, I will see if I have no meaning while the houses and ships have meaning, ... I am for those that have never been mastered, For men and women whose tempers have never been mastered, For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master. I am for those who walk abreast of the whole earth Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all."_ CHAPTER I THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO I was spending a little time not long ago with a man of singularly devoted and noble spirit who had dedicated his life and his fortune to the Socialist movement. We had had several talks before, and always with a little flurry at first of hopefulness toward one another's ideas. We both felt that the other, for a mere Socialist or for a mere Individualist, was really rather reasonable. We admitted great tracts of things to one another, and we always felt as if by this one next argument, perchance, or by one further illustration, we would convince the other and rescue him like a brand from the burning. The last time I saw him he started in at once at the station as we climbed up into the car by telling me what he was doing. He was studying up the heroes of the American Revolution, and was writing something to show that they were not really heroes after all. All manner of things were the matter with them. They had always troubled him, he said. He knew there was something wrong, and he was glad to have the matter settled. He said he did not, and never had believed in heroes, and thought they did a great deal of harm--even dead ones. Heroes, he said, always deceived the people. They kept people from seeing that nothing could be done in our modern society by any one man. Only crowds could do things, he intimated--each man, like one little wave on the world, wavering up to the shore and dying away. As the evening wore on our conversation became more concrete, and I began to drag in, of course, every now and then, naturally, an inspired or semi-inspired millionaire or so. I cannot say that these gentlemen were received with enthusiasm. Finally, I turned on him. "What is it that makes you so angry (and nearly all the Socialists) every time you hear something good, something you cannot deny is good, about a successful business man? If I brought a row of inspired millionaires, say ten or twelve of them one after the other, into your library this minute, you would get hotter and hotter with every one, wouldn't you? You would scarcely speak to me." ---- intimated that he was afraid I was deceived; he was afraid that I was going about deceiving other people about its being possible for mere individual men to be good; he was afraid I was doing a great deal of damage. He then confided to me that not so very long ago he dropped in one Monday morning into his guest-chamber just after his guest had gone and found a copy of "Inspired Millionaires," which his guest had obviously been reading over Sunday, lying on the little reading-table at the head of the bed. He said that he took the book back to his library, took out two or three encyclopædias from the shelf in the corner, put my inspired millionaires in behind them, put the encyclopædias back, and that they had been there to this day. With this very generous and kindly introduction we went on to a frank talk on the general attitude of Socialists toward the instinct of hero-worship in human nature. A Socialist had said only a few days before, speaking of a certain municipal movement in which the people were interested, that he thought it really had a very good chance to succeed "if only the heroes could be staved off a little longer." He deprecated the almost incurable idea people seemed to have that nothing could ever be done in this world without being all mixed up with heroes. My mind kept recurring in a perplexed way to this remark for a few days after I had heard it, and I soon came on the following letter from a prominent Socialist which had been read at a dinner the night before: "I am glad to join with others of my comrades in conveying greetings to Comrade Cahan on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and in recognition of the eminent services that he has rendered in the Socialist movement. "Yet my gladness is not untinged with a certain note of apprehension lest in expressing so conspicuously our esteem of an honoured comrade we obscure the broader scene which, if equally illumined, would disclose tens of thousands of other comrades, labouring with equal devotion, and each no less worthy of praise.... "In our rejoicing over the services of Comrade Cahan let us not forget that the facilities that he and that each of us enjoy are the products of thousands of other men and women, and sometimes of children too. "In our rejoicing let us recall that we cannot safely assume that any comrade's services to the movement have been greater than the movement's services to him; that we are but fellow-workers together, deriving help and perhaps inspiration one from another and each from all. "In our rejoicing let us place the emphasis rather upon the services of the many to each, than upon the services of any one of the many." I have not quoted from this letter because I disagree with the idea in it. I am ready to admit that though the idea is a somewhat dampening one perhaps for a banquet, that it is true and important. What I object to in the letter is the Fear in it. In spite of the fineness and truth of the motive that lies, I know, underneath every line, the letter is baleful, sinister, and weary. I accuse the letter of being, in a kind of nobly sick way, visionary, unpractical, and socially destructive. I would heartily agree with the writer of the letter about the quality of many heroes, possibly about most heroes. I would agree in a large measure that the heroes the crowds choose are the wrong ones. But there is a great difference between his belief and mine as to our practical working policy in getting the things for crowds that we both want for them. It seems to me that he does not believe in crowds. He is filled with fear that they would select the wrong heroes. He says they must not have heroes, or must be allowed as few as possible. I believe in crowds, and I believe that the more they have the hero-habit, the more heroes they have to compare and select from, the finer, longer, and truer heroes they will select, the more deeply, truly, and concretely the crowds will think, and the more nobly they will express themselves. But the great argument for the hero as a social method is that the crowd in a clumsy, wistful way, deep down in its heart, in the long run, loves the beautiful. Appealing to the crowd's ideal of the beautiful in conduct, its sense of the heroic, or semi-heroic, is the only practical, hard-headed understanding way of getting out of the crowd, for the crowd, what the crowd wants. I saw the other day in Boston several thousand schoolboys in the street keeping step. It was a band that held them together. A band is a practical thing. Is it not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have a band of music? What economics needs now is a march. We have to-day a thousand men who can tell people what to do where we have one who can touch the music, the dance, the hurrah, the cry, the worship in them, and make them want to do something. The hero is the man who makes people want to do something, and strangely and subtly, all through the blood, while they watch him, he makes them believe they can. It is socially destructive to throw away the overpowering instinct of human nature which we have called hero-worship. CHAPTER II THE CROWD AND THE HERO But it is not only socially destructive. It is dumb and helpless for crowds to try to get on without heroes. Big events and big men are crowd expressions. Heroes, World Fairs, and Titanic disasters are crowd words, the crowd's way of seeing and saying things. Crowds think in great men, or they think in simple, big, broadly drawn events, or words of one syllable, like coal strikes. A whole world works through to an entirely new idea, the idea that England is not necessarily impregnable, in the Boer war. And we see England, by way of South Africa, searching her own heart. The Meat Trust, by raising prices for a few trial weeks, makes half a nation think its way over into vegetarianism or semi-vegetarianism. In the American war with Spain modern thought attacked the last pathetic citadel in modern life of polite illusion, of lie-poetry, and in that one little flash of war between the Spain spirit and the American spirit, in our modern world, the nations got their final and conclusive sense of what the Spanish civilization really was, of the old Don Quixote thinking, of the delightful, brave, courtly blindness, of the world's last stronghold of pomposity, of vague, empty prettiness, of talking grand and shooting crooked. Japan and Russia fight with guns, but the real fight is not between their guns, but between two great national conceptions of human life. Like two vast national searchlights we saw them turned on each other, two huge, grim, naked civilizations, and now in an awful light and roar, and now in stately sudden silence, while we all looked on, all breathless and concentrated, we saw them, as on some strange vast stage of the world, all lit up, exposed, penetrated by the minds of men forever. While they fought before us we saw the last two thousand years flash up once more and fade away, and then the next two thousand years on its slide, with one click before our faces was fastened into place. Men see great spiritual conceptions or ideals for a world when the great ideals are dramatized, when they stalk out before us, are acted out before our eyes by mighty nations. Before the stage we sit silently and think and watch the ideals of a world, the souls of the nations struggling together, and as we watch we discover our souls for ourselves, we define our ideals for ourselves. We make up our minds. We see what we want. We begin to live. I have come to believe that the hero, in the same way, is the common man's desire and prayer writ large. It is his way of keeping it refreshed before him so that he sees it, recalls it, suns himself in it, lifts up his life to it, every day. CHAPTER III THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON To state still further my difference with the typical Socialist point of view, as expressed in the letter from which I have quoted, I am obliged to confess that I not only believe in having heroes on behalf of crowds, but in having as a regular method of democracy little crowds of heroes, or an aristocracy. In other words, I am a democrat. I believe that crowds can produce, and are bound to produce by a natural crowd-process, a real aristocracy--an aristocracy which will be truly aristocratic and noble in spirit and action, and which will express the best ideas in the best way that a crowd can have. The main business of a democracy is to find out which these people are in it and put them where they will represent it. The trouble seems to have been in democracies so far, that we find out who these people are a generation too late. The great and rare moments of history have been those in which we have found out who they were in time, as when we found in America Abraham Lincoln, an unaristocratic-looking and ungainly man, and saw suddenly that he was the first gentleman in the United States. The next great task of democracy is to determine the best means it can of finding out who its aristocrats are, its all-men, and determining who they are in time, men who have vision, courage, individuality, imagination enough to face real things, and to know real people, and to put real things and real people together. It is what an aristocracy in a democratic form of government is for, to furnish imagination to crowds. A real aristocracy is the only clear-headed, practical means a great nation can have of distributing, classifying, and digesting and evoking hordes of men and women. People do not have imagination in hordes, and imagination is latent and unorganized in masses of people. The crowd problem is the problem of having leaders who can fertilize the imagination and organize the will of crowds. Nothing but worship or great desire has ever been able to focus a crowd, and only the great man, rich and various in his elements, abounding, great as the crowd is great, can ever hope to do it. Every man in a crowd knows that he is or is in danger of being a mere Me-man, or a mere class-man, and he knows that his neighbour is, and he wishes to be in a world that is saved from his own mere me-ness and his own mere classness. His hero-worship is his way of worshipping his larger self. He communes with his possible or completed self, his self of the best moments in the official great man or crowd man. The average man in a crowd does not want to be an average man, and the last thing he wants is to have an average man to represent him. He wants a man to represent him as he would like to be. He cannot express himself--his best self, in the State, to all the others in the State, without a lifted-up man or crowd man to do it. It is as if he said--as if the average man said, "I want a certain sort of world, I want to be able to point to a man, to a particular man, and say, as I look at him and ask others to look at him, 'This is the sort of world I want.'" Then everybody knows. The great world that lies in all men's hearts is expressed in miniature, in the great man. Crowds speak in heroes. * * * * * I have often heard Socialists wondering among themselves why a movement that had so many fine insights and so many noble motives behind it had produced so few artists. It has seemed to me that it might be because Socialists as a class, speaking roughly, are generalizers. They do not see vividly and deeply the universal in the particular, the universal in the individual, the national in the local. They are convinced by counting, and are moved by masses, and are prone to overlook the Spirit of the Little, the immensity of the seed and of the individual. They are prone to look past the next single thing to be done. They look past the next single man to be fulfilled. They feel a bit superior to Individualists for the way they have of seeing the universal in the particular, and of being picturesque and personal. Socialists are not picturesque and personal. They do not think in pictures. Then they wonder why they do not make more headway. Crowds and great men and children think in pictures. A hero pictures greatness to them. Then they want it for themselves. From the practical, political point of view of getting things for crowds, perhaps the trouble lies, not in our common popular idea of having heroes, but in the heroes. And perhaps the cure lies not in abolishing heroes, but in making our heroes move on and in insisting on more and better ones. Any man who looks may watch the crowd to-day making its heroes move on. If they do not move on, the crowd picks up the next hero at hand who is moving--and drops them. One can watch in every civilized country to-day crowds picking up heroes, comparing, sorting, selecting, seeing the ones that wear the longest, and one by one taking the old ones down. The crowd takes a hero up in its huge rough hand, gazes through him at the world, sees what it wants through him. Then it takes up another, and then another. Heroes are crowd spy-glasses. Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann for example. Pierpont Morgan is a typical American business man raised to the n-th or hero power. The crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Pierpont Morgan, the Tom Mann of the banks. It will see what it wants, through him. And the crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Tom Mann, too, the Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions. It will see what it wants, through him. CHAPTER IV THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN One keeps turning back every now and then, in reading the "Life of Pierpont Morgan," to the portrait which Carl Hovey has placed at the beginning of the book. If one were to look at the portrait long enough, one would not need to read the book. The portrait puts into a few square inches of space what Mr. Hovey takes half an acre of paper for. And all that he really does on the half-acre of paper is to bring back to one again and again that set and focused look one sees in Mr. Morgan's eyes--the remoteness, the silence, the amazing, dogged, implacable concentration, and, when all is said, a certain terrible, inexplicable blindness. The blindness keeps one looking again. One cannot quite believe it. The portrait has something so strong, so almost noble and commanding, about it that one cannot but stand back with one's little judgments and give the man who can hurl together out of the bewilderment of the world a personality like this, and fix it here--all in one small human face--the benefit of the doubt. This is the way the crowd has always taken Pierpont Morgan at first. The bare spectacle of a man so magnificently set, so imperiously preoccupied, silences our judgments. It seems as if, of course, he must be seeing things--things that we and others possibly do not and cannot see. The blindness in the eyes is so complete and set in such a full array that it acts at first on one almost like a kind of vision. The eyes hold themselves like pictures of eyes, like little walls, as if real eyes were in behind them. One wonders if there is any one who could ever manage to break through them, fleck up little ordinary human things--personality, for instance, atmosphere, or light--against them. If Shakespeare, whose folios he has, and Keats, whose "Endymion" he owns, or Milton, whose "Paradise Lost" he keeps in his safe, were all to assail him at once, were to bear down upon that set look in Pierpont Morgan's eyes--try to get them to turn one side a second and notice that they--Shakespeare and Milton and Keats--were there, there would not be a flicker or shadow of movement. They are eyes that are set like jaws, like magnificent spiritual muscles, on Something. Neither do they reveal light or receive it. * * * * * It will be some time before the crowd will find it possible to hand in an account and render a full estimate of the value of the service that Pierpont Morgan has rendered to our modern world; but the service has been for the most part rendered now and while the world, in its mingled dismay and gratitude at the way he has hammered it together, is distributing its praise and blame, there are some of us who would like to step one side a little and think quietly, if we may, not about what Pierpont Morgan has done, which we admit duly, but about the blindness in his eyes. It is Pierpont Morgan's blindness that interests the crowd more than anything else about him interests them now. It is his blindness--and the chance to find out just what it is that is making people read his book. His blindness (if we can fix just what it is) is the thing that we are going to make our next Pierpont Morgan out of. The next Pierpont Morgan--the one the crowd is getting ready now--will be made out of the things that this Pierpont Morgan did not see. What are these things? We have been looking for the things in Carl Hovey's book, peering in between the lines on every page, and turning up his adjectives and looking under them, his adverbs and qualifications, his shrewdness and carefulness for the things that Pierpont Morgan did not see. Pierpont Morgan himself would not have tried to hide them, and neither has his biographer. His whole book breathes throughout with a just-mindedness, a spirit of truth, a necessary and inevitable honesty, which of itself is not the least testimony to the essential validity and soundness of Morgan's career. Pierpont Morgan's attitude toward his biography (if, in spite of his reticence, it became one of the necessities--even one of the industrial necessities, of the world that he should have one) was probably a good deal the attitude of Walt Whitman when he told Traubel, "Whatever you do with me, don't prettify me"; and if there were things in Mr. Morgan's career which he imperturbably failed to see, Mr. Morgan himself would be the last man not to try to help people to find out what they are. But living has been to Mr. Morgan as it is to us (as I write these lines he is seventy-four years old) a serious, bottomless business. He does not know which the things are he has not seen. His eyes are magnificently set. They cannot help us. We must do our own looking. * * * * * If I were called upon to speak very quickly and without warning; if any one suddenly expected me in my first sentence to hit the bull's-eye of Mr. Morgan's blindness, I think I would try socialism. When the Emperor William was giving himself the treat of talking with the man who runs, or is supposed to run, the economics of a world, he found that he was talking with a man who had not noticed socialism yet, and who was not interested in it. Most people would probably have said that Morgan was not interested in socialism enough; but there are very few people who would not be as surprised as Emperor William was to know that he, Pierpont Morgan, was not informed about the greatest and, to some of us, the most threatening, omnipresent, and significant spectre in modern industrial life. But when one thinks of it, and, when more particularly, one looks again at that set look in his eyes, I cannot see how it could possibly have been otherwise. If Morgan's eyes had suddenly begun seeing all sorts of human things--the bewildering welter of the individual minds, the tragedy of the individual interests around him; if he had lost his imperious sense of a whole--had tried to potter over and piece together, like the good people and the wonderers, the innumerable entangled wires of the world, his eyes might have been filled perhaps with the beautiful and helpless light of the philosophers, with the fire of the prophets, or with the gentle paralysis of the poets, but he never would have had the courage to do the great work of his life--to turn down forever those iron shutters on his eyes and smite a world together. There was one thing this poor, dizzied, scattered planet needed. With its quarrelling and its peevish industries, its sick poets and its tired religions, the one thing this planet needed was a Blow; it needed a man that could hammer it together. To find fault with this man for not being a seer, or to feel superior to him for not being an idealist, or to heckle him for not being a sociologist, when here he was all the time with this mighty frenzy or heat in him that could melt down the chaos of a world while we looked, weld it to his will, and then lift his arm and smite it, though all men said him nay--back into a world again--to heckle over this man's not being a complete sociologist or professor is not worthy of thoughtful and manful men. I cannot express it, but I can only declare, living as I do in a day like this, that to me there is a kind of colossal naked poetry in what Pierpont Morgan has done which I cannot but acknowledge with gratitude and hope. Though there be in it, as in all massive things, a brutality perhaps like that of the moving glaciers, like the making and boiling of coal in the earth, like death, like childbirth, like the impersonality of the sea, my imagination can never get past a kind of elemental, almost heathen poetry or heathen-god poetry in Pierpont Morgan's Blow or shock upon our world. There may be reason to doubt as to whether it is to be called a heaven-poetry or a hell-poetry--something so gaunt and simple is there about it; but here we are with all our machines around us, with our young, rough, fresh nations in the act of starting a great civilization once more on this old and gentle earth, and I can only say that poetry (though it be new, or different, or even a little terrible) is the one thing that now, or in any other age, men begin great civilizations with. * * * * * I have tried to express the spirit of what Morgan's genius seized unconsciously by the grim, resistless will of his age, has wrought into his career. But in the background of my mind as I see Pierpont Morgan, there is always the man who will take his place, and if I did not see the man coming, and coming rapidly, who is to take Mr. Morgan's place, I admit that Mr. Morgan himself would be a failure, a disaster, a closed wall at the end of the world. No one man will take Mr. Morgan's place, but the typical man in the group of men that will take his place will justify Mr. Morgan's work, by taking this world in his hand and riveting his vision on where Morgan's vision leaves off. As Morgan has fused railroads, iron, coal, steamships, seas, and cities, the next industrial genius shall fuse the spirits and the wills of men. The Individualists and the Socialists, the aristocracies and democracies, the capitalists and the labourers shall be welded together, shall be fused and transfused by the next Morgan into their ultimate, inevitable, inextricable, mutual interests. The chief characteristic of the new industrial leader is coming to be social imagination or the power of seeing the larger industrial values in human gifts and efficiencies, the more human and intellectual energies of workmen, the market value of their spirits, their imaginations, and their good-will. The underpinning and Morganizing work has been done; the power of instant decision which Mr. Morgan has had, has been very often based on a lack of imagination about the things that got in his way; but the things that get in the way now, the big, little-looking things--are the things on which the new and inspired millionaires' imagination will find its skill and accumulate its power. It is men's spirits that are now in the way; they have been piling up and accumulating under Morgan's régime long enough, and it is now their turn. Perhaps men's spirits have always been beyond Mr. Morgan, and perhaps his imagination has been worked largely as a kind of cerebellum imagination: it is a kind of imagination that sees related and articulated the physical body of things, the grip on the material tools, on the gigantic limbs of a world. The man who succeeds Mr. Morgan, and for whom Mr. Morgan has made the world ready, is the man who has his imagination in the upper part of his brain, and instead of doing things by not seeing, and by not being seen, he will swing a light. He will be himself in his own personality, a little of the nature of a searchlight, and he will work the way a searchlight works, and will have his will with things by seeing and lighting, by X-raying his way through them and not by a kind of colossal world-butting, which is Morgan's way, both eyes imperiously, implacably shut, his whole being all bent, all crowded into his vast machine of men, his huge will lifted ... and excavating blindly, furiously, as through some groping force he knew not, great sub-cellars for a new heaven and new earth. The Crowd gets its heroes one at a time. Heroes are the Crowd's tools. Some are dredges, some are telescopes. The Crowd, by a kind of instinct--an oversoul or undersoul of which it knows not until afterward, takes up each tool gropingly--sometimes even against its will and against its conscience, uses it and drops it. Then it sees why, suddenly, it has used it. Then God hands it Another One. CHAPTER V THE CROWD AND TOM MANN I dropped into the London Opera House the other night to see Tom Mann (the English Bill Heywood), another hero or crowd spy-glass that people have taken up awhile--thousands of them--to see through to what they really want. I wanted to hear him speak, and see, if I could, why the crowd had taken him up, and what it was they were seeing through him. I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree with, if I can. It gives one a better start in understanding him and in not agreeing with him to some purpose. But it was not necessary to try to like Tom Mann or to make arrangements for being fair to him. He came up on the platform (it was at Mr. Hyndmann's Socialist rally) in that fine manly glow of his of having just come out of jail (and a jail, whatever else may be said about it, is certainly a fine taking place to come out of--to blossom up out of, like a night-blooming cereus before a vast, lighted-up, uproarious audience). It is wonderful how becoming a jail is to some people! Had I not seen Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the flush of Old Bailey on her cheek only a little while before in Albert Hall? If Tom Mann had had, like Elisha, that night, a fiery chariot at his disposal, and had come down, landed plump out of heaven on his audience, he could not have done half as well with it as he did with that little gray, modest, demure Salford Jail the kind Home Secretary gave him. He tucked the jail under his arm, stood there silently before us in a blaze of light. Everybody clapped for five minutes. Then he waved the air into silence and began to speak. I found I had come to hear a simple-minded, thoughtless, whole-hearted, noisy, self-deceived, hopelessly sincere person. He was a mere huge pulse or muscle of a man. All we could do was to watch him up there on the platform (it was all so simple!) taking up the world before everybody in his big hands and whacking on it with a great rapping and sounding before us all, as if it were Tommy's own little drum mother gave him. He stood there for some fifteen minutes, I should think, making it--making the whole world rat-a-tat-tat to his music, to Tommy's own music, as if it were the music of the spheres. Mr. Mann's gospel of hope for mankind seemed to be to have all the workers of the world all at once refuse to work. Have the workers starve and silence a planet, and take over and confiscate the properties and plants of capital, dismiss the employers of all nations and run the earth themselves. * * * * * I sat in silence. The audience about me broke out into wild, happy appreciation. It acted as if it had been in the presence of a vision. It was as if, while they sat there before Tom Mann, they had seen being made, being hammered out before them, a new world. I rubbed my eyes. It seemed to me precisely like the old one. And all the trouble for nothing. All the disaster, the proposed starvation, and panic for nothing. There was one single possible difference in it. We had had before, Pierpont Morgan, the Tom Mann of the banks, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us--with all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the Blackness. And now we were having instead, Tom Mann, the Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us, with all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life, riding out into the Blackness. Of course Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann are both very useful as crowd spy-glasses for us all to see what we want through. But is this what we want? Is it worth while to us, to the crowd, to all classes of us, to have our world turned upside down so that we can be bullied on it by one set of men instead of being bullied on it by another? This is the thing that the Crowd, as it takes up one hero after the other, and looks at the world through him, is seeing next. Some of us have seen sooner than the others. But we are nearly all of us seeing to-day. We have stood by now these many years through strikes and rumours of strikes, and we have watched the railway hold-ups, the Lawrence Mill strike, and the great English coal strike. We have seen, in a kind of dumb, hopeful astonishment, everybody about us piling into the fray, some fighting for the rights of labour and some for the rights of capital, and we have kept wondering if possibly a little something could not be done before long, possibly next year, in behalf of the huge, battered, helpless Public, that dear amorphous old ladylike Person doddering along the Main Street of the World, now being knocked down by one side and now by the other. It has almost looked, some days, as if both sides in the quarrel--Capital and Labour, really thought that the Public ought not to expect to be allowed to be out in the streets at all. Both sides in the contest are so sure they are right, and feel so noble and Christian, that we know they will take care of themselves; but the poor old Lady!--some of us wonder, in the turmoil of Civilization and the scuffle of Christianity, what is to become of Her. Is it not about time that somebody appeared very soon now who will make a stand once and for all in behalf of this Dear Old Lady-Like Person? Is it really true that no one has noticed Her and is really going to stand up for Her--for the old gentle-hearted Planet as a Whole? We have our Tom Mann for the workers, and we have the Daily Newspaper--the Tom Mann of Capital, but where is our Tom Mann for Everybody? Where is the man who shall come boldly out to Her, into the great crowded highway, where the bullies of wealth have tripped up her feet, and the bullies of poverty have thrown mud in her face, where all the little mean herds or classes one after the other hold Her up--the scorners, and haters, and cowards, and fearers for themselves, fighting as cowards always have to fight, in herds ... where is the man who is going to climb up alone before the bullies of wealth and the bullies of poverty, take his stand against them all--against both sides, and dare them to touch the dear helpless old Lady again? When this man arises--this Tom Mann for Everybody--whether he slips up into immortality out of the crowd at his feet, and stands up against them in overalls or in a silk hat, he will take his stand in history as a man beside whom Napoleon and Alexander the Great will look as toys in the childhood of the world. * * * * * We are living in a day when not only all competent-minded students of affairs, but the crowd itself, the very passers-by in the streets, have come to see that the very essence of the labour problem is the problem of getting the classes to work together. And when the crowd watches the labour leader and sees that he is not thinking correctly and cannot think correctly of the other classes, of the consumers and the employers, it drops him. Unless a leader has a class consciousness that is capable of thinking of the other classes--the consumers and employers, so shrewdly and so close to the facts that the other classes, the consumers and the employers, will be compelled to take him seriously, tolerate him, welcome him, and coöperate with him, the crowd has come at last to recognize promptly that he is only of temporary importance as a leader. He is the by-product of one of the illusions of labour. When the illusion goes he goes. Capital has been for some time developing its class consciousness. Labour has lately been developing in a large degree a class consciousness. The most striking aspect of the present moment is that at last, in the history of the world, the Public is developing a class consciousness. The Crowd thinks. And as from day to day the Crowd thinks--holds up its little class heroes, its Tom Manns and Pierpont Morgans, and sees its world through them--it comes more and more to see implacably what it wants. It has been watching the Tom Mann, or Bill Heywood type of Labour leader, for some time. There are certain general principles with regard to labour leaders that the crowd has come to see by holding up its heroes and looking through them, at what it wants. The first great principle is that no man needs to be taken very seriously, as a competent leader of a great labour movement who is merely thinking of the interest of his own class. The second general principle the Crowd has come to see, and to insist upon--when it is appealed to (as it always is, in the long run) is that no labour leader needs to be taken very seriously or regarded as very dangerous or very useful--who believes in force. A labour leader who has such a poor idea that a hold-up is the only way he can express it--the Crowd suspects. The only labour leaders that the Crowd, or people as a whole, take seriously are those that get things by thinking and by making other people think. The Crowd wants to think. The Crowd wants to decide. And It has decided to decide by being made to think and not by being knocked down. It is not precisely because the Crowd is not willing to be knocked down, and has not shown itself to be over and over again, when it thought its being knocked down might possibly help in a just cause. But it has not been through coal strikes, Industrial Workers of the World, and syndicalist outbreaks for nothing. It is not the knocking down indulged in by labour and by capital that the Crowd fears. It is the not-thinking. The Crowd has noticed that the knocking-down disposition and the not-thinking disposition go together. The Crowd has watched Force and Force-people, and has seen what always happens after a time. It has come to see that people who have to get things by force and not by thinking will not be able to think of anything to do with the things when they get them. So the Crowd does not want them to get them. The Crowd has learned all this even from the present owners of things. It does not want to learn them all over again from new ones. The present owners of things have got them half by force, and that is why they only half understand how to run them. But they do half understand because they only half believe in force. The crowd has seen them get their supremacy by the use of the employment-hold-up, or by starving or threatening to starve the workers. And now it sees the Syndicalist workers proposing to get control by starving or threatening to starve everybody. Of the two, those who propose to starve all the people to get their own way, and those who threaten to starve part of the people, it has seemed to the Crowd, naturally, that those who only half believe in starving, and who only starve a part of us, would be likely to be more intelligent as world-runners. In other words (accepting for the sake of argument the worst possible interpretation of the capitalist class), they have spent several years in learning, and have already half learned that force in industry is inefficient and cannot be made to work. Now when the Crowd sees the Syndicalists swinging their hats in a hundred nations, with one big hoarse hurrah around a world, with five minutes' experience, come rushing in, and propose to take up the world--the whole world in two minutes more and run it in the same old bygone way--the way that the capitalists are just giving up--by force--it knows what it thinks. It thinks it will fight Class Syndicalism. It makes up its mind it will fight Class Syndicalism with Crowd Syndicalism. It has decided that, in the interests of all of us, of a crowd civilization, of what we call the world or Crowd Syndicate, its industries should be controlled, not by the owners and not by the workers, but by those men, whoever they are, who can control them with the most skill and efficiency. The Crowd has come to see that the present owners--judging from current events, and taking them as a whole, and speaking impersonally and historically--have proved themselves, on the whole, incompetent to control industries with skill and efficiency, because they have treated labour as the natural enemy of capital and have quarrelled with it. It sees that the present workers, acting as syndicates or otherwise, are incompetent to own and control and manage industry because they propose to treat capital as the natural enemy of the workers. There has been but one conclusion possible. If Civilization or the Crowd Syndicate has a right to have its industries managed in the interests of all, and if the present owners have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent to control industry because they fight labour, and if the present labourers as a class have proved themselves to be mentally incompetent because they propose to fight capital, there is naturally but one question the crowd syndicate is asking to-day, namely, _"Are there any mentally competent business firms at all in the world, any firms whose owners and labourers have thought out a way of not fighting?"_ From the point of view of the Crowd, the men who are competent, who know how to do their work, do not have to lay down their tools and find out all over again how to do their work. They know it and keep doing it. So the Crowd keeps coming back with the question, "Are there or are there not any competent business establishments in our modern life? Which are they, and where are they?" We want to know about them. We want to study them. We want to focus the thought of the world on them and see how they do it. The answering of this question is what the next Pierpont Morgan and the next Tom Mann are for. What the next Pierpont Morgan is for is to find out for us who the competent employers are--the employers who can get twice as much work out of their labour as other employers do--recognize them, stand by them and put up money on them. The next Pierpont Morgan will find out also who the incompetent employers are, recognize them, stand out against them, and unless they have brains enough or can get brains enough to coöperate with their own workmen, refuse to lend money to them. This would make a banker a statesman, would make banking a great and creative profession, shaping the destinies of civilizations, determining with coins back and forth over a counter the prayers and the songs, the very religions of nations, and swinging like a pendulum the fate of the world. The first Pierpont Morgan has made himself, in a necessary transitional movement, a hero in the business world because of a certain moral energy there is in him. He has insisted in expressing his own character in business. He would not send money to capitalists fighting capitalists, and in a general way he has compelled capitalists to coöperate. The new hero of the business world is going to compel capital not merely to coöperate with capital, but to coöperate with labour and with the public. And as Morgan compelled the railroads of the United States to coöperate with one another by getting money for those that showed the most genius for coöperation, and by not getting money for railroads that showed less genius for it, so the next Pierpont Morgan will throw the weight of his capital at critical times in favour of companies that show the largest genius for building the mutual interests of capitalists, employees, and the public inextricably into one body. He is going to recognize as a banker that the most permanent, long-headed, practical, and competent employers are those whose business genius is essentially social genius, the genius for being human, for discovering the mutual interests of men, and for making human machinery work. There is a great position ahead for this hero when he comes. And I have seen in my mind to-day thousands of men, young and old in every business, in every country of the world, pressing forward to get the place. It is what the next Tom Mann is for--to find out for the Trades Unions and for the public who the most competent workmen are in every line of business, the workmen who are the least mechanical-minded, who have shown the most brains in educating and being educated by their employers, the most power in touching the imaginations of their employers with their lives and with their work, and in coöperating with them. When the next Tom Mann has searched out and found the workmen in every line of business who are capable of working with their superiors, and of becoming more and more like them, he will make known to all other workmen and to all other Trades Unions who these workmen are, and how they have managed to do it. He will see that all Trades Unions are informed, in night-schools and otherwise, how they have done it. He will see that the principles, motives, and conditions that these men have employed in making themselves more like their superiors, in making themselves more and more fit to take the place of their superiors, in making their work a daily, creative, spirited part of a great business, are made so familiar to all Trades Unions that the policies of all our labour organizations everywhere shall change and shall be infected with a new spirit; and labouring men, instead of going to their shops the world over, to spend nine hours a day in fighting the business in which they are engaged, to spend nine hours a day in trying to get themselves nothing to do, nine hours a day in getting nobody to want to employ them, will work the way they would like to work, and the way they would all work to-morrow morning if they knew the things about capital and about labour that they have a right to know, and that only incompetent employers and incompetent labor leaders year by year have kept them from knowing. CHAPTER VI AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT PIERPONT MORGAN Christ said once, "He that is greatest among you let him be your servant." Most people have taken it as if He had said: "He that is greatest among you let him be your valet. "He that is greatest among you let him be your butler. "He that is greatest among you let him be your hostler, porter, footman." They cling to a mediæval Morality-Play, Servant-in-the-House idea, a kind of head-waiter idea of what Christ meant. This seems to some of us a literal-minded, Western way of interpreting an Oriental metaphor. We do not believe that Christ meant servanthood. It seems to us that He meant something deeper, that He meant service; that He might have said as well: "He that is greatest among you let him be your Duke of Wellington. "He that is greatest among you let him be your Lincoln. "He that is greatest among you let him be your Edison, your Marconi." At all events, it is extremely unlikely that He meant looking and acting like a servant. He meant really being one, whether one looked like a servant or not. If looking independent and being independent makes the service better, if defying the appearance of a servant makes the service more efficient, we believe the appearance should be defied. It troubles us when we see the Czar of Russia in the presence of the civilized world, once a year taking such great pains to look like a servant and to wash his peasants' feet. We are not willing, if we ever have any relations with the public, to be Czars and look like servants. We would prefer to look like czars and be servants. We are inclined to believe that no man who is rendering his utmost service to the crowd ever thinks in the ordinary servant sense of being obedient to it. He is thinking of his service, and of its being the most high and perfect and most complete thing that he can render--the thing that he, out of all men, could think of and do, and that the crowd would want him to do. He is busy in being obedient to the crowd, in fulfilling daily its spirit, and not in taking orders from it. The reason that the larger number of men who go into politics to-day are inefficient and do not get the things done that crowds want, is that they are the kind of men who feel that they must talk and act like servants. Even the most independent-looking and efficient men, who look as if they really saw something and had something to give, often prove disappointing. When one comes to know a man of this type more intimately, one is apt to find that he is really a flunkey in his thoughts; that he feels hired in his mind; that he is the valet of a crowd, and often, too, the valet of some particular crowd--some little, safe, shut-in crowd, party, or special interest that wants to own, or to keep, or to take away a world. Whichever way to-day one looks, one finds this illusion as to what a public servant really is, for the moment, corrupting our public life. But Christ did not say, "He that is greatest among you, let him be your valet." The man who is greatest among us, neither in this age nor in any other, ever will or ever can be a valet. He faces the crowd the way Christ did--with his life, with his soul, with his God. He will not be afraid of the Crowd.... He will be the Greatest, he will be a Servant. In the meantime--in the hour of the valets, only the little crowds, speak. The People wait. The Crowd is dumb, massive, and silent. There seems to be no one in the world to express it, to express its indomitable desire, its prayer, to lay at last its huge, terrible, beautiful will upon the earth. It is the classes or little crowds--the little pulling and pushing, helpless, lonely, mean, separated crowds--blind, hateful, and afraid, who are running about trying to lay their little wills upon the earth. The Crowd waits and is not afraid. The little, separated crowds are afraid. The world, for the moment, is being interpreted, expressed, and managed by People Who Are Afraid. It is the same in all the nations. In the coal strike in England one finds the miners in the trades unions afraid to vote except in secret because they are afraid of one another. One finds the miners' leaders afraid of the men under them and of what they might do, so that they have no policy except to fight. One finds the miners' leaders afraid of the mine-managers and of what they might do, so that they have no policy except to fight. One finds the mine-managers afraid of one another, afraid of their stockholders, afraid of the miners' leaders, and afraid of the newspapers and afraid of the Government. One finds the Government afraid of everybody. Everybody is afraid of the Government. Everybody fights because everybody is afraid. And everybody is afraid because everybody sees that it is mere crowds that are running the world. There is another reason why everybody is afraid. Everybody is afraid because everybody is shut in with some little separated crowd. People who are never Outside, who only see a little way out over the edge of the little crowd in which they are penned up, are naturally afraid. A world that is run by little shut-in crowds is necessarily a world that is run by People Who Are Afraid. And so now we have come to the fulness of the time. The cities and the nations, the prairies, and the seas and the mines, the very skies about us can be seen by all to-day to be full of a dull groping and of a great asking, "_Who Are The Men Who Are not Afraid?_" The moment these men appear who are not afraid, and it is seen by all that they are not afraid, the world (and all the little blind, helpless crowds in it) will be placed in their hands. CHAPTER VII AN OPENING FOR THE NEXT TOM MANN I am aware that Tom Mann is not a world figure. But he is a world type. And as the editor of the _Syndicalist_, the leader of the most imposing and revealing labour rally the world has seen, he is of universal interest. Those of us who believe in crowds are deeply interested in finding, recognizing, creating, and in seeing set free out of the ranks of men the labour leaders who shall express the nobility and dignity of modern labour, who shall express the bigness of spirit, the brawny-heartedness, the composure, the common-sense, the patriotism, the faithfulness and courage of the People. I indict Tom Mann before the bar of the world as not expressing the will and the spirit of the People. I do this as a labouring man. I decline, because I spend my time daily tracing out little crooked lines on paper with a pen, because I have wrought day and night to make little patterns of ink and little stretches of words reach men together round a world, because I have sweat blood to believe, because in weariness and sorrow I have wrought out at last my little faith for a world ... I decline not to be numbered with the labourers I see in the streets. I claim my right before all men this day, with my unbent body and with my unsoiled hands, to be enrolled among the toilers of the earth. I speak as a labouring man. I say Tom Mann is incompetent as a true leader of Labour. The first reason that he is incompetent is that he does not observe facts. He merely observes facts that everybody can see, that everybody has seen for years. He does not observe the new and exceptional facts about capital that only a few can see, the seeing of which, and the seeing of which first, should alone ever constitute a man a true leader in dealing with capital. He merely believes facts that nearly everybody has caught up to believing--facts about human nature, about what works in business. The crowd is not content with this. It has become accustomed to seeing that the men who lead in business, and who make others follow them, whether masters or workmen, are men who do it by observing certain new and exceptional facts and acting upon them. If these men cannot observe them, we have seen them create them. It is the men who make new things true wherever they go that the crowd is coming to recognize and to take seriously and permanently as the real leaders of Labour and of Capital to-day. Tom Mann is incompetent as a labour leader in dealing with capital to-day, because the things that he proposes to do all turn on three facts which, looked at on the outside, merely have or might be said to have a true look: First, employers are all alike; Second, none of them ever work; Third, they are all the enemies of Labour. Tom Mann is incompetent to grapple with Capital in behalf of Labour as any great labour leader would have to do, because he has his facts wrong about Capital, is simple-minded and rudimentary and undiscriminating about the men with whom he deals, and sees them all alike. This is a poor beginning even for fighting with them. The second reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is, not that he has his facts wrong and does not think, but that he carries not-thinking about the employing class still further, has come to make a kind of religion out of not-thinking about them. And instead of thinking how to make labouring men think better than their employers think, and making them think so well that they can crowd their way into their employers' places, he proposes to have labour get into their places without thinking, and run a world without thinking. All that is necessary in order to have workmen run the world, is to get workmen to stop working, to stop thinking, and then as rapidly as possible to get everybody else to stop thinking. Then the world will fall into their hands. The third reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is that he is unpractical and full of scorn. And scorn, from the point of view of the practical-minded man, is a sentimental and useless emotion. We have learned that it almost always has to be used by a man who has his facts wrong, that is, who does not see what he himself is really like, and who has not noticed what other people are really like. No man who sees himself as he is, feels at liberty to use scorn. And no man who sees others as they are, sees any occasion for it. Tom Mann uses hate also, and hate has been found to be, as directed toward classes of persons as a means of getting them to do things, archaic and inefficient. It is not quite bright. It need not be denied that hate and scorn both impress some people, but they never seem to impress the people that see things to do and who find ways to do them. And the people who use scorn are all too narrow, too class-bound, and too self-regarding to do things in a huge world problem like the present one. The fourth reason that Tom Mann as a labour leader is incompetent is that he is afraid; he is afraid of capital, so afraid that he has to fight it instead of grappling with it and coöperating with it. He is afraid to believe in labour--so afraid that he takes orders from it instead of seeing for it, and seeing ahead for it. He is afraid of his employers' brains, of their having brains enough to understand and to to be convinced as to the position of the labourer. He is afraid to believe in his own brains, in his own brains being good enough to convince them. So he backs down and fights. If any reader who is interested to do so will kindly turn back at this point a page or so, and read this chapter we have just gone through together, over again, and if he will kindly, wherever it occurs, insert for Tom Mann, labour leader, "D.A. Thomas, leader of mine-owners," he will save much time for both of us, and he will kindly make one chapter in this book which is already much too long, as good as two. Tom Mann (unless he is changed) is about to be dropped as a typical modern leader of Labour because he is afraid, and what he expresses in the labouring class is its fear of Capital. And what D.A. Thomas expresses for Capital is its fear of Labour. There are thousands of capitalists and hundreds of thousands of labour men who have something better they want expressed by their leaders, than their Fear. Out of these men the new leaders will be chosen. CHAPTER VIII THE MEN WHO LOOK During the recent coal strike in England, as at all times in the world, heroes abounded. The trouble with most of us during the coal strike was not in our not having heroes, but in our not being quite sure which they were. Davy McEwen, a miner who stood out against the whole countryside, and went to his work every day in defiance of thousands of men on the hills about him trying to stop him, and hundreds of thousands of men all over England trying to scare him, was not a hero to Mr. Josiah Wedgewood. Mr. Josiah Wedgewood one day in the height of the conflict, from his seat in the House of Commons, rose in his might--and before the face of the nation called Davy McEwen a traitor to his class. Sir Arthur Markham, one of the largest of the mine-owners, in the height of the conflict between the mine-owners and the miners over wages, rose in the House and declared that, in his opinion as a mine-owner, the mine-owners were wrong and the miners were right, and that the mine-owners could afford to pay better wages, and should yield to the men. He was called a traitor to his class. At the last moment in the coal strike, when the Government had done its best, and when the labour leaders still proposed to hold up England and defy the Government until they got their way, Stephen Walsh, one of the leaders of the miners, stood up in the face of a million miners and said he would not go on with the others against the Government. "It is now time for the trades union men to return to work. We have done what we could. Our citizenship should be higher than our trades unionship, and with me, as long as I am a trades union man, it will be." He was called a traitor to his class. I am an unwilling and unfit person, as a sojourner and an American, to take any position on the merits of the question as to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. But when I saw Bishop Gore standing up and looking unblinkingly at facts or what he thought were facts which he would rather not have seen and which were not on his side, and when I saw him voting deliberately for the disestablishment of his own Church, I greeted with joy, as if I had seen a cathedral, another traitor to his class. I almost believe that a Church that could produce and supply a man like this for a great nation looking through every city and county year by year for men to go with it ... a Church that could produce and keep producing Bishop Gores, would be entitled, from a great nation to anything it liked. * * * * * Men seem to be capable of three stages of courage. Courage is graded to the man. There is the man who is so tired, or mechanical-minded, that he can only think of himself. There is the man who is so tired that he can only think of his class. And there is the man that one has watched being moved over slowly from a Me-man into a Class-man, who has begun to show the first faint beginnings of being a Crowd-man. One man has courage for himself because he knows what he wants for himself. Another has courage for his class because he knows what he wants for his class. Another has courage for God and for the world because there are things he sees that he wants for God and for the world, and he sees them so clearly that he sees ways to get them. Lack of courage is a lack of vision or clear-headedness about what one wants. I do not know, but I can only say that it has seemed to me that Bishop Gore has a vision or clear-headedness about what he wants for democracy, and that he uses his vision of what he wants for democracy to true his vision for his class. Perhaps also he has a vision for his class for the church people that it is for the interest church people to be the class that is, out of all the world, supremely considerate, big, leisurely, unfretful in its dealings with others. Perhaps also he has a vision for himself and is clear-headed for himself, and has seen that though the steeples fall about him, and though the altars go up in smoke, he will keep the spirit of God still within his reach. The gentleness, the grim hope for the world and the patience that built the cathedrals, shall be in his heart day and night. I hold no brief for Bishop Gore. I know there must be others like him who voted on the other side. I know there are hundreds of thousands of employers who in their hearts are like him. I know there are hundreds of thousands of men in the trades unions who are like him. I am not sure that Bishop Gore, on the merits of the case, was right. I wish this day I knew that he was wrong. I wish that I had spent the last six months in fighting him, in fighting against his vision, that I might be more free to-day to point to him with joy when I go up and down the streets with men and look at the churches with men--the rows of churches--and try to tell them what they are for. I have seen that the cathedrals scattered about under the sky in England are but God's little tools to make great cities on the earth, and to build softly out of the hearts of men and women men who shall be cathedrals too--men buttressed against the world, men who can stand alone. And it has seemed to me that Tom Mann and D.A. Thomas are incompetent as leaders of industry because they do not see that Labour is full of men who can do things like this. I am proud, over in my country across the sea, to be cousin to a nation that is still the headquarters--the international citadel--of individualism upon the earth. The world knows if England does not, that this kind of individualism is the most characteristic, the most mighty and impregnable Dreadnought against that England has produced. But England knows it too. I have seen thousands of men in England in their dull brown clothes pass by me in the street who know and respond to the spirit that is in Bishop Gore, and who have the courage to show it themselves. And the vision is in them, but it is not waked. The moment it is waked we will have a new world. It is because Tom Mann and D.A. Thomas are not leaders of men who have this spirit that they are about to be dropped as typical leaders of Labour and Capital in modern times. No man will be accepted by the Crowd to-day as a competent leader of his class who is afraid of the other classes. No man will be said to be a true leader, to be competent to make things move in the world, who does not have three gears of courage: courage for himself, courage for his own people, courage for other people; and who does not dare to deal with other people as if they really might be dealt with, after all, as fellow human beings capable of acting like fellow human beings, capable of finer and of truer things, of more manly and patient, more shrewdly generous, more far-sighted things, than might appear at first. * * * * * Was Mr. Josiah Wedgewood right when he called Davy McEwen a traitor to his class? I do not want to judge Davy McEwen. Such things are matters of personal interpretation, and of standing with a man face to face for a moment and looking him in the eyes. Of course, if I had done this, I might have been tempted and despised him. And I might now. The thing that I would have tried to look down through to in him, if I had looked him in the eye, would have been something like this: "Are you or are you not, Davy McEwen, standing out day after day against your class because you can see less than your class sees, because you are a mere me-man? Do you go by here grimly day by day, past all these people lined up on the hills, sternly thinking of yourself?" If I found that this was true, as it might well be, and often is, I would say that Davy McEwen was a traitor to his class. But if I found Davy McEwen going past hills-ful of workmen because he had a larger, fairer vision of what his class is than they had, if it proved to be true that the crowd-man in him was keeping the class-man in place, and holding true his vision for his class, I would say that it was his class that was being a traitor to him; I would say that sooner or later his class would see in some quiet day that it had been a traitor to him and to the world, and a traitor to itself. * * * * * If socialism and individualism cannot work together, and if (like the masculine and feminine in spirit) each cannot make itself the means and the method of fulfilling the other, there is no reason why either of them should be fulfilled. In the meantime, there is a kind of self-will that seems to me, as its shadow comes across my path, like God himself walking on the earth. And I have seen it in the rich and I have seen it in the poor, and in people who were being wrong and in people who were being right. It is like hearing great bells in the dark, singing in the solemn night to so much as hear of a man somewhere, I might go and see, who stands alone. If we want to stand together, let us begin with these men who can stand alone. There is a sense in which Christ died on the cross because He could find at the time no other way of saying this. There is a sense in which the decline of individualism is what he died for. Or we might call it the beginning of individualism. He died for the principle of doing what he thought was right before anybody else did it, and whether anybody else did it or not. The self-will of Jesus was half the New Testament. He crucified himself, his mother, and a dozen disciples that His own vision for all might be fulfilled. Socialism itself, what is good in it, would not exist to-day if Jesus, the Christ, had not practised socialism, in the best sense, by being an individualist. If we are going to get to socialism by giving up individualism, by abolishing heroes, why get to it? This more glorious self-will is not, of course, of a kind that all men can expect to have. Most of us have not the vision that equips us, and that gives us the right, to have it. But we can exact of our leaders that they shall have it--that they shall see more for us than we can see for ourselves, that they shall hold their vision up before us and let us see it, and let us have the use of it, that they shall be true to us, that they shall be the big brothers of the people. CHAPTER IX RULES FOR TELLING A HERO--WHEN ONE SEES ONE I have sometimes hoped that the modern world was about to produce at last some man somewhere with a big-hearted, easy powerful mind, who could protect the French Revolution. What we need most of all just now in our present crisis is some man who could take up the French Revolution without half trying, all the world looking on and wondering softly how he dares to do it, and put it gently but firmly, and once for all, up high somewhere where no one except geniuses, or at least the very tallest-minded people, could ever again get at it. As it is, hardly a day passes but one sees new little nobodies everywhere all about one reaching up without half thinking to it--to the French Revolution--grabbing it calmly, and then using it deliberately before our eyes as a general free-for-all analogy for anything that comes into their heads. The Syndicalists and Industrial Workers of the World have had the use of it last. The fact that the French Revolution was French and that it worked fairly well a hundred years ago and with a Louis Sixteenth sort of person, and as a kind of first rough sketch, or draft of just what a revolution might be for once, and what it would have to get over being afterward, as soon as possible, never seems to have occurred to many people. One sees them rushing about the world trying to get up exact duplicates, little fussy replicas of a revolution, and of a kind of revolution that the real world put quietly away in the attic seventy years ago. The real world, and all the men in it who are facing real facts to-day, are getting what they want in precisely the opposite of the violent, theatrical French-Revolution way. The fact that people are quite different now, and that it is more effective and practical to get new ideas into their heads by keeping their heads on than it is by taking their heads off--some of us seem to have passed over. Living as we do in a world to-day with our new explosives, our new antiseptics, our new biology, bacteriology, our new storage batteries, our habit of getting everything we get and changing everything we change by quietly and coolly looking at facts, the old lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy, emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become scientific, and see things as they are--has gone by. We have not time for revolutions nowadays. They may be amusing, but they are not practical, and evolution or revolution-without-knowing-it, or evolution all together, suit us better. We are in a world in which we are seeing men almost being made over before our eyes by the scientific habit of thought--by the new, slow, imperious way we have come to have of making ourselves look at things at which we would rather not look, until we see them as they are. The man of scientific spirit, the quiet-minded, implacable man who gets what he wants for himself and for others by merely turning on the light, who makes a new world for us by just showing us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth. There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they are particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-minded, romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior people. The real adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder of living in the twentieth century, lies in the high, patient, slow, quiet, silent enterprise of seeing facts as they are, and without any fuss, and inexorably and with good cheer, acting on them. The human race has a new temperament. The way to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to look for the most people. The way we win a revolution or bring the enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with coöperation, with understanding him and being understood by him, by being impregnably, obstinately his brother, by piling up huge happy citadels of good-will, of services rendered, services deserved, and services returned. We had an idea once that the way to conquer a man was by hitting the outside of him. We conquer men now by getting inside of them, and by getting inside first and then dealing with outside things together. We see the inside. It is the modern note to see the inside, to attack the essence, the spirit, and to work everything out from that. The modern method of being courageous and of defending what we want is a kind of chemistry. Hercules is a bust now. We prefer still little women like Madame Curie, or a man like Sir Joseph Lister, or like Wilbur Wright--the courage that faces material facts, that deals with the elements of things, whether in a bottle, or in the heaven above us, or in the earth, or in a man, or in an enemy. When the subject-matter is human nature and the courage we have to have is the courage that can deal with people, we ask ourselves: "What are the most difficult facts to face in people?" They are: The facts about how they are different from us. The facts about their being like us. The facts as to what we can do about it. So it has come to seem to me to be the greatest, the most typical and difficult courage of modern life and of a crowd civilization, the courage to look at actual facts in people and to see how the people can be made to go together. A man's courage is his sense of identity. A man's courage toward nature, heat, cold, mountains, seas, deserts, chemistry, geology, is his sense of identity with God and of his right to share with God in the creating of His world. His courage toward people is his sense of identity with men who seem different from him, of all races, all classes, and all nations. He sees the differences in their big relations alongside the resemblances. Then he fits the differences into the resemblances and knows what to do. There is a statue of Sir George Livesey, one of the early presidents of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, placed at the entrance of the works where thousands of workmen day and night pass in and pass out. Sir George Livesey was the man who, in the early days of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, stood out against all his workmen, for six long weeks, to get the workmen to believe that they were as good as he was. He believed that they were capable, or should be capable, of being identified with him and working with him as partners, of sharing in the direction of the business, of sharing in the profits, and coöperating all day, every day, with him and the other partners, to make the business a success. He did not propose to be locked up in a business, if he could help it, with men who did not feel identified with him, who were not his partners, or who did not want to be. He thought it was not good business to engage five thousand men and pay them deliberately so much a day to fight his business on the inside of the works. Being obliged to do his business as a fight against people who helped him all the time, watching and outwitting them as if he were dealing with five thousand intelligent gorillas instead of with fellow human beings, did not interest him. He did not believe that the men themselves, in spite of the way they talked, when they came to think of it, really enjoyed being intelligent gorillas, any more than he did. The Trades Unions passed a resolution that it was safer for the men in dealing with Sir George Livesey to keep on being gorillas. Sir George Livesey proposed that they should all try being fellow human beings and being in partnership for a little while and see how it worked. The Trades Unions were afraid to let them try. Even if it worked very well, and if it turned out that being men was safer, in this one particular case, than being gorillas, it would set a bad example, the Trades Unions thought. They took the ground that it was safer to have all men treated alike, whether they were gorillas or not. They instructed the men to strike. The South Metropolitan Gas Company was almost closed up, but it did not yield. Sir George Livesey took the ground that if the Trades Unions believed that his men were not good enough for him, and that he was not good enough for his men, he would wait until they did. The bronze statue of Sir George Livesey that the men have raised, and that thousands of men go by every day, day after day, and look up to at their work, was raised to a man who had stood out against his workmen for weeks to prove that they were as good as he was, and could be trusted to be loyal to him, and that he was as good as they were, and that he could be trusted to be loyal to them. He had the courage to insist on being, whether anybody wanted it for the moment or not, a new kind and new size of man. He preferred being allowed to be a new kind and new size himself, and he preferred allowing his men to be new kinds and new sizes of men, and he made a shrewd, dogged guess that when they tried it they would like it. They were merely afraid to be new sizes, as we all are at first. * * * * * There are possibly three ways in which, in the confusion of our modern world, one can tell a hero when one sees one. One knows a hero first by his originality. He invents a new kind and new size of man. He finishes off one sample. There he is. The next thing one notices about this man (when he is invented) is his humility. He never seems to feel--having invented himself--how original he is. The more original people think he is, and the more they try to set him one side as an exception, the more he resents it. And then, of course, the final way one knows a man is a hero is always by his courage, by his masterful way of driving through, when he meets a man, to his sense of identity with him. One always sees a hero going about quietly everywhere, treating every other man as if he were a hero too. He gets so in the habit, from day to day (living with himself), of believing in human nature, that when he finds himself suddenly up against other people he cannot stop. It is not that he is deceived about the other people, though it might seem so sometimes. He merely sees further into them and further for them. Has he not invented himself? Is he not at this very moment a better kind of man than he thought he could be once? Is he not going to be a better kind to-morrow than he is now? So, quietly, he keeps on year by year and day by day, treating other people as if they were, or were meant to be, the same kind of man that he is, until they are. CHAPTER X WHO IS AFRAID? When Christ turned the other cheek, the last thing He would have wanted any one to think was that He was backing down, or that He was merely being a sweet, gentle, grieved person. He was inventing before everybody, and before His enemies, promptly and with great presence of mind, a new kind and new size of man. It was a more spirited, more original, more unconquerable and bewildering way of fighting than anybody had thought of before. To be suddenly in an enemy's presence a new kind and new size of man--colossal, baffling--to turn into invisibility before him, into intangibility, into another kind of being before the enemy's eyes, so that he could not possibly tell what to do, and so that none of the things that he had thought of to do would work.... This is what Christ was doing, it seems to some of us, and it is apparently the way He felt about it when He did it. Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu. * * * * * The last thing that many of us who are interested in the modern world really want is to have war, or fighting, stop. We glory in courage, in the power of facing danger, in adventuresomeness of spirit, in every single one of the qualities that always have made, and always will make, every true man a fighter. We contend that fighting, as at present conducted, is based on fear and lazy-mindedness; that it is lacking in the manlier qualities, that the biggest and newest kind of men are not willing to be in it, and that it does not work. We would rather see the world abolished than to see war abolished. We want to see war brought up to date. The best way to fight was invented some two thousand years ago, and the innocent, conventional persons who still believe in a kind of routine, or humdrum, of shooting, who have not caught up with this two-thousand-year-old invention, are about to be irrevocably displaced in our modern life by men who have a livelier, more far-seeing, more practical, more modern kind of courage. From this time on we have made up our minds, we, the people of this world, that the only men we are going to allow to fight for us are the men who can fight the way Christ did. Men who have not the courage to fight the way Christ did are about to be shut up by society; no one will harm them, of course, innocent, afraid persons, who have to protect themselves with gunpowder, but they will merely be set one side after this, where they will not be in a position to spoil the fighting of the men who are not afraid. And who are the men who are not afraid? To search your enemy's heart, to amputate, as by a kind of spiritual surgery, the very desire for fighting in him, to untangle his own life before his eyes and suddenly make him see what it is he really wants, to have him standing there quietly, radiantly disarmed, gentle-hearted, and like a child before you; if you are able, Gentle Reader, or ever have been able, to do this, you are not afraid! Why should any one ever have supposed that it takes a backing down, giving up, teary, weak, and grieved person to do this? Christ expressed His idea of courage very mildly when He said, in effect: "Blessed are those who dare to be meek, for they shall inherit the earth." It takes a bolder front to step up to a man one knows is one's enemy and coöperate with him than it does to do a little, simple, thoughtless, outside thing like stepping up to him and knocking him down. Coöperating with a man in spite of him, moving over to where he is, winning a victory over him by getting at his most rooted, most protected, secret, instinctive feelings, literally striking him through to the heart and making a new kind of man out of him before his own eyes, by being a new kind of man to him, takes a bigger, stiller courage, is a more exposed and dangerous thing to do than to fall on him and fight him. It is also more practical. The one cool, practical, hard-headed way to win a victory over an enemy is to do the thing that makes him the most afraid. And there is no man people are more afraid of than the man who stands up to them, quietly looks at them, and will not fight with them. He is doing the one thing of all others to them that they would not dare to do. They wonder what such a man thinks. If he dares stand up before them and face them with nothing but thinking, what is he thinking? What he thinks, if it makes him able to do a thing like this, must have some man-stuff in it. They prefer to wait and see what he thinks. Courage consists in not being afraid of one's own mind and of other people's minds. When men become so afraid of one another's minds and of their own minds that they cannot think, they have to back down and fight. They are cowards. They do not know what they think. They do not know what they want. CHAPTER XI THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE I have never known a coward. I have known men who did cowardly things and who were capable of cowardly thoughts, but I have never known a man who could be fairly and finally classified as a coward. Courage is a process. If people are cowards it is because they are in a hurry. They have not taken the pains to see what they think. The man who has taken the time to think down through to what he really wants and to what he is bound to get, is always (and sometimes very suddenly and unexpectedly) a courageous man. It is the man who is half wondering whether he really wants what he thinks he wants or not, or whether he can get it or not, who is a coward. The coward is a half man. He is slovenly minded about himself. He gets out of the hard work of seeing through himself, of driving on through what he supposes he wants, to what he knows he wants. So, after all, it is a long, slow, patient pull, being a courageous man. Few men have the nerve to take the time to attend to it. The first part of courage consists in all this hard work one has to put in on one's soul day after day, and over and over again, doggedly, going back to it. _What is it that I really want?_ The second, or more brilliant-looking part of courage, the courageous act itself (like Roosevelt's when he is shot), which everybody notices, is easy. The real courage is over then. Courage consists in seeing so clearly something that one wants to get that one is more afraid of not getting it than one is of anything that can get in the way. The first thing that society is ever able to do with the lowest type of labouring man seems to be to get him to want something. It has to think out ways of getting him waked up, of getting him to be decently selfish, and to want something for himself. He only wants a little at first; he wants something for himself to-day and he has courage for to-day. Then perhaps he wants something for himself for to-morrow, or next week, or next year, and he has courage for next week, or for next year. Then he wants something for his family, or for his wife, and he has courage for his family, or for his wife. Gradually he sees further and wants something for his class. His courage mounts up by leaps and bounds when he is liberated into his class. Then he discovers the implacable mutual interest of his class with the other classes, and he thinks of things he wants for all the classes. He thinks the classes together into a world, and becomes a man. He has courage for the world. When men see, whether they are rich or poor, what they want, what they believe they can get, they are not afraid. The next great work of the best employers is to get labour to want enough. Labour is tired and mechanical-minded. The next work of the better class of labourer, or the stronger kind of Trades Union, is to get capital to want enough. Capital is tired, too. It does not see really big, worth-while things that can be done with capital, and has no courage for these things. The larger the range and the larger the variety of social desire the greater the courage. The problem in modern industry is the arousing of the imaginations of capitalists and labourers so that they see something that gives them courage for themselves and for one another, and courage for the world. The world belongs to the men of vision--the men who are not afraid--the men who see things that they have made up their minds to get. Who are the men to-day, in all walks of life, who want the most things for the most people, and who have made up their minds to get them? There is just one man we will follow to-day--those of us who belong to the crowd--the man who is alive all over, who is deeply and gloriously covetous, the man who sees things he wants for himself, and who therefore has courage for himself, and who sees things he wants and is bound to get for other people, and who therefore has courage for other people. This is the hardest kind of courage to have--courage for other people. CHAPTER XII THE MEN WHO WANT THINGS During the coal strike I took up my morning paper and read from a speech by Vernon Hartshorn, the miners' leader: "In a week's time, by tying up the railways and other means of transportation, we could so paralyze the country that the government would come to us on their knees and beg us to go to work on terms they are now flouting as impossible." During the dockers' strike I took up my morning paper and read Ben Tillett's speech, at the meeting the day before, to fifty thousand strikers on Tower Hill. "'I am going to ask you to join me in a prayer,' Tillett said. 'Lord Devonport has contributed to the murder, by starvation, of your children, your women, and your men. I am not going to ask you to do it, but I am going to call on God to strike Lord Devonport dead,' He asked those who were prepared to repeat the 'prayer' to hold up their hands. Countless hands were held up, and cries: 'Strike him doubly stone dead!' The men then repeated the following 'prayer', word for word, after Tillett: "'O God, strike Lord Devonport dead.' "Afterward the strikers chanted the words: 'He shall die! He shall die!'" There are times when it is very hard to have courage for other people. It is when one watches people doing cowardly things that one finds it hardest to have courage for them. I felt the same way both mornings at first when I held my paper in my hand and thought about what I had read, about the government's going down on its knees, and about God's striking Lord Devonport dead. The first feeling was one of profound resentment, shame--a huge, helpless, muddle-headed anger. I had not the slightest trace of courage for the miners; I did not see how the government could have any courage for them. And I had no courage for the dockers, or for what could be expected of the dockers. I did not see how Lord Devonport could have any courage for them. I repeated their prayer to myself. The dockers were cowards. I was not going to try to sympathize with them, or try to be reasonable about them. It was nothing that they were desperate and had prayed. Was I not desperate too? Would not the very thought that fifty thousand men could pray a prayer like that make any man desperate? It was as if I had stood and heard fifty thousand beasts roaring to their god. "They are desperate," I said to myself: "I will not take what they think seriously. It does not matter what desperate people think." Then I waited a minute. "But I am desperate, too," I said; "I must not take what I think seriously. It does not matter what desperate people think." I thought about this a little, and drove it in. "What I think will matter more a little later, perhaps, when I get over being desperate." "Perhaps what the dockers think will matter more a little later, too." In the meantime are not their scared and hateful opinions as good as my scared and hateful opinions? The important and final opinions, the ones to be taken seriously, that can be acted on, will be the opinions of those who get over being scared and hateful first. Then I stood up for myself. I had a reason for being scared and hateful. They and their prayer drove me to be scared and hateful. I thought again. Perhaps they had a reason, too. Then it all came over me. I became a human being all in a minute when I thought of it. I became suddenly full of courage for the hateful dockers. I thought how much more discouraging it would be if they had not been hateful at all. * * * * * I do not imagine God was sorry when He heard those fifty thousand dockers asking Him to strike Lord Devonport dead. Not that He would have approved of it. It was not the last word of wisdom or reasonableness. It was lacking in beauty and distinction as a petition, as being just the right form of prayer for those fifty thousand faultless dockers up on Tower Hill that afternoon (the whole of London listening, in that shocked and proper way that London has). But I have not lost all courage for the dockers who made it. They still want something! They still are men! They still stand up when they speak to Heaven! There is some stuff in them yet! They make heaven and earth ring to get a word with God! This all means something to God, probably. Perhaps it might mean something to us. We are superior persons, it is true. We do not pray the way they pray. We believe in being more self-controlled. We take our breakfasts quietly, and with high collars and silk hats, and with gilt prayer-books we go into the presence of our Maker. We believe in being calm and reasonable. But if men who have not enough to eat are so half-dead and so worthless that they can feel calm and reasonable about it, and can always be precisely right and always say precisely the right thing--if, with their wives fainting in their arms and their babies crying for food, all that those dockers had character enough to do, up on Tower Hill, was to make a polite, smooth, Anglican prayer to God--a prayer like a kind of blessing before not having any meat, and not that awful, fateful, husky cry to Heaven, a roar or rending of their hearts up to the black and empty sky--what would such men have been good for? What hope or courage could any one have for them, for such men at such a time, if they would not, if they could not, come thundering and breaking into His presence, fifty thousand strong, to get what they want? I may not know God, but whatever else He is, I feel sure that He is not a precise stickler-god, that He is not pompous about spiritual manners, a huge, literal-minded, Proper Person, who cannot make allowances for human nature, who cannot hear what humble, rough men like these, hewing their vast desires for Him out of darkness, and out of little foolish words, are trying to say to Him. And perhaps we, too, do not need to be literal-minded about a prayer that we may hear, or that we may overhear, roaring its way up past our smooth, beautiful lives rudely to Heaven. What is the gist of the prayer to God, and to us? What is it that the men are trying to say in this awful, flaming, blackening metaphor of wishing Lord Devonport dead? The gist of it is that they mean to say, whether they are right or wrong (like us, as we would say, whether we were right or wrong), they mean to say that they have a right to live. In other words, the gist of it is that we are like them, and that they are like us. I, too, in my hour of deepest trial, with no silk hat, with no gloves, with no gilt prayer-book, as I should, have flashed out my will upon my God. I, too, have cried with Paul, with Job, across my sin--my sin that very moment heaped up upon my lips--have broken wildly in upon that still, white floor of Heaven! And when the dockers break up through, fling themselves upon their God, what is it, after all, but another way of saying, "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God...." It may have been wicked in the dockers to address God in this way, but it would have been more wicked in them not to think He could understand. I believe, for one, that when Jacob wrestled with the angel, God looked on and liked it. The angel was a mere representative at best, and Jacob was really wrestling with God. And God knew it and liked it. Praying to strike Lord Devonport dead was the dockers' way of saying to God that there was something on their minds that simply could not be said. I can imagine that this would interest a God, a prayer like the dockers' prayer, so spent, so desperate, so unreasonable, breaking through to that still, white floor of Heaven! And it does seem as if, in our more humble, homely, and useful capacity as fellow human beings, it might interest us. It seems as if, possibly, we might stop criticising people who pray harder than we do, pointing out that wrestling with God is really rather rude--as if we might stop and see what it means to God and what it means to us, and what there is that we might do, you and I, oh, Gentle Reader, to make it possible for the dockers on Tower Hill to be more polite, perhaps, more polished, as it were, when they speak to God next time. Perhaps nothing the dockers could do in the way of being violent could be more stupid and wicked than having all these sleek, beautiful, perfect people, twenty-six million of them, all expecting them not to be violent. In my own quiet, gentle, implacable beauty of spirit, in my own ruthless wisdom on a full stomach, I do not deny that I do most sternly disapprove of the dockers and their violence. But it is better than nothing, thank God! They want something. It gives me something to hope for, and to have courage for, about them--that they want something. Possibly if we could get them started wanting something, even some little narrow and rather mean thing, like having enough to eat--possibly they will go on to art galleries, to peace societies, and cathedrals next, and to making very beautiful prayers (alas, Gentle Reader, how can I say it?) like you--Heaven help us!--and like me! I would have but one objection to letting the dockers have their full way, and to letting the control of the situation be put into their hands. They do not hunger enough. They are merely hungering for themselves. This may be a reason for not letting the world get entirely into their hands, but in the meantime we have every reason to be appreciative of the good the dockers are doing (so far as it goes) in hungering for themselves. It would be strange indeed if one could not tolerate in dockers a little thing like this. Babies do it. It is the first decency in all of us. It is the first condition of our knowing enough, or amounting to enough, to ever hunger for any one else. Everybody has to make a beginning somewhere. Even a Saint Francis, the man who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, who rises to the heights of social-mindedness, who hungers and thirsts for everybody, begins all alone, at the breast. Which is there of us who, if we had not begun our own hungering and thirsting for righteousness, our tugging on God, in this old, lonely, preoccupied, selfish-looking way, would ever have grown up, would ever have wanted enough things to belong to a Church of England, for instance, or to a Congregational Home Missionary Society? It is true that the dockers are, for the moment (alas, fifty or sixty years or so!), merely wanting things for themselves, or wanting things for their own class. And so would we if we had been born, brought up, and embedded in a society which allowed us so little for ourselves that not growing up morally--keeping on over and over again, year after year, just wanting things for ourselves, and not really being weaned yet--was all that was left to us. There is really considerable spiritual truth in having enough to eat. Sometimes I have thought it would be not unhelpful, would make a little ring of gentle-heartedness around us, some of us--those of us who live protected lives and pray such rich, versatile prayers, if we would stop and think what a docker would have to do, what arrangements a docker would have to make before he could enjoy praying with us--falling back into our beautiful, soft, luxurious wanting things for others. Possibly these arrangements, such as they are, are the ones the dockers are trying to make with Lord Devonport now. The docker is trying to get through hungering for something to eat, to arrange gradually to have his hungers move on. CHAPTER XIII MEN WHO GET THINGS All the virtues are hungers. A vice is the failure of desire. A vice is a man's failure to have enough big hungers at hand, sternly within reach, to control his little ones. A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored. He has let himself drop into doing rows of half-things, or things which he can only half do. He forgets, for the moment, what it really is that he wants, or possibly that he wants anything. Then it is that the one little, mean Lonely Hunger--a glass of liquor, a second piece of pie, another man's wife, or a million dollars, runs away with him. When a man sins it is because his appetites fail him. Self-control lies in maintaining checks and balances of desire, centripetals, and centrifugals of desire. The worst thing that could happen to the world would be to have it placed in the hands of men who only have a gift of hungering for certain sorts of things, or hungering for certain classes of people, or hungering for themselves. We do not want the man who is merely hungering for himself to rule the world--not because we feel superior to him, but because a man who is merely hungering for himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority on worlds. People can take him seriously as an authority on his own hunger. But what he thinks about everything beyond that point cannot be taken seriously. What he thinks about how the world should be run, about what other people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken seriously. I will not yield place to any one in my sympathy with the dockers. I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the same sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same tincture of religion, would dare to do what they have done. But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the point. And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers, or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts: First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation as conclusive and imperative. It must be obeyed. Second, I do not care what they think. What they think must not be obeyed. Men who are in the act of being scared or hateful, whether it be for five minutes, jive months, or sixty years, who have given up their courage for others, or for their enemies, are not practical. What a man who despairs of everybody except himself thinks, does not work and cannot be made to work. The fact that the dockers have no courage about their employers may be largely the employers' fault. It is largely the fault of society, of the churches, the schools, the daily press. But the fact remains, and whichever side in the contest has, or is able to have, first, the most courage for the other side, whichever side wants the most for the other side, will be the side that will get the most control. If Labour, in the form of syndicalism, wants to grasp the raw materials, machinery, and management of modern industry out of the hands of the capitalists and run the world, the one shrewd, invincible way for Labour to do it is going to be to want more things for more people than capitalists can want. The only people, to-day, who are going to be competent to run a world, or who can get hold of even one end of it to try to run it, are going to be the people who want a world, who have a habit, who may be said to be almost in a rut, of wanting things all day, every day, for a world--men who cannot keep narrowed down very long at a time to wanting things for themselves. There will be little need of our all falling into a panic, or all being obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave off an uprising of the labour classes as long as the labour classes are merely wanting things for themselves. It is the men who have the bigger hungers who are getting the bigger sorts of things--things like worlds into their hands. The me-man and the class-man, under our modern conditions, are being more and more kept back and held under in the smaller places, the me-places and class-places, by the men who want more things than they can want, who lap over into wanting things for others. The me-man often may see what he wants clearly and may say what he wants. But he does not get it. It is the class-man who gets it for him. The class-man may see what he wants for his class clearly and may say what he wants. But he does not get it. It is the crowd-man who gets it for him. It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that God has worked it out! It is one of His usual paradoxes. The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get things more than other people can get them is his margin of unselfishness. He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that lies around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time the people and the things that are in the way of what he wants; how the people look or try to look, how they feel or try to make him think they feel, what they believe and do not believe or can be made to believe; he sees what he wants in a vast setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what he can--in a huge moving picture of the interests of others. The man who, in fulfilling and making the most of himself, can get outside of himself into his class, who, in being a good class-man, can overflow into being a man of the world, is the man who gets what he wants. I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in the industrial world, as at present constituted in our coöperative age, the men who can get what they want, who get results out of other people, are the men who have the largest, most sensitive outfits for wanting things for other people. If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with courage for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal failure Ben Tillett makes in leading them in prayer. Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the most spent and desperate class of Labour of all, only prayed Ben Tillet's prayer a minute and they were sorry the day after. And it was Ben Tillett's prayer in the end that lost them their cause--a prayer that filled all England on the next day with the rage of Labour--that a man like Ben Tillett, with such a mean, scared, narrow little prayer, should dare to represent Labour. In the same way, after the shooting in the Lawrence strike, when all those men (Syndicalists) had streamed through the streets, showing off before everybody their fine, brave-looking thoughtless, superficial, guillotine feelings and their furious little banner, "No God and no Master"--it did one good, only a day or so later, to see a vast crowd of Lawrence workers, thirty thousand strong, tramping through the streets, singing, with bands of music, and with banners, "In God we trust" and "One is our Master, even Christ"--thousands of men who had never been inside a church, thousands of men who could never have looked up a verse in the Bible, still found themselves marching in a procession, snatching up these old and pious mottoes and joining in hymns they did not know, all to contradict, and to contradict thirty thousand strong, the idea that the blood and froth, the fear and unbelief, of the Industrial Workers of the World represented or could ever be supposed to represent for one moment the manhood and the courage, the faithfulness and (even in the hour of their extremity) the quiet-heartedness, the human loyalty and self-forgetfulness, the moral dignity of the American workingman. It cannot truly be said that the typical modern labouring man, whether in America or England, is a coward; that he has no desire, no courage, for any one except for himself and for his own class. Mr. O'Connor of the Dockers' Organization in the East of Scotland, said at the time of the strike of the dockers in London: "This kind of business of the bureaucratic labour men in London, issuing orders for men to stop work all over the country, is against the spirit of the trades unions of England. It is a thing we cannot possibly stand. We have an agreement with the employers, and we have no intention of breaking it." It cannot be said that the typical modern labourer is listening seriously to the Syndicalist or to the Industrial Worker of the World when he tells him that Labour alone can save itself, and that Labour alone can save the world. He knows that any scheme of social and industrial reform which leaves any class out, rich or poor, which does not see that everybody is to blame, which does not see that everybody is responsible, which does not arrange or begin to arrange opportunity and expectation for every man and every degree and kind of man, and does not do it just where that man is, and do it now, is superficial. If we are going to have a society that is for all of us, it will take all of us, and all of us together, to make it. Mutual expectation alone can make a great society. Mutual expectation, or courage for others, persistently and patiently and flexibly applied--applied to details by small men, applied to wholes by bigger ones--is going to be the next big serious, unsentimental, practical industrial achievement. And I do not believe that for sheer sentiment's sake we are going to begin by rooting up millionaires and, with one glorious thoughtless sweep, saying, "We will have a new world," without asking at least some of the owners of it to help, or at least letting them in on good behaviour. Nor are we going to begin by rooting up trade unions and labour leaders. The great organizations of Capital in the world to-day are daily engaged, through competition and experiment and observation, in educating one another and finding out what they really want and what they can really do; and it is equally true that the great organizations of labour, in the same way, are educating one another. The real fight of modern industry to-day is an educational fight. And the fight is being conducted, not between Labour and Capital, but between the labouring men who have courage for Capital and labouring men who have not, and between capitalists who have courage for Labour and those who have not. To put it briefly, the real industrial fight to-day is between those who have courage and those who have not. It is not hard to tell, in a fight between men who have courage and men who have not, which will win. Probably, whatever else is the matter with them, the world will be the most safe in the hands of the men who have the most courage. There are four items of courage I would like to see duly discussed in the meetings of the trades unions in America and England. First, A discussion of trades unions. Why is it that, when the leaders of trades unions come to know employers better than the other men do and begin to see the other side and to have some courage about employers and to become practicable and reasonable, the unions drop them? Second, Why is it that, in a large degree, the big employers, when they succeed in getting skilled representatives or managers who come to know and to understand their labouring men better than they do, do _not_ drop them? Why is it that, day by day, on all sides in America and England, one sees the employing class advancing men who have a genius for being believed in, to at first questioned, and then to almost unquestioned, control of their business? If this is true, does it not seem on the whole that industry is safer in the hands of employers who have courage for both sides and who see both sides than of employees who do not? Does not the remedy for trades unions and employees, if they want to get control, seem to be, instead of fighting, to see if they cannot see both sides quicker, and see them better, than their employers do? Third, A discussion of efficiency in a National Labour Party from the point of view of the trend of national efficiency in business. Apparently the most efficient and shrewd business men in England and America are the men who are running what might be called lubricated industries--who are making their industries succeed on the principle of sympathetic, smooth-running, mutual interests. If the successful modern business man who owns factories is not running each factory as a small civil war, is it not true that the only practical and successful Labour Party in England, the only party that can get things done for labour and that can hold power, is bound to be the party that succeeds in having the most courage for both sides, in seeing the most mutual interests, and in seeing how these interests can be put together, and in seeing it first and acting on it before any other merely one-sided party would be able to think it out? Fourth, A discussion of the selection of the best labour leaders to place at the head of the unions. Nearly every man who succeeds in business notably, succeeds in believing something about the people with whom he deals that the men around him have not believed before, or in believing something which, if they did believe it, they had not applied or acted as if they had believed before. If, in order to succeed, a business man does not believe something that needs to be believed before other people believe it, he hires somebody who does believe it to believe it for him. Perhaps Labour would find it profitable to act on this principle too, and to see to it that the leaders chosen to act for them are not the noisiest minded, but the most creative men, the men who can express original, shrewd faiths in the men with whom they have to deal--faiths that the men around them will be grateful (after a second thought) to have expressed next. * * * * * In the meantime, whether among the labourers or the capitalists, however long it may take, it is not hard to see, on every hand to-day, the world about us slowly, implacably getting into the hands of the men, poor or rich, who have the most keen, patient courage about other people, the men who are "good" (God save the word!), the men who have practical, working human sympathies and a sense of possibilities in those above them and beneath them with whom they work--the men who most clearly, eagerly, and doggedly want things for others, who have the most courage for others. I have thought that if we could find out what this courage is, how it works, how it can be had, and where it comes from, it might be more worth our while to know than any other one thing in the world. I would like to try to consider a few of the sources of this courage for others. CHAPTER XIV SOURCES OF COURAGE FOR OTHERS--TOLERATION After making an address on inspired millionaires one night before the Sociological Society in their quarters in John Street, I found myself the next day--a six-penny day--standing thoughtfully in the quarters of the Zoölogical Society in Regent's Park. The Zoölogical Society makes one feel more humble, I think, than the Sociological Society does. All sociologists, members of Parliament, eugenists, professors, and others, ought to be compelled by law to spend one day every two weeks with the Zoölogical Society in Regent's Park. All reformers who essay to make over human nature, all idealists, should be required by law to visit menageries--to go to see them faithfully or to be put in them a while until they have observed life and thought things out. A GREEN BENCH, THE ZOO, REGENT'S PARK, 1911. For orienting a man and making him reasonable, there is nothing, I find, like coming out and putting in a day here, making one's self gaze firmly and doggedly at the other animals. We have every reason to believe that Noah was a good psychologist, or judge of human nature, before he went into the ark, but if he was not, he certainly would have come out one. There is nothing like a menagerie to limber one up. Especially an idealist. Take a pelican, for instance. What possible personal ideal was it that could make a pelican want to be a pelican or that could ever have made a pelican take being a pelican seriously for one minute? And the camel with his lopsided hump. "Why, oh, why," cries the idealist, wringing his hands. "Oh, why----?" I have come out here this afternoon, in the middle of my book, in the middle of a chapter against the syndicalists, but it ill beseems me, after spending half a day looking calmly at peacocks, at giraffes, at hippopotamuses, at all these tails, necks, legs and mouths, at this stretch or bird's eye view--this vast landscape of God's toleration--to criticise any man, woman or child of this world for blossoming out, for living up, or fleshing up, or paring down, to what he is really like inside. Possibly what each man stands for is well enough for him to stand for. It is only when what a man says, comes to being repeated, to being made universal, to being jammed down on the rest of us, that the lie in it begins to work out. Let us let everybody alone and be ready to find things out just for ourselves. Here is this big, frivolous, gentle elephant, for instance, poking his huge, inquiring trunk into baby carriages. He is certainly too glorious, too profound, a personage to do such things! It does seem a little unworthy to me, as I have been sitting here and watching him from this park bench, for a noble, solemn being like the elephant--a kind of cathedral of a beast, to be as deeply interested as he is in peanuts. He looms up before me once more. I look up a little closer--look into his little, shrewd eyes--and, after all, what do I know about him? And I watch the camels with the happy, dazed children on their backs, go by with soft and drifting feet. Do I suppose I understand camels? Or I follow the crowd. I find myself at last with that huge, hushed, sympathetic congregation at the 4 P.M. service, watching the lions eat. Everything does seem very much mixed up when one brings one's Sociological Society dogmas, and one's little neat, impeccable row of principles to the test of watching the lions eat! Possibly people are as different from one another inside--in their souls at least--as different as these animals are. It is true, of course, that as we go about, people do have a plausible way in this world--all these other people, of looking like us. But they are different inside. If one could stand on a platform as one was about to speak and could really see the souls of any audience--say of a thousand people--lying out there before one, they would be a menagerie beside which, O Gentle Reader, I dare to believe, Barnum and Bailey's menagerie would pale in comparison. But in a menagerie (perhaps you have noticed it, Gentle Reader) one treats the animals seriously, and as if they were Individuals. They are what they are. Why not treat people's souls seriously? It is true that people's souls, like the animals, are alike in a general way. They all have in common (in spiritual things) organs of observation, appropriation, digestion and organs of self-reproduction. But these spiritual organs of digestion which they have are theirs. And these organs of self-reproduction are for the purpose of reproducing themselves and not us. These are my reflections, or these try to be my reflections when I consider the Syndicalist--how he grows or when I look up and see a class-war socialist--an Upton Sinclair banging loosely about the world. My first wild, aboriginal impulse with Upton Sinclair when I come up to him as I do sometimes--violent, vociferous roaring behind his bars, is to whisk him right over from being an Upton Sinclair into being me. I do not deny it. Then I remember softly, suddenly, how I felt when I was watching the lions eat. I remember the pelican. Thus I save my soul in time. Incidentally, of course, Upton Sinclair's insides are saved also. It is beautiful the way the wild beasts in their cages persuade one almost to be a Christian! Of course when one gets smoothed down one always sees people very differently. In being tolerant the rub comes usually (with me) in being tolerant in time. I am tempted at first, when I am with Upton Sinclair, to act as if he were a whole world of Upton Sinclairs and of course (anybody would admit it) if he really were a whole world of Upton Sinclairs he would have to be wiped out. There would be nothing else to do. But he is not and it is not fair to him or fair to the world to act as if he were. The moment I see he is confining himself to just being Upton Sinclair I rather like him. It is the same with Ella Wheeler Wilcox. It is when I fall to thinking of her as if she were, or were in danger of being, a whole world of Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes that I grow intolerant of her. Ella Wheeler Wilcox as a Tincture, which is what she really is, of course, is well enough. I do not mind. The real truth about a man like Upton Sinclair, when one has worked down through to it, is that while from my point of view a class-war socialist--a man who proposes to put society together by keeping men apart--is wrong and is sure to do a great deal of harm to some people, there are other people to whom he does a great deal of good. There really are people who need Upton Sinclair. It may be a hard fact to face perhaps, but when one faces it one is glad there is one. Some of the millionaires need Sinclair. There are others whose attention would be attracted better in more subtle ways. The class-war socialist, though I may be at this moment in the very act of trying to make him impossible, to put him out of date, has been and is, in his own place and his own time, I gratefully acknowledge, of incalculable value. Any man who can, by saying violent and noisy things, make rich, tired, mechanical-minded people, and poor, tired mechanical-minded people wake up enough to feel hateful has performed a public service. The hatefulness is the beginning of their being covetous for other things than the things they have. If a man has a habit of hunger he gets better and better hungers as a matter of course; bread and milk, ribbons, geraniums, millinery, bathtubs, Bibles, copartnership associations. And in the meantime the one precious thing to be looked out for in a man, and to be held sacred, is his hunger. The one important religious value in the world is hunger and to all the men to-day who are contributing to the process of moving on hungers; whether the hungers happen to be our hungers or not or our stages of hunger or not, we say Godspeed. There are times when the sudden sense one comes to have that the world is a struggle, a great prayer toward the sun, a tumult and groping of desire, the sense that every kind and type of desire has its time and its place in it and every kind and type of man, gives a whole new meaning to life. This sense of a now possible toleration which we come to have, some of us, opens up to us always when it comes a new world of courage about people. It makes all these dear, clumsy people about us suddenly mean something. It makes them all suddenly belong somewhere. They become, as by a kind of miracle, bathed in a new light, wrong-headed, intolerable though they be, one still sees them flowing out into the great endless stream of becoming--all these dots of the vast desire, all these queer, funny, struggling little sons of God! It has been overlooked that social reform primarily is not a matter of legislation or of industrial or political systems, or of machinery, but a matter, of psychology, of insight into human nature and of expert reading and interpretation of the minds of men. What are they thinking about? What do they think they want? The trades unions and employers' associations, extreme socialists and extreme Tories have so far been very bad psychologists. If the Single Tax people were as good at being intuitionalists or idea-salesmen as they are at being philosophers in ideas they would long before this have turned everything their way. They would have begun with people's hungers and worked out from them. They would have listened to people to find out what their hungers were. The people who will stop being theoretical and logical about each other and who will look hard into each other's eyes will be the people whose ideas will first come to pass. Everything we try to do or say or bring to pass in England or America is going to begin after this, not in talking, but in listening. If social reformers and industrial leaders had been good listeners, the social deadlock--England with its House of Lords and railroads both on strike and America with its great industries quarrelling--would have been arranged for and got out of the way over twenty years ago. We have overlooked the first step of industrial reform, the rather extreme step of listening. The most hard-headed and conclusive man to settle any given industrial difficulty is the man who has the gift of divining what is going on in other people's minds, a gift for being human, a gift for treating everybody who disagrees with him as if they might possibly be human too, though they are very poor, even though they are very rich. Practical psychology has come to be not only the only solution but also the only method of our modern industrial questions. Being so human that one can guess what any possible human being would think is the one hard-headed and practical way to meet the modern labour problem. The first symptom of being human in a man is his range and power of shrewd, happy toleration, or courage for people who know as little now as he knew once. A man's sense of toleration is based primarily upon the range and power of his knowledge of himself, upon his power of remembering and anticipating himself, upon his laughing with God at himself, upon his habit in darkness, weariness or despair, or in silent victory and joy, of falling on his knees. Toleration is reverence. It is the first source of courage for other people. CHAPTER XV CONVERSION Some people think of the world as if it were made all through, people and all, of reinforced concrete, as if everything in it--men, women, children, churches, colleges, and parties, were solidly, inextricably imbedded in it. Every age in history has had to get on as well as it could with two sets of totally impracticable people, our two great orders of Philistines in this world, the people who put their trust in Portland Cement and the people who put their trust in Explosives. There has not been a single great movement in history yet that every thoughtful man has not had to watch being held up by these people--by millions of worthy, simple, rudimentary creatures who consent to be mere conservatives or mere radicals. One set says, "People cannot be converted so we will blow them up." The other set says, "We are going to be blown up, so let us put on Plaster of Paris as a garment, we will array ourselves before the Lord in Portland Cement." Both of these classes of people believe alike on one main point. They do not believe in Conversion. If the conservatives believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Portland Cement. If the radicals believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Explosives. In our machine civilization to these two great standard classes of scared people, there has been added what seems to be a third class--the people who have responded to a kind of motor spirit in the time, who have modulated a little their unbelief in human nature. They have substituted for their reinforced concrete Unbelief, a kind of Whirling Unbelief, called machinery. They admit that in our modern life men are not made of reinforced concrete. We may move, but we move as wheels move, they tell us. We arc whirlingly imbedded. We are cogs and wheels in an Economic Machine. I would like to consider for a moment this Whirling Unbelief. There was a time once when I took the Economic Machine very seriously. I looked up when I went by, at the Economic Machine as the last and the most terrific of the inventions among the machines. The machine that mocked all the other machines, that made all our machines look pathetic and ridiculous, was the Economic Machine. There were days when I heard it or seemed to hear it--this Economic Machine closing in around my life, around all our lives like the last hoarse mocking laugh of civilization. I said I will love every machine that runs except the Economic Machine--the machine for making people into machines. But one day when I had waited or dared to wait, I know not why, a little longer than usual before the Whirling Unbelief, I heard the hoarse mocking laugh die away. I became very quiet. I began to think, I reflected on my experiences. I began to notice things. I noted that every time I had found myself being discouraged about people, I had caught myself thinking of people as Cogs and Wheels. Were they really Cogs and Wheels? Possibly it was merely the easiest, most mechanical-minded thing to do to think of people (with all this machinery around one) as cogs and wheels in an economic machine. Then it began to occur to me that it was because I had looked upon the economic machine a little lazily, a little innocently that I had been awed and terrific--and had been swept away with it into the Whirling Unbelief. Then I stood quietly and calmly for days, for weeks, for years before it. I watched it Go Round. I then discovered under close observation that what had looked to me like an economic machine was not an economic machine at all. The modern economic world has innumerable mechanical elements in it, but it is not an economic machine. It is a biological engine. It is the biology in it that conceives, desires, and determines the machinery in it. The most important parts of the machine are not the very mechanical parts. They are the very biological parts. The economic machine is full of made-people, but it does not make very much difference about the made-people. I find that as a plain, practical matter of fact I do not need to watch the made-people so very much to understand the world, or to get ready for what is happening to it. In prospecting for a world, I watch the born people. I watch especially the people who have been born twice. As one watches the way the world is going round one finds that what is really making it go round, is not its being an economic machine, but its being a biological engine. Industrial reform is a branch of biology. The main fact of biology as regards a man is that he can be born. The main fact of biology as regards society--that is, the main fact of social biology--is that a man can be born twice. As long as a man is born to go with a father and a mother it is well enough to have been born once, but the moment a man deals with other people or with the world, he has to be born again. This is the main fact about the biological engine we call the world. The main fact about the Engine is the biology in it. Every other fact for a man has to be worked out from this--that is: out of being born once if one wants to belong merely to a father and mother, and out of being born twice if one wants to belong to a world. A man does not need to enter again into his mother's womb and come out a child. He enters into the World's Womb and comes out a man. * * * * * The world is being placed to-day before our eyes in the hands of the men who are born twice. Not all men are cogs and wheels. The first day I discovered this and believed this I went out into the streets and looked into the faces of the men and the women and I looked up at the factories and the churches and I was not afraid. I do not deny that cogs and wheels are very common. But I do not believe that an economic system or industrial scheme based on the general principle of arranging a world for cogs and wheels would work. I believe in arranging the world on the principle that there are now and are going to be always enough men in it who are born, and enough who are born twice to keep cogs and wheels doing the things men who have been born twice, who have visions for worlds, want done, and to keep people who prefer being cogs and wheels where they will work best and where they will help the running gear of the planet most--by going round and round, in the way they like--going round and round and round and round. But why is it, one cannot help wondering, that the moment a man rises up suddenly in this modern world and bases or seeks to base an industrial or social reform frankly on courage for other people, on believing in the inherent and eternal power of men of changing their minds, of being put up in new kinds and new sizes of men, in other words, on conversion--why is it that clergymen, atheists, ethical societies, politicians, socialists will all unite, will all flock together and descend upon him, shout and laugh him away, bully him with dead millionaires, bad corporations and humdrum business men, overawe him with mere history, argue him with statistics, and thunder him with sermons out of the world--if he puts up a faint little chirrup of hope that men can be converted? It is not that the synods, ethical societies, anarchists, the bishops and Bernard Shaw, have merely given up expecting individual men to be converted. There would be a measure of plausibility in giving up on a few particular men's being born again. It is worse than that. What seems to have happened to nearly all the people who have schemes of industrial reform is that they have really given up at one fell swoop a whole new generation's being born again. It is going to be just like this one, they tell us, the new generation--the same old things the same old foolish ways of deceiving the world, that any child can see have not worked--Bernard Shaw and the bishops whisper to us, are coming around and around again. They must be planned for. All these young men of wealth about us who read the papers and who are ashamed of their fathers are going to be just like their fathers. The atheists, the socialists, and the single taxers, missionaries and evangelists have given up their last loophole of hope in the new business generation and they trust only to machines to save us, or to professors, or to paper-treatises on eugenics! And yet, after all, if we were going to start an absolute, decisive, and practical scheme of eugenics to-morrow with whom would we begin, with which particular people would we begin? We would have to go back, Bernard Shaw and the bishops and all of us, to the New Testament--to the old idea of being born again. I have watched now these many years the professors, caught in their culture-machines going round and round, and the priests caught in their religion-machines going round and round, and the business men caught in their economic machine, and I have heard them all saying over and over in a kind of terrible sing-song day and night, the silly, lazy words of a glorious old roue four thousand years ago, "The thing that hath been is the thing which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done and there is no new thing under the sun." There are some of us who do not believe this. We defy the culture-machines. We believe that even professors can be converted, can be educated. We defy the bishops. We believe that business men can be converted. We defy the business men. We believe the bishops can be converted. I speak for a thousand, thousand men. In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the Whirling Unbelief. I speak for these men--for all of us. _We are not cogs and wheels. We are men. We are born again ourselves. Other men can be born again._ Men shall not look each other in the eyes wisely and nod their heads and say that human nature will not change. We will change it. If we cannot get but two or three together to change it, then two or three by just being two or three and by daring to be two or three, or even one if necessary shall change it. The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a vision of the kind of man of wealth--the kind of employer they want, the moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people, the people will have the millionaire they want. If a nation really wants a great man it invents him. We have hut to see we really want him, and that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him. Necessity is the mother of invention. Here in these United States sixty years ago were we not all at work on a man named Abraham Lincoln? We had been at work on him for years trying to make him into a Lincoln. He could not have begun to be what he was without us, without the daily thought, the responsibility, the tragical national hope and fear, the sense of crisis in a great people. All these had been set to work on him, on making him a Lincoln. Lincoln would not have dared not to be a great man, an all-people man with a whole mighty nation, with all those millions of watchful, believing people laying their lives softly, silently, their very sons' lives in his hands. He did not have the smallest possible chance from the day he was named for President, to be a second-rate man or to betray a nation, or to back down out of being himself. He had been filled night and day with the vision of a great nation struggling, with the grim glory of it. He was free to make mistakes for it, but there was no way he could have kept from being a true, mighty, single-hearted man for it, if he had tried. We had clinched Lincoln in 1862. He was caught fast in the vise of our hopes. Perhaps it is because, at certain times in history, nations seem to be siding with the worst in their public men and expecting the worst in them that they get them. If a crowd wants to be represented, wants to touch to the quick and kindle the man in it, the man filled with vision, the man who is born again into its desire, the crowd-man, they have but to surround him and overshadow him. They will create him, in scorn and joy will they conceive him, and before he knows who he is, they will bring him forth. It would not be hard, I imagine, to be a great man, with a true, steadied, colossal, single-heartedness, if one were caught fast in the vision, the expectation of a great nation. To be born again is simple with ninety million people to help. We have all been born again in little things with a few people to help. We have been swung over from little short motives to big, long-levered controlling ones. We have known in a small way what Conversion is. We have seen how naturally it works out in little things. There is nothing new about it. There is not a man who does not know what it is to get over a small motive. We have seen, when we looked back, what it was that happened. The way to get over a small motive is to let it get lost in a big one. A man does not stop to pick up a penny or a million dollars when he is running to save his life. A man does not stop to pick up two pennies, or two thousand dollars, or two million dollars when he is running to save ten thousand lives or running to save ninety million lives, when he is running to save a city or a nation. This is Conversion--entering into the World's Womb, the world's vision or expectation and being born again. * * * * * It is not for nothing that I have seen the sun lifting up the faces of the flowers, and crumbling the countenances of the hills. And I have seen music stirring faintly in the bones of old men. And I have heard the dead Beethoven singing in the feet of children. And I have watched the Little Earth in its little round of seasons dancing before the Lord. And I have believed that music is wrought into all things, and that the people I see about me have not one of them been left out. I believe in sunshine and in hothouses. I believe in burning glasses. I believe in focusing light into heat and heat into white fire, and turning white fire into little flowing brooks of steel. And I believe in focusing men upon men. I believe in Conversion. Of course it would all be different--focusing men upon men, if men were cogs and wheels, or if the men they were focused on were made of stones. I stand and look at this stone and believe it is all rubber and whalebone inside. But what of it? It does not get true. While I am looking at a man and believing a certain thing about the man, it gets true. What is going on in my mind while I look at him effects actual mechanical changes in him, affects the flow of blood in his veins. A look colours him, whitens him, twists and turns the muscles and tissues in his body. I draw lines upon his inmost being. I lay down a new face upon his face. A moment after I look upon the man's face it has become, as it were, or may have become, a new little landscape. I have seen a great country opened up in him of what he might be like. While I look I have been ushered softly, for a second, into the presence of a man who was not there before. Such things have happened. Beatrice looked at Dante once. Ten silent centuries began singing. A man named Stephen, one day, while he was dying, gave a look at a man named Paul. Paul came away quietly and hewed out history for two thousand years. CHAPTER XVI EXCEPTION A bicycle, the other day, a little outside Paris as it was running along quietly, lifted itself off the ground suddenly, and flew three yards and seven inches. There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not flown three yards and seven inches. But what of it? Why count them up? Why bother about them? The important, conclusive, massive, irresistible, crushing, material fact is that one bicycle has flown three yards seven inches. The nine million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet are negligible. So are nine out of ten business firms. If there is one exceptional man in modern industry who is running his business in the right way and who has made a success of it and has proved it--he may look visionary to class-socialists and to other people who decide by measuring off masses of fact, and counting up rows of people and who see what anybody can see, but he is after all in arranging our social programme the only man of any material importance for us to consider. It would be visionary to take the past, dump it around in front of one, and try to make a future out of it. I do not deny what people tell me about millionaires and about factory slaves. I have not mooned or lied or turned away my face. I stand by time one live, right, implacable, irrevocable, prolific exception. I stand by the one bicycle out of them all that has flown three yards and seven inches. I lay out my program, conceive my world on that. Piles of facts arranged in dead layers high against heaven, rows of figures, miles of factory slaves, acres of cemeteries of dead millionaires, going-by streetfuls of going-by people, shall not cow me. My heart has been broken long enough by counting truths on my fingers, by numbering grains of sand, men, and mountains, bombs, acorns and marbles alike. Which truth matters? Which man is right? Where is Nazareth? * * * * * Nazareth is our only really important town now. I will see what is going on in Nazareth. On every subject that comes up, in every line of thought, I will go to the city of implacable exceptions. All the inventors flock there--the man with the one bicycle which flies, the one great industrial organizer, the man with the man-machine, and the man--the great boy who carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket like strings and nails and knives, they are all there. Nazareth is the city, the one mighty little city of the spirit where all the really worth-while men wherever they may seem to be, all day, all night, do their living. Other cities may make things, in Nazareth they make worlds. One can see a new one almost any day in Nazareth. Men go up and down the streets there with their new worlds in their eyes. Some of them have them almost in their hands or are looking down and working on them. It does not seem to me that any of us can make ourselves strong and fit to lay out a sound program or vision for a world, who do not watch with critical expectation and with fierce joy these men of Nazareth, who do not take at least a little time off every day, in spirit, in Nazareth, and spend it in watching bicycles fly three feet and seven inches. To watch these men, it seems to me, is our one natural, economical way to get at essential facts, at the set-one-side truths, at the exceptions that worlds and all-around programs for worlds are made out of. To watch these men is the one way I know not to be lost in great museums and storehouses of facts that do not matter, in the streetfuls and skyscraperfuls of men that go by. I regret to record that professors of political economy, social philosophers, industrial big-wigs, presidents of boards of trade have not been often met with on the streets of this silent, crowded, mighty, invisible little town that rules the destinies of men. Not during the last twenty years, but one is meeting them there to-day. All these things that people are saying to me are mere history. I have seen the one live exception. One telephone was enough. And one Galileo was enough, with his little planet turning round and round, with all of us on it who were obliged to agree with him about it. It kept turning round and round with us until we did. CHAPTER XVII INVENTION If I were a Noah and wanted to get a fair selection of people in London to be saved to start a new world, I would go out and look over the crowd who are watching the flying machines at Hendon, and select from them. The Hendon crowd will not last forever. People who would be far less desirable to start worlds with would gradually work their way in, but it is only fair to say that these first few thousand men and women of all classes who responded to the flying machine would be possessed, as any one could see with a look, of special qualifications for running worlds. I shall never quite forget the sense I had the first day of the crowd at Hendon--those thousands of faces that had gathered up in some way out of themselves a kind of huge crowd-face before one--that imperturbable happiness on it and that look of hard sense and hope, half poetry, half science ... it was like gazing at some portrait, or some vast countenance of the future--watching the crowd at Hendon. Scores of times I looked away from the machines swinging up past me into the sky to watch the faces of the men and the women that belonged with sky machines; these men and women who stood on the precipice of a new world of air, of sunshine, and of darkness, and were not afraid. One was in a little special civilization for the time being, all the new people in it sorted out from the old ones. One felt a vast light-heartedness all about. One was in the presence of the picked people who had come to see this first vast initiative of man toward Space, toward the stars, the people who had waited for four thousand years to see it; to see at last Little Man (as it would seem to God) in this his first clumsy, beautiful childlike tottering up the sky. One was with the people on the planet who were the first to see the practical, personal value, the market value, of all these huge idle fields of air that go with planets. They were the first people to feel identified with the air, to have courage for the air, the lovers of initiative, the men and women that one felt might really get a new world if they wanted one and who would know what to do with it when they got it. * * * * * The other day in London near Charing Cross, as the crowds were streaming down the Strand, a heavy box joggled off over the end of a dray, crashed to the pavement, flew open and sent twenty-four hundred pennies rolling under the feet of the men and of the women and of the boys along the street. Traffic was stopped and a thousand men and women and boys began picking the pennies up. They all crowded up around the dray and put the pennies in the box. The next day the brewer to whom the pennies belonged had a letter in the _Times_ saying that not one of the twenty-four hundred pennies was missing. He closed his letter with a few moral remarks, announced that he had sent the twenty-four hundred pennies as a kind of tribute to people--to anybody Who Happened Along the Strand--to a Foundling Hospital. * * * * * The man who told me this (it was at a business men's dinner), told it because he knew I was trying to believe pleasant things about human nature. He thought he ought to encourage me. I will not record the conversation, I merely record my humble opinion. I think it would have been better to have had just a few of those pennies in the Strand say seven or eight missing. On Broadway probably eleven or twelve out of twenty-four hundred would have been missing--I hope. And I am not unhopeful about England, or about the Strand. There are two ways to get relief from this story. First, the brewer lied. There were fewer pennies stolen than he would have thought, and when he figured it out and found just a few pennies between him and a good story, he put the pennies in. And so the dear little foundlings got them--the letter in the _Times_ said. They were presented to them, as it were, by the Good Little Boys in the Strand. Second, somebody else put the pennies in, some person standing by with a sense of humour, who knew the letters that people write to the _Times_ and the kind, serious, grave way English people read them. He put the pennies grimly in at one end, then he waited grimly for the letter in the _Times_ to come out at the other. Either of these theories would work very well and let the crowd off. But if they are disproved to me, I have one more to fall back upon. If the story is true and not a soul in that memorable crowd on that memorable day stole a penny, it was because they had all, as it happened in that particular crowd, stolen their pennies before, and got over it. It would seem a great pity if there had not been some one boy with enough initiative in him, enough faculty for moral experiment, to try stealing a penny just once, to see what it would be like. The same boy would have seen at once what it was like, tried feeling ashamed of it promptly, and would never have had to bother to do it again. He would have felt that penny burning in his pocket past cash drawers, past banks, past bonds, until he became President of the United States. At all events the last thing that I would be willing to believe is that either America or England would be capable of producing a chance crowd in the street that out of sheer laziness or moral thoughtlessness would not be able to work up at least one boy in it who would have a sudden flash of imagination about a penny rolling around a man's leg--if he picked it up and--did not put it in the box. The crowd in the Strand, of course, like any other real crowd, was a stew of development, a huge laboratory of people. All stages of experience were in it. Some of the people in the crowd that day had a new refreshing thought, when they saw those pennies rolling around everybody. They thought they would try and see what stealing a penny was like. Then they did it. Others in the crowd thought of stealing a penny too, and then they had still another thought. They thought of not stealing it. And this second thought interested them more. Others did not think of stealing a penny at all because they had thought of it so often before had got used to it and had got used to dismissing it. Others thought of stealing a penny and then they thought how ashamed they were of having thought of it. Others looked thoughtfully at the pennies and thought they would wait for guineas. But whatever it was or may have been that was taking place in that crowd that day--they all thought. And after all what is really important to a nation is that the people in it--any chance crowd in a street in it should think. I confess I care very little one way or the other about the pennies being saved, or about the brewer's little touch of moral poetry, his idea that this particular crowd was solid Sunday-school from one end to the other, all through. Whether it was a crowd that thought of stealing a penny and did or did not, if the pennies rolling around among their feet made them think, made them experiment, played upon the initiative, the individuality or invention in them, the personal self-control, the social responsibility in them, it was a crowd to be proud of. And I am glad, for one, that the box of pennies was dumped in the street. I would like to see shillings tried next time. Then guineas might be used. A box of guineas dumped in the street would do more good than a box of pennies because there are many people who would think more with the guineas rolling around out of sight around a man's legs than they would with a penny's doing it. In this way a box of guineas would do more good. * * * * * Thousands of men and women that we have sent to India from this Western World have been trying with Bibles, and good deeds, and kind faces, and Sunday-schools to get the Hindoos to believe that it would not be a sin to kill the rats and stop the bubonic plague. Nothing came of it. In due time General Booth-Tucker appeared on the scene. He came too, of course, with a Bible and with his kind face like the others, and of course, too, he went to Sunday-school regularly. And while he was watching the bubonic plague sweeping up cities, he tried too, like the others, to tell the people about a God who would not be displeased if they killed the rats and stopped the plague. But he could not convince anybody, or at best a few here and there. The next thing that was known about General Booth-Tucker's work in India was, that he had (still with his Bible, of course, and with his kind look) slipped away and established in the south of France a factory for the manufacture of gloves. He then returned to his poor superstitious people in India who would not believe him, and told them that he knew and knew absolutely that they would not be punished for killing the rats, that the rats were not sacred, and that he could prove it. He offered the people so much apiece for the skins of the rats. The poorest and most desperate of the natives then began killing the rats secretly and bringing in the skins. They waited for the wrath of Heaven to fall upon them. Nothing happened, then they told others. The others are telling everybody. General Booth-Tucker's factory to-day in the south of France is very busy making money for the Salvation Army, turning out Christian gloves for the West and turning out Christians or the beginnings of Christians for the East, and the ancient, obstinate theological idea of the holiness of the rats which the Hindoos have had is being ceaselessly, happily, and stupendously, all day and all night, disproved. Incidentally the little religious glove factory of General Booth-Tucker's in the south of France is giving India the first serious and fair chance it has ever had to stop being a pest house on the world, and to bring the bubonic plague with its threat at a planet to an end. General Booth-Tucker's Bible was just like anybody else's Bible. But there must have been something about the way he read his Bible that made him think of things. And there must have been something about his kind look. He looked kindly at something in particular, and he was determined to make that something in particular do. He had the rats, and he had the gloves, and he had the Hindoo's--and he made them do, and before he knew it (I doubt if he knows it now) he became a saviour or inventor. In the big, desolate, darkened heart of a nation he had wedged in a God. * * * * * I wonder if General Booth-Tucker--that is, the original, very small edition of General Booth-Tucker--had been in that memorable crowd, that memorable day in the Strand when nobody (with a report that was heard around the world) stole a penny--I wonder if General Booth-Tucker would have been A Very Good Little Boy. One of the pennies might have been missing. I have no prejudice against the Very Good Little Boy. It is not his goodness that is what is the matter with him. But I am very much afraid that if there were any way of getting all the facts, it would not be hard to prove categorically that what has been holding the world back the last twenty-five years in its religious ideals, its business ethics, its liberty, candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering, is the Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at first and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he becomes a grown-up or the moment he sits on committees with his quiet, careful, snug, proper fear of experiment, of bold initiative, his disease of never running a risk, his moral anæmia, he blocks all progress in churches, in legislatures, in directors' meetings, in trades unions, in slums and May-fairs. One sees The Good Little Boys weighing down everything the moment they are grown up. They have all been brought up each with his one faint, polite little hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy of Never Making a Mistake. If I had been given the appointment and were about to set to work to-morrow morning to make a new world, I would begin by getting together all the people in this one that I knew, or had noticed anywhere, who seemed to have in them the spirit of experiment. Any boy or girl or man or woman that I had seen having the curiosity to try the different kinds and different sizes of right and wrong, or that I had seen boldly and faithfully experimenting with the beautiful and the ugly so that they really knew about them for themselves--would be let in. I would put these people for a time in a place by themselves where the people who want to keep them from trying or learning, could not get at them. Then I would let them try. I would put the humdrum people in another place by themselves and let them humdrum, the respectable people by themselves and let them respectabilize. Then after my try-world had tried, and got well started and the people in it had finished off some things and knew what they wanted, I would allow the humdrums and the respectabilities to be let in--to do what they were told. Doing what they are told is what they like. So they would be happy. Of course doing what they are told is what is the matter with them. But what is the matter with them would be useful. And everybody would be happy. * * * * * When the Titanic went down a little while ago and those few quiet men on deck began their duty in that soft, gracious moonlit night, of sorting out the people who should die from the people who should live--if one was a woman one could live. If one was a man one could die. No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible or endurable one that could have been made. But if God himself could have made the division or some super-man ship's officer who could have represented God, could have made it, it is not hard to believe that a less superficial, a more profound and human difference between people would have been used in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die than a difference in organs of reproduction. The women were saved first because the men were men and because it was the way the men felt. It expressed the men who were on the deck that night that the women should be saved first; it was the last chance they had to express themselves like men and they wanted to do it. But if God himself could have made the division with the immediate and conclusive knowledge of who everybody was, of what they really were in their hearts, and of what they and their children and their children's children would do for the world if they lived no one would have quarrelled with God for making what would have seemed at the moment, no doubt, very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking discriminations in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die. Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting from the point of view of history and of the race and from the point of view of making a kind of world where _Titanic_ disasters could not happen, would have chosen on the deck of the _Titanic_ that night, very much the way God would. From the point of view of Man there would have been no discrimination in favour of a woman because she was a woman. The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats heard coming up out of the sea that night might have been the cry of the man who had invented a ship that could not sink. There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a woman sinking in the sea who would not have had this man saved before a woman. If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are the people in this world that we should want to have saved first, that we would want to have taken to the life-boats and saved first at sea? The women who are with child. And the men who are about to have ideas. And the men who man the boats for them, who in God's name and in the name of a world protect its women who are with child, and its men who are about to have ideas. The world is different from the _Titanic_. We do not need to line up our immortal fellow human beings, sort them out in a minute on a world and say to them, "Go here and die!" "Go there and live!" We are able to spend on a world at least an average of thirty-five years apiece on all these immortal human beings we are with, in seeing what they are like, in guessing on what they are for and on their relative value, and in deciding where they belong and what a world can do with them. We ought to do better in saving people on a world. We have more time to think. What would we try to do if we took the time to think? Would there be any way of fixing upon an order for saving people on a world? What would be the most noble, the most universal, the most Godlike and democratic schedule for souls to be saved on--on a world? I think the man that would save the most other people should be saved first. It would not be democratic to save an ordinary man, a man who could just save himself, just think for himself, when saving the man next to him instead would be saving a man who would save a thousand ordinary men, or men who have gifts for thinking only of themselves. Of course one man who thinks merely of himself is as good as another man who thinks merely of himself, but from the point of view of a democracy every common man has an inalienable right--the right to have the man who saves common men saved first. And the moment we get in this world, our first democracy, the moment the common man really believes in democracy, this aristocracy or people who save others (the common man himself will see to it) will be saved first. He will make mistakes in applying the principle of democracy, that is in collecting his aristocracies, his strategic men, his linchpins of society, but he will believe in the principle all through. It will be not merely in his brain, but in his instincts, in his unconscious hero-worship, in his sinews and his bones, and it will stir in his blood, that some men should be saved before others. But if the world is not a _Titanic_, and if we have on the average thirty-five years apiece to decide about men on a world and put them where they belong, it might not be amiss to try to unite for the time being on a few fundamental principles. What would seem to us to be a few fundamental principles for the act of world-assimilation, that vast, slow, unconscious crowd-process, that peristaltic action of society of gathering up and stowing away men--all these little numberless cells of humanity where they belong? No one cell can have much to say about it. But we can watch. And as we watch it seems to us that men may be said to be dividing themselves roughly and flowingly at all times into three great streams or classes. They are either Inventors, or they are Artists, or they are Hewers. Of course in classifying men it is necessary to bear in mind that their getting out of their classifications is what the classifications are for. And it is also necessary to bear in mind that men can only be classified with regard to their emphasis and may belong in one class in regard to one thing and in another class with regard to another, but in any particular place, or at any particular time a man is doing a thing in this world, he is probably for the time being, while he is doing it, doing it as an Inventor (or genius), as an Artist (or organizer), or as a Hewer. Most men, it must be said, settle down in their classifications. They are very apt to decide for life whether they are Inventors or Artists or Hewers. But as has been said before, being on a world and not on a _Titanic_, we have time to think. On what principles could we make out a schedule or inventory of human nature, and decide on world-values in men? When I was a boy I played in the hollow of a great butternut tree--the one my mother was married under. When I was in college I used to go back to it. I used to wonder a little that it was still there. When we had all grown up we all came back and got together under it one happy day and there it still stood, its great arms from out of the sky bent over lovers and over children on its little island, its wide river singing round it, still that glorious old hollow in it, full of dreams and childhood and mystery, and that old sudden sunshine in it through the knots like portholes ... then we stood there all of us together. And the mother watched her daughter married under it. I can remember many days standing beneath it as a small boy (my small insides full of butternuts, a thousand more butternuts up on the tree), and I used to look up in its branches and wonder about it, wonder how it could keep on so with its butternuts and with its leaves, with its winters and with its summers, its cool shadows and sunshines, still being a butternut tree, with that huge hollow in it. I have learned since that if a few ounces or whittlings of wood in a tree are chipped out in a ring around it under the bark, cords of wood in the limbs all up across the sky would die in a week--if one chips out those few little ounces of wood. Cords of wood can be taken out of the inside of the tree and it will not mind. It is that little half-inch rim of the tree where the juice runs up to the sun that makes the tree alive or dead. The part that must be saved first and provided for first is that slippery little shiny streak under the bark. One could dig out a huge brush-heap of roots and the tree would live. One could pick off millions of leaves, could cut cords of branches out of it, or one could make long hollows up to the sun, tubes to the sky out of trees, and they would live, if one still managed to save those little delicate pipe lines for Sap, running up and running down, day and night, night and day, between the light in heaven and the darkness in the ground. Perhaps Men are valuable in proportion as it would be difficult to produce promptly other men to perform their functions, or to take their places. If we cut away in society men of genius, leaves, and blossoms, in trees, men who reach down Heaven to us, they grow out again. If we cut away in society great masses of roots, common men who hew out the earth in the ground and get earth ready to be heaved up to the sky--the roots grow out again. But if we cut a little faint rim around it of artists, of inventive men-controllers, of the Sap-conductors, the men who make the Hewers run up to the sky and who make the geniuses come down to the ground, the men who run the tree together, who out of dark earth and bright sunshine build it softly--if we destroy these, this little rim of great men or men who save others, a totally new tree has to be begun. It is the essence of a democracy to acknowledge that some men for the time being are more important in it than others, and that these men, whosoever they are, in whatever order of society they may be--poor, rich, famous, obscure--these men who think for others, who save others and invent others, who make it possible for others to invent themselves, these men shall be saved first. * * * * * One always thinks at first that one would like to make a diagram of human nature. It would be neat and convenient. Then one discovers that no diagram one can make of human nature--unless one makes what might be called a kind of squirming diagram will really work. Then one tries to imagine what a flowing diagram would be like. Then it occurs to one, one has seen a flowing diagram. A Tree is a flowing diagram. So I am putting down on this page for what it may be worth, what I have called A Family Tree of Folks. _Read across_: =INVENTORS= =ARTISTS= =HEWERS= Inventors Organizers Labourers Imagination Applied Imagination Tool or Mechanism Fecundity Control Activity Seer Poet Actor { The Man who Sees the } The Man who Generalizes {General in the Particular} Action The Deeper Permanent {The Immediate Significance} Hewing Significance { or Meaning } Light Applied Light or Heat Applied Heat or Motion Stevenson and Wall James J. Hill Railway Hands Creating Creative Selecting Hewing The Democrat {The Aristocrat or} The Crowd { Crowdman } Gods Heroes Men Centrifugal Power Equilibrium Centripetal Power The Whirl-Out People The Centre People The Whirl-In People Alexander Graham Bell Telephone-Vail Hands Architect Contractor Carpenter Genius Artist Workmen Columbus Columbus Isabella and the sailors The Prospector The Engineer }Scoopers, Grabbers }(in mind or body), }Hewers David the poet David the king David the soldier Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare CHAPTER XVIII THE MAN WHO PULLS THE WORLD TOGETHER The typical mighty man or man of valour in our modern life is the Organizer or Artist. If a man has succeeded in being a great organizer, it is because he has succeeded in organizing himself. A man who has organized himself is a man who has built a personality. The main fact about a man who has succeeded in being an organized man or personality is, that he has ordered himself around. Naturally, when other people have to be ordered around, being full-head-on in the habit of ordering, even ordering himself, the hardest feat of all, he is the man who has to be picked out to order other people. As a rule the man who orders himself around successfully, who makes his whole nature or all parts of himself work together, does it because he takes pains to find out who he is and what he is like. If he orders other men successfully and makes them work together it is because he knows what they are like. A man knows what other people are like and bow they feel by having times of being a little like them and by being a big, latent all-possible, all-round kind of man. Leadership follows. Modern business consists in getting Inventors' minds and Hewers' minds to work together. The ruler of modern business is the man who by experience or imagination is half an Inventor himself, and half a Hewer himself. He knows how inventing feels and how hewing feels. He has a southern exposure toward Hewers and makes Hewers feel identified with him. He has what might be called an eastern exposure toward men of genius, understands the inventive temperament, has the kind of personality that evokes inventiveness in others. Incidentally he has what might be called a northern exposure which keeps him scientific, cool, and close to the spirit of facts. And there has to be something very like a western exposure in him too, a touch of the homely seer, a habit of having reflections and afterglows, a sense of principles, and of the philosophy of men and things. If I were to try to sum up all these qualities in a man and call it by one name, I would call it Glorified-commonsense. If I were asked to define Glorified-commonsense I would say it is a glory which works. It belongs to the man who has a vision or coinage for others because he sees them as they are, and sees how the glory buried in them (_i.e._, the inspiration or source of hard work in them) can be got out. Everywhere that the Artist in business, or Organizer, with his Inventors on one side of him and his Hewers on the other, can be seen to-day competing with the man who has the mere millionaire or owning type of mind, he is crowding him from the market. It is because he understands how Inventors and Hewers feel and what they think and when he turns on Inventors he makes them invent and when he turns on Hewers he makes them hew. The Hewer often thinks because he is rich or because he owns a business, that he can take the place of the artist, but he can be seen every day in every business around us, being passed relentlessly out of power because he cannot make his Inventors invent and cannot make his Hewers hew as well as some other man. The moment his Inventors and Hewers think of him, hear about him, or have any dealing with him--with the mere millionaire, the mere owner kind of person, his Inventors invent as little as they can, and his Hewers hew as softly as they dare. This is called the Modern Industrial Problem. And no man but the artist, the man with the inventing and the hewing spirit both in him, who daily puts the inventing spirit and the hewing spirit together in himself, can get it together in others. Only the man who has kept and saved both the inventing and hewing spirit in himself can save it in others--can be a saviour or artist. CHAPTER XIX THE MAN WHO STANDS BY I have been trying to say in this book that goodness in daily life, or in business, in common world-running or world housekeeping, is by an implacable crowd-process working slowly out of the hands of the wrong men into the hands of the right ones. If this is not true, I am ready to declare myself as a last resort, in favour of a strike. There is only one strike that would be practical. I would declare for a strike of the saviours. * * * * * By a saviour I do not mean a man who stoops down to me and saves me. A saviour to me is a man who stands by and lets me save myself. I am afraid we cannot expect much of men who can bear the idea of being saved by other people, or by saviours who have a stooping feeling. I rejoice daily in the spirit of our modern laboring men, in that holy defiance in their eyes, in the way they will not say "please" to their employers and announce that they will save themselves. The only saviour who can do things for labouring men is the saviour who proposes to do things with them, who stands by, who helps to keep oppressors and stooping saviours off--who sees that they have a fair chance and room to save themselves. I define a true saviour as a man who is trying to save himself. It was because Christ, Savonarola, and John Bunyan were all trying to save themselves that it ever so much as occurred to them to save worlds. Saving a world was the only way to do it. The Cross was Christ's final stand for his own companionableness, his stand for being like other people, for having other people to share his life with, his faith in others and his joy in the world. The world was saved incidentally when Christ died on the Cross. He wanted to live more abundantly--and he had to have certain sorts of people to live more abundantly with. He did not want to live unless he could live more abundantly. We live in a world in which inventors want to die if they cannot invent and in which Hewers want to die if they cannot hew. I am not proud. I am willing to be saved. Any saviour may save me if he wants to, if his saving me is a part of his saving himself. If the inventor saves me and saves us all because he wants to be in a world where an inventor can invent, wants some one to invent to; if the artist saves me because it is part of his worship of God to have me saved and wants to use me every day to rejoice about the world with--if the Hewer comes over and hews out a place in the world for me because he wants to hew, I am willing. All that I demand is, that if a man take the liberty of being a saviour to me that he refrain from stooping, that he come up to me and save me like a man, that he stand before me and tell me that here is something that we, he and I, shoulder to shoulder, can do, something that neither of us could do alone. Then he will fall to with me and I will fall to with him, and we will do it. This is what I mean by a saviour. CHAPTER XX THE STRIKE OF THE SAVIOURS A factory in ---- some ten years ago employed one hundred men. Three of these men were in the office and ninety-seven were hands in the works. To-day this same factory which is doing a very much larger business is still employing one hundred men, but thirty of the men are employed in the office and seventy in the works. Ten years, ago to put it in other words, the factory provided places for one artist or manager and two inventors and places for ninety-seven Hewers. To-day the factory has made room for thirty inventors, one manager and twenty-nine men who spend their entire time in thinking of things that will help the Hewers hew. It has seventy Hewers who are helping the Inventors invent by hewing three times as hard and three times as skilfully or three times as much as without the Inventors to help them, they had dreamed they could hew before. The Artist or Organizer who made this change in the factory found that among the ninety-seven Hewers that were employed a number of Hewers were hewing very poorly, because though hewing was the best they could do, they could not even hew. He found certain others who were hewing poorly because they were not Hewers, but Inventors. These he set to work--some of them inventing in the office. On closer examination the two Inventors in the office were found to be not Inventors at all. One of them was a fine Hewer who liked to hew and who hated inventing and the other was merely a rich Hewer who was an owner in the business who saw suddenly that he would have to stop inventing and stop very soon if he wanted the business to make any more money. There are four things that the Artist has to do with a factory like this before he can make it efficient. Each of these things is an art. One art is the art of compelling the mere owner, the man with the merely hewing mind, to confine himself to the one thing he knows how to do, namely to shovelling, to shovelling his money in when and where he was told it was needed, and to shovelling his money out when it has been made for him. The art of compelling a mere owner to know his place, of keeping him shovelling money in and shovelling money out silently and modestly, consists as a rule in having the Artist or Organizer tell him that unless the business is placed completely in his hands he will not undertake to run it. This is the first art. The second art consists in having an understanding with the inventors that they will invent ways of helping the Hewers hew. The third art consists in having an understanding with the Hewers that they will accept the help of the Inventors and hew with it. The fourth art is the art of representing the consumer with the Hewer and with the Inventor and with the Owner and seeing that he shares in the benefits of all economies and improvements. These are all human arts and turn on the power in a man of being a true artist, of being a man-inventor, a man-developer and a man-mixer, daily taking part of himself and using these parts in putting other men together. These organizers or artists, being the men who see how--are the men who are not afraid. CHAPTER XXI THE LEAGUE OF THE MEN WHO ARE NOT AFRAID If all the unbrained money in the world to-day and the men that go with it could be isolated, could be taken by men of imagination and put in a few ships and sent off to an island in the sea--if New York and London and all the other important places could be left in the hands of the men who have imagination, poor and rich, they would soon have the world in shape to make the men with merely owning minds, the mere owners off on their island, beg to come back to it, to be allowed to have a share in it on any terms. In order to be fair, of course, their island would have to be a furnished island--mines, woods, and everything they could want. It would become a kind of brute wilderness or desert in twenty-five years. We could, now and then, some of us, take happy little trips, go out and look them over on their little furnished island. It would do us good to watch them--these men with merely owning or holding-on minds, really noticing at last how unimportant they are. But it is not necessary to resort to a furnished island as a device, as a mirror for making mere millionaires see themselves. This is a thing that could be done for millionaires now, most of them, here just where they are. All that is necessary is to have the brains of the world so organized that the millionaires who expect merely because they are millionaires to be run after by brains, cannot get any brains to run after them. I am in favour of organizing the brains of the world into a trades union. One of the next things that is going to happen is that the managing and creating minds of the world to-day are going to organize, are going to see suddenly their real power and use it. The brains are about to have, as labour and capital already have, a class consciousness. I would not claim that there is going to be an international strike of the brains of the world, but it will not be long before the managing class as a class will be organized so that they can strike if they want to. The Artists or Organizers and Managers of business will not need probably, in order to accomplish their purpose, to strike against the uncreative millionaires. They will make a stand (which the best of them have already made now) for the balance of power in any business that they furnish their brains to. The brains that create the profits for the owners and that create the labour for the labourers, will make terms for their brains and will withhold their brains if necessary to this end. But it is far more likely that they will accomplish their purpose sooner by using their brains for the millionaires and for the labourers--by coöperating with the millionaires and labourers than they will by striking against them or keeping their brains back. They are in a position to make the millionaires see how little money they can make without them even in a few days. They will let them try. A very little trying will prove it. Where hand labour would have to strike for weeks and months to prove its value, brain labour would have to strike hours and days. This is what is going to be done in modern business in one business at a time, the brains insisting in each firm upon full control. Then, of course, the firms that have the brains in most full control will drive the firms in which brains are in less control out of competition. Then brains will spread from one business to another. The Managers, Artists, and Organizers of the world will have formed at last a Brain Syndicate, and they will put themselves in a position to determine in their own interests and in the interests of society at large the terms on which all men--all men who have no brains to put with their money--shall be allowed to have the use of theirs. They will monopolize the brain supply of the world. Then they will act. Under our present régime money hires men; under the régime of the Brain Syndicate men will hire money. Money--_i.e._, saved up or canned labour, is going to be hired by Managers, Organizers, and Engineers with as much discrimination and with as deep a study of its efficiency, as new labour is hired. The millionaires are going to be seen standing with their money bags and their little hats in their hands like office boys asking for positions for their money before the doors of the really serious and important men, the men who toil out the ideas and the ways and the means of carrying out ideas--the men who do the real work of the world, who see things that they want and see how to get them--the men of imagination, the inventors of ideas, organizers of facts, generals and engineers in human nature. It is these men who are going to allow people who merely have thoughtless labour and people who merely have thoughtless money to be let in with them. The world's quarrel with the rich man is not his being a rich man, but his being rich without brains, and its quarrel with the poor labourer is not his being a poor labourer, but his being a poor labourer without brains. The only way that either of these men can have a chance to be of any value is in letting themselves be used by the man who will supply them with what they lack. They will try to get this man to see if he cannot think of some way of getting some good out of them for themselves, and for others. We have a Frederick Taylor for furnishing brains to labour. We are going to have a Frederick Taylor to attend to the brain-supply of millionaires, to idea-outfits for directors. Every big firm is going to have a large group of specialists working on the problem of how to make millionaires--its own particular millionaires think, devising ways of keeping idle and thoughtless capitalists out of the way. If the experts fail in making millionaires think, they may be succeeded by experts in getting rid of them and in finding thoughtful money, possibly made up of many small sums, to take their place. The real question the Artist or Organizer is going to ask about any man with capital will be, "Is it the man who is making the money valuable and important or is it the money that is making this man important for the time being and a little noticeable or important-looking?" The only really serious question we have to face about money to-day is the unimportance of the men who have it. The Hewers or Scoopers, or Grabbers, who have assumed the places of the Artist and the Inventor because they have the money, are about to be crowded over to the silent, modest back seats in directors' meetings. If they want their profits, they must give up their votes. They are going to be snubbed. They are going to beg to be noticed. The preferred stock or voting stock will be kept entirely in the hands of the men of working imagination, of clear-headedness about things that are not quite seen, the things that constitute the true values in any business situation, the men who have the sense of the way things work and of the way they will have to go. Mere millionaires who do not know their place in a great business will be crowded into small ones. They will be confronted by the organized refusal of men with brains to work for their inferiors, to be under control of men of second-rate order. Men with mere owning and grabbing minds will only be able to find men as stupid as they are to invest and manage their money for them. In a really big creative business their only chance will be cash and silence. They will be very glad at last to get in on any terms, if the men of brains will let their money edge into their business without votes and be carried along with it as a favour. It is because things are not like this now, that we have an industrial problem. Managers who have already hired labour as a matter of course are going to hire the kind of capital they like, the kind of capital that thinks and that can work with thinking men. There will gradually evolve a general recognition in business on the part of men who run it and on the part of managers, of the moral or human value of money. The successful manager is no longer going to grab thoughtlessly at any old, idle, foolish pot of money that may be offered to him. He is going to study the man who goes with it, see how he will vote and see whether he knows his place, whether he is a Hewer, for instance, who thinks he is an Inventor. Does he or does he not know which he is, an Inventor, an Artist, or a Hewer? Capitalists will expect as a matter of course to be looked over and to be hired in a great business enterprise as carefully as labourers are being hired now. The moment it is generally realized that the managers of every big modern business have become as particular about letting in the right kind of directors as they have been before about letting in the right kind of labour, we will stop having an upside-down business world. An upside-down business world is one in which any man who has money thinks he can be a director almost anywhere, a world in which on every hand we find managers who are not touching the imagination of the public and getting it to buy, and not touching the imagination of labour and getting it to work, because they are not free to carry out their ideas without submitting them to incompetent and scared owners. The incompetent and scared owners--the men who cannot think--are about to be shut out. Then they will be compelled to hire incompetent and scared managers. Then they will lose their money. Then the world will slip out of their hands. The problem of modern industry is to be not the distribution of the money supply, but the distribution of the man-supply. Money follows men. Free men. Free money. BOOK FIVE GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK TO ANYBODY "_I know that all men ever born are also my brothers.... Limitless leaves too, stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heaped stones, elders, mulleins and poke weed._" _A Child said, "What is grass?" fetching it to me with full hands. How could I answer the Child?_ * * * * * _"I want to trust the sky and the grass! I want to believe the songs I hear from the fenceposts! Why should a maple-bud mislead me?"_ PART ONE NEWS AND LABOUR A big New England factory, not long ago, wanted to get nearer its raw material and moved to Georgia. All the machine considerations, better water-power, cheaper labour, smaller freight bills, and new markets had argued for moving to Georgia. Long rows of new mills were built and thousands of negroes were moved in and thousands of shanties were put up, and the men and the women stood between the wheels. And the wheels turned. There was not a thing that had not been thought of except the men and women that stood between the wheels. The men and women that stood between the wheels were, for the most part, strong and hearty persons and they never looked anxious or abused and did as they were told. And when Saturday night came, crowds of them with their black faces, of the men and of the women, of the boys and girls, might have been seen filing out of the works with their week's wages. Monday morning a few of them dribbled back. There were enough who would come to run three mills. All the others in the long row of mills were silent. Tuesday morning, Number Four started up, Wednesday, Number Five. By Thursday noon they were all going. The same thing happened the week after, and the week after, and the week after that. The management tried everything they could think of with their people, scolding, discharging, making their work harder, making their work easier, paying them less, paying them more, two Baptist ministers and even a little Roman Catholic Church. As long as the negroes saw enough to eat for three days, they would not work. It began to look as if the mills would have to move back to Massachusetts, where people looked anxious and where people felt poor, got up at 5 A.M. Mondays and worked. Suddenly one day, the son of one of the owners, a very new-looking young man who had never seen a business college, and who had run through Harvard almost without looking at a book, and who really did not seem to know or to care anything about anything--except folks--appeared on the scene with orders from his father that he be set to work. The manager could not imagine what to do with him at first, but finally, being a boy who made people like him more than they ought to, he found himself placed in charge of the Company Store. The company owned the village, and the Company Store, which had been treated as a mere necessity in the lonely village, had been located, or rather dumped, at the time, into a building with rows of little house-windows in it, a kind of extra storehouse on the premises. The first thing the young man did was to stove four holes in the building, all along the front and around the corners on the two sides, and put in four big plate-glass windows. The store was mysteriously closed up in front for a few days to do this, and no one could see what was happening, and the negroes slunk around into a back room to buy their meal and molasses. And finally one morning, one Sunday morning, the store opened up bravely and flew open in front. The windows on the right contained three big purple hats with blue feathers, and some pink parasols. The windows on the left were full of white waistcoats, silver-headed canes, patent-leather shoes and other things to live up to. Monday morning more of the mills were running than usual. Later in the week there appeared in the windows melodions, phonographs, big gilt family Bibles, bread machines, sewing machines, and Morris chairs. Only a few hands took their Mondays off after this. All the mills began running all the week. * * * * * Of course there are better things to live for than purple hats and blue feathers, and silver-headed canes, and patent leather shoes. But if people can be got to live six days ahead, or thirty days, or sixty days ahead, instead of three days ahead, by purple hats and blue feathers and white waistcoats, and if it is necessary to use purple hats and blue feathers to start people thinking in months instead of minutes, or to budge them over to where they can have a touch of idealism or of religion or of living beyond the moment, I say for one, with all my heart, "God bless purple hats and blue feathers!" * * * * * The great problem of modern charity, the one society is largely occupied with to-day, is: "What is there that we can possibly do for our millionaires?" The next thing Society is going to do, perhaps, is to design and set up purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires. The moment our millionaires have placed before them something to live for, a few real, live, satisfying ideals, or splendid lasting things they can do, things that everybody else would want to do, and that everybody else would envy them for doing, it will bore them to run a great business merely to make money. They will find it more interesting, harder, and calling for greater genius, to be great and capable employers. When our millionaires once begin to enter into competition with one another in being the greatest and most successful employers of labour on earth, our industrial wars will cease. Millionaires who get as much work out of their employees as they dare, and pay them as little as they can, and who give the public as small values as they dare, and take as much money as they can, only do such stupid, humdrum, conventional things because they are bored, because they cannot really think of anything to live for. Labourers whose daily, hourly occupation consists in seeing how much less work a day than they ought to do, they can do, and how much more money they can get out of their employers than they earn, only do such things because they are tired or bored and discouraged, and because they cannot think of anything that is truly big and fine and worth working for. The industrial question is not an economic question. It is a question of supplying a nation with ideals. It is a problem which only an American National Ideal Supply Company could hope to handle. The very first moment three or four purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires and for labourers have been found and set up in the great show window of the world, the industrial unrest of this century begins to end. * * * * * As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys playing house--marking off rooms--sitting-rooms and bedrooms, with rows of stones on the ground. When I came up they had just taken hold of a big stone they wanted to lift over into line a little. They were tugging on it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for them, and went on with my walk. When I came back after my walk that night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had given up working on their house. And as I looked about, every big stone for yards around--every one that was the right size--seemed subtly out of place. The top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked. They had given up playing house and had played crowbar all day instead. I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, those boys' first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just a little time off for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked! I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch more on a crowbar lifts. I never know figures very well. But I know people and I know that a man with only three day's worth of things ahead to live for does not get one hundredth part of the purchase power on what he is doing that the man gets who works with thirty days ahead of things to live for, all of them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and inspiring him. And I know that the man who does his work with a longer lever still, with thirty or forty years worth' of things he wants, all crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things so easily, so even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many of us sometimes to be a new size and a new kind of man. * * * * * The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee, knows how to give him something or suggest something in his life that will make him want to live twenty times as much, it would not only be cheaper, but it would work better than paying him twice as much wages. Efficiency is based on news. Put before a man's life twenty times as much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least, well--twice as much work. If a man has a big man's thing or object in view, he can do three times as much work. If the little thing he has to do, and keep doing, is seen daily by him as a part of a big thing, the power and drive of the big thing is in it, the little thing becomes the big thing, seems big while he is doing it every minute. It makes it easier to do it because it seems big. The little man becomes a big man. From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern business who is the man of economic sense. The employer who can put out ideals in front of his people, who can make his people efficient with the least expense, is the employer who has the most economic sense. The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives, to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace in the twentieth-century business world. Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers or, at least, in the great managers of employers? You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop. As you move down the long aisles of candy machines you hear the clock strike eleven. Suddenly music starts up all around you and before your eyes four hundred girls swing off into each other's arms. They dance between their machines five minutes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work. You see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-meats with flushed and glowing cheeks. Is this sentiment or is it cold businesslike efficiency? The more sentiment there is in it, I think, the more efficient it is and the better it works. "Business is not business." One need not quarrel about words, but certainly, whatever else business is, it is not business. It would be closer to the facts to call business an art or a religion, a kind of homely, inspired, applied piety, based upon gifts in men which are essentially religious gifts; the power of communion in the human heart, the genius for cultivating companionship, of getting people to understand you and understand one another and do team work. The bed-rock, the hard pan of business success lies in the fundamental, daily conviction--the personal habit in a man of looking upon business as a hard, accurate, closely studied, shrewd human art, a science of mutual expectation. I am not saying that I would favour all employers of young women having them, to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock, swing off into each other's arms and dance for five minutes. The value of the dance in this particular case was that the Firm thought of the dancing itself and was always doing things like it, that everybody knew that the Firm, up in its glass office, felt glad, joined in the dance in spirit, enjoyed seeing the girls caught up for five minutes in the joy and swing of a big happy world full of sunshine and music outside, full of buoyant and gentle things, of ideals around them which belonged to them and of which they and their lives were a part. When we admit that business success to-day turns or is beginning to turn on a man's power of getting work out of people, we admit that a man's power of getting work out of people, his business efficiency, turns on his power of supplying his people with ideals. Ideals are news. You come on a man who thinks he is out of breath and that he cannot possibly run. You happen to be able to tell him that some dynamite in the quarry across the road is going to blow the side of the hill out in forty-five seconds and he will run like a gazelle. You tell a man the news, the true news that his employees are literally and honestly finding increased pay or promotion, either in their own establishment or elsewhere for every man they employ, as fast as he makes himself fit, and you have created a man three times his own size before your own eyes, all in a minute. And he begins working for you like a man three times his own size, and not because he is getting more for it, but because he suddenly believes in you, suddenly believes in the world and in the human race he belongs to. To make a man work, say something to him or do something to him which will make him swing his hat for humanity, and give three cheers (like a meeting of workmen the other day): "Three cheers for God!" There is a well-known firm in England which has the best labour of its kind in the world, because the moment the Firm finds that a man's skill has reached the uttermost point in his work, where it would be to the Firm's immediate interests to keep him and where the Firm could keep on making money out of him and where the man could not keep on growing, they have a way of stepping up to such a man (and such things happen every few days), and telling him that he ought to go elsewhere, finding him a better place and sending him to it. This is a regular system and highly organized. The factory is known or looked upon as a big family or school. There are hundreds of young men and young women who, in order to get in and get started, and merely be on the premises of such a factory, would offer to work for the firm for nothing. The Factory, to them, is like a great Gate on the World. It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on the World. And ideals are news. Ideals are news to a man about himself. News to a man about himself and about what he can be, is gospel. And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about human nature to do things like this, men who can tell people news about themselves, all day, every day, all the week, like a church--let such a factory, I say, for one, have a steeple with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be counted with the other churches! People have a fashion of speaking of a man's ideals in a kind of weak, pale way, as if ideals were clouds, done in water-colour by schoolgirls, as if they were pretty, innocent things, instead of being fierce, splendid, terrific energies, victorious, irrevocable in human history, trampling the earth like unicorns, breathing wonder, deaths, births upon the world, carrying everything before them, everywhere they go. These are ideals! This may not be the way ideals work in a moment or in a year, but it is the way they work in history, and it is the way they make a man feel when he is working on them. It is what they are for, to make him feel like this, when he is working on them. With the men who are most alive and who live the longest, the men who live farther ahead and think in longer periods of time, the energies in ideals function as an everyday matter of course. I wish people would speak oftener of a man's motives, what he lives for, as his motive powers. They generally speak of motives in a man as if they were a mere kind of dead chart or spiritual geography in him, or clock-hand on him or map of his soul. The motives and desires in a man are the motors or engines in him, the central power house in a man, the thing in him that makes him go. All a man has to do to live suddenly and unexpectedly a big life is to have suddenly a big motive. Anybody who has ever tried, for five minutes, a big motive, ever tried working a little happiness for other people into what he is doing for himself, for instance, if he stopped to think about it and how it worked and how happy it made him himself, would never do anything in any other way all his life. It is the big motives that are efficient. PART TWO NEWS AND MONEY I think it was Sir William Lever who remarked (but I have heard in the last two years so many pearls dropped from the lips of millionaires that I am not quite sure) that the way to tell a millionaire, when one saw one, was by his lack of ready money. He added that perhaps a surer way of knowing a millionaire, when one saw one, was by his lack of ideas. My own experience is that neither of these ways works as well as it used to. I very often meet a man now--a real live millionaire, no one would think it of. One of them--one of the last ones--telegraphed me from down in the country one morning, swung up to London on a quick train, cooped me up with him at a little corner table in his hotel, and gave me more ideas in two hours than I had had in a week. I came away very curious about him--whoever he was. Not many days afterward I found myself motoring up a long, slow hill, full of wind and heather, and there in a stately park with all his treetops around him, and his own blue sky, in a big, beautiful, serene room, I saw him again. He began at once, "Do you think Christ would have approved of my house?" His five grown sons were sitting around him but he spoke vividly and directly and like a child, and as if he had just brushed sixty years away, and could, any time. I said I did not think it fair to Christ, two thousand years off, to ask what he would have thought of a house like his, now. The only fair thing to do would be to ask what Christ would think if He were living here to-day. "Well, suppose He had motored over here with you this afternoon from ---- Manor, and spent last night with you there, and talked with you and with ---- and had seen the pictures, and the great music room and wandered through the gardens, and suppose that then He had come through on his way up, all those two miles of slums down in ---- seen all those poor, driven, crowded people, and had finally come up here with you to this big, still, restful place two thousand people could live in, and which I keep all to myself. You don't really mean to say, do you, that He would approve of my living in a house like this?" I said that I did not think that Christ would be tipped over by a house or lose his bearings with a human soul because he lived in a park. I thought He would look him straight in the eyes. "But Christ said, 'He that loseth his life shall save it!'" "Yes, but He did not intend it as a mere remark about people's houses." It did not seem to me that Christ meant simply giving up to other people easy and ordinary things like houses or like money, but that He meant giving up to others our motives, giving up the deepest, hardest things in us, our very selves to other people. "And so you really think that if Christ came and looked at this house and looked at me in it, He would not mind?" "I do not know. I think that after He had looked at your house He would go down and look at your factory, possibly. How many men do you employ?" "Sixteen hundred." "I think He would look at them, the sixteen hundred men, and then He would move about a little. Very likely He would look at their wives and the little children." He thought a moment. I could see that he was not as afraid of having Christ see the factory as he was of having Him see the house. I was not quite sure but I thought there was a little faint gleam in his eye when I mentioned the factory. "What do you make?" I asked. He named something that everybody knows. Then I remembered suddenly who he was. He was one of the men I had first been told about in England, and the name had slipped from me. He had managed to do and do together the three things one goes about looking for everywhere in business--what might be called the Three R's of great business (though not necessarily R's). (1) He had raised the wages of his employees. (2) He had reduced prices to consumers. (3) He had reduced his proportion of profit and raised the income of the works, by inventing new classes of customers, and increasing the volume of the business. He had found himself, one day, as most men do, sooner or later, with a demand for wages that he could not pay. At first he told the men he could not pay them more, said that he would have to close the works if he did. He was a very busy man to be confronted with a crisis like this. The market was trouble enough. One morning, when he was up early, and the house was all still and he was sitting alone with himself, the thought slipped into his mind that there had been several times before in his life when he had sat thinking about certain things that could not be done. And then he had got up from thinking they could not be done and gone out and done them. He wondered if he could not get up and go out and do this one. As he sat in the stillness with a clear road before his mind and not a soul in the world up, the thought occurred to him, with not a thing in sight to stop it, that he had not really trained himself to be quite such an expert in raising wages as he had in some other things. Perhaps he did not know about raising wages. Perhaps if he concentrated his imagination as much on getting higher wages for his workmen as he had in those early days years before on making over all his obstinate raw material into the best cases of ---- on earth, he might find it possible to get more wages for his men by persuading them to earn more and by getting their coöperation in finding ways to earn more. As he sat in the stillness, gradually (perhaps it was the stillness that did it) the idea grew on him. He made up his mind to see what would happen if he worked as hard at paying higher wages for three months as he had for three years at making raw material into cases of the best----on earth. Then things began happening every day. One of the most important happened to him. He found that higher wages were as interesting a thing to work on as any other raw material had ever been. He found that a cheap workman as raw material to make a high-priced workman out of was as interesting as a case of----. A year or so after this, there was a strike (in his particular industry) of all the workmen in England. They struck to be paid the wages his men were paid. He had been able to do three things he thought he thought he could not do. He had succeeded in doing the first, in raising the wages of his employees, by thinking up original ways of expressing himself to them, and of getting them to believe in him and of making them want to work a third harder. At the same time he succeeded in doing the second, in reducing the prices to consumers, by inventing new by-products out of waste. He had succeeded in doing the third, in reducing his per cent. of profits and increasing his income from the works at the same time, by thinking up ways of creating new habits and new needs in his customers. He had fulfilled, as it seems, the three requisites of a great business career. He had created new workmen, invented new things for men and women to want, and had then created some new men and women who could want them. Incidentally all the while, day by day, while he was doing these things, he had distributed a large and more or less unexpected sum of money among all these three classes of people. Some of this extra money went to his workmen, and some to himself, and some to his customers, but it was largely spent, of course, in getting business for other manufacturers and in getting people to buy all over England, from other manufacturers, things that such people as they had never been able before to afford to buy. * * * * * All these things that I have been saying and which I have duly confided to the reader flashed through my mind as I stood with my back to the fire, realizing suddenly that the man who had done them was the man with whom I was talking. Possibly some little thing was said. I do not remember what. The next thing I knew was that, with his five grown sons around him, he returned to his attack on his house. He said some days he was glad it was so far away. He did not want his workmen to see it. He did not go to the mill often in his motor-car, not when he could help it. I said that I thought that a man who was doing extraordinary things for other people, things that other men could not get time or strength or freedom or boldness of mind or initiative to do, that any particular thing he could have that gave him any advantage or immunity for doing the extraordinary things better, that would give him more of a chance to give other people a chance, that the other people, if they were in their senses, would insist upon his having these things. "I think there are hundreds of men in my mill who think that they ought to have my motor-car and three or four rooms in this house." "Are they the most efficient ones?" "No." If a man gives over to other people his deepest motives, and if he really identifies himself--the very inside of himself with them and treats their interests as his interests, the more money he has, the more people like it. "Take me, for instance," I said. "I have hoped every minute since I knew you, that you were a prosperous man. I saw the house and looked around in the park as I motored up with joy. And when I came to the big gate I wanted to give three cheers! I wish you had stock in the Meat Trust in America, that you could pierce your way like a microbe into the vitals, into the inside of the Meat Trust in my own country, make a stand in a Directors' Meeting for ninety million people over there, say your say for them, vote your stock for them, say how you want a Meat Trust you belong to, to behave, how you want it to be a big, serious, business institution and not a humdrum, mechanical-minded hold-up anybody could think of--in charge of a few uninteresting, inglorious men--men nobody really cares to know and that nobody wants to be like ... when I think of what a man like you with money can do ...! "Am I not tired every day, are you not tired, yourself, of going about everywhere and seeing money in the hands of all these second-class, socially feeble-minded men, of seeing columns in the papers of what such men think, of having college presidents, great universities, domes, churches and thousands of steeples all deferring to them and bowing to them, and all the superior, live, interested people ringing their door bells for their money waiting outside on benches for what they think?" I do not believe that Christ came into the world, two thousand years ago, to say that only the men who have minds of the second class, men who are not far-sighted enough in business to be decently unselfish in this world, should be allowed to have control of the money and of the peoples' means of living in it. We are living in an age of big machines and big, inevitable aggregations, and to say in an age like this, and above all, to get it out of a Bible, or put it into a hymn book or make a religion of it, that all the first class minds of the world--the men who see far enough to be unselfish, should give over their money to second-class men, is the most monstrous, most unbelieving, unfaithful, unbiblical, irreligious thing a world can be guilty of. The one thing that is now the matter with money, is that the second-class people have most of it. "What would happen if we applied asceticism or a tired, discouraged unbelief to having children that we do to having pounds and pence and dollars and cents? You would not stand for that would you?" I looked at his five sons. "Suppose all the good families of to-day were to take the ground that having children is a self-indulgence unworthy of good people; suppose the good people leave having children in this world almost entirely to bad ones? "This is what has been happening to money. "Unbelief in money is unbelief in the spirit. It is paying too much attention to wealth to say that one must or that one must not have it." I cannot recall precisely what was said after this in that long evening talk of ours but what I tried to say perhaps might have been something like this: The essence of the New Testament seems to be the emphasis of a man's spirit with or without money. Whether a man should be rich or get out of being rich and earn the right to be poor (which some very true and big men, artists and inventors in this world will always prefer) turns on a man's temperament. If a man has a money genius and can so handle money that he can make money, and if he can, at the same time, and all in one bargain, express his own spirit, if he can free the spirits of other men with money and express his religion in it, he should be ostracized by all thoughtful, Christian people, if in the desperate crisis of an age like this, he tries to get out of being rich. The one thing a man can be said to be for in this world, is to express the goodness--the religion in him, in something, and if he is not the kind of man who can express his religion in money and in employing labour, then let him find something--say music or radium or painting in which he can. It is this bounding off in a world, this making a bare spot in life and saying "This is not God, this cannot be God!"--it is this alone that is sacriligious. * * * * * It may be that I am merely speaking for myself, but I did discover a man on Fleet Street the other day who quite agreed with me apparently, that if the thing a man has in him is religion he can put it up or express it in almost anything. This man had tried to express his idea in a window. He had done a Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," in sugar--a kind of bas-relief in sugar. I do not claim that this kind of foolish, helpless caricature of a great spiritual truth filled me with a great reverence or that it does now. But it did make me think how things were. If sugar with this man, like money with a banker, was the one logical thing the man had to express his religion in, or if what he had had to express had been really true and fine, or if there had been a true or fine or great man to express, I do not doubt sugar could have been made to do it. One single man with enough money and enough religions skill in human nature, who would get into the Sugar Trust with some good, fighting, voting stock, who could make the Sugar Trust do as it would be done by, would make over American industry in twenty years. He would have thrown up as on a high mountain, before all American men, one great specimen, enviable business. He would have revealed as in a kind of deep, sober apocalypse, American business to itself. He would have revealed American business as a new national art form, as an expression of the practical religion, the genius for real things, that is our real modern temperament in America and the real modern temperament in all the nations. Of course it may not need to be done precisely with the Sugar Trust. The Meat Trust might do it first, or the Steel Trust. But it will be done. Then the Golden Rule, one great Golden Rule-machine having been installed in our trust that knew the most, and was most known, it could be installed in the others. Religion can be expressed much better to-day in a stock-holder's meeting than it can in a prayer-meeting. Charles Cabot, of Boston, walked in quietly to the Stock-holder's Meeting of the Steel Trust one day and with a little touch of money--$2,900 in one hand, and a copy of the _American Magazine_ in the other, made (with $2,900) $1,468,000,000 do right. PART THREE NEWS AND GOVERNMENT CHAPTER I OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS Every now and then when I am in London (at the instigation of some business man who takes the time off to belong to it), I drop into a pleasant but other-worldly and absent-minded place called the House of Commons. I sit in the windows in the smoking-room and watch the faces of the members all about me and watch the steamships, strangely, softly, suddenly--Shakespeare and Pepys, outside on the river, slip gravely by under glass. Or I go in and sit down under the gallery, face to face with the Speaker, looking across those profiles of world-makers in their seats; and I watch and listen in the House itself. There is a kind of pleasant, convenient, appropriate hush upon the world there. Wisdom. The decorous, orderly machinery of knowledge rolls over one--one listens to It, to the soft clatter of the endless belt of words. Every now and then one sees a member in the middle of a speech, or possibly in the middle of a sentence, slip up quietly and take a look (under glass) at The People, or he uses a microscope, perhaps, or a reading glass on The People, Mr. Bonar Law's, Mr. Lloyd George's, Ramsay MacDonald's, Will Crook's, or somebody's. Then he comes back gravely as if he had got the people attended to now, and finishes what he was saying. It is a very queer feeling one has about the People in the House of Commons. I mean the feeling of their being under glass; they all seem so manageable, so quiet and so remote, a kind of glazed-over picture in still life, of themselves. Every now and then, of course one takes a member seriously when he steps up to the huge showcase of specimen crowds, which members are always referring to in their speeches. But nothing comes of it. The crowds seem very remote there under the glass. One feels like smashing something--getting down to closer terms with them--one longs for a Department Store or a bridge or a 'bus--something that rattles and bangs and is. All the while outside the mighty street--that huge megaphone of the crowd, goes shouting past. One wishes the House would notice it. But no one does. There is always just the House Itself and that hush or ring of silence around it, all England listening, all the little country papers far away with their hands up to their ears and the great serious-minded Dailies, and the witty Weeklies, the stately Monthlies, and Quarterlies all acting as if it mattered.... Even during the coal strike nothing really happened in the House of Commons. There was a sense of the great serious people, of the crowds on Westminster Bridge surging softly through glass outside, but nothing got in. Big Ben boomed down the river, across the pavements, over the hurrying crowds and over all the men and the women, the real business men and women. The only thing about the House that seemed to have anything to do with anybody was Big Ben. Finally one goes up to Harrod's to get relief, or one takes a 'bus, or one tries Trafalgar Square, or one sees if one can really get across the Strand or one does something--almost anything to recall one's self to real life. And then, of course, there is Oxford Street. Almost always after watching the English people express themselves or straining to express themselves in the House of Commons, I try Oxford Street. I know, of course, that as an art-form for expressing a great people, Oxford Street is not all that it should be, but there is certainly something, after all the mooniness and the dim droniness, and lawyer-mindedness in the way the English people express themselves or think that they ought to express themselves in their house of Commons--there is certainly something that makes Oxford Street seem suddenly a fine, free, candid way for a great people to talk! And there is all the gusto, too, the 'busses, the taxies, the hundreds of thousands of men and women saying things and buying things they believe. Taking in the shops on both sides or the street, and taking in the things the people are doing behind the counters, and in the aisles, and up in the office windows three blocks of Oxford Street really express what the English people really want and what they really think and what they believe and put up money on, more than three years of the house of Commons. If I were an Englishman I would rather be elected to walk up and down Oxford Street and read what I saw there than to be elected to a seat in the House of Commons, and I could accomplish more and learn more for a nation, with three blocks of Oxford Street, with what I could gather up and read there, and with what I could resent and believe there, than I could with three years of the House of Commons. I know that anybody, of course, could be elected to walk up and down Oxford Street. But it is enough for me. So I almost always try it after the house of Commons. And when I have taken a little swing down Oxford Street and got the House of Commons out of my system a little, perhaps I go down to the Embankment, and drop into my club. Then I sit in the window and mull. If the English people express themselves and express what they want and what they are bound to have, on Oxford Street and put their money down for it, so much better than they do in the House of Commons, why should they not do it there? Why should elaborate, roundabout, mysterious things like governments, that have to be spoken of in whispers (and that express themselves usually in a kind of lawyer-minded way, in picked and dried words like wills), be looked upon so seriously, and be taken on the whole, as the main reliance the people have, in a great nation, for expressing themselves? Why should not a great people be allowed to say what they are like and to say what they want and what they are bound to get, in the way Oxford Street says things, in a few straight, clean-cut, ordinary words, in long quiet rows of deeds, of buying and selling and acting? Pounds, shillings, and silence. Then on to the next thing. If the House of Commons were more like Oxford Street or even if it had suddenly something of the tone of Oxford Street, if suddenly it were to begin some fine morning to express England the way Oxford Street does, would not one see, in less than three months, new kinds and new sizes of men all over England, wanting to belong to it? Big, powerful, uncompromising, creative men who have no time for twiddling, who never would have dreamed of being tucked away in the house of Commons before, would want to belong to it. In the meantime, of course, the men of England who have empires to express, are not unnaturally expressing them in more simple language like foundries, soap factories around a world, tungsten mines, department stores, banks, subways, railroads for seventy nations, and ships on seven seas, Winnipeg trolleys and little New York skyscrapers. Business men of the more usual or humdrum kind could not do it, but certainly, the first day that business men like these, of the first or world-size class, once find the House of Commons a place they like to be in, once begin expressing the genius of the English people in government as they are already expressing the genius of the English people in owning the earth, in buying and selling, in inventing things and in inventing corporations, the House of Commons will cease to be a bog of words, an abyss of committees, and legislation will begin to be run like a railroad--on a block signal system, rows of things taken up, gone over, and finished. The click of the signal. Then the next thing. I sit in my club and look out of the window and think. Just outside thousands of taxies shooting all these little mighty wills of men across my window, across London, across England, across the world ... the huge, imperious street ... all these men hurling themselves about in it, joining their wills on to telephone wires, to mighty trains and little quiet country roads, hitching up cables to their wills, and ships--hitching up the very clouds over the sea to their wills and running a world--why are not men like these--men who have the street-spirit in them, this motor genius of driving through to what they want, taking seats in the House of Commons? Perhaps Oxford Street is more efficient and more characteristic in expressing the genius and the will of the English people than the House of Commons is because of the way in which the people select the men they want to express them in Oxford Street. It may be that the men the people have selected to be at the top of the nation's law-making are not selected by as skillful, painstaking, or thorough a process as the men who have been selected to be placed at the top of the nation's buying and selling. Possibly the reason the House of Commons does not express the will of the people is, that its members are merely selected in a loose, vague way and by merely counting noses. Possibly, too, the men who are selected by a true, honest, direct, natural selection to be the leaders and to free the energies and steer the work of the people, the men who are selected to lead by being seen and lived with and worked with all day, every day, are better selected men than men who having been voted on on slips of paper, and having been seen in newspaper paragraphs, travel up to London and begin thoughtlessly running a world. The business man drops into the House of Commons after the meeting of his firm in Bond Street, Lombard Street, or Oxford Street and takes a look at it. He sees before him a huge tool or piece of machinery--a body of men intended to work together and to get certain grave, particular, and important things done, that the people want done, and he does not see how a great good-hearted chaos or welter, a kind of chance national Weather of Human Nature like the House of Commons, can get the things done. So he confines himself more and more to business where he loses less time in wondering what other people think or if they think at all, cuts out the work he sees, and does it. He thinks how it would be if things were turned around and if people tried to get expressed in business in the loose way, the thoughtless reverie of voting that they use in trying to get themselves expressed in politics. He thinks the stockholders of the Sunlight Soap Company, Limited, would be considerably alarmed to have the president and superintendent and treasurer and the buyers and salesmen of the company elected at the polls by the people in the county or by popular suffrage. He thinks that thousands of the hands as well as the stockholders would be alarmed too. It does not seem to him that anybody, poor or rich, employer or employee, in matters of grave personal concern, would be willing to trust his interest or would really expect the people, all the people as a whole, to be represented or to get what they wanted, to act definitely and efficiently through the vague generalizations of the polls. Perhaps a natural selection, a dead-earnest rigorous, selection that men work on nine hours a day, an implacable, unremitting process during working hours, of sorting men out (which we call business), is the crowd's most reliable way of registering what it definitely thinks about the men it wants to represent it. Business is the crowd's, big, serious, daily voting in pounds, shillings, and pence--its hour to hour, unceasing, intimate, detailed labour in picking men out, in putting at the top the men it can work with best, the men who most express it, who have the most genius to serve crowds, to reveal to crowds their own minds, and supply to them what they want. As full as it is--like all broad, honest expressions, of human shortcomings and of things that are soon to be stopped, it does remain to be said that business, in a huge, rough way, daily expressing the crowds as far as they have got--the best in them and the worst in them, is, after all, their most faithful and true record, their handwriting. Business is the crowds' autograph--its huge, slow, clumsy signature upon our world. Buying and selling is the life blood of the crowds' thought, its big, brutal daily confiding to us of its view of human life. What do the crowds, poor and rich, really believe about life? Property is the last will and testament of Crowds. The man-sorting that goes on in distributing and producing property is the Crowd's most unremitting, most normal, temperamental way of determining and selecting its most efficient and valuable leaders--its men who can express it, and who can act for it. This is the first reason I would give against letting the people rely on having a House of Commons compel business men to be good. Men who meet now and again during the year, afternoons or evenings, who have been picked out to be at the top of the nation's talking, by a loose absent-minded and illogical paper-process, cannot expect to control men who have been picked out to be at the top of a nation's buying and selling, by a hard-working, closely fitting, logical process--the men that all the people by everything they do, every day, all day, have picked out to represent them. Any chance three blocks of Oxford Street could be relied on to do better. Keeping the polls open once in so often, a few hours, and using hearsay and little slips of paper--anybody dropping in--seems a rather fluttery and uncertain way to pick out the representatives of the people, after one has considered three blocks of Oxford Street. The next thing the crowd is going to do in getting what it wants from business men is to deal directly with the business men themselves and stop feeling, what many people feel partly from habit, perhaps, that the only way the crowd can get to what it wants is to go way over or way back or way around by Robin Hood's barn or the House of Commons. But there is a second reason: The trouble is not merely in the way men who sit in the House of Commons are selected. The real deep-seated trouble with the men who sit in the House of Commons is that they like it. The difficulty (as in the American Congress too) seems to be something in the men themselves. It lies in what might be called, for lack of a better name, perhaps, the Hem and Haw or Parliament Temperament. The dominating type of man in all the world's legislative bodies, for the time being, seems to be the considerer or reconsiderer, the man who dotes on the little and tiddly sides of great problems. The greatness of the problem furnishes, of course, the pleasant, pale glow, the happy sense of importance to a man, and then there is all the jolly littleness of the little things besides--the little things that a little man can make look big by getting them in the way of big ones--a great nation looking on and waiting.... For such a man there always seems to be a certain coziness and hominess in a Legislative Body.... As a seat in the House of Commons not unnaturally--every year it is hemmed or hawed in, gets farther and farther away from the people, it is becoming more and more apparent to the people every year that the Members of their House of Commons as a class are unlikely to do anything of a very striking or important or lasting value in the way of getting business men to be good. The more efficient and practical business men are coming to suspect that the members of the House of Commons, speaking broadly, do not know the will of the people, and that they could not express it in creative, straightforward and affirmative laws if they did. CHAPTER II OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS But it is not only because the members of the House of Commons are selected in a vague way or because they are a vague kind of men, that they fail to represent the people. The third reason against having a House of Commons try to compel business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way position. The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in getting business men to be good, can be best considered, perhaps, by admitting at the outset that a government really is one very real and genuine way a great people may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what they are like and what they want, and that business is another way. Then the question narrows down. Which way of expressing the people is the one that expresses them the most to the point, and which expresses them where their being expressed counts the most? The people have a Government. And the people have Business. What is a Government for? What is Business for? Business is the occupation of finding out and anticipating what the wants of the English people really are and of finding out ways of supplying them. The business men on Oxford Street hire twenty or thirty thousand men and women, keep them at work eight or nine hours a day, five or six days in a week, finding out what the things are that the English people want and reporting on them and supplying them. They are naturally in a strategic position to find out, not only what kinds of things the people want, but to find out, too, just how they want the things placed before them, what kind of storekeepers and manufacturers, salesmen and saleswomen they tolerate, like to deal with and prefer to have prosper. And the business men are not only in the most strategic and competent position to find out what the people who buy want, but to find out too, what the people who sell want. They are in the best position to know, and to know intimately, what the salesmen and saleswomen want and what they want to be and what they want to do or not do. They are in a close and watchful position, too, with regard to the conditions in the factories from which their goods come and with regard to what the employers, stockholders, foremen and workmen in those factories want. What is more to the point, these same business men, when they have once found out just what it is the people want, are the only men who are in a position, all in the same breath, without asking anybody and without arguing with anybody, without meddling or convincing anybody--to get it for them. Finding out what people want and getting it for them is what may be called, controlling business. The question not unnaturally arises with all these business men and their twenty or thirty thousand people working with them, eight or nine hours a day, five or six days a week, in controlling business, why should the members of the House of Commons expect, by taking a few afternoons or evenings off for it, to control business for them? If I were an employee and if what I wanted to do was to improve the conditions of labour in my own calling, I do not think I would want to take the time to wait several months, probably, to convince my member of Parliament, and then wait a few months more for him to convince the other members of Parliament, and then vote his one vote. I would rather deal directly with my employer. If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the attention of my employer himself, as to where he is and as to how he is interrupting what I am doing for him--if I once get his attention and once get him to notice my back, he can get down. No one else can get down for him and no one else, except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him get down. Why should a man bother with T.P.'s _Weekly_ or with Horatio Bottomley or with the _Daily Mail_ or the _Times_, with a score of other people's by-elections all over England to lift his own employer off his back? There is a very simple rule for it. The way to lift one's employer off one's back is to make one's back so efficient that he cannot afford to be on it. The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not persuade my employer to take steps to train me and to make me efficient, himself. And perhaps the second thing I would try to do would be to wake my trades union up, to get my trades union to consent to let me want to try to be efficient and work as hard as I can, or to consent to my employer's hiring engineers to make me efficient. I would try to get my trades union to be interested in hiring itself some special expert like Frederick Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much work with the same strength, making him three times as valuable for his employer and three times as fit and strong for himself. This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer good. I would be so good that he could not afford not being good too. If I were an employer, on the other hand, and understood human nature, and knew enough about psychology to found a great business house and wanted to make my employee good, or make him work three times as hard for me, with three times the normal strength, day by day, and have a normal old age to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the House of Commons to butt in and pension him. It seems to me that I would be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly, and do it with more intimate knowledge of economy than the House of Commons could. And I would not have to convince several hundred men, men from rural counties, how I could improve my factory and get them to let me improve it. I could do it quietly by myself. In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he is. In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the n-th power, in what might be called a kind of larger syndicalism. The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, "We will take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves," is going to say, "We will make ourselves fit to run the factories ourselves." What would please the employers more, give them a general, or national confidence in trying to run business and improve the conditions of work to-day, than to have their employees, suddenly, all over the nation, begin doing their work so well that they would be fit to run the factories? What is true of employers and employees in factories is still more true of the employers and employees in the great retail stores. If there is one thing rather than another the business men and women on Oxford Street, the managers, floor walkers and clerks all up and down the street are really engaged in all day all their lives, it is what might be called a daily nine-hour drill in understanding people. Why should employers and employees like these--experts in human nature--men who make their profession a success by studying human nature, and by working in it daily, call in a few drifting gentlemen from the House of Commons and expect them to work out their human problems better than they can do it? Employers and clerks in retail stores are the two sets of people in all the world most competent to study together the working details of human nature, to act for themselves in self-respecting man-fashion and without whining at a nation. Who that they could hope to deal with and get what they want from, could know more about human nature than they do? Are they not the men of all others, all up and down that little strip of Oxford Street, who devote their entire time to human nature? They are in the daily profession of knowing the soonest and knowing the most about what people are like, and about what people will probably think. They are intimate with their peccadillos in what they want to wear and in what they want to eat; they have learned their likes and dislikes in human nature; they know what they will support and what they will defy in human nature, in clerks, and in stores, and in storekeepers. And these things that they have learned about human nature (in themselves and other people) they have learned not by talking about human nature but by a grim daily doing things with it. These things being so, it would almost seem that these people and people like them were qualified to act, and as they happen to be in the one strategic position, both employers and employees alike, to act and to act for themselves and act directly and act together, it will not be very long, probably, before the nation will be very glad to have them do it. It is likely to be seen very soon (at least by all skilled Labour and all skilled Capital) that running out into the street and crying "Help!" and calling in some third person to settle family difficulties that can be better settled by being faced and thought out in private, is an inefficient and incompetent thing to do. And for the most part it is going to be only in the more superficial, inefficient, thoughtless industry that men, either employers or employed, will be inclined to leave their daily work, run out wildly and drag in a House of Commons to help them to do right. I am only speaking for myself but certainly if I were an employer or an employee, I would not want to wait for an election a year away or to wait for the great engineering problem of compelling my member of Parliament by my one vote to act for me. Perhaps workingmen in England and America are deceived about the value of voting as a means of improving conditions of workingmen. Possibly women are deceived about the value of voting as a means of improving the conditions of working women. Possibly a woman could do more behind a counter or by buying a store than by voting to have some man she has read about in a paper, improve business by talking about it in the House of Commons. * * * * * There is also a kind of program or vision of action one can use as a customer as well as an employer or employee. I might speak for myself. I have about so much money I spend every year in buying things. I have proposed to study with my money every firm on which I spend it. I propose to take away my trade from the firm that does the least as it should and give it to the firm that does the most as it should. I will vote with my entire income and with every penny I save for the kind of employers I believe in and that I want, for the kind of employers who can earn and deserve and enjoy and keep the kind of salesmen and saleswomen I choose to do business with. All the year round, every firm with which I deal, I am going to study not only with my mind but with my money. I will proceed to take my trade away from the big employers who think that I want shoddy goods or who think that I want or am willing to trade with saleswomen who would let an employer impose on them, saleswomen that he thinks he can afford to impose upon. I will proceed to vote with my money, with every penny I have in the world, and I will earn more that I may vote more, for the kind of employer with whom I like to trade. And there shall not be a man, woman, or child of my acquaintance, if I can help it, or of my family's acquaintance who shall not know who these employers are by name and by address, the employers that I will trade with and the employers that I will not. This is my idea as a customer, as a member of the public, of the way for a people to express itself and to get what it wants. What I want may be said to be a kind of news, news about me so far as I go, as one member of the public. As I am only one person every item of the news about me must be put where it works. I will deal directly with the news of what I want and I will convey that news, not to the House of Commons but to the men who have what I want and who can give it to me when they know it. News is the real government now and always of this world. When one has made up one's mind to tell this news, obviously the best art-form for telling news to employers and business men--the news of what we want and what we do not want and of what we want in them as well as in the things they sell, is to tell them the news in the language they have studied most, tell it to them in pounds, shillings, dollars, and cents, and by trading somewhere else. The gospel-bearing value, the news that one can get into a man's mind with one dollar, the news that he can be made to see and act on for one dollar--well, thinking of this some days, makes for me, at least, going up and down the Main Street of the World feeling my purse snuggling in my pocket, and all the people I can step up to with my purse and tell so many dollars' worth of news to, tell that dollar's worth of gospel to about the world--makes going up and down with a dollar on a big business street, and spending it or not spending it, feel like a kind of chronic, easy, happy, going to Church. One always has a little money in one's pocket that one spends or that one won't spend, and sometimes even not spending a dollar, practised by some people, at just the right moment and in just the right way, can be made to mean as much and do as much with a world as spending a thousand dollars would without any meaning put into it. Sometimes I even go into a store on purpose, a certain kind of store I know will try to cheat me in a certain way, let them look a minute at the dollar they cannot have. Then I walk out with it quietly. I have said that the life-blood of my convictions shall circulate in my money and if I cannot express my soul, my religion, my gospel or news for this world, news about what I want and about what I will have in a world, if I cannot make every dollar, every shilling I earn, go through the world and sing my own little world-song in it, may I never have another shilling or earn another dollar as long as I live! The very sight of a dollar now whenever I see one once more, fills me with deep, hopeful working joy, thinking of what a bargain it is and how I can use it twice over, thinking of the dollar's worth of news, to say nothing of the dollar's worth of things that belong with a dollar! * * * * * For some generations, now, we have tried to make people good in a vague, general way, by using priests, sacraments and confessional boxes. For some centuries we have been trying to make people good with lawyers and juries and ballot boxes. We are now to try, at last, religion or gospel or news or ideals--practical, shrewd aimed ideals, that is, news to a man about himself or news about the man from the man himself to us. In everything a man does he is expressing to us this news about himself, and about his world, and about his God. We are all telling news about the world and about ourselves all the time and we are all in a position for news all the time. What is it from hour to hour and day to day that we will do and we will not do? This news about us is the religion in us. The average man is coming to have very accurate ideas of late as to just where his religion is located. He has come to see that real religion in a man, very conveniently located (immediately at hand in him and personally directed), is his own action, his own divine "I will" or "I won't." He has come to be deeply attracted by this idea of a religion for every man just where he is, fitted on patiently, cheerfully, to just where he is, every day all day, his glorious, still, practical, good-natured, godlike "I will" and "I won't "--or News about himself. CHAPTER III PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES We are deeply interested in the United States just now, in seeing what will be the fate of President Wilson's government in getting men to be good. The fate of a government in 1913 may be said to stand on the government's psychology or knowledge of human nature or of what might be called human engineering, its mastery of the principles of lifting over in great masses heavy spiritual bodies, like people, swinging great masses of people's minds over as on some huge national derrick up on The White House, from one lookout on life to another. There are certain aspects of human nature when power is being applied to it in this way, and when it is being got to be good, that may not be beside the point. If one could drop in on a government and have a little neighbourly chat with it, as one was going by, I think I would rather talk with it (especially our government, just now), about Human Nature than about anything. I would have to do it, of course, in what might seem to a government to be a plain and homely way. I would ask the government what it thought of two or three observations I have come to lately about the way that human nature works, when people are getting it to be good. What a government thinks about them might possibly prove before many months to be quite important to It. The first observation is this: The reason that the average bachelor is a bachelor is that he spends the first forty-five years of his life in picking out women he will not marry. Possibly it is because many people are following the same principle in trying to be good and in getting other people to be good that they make such poor work of it. Possibly the main reason why there are so many wicked people or seem to be, in proportion, among the Hebrews in the Old Testament, is that Moses was a lawyer and that he tried to start off a great people with the Ten Commandments, that is, a list of nine things they must never do any more, and of one that they must. Some of us who have tried being good, have noticed that when we have hit it off, being good (at least with us) consists in being focused, in getting concentrated, in getting one's attention to what one really wants to do. Moses' idea when he started his government, the idea of getting people concentrated on not getting concentrated on nine things, was not conducive to goodness. The fundamental principle Moses tried to make the people good with was a contradiction in terms. It is a principle that would make wicked people out of almost anybody. It is not a practicable principle for a government to rely on in getting people to be good. It did not work with the people in the Old Testament and it has never worked with people since. It does not call people out, in getting them to take up goodness, to point out to them nine places not to take hold of and one where they will be allowed to take hold, if they know how. All that one has to do to see how true this is, is to observe the groups or classes of people who are especially not what they should be. The people who never get on morally (as different as they may be in most things and in the fields of their activity) all have one illusion in common. There is one thing they always keep saying when any new hopeful person tries once more to get them to be good. They say (almost as if they had a phonograph) that they try to be good and cannot do it. And this is not true. When a man says he tries to be good and cannot do it, if he sits down and thinks it over he finds, generally, he is not trying to be good at all. He is trying to be not bad. A man cannot get himself reformed, by a negative process, by being not bad, and it is still harder for him and for everybody, when other people try to do it--those who are near him, and it is still, still harder for a President down in Washington to do it. An intelligent, live man or business corporation cannot be got to keep up an interest very long in being not bad. Being not bad is a glittering generality. It is like being not extravagant or economical. Most people who have ever tried to attain in a respectable degree to a pale little neuter virtue like economy, and who have reflected upon their experiences, have come to conclusions that may not be very far from the point in a fine art like getting one's self to be good or getting other people to be good. To concentrate on being economical by going grimly down the street, looking at the shop windows, looking hard at miles of things one will not buy, cannot be said to be a practicable method of attaining economy. The real artist, in getting himself to be good, proceeds to upon the opposite principle. Even if the good thing he tries for is merely a negative good thing like economy, he instinctively seeks out some positive way of getting it. A man who is cultivating the art of getting himself to be economical, or of getting his wife to be economical, does not make a start by sitting down with a pencil and making out a list, by concentrating his mind on rows of things that he and his family must get along without. He knows a better way. He goes downtown with his entire family, takes them into a big shop and sits down with them and listens to a Steinway Grand he cannot get. As he listens to it long enough, he thinks he will get it. Then a subtle, spiritual change passes over him and over his family while they listen. He would not have said before he started that sitting down and thinking of things he could get along without--making lists in his mind of things that he must not have--could ever be in this world a happy, even an almost thrilling experience. But as a matter of fact, as he sits by the piano and listens, he finds himself counting off economies like strings of pearls, and he greets each new self-sacrifice he can think of with a cheer. While the Steinway Grand fills the room with melody all around him, there he actually is sitting, and having the time of his life dreaming of the things he can get along without! When he goes home, he goes home thinking. And the family all go home thinking. Then economy sets in. The reason most people make a failure of their economy is that they are not artistic with it, they do not enjoy it. They do not pick out anything to enjoy their economy with. With some people an automobile would work better than a Steinway Grand and there are as many ways, of course, of practising the Steinway Grand principle in not being bad as there are people, but they all consist apparently in selecting some big, positive thing that one wants to do, which logically includes and bundles all together where they are attended to in a lump, all the things that one ought not to do. Most sins (every one who has ever tried them knows this) most sins are not really worth bothering with, each in detail, even the not-doing them and the most practical, firm method of getting them out of the way (thousands of them at once, sometimes, with one hand) is to have something so big to live for that all the things that would like to get in the way, and would like to look important, look, when one thinks of it, suddenly small. The distinctive, preëminent, official business for the next four years, of making small things in this country look small and of gently, quietly making small men feel small, has been assigned by our people recently, to Mr. Woodrow Wilson. Now it naturally seems to some of us, the best way for Mr. Wilson's government to do in getting the Trusts to give up lying and stealing, is going to be to place before them quietly a few really big, interesting, equally exciting things that Trusts can do, and then dare them, as in some great game or tournament of skill--all the people looking on--dare them, challenge them like great men, to do them. There are three ideas President Wilson may have of the government's getting people to be good. First, not letting people be bad. (Moses.) Second, being good for them. (Karl Marx.) Third, letting them be good themselves. (Any Democrat.) The first of these ideas means government by Prison. The second, means government by Usurpation, that is, the moment a man amounts to enough to choose to do right or do wrong of his own free will, the moment he is a man, in other words, being so afraid of him and of his being a man, that we all, in a kind of panic, shove into his life and live it for him--this is Socialism, a scared machine that scared people have invented for not letting people choose to do right because they may choose to do wrong. The third, letting people be good themselves, letting them be self-controlling, self-respecting, self-expressing or voluntarily good people, is democracy, a machine for letting men be men by trying it. Moses was the inventor of a kind of national moral-brake system, a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten. The question that faces President Wilson just now, while the world looks on is, "Is a government or is it not a moral-brake system--a machine for stopping people nine times out of ten?" There is a considerable resemblance between Moses' position and the new President's in the United States. When Moses looked around on the things he saw the men around him doing, and took the ground that at least nine out of ten of the things should be stopped, he was academically correct. And so, also, President Wilson, gazing at the business of this country to-day, at nine out of ten of the humdrum thoughtless things that trusts and corporations have been doing, will be academically correct in telling them to stop, in having his little, new, helpless, unproved, adolescent government stand up before all the people and speak in loud, beautiful, clear accents and (with its left fist full of prisons, fines, lawyers, of forty-eight legislatures all talking at once) bring down its right fist as a kind of gavel on the world and say to these men, before all the nations, that nine of the things they are doing must be stopped and that one of the things, if they happen to able be to think out some way of keeping on doing it--nobody will hurt them. But the question before President Wilson, to-day, with all our world looking on, is not whether he would be right in entering upon a career of stopping people. The real and serious question is, does stopping people stop them? And if stopping people does not stop them, what will? Perhaps the way for a government to stop people from doing things they are doing, is to tell them the things it wants done. A government that does not express what it wants, that has not given a masterful, clear, inspired statement of what it wants--a government that has only tried to say what it does not want, is not a government. The next business of a government is a statement of what it wants. The problem of a government is essentially a problem of statement. How shall this statement be made? CHAPTER IV THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO It was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but because it was abstract that David found it so hard to keep. If the seventh commandment (like Uriah's wife) could have had deep blue eyes or could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have found keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a statue of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little further in moral evolution, than the moral statement that Moses had managed to get, and it was further toward the concrete, but it was not far enough for a real artist or man who does things. One of the things about the real artist that makes him an artist, is that he is always and always has been and always will be profoundly dissatisfied with a statue of a female figure as an emblem of purity. He challenges the world, he challenges God, he challenges himself, he challenges the men and women about him when he is being put off with a Statue as an emblem of purity. He demands, searches out, interprets, creates something concrete and living to express his idea of purity. How can President Wilson, in getting the Trusts not to be corrupt, in trying to win them--how can President Wilson make the law alluring? How can he make the People have a Low Voice? A great deal if not nearly everything depends in tempting business men to be good, upon the tone in which they are addressed. Every government, like every man, soon comes to have its own characteristic tone in addressing the people. And, as a matter of fact, it is almost always the tone in a government, like the voice in a man, which tells us the most definitely what it is like, and is the most intimate and effective expression of what it wants and is the most practical way of getting what it wants. Everybody has noticed that a man's voice works harder for him, works more to the point for him in getting what he wants than his words do. It is his voice that makes people know him, that makes them know he means what he says. It is his voice that tells them whether he is in the habit of meaning what he says, and it is his voice that tells them whether he is in habit of getting what he wants, and of knowing what to do with what he wants when he gets it. A government does not need to say very much if it has the right tone. The tone of a government is the government. If President Wilson is going to succeed in tempting business men to be good, he is going to do it, some of us think, by depending on three principles. These three principles, like all live, active principles, may be stated as three principles or as three personal traits. First, by being affirmative. (Isaiah, in distinction from Moses.) Second, by being concrete. (Bathsheba.) Third, by being specific, by seeing the universal in the particular. (Like any artist or man who does things.) The value of being affirmative and the value of being concrete have already been touched upon. There remains the value of being specific. Possibly, in this present happy hour, when our country has grown suddenly sensible and has become practical enough to pick out at last, once more, a President with a real serious working sense of humour, even a sense of humour about himself, it may not be considered disrespectful if I continue a little longer dropping in on the Government, and saying what I have to say in a few plain and homely words. The trouble with most people in being economical with their money is, that when they spend it, they spend it on something in particular, and when they save it, they try to save it in a kind of general way. The same principle applies to doing right. It is because when people do right, they do it in a kind of general pleasant, abstract way, and when they do wrong they always do something in particular, that they are so Wicked. A man will do almost anything to save his life at a particular place and at a particular time, say at ten o'clock to-morrow morning, if he is drowning, but if he has a year to save it in, a year of controlling his appetites, of daily, detailed mastering of his spirit, of not taking a piece of mince pie, of stopping his work in time and of going to bed early, he will die. It is easier when one is going under water for the third time and sees a rope, to stretch just one inch more and grasp the rope, reach up to forty more years of one's life, all concentrated for one on the tip of a rope, than it is to spread out saving one's life over a whole year, 365 breakfasts, 365 luncheons, 365 dinners, 33,365 moments of anger, of reckless worry, of remorse, of self-pity, 40,000 of despair and round up with a swing at the end of one's year at the tiptop of one's being, as if it had only taken five minutes. And yet it is only an act of the creative imagination of seeing the whole, of having a happy, daily, detailed spectacle of the end in view, that is, of the part in its setting of the whole--going without a piece of mince pie. If one could only make one's self see the piece of mince pie as it is, it would not be difficult. If one could see it on the plate there and see the not taking it as a little wedge-shaped rivet, a little triangular link of coupling in the chain that keeps one holding on forty years longer to this planet, a piece of mince pie left on a plate would become a Vision. This seems to be the principle that works best in getting other people to be good. Perhaps the President will succeed in getting Trusts to be good, by taking hold of specific Trusts, one by one, and setting them--all mankind looking on--in the nation's vision, setting them even in their own vision--taking the Trusts that thought they had got what they wanted, making them stand up and look (in some great public lighted place) at what pathetic, tragical failures they are, letting them see that what their Trust had wanted all along, if it had only thought about it, was not success one went to jail for--success by getting the best out of the most people, but success by serving the most people the best. A great many of us in America have been exercising our minds for a long time now about the eagerness of the Trusts, and the trouble we were going to have in curbing the eagerness of the Trusts. Sometimes I have wondered if, after all, it was our minds we were exercising, for when one sits down seriously to think of it, it is the eagerness of the Trusts that is the most hopeful thing about them. What is the matter with our American Trusts, perhaps, is not and never has been, their eagerness, but their eagerness for things that they did not want, and for things that almost everybody is coming to see that they did not want. The moment that the eagerness of our American Trusts is an eagerness for things that they really want, the Trusts will be seen piling over each other's heels, asking the government to please investigate them. The more they can get the people to know about them and about their eagerness, the more the people will trust them and deal with them. All that we have been waiting for is a government that sees the part from the point of view of the whole, which will take up a few specific Trusts and be specific enough with them to make them think, think hard what they really want, and what their real eagerness is about, and the entire face of modern business will change. First the expression will change and then the face itself. The moment it is found that the government is a specific government, all the trusts that know what they really want and know what they really are doing, will want to be investigated, because they will want everybody to know that they know. In case of the trusts that do not know what they want and that do not know what they are doing, the government will just step in, of course, and investigate them until they find out. A specific government will not need to be specific many times. It takes up a particular Trust in its hand, turns it over quietly, empties its contents out before the people and says to everybody, "This particular Trust you see here has tried to be a kind of Trust, which it found out afterward, it did not want to be. It is the kind of Trust whose officers hide their faces when they think of what it was that they thought that they thought that they wanted.... "These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on, hundreds and thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting, public-serving, creative, successful business men, whom all the world envies looking on, do hereby beg to declare to all business men who know them and to the people, that they did not ever really want these things for themselves that their business says or seems to say they wanted. "They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places and to refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down, seriously thought it all out, that they had planned to express to everybody what their natures really were in a blind, brutal, foolish business like this which we have just been showing you. They beg to have it believed that their business misrepresents them, that it misrepresents what they want, and they ask to be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and forgiveness, the companionship of a great people. "They declare" (the government will go on) "that they are not the men they seem. They are merely men in a hurry. They want it understood that they have merely hurried so fast and hurried so long that they now wake up at last only to see, see with this terrific plainness what it really is that has been happening to them all their lives, _viz._: for forty, fifty, or sixty years they have merely forgot who they were and overlooked what they were like. "In hurrying, too, it is only fair to say they have had to use machines to hurry with and unconsciously, year by year, associating almost exclusively with machines, their machines (pump handles, trip-hammers, hydraulic drills, steam shovels and cranes and cash registers) have grown into them. "This is the way it has happened. 'Let the nation be merciful to them,' the government will then say, and dismiss the subject." * * * * * What our President seems to be for in America, is to do up a nation in one specific, particular man who expresses everybody. This man deals with each other specific man, his aggressions and services, as a nation would if a nation could be one specific man. The President of the United States is the Comptroller of the people's vision, by seeing a part and dealing with a part as a part of a whole, he governs the people. He is the Chancellor of the People's Attention. The business of being a President is the business of focusing the vision, of flooding the whole desire or will of a people around a man and letting him have the light of it, to see what he is doing by, and to be seen by, while he is doing it. The corporations have expressed or focused the employers of labour. The Labour Unions have focused or expressed the will of the labourers, and the government focuses and expresses the will of the consumers, of the people as a whole, rich and poor, so that Labour and Capital, both listen to It, understand It and act on It. The way to deal with a specific sin is to flood it around with the general vision. Then it does not need to be dealt with. Then strangely, softly, and almost before we know--out there in the Light, it automatically deals with itself. When the Government takes hold quietly of the National Cash Register Company, turns it up, empties its contents out,--all its methods and its motives--and all the things It thought It wanted, and then proceeds to put its president and twenty-nine of its officers into jail, my readers will perhaps point out to me that this action of the government as a method of tempting people to be good, while it may have the virtue of being concrete and the virtue of being specific, certainly does not have the other virtue that I have laid down, the virtue of being affirmative. "Certainly" they will say "there is not anything affirmative about putting twenty-nine big business men in jail." Many people would call it the most magnificently negative thing a President could have done. Moses himself would have done it. It does not seem to me that Moses would have done it, or that it was essentially negative. It could not unfairly be claimed that in spite of its negative look on the surface, it was the most massive, significant, crushing affirmation that a great people has made for years. By putting the twenty-nine officers of the National Cash Register Company in jail, the American people affirmed around the world the nation's championship of the men that had been defeated in the competition with the National Cash Register Company. They affirmed that these men who were not afraid of the National Cash Register Company because they were bigger, and who stood up to them and fought them, were the kind of men Americans wanted to be like, and that the officers of the National Cash Register Company were the kind of men Americans did not want to be like, would not do business with, would not tolerate, would not envy, would not live on the same continent with, unless they were kept in jail. The President of the United States, sitting in Washington, at the head of this vast affirmative and assertive continent, indicted the Cash Register Company, that is, by a slight pointed negative action, by pushing back a button he turned on the great chandelier of a nation and flooded a nation with light. We, the American people, suddenly, all in a flash, looked into each other's faces and knew what we were like. We had hoped we believed in human nature, and in brave men and in men against machines but we could not prove it. Suddenly, we stood in a blaze of truth about ourselves. Suddenly, we could again look with our old stir of joy at our national Flag. If we liked, we could swing our hats. Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I had been trying to get this news for years. It is news I have wanted to live with and do business with. I have been trying to get my question answered. What are the American people really like? The President points at the National Cash Register Company and I find out. All the people find out. In the last analysis, the masterful, shrewd, practical, and constructive part of being a President of the United States--the thing in the business of being a President that keeps the position from being a position which only the second rate or No type of man would have time to take, is the fact that the President is the Head Advertising Manager of the United States, conducting a huge advertising campaign of what Americans really want. He takes up the National Cash Register Company, picks out its twenty-nine officers, makes it a bill board sky-high across the country. "Here are the kind of business men that the people of the United States do not want, and here are the kind of men that we do!" The thing that makes indicting a trust a positive and affirmative act is the advertising in it. Gladstone once wrote a postcard about a little book of Marie Bashkirtseff's. Twenty nations read the little book. Every now and then one watches a man or sees a truth that would make a nation. One wishes one had some way of being the sort of person or being in the kind of place where one could make a nation out of it. One thinks it would be passing wonderful to be President of the United States. It would be like having a great bell up over the world that one could reach up to and ring! But it is better than that. One touches a button at one's desk if one is President of the United States, a nation looks up. He whispers to twenty thousand newspapers, "Take your eyes away a minute," he says, "from Jack Johnson and Miss Elkin's engagement, and look, oh, look, ye People, here is a man in this world like this! He has been in the world all this while without our suspecting it. Did you know there was or could be anywhere a man like THIS? And here is a man like this! Which do you prefer? Which are you really like?" There is nothing really regal or imperial in a man, nothing that makes a man feel suddenly like a whole Roman Empire all by himself, in 1913, like saying "Look! Look!" Sometimes I think about it. Of course I could take a great reel of paper and sit down with my fountain pen, say Look for a mile, "Look! look! look! look!!!--President Wilson says it once and without exclamation points. Skyscrapers listen to him! Great cities rise and lift themselves and smite the world. And the faint, sleepy little villages stir in their dreams." Moses said, "Thou shalt not!" President Wilson says, "Look!" Perhaps if Moses had had twenty thousand newspapers like twenty thousand field-glasses that he could hand out every morning and lend to people to look through--he would not have had to say, "Thou shalt not." The precise measure of the governing power a man can get out of the position of being President of the United States to-day is the amount of advertising for the people, of the people, and by the people he can crowd every morning, every week, into the papers of the country. A President becomes a great President in proportion as he acts authoritatively, tactfully, economically, and persistently as the Head Advertising Manager of the ideals of the people. He is the great central, official editor of what the people are trying to find out--of a nation's news about itself. By his being the President of what people think, by his dictating the subjects the people shall take up, by his sorting out the men whom the people shall notice, this great ceaseless Meeting of ninety million men we call the United States--comes to order. CHAPTER V THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!" Our American President, if one merely reads what the Constitution says about him, is a rather weak-looking character. The founders of the country did not intend him to be anybody in particular--if it could be helped. They were discouraged about allowing governments to be efficient. Not very much that was constructive to do was handed over to him. And the most important power they thought it would do for him to have was the veto or power to say "No." Possibly if our fathers had believed in liberty more they would have allowed more people to have some; or if they had believed in democracy more, or trusted the people more, they would have thought it would do to let them have leaders, but they had just got away. They felt timid about human nature and decided that the less constructive the government was and the less chance the government had to be concrete, to interpret a people, to make opportunities and turn out events, the better. Looked at at first sight no more elaborate, impenetrable, water-tight arrangement for keeping a government from letting in an idea or ever having one of its own or ever doing anything for anybody, could have been conceived than the Constitution of the United States, as the average President interprets it. Each branch of the government is arranged carefully to keep any other branch from doing anything, and then the people, every four years, look the whole country over for some new man they think will probably leave them alone more than anybody--and put him in for President. Looking at it narrowly and by itself, all that a President selected like this could ever expect in America to put in his time on, would seem to be--being the country's most importantly helpless man--the man who has been given the honour of being a somewhat more prominent failure in America than any one else would be allowed to be. He stops people for four years. Other people stop him for four years. Then with a long happy sigh, at the end of his term, he slips back into real life and begins to do things. This has been the more or less sedately disguised career of the typical American President. Merely reading the Constitution or the lives of the Presidents, without looking at what has been happening to the habits of the people in the last few years, we might all be asking to-day, "What is there that is really constructive that President Wilson can do?" What is there that is going to prevent him, with all that moral earnestness dammed up in him, that sense of duty, that Presbyterian sense of other people's duties--what is there that is going to prevent him, with his school-book habits, his ideals, his volumes of American history, from being a teachery or preachery person--a kind of Schoolmaster or Official Clergyman to Business? News. The one really important and imperative thing to the people of this country to-day is News. In spite of newspapers, authors, College presidents, Bank presidents, Socialist agitators, Bill Heywoods, and Trusts, the people are bound to get this news, and any man who is so placed by his prominence that he can scoop up the news of a country, hammer its news together into events the papers will report, express news in the laws, build news into men who can make laws and unmake laws, any man who is so placed that directly or indirectly he takes news, forces it in by hydraulic pressure where people see it doing things, who takes news and crowds it into courts, crowds news into lawyers and into legislatures, pries some of it even into newspapers, can have, the ordinary American says to-day, as much leeway in this government as he likes. The ordinary American has never been able to understand the objection important people have--that nearly everybody has (except ordinary people) to news--especially editors and publishers. It is an old story. Every one must have noticed it. One set of people in this world, always from the beginning, trying to climb up on the housetops to tell news, and another set of people hurrying up always and saying, "Hush, Hush!" Some days it seems, when I read the papers, that I hear half the world saying under its breath, a vast, stentorian, "Shoo! shoo! SHSH! SHSH!" Then I realize I live in an editor's world. I am expected to be in the world that editors have decided on the whole to let me be in. Of course I did not know what to do at first when this came over me. I naturally began to try to think of some way of cutting across lots, of climbing up to News. I looked at all the neat little park paths, with all those artistic curves of truth on them the editors have laid out for me and for all of us. Then I looked at the world and asked myself, "Who are the men in this world, if any, who are able to walk on the Grass, who cut across the little park paths when they like?" And as fate would have it (it was during the Roosevelt administration), the first two men I came on who seemed to be stamping about in the newspapers quite a little as they liked were the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States. Just how much governing can a President do? How many columns a day is he good for, how many acres of attention every morning in the papers of the country--all these white fields of attention, these acres of other people's thoughts, can he cover? How many sticks a day can he make compositors set up of what he thinks? How many square miles of the people's thoughts can he spread out at breakfast tables, lift up in a thousand thousand trolleys before their faces? I have seen the white fields of attention filled with the footprints of his thoughts, of his will, of his desires! I have seen that the President is the Editor of that vast, anonymous, silent newspaper, written all the night, written all the day, and softly published across a country--the newspaper of people's thoughts. I have seen the vision of the forests he has cast down, ground into headlines, into editorials, into news. Mountains and hills are laid bare to say what he thinks. Thousands of presses throb softly and the white reels of wood pulp fly into speech. Thousands of miles of paper wet with the thoughts of a people roll dimly under ground in the night. The President is saying Look! in the night! The newsboys hasten out in the dawn. They cry in the streets! CHAPTER VI THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE YOU?" If news is governing, how does the President do his governing? By being News, himself. By using his appointing power and putting other men who are News Themselves, news about American human nature--where all the people will see it. By telling the people directly (when he feels especially asked) news about what is happening in his mind--news about what he believes. By telling the people sometimes (as candidly as he can without giving the people's enemies a chance to stop him), what he is going to do next, sketching out in order of time, and in order of importance, his program of issues. By telling the people news about their best business men, the business men and inventors who, in their daily business, free the energies, unshackle the minds and emancipate the genius of the people. By telling these business men news about the people--and interpreting the people to them. * * * * * It is by being news to the people himself that all the other news a President can get into his government counts. A man is a man according to the amount of news there is in him. There are twenty personal traits in a President which of themselves would all be national news of the first importance if he had them. The bare fact that a President could have certain traits at all and still get to be a President in this country, would be news. One of the most important facts about news is that while it can be distributed by machines, machines cannot make it, and as a rule they do not understand it. Important and critical news is almost always fresh and made by hand the first time. Most of the popular news as to what is practical in American polities for the last forty years has been produced by political machines, and of course men who were a good deal like machines were the best men to finish the ideas off and to carry them out. As a result of course, all the really big leaders for the last forty years, our most powerful and interesting personalities have been shut out from being President of the United States. The White House was merely being run as machinery and did not interest them. They watched it grinding its ideas faithfully out from year to year of what America was like and what American politicians were like, and finally at last in the clatter of the machines there rings out suddenly across the land a shot that no machinery had allowed for. Before any one knows almost there slips suddenly by the side door into the White House a really interesting man, and suddenly, all in one minute, almost, this man makes being President of the United States the most interesting lively and athletic feat in the country. And now, apparently that the idea has been worked out in public before everybody, by hand, as it were, that a man can be alive and interesting all over, can have at least a little touch of news about him and still be a President in this country, another man with some news in him has been allowed to us and suddenly politics throughout all America has become a totally new revealing profession, and men, instead of being selected because they were blurred personalities, the ghosts of compromises, would-be everybodies--men who had not decided who they were, and who could not settle down and let people know which of their characters they had hit on at last to be really theirs, men who had no cutting edge to do things, screw-drivers trying to be chisels--were revealed to our people at last as vague, mean, other-worldly persons, not fitting into our real American world at all, and hopelessly visionary and impracticable in American politics. And now one more hand-made man has been allowed to us. The machines run very still in the White House. The people of this country no longer go by the White House on their way to their business and just hear it humdrumming and humdrumming behind the windows as of yore. The nation stands in crowds around the gates and would like to see in. The people wonder. They wonder a million columns a day what is inside. What is inside? An American who governs by being news, himself. The first thing that the people demand from our President now is that he shall be news himself. The news that they have selected to know first during the next four years--have put into the White House to know first is Woodrow Wilson. "Who are you, Woodrow Wilson, in God's name?" the steeples and smoking chimneys, the bells and whistles, the Yales and Harvards, and the little country schools, the crowds in the streets, and the corn in the fields all say, "Who Are You?" Then the people listen. They listen to his "I wills" and "I won'ts" for news about him. They look for news about him in the headlines he steers into the papers every morning, in the events he makes happen, in the editorials he makes men think of, in the men he calls up and puts on the National Wire--in all these, slowly, daily, hourly they drink up their long, patient, hopeful answer to their question, "Who Are You, Woodrow Wilson?" CHAPTER VII THE PEOPLE SAY "WHO ARE WE?" But if the President governs first by being news himself, he governs second by his appointments, by gathering about him other men who are news to people, too. One need not divide people into good and bad, because the true line of division between good and bad instead of being between one man and another, is apt to be as a matter of fact and experience cut down through the middle of each of us. But for the purposes of public action and decision and getting good things done, this line does seem to be cut farther over in the middle of some of us, than it is in others. Taking a life-average in any moral or social engineering feat, in any correct calculation of structural strain, how far over this line cuts through in a man, has to be reckoned with. The president by appointing certain men to office, saying "I will" and "I won't" to certain types of men, in saying who shall be studied by the people, who shall be read as documents of our national life, puts, if not the most important, at least the most lively and telling news about his administration into print. We watch our President acting for us, telling us news about what we are like, sorting men out around him the way ninety million people would sort them out if they were there to do it. The President's appointments may be said to be in a way the breath of the nation. A nation has to breathe, and the plain fact seems to be that certain kinds of people have to be breathed out of a nation and other kinds of people have to be breathed in. The way a President appoints men to office is his way of letting a nation breathe. With all his attractive qualities, perhaps it is because Mr. Taft did not quite let the nation breathe, and suffocated it a little that there came such an outbreak at the end. Perhaps it is because Mr. Taft looked at Mr. Ballinger and then looked at Mr. Pinchot, all the people of the country all the while looking on, and said, "Ballinger is the kind of man our people prefer, and Pinchot is not," that the people broke out so amazingly, so incredibly, and decided by such an enormous majority that a man who could pick out men for them like this would not do--as things are just now anyway--for a President of the United States. CHAPTER VIII NEWS ABOUT US TO THE PRESIDENT A nation wakes up every morning and for one minute before it runs to its work it says to its President, "HERE WE ARE!" The best a President can do in the way of a plain, everyday acknowledgment of the presence of the people is News. The news that the people are demanding from the President to-day is intensely personal. It is a kind of rough, butting, good-natured familiarity a great people has with its President, a little heedless, relentless, like some splendid Child, ready to forgive and expecting to be forgiven, it jostles in upon him daily, "Here we are! What are you believing this morning? Did you believe in us yesterday? Did you act as if you believed in us? Did you get anybody to believe in us? Who are the men you say are like us? What are they like this morning? "We have asked a hundred times; we can only ask it once more. How do you think you are turning out yourself, Mr. President? Are you what you thought you would be? Do you think it is a good time for us to decide this morning what you are really like? And, after all, Mr. President--if you please--who _are_ you? And once more, Mr. President, in God's name, _who are we?_" This is always the gist of what it says, "Who are we?" It is the people's main point, after all, asking a President who they are, wondering if he can interpret them. Then he shuts his door and thinks, or he calls his Cabinet and thinks. Rows of little-great men file by all day. They stand each a few minutes with his little Speck or Dot of the People in his hands, and they say, "This is the People." He listens. It is very hard to be always President of the People when one is listening and the little-great go by. One has to go back a little, in the night perhaps, or when one is quite alone. He sees again the Child; it is what he is in the White House for, he remembers, to express this dumb giant, this mighty Child, half weary, half glad, standing there by day by night, saying, "Who are we?" One would think it would be hard to be glib with the Child. Sometimes it is so deep and silent! Once when It broke in on Lincoln in this way and said, "_Who are we?_" he prayed. CHAPTER IX NEWS-MEN It seems very difficult to get news through as to who we really are to a President. When I look about me and see what the President's ways are of telling news about himself to us, I see that he is not without his advantages. But when I look about to see what conveniences we have as a people for telling our President news about us, I note some curious things. The fears of the American people, the fears and threats of labour and capital are organized and expressed, but their faiths, their wills, the things in them that make them go and that make them American, are not organized and are not expressed. The labour unions are afraid and say, "We will not work," to their employers, "You cannot make us work." The President hears this. It is about all they say. The capitalists and employers are afraid and they say, "We will not pay," "You cannot make us pay." Shall the President act as if these men represent Labor and Capital? We say, "No." Neither of these groups of men express real live American labour or real live characteristic American money. American money is free, bold, manful, generous and courageous to a fault. American money swings out in mighty enterprises, shrewdly believing things, imperiously singing things out of its way. A singing people want a singing government. How is our President going to hear our labour and our money sing? Pinchot expressed us, not Ballinger. Mr. Pinchot is no mere uplifter or missionary. He is an artist in expressing America to a President. If we have a President who will not listen to a man like Pinchot, let us try a President that will. Pinchot--an American millionaire with a fortune made out of forests, who is spending the fortune in protecting the forests for the nation, is the kind of American Americans like to set up before a President to say what Americans are like. Millions of men stand by Pinchot. We like the way he makes money sing. Tom L. Johnson--an American millionaire who made his money in the ordinary humdrum way, by getting valuable street railway franchises out of a city for nothing--has the courage to turn around, spend his fortune and spend it all, in keeping other people from doing it. America presents Tom L. Johnson to a President with its compliments and says, "This is what America is like." It may not look always as if Tom L. Johnson were America--America in miniature. But millions of us say he is. He makes money sing. We want a President--millions of us want him--and this is the most important news about us, who expects money in this country to sing. We want our money and expect our money in this country to stop saying mean things about us, things that make us ashamed to look a true newspaper in the face, or one another in the face, and that humiliate us before the world. * * * * * And now I have come to an awkward place in this book where I hope the reader will help me all he can. There is nothing to do but to let out the real truth and face the music. The fact is, Gentle Reader--perhaps you have suspected it all along--that if it had not been for fear of mixing my book all up with him and making it a kind of arena or tournament instead of a book, I would have mentioned ex-President Roosevelt before this. He has been getting in or nearly getting in to nearly every chapter so far, but of course I knew, as any one would, that he would spoil all the calm equipoise, the quiet onward flowing of the Stream of Thought, and with one chapter after the other, with each as the crisis came up, though I scarcely know how, I have managed to keep him out. And now, oh, Gentle Reader, here he is! I know very well that he is in everything, and right in the middle of everything, and that in a kind of splendid mixed happy uproarious way, there somehow has to be a great to-do the moment he appears. The beautiful clear water, the lucid depth of Thought--will all become (ah, I know it too well, Gentle Reader) all thunder and spray and underneath the mighty grinding of the wheels--the wheels of the Nation and the Mowing Machine of Time, and in the background--in the red background of the Dawn, there will be the face of Theodore--just the face of Theodore in this book shining at us--readers and writer and all--out of a huge rosy mist! But I have been driven to it. The fact seems to be that I must find at just this point in the book, if I can, a word. And the word will have to be a word, too, that everybody knows, and that conveys a lively sense to everybody the moment it is used--of a certain tone or quality, or hum or murmur of being. No one regrets this more than I, because it is so unwieldy and inconvenient and always bulges out in a sentence or a book or a nation more than it was meant to, but the word ROOSEVELT, R O O S E V E L T, happens to be the word that people in this country, and very largely in other nations, and in all languages have chosen and are using every day to express to one another a certain American quality or tone now abroad in our world--a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr of goodness. This particular hum, or whirr of goodness, which is instantly associated with the word Roosevelt, expresses, except that of course it over-expresses, a part of the news to-day about America which we want our President to read. One cannot help wondering why it is that if one wanted to express to the largest number of people in the world a certain quality of goodness, the word Roosevelt would do it best. I am not dealing for the purpose of this book in what Mr. Roosevelt's goodness is or whether it is what he thinks it is. We might all disagree about that. I am dealing quite strictly in this connection with what even his enemies would say is his almost egregious success in advertising goodness. While we might all disagree as to his goodness being the kind that he or any one ought to love, we would not fail to agree that it is his love of his own goodness, such as it is, and his holding on to it, and his love of other people's and his love of getting his goodness and their goodness together, that has made him the most unconcealed person in modern life. These qualities have established him, with his ability raised to the n-th power of attracting attention to anything he likes, as the world's greatest News Man--the world's greatest living energy to-day in advertising what is good and what is had in our American temperament. Even the people who disagree with him or dislike him--many of them would have to fall back on using the word roosevelt, or rather the verb to roosevelt. It does not seem to be because his goodness in itself is extraordinary. It is even, for that matter, in the sense that anybody could have it, or some more just like it, a little common. What seems to be uncommon and really distinguished about Mr. Roosevelt is the way he feels about his goodness, and the way he grips hold of it, and the way he makes it grip hold of other people--practically anybody almost, who is standing by. Even if they are merely going by in automobiles, sometimes they catch some. I do not imagine that his worst enemies, however seriously they may question the general desirability or safety of having so much goodness roosevelting around, would fail to admit his own real enthusiasm about goodness anywhere he finds it indiscriminately, whether it is his own or other people's. He grips hold of it, and grips like a cable car--instantly. His enthusiasm is so great that many people are nonplussed by it. The enthusiasm must really be in spite of appearances about something else, something wicked in behind, they think, and not really about goodness. An entire stranger would not quite believe it. It would be too original in him, they would say, or in anybody, to care so about goodness. If one could watch the expression in Mr. Roosevelt's face or his manner while he is in the act of having a virtue and if one could not see plainly from where one was, just what it was he was doing, one would at once conclude that it must be some vice he is having. He looks happy and as if it were some stolen secret. There is always that manner of his when he is caught doing right, as if one were to say "Now, at last, I have got it!" He does right like a boy with his mouth full of jam, and this seems to be true not only when, with a whole public following and two or three nations besides, and all the newspapers, he goes off on an orgy of righteousness, makes the grand tour of Europe, and has the time of his life. It is the steady-burning under enthusiasm with him all the while. The spectacle of a good man doing a tremendous good thing affects Theodore Roosevelt like one of the great forces of nature, like Niagara Falls, like the screws of the _Mauritania_, or any other huge, happy thing that is having its way against fear; against weakness, or against small terrified goodness. Mr. Roosevelt in doing right conveys the sense of enjoying it so himself that he has made almost an art form of public righteousness. He has found his most complete, his most naïve, instinctive self-expression in it, and while we have had goodness in public men before, we have had no man who has been such an international chromo for goodness, who has made such a big, comfortable "He-who-runs-may-read" bill-poster for doing right as Roosevelt. Other men have done things that were good to do, but the very inmost muscle and marrow of goodness itself, goodness with teeth, with a fist, goodness that smiled, that ha-ha'd, and that leaped and danced--perpetual motion of goodness, goodness that reeked--has been reserved for Theodore Roosevelt. We have had goodness that was bland or proper, and goodness that was pious or sentimental and sang, "Nearer My God to Thee," or goodness that was kind and mushy, but this goodness with a glad look and bounding heart, goodness with an iron hand, we have not had before. It is Mr. Roosevelt's goodness that has made him interesting in Cairo, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. He has been conducting a grand tour of goodness. He has been a colossal drummer of goodness, conducting an advertising campaign. He has proved himself a master salesman for moral values. And he has put the American character, its hope, its energy, on the markets and on the credits of the world. With all his faults, those big, daring, yawning fissures in him, he is news about us, faults and all. Though I may be, as I certainly am much of the time, standing and looking across at him, across an abyss of temperament that God cut down between us thousands of years ago, and while he may have a score of traits I would not like and others that no one would like in any one else, there he is storming out at me with his goodness! It is his way--God help him!--God be praised for him! There he is! I know an American when I see one. He is a man who is singing. A man who is singing is a man who is so shrewd about people that he sees more in them than they see in themselves and who does things so shrewdly in behalf of God, that when God looks upon him he delights in him. Then God falls to of course and helps him do them. When American men saw that there was a man among them who was taking a thing like the Presidency of the United States (that most people never run risks with) and putting it up before everybody, and using it grimly as a magnificent bet on the people, they looked up. Millions of men leaped in their hearts and as they saw him they knew that they were like him! So did Theodore Roosevelt become news about Us. CHAPTER X AMERICAN TEMPERAMENT AND GOVERNMENT I would like to say more specifically what I mean by an American or singing government. The thing that counts the most in a government is its temperament. A German government succeeds by having the German temperament. An American government must have the American temperament. If we are fortunate enough to have in America a government with an American temperament what would it be like? And how would it differ from the traditional or conventional temperament, governments are usually allowed to have? If I were confined to one or two words I would put it like this: If a government has the conventional temperament, it says "NO." If it has the American Temperament it says, "YES, BUT ..." The whole policy and temper of a true American government is summed up in its saying as it looks about it--now to this business man and now to that, just in time, "YES BUT." Louis Brandeis, of Boston, when he was made attorney for the Gas Company of Boston to defend the company from the criticisms of the people, sent suddenly scores of men all about canvassing the city and looking up people to find fault with the gas. He spent thousands of dollars a month of the Gas Company's money for a while in helping people to be disagreeable, until they had it attended to and got over it. The Gas Company had the canvassers show the people how they could burn less gas for what they got for it, and tried to help them cut their bills in two. Incidentally, of course, they got to thinking about gas and about what they got for it, and about other ways they could afford to use it, and began to have the gas habit--used it for cooking and heating. The people found they wanted to use four times as much gas. The Boston Gas Company smiled sweetly. Boston smiled sweetly. Not many months had passed and two things had happened in Boston. The Boston Gas Company, with precisely the same directors in it, had made over the directors into new men, and all the people in Boston (all who used gas) apparently had been made over into new people. What had happened was Brandeis--a man with an American temperament. Mr. Brandeis had defended his company from the people by going the people's way and helping them until they helped him. Mr. Brandeis gave gas a soul in Boston. Before a gas corporation has a soul, it would be American for a government to treat it in one way. After it has one it would be American to treat it in another. There are two complete sets of conduct, principles, and visions in dealing with a corporation before and after its having a soul. Preserving the females of the species and killing males as a method of discrimination has been applied to all animals except human beings. This is suggestive of a method of discrimination in dealing with corporations. A corporation that has a soul and that is the most likely to keep reproducing souls in others should be treated in one way, and a corporation that has not should be treated in another. There are two assumptions underneath everybody's thought, underneath every action of our government: Which is the American assumption? People are going to be bad if they can. People are going to be good if they can. Men who want to arrange laws and adjust life on the assumption that business men will be bad if they can, it seems to some of us, are inefficient and unscientific. It seems to us that they are off on the main and controlling facts in American human nature. It is not true that American business men will be bad if they can. They will be good if they can. This is my assertion. I cannot prove it. What we seem to need next in this country in order to be clear-headed and to go ahead, is to prove it. We want a competent census of human nature. Lacking a census of human nature, the next best thing we can do is to watch the men who seem to know the most about human nature. We put ourselves in their hands. These men seem to believe, judging from their actions, that there is really nothing that suits our temperament better in America than being good. If we can manage to have some way of being good that we have thought of ourselves, we like it still better. We dote on goodness when it is ours and when we are allowed to put some punch into it. We want to be good, to express our practical, our doing-idealism, but we will not be driven to being good and people who think they can drive us to being good in a government or out of it are incompetent people. They do not know who we are. We say they shall not have their way with us. Let them get us right first. Then they can do other things. What is our American temperament? Here are a few American reflections. The government of the next boys' school of importance in this country is going to determine the cuts and free hours, and privileges not by marks, but by its genius for seeing through boys. And instead of making rules for two hundred pupils because just twenty pupils need them, they will make the rules for just twenty pupils. Pupils who can use their souls and can do better by telling themselves what to do, will be allowed to do better. Why should two hundred boys who want to be men be bullied into being babies by twenty infants who can scare a school government into rules, _i.e._, scare their teachers into being small and mean and second-rate? A government that goes on this principle with business men, and that does it in a spirit of mutual understanding for those who are not yet free from rules, and in a spirit of confidence and expectation and of talking it over, will be a government with an American temperament. The first trait of a great government is going to be that it will recognize that the basis of a true government in a democracy is privilege and not treating all people alike. It is going to see that is it a cowardly, lazy, brutal, and mechanical-minded thing for a government which is trying to serve a great people--to treat all the people alike. The basis of a great government like the basis of a great man (or even the basis of a good digestion) is discrimination, and the habit of acting according to facts. We will have rules or laws for people who need them, and men in the same business who amount to enough and are American enough to be safe as laws to themselves, will continue to have their initiative and to make their business a profession, a mould, an art form into which they pour their lives. The pouring of the lives of men like this into their business is the one thing that the business and the government want. Several things are going to happen when what a good government seeks each for a man's business, is to let him express himself in it. When a man has proved conclusively that he has a higher level of motives, and a higher level of abilities to make his motives work, the government is going to give him a higher level of rights, liberties, and immunities. The government will give special liberties on a sliding scale and with shrewd provision for the future. The government will not give special liberties to the man with higher motives than other men have, who has not higher abilities to make his motives work, nor will it give special liberties to the man who has higher abilities which could make higher motives work, but who has not the higher motives. Men who are new kinds and new sizes of men and who have proved that they can make new kinds and new sizes of bargains, that they can make (for the same money) new kinds and new sizes of goods, and who incidentally make new kinds and new sizes of people out of the people who buy the goods, men who have achieved all these supposed visionary feats by their own initiative, will be allowed by the government to have all the initiative they want, and immunities from fretful rules as long as they resemble themselves and keep on doing what they have shown they can do. The government will deal with each man according to the facts, the scientific facts, that he has proved about himself. The government acts according to scientific facts in everything except men, in pure food, in cholera, and the next thing the government is going to do is to be equally efficient in dealing with scientific facts in men. It is going to give some men inspected liberty. If these men say they can be more efficient, as a railroad sometimes is, by being a monopoly, by being a vast, self-visioned, self-controlled body the government will have enough character, expert courage and shrewdness about human nature to provide a way for them to try it. When the other people come up and ask why they cannot have these special immunities and why they cannot be a monopoly, or nearly a monopoly, too, the government will tell them why. Telling them why will be governing them. When we once reckon with new kinds and new sizes of men, everything follows. The first man who organizes a true monopoly for public service and who does it better than any state could do it, because he thinks of it himself, glories in it and has a genius for it, will be given a peerage in England perhaps. But he would not really care. The thing itself would be a peerage enough and either in America or England he would rather be rewarded by being singled out by the government for special rights and distinctions in conducting his business. The best way a democracy can honour a man who has served it is not to give him a title or to make a frivolous, idle monument of bronze for him, but to let him have his own way. The way to honour any artist or any creative man, any man a country is in need of especially, is to let him have his own way. * * * * * We are told that the way to govern trusts is to untrammel competition. But the way to untrammel competition is not to try to untrammel it in its details with lists of things men shall not do. This is cumbersome. We would probably find it very much more convenient in specifying 979 detailed things trusts cannot do, if we could think of certain sum-totals of details. Then we could deal with the details in a lump. The best sum totals of details in this world that have ever been invented yet, are men. We will pick out a man who has a definite, marked character, who is a fine, convenient sum-total that any one can see, of things not to do. We will pick out another man in the same line of business who is a fine, convenient sum-total of things that people ought to do. The government will find ways, as the Coach of Business as the Referee of the Game for the people, to stand by this man until he whips the other, drives him out of business or makes him play as good a game as he does. * * * * * When a child finds suddenly that his father is not merely keeping him from doing things, that his father has a soul, the father begins to get results out of the child. As a rule a child discovers first that his father has a soul by noticing that he insists on treating him as if he had one. Of course a corporation that has not a soul yet does not propose to be dictated to by a government that has not a soul yet. When corporations without souls see overwhelmingly that a government has a soul, they will be filled with a wholesome fear. They will always try at first to prevent it from having a soul if they can. But the moment it gets one and shows it, they will be glad. They will feel on firm ground. They will know what they know. They will act. In the hospital on the hill not far from my house, one often sees one attendant going out to walk with twelve insane men. One would think it would not be safe for twelve insane men to go out to walk with one sane man, with one man who has his soul on. The reason it is safe, is, that the moment one insane man or man who has not his soul on, attacks the man who has a soul, all of the other eleven men throw themselves upon him and fling him to the ground. Men whose souls are not on, protect, every time, the man who has his soul on because the man who has a soul is the only defence they have from the men who have not. It is going to be the same with governments. We believe in a government's having as much courage in America as a ten-dollar-a-week attendant in an insane asylum. We want a government that sees how courage works. We are told in the New Testament that we are all members one of another. If society has a soul and if every member of it has a soul, what is the relation of the social soul to the individual soul? A man's soul is the faculty in him for seeing the Whole in relation to the part--his vision for others in relation to his vision for himself. My forefinger's soul in writing with this fountain pen is the sense my forefinger has of its relation to my arm, my spinal column, and my brain. The ability and efficiency of my forefinger depends upon its soul, that is, its sense of relation to the other members of the body. If my forefinger tries to act like a brain all by itself, as it sometimes does, nobody reads my writing. The government in a society is the soul of all the members and it treats them according to their souls. The one compulsion a government will use if it has a soul, will be granting charters in business in such a way as to fix definite responsibility and definite publicity upon a few men. If a corporation has a soul, it must show. It must have a face. Anybody can tell a face off-hand or while going by. Anybody can keep track of a corporation if it has a face. The trouble with the average corporation is that all that anybody can see is its stomach. Even this is anonymous. Whose Stomach is it? Who is responsible for it? If we hit it, whom will we hit? Let the government find out. If the time the government is now spending in making impossibly minute laws for impossibly minute men, were spent in finding out what size men were, and who they were and then giving them just as many rights from the people, as they are the right kind and the right size to handle for the people, it would be an American government. If there is one thing rather than another that an American or an Englishman loves, it is asserting himself or expressing his character in what he does. The typical dominating Englishman or American is not as successful as a Frenchman or as an Italian in expressing other things, as he is in expressing his character. He cares more about expressing his character and asserting it. If he is dealing with things, he makes them take the stamp of who he is. If he is dealing with people, he makes them see and acknowledge who he is. They must take in the facts about what he is like when they are with him. They must deal with him as he is. This trait may have its disadvantages, but if an Englishman or an American is on this earth for anything, this is what he is for--to express his character in what he does--in strong, vigorous, manly lines draw a portrait of himself and show what he is like in what he does. This may be called on both sides of the sea to-day as we stand front to front with the more graceful nations, Anglo-Saxon Art. It is because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket of machines and crowds to give us the lead. And now we are threading a way for nations through the moral wilderness of the earth. This position has been accorded us because it goes with our temperament, because we can be depended upon to insist on asserting ourselves and on expressing ourselves in what we do. If the present impromptu industrial machinery which has been handed over to us thoughtlessly and in a hurry, does not express us, everybody knows that we can be depended on to assert ourselves and that we will insist on one that will. The nations that are more polite and that can dance and bow more nicely than we can in a crisis like this would be dangerous. It is known about us throughout a world that we are not going to be cowed by wood or by iron or by steel and that we are not going to be cowed by men who are all wood and iron and steel inside. If wood, iron, or steel does not express us, we are Englishmen and we are Americans. We will butt our character into it until it does. * * * * * If the American workman were to insist upon butting his American temperament into his labour union machinery, what would his labour machinery in America soon begin to show that an American labourer was like? I imagine it might work out something like this: The thoughtful workman looks about him. He discovers that the workman pays at least two times as much for coal as he needs to because miners down in Pennsylvania work one third as hard as they might for the money. When he comes to think of it, all the labouring men of America are paying high prices because they have to pay all the other workmen in America for working as little as they can. He is working one third less than he can and making his own class pay for it. He sees every workman about him paying high prices because every other workman in making things for him to eat and for him to wear, is cheating him--doing a third less a day for him than he ought. At this point the capitalists pile in and help. They shove the prices up still higher because capital is not interested in an industry in which the workmen do six hours' work in nine. It demands extra profits. So while the workmen put up the prices by not working, the capitalists put up the prices because they are afraid the workmen will not work. Half work, high prices. Then the American workman thinks. He begins to suppose. Suppose that the millers' workmen and the workmen in the woollen mills in America see how prices of supplies for labouring men are going up and suppose they agree to work as hard as they can? Suppose the wool workers of the world want cheap bread. The flour mill workers want cheap clothes. We will say to the bread people, "We will bring down the price of wool for you if you will bring down the price of bread for us." Then let Meat and Potatoes do the same for one another. Then two industries at a time, industries getting brains in pairs, until like the animals going into the ark, little by little (or rather very fast, almost piling in, in fact, after the first pair have tried it), at last our true, spirited, practical minded American workmen will have made their labour machines as natural and as human and as American as they are. They will stop trying to lower prices by not working, each workman joining (in a factory) the leisure classes and making the other workmen pay for it. * * * * * The American workman, as things are organized now, finds himself confronted with two main problems. One is himself. How can he get himself to work hard enough to make his food and clothes cheap? The other is his employer. What will the American workman do to express his American temperament through his labour union to his employer? The American workmen will go to their employers and say: "Instead of doing six hours' work in nine hours, we will do nine hours' work in nine hours." The millers, for instance, will say to the flour mill owners: "We will do a third more work for you, make you a third more profit on our labour if you will divide your third more profit like this: "First, by bringing down the price of flour to everybody; "Second, by bringing up our wages. Third, by taking more money yourselves." American labouring men who did this would be acting like Americans. It is the American temperament. They will insist on it: The labour men will continue to say to their employers, "We will divide the proceeds of our extra work into three sums of money--ours, yours, and everybody's." In return we will soon find the employers saying the same thing to the labour men. Employers would like to arrange to be good. If they can get men who earn more, they want to pay them more. The labourers would like to be good, _i.e._, work more for employers who want to pay them more. But being good has to be arranged for. Being good is a matter of mutual understanding, a matter of organization, a matter of butting our American temperament into our industrial machines. All that is the matter with these industrial machines is that they are not like us. Our machines are acting just now for all the world as if they were the Americans and as if we were the machines. Are we for the machines, or are the machines for us? All that the American labourers and that the American capitalists have to do is to show what they are really like, organize their news about themselves so that they get it through to one another, and our present great daily occupation in America (which each man calls his "business") all the workmen going down to the mills and all the employers going down to their offices, and then for six, eight, nine hours a day being chewed on by machines, will cease. We make our industrial machines. We are Americans. Our machines must have our American temperament. * * * * * If an American employer were to insist on butting his American temperament into his industrial machine, what would his industrial machine, when it is well at work at last, show an American employer's temperament to be like? The first thing that would show in his machine, I think, would be its courage, its acting with boldness and initiative, originality and freedom, without being cluttered up by precedents or running and asking Mama, its clear-headedness in what it wants, its short-cut in getting to it, and above all a kind of ruthless faith in human nature, in the American people, in its goods and in itself. The typical American business man of the highest class--the man who is expressing his American temperament best in his business--is the one who is expressing in it the most courage for himself and for others and for his government. He has big beliefs every few minutes a day, and he acts on them with nonchalance. If he is running a trust--our most characteristic, recklessly difficult American invention for a man to show through, and if he tries to get his American temperament to show through in it, tries to make his trust like a vast portrait, like a kind of countenance on a country, of what a big American business is like, what will he do? He will take a little axiom like this and act as if it were so. _If in any given case the producers by collusion and combination can be efficient in lowering wages to employees and raising prices and cheating the public, this same combination or collusion would be efficient in raising the wages of employees, lowering prices and serving the public._ He will then, being an American, turn to his government and say "I am a certain sort of man. If I am allowed to be an exception and to combine in this matter, I can prove that I can raise wages, lower prices for a whole nation in these things that I make. I am a certain sort of man. Do you think I am, or do you think that I am not? I want to know." The government looks noncommittally at him. It says it cannot discriminate. He says nothing for a time, but he thinks in his heart that it is incompetent and cowardly to run a great government of a great nation as a vast national sweep or flourish of getting out of brains and of evading vision. It seems to him lazy and effeminate in a government to treat all combinations and all monopolies alike. He says: "Look me in the eyes! I demand of you as a citizen of this country the right to be looked by my government in the eyes. What sort of man am I? Here are all my doors open. My safes are your safes and my books are your books. Am I or am I not a man who can conduct his business as a great profession, one of the dignities and energies and joys of a great people? "What am I like inside? Is what I am like inside--my having a small size or a big size of motive, my having a right kind or a wrong kind of ability of no consequence to this government? Does the government of this country really mean that the most important things a country like this can produce, the daily, ruling motives of the men who are living in it, have no weight with the government? Am I to understand that the government does not propose to avail itself of new sizes and new kinds of men and new sizes and new kinds of abilities in men? What I am trying to do in my product is to lower the prices and raise the wages for a nation. Will you let me do it? Will you watch me while I do it?" This will be the American trust of to-morrow. The average trust of this country has not yet found itself, but the moral and spiritual history, the religious message to a government of The Trust That Has Found Itself will be something like this. Perhaps when we have a trust that has found itself, we will have a government that has dared to find itself, that has the courage to use its insight, its sense of difference between men, as it means of getting what it wants for the people. As it is now, the government has not found itself and it falls back on complex rules or machines for getting out of seeing through people. Where courage is required, it proceeds as it proceeds with automobile speeding laws. Everybody knows that one man driving his car three miles an hour may be more dangerous than another kind of man who is driving his car thirty. When our government begins to be a government, begins to express the American temperament, it will be a government that will devote its energy, its men, and its money to being expert in divining, and using differences between men. It will govern as any father, teacher, or competent business man does by treating some people in one way and others in another, by giving graded speed licenses in business, to labour unions, trusts, and business men. The government will be able to do this by demanding, acquiring, and employing as the servants of the people, men who are experts in human nature, masters in not treating men alike--Crowbars, lemonade-straws, chisels, and marshmallows, powerhouses and �olian harps by the people, for the people, and of the people, will be rated for what they are and will be used for what they are for. This will be democracy. It will be the American temperament in government. * * * * * Is President Wilson or is he not going to fall back into a mere lawyer Moseslike way of getting people to be good, or is he going to be a man like David, half poet, half soldier, who got his way with the nation half by appreciating the men in it and being a fellow human being with them, and half by fighting them when they would not let him be a fellow human being with them, and would not let him appreciate them? Almost any nation or government can get some kind of Moses to-day but the men that America is producing would not particularly notice a Moses probably now. A Moses might do for a Rockefeller, but he could not really do anything with a man like Theodore N. Vail who has the telephones and telegraphs of a country talking and ticking to us all, all night, all day, what kind of a man he is. A big affirmative, inspirational man like David or even Napoleon who inspires people with one breath and fights hard with the next, a man who swings his hat for the world, a man who goes on ahead and says "Come!" is the only man who can be practical in America to-day in helping real live American men like McAdoo, like Edison and Acheson,--men who can express a people in a business--to express them. The people have spoken. A man in the White House who cannot say "Come" goes. We want a poet in the White House. If we can not have a poet for the White House soon, we want a poet who will make us a poet for the White House. I do not believe it is too much to expect a President to be a poet. We have had a poet for President once in one supreme crisis of this nation and the crisis that is coming now is so much deeper, so much more human and world-wide than Lincoln's was that it would almost seem as if a place like the White House (where one's poetry could really work) would make a poet out of anybody. A President who has not a kind of plain, still, homely poetry in him, a belief about people that sings, in the present appalling crisis of the world is impracticable or visionary. So we do not say, "Have we a President that can get our Bells, Edisons, McAdoos, Achesons to be good by toeing a line?" We say, "Have we a President who can swing into step, who can join in the singing, who can catch up?" Tunnel McAdoo, when he lifted up his will against the sea and against the seers of Wall Street, was singing. When he conceived those steel cars, those roaring yellow streaks of light ringing through rocks beneath the river, streets of people flashing through under the slime and under the fish and under the ships and under the wide sunshine on the water, he was singing! He raised millions of dollars singing. Of course he sang the way Americans usually sing, and had to do as well as he could in talking to bankers and investors not to look as if he were singing, but there it all was singing inside him, the seven years of digging, the seven years of dull thundering on rocks under the city, and at last the happy steel cars all green and gold, the streams of people all yellow light hissing and pouring through--those vast pipes for people beneath the sea! If we have a President, let him sing like McAdoo, or like Luther Burbank, or like Theodore N. Vail, or like Colonel Goethals, picking up a little isthmus like Panama, a string between two continents, playing on it as if it were a harp; or like Edward Ripley playing with the Santa Fé Railroad for all the world like Homer with a lute, all his seven thousand men, all his workmen, all their wives and their children, all the cities along the line striking up and joining in the chorus or like Carborundum Acheson, backed up by his little Niagara Falls oiling the wheels of a world, weaving diamonds into steel, hardening the bones of the earth into skyscrapers, into railroads, into the mighty thighs of flying locomotives.... Any man who is seen acting in this world with a thing, as if he believed in the thing, as if he believed in himself and believed in other people, is singing. Moses striking out with a rod, as we are told, a path along the sea for his people may have done a more showy thing from a religious point of view, hitting the water on top so, making a great splash with an empty place in it for people to march through, but he was not essentially more religious than McAdoo, with all those modest but mighty columns of figures piling up behind him, with all those splendid, dumb, still glowing engineers behind him, lifting up his will against cities, lifting up his will against herds of politicians, haughty newspapers, against the flocks of silly complacent old ferry-boats waddling in the bay, against the wind and the rain and the cold on the water, and all the banks of Wall Street.... When we want to tell News to our President about ourselves in America, we point to William G. McAdoo. The first news that we, the American people, must contrive to get into the White House about ourselves is that we do not want to be improved, and that we do not like an improving tone in our government. We want to be expressed the way McAdoos express us. We want a government that expresses our faith in one another, in what we are doing, and in ourselves, and in the world. We are singing over here on this continent. We would not all of us put it in just this way. But our singing is the main thing we can do, and a government that is trying to improve us feebly, that is looking askance at us and looking askance at our money, and at our labour, and that does not believe in us and join in with us in our singing does not know what we are like. Our next national business in America is to get the real news over to the President of what we are like. It is news that we want in the White House. A missionary in the White House, be he ever so humble, will not do. Mr. Roosevelt, himself, with the word Duty on every milepost as he whirled past, with suggestions of things for other people to do buzzing like bees about his head, acquired his tremendous and incredible power with us as a people because, in spite of his violent way of breaking out into a missionary every morning and every evening when he talked, it was not his talking but his singing that made him powerful--his singing, or doing things as if he believed in people, his I wills and I won'ts, his assuming every day, his acting every day, as if American men were men. He sang his way roughly, hoarsely, even a little comically at times into the hearts of people, stirred up in the nation a mighty heat, put a great crackling fire under it, put two great parties into the pot, boiled them, drew off all that was good in them, and at last, to-day, as I write (February 1913), the prospect of a good square meal in the White House (with some one else to say grace) is before the people. The people are waiting to sit down once more in the White House and refresh themselves. At least, the soup course is on the table. Who did it, please? Who bullied the cook and got everybody ready? Theodore Roosevelt, singing a little roughly, possibly hurrahing "_I will, I will, I won't, I won't_," and acting as if he believed in the world. Bryan in the village of Chicago sitting by at a reporter's table saw him doing it. Bryan saw how it worked. Bryan had it in him too. Bryan heard the shouts of the people across the land as they gloried in the fight. He saw the signals from the nations over the sea. Then Armageddon moved to Baltimore. * * * * * And now table is about to be spread. It is to be Mr. Wilson's soup. But the soup will have a Roosevelt flavour or tang to it. And we will wait to see what Mr. Wilson will do with the other courses. * * * * * A poet in words, with two or three exceptions, America has not produced. The only touch of poetry or art as yet that we have in America is--acting as if we believed in people. This particular art is ours. Other people may have it, but it is all we have. This is what makes or may make any moment the common American a poet or artist. Speaking in this sense, Mr. Roosevelt is the first poet America has produced that European peoples and European governments have noticed for forty years, or had any reason to notice. We respectfully place Mr. Roosevelt with Mr. McAdoo (and if Mr. Brandeis will pardon us, with Mr. Brandeis) as a typical American before the eyes of the new President. We ask him to take Mr. Roosevelt as a very important part of the latest news about us. The true imaginative men of our modern life, the poets of crowds and cities are not to-day our authors, preachers, professors or lawyers or philosophers. The poets of crowds are our men like this, our vision-doers, the men who have seen visions and dreamed dreams in the real and daily things, the daring Governors like Wilson and like Hughes, the daring inventors of great business houses, the men who have invented the foundations on which nations can stand, on which railroads can run, the men whose imaginations, in the name of heaven, have played with the earth mightily, watered deserts, sailed cities on the seas, the men who have whistled and who have said "Come!" to empires, who have thought hundred-year thoughts, taken out nine hundred and ninety-nine year leases, who have thought of mighty ways for cities to live, for cities to be cool, to be light, to be dark, who have conceived ways for nations to talk, who have grasped the earth and the sky like music, like words, and put them in the hands of the people, and made the people say, "O earth," and "O sky, thou art great, but we also are great! Come earth and sky, thou shalt praise God with us!" Who are these men? Let the President catch up! Who are these men? Here is Edward A. Filene, who takes up the pride, joy, beauty, self-respect, and righteousness of a city, swings it into a Store, and makes that Store sing about the city up and down the world! Here is Alexander Cassatt, imperturbable, irrepressible, and like a great Boy playing leapfrog with a Railroad--Cassatt who makes quick-hearted, dreamy Philadelphia duck under the Sea, bob up serenely in the middle of New York and leap across Hell Gate to get to Boston! Let the parliaments droning on their benches, the Congresses pile out of their doors and catch up. Let the lawyers--the little swarms of dark-minded lawyers, wondering and running to and fro, creeping in offices, who have tried to run our world, blurred our governments, and buzzed, who have filled the world with piles of old paper, Congressional Records, with technicalities, words, droning, weariness, despair, and fear ... let them come out and look! Let them catch up! Let a man in this day in the presence of men like these sing. If a man cannot sing, let him be silent. Only men who are singing things shall do them. I go out into the street, I go out and look almost anywhere, listen anywhere, and the singing rises round me! It was singing that spread the wireless telegraph like a great web across the sky. It was singing that dug the subways under the streets in New York. It was singing, a kind of iron gladness, hope and faith in men, that has flung up our skyscrapers into the lower stories of the clouds, and made them say, "_I will! I will! I will!_" to God. Ah, how often have I seen them from the harbour, those flocking, crowded skyscrapers under that little heaven in New York, lifting themselves in the sunlight and in the starlight, lifting themselves before me, sometimes, it seems, like crowds of great states, like a great country piled up, like a nation reaching, like the plains and the hills and the cities of my people standing up against heaven day by day--all those flocks of the skyscrapers saying, "_I will! I will! I will!_" to God. The skyscrapers are news about us to our President. He shall reckon with skyscraper men. He shall interpret men that belong with skyscrapers. And as he does so, I shall watch the people answer him, now with a glad and mighty silence and now with a great solemn shout. The skyscrapers are their skyscrapers. The courage, the reaching-up, the steadfastness that is in them is in the hearts of the people. If the President does not know us yet in America, does not know McAdoo as a representative American, we will thunder on the doors of the White House until he does. My impression is he would be out in the yard by the gate asking us to come in. We are America. We are expressing our joy in the world, our faith in God, and our love of the sun and the wind in the hearts of our people. In America the free air breathes about us, and daily the great sun climbs our hillsides, swings daily past our work. There are ninety million men with this sun and this wind woven into their bodies, into their souls. They stand with us. The skyscrapers stand with us. All singing stands with us. Ah, I have waked in the dawn and in the sun and the wind have I seen them! That sun and that wind, I say before God, are America! They are the American temperament. I will have laws for free men, laws with the sun and the wind in them! I have waked in the dawn and my heart has been glad with the iron and poetry in the skyscrapers. I will have laws for men and for American men, laws with iron and poetry in them! The way for a government to get the poetry in is to say "Yes" to somebody. The way for a government to get the iron in is not by saying "No." It is not American in a government to keep saying "No." The best way for our government in America to say "No" to a man, is to let him stand by and watch us saying "Yes" to some one else. Then he will ask why. Then he will stand face to face with America. CHAPTER XI NEWS-BOOKS The most practical thing that could happen now in the economic world in America would be a sudden, a great national, contemporary literature. America, unlike England, has no recognized cultured class, and has no aristocracy, so called, with which to keep mere rich men suitably miserable--at least a little humble and wistful. Our greatest need for a long time has been some big serene, easy way, without half trying, of snubbing rich men in America. All these overgrown, naughty fellows one sees everywhere like street boys on the corners or on the curbstones of society, calling society names and taking liberties with it, tripping people up; hoodlums with dollars, all these micks of money!--O, that society had some big, calm, serene way like some huge hearty London policeman, of taking hold of them--taking hold of them by the seats of their little trousers if need be, and taking them home to Mother--some way of setting them down hard in their chairs and making them thoughtful! Nothing but a national literature will do this. "Life," (which is, with one exception, perhaps, the only religious weekly we have left in America) succeeds a little and has some spiritual value because it succeeds in making American millionaires look funny, and in making them want to get away and live in Europe. But "Life" is not enough; it merely hitches us along from day to day and keeps our courage up. We want in America a literature, we want the thing done thoroughly and forever and once for all. We want an Aristophanes, a master who shall go gloriously laughing through our world, through our chimneys and blind machines, pot-bellied fortunes, empty successes, all these tiny, queer little men of wind and bladder, until we have a nation filled with a divine laughter, with strong, manful, happy visions of what men are for. All we have to do is to have a News-book--a bookful of the kind of rich men we want, then we will have them. We will see men piling over each other all day to be them. Men have wanted to make money because making money has been supposed to mean certain things about a man. The moment it ceases to mean them, they will want to make other things. Where is the news about what we really want? ----, when I took him to the train yesterday, spoke glowingly of the way the Standard Oil Trust had reduced oil from twenty-nine cents to eleven cents. There was not time to say anything. I just thought a minute of how they did it. Why is it that people--so many good people will speak of oil at eleven cents in this way, as if it were a kind of little kingdom of heaven? I admit that eleven cents from twenty-nine cents leaves eighteen cents. I do not deny that the Standard Oil Trust has saved me eighteen cents. But what have they taken away out of my life and taken out of my sense of the world and of the way things go in it and out of my faith in human nature to toss me eighteen cents? If I could have for myself and others the sense of the world that I had before, would I not to-day, day after day, over and over, gallon by gallon, be handing them their eighteen cents back? What difference does it make to us if we are in a world where we can buy oil for eleven cents a gallon instead of twenty-nine, if we do not care whether we are alive or dead in it and do not expect anything from ourselves or expect anything of anybody else? I submit it to your own common sense, Gentle Reader. Is it any comfort to buy oil to light a room in which you do not want to sit, in which you would rather not see anything, in which you would rather not remember who you are, what you do, and what your business is like, and what you are afraid your business is going to be like? I have passed through all this during the last fifteen years and I have come out on the other side. But millions of lives of other men are passing through it now, passing through it daily, bitterly, as they go to their work and as they fall asleep at night. The next thing in this world is not reducing the price of oil. It is raising the price of men and putting a market-value on life. What makes a man a man is that he knows himself, knows who he is, what he is for and what he wants. Knowing who he is and knowing what he is about, he naturally acts like a man, knows what he is about like a man, and gets things done. A nation that does not know itself shall not be itself. A nation that has a muddle-headed literature, a nation that to say nothing of not being able to express what it has, has not even made a beginning at expressing what it wants; a nation that has not a great, eager, glowing literature, a sublime clear-headedness about what it is for--a nation that cannot put itself into a great book, a nation that cannot weave itself together even in words into a book that can be unfurled before the people like a flag where everybody can see it and everybody can share it, look up to it, live for it, sleep for it, get up in the morning and work for it--work for the vision of what it wants to be--cannot be a great nation. A masterpiece is a book that has a thousand years in it. No man has a right to say where these thousand years in it shall lie, whether in the past or in the future. It is the thousand years' worth in it that makes a masterpiece a masterpiece. In America we may not have the literature of what we are or of what we have been, but the literature of what we are bound to be, the literature of what WE WILL, we will have, and we will have to have it before we can begin being it. First the Specifications, then the House. From the practical or literary point of view the one sign we have given in this country so far, that the stuff of masterpieces is in us and that we are capable of a great literature, is that America is bored by its own books. We let a French parson write a book for us on the simple life. We let a poor suppressed Russian with one foot in hell reach over and write books for us about liberty which we greedily read and daily use. We let a sublimely obstinate Norwegian, breaking away with his life, pulling himself up out of the beautiful, gloomy, morose bog of romance he was born in--express our American outbreak for facts, for frank realism in human nature. America is bored by its own books because every day it is demanding gloriously from its authors a literature--books that answer our real questions, the questions the people are asking every night as they go to sleep and every morning when they crowd out into the streets--Where are we going? Who are we? What are we like? What are we for? * * * * * A---- C----, the little stoopy cobbler on ---- street in ----, bought some machines to help him last year before I went away and added two or three slaves to do the work. I find on coming back that he has moved and has two show windows now, one with the cobbling slaves in it cobbling, and the other (a kind of sudden, impromptu room with a show window in it) seems to be straining to be a shoe store. When you go in and show C---- in his shirt sleeves,--your old shoes hopefully, he slips over from his shining leather bench to the shoe-store side and shows you at the psychological moment a new pair of shoes. He is in the train now with me this morning, across the aisle, looking out of the window for dear life, poor fellow, for all the world as if he could suck up dollars and customers--and people who need shoes--out of the fields as he goes by, the way the man does mists, by looking hard at them. I watched him walking up and down the station platform before I got on, with that bent, concentrated, meek, ready-to-die-getting-on look. I saw his future while I looked. I saw, or thought I saw, windows full of bright black shoes, I saw the cobbler's shop moved out into the ell at the back, and two great show windows in front. A---- C---- looks like an edged tool. Millions of Americans are like A---- C----, like chisels, adzes, saws, scoops. You talk with them, and if you talk about anything except scooping and adzing, you are not talking with just a man, but a man who is for something and who is not for anything else. He is not for being talked with certainly, and alas! not for being loved. At best he is a mere feminine convenience--a father or a cash secreter; until he wears out at last, buzzes softly into a grave. An Englishman of this type is a little better, would be more like one of these screw-driver, cork-screw arrangements--a big hollow handle with all sorts of tools inside. Is this man a typical American? Does he need to be? What I want is news about us. All an American like C---- needs is news. His eagerness is the making of him. He is merely eager for what he will not want. All he needs is the world's news about people, about new inventions in human beings, news about the different and happier kinds of newly invented men, news about how they were thought of, and how they are made, and news about how they work. I demand three things for A---- C----: I want a novel that he will read which will make him see himself as I see him. I want a moving picture of him that he will go to and like and go to again and again. I want a play that will send him home from the theatre and keep him awake with what he might be all that night. I want a news-book for A---- C----, a news-book for all of us. * * * * * I read a book some years ago that seemed a true news-book and which was the first suggestion I had ever received that a book can be an act of colossal statesmanship, the making or remaking of a people--a masterpiece of modern literature, laying the ground plan for the greatness of a nation. When I had read it, I wanted to rush outdoors and go down the street stopping people I met and telling them about it. Once in a very great while one does come on a book like this. One wants to write letters to the reviews. One does not know what one would not do to go down the long aimless Midway Plaisance of the modern books, to call attention to it. One wishes there were a great bell up over the world.... One would reach up to it, and would say to all the men and the women and to the flocks of the smoking cities, "Where are you all?" The bell would boom out, "What are you doing? Why are you not reading this book?" One wonders if one could not get a coloured page in the middle of the _Atlantic_ or the _North American Review_ or _Everybody's_ and at least make a great book as prominent as a great soap--almost make it loom up in a country like a Felt Mattress or a Toothbrush. The book that has made me feel like this the most is Charles Ferguson's "Religion of Democracy." I have always wondered why only people here and there responded to it. The things it made me vaguely see, all those huge masses of real things, gigantic, half-godlike, looming like towers or mountains in a mist.... Well, it must have been a little like this that Columbus felt that first morning! But as Columbus went on, what he struck after all was real land, some piece of real land in particular. The mist of vision did precipitate into something one could walk on, and I found as I went on with Mr. Ferguson's book that if there was going to be any real land, somebody would have to make some. But for the time being Charles Ferguson's book--all those glorious generalizings in behalf of being individual, all those beautiful, intoned, chanted abstractions in behalf of being concrete--came to me in my speechless, happy gratitude as a kind of first sign in the heavens, as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, up over the place in the waste of water where land, Land! At last! Land again! will have to be. If we ever have a literature in America, it will be found somewhere when the mist rolls away, right under Charles Ferguson's book. It may be too soon just now in this time of transition in our land of piles and of derricks against the sky, for the book. All we are competent for now is to say that we want such a book, that we see what it will do for us. When we want it, we will get it. Let the American people put in their order now. In the meantime the Piles and the Derricks. All these young and mighty derricks against the sky, all these soaring steel girders with the blue through them--America! Ah, my God! is it not a hoping nation? Three thousand miles of Hope, from Eastport, Maine, to San Francisco--does not the very sun itself racing across it take three hours to get one look at our Hope? Here it is!--Our World. Let me, for one, say what I want. It is already as if I had seen it--one big, heroic imagination at work at last like a sea upon our world, poetry grappling with the great cities, with their labour, with their creative might, full of their vast joys and sorrows, full of their tussle with the sea and with the powers of the air and with the iron in the earth!--the big, speechless cities that no one has spoken for yet, so splendid, and so eager, and so silent about their souls! It is true we are crude and young. Behold the Derricks like mighty Youths! In our glorious adolescence so sublime, so ugly, so believing, will no one sing a hymn to the Derricks? Where are the dear little Poets? Where are they hiding? Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks. Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first. Some dear, hopeful, modest American poet might creep up from under them, out from under the great believing, dumb Derricks standing on tiptoe of faith against the sky, and write a book and call it "Beliefs American Poets Would Like to Believe if They Could." CHAPTER XII NEWS-BOOKS II A nation's religion is its shrewdness about its ideals, its genius for stating its ideals or news about itself, in the terms of its everyday life. A nation's literature is its power of so stating its ideals that we will not need to be shrewd for them--its power of expressing its ideals in words, of tracing out ideals on white paper, so that ideals shall enthrall the people, so that ideals shall be contagious, shall breathe and be breathed into us, so that ideals shall be caught up in the voices of men and sung in the streets. Ideals, intangible, electric, implacable irresistible, all-enfolding ideals, shall hold and grip a continent the way a climate grips a continent, like sunshine around a helpless thing, in the hollow of its hand, and possess the hearts of the people. What our government needs now is a National band in Washington. America is a Tune. America is not a formula. America is not statistics, even graphic statistics. A great nation cannot be made, cannot be discovered, and then be laid coldly together like a census. America is a Tune. It must be sung together. The next thing statesmen are going to learn in this country is that from a practical point of view in making a great nation only our Tune in America and only our singing our Tune can save us. A great nation can be made out of the truth about us. The truth may be--must be probably,--plain. But the truth must sing. It will not be the government that first gets the truth that will govern us. The government that gets the truth big enough to sing first, and sings it, will be the government that will govern us. The political party in this country that will first be practical with the people, and that will first get what it wants, will be the political party that first takes Literature seriously. Our first great practical government is going to see how a great book, searching the heart of a nation, expressing and singing the men in it, governs a people. Being a President in a day like this, if it does not consist in being a poet, consists in being the kind of President who can be, at least, in partnership with a poet. It is not every President who can be his own David, who can rule with one hand and write psalms and chants for his people with the other. The call is out, the people have put in their order to the authors of America, to the boys in the colleges, and to the young women in the great schools--Our President wants a book. Before much time has passed, he is going to have one. Being a President in this country has never been expressed in a book. The President is going to have a book that expresses him to the people and that says what he is trying to do. He will live confidentially with the book. It shall be in his times of trial and loneliness like a great people coming to him softly. He shall feel with such a book, be it day or night, the nation by him, by his desk, by his bedside, by his silence, by his questioning, standing by, and lifting. In the book the people shall sing to the President. He shall be kept reminded that we are there. He shall feel daily what America is like. America shall be focussed into melody. We shall have a literature once more and the singers, as in Greece, as in all happy lands and in all great ages, shall go singing through the streets. There is no singing for a President now. All a President can do when he is inaugurated, when he begins now, is to kiss helplessly some singing four thousand years old in a Bible by another nation. When David sang to his people, he sang the news, the latest news, the news of what was happening to people about him from week to week. Why is no one singing 1913, our own American 1913? Why is no one stuttering out our Bible--one the President could have to refer to, our own Bible in our own tongue from morning to morning in the symbols that breathe to us out of the sounds in the street, out of the air, out of the fresh, bright American sky, and out of the new ground beneath our feet? * * * * * It is easy for a President to pile up three columns a morning of news about himself to us, show each man his face in the morning, but what is there he can do with twenty thousand newspapers at his breakfast table, to pick out the real news about us? Who shall paint the portrait of a people? One could go about in the White House and study the portraits of the presidents, but where is the portrait of the people? The portrait of the people comes in little bits to the president like a puzzle picture. Each man brings in his little crooked piece, jig-sawed out from Iowa, South Dakota, Oklahoma or Aroostook County, Maine. This picture or vision of a nation, this wilderness of pieces, can be seen every day when one goes in, lying in heaps on the floor of the White House. A literature is the expression on the face of a nation. A literature is the eyes of a great people looking at one. It seems to be as we look, looking out of the past and faraway into the future. A newspaper can set a nation's focus for a morning, adjusting it one way or the other. A President can set the focus for four years. But only a book can set the focus for a nation's next hundred years so that it can act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week and morning to morning. Only a book can make a vast, inspiring, steadfast, stage-setting for a nation. Only a book, strong, slow, reflective, alone with each man, and before all men, can set in vast still array the perspective, the vision of the people, can give that magnificent self-consciousness which alone makes a great nation, or a mighty man. At last humble, imperious, exalted, it shall see Itself, its vision of its daily life lying out before it, threading its way to God! CHAPTER XIII NEWS-PAPERS I went one day six months ago to the Mansion House and heard Lord Grey, and Lord Robert Cecil, and Mr. T.C. Taylor and others address the annual meeting of the Labour Copartnership Association. I found myself in the presence of a body of men who believe that Englishmen are capable of bigger and better things than many men believe they are capable of. They refuse to evade the issue of the coal strike and to agree with the socialists who have given up believing that English employers can be competent and who merely believe that we will have to rely on our governments now to be employers, and they refuse to agree with the syndicalists, who believe in human nature still less and have given up on employers and on governments both. I have retained three impressions as a result of the meeting. The first was that it was the most significant and impressive event since the coal strike, that it brought the whole industrial issue to a point and summed the coal strike up. The second impression was one of surprise that the hall was not full. The third impression came the next day when I looked through the papers for accounts of what had been said and of what it stood for. It was noted pleasantly and hurriedly as one of the day's events. It was just one more of those shadowy things that flicker on the big foolish, drifting, rolling attention of a world a second and are gone. People were given a few inches. I read in the papers that same day a quite long account of a discussion of nine bishops for five hours (meeting at the same time) on a matter of proper clothes for clergymen. I would have said of that meeting of the Labour Copartnership Association--that it was a meeting of a Society for Defence and Protection of Longer Possible Religion on the Earth--but the clergy out of all the invitations, did not seem very largely to have had time to be there. I wondered too a little about the papers, as I hunted through them. It set one to thinking if anything serious to the nation would have happened, if possibly during the coal strike the London papers had devoted as much attention to T.C. Taylor--a mutual interest employer--and to how he runs his business--as to Horatio Bottomley? Possibly too what Mr. Sandow prefers to have people drink is not so important--perhaps whole pages of it at a time--as Amos Mann and how he runs his shoe business without strikes, or as Joseph Bibby and how he makes oil cakes and loyal workmen together. I read the other day of a clergyman in New Jersey--who was organizing a league of all the left-handed men in the world. Everything is being organized, whether or no. Some one has financed him. There will be some one very soon now who will pay the bill for organizing the attention of a world and for deciding the fate of human nature. It would be worth while spending possibly one fortune on getting human nature to settle decisively and once for all whether it has any reason to believe in itself or not. Why have a world at all--one like this? Do we want it? Who wants it? What do we want instead? We will advertise and find out. We will spend millions of pounds and Dreadnoughts, even national beer-bills on it, if necessary, on making everybody know that mentally competent business men--mutual-interest employers, and mentally competent workmen--mutual-interest workmen, can be produced by the human race. When everybody knows that this is true, nine out of ten Parliamentary questions would be settled, the Churches would again have a chance to be noticed, and education and even religion could be taken seriously. There would be some object in being a teacher perhaps once more and in making teaching again a great profession. There would be some object perhaps in even being an artist. The world would start off on a decent, self-respecting theory or vision about itself. Things could begin to be done in society once more, soundly, permanently, humanly and from the bottom up. We would go out on the streets again--rich and poor--and look in each other's faces. We would take up our morning papers without a sinking at the heart. And the men who have stopped believing in men and who merely believe in machines would be indicted before the bar of mankind. We would see them slowly filing back, one by one, to where they belong--on the back seats of the world. The newspapers in England and America seem to think that in their business of rolling the world along, what they find themselves confronted with just now is an economic problem. The problem that the newspapers are really confronted with, as a matter of fact, is one with which newspaper men big and little are more competent to deal than they would be with an expert problem in economics. The real problem that newspapers are confronted with every night, every morning, to-day, is a problem in human nature. Some people believe that human nature can be believed in, and others do not. The socialists, the syndicalists, the trades unionists, as a class, and the capitalists as a class, are acting as if they did not. A great many inventors, and a great many workmen, all the more bold and inventive workmen, and many capitalists and great organizers of facts and of men, are acting as if they believed in human nature. Which are right? Can a mutual-interest employer, can a mutual-interest worker, be produced by the human race? There are some of us who answer that this is a matter of fact, that this type of man can be produced, is already produced, and is about to be reproduced indefinitely. The moment we can convince trades unions and convince employers that this is true we will change the face of the earth. Why not change the face of the earth now? In this connection I respectfully submit three considerations: 1st. If all employers of the world to-morrow morning knew what Lord Grey (as President of the Labour Copartnership Association) knows to-day about copartnership--the hard facts about the way copartnership works in calling out human nature--in nerving and organizing labour, every employer in the world to-morrow would begin to take an attitude toward labour which would result in making strikes and lockouts as impracticable, as incredible, as moony, as visionary forever as ideals of a world without strikes look now. 2nd. If all the workmen of the world to-morrow morning knew what Frederick Taylor (the American engineer) knows about planning workmen's work so that they receive, for the same expenditure of strength, a third more wages every day, the whole attitude of labour in every nation and of the trades unions of the world--the attitude of doing as little work as possible, of labouring and studying and slaving away to discover ways of not being of any use to employers--would face about in a day. 3rd. What Lord Grey knows about copartnership and the way it works is in the form of ascertainable, communicable, and demonstrable facts. What Frederick Taylor knows and what he has been doing with human beings and with steel and pig iron and with bricks and other real things is in the form of history that has been making for thirty years--and that can be looked up and proved. Why should not everybody who employs labour know what Lord Grey knows? And why should not all workmen know what a few thousand workmen who have been trained under Frederick Taylor to work under better conditions and with more wages, know? If I were an inspired millionaire the first thing I would do to-morrow would be to supply the funds and find the men who should take up what Lord Grey knows about employers, and what Frederick Taylor knows about workmen, and put it where all who live shall see it and know it. I would spend my fortune in proving to the world, in making everybody know and believe that the mutual-interest business man and the mutual-interest workman have been produced and can be produced and shall be produced by the human race. The problem of the fate of the world in its essential nature and in its spiritual elements and gifts--has come to be in this age of the press a huge advertising problem--a great adventure in human attention. The most characteristic and human and natural way, and the only profound and permanent way to handle the quarrel between Capital and Labour is by placing certain facts--certain rights-of-all-men-to-know, into the hands of some disinterested and powerful statesman of publicity--some great organizer of the attention of a world. He would have to be a practical passionate psychologist, a man gifted with a bird's-eye view of publics--a discoverer of geniuses and crowds, a natural diviner or reader of the hearts of men. He shall search out and employ twenty men to write as many books addressed to as many classes and types of employers and workers. He shall arrange pamphlets for every dooryard that cannot help being read. He shall reach trades unions by using the cinema, by having some master of human appeal take the fate of labour, study it out in pictures--and the truth shall be thrown night after night and day after day on a hundred thousand screens around a world. He shall organize and employ wide publicity or rely on secret and careful means on different aspects of the issue according to the nature of the issue, human nature and common sense, and organize his campaign to reach every type of person, every temperament, and order of circumstance, each in its own way. What Lord Grey knows and what Frederick Taylor's workmen know shall be put where all who live shall see it where every employer, every workman, every workman's wife and every growing boy and girl that is passing by, as on some vast billboard above the world, shall see it--shall see and know and believe that employers that are worth believing in--and that workmen who can work and who are skilled and clever enough to love to work--can still be produced by the human race. If I were a newspaper man I would start what might be called Pull Together Clubs in every community, men in all walks of life, little groups of crowdmen or men in the community who could not bear not to see a town do team work. I would use these Pull Together Clubs in every community as means of gathering and distributing news--as local committees on the national campaign of touching the imagination of labour and touching the imagination of capital. "_Without Vision the People perish_." I would begin with spending five million dollars on a vision for the people. What would I do with a five-million-dollar fund for touching the imagination of labour and touching the imagination of capital? First: preliminary announcement in all papers and in all public ways, asking names and addresses of workmen who have already proved and established their belief in copartnership. Names and addresses of employers in the same way. Second: names and addresses of workmen who would believe in it if they could; who believe in the principle theoretically and would be interested in seeing how it could be practically and technically proved. Names and addresses of employers in the same way. Third: selection of one firm in each industry, the best and most strategically placed to carry it out in that industry, and placing the facts before them. Selection of the leading workmen out of all the workmen in the nation employed in that industry, who would be willing to work with such a firm. Fourth: a selection of travelling secretaries to visit trades unions and get provisional permission and toleration for these workmen so that they can take copartnership places under such a firm with the consent of their fellows and he set one side for experimental purposes, under the protection of the trades union rules. Fifth: I would find the most promising trades-union branch in each industry and I would try to get this branch to take it up with the other branches until all trades unions were brought to admit copartnership members on special terms. Sixth: after getting copartnership tolerated for certain workmen employed in certain firms I would try to make copartnership a trades-union movement. I would then let the trades unions educate the employers. Seventh: I would prepare a list of apparent exceptions to copartnership as a working principle. I would investigate and try to see why they were exceptions and why copartnership would not work, and I would find and set inventors at work, and find in what way the spirit that is back of copartnership could be applied. CHAPTER XIV NEWS-MACHINES We want to be good and the one thing we need to do is to tell each other. Then we will be good. Our conveniences for being good in crowds are not finished yet. We have invented machines for crowds to see one another with and to use in getting about in the dark. One engine whirls round and round all night so that half a million people can be going about anywhere after sunset without running into each other. Crowds have vast machines for being somewhere else--run in somewhat the same way all from one unpretentious building they put up called a Power House. A great many of our machines for allowing crowds of people to move their bodies around with have been attended to, but our Intelligence-Machine, our machine for knowing what other people really think, and what they are like in their hearts so that we can know enough to be good to them, and have brains enough to get them to be good to us, is not finished and set up yet. The industrial problem instead of being primarily an economic problem is a news problem. If a President were to appoint a Secretary of Labour and were to give him as one of his conveniences, a news engineer--an expert at attracting and holding the attention of labour unions and driving through news to them about themselves that they do not know yet, who would be practically at the head of the department in two years? The Secretary or the Secretary's news engineer? News is all there is to such a department, finding out what it is and distributing it. Any one can think of scores of labour-union fallacies, news they do not know about themselves that they will want to know at once when their attention is called to it. If nine members of the President's Cabinet were national news agents, experts in nationalizing news, one member could do with his subordinates all the other things that Cabinet members do. The real problem before each Cabinet member is a problem of news. If the Secretary of Commerce, for instance, could get people to know certain things, he would not need to do at all most of the things that he is doing now. Neither would the Attorney General. If everything in a Cabinet position turns on getting people to know things, why not get them to know them? Why not take that job instead? Why not take the job of throwing one's self out of a job? Every powerful man has done it--thrown himself out of what he was doing, by making up something bigger to do from the beginning of the world. In every business it is the man who can recognize, focus, organize, and apply news, and who can get news through to people, who soon becomes the head of the business. The man who can get news through to directors and to employees and make them see themselves and see one another and the facts as they are, soon gets to be Head of the factory. The man who can get news through to the public, the salesman of news to people about what they want to buy and about how they are to spend their money--very personal, intimate news to every man--soon rises to be Head of the Head of the factory and of the entire business. It will probably be the same in a cabinet or in a government. If the Secretary of the Department of Commerce has a news engineer as a subordinate in his department and begins to study and observe how to do his work best, how to solve his problem in the nation, we will soon see the head of the department, if he really is the head of the department, quietly taking over his news engineer's job and letting his news engineer have his. It is a news engineering job, being a Secretary of Commerce. Every member of the Cabinet has a news engineering job. And the fact seems to be that the moment the news is attended to in each member's department--applied news, special and private news, turned on and set to work where it is called for--most members of cabinets, secretaries of making people do things, and for that matter, the Presidents of making people do things will be thrown out of employment. The Secretaries of What People Think, and the President of What People Think--the engineers of the news in this nation--will be the men who govern it. CHAPTER XV NEWS-CROWDS I have tried to express in the last chapter, some kind of tentative working vision or hope of what authors and of what newspaper men can do in governing a country. This chapter is for anybody, any plain human being. Governments all over the world to-day are groping to find out what plain human beings are like. It does not matter very long what other things a government gets wrong, if it gets the people right. This suggests something that each of us can do. I was calling on ----, Treasurer of ----, in his new bank, not long ago--a hushed, reverent place with a dome up over it and no windows on this wicked world--a kind of heavenly minded way of being lighted from above. It seemed to be a kind of Church for Money. "This is new," I said, "since I've been away. Who built it?" ---- mentioned the name of Non-Gregarious as if I had never heard of him. I said nothing. And he began to tell me how Non built the bank. He said he had wanted Non from the first, but that the directors had been set against it. And the more he told the directors about Non, he said, the more set they were. They kept offering a good many rather vague objections, and for a long time he could not really make them out. Finally he got it. All the objections boiled down to one. Non was too good to be true. If there was a man like Non in this world, they said, they would have heard about it before. * * * * * When I was telling ex-Mayor ----, in ----, about Non, the first time, he interrupted me and asked me if I would mind his ringing for his stenographer. He was a trustee and responsible, either directly or indirectly, for hundreds of buildings, and he wanted the news in writing. Of course there must be something the matter with it, he said, but he wanted it to be true, if it could, and as the bare chance of its being true would be very important to him, he was going to have it looked up. Now ex-Mayor ---- is precisely the kind of man (as half the world knows) who, if he had been a contractor, instead of what he had happened to be, would have been precisely the kind of contractor Non is. He has the same difficult, heroic blend of shrewd faiths in him, of high motives and getting what he wants. But the moment ex-Mayor ---- found these same motives put up to be believed in at one remove, and in somebody else, he thought they were too good to be true. I have found myself constantly confronted in the last few years of observation with a very singular and interesting fact about business men. Nine business men out of ten I know, who have high motives, (in a rather bluff simple way, without particularly thinking about it, one way or the other) seem to feel a little superior to other people. They begin, as a rule, apparently, by feeling a little superior to themselves, by trying to keep from seeing how high their motives are, and when, in the stern scuffle of life, they are unable any longer to keep from suspecting how high their motives are themselves, they fall back on trying to keep other people from suspecting it. In ----'s factory in ----, the workers in brass, a few years ago, could not be kept alive more than two years because they breathed brass filings. When ---- installed, at great expense, suction machines to place beside the men to keep them from breathing brass, some one said, "Well surely you will admit this time, that this is philanthropy?" "Not at all." The saving in brass air alone, gathered up from in front of the men's mouths, paid for the machines. What is more he said that after he had gone to the expense of educating some fine workmen, if a mere little sucking machine like that could make the best workmen he had, work for him twenty years instead of two years, it was poor economy to let them die. Nearly all of the really creative business men make it a point, until they get a bit intimate with people, to talk in this tone about business. One can talk with them for hours, for days at a time, about their business--some of them, without being able a single time to corner them into being decent or into admitting that they care about anybody. Now I will not yield an inch to ---- or to anybody else in my desire to displace and crowd out altruism in our modern life. I believe that altruism is a feeble and discouraged thing from a religious point of view. I have believed that the big, difficult and glorious thing in religion is mutualism, a spiritual genius for finding identities, for putting people's interests together-you-and-I-ness, and we-ness, letting people crowd in and help themselves. And why not believe this and drop it? Why should nearly every business man one meets to-day, try to keep up this desperate show, of avoiding the appearance of good, of not wanting to seem mixed up in any way with goodness--either his own or other people's? In the present desperate crisis of the world, when all our governments everywhere are groping to find out what business men are really like and what they propose to be like, if a man is good (far more than if he is bad) everybody has a right to know it. The President has a right to know it. The party leaders have a right to know it. It is a big businesslike thing for a man to make goodness pay, but what is the man's real, deep, happy, creative, achieving motive in making goodness pay? What is it in the man that fills him with this fierce desire, this almost business-fanaticism for making goodness pay? It is a big daily grim love of human nature in him, his love of being in a human world, his passion for human economy, for world efficiency and world-self-respect. This is what it is in him that makes him force goodness to pay. The business men of the bigger type who let themselves talk in this tone to-day, do not mean it, they are letting themselves be insensibly drawn into the tone of the men around them. We have gone skulking about with our virtues so long, saying that we have none, that we have believed it. We all know men finer than we are who say they have none. So we have not, probably. And so it goes on. I grow more and more tired every year of going about the business world, at boards of trade and at clubs and at dinners, and finding all this otherwise plain and manly world, all dotted over everywhere with all these simple, good, self-deceived blundering prigs of evil, putting on airs before everybody day and night, of being worse than they are! It is not exactly a lie. It is a Humdrum. People do not deliberately lie about human nature. They merely say pianola-minded things. One goes down any business street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, or Broadway. One hears the same great ragtime tune of business, dinging like a kind of street piano, through men's minds, "Sh-sh-sh-sh-Oh, SH-SH! Oh, do not let anybody know I'm being good!" =II= I am not going to try any longer to worm out of my virtues or to keep up an appearance of having as low motives as other people are trying to make me believe they have. They have lied long enough. I have lied long enough. My motives are really rather high and I am going to admit it. And the higher they are (when I have hustled about and got the necessary brains to go with them) the better they have worked. Nine times out of ten when they have not worked, it has been my fault. Sometimes it is John Doe's fault. I am going to speak to John Doe about it. I am going to tell him what I am driving at. I have turned over a new leaf. In the crisis of a great nation and as an act of last desperate patriotism, I am going to give up looking modest. For a long time now I have wanted to dare to come out and stand up before this Modesty Bug-a-boo and have it out with it and say what I think of it, as one of the great, still, sinister threats against our having or getting a real national life in America. I knew a boy once who grew so fast that his mother always kept him wearing shoes three sizes too large, and big, hopeful-looking coats and trousers. Except for a few moments a year he never caught up. Nobody ever saw that boy and his long shoes when he was not butting bravely about, stubbing his toes on the world and turning up his sleeves. It was a great relief to him and everybody, finally, when he grew up. I am going to let myself go around, for a while now, at least until our present national crisis is over in business and in politics, like that boy. There are millions of other men in this country who want to be like that boy. Nations may smile at us if they want to. We will smile too--rather stiffly and soberly, but for better or worse we propose from to-day on, to let people see what we are trying to be daily, grimly, right along side of what we are! I have come to the conclusion that the only way, for me, at least, to keep modest and kind, is to have my ideals all on. When one is going around in sight of everybody with one's moral sleeves rolled up, and one's great wistful, broad trousers that do not look as if they would ever get filled out, it is awkward to find fault with other people for not filling out their moral clothes. It may be a severe measure to take with one's self hut the surest way to be kind is to live an exposed life. I propose to live the next few years in a glass house. There are millions of other men who want to. We want to see if we cannot at last live confidentially with a world, live naïvely and simply with a world like boys and like great men and like dogs! What I have written, I have written. I propose to run the risk of being good. When driven to it, I will run the risk of saying I am good. My motives are fairly high. See! here is my scale of one hundred! I had rather stand forty-five on my scale than ninety-eight on yours! If there is any discrepancy between my vision and my action, I am not going to be bullied out of my life and out of living my life the way I want to, by the way I look. Though it mock me, I will not haul down my flag. I will haul up my life! Here it is right here in this paragraph, in black and white. I take it up and look at it, I read it once more and lay it down. What I have written, I have written. =III= People do not seem to agree in the present crisis of our American industrial and national life, about the necessity of getting at the facts and at the real news in this country about how good we are. Last November in the national election, four and a half million men (Republicans) said to Theodore Roosevelt, "Theodore! do not be good so loud!" Four and a half million other men, also Republicans, told him not to mind what anybody said, but to keep right on being good as loud as he liked, for as long as it seemed necessary. They wanted to be sure our goodness in America such as we had, was being loud enough to be heard, believed in, and acted on in public. The other set of men, last November (who were really very good too, of course), were more sedate and liked to see goodness modulated more. They stood out for what might be called a kind of moral elegance. The governing difference between the Roosevelt type and the Taft type in America has not been a mere difference of temperament but a difference in news-sense, in a sense of crisis in the nation. Thousands of men of all parties, with the nicest, easiest stand-pat Taft temperaments in the world, with soft, low voices and with the most beautiful moral manners, have let themselves join in a national attempt to shock this nation into seeing how good it is. A great temporary crisis can only be met by a great temporary loudness. This is what has been happening in America during the last six months. At last, all men in all parties are engaged in trying to find out: Is it true or not true that we want to be good? We are trying to get the news through. It may not be very becoming to us and we know as well as any one, that loudness, except when morally deaf people drive us to it is in bad taste. We are looking forward, every one of us, to being as elegant as any one is, and the very first minute we get the morally deaf people out of office where we will not have to go about shouting out at them we will tone down in our goodness. We will modulate beautifully! =IV= There are three other bug-a-boos, besides the Modesty Bug-a-boo that America will have to face and drive out of the way before it can be truly said to have a national character or to have grown up and found itself. There is the Goody-good Bug-a-boo, the Consistency Bug-a-boo, and the Bug-a-boo that Thomas Jefferson if he were living now, would never never ride in a carriage. Each of these bug-a-boos in the general mistiness and muddle-headiness of the time can be seen going about, saying, "Boo! Boo!" to this democracy from day to day and year to year, keeping it scared into not getting what it wants. There is not one of them that will not evaporate in ten minutes the first morning we get some real news through in this country about ourselves and about what we are like. What is the real news about us, for instance, as regards being goody-good? I can only begin with the news for one. For years, I have held myself back from taking a plain or possibly loud stand for goodness as a shrewd, worldly-wise program for American business and public life, because I was afraid of people, and afraid people would think I was trying to improve them. What was worse, I was afraid of myself too. I was afraid I really would. I am afraid now, or rather I would be, if I had not drilled through to the news about myself and about other people and about human nature that I am putting into this chapter. * * * * * I have written five hundred pages in this book on an awkward and dangerous subject like the Golden Rule, and I appeal to the reader--I ask him humbly, hopefully, gratefully if he can honestly say (except for a minute here and there when I have been tired and slipped up), if he has really felt improved or felt that I was trying to improve him in this book. On your honour, Gentle Reader--you who have been with me five hundred pages! You say "Yes"? Then I appeal to your sense of fairness. If you truly feel I have been trying to improve you in this book, turn this leaf down here and stop. It is only fair to me. Close the book with your improved and being improved feeling and never open it again until it passes over. You have no right to go on page after page calling me names, as it were, right in the middle of my own book in this way behind my back, you!--hundreds and thousands of miles away from me, by your own lamp, by your own window--you come to me here between these two helpless pasteboard covers where I cannot get out at you, where I cannot answer back, and you say that I am trying to improve you! Ah, Gentle Reader, forgive me! God forgive me! Believe me, I never meant, not if it could possibly be helped, to improve you! If you insist on it and keep saying that I have been improving you, all I can say is that I was merely looking as if I were improving you. _You_ did it. I did not. God help me if I am trying to improve you! I am trying to find out in this book who I am. If, incidentally, while I am quietly working away on this for five hundred pages, you find out who you are yourself, and then drop into a gentle glowing improved feeling all by yourself, do not mix me up in it. I deny that I have tried to improve you or anybody. I have written this book to get my own way, to express my America. I have written it to say "i," to say "I," to say (the first minute you let me), "you and I," to say we, WE about America--to drive the news through to a President of what America is like. I am not improving you. I am telling you what may or may not be news about you. Take it or leave it. =V= I want to be good. I do not feel superior to other men. And I do not propose, if there is anything I can do about it, to be compelled to feel superior. I believe we all want to be good. The one thing I want in this world is to prove it. I want my own way. I am not going to slump into being a beautiful character. I have written this book to get my own way. I have said I will not be mixed up in the fate of people who do not know where they are going, who have not decided what they are like, who do not know who they are. What do the people want? Some people tell me they want nothing. They tell me it would only make things worse and stir things up for me to want to be good. Or perhaps they think it is beautiful to lower the price of oil. They want oil at seven cents a gallon. Do they? Do you? Do I? I say no. Let oil wait. I want to raise the price of men and to put a market value on human life. I find as I look about me that there are two classes of statesmen offering to be helpful in making life worth living in America. There are the statesmen who think we are going to be good and who believe in a program which trusts and exalts the people and the leaders of the people. There are the statesmen who seem to believe that American human nature does not amount to enough to be good. They are planning a program on the principle that the best that can be done with human nature in America in business and public life is to have it expurgated. Which class of statesmen do we want? In some of our state prisons men who are not considered fit to reproduce themselves are sterilized. The question that is now up before this country is, Do we or do we not want American business sterilized? Are we or are we not going to put a national penalty on all initiative in all business men because some men abuse it? There is but one thing that can save us, namely, proving to one another and to our public men, that we are good, that we are going to be good and that we know how. We face the issue to-day. Two definite programs are before the country. Those who have put their faith in being afraid of one another as a national policy have devised several By-laws for an Expurgated America. They say, eliminate the right of a man to do wrong. Deny him the right of moral experiment because some of his experiments do not work. We say let him try. We can look out for ourselves or we will have bigger men than he is, to look out for us. They say, eliminate the right of a man to be an owner, because nobody has the courage to believe that a man can express his best self in property. We say that property may express a man's religion, and that the way a man has of being rich or of being poor may be an art-form. Most men can express themselves better in property than in anything else. They say, eliminate all monopoly indiscriminately and the occasional logical efficiency of monopoly because it has not worked well for the people the first few times and because we have not learned how to handle it. We say learn how to handle it. They say eliminate the middleman. They say that the one strategic man in every industry who can represent everybody if he wants to, who can be a great man and who can make a great industry serve everybody, must be eliminated because nobody believes America can produce a middleman. We say instead of weakly and helplessly giving up a great spiritual and morally-engineering institution like the middleman because the average middleman does not know his job, we say: Exalt the middleman raise him to the n-th power, make him--well--do you remember, Gentle Reader, the walking beams on the old sidewheel steamers? We say do not eliminate him--lift him up--make him what he naturally is and is in position to be--the walking beam of Business! If the average middleman does not know how to be a real middleman we will make one who does. And all the other eliminations that we have watched people being scared into, one by one, we will turn into exaltations--each in its own kind and place. There is not one of our fears that is not the suggestion, the mighty outline, the inspiration for the world's next new size and new kind of American man. We say place the position before the man--with its fears, with its songs, with its challenge. We say, tell him what we expect of him and demand of him. Put him in a high place on a platform before the world! There with the truth about him written on his forehead in the sight of all the people, call him by name, glorify him or behead him! We are men and we are Americans. We will stand up to each of our dangers one by one. Each and every danger of them is a romance, a sublime adventure, a nation-maker. Our threats, our very by-words and despairs, we will take up, and, in the sight of the world, forge them into shrewd faiths and into mighty men! This is my news or vision. I say that this is where we are going in America. I compel no man to follow my news but I will pursue him with my news until he gives me his! * * * * * This news, I am telling, Gentle Reader, is perhaps news about you. If it is not true news, say so. Say what is. We all have a right to know. The one compulsion of modern life is our right to know, our right to compel people who live on the same continent or who live in the same country with us, to open up their hearts, to furnish us with their share of the materials for a mutual understanding, or for a definite mutual misunderstanding, on which to live. It is the one compulsion of which we will be guilty. All liberty is in it. These people who have to live with us and that we have to live with, these people who breathe the same moral air with us, drink the same water with us, these people who have their moral dumps, who throw away their moral garbage with us--these people who will not help provide some daily, mutual understanding for these common decencies for our souls to live together these people we defy and challenge! We will compel them to reveal themselves. We will drive them away, or we will drive them into driving us away, if they will not yield to us what is in their hearts--Mars, hell, anywhere we go, it matters not to us where we go, except that we cannot and we will not live with men about us who thrust down their true feelings and their real desires into a kind of manhole under them, and sit on the lid and smile. Some seem to have manholes and some have safes or spiritual banks, and there are others who have convenient, dim, beautiful clouds in the sky to hide their feelings in. But whatever their real feelings are, and wherever they keep them, they belong to us. We insist on having or on making mutual arrangements to have, if we live in crowds, some kind of spiritual rapid transit system for getting our minds through to one another. We demand a system for having the streets of our souls decently lighted, some provision for moral sewers, for air or atmosphere--and all the common conveniences for having decent and self-respecting souls in crowds--all the intelligence-machines, the love-machines, the hope-machines, and the believing-machines that the crowds must have for living decently, for living with beauty, living with considerateness and respect in this awful daily sublime presence of one another's lives! We shall still have our splendid isolations when we need them, some of us, and our little solitudes of meanness, but the main common fund of motives for living together, for growing up into a world together, the desires, motives, and intentions in men's hearts, their desires toward us and ours toward them, we are going to know and compel to be made known. We will fight men to the death to know them. Have we not fought, you and I, Gentle Reader, all of us, each man of us, all our years, all our days, to drive through to some sort of mutual understanding with our own selves? Now we will fight through to some mutual understanding with one another and with the world. We will knock on every door, make a house to house canvass of the souls of the world, pursue every man, sing under his windows. We will undergird his consciousness and his dreams. We will make the birds sing to him in the morning, "_Where are you going_?" We will put up a sign at the foot of his bed for his eyes to fall on when he awakes, "_Where are you going_?" Whatever it is that works best, if we blow it out of you with dynamite or love or fear or draw it out of you with some mighty singing going past--ah, brother, we will have it out of you! You shall be our brother! We will be your brother though we die! We will live together or we will die together. What do you really want? What do you really like? _Who are you_? We may pile together all our funny, fearful, little Dreadnoughts, our stodgy dead lumps of men called armies, and what are they? And what do they amount to and what can they do, as compared with truth, the real news about what people want in this world, and about where we are going? I say--they shall be as nothing as a rending force, as a glory to tear down and rebuild a world, as compared with the truth, with the news about us, that shall come out at last (God hasten the day!) from the open--the pried-open hearts of men! And I have seen that men shall go forth with shouts in that day and with glad and solemn silence, to build a world! * * * * * I wonder if I have faced down the Goody-good Bug-a-boo. I speak for five million men. We have got this book written between us (under the name of one of us), because we want our own way. We are not improving people. We are not even trying to improve ourselves. Many of us started in on it once and the first improvement we thought of was not to try any more. It is a great deal harder to try to live. Few people want us to--most people get in the way. And when people get in the way we lay about us a little--We hit them. We have written this book, because we want to hit a great many people at once. We find them everywhere about us, in monster cities, huge thoughtless anthills of them, and they will not let us live a larger and a richer life. We say to them, We resent your houses your shoes, your voices, your fears, your motives, your wills, the diseases you make us walk past every day, the rows of things you seem to think will do, and that you think we must get used to, and we do not propose, if we can help it, to get used to what you think will do for Churches; nor to what you think will do for a government or to the little lonely, scattered, toyschool-houses, that when you come into the world, fresh and strange and happy you all proceed solemnly to coop your souls in. Nor do we want to get used to your hem-and-haw parliaments and your funny little perfumed prophets--your prophets lying down or propped up with pillows or your poets wringing their hands. Nor will we be put off with all your gracefully feeble, watery, lovely little pastel religions for this grim and mighty modern world. We are American men. We do not propose to be driven out to sea, to stand face to face every day with what is true and full of beauty and magic, or to have skies and mountains and stars palmed off on us as companions instead of men! This is what five million men are trying to express in writing this book. If people deny that I have the right to give the news about America for five million men; if they say that this is not true about American human nature, that this is not the news, then I will say, _I am the news_! I am this sort of an American! God helping me, I say it! "Look at _me_!" I am this sort of man of whom I am writing! If I am not this sort of man this afternoon, I will be in the morning! Though I go down as a hiss and as laughter and as a by-word and a mocking to the end of my days--_I_ am this sort of man! I say, "Look at _me_!" If you will not believe me--that this is an American, if you say that I cannot prove that there are five million of men like this in America, then I will still say, "Here is _one_! What will you do with ME?" Though I die in laughter, all my desires and all my professions in a tumult about my soul, I say it to this nation, "Your laws, your programs, your philosophies, your I wills, and I won'ts, I say, shall reckon with _me_! Your presidents and your legislatures shall reckon with Me!" Here I am. The man is here. He is in this book! I will break through to the five million men. I will make the five million men look at me until they recognize themselves. If no one else will attend to it for me, and if there shall be no other way, I will have a brass band go through the streets of New York and of a thousand cities, with banners and floats and great hymns to the people, and they shall go up and down the streets of the people with signs saying, "Have you read Crowds?" I will have the Boston Symphony Orchestra tour the country singing--singing from kettledrums to violins to a thousand silent audiences, "_Have yon read 'CROWDS'_?" I live in a nation in which we are butting through into our sense of our national character, working our way up into a huge mutual working understanding. In our beautiful, vague, patriotic, muddleheadedness about what we want and whether we really want to be good, and about what being good is like and I say, for one, half-laughing, half-praying, God helping me--_Look at_ =ME=! =VI= I was much interested some time ago when I had not been long landed in England, and was still trying in the hopeful American way to understand it--to see the various attitudes of Englishmen toward the discussions which were going on at that time in the _Spectator_ and elsewhere, of Mr. Cadbury's inconsistency; and while I had no reason, as an American, fresh-landed from New York, to be interested in Mr. Cadbury himself, I found that his inconsistency interested me very much. It insisted on coming back into my mind, in spite of what I would have thought, as a strangely important subject--not merely as regards Mr. Cadbury, which might or might not be important, but as regards England and as regards America, as regards the way a modern man struggling day by day with a huge, heavy machine civilization like ours, can still manage to be a live, useful, and possibly even a human, being in it. There are two astonishing facts that stand face to face with all of us to-day, who are labouring with civilization. The first fact is that almost without exception all the men in it who mean the most in it to us and to other people for good or for evil--who stir us deeply and do things--all fall into the inconsistent class. The second fact is that this is a very small, select distinguished, and astonishingly capable class. A man who is in a grim, serious business like being good, must expect to give up many of his little self-indulgences in the way of looking good. Looking inconsistent, possibly even inconsistency itself, may be sometimes, temporarily, a man's most important public service to his time. One needs but a little glance at history, or even at one's own personal history. It is by being inconsistent that people grow, and without meaning to, give other people materials for growing. For the particular purpose of making the best things grow, of pointing up truths, of giving definite edges to right and wrong, an inconsistent man--a man who is trying to pry himself out a little at a time from an impossible situation in an impossible world, is likely to do the world more good than a very large crowd of angels who have made up their minds that they are going to be consistent and going to keep up a consistent look in this same world--whatever happens to it. * * * * * If one is marking people on consistency, and if one takes a scale of 100 as perfect, perhaps one should not always insist on 98. One does not always insist on 98 for one's self. And when one does and does not get it, one feels forgiving sometimes. In dealing with public men and with other people that we know less than we know ourselves--if they really do things, it is well to make allowances, and let them off at 65. In some cases, in fact, when men are doing something that no one else volunteers to do for a world, I find I get on very well with letting them off at 51. I have sometimes wished, when I have been in England, that Tories and Liberals and Socialists and the Wise and the Good would consider letting George Cadbury off at 51. Perhaps people are being more safely educated by George Cadbury in his journals than they might be by other people in what seem to seem to many of us unfamiliar and dangerous ideas. Perhaps posterity, in 1953, looking down this precipice of revolution England did not fall into in 1913, may mark George Cadbury 73--possibly 89. If, in any way, in the crisis of England, George Cadbury can crowd in and can keep thousands and thousands of Englishmen and women from being educated by John Bottomley Bull or by Mrs. John Bottomley Bull and hosts of other would-be friends of the people--by Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and Vernon Hartshorn, does it really seem after all a matter of grave national importance that George Cadbury--a professional non-better--in educating these people should allow them to keep on in his paper, having a betting column? So long as he really helps stave off John Bottomley Bull and Mrs. John Bottomley Bull, let him slump into being a millionaire, if he cannot very well help it! We say, some of us, let him even make cocoa! or have family prayers! or be a Liberal! At least this is the way one American visiting England feels about it, if he may be permitted. Perhaps I would not, if I were an angel. I do not want to be an angel. I am more ambitious. I want my ideals to do things, and I want to stand by people who are doing things with their ideals, whether their ideals are my ideals or not. * * * * * Let us suppose. Suppose the reader were in Mr. Cadbury's place. What would he do? Here are two things, let us suppose, he wishes very much. He wishes a certain class of people would not bet, and he also wishes to convince these same people of certain important social and political ideas for which he stands. If he told them that he would have nothing to do with them unless they stopped betting, there would be no object in his publishing their paper at all. There would be nothing that they would let him tell them. If, on the other hand, he begins merely as one more humble, fellow-human being, and puts himself definitely on record as not betting himself, and still more definitely as wishing other people would not bet, and then admits honestly that these other people have as good a right to decide to bet as he has to decide not to; and if he then deliberately proceeds to do what every real gentleman who does not smoke and wishes other people did not, does without question--namely, offers them the facilities for doing it why should people call him inconsistent? Perhaps a man's consistency consists in his relation to his own smoking and betting and not in his rushing his consistency over into the smoking and betting of other people. Perhaps being consistent does not need to mean being a little pharisaical, or using force, or cutting people off and having no argument with them, in one matter, because one cannot agree with them in another. Of course, I admit it would be better if Mr. Cadbury would publish in a parallel column (if he could get a genius to write it) an extremely tolerant, human, comrade-like series of objections to betting, which people could read alongside, and which would persuade people as much as possible not to read the best betting tips in the world in the column next door, but certainly the act of furnishing the tips in the meantime and of being sure that they are the best tips in the world, is a very real, human, courageous act. It even has a kind of rough and ready religion in it. It may be too much to expect, but even in our goodness perhaps we ought to do as we would be done by. We must be righteous, but on the whole, must we not be righteous toward others as we would have them righteous toward us? What many of us find ourselves wishing most of all, when we come upon some specially attractive man is, that we could discover some way, or that he could discover some way, in which the idealist in him, and the realist in him could be got to act together. There are some of us who have come to believe that in the dead earnest, daily, almost desperate struggle of modern life, the real solid idealist will have to care enough about his ideals to arrange to have two complete sets, one set which he calls his personal ideals, which are of such a nature that he can carry them out alone and rigidly and quite by himself, and another which he calls his bending or coöperative ideals, geared a little lower and adjusted to more gradual usage, which he uses when he asks other men to act with him. It may take a very single-hearted and strong man to keep before his own mind and before other people's his two sets of ideals, his "I" faiths, and his you-and-I faiths, keeping each in strict proportion, but it would certainly be a great human adventure to do it. Saying "God and I," and saying "God and you and I" are two different arts. And it is clear-headedness and not inconsistency in a man that keeps him so. This is not a mere defence of Mr. Cadbury; it is a defence of a type of man, of a temperament in our modern life, of men like Edward A. Filene, of Boston, of a man like Hugh Mac Rae, one of the institutions of North Carolina, of Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, of nine men out of ten of the bigger and more creative sort who are helping cities to get their way and nations to express themselves. I have believed that the principle at stake, the great principle for real life in England and in America, of letting a man be inconsistent if he knows how--must have a stand made for it. There is no one thing, whether in history, or literature, or science, or politics that can be more crucial in the fate of a nation to-day than the correct, just, and constructive judgment of Contemporary Inconsistent People. =VII= If I could have managed it, I would have had this book printed and written--every page of it--in three parallel columns. The first column would be for the reader who believes it, who keeps writing a book more or less like it as he goes along. I would put in one sentence at the top for him and then let him have the rest of the space to write in himself. In other words I would say 2 plus 2 equals 4 and drop it. The second column would be for the reader who would like to believe it if he could, and I would branch out a little more--about half a column. 2 + 2 = 4 20 + 20 = 40 The third column would be for the reader who is not going to believe it if it can be helped. It would be in fine type, bitterly detailed and statistical and take nothing for granted. 2 + 2 = 4 20 + 20 = 40 200 + 200 = 400 2,000 + 2,000 = 4,000 20,000 + 20,000 = 40,000 etc. This arrangement would make the book what might be called a Moving Sidewalk of Truth. First sidewalk rather quick (six miles an hour). Second, four miles an hour. Third, two miles an hour. People could move over from one sidewalk to the other in the middle of an idea any time, and go faster or slower as they liked to, needed to. No one would accuse me--though I might like or need for my own personal use at one time or another, a slower sidewalk or a faster one than others--no one would accuse me of being inconsistent if I supplied extra sidewalks for people of different temperaments to move over to suddenly any time they wanted to. I have come to some of my truth by a bitterly slow sidewalk--slower than other people need, and sometimes I have come by a fast one (or what some would say was no sidewalk at all!) but it cannot fairly be claimed that there is anything inconsistent in my offering people every possible convenience I can think of--for believing me. Mr. Cadbury is not inconsistent if he tells truth at a different rate to different people, or if he chooses to put truths before people in Indian file. A man is not inconsistent who does not tell all the news he knows to all kinds of people, all at once, all the time. There is nothing disingenuous about having an order for truth. It is not considered compromising to have an order in moving railway trains. Why not allow an order in moving trains of thought? And why should a schedule for moving around people's bodies be considered any more reasonable than a schedule or timetable or order for moving around their souls? Truth in action must always be in an order. Nine idealists out of ten who fight against News-men, or men who are trying to make the beautiful work, and who call them hypocrites, would not do it if they were trying desperately to make the beautiful work themselves. It is more comfortable and has a fine free look, to be blunt with the beautiful--the way a Poet is--to dump all one's ideals down before people and walk off. But it seems to some of us a cold, sentimental, lazy, and ignoble thing to do with ideals if one loves them--to give everybody all of them all the time without considering what becomes of the ideals or what becomes of the people. CHAPTER XVI CROWD-MEN MARCH 4, 1913. As I write these words, I look out upon the great meadow. I see the poles and the wires in the sun, that long trail of poles and wires I am used to, stalking across the meadow. I know what they are doing. They are telling a thousand cities and villages about our new President, the one they are making this minute, down in Washington, for these United States. With his hand lifted up he has just taken his oath, has sworn before God and before his people to serve the destinies of a nation. And now along a hundred thousand miles of wire on dumb wooden poles, a hope, a prayer, a kind of quiet, stern singing of a mighty people goes by. And I am sitting here in my study window wondering what he will be like, what he will think, and what he will believe about us. What will our new President do with these hundreds of miles of prayer, of crying to God, stretched up to him out of the hills and out of the plains? Does he really overhear it--that huge, dumb, half-helpless, half-defiant prayer going up past him, out of the eager, hoarse cities, out of the slow, patient fields, to God? Does he overhear it, I wonder? What does he make out that we are like? I should think it would sound like music to him. It would come to seem, I should think, when he is alone with his God (and will he not please be alone with his God sometimes?), like some vast ocean of people singing, a kind of multitudinous, faraway singing, like the wind--ah, how often have I heard the wind like some strange and mighty people in the pine treetops go singing by! I do not see how a President could help growing a little like a poet--down in his heart--as he listens. If he does, he may do as he will with us. We will let him be an artist in a nation. As Winslow Homer takes the sea, as Millet takes the peasants in the fields, as Frank Brangwyn lifts up the labour in the mills and makes it colossal and sublime, the President is an artist, in touching the crowd's imagination with itself--in making a nation self-conscious. He shall be the artist, the composer, the portrait painter of the people--their faith, their cry, their anger, and their love shall be in him. In him shall be seen the panorama of the crowd, focused into a single face. In him there shall be put in the foreground of this nation's countenance the things that belong in the foreground. And the things that belong in the background shall be put in the background, and the little ideas and little men shall look little in it, and the big ones shall look big. They do not look so now. This is the one thing that is the matter with America. The countenence of the nation is not a composed countenance. All that we want is latent in us, everything is there in our Washington face. The face merely lacks features and an expression. This is what a President is for--to give at last the Face of the United States an expression! If he is a shrewd poet and believes in us, we shall accept him as the official mind reader of the nation. He focuses our desires. In the weariness of the day he looks away--he looks up--he leans his head upon his hand--through the corridors of his brain, that little silent Main street of America, the thoughts and the crowds and the jostling wills of the people go. If he is a shrewd poet about us, he becomes the organic function, the organizer of the news about our people to ourselves. He is the public made visible, the public made one. He is a moving picture of us. He speaks and gestures the United States--if he is a poet about us--when he beckons or points or when he puts his finger on his lips, or when he says, "Hush!" or when he says, "Wait a moment!" he is the voice of the people of the United States. * * * * * I am sitting and correcting, one by one, as they are brought to me, these last page proofs in the factory. The low thunder on the floors of the mighty presses, crashing down into paper words I can never cross out--rises around me. In a minute more--minute by minute that I am counting, that low thunder will overtake me, will roar down and fold away these last guilty, hopeful, tucked-in words with you, Gentle Reader, and you will get away! And the book will get away! There is no time to try to hold up that low thunder now, and to say what I have meant to say about false simplicity and democracy, and about our all being bullied into being little old faded Thomas Jeffersons a hundred years after he is dead. But I will try to suggest what I hope that some one who has no printing-presses rolling over him--will say: One cannot help wishing that our socialists to-day would outgrow Karl Marx, and that our individualists would outgrow Emerson. Democrats by this time ought to grow a little, too, and outgrow Jefferson, and Republicans ought to be able by this time to outgrow Hamilton. Why not drop Karl Marx and Emerson and run the gamut of both of them, on a continent 3,000 miles wide? Why should we live Thomas Jefferson's and Alexander Hamilton's lives? Why not drop Jefferson and Hamilton and live ours? The last thing that Jefferson would do, if he were here, would be to be Jefferson over again. It is not fair to Jefferson for anybody to take the liberty of being like him, when he would not even do it himself. If Jefferson were here, he would break away from everybody, lawyers, statesmen and Congress and go outdoors and look at 1913 for himself. I like to imagine how it would strike him. I am not troubled about what he would do. Let Jefferson go out and listen to that vast machine, to the New York Central Railway smoothing out and roaring down crowds, rolling and rolling and rolling men all day and all night into machines. Let Jefferson go out and face the New York Central Railway! Jefferson in his time had not faced nor looked down through those great fissures or chasms of inefficiency in what he chose to call democracy, the haughty, tyrannical aimlessness and meaninglessness of crowds, too mean-spirited and full of fear and machines to dare to have leaders! He had not faced that blank staring hell of anonymousness, that bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility--that terrific, devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has to be without leaders. Jefferson did not know about or reckon with Inventors, as a means of governing, as a means of getting the will of the people. A whole new age of invention, of creation, has flooded the world since Jefferson. This is the main fact about the modern man, that he is gloriously self-made. He is practising democracy, inventing his own life, making his own soul before our eyes. If we have a poet in the White House, this is the main fact he is going to reckon with: He will not be seen taking sides with the Alexander Hamilton model or with the Thomas Jefferson model or with Karl Marx or Emerson. We will see him taking Karl Marx and Emerson and Hamilton and Jefferson and melting them down, glowing them and fusing them together into one man--the Crowd-Man--who shall be more aristocratic than Hamilton ever dreamed, and be filled with a genius for democracy that Jefferson never guessed. America to-day, on the face of the earth and in the hearts of men, is a new democracy, as new as Radium, Copernicus, the Wireless Telegraph, as new and just beginning to be noticed and guessed at as Jesus Christ! Copernicus, Marconi, Wilbur Wright, and Christianity have turned men's hearts outward. Men live for the first time in a wide daily consciousness of one another. Alexander Hamilton, had really a rather timid and polite idea of what an aristocrat was and Jefferson had merely sketched out a ground plan for a democrat. If Hamilton had been aristocratic in the modern sense, he would have devoted half his career to expressing a man like Jefferson; and if Jefferson had been more of a democrat, he would have had room in himself to tuck in several Alexander Hamiltons. Either one of them would have been a Crowd-Man. By a Crowd-Man I do not mean a pull-and-haul man, a balance of equilibrium between these two men, I mean a fusion, a glowed together interpenetration of them both. They did not either of them believe in the people as much as a man made out of both of them would--a really wrought-through aristocrat, a really wrought-through democrat or Crowd-Man, or Hero or Saviour. * * * * * I am afraid that some of us do not like the word Saviour as people think we ought to. There seems to be something about the way many people use the word Saviour which makes it seem as if it had been dropped off over the edge of the world--of a real world, of a man's world. I do not believe that Christ spent five minutes in His whole life in feeling like a Saviour. He would have felt hurt if He had found any one saying He was a Saviour in the tone people often use. He wanted people to feel as if they were like Him. And the way He served them was by making them feel that they were. I do not believe that Thomas Jefferson, if he were here to-day, would object to a hero, or aristocrat, a special expert or a genius in expressing crowds, if he lived and wrought in this spirit. The final objection that people commonly make to heroes or to men of marked and special vision or courage is that they are not good for people, because people put them on pedestals and worship them. They look up at them wistfully. And then they look down on themselves. But I have never seen a hero on a pedestal. It is only the Carlyle kind of hero who could ever be put on a pedestal, or who would stay there if put there. And Carlyle--with all honour be it said--never quite knew what a hero was. A hero is either a gentleman, or a philosopher, or an inventor. The gentleman--on a pedestal--feels hurt and slips down. The philosopher laughs. The inventor thinks up some way of having somebody else get up so that it will not really be a pedestal at all. I agree with all the socialists' objections to heroes, if they mean by a hero the kind of man that Thomas Carlyle, with all his little glorious hells, all his little cold, lonesome, select heavens, his thunderclub view of life, and his Old Testament imagination, called a hero. There is always something a little strained and competitive about Carlyle's heroes as he conceives them except possibly one or two. Being a hero with Carlyle consisted in conquering and displacing other heroes. Even if you were a poet, being a hero consisted in a kind of spiritual standing on some other poet's neck. According to Carlyle, one must always be a hero against other men. Modern heroism consists in being a hero with other men. The hero Against comes in the Twentieth Century to be the hero With, and the modern hero is known, not by cutting his enemies down, but by his absorbing and understanding them. He drinks up what they wish they could do into what he does, or he states what they believe better than they can state it. Combination or coöperation is the tremendous heroism of our present life. I admit that I would be afraid of Carlyle's heroes having pedestals. They have already--many of them--done a good deal of harm because they have had pedestals, and because they would not get down from them. But mine would. With a man who is being a hero by coöperation, getting down is part of the heroism. And there is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal for a real hero. He never has time to sit on it. One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from under him and using it to batter a world with. As the world does not take to enjoying its heroes' pedestals in this way, a pedestal is quite safe. Most people feel the same about a hero's halo. They prefer to have him wear it like a kind of glare around his head, and if he uses it as a searchlight upon them, if he makes his halo really practical and lights up the world a little around him instead, he is not likely to be spoiled, is almost always safe from any danger of having any more halo crowded upon him than he wants, or than anybody wants him to have. One might put it down as a motto for heroes, "Keep your halo busy and it won't hurt you." Modern democracy will never have a chance of being what it wants to be as long as it keeps on throwing away great natural forces like halos and pedestals. There is no reason why we should not believe in halos and pedestals, not to wear or stand on, but when used strictly for butting and seeing purposes. We may know a real hero by the fact that we always have to keep rediscovering him. One knows the real hero by the fact that in his relation to people who put him on a pedestal he is always kicking his pedestal away and substituting his vision. There is something about any real heroism that we see to-day which makes heroes out of the people who see it, A real hero has his back to the people and the crowd looks over his shoulders with him at his work and he feels behind him daily, with joy and strength, thousands of heroes pressing up to take his place. And he is daily happy with a strange, mighty, impersonal joy in all these other people who could do it, too. He lives with a great hurrah for the world in his heart. The hero he worships is the hero he sees in others. A man like this would feel cramped if he were merely being himself, or if he were being imprisoned by the people in his own glory, or were being cooped up into a hero. It is in this sense that I have finally come again to believe that hero worship is safe, that in some form as one of the great elemental energies in human nature it must be saved, that it must be regulated and used, that it has an incalculable power which was meant to be turned on to run a nation with. And I believe that Thomas Jefferson, confronted in this desperate, sublime 1913, with the new socialized spirit of our time, placed face to face at last with a Christian aristocrat or Crowd-Man, would want him saved and emphasized too. It is because in democracies saviours are being kept by crowds and by millionaires and by machines very largely in the position of hired men, or of ordered about men, that ninety-nine one-hundredths of the saving or of the man-inventing and man-freeing in crowds, is not being attended to. I have wanted to suggest in this book that the moment the Saviours in any nation will organize quietly and save themselves first, the less difficult thing (with men to attend to it) like saving the rest of us, will be a mere matter of detail. The only thing that stands in the way is the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo. People seem to have a kind of left-over fear that the moment these saviours or experts or inventors or heroes, call them what you will, get the chance that they have been working to get to save us, they will not want to use it. It does not seem to me that anything will be allowed to interfere with it--with their saving us, or making detailed arrangements for our saving ourselves. Being a great man (if as democracies seem to think being a great man is a disease) is at least a self-limiting disease. Inventors when they get their first chance are going to save us, because they could not endure living with us unless we were saved. Inventors could not enjoy inventing--inventing their greater, more noble inventions, until they had attended to a little rudimentary thing in the world like having people half alive on it to live with and to invent for. It does not interest a really inspired man--inventing flying machines for people who have not time to notice the sky, wireless telegraph for people who have nothing to say, symphonies for tone-deaf crowds, or ambrosia for people who prefer potatoes. This is the whole issue in a nutshell. When people say that our inventors, or Crowd-Men or saviours, when they have fulfilled or saved themselves, cannot be trusted to save us, the reply that will have to be made is that only people who do not know how inventors feel or how they are made or what it is in them that drives them to do things, or how they do them, will be afraid to let men who give us worlds and who express worlds for us and who make us express ourselves in worlds the freedom to help shape them and run them. Men who have the automatic courage, the helpless bigness and disinterestedness that always goes with invention, with creative power, can be trusted by crowds. The prejudice against the hero is due to the fact that heroes in days gone by have been by a very large majority fighters, expressing themselves against the world, or expressing one part of the world against another. The moment the hero becomes the artist and begins expressing himself and expressing the crowd together, the crowd will no longer be touched with fear and driven back upon itself by the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo. EPILOGUE France is threatened by her childless women, Germany by her machines, Russia is beginning the Nineteenth Century. It is to England and America, struggling still sublimely with their sins, the nations look--for the time being--for the next big free lift upon the world. Looked at in the large, in their historic import and their effect on the time, the English temperament and the American temperament are essentially the same. As between ourselves, England and America are apt to seem different, but as between us and the world, we blend together. One could go through in what I have been saying about Oxford Street and the House of Commons in this book, strike out all after Oxford Street and read Broadway, and all after the House of Commons and read Congress, and it would be essentially true with the necessary English or American modulation. In the same way it would be possible to go through and strike out all after the President and read Prime Minister or the Government. England and America have the individualistic temperament, and if we cannot make a self-expressive individualism noble, and if we are not men enough to sing up our individualism into the social and the universal, we perish. It is our native way. We are to be crowdmen or nobodies. The English temperament or the American temperament, whichever we may call it, is the same tune, but played with a different and almost contrasting expression. England is being played gravely and massively like a violoncello, and America--played more lightly, is full of the sweeps and the lulls, the ecstasy, the overriding glory of the violins. But it is the same tune, and God helping us, we will not and we shall not be overwhelmed under the great dome of the world, by Germany with all her faithful pianolas, or by France with her cold sweet flutes, or by Russia with her shrieks and her pauses, pounding her splendid kettledrums in that awful silence! Our song is ours--England and America, the 'cello, and the bright violins! And no one shall sing it for us. And no one shall keep us from singing it. The skyscrapers are singing, "I will, I will!" to God, and Manchester and London and Port Sunlight are singing, "I will, I will!" to God. I have heard even Westminister Abbey and York--those beautiful old fellows--altering, "I will, I will!" to God! And I have seen, as I was going by, Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street repenting her sins and holding noonday prayer meetings for millionaires. Our genius is a moral genius, the genius of each man for fulfilling himself. Our religion is the finding of a way to do it beautifully. Let Russian men be an army if they like--death and obedience. Let German men keep on with their faithful, plodding, moral machines if they want to, and let all French men be artists, go tra-la-laing up and down the Time to the beautiful--furnishing nudes, clothes, and academies to a world. But we--England and America--will stand up on this planet in the way we like to stand on a planet and sing, "I will, I will!" to God. If we cannot do better, we will sing, "I won't, I won't!" to God. Our wills and our won'ts are our genius among the sons of men. They are what we are for. With England and America I will and I won't are an art form, our means of expressing ourselves, our way of invention and creation, of begetting an age, of begetting a nation upon a world. We do not know (like great men and children) who we are at first. We begin saying vaguely--will--will! Then i will! Then I will! Then WE WILL! THE BEGINNING. THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y. 
3630	----	Transcribed from the 1887 Tomas Y. Crowell edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org WHAT TO DO? THOUGHTS EVOKED BY THE CENSUS OF MOSCOW BY COUNT LYOF N. TOLSTOI _TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN_ BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 13 ASTOR PLACE 1887 COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY RAND AVERY COMPANY, BOSTON. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. Books which are prohibited by the Russian Censor are not always inaccessible. An enterprising publishing-house in Geneva makes a specialty of supplying the natural craving of man for forbidden fruit, under which heading some of Count L. N. Tolstoi's essays belong. These essays circulate in Russia in manuscript; and it is from one of these manuscripts, which fell into the hands of the Geneva firm, that the first half of the present translation has been made. It is thus that the Censor's omissions have been noted, even in cases where such omissions are in no way indicated in the twelfth volume of Count Tolstoi's collected works, published in Moscow. As an interesting detail in this connection, I may mention that this twelfth volume contains all that the censor allows of "My Religion," amounting to a very much abridged scrap of Chapter X. in the last-named volume as known to the public outside of Russia. The last half of the present book has not been published by the Geneva house, and omissions cannot be marked. ISABEL F. HAPGOOD BOSTON, Sept. 1, 1887 ARTICLE ON THE CENSUS IN MOSCOW. [1882.] The object of a census is scientific. A census is a sociological investigation. And the object of the science of sociology is the happiness of the people. This science and its methods differ sharply from all other sciences. Its peculiarity lies in this, that sociological investigations are not conducted by learned men in their cabinets, observatories and laboratories, but by two thousand people from the community. A second peculiarity is this, that the investigations of other sciences are not conducted on living people, but here living people are the subjects. A third peculiarity is, that the aim of every other science is simply knowledge, while here it is the good of the people. One man may investigate a nebula, but for the investigation of Moscow, two thousand persons are necessary. The object of the study of nebulae is merely that we may know about nebulae; the object of the study of inhabitants is that sociological laws may be deduced, and that, on the foundation of these laws, a better life for the people may be established. It makes no difference to the nebula whether it is studied or not, and it has waited long, and is ready to wait a great while longer; but it is not a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of Moscow, especially to those unfortunates who constitute the most interesting subjects of the science of sociology. The census-taker enters a night lodging-house; in the basement he finds a man dying of hunger, and he politely inquires his profession, his name, his native place, the character of his occupation, and after a little hesitation as to whether he is to be entered in the list as alive, he writes him in and goes his way. And thus will the two thousand young men proceed. This is not as it should be. Science does its work, and the community, summoned in the persons of these two thousand young men to aid science, must do its work. A statistician drawing his deductions from figures may feel indifferent towards people, but we census-takers, who see these people and who have no scientific prepossessions, cannot conduct ourselves towards them in an inhuman manner. Science fulfils its task, and its work is for its objects and in the distant future, both useful and necessary to us. For men of science, we can calmly say, that in 1882 there were so many beggars, so many prostitutes, and so many uncared-for children. Science may say this with composure and with pride, because it knows that the confirmation of this fact conduces to the elucidation of the laws of sociology, and that the elucidation of the laws of sociology leads to a better constitution of society. But what if we, the unscientific people, say: "You are perishing in vice, you are dying of hunger, you are pining away, and killing each other; so do not grieve about this; when you shall have all perished, and hundreds of thousands more like you, then, possibly, science may be able to arrange everything in an excellent manner." For men of science, the census has its interest; and for us also, it possesses an interest of a wholly different significance. The interest and significance of the census for the community lie in this, that it furnishes it with a mirror into which, willy nilly, the whole community, and each one of us, gaze. The figures and deductions will be the mirror. It is possible to refrain from reading them, as it is possible to turn away from the looking-glass. It is possible to glance cursorily at both figures and mirror, and it is also possible to scrutinize them narrowly. To go about in connection with the census as thousands of people are now about to do, is to scrutinize one's self closely in the mirror. What does this census, that is about to be made, mean for us people of Moscow, who are not men of science? It means two things. In the first place, this, that we may learn with certainty, that among us tens of thousands who live in ease, there dwell tens of thousands of people who lack bread, clothing and shelter; in the second place, this, that our brothers and sons will go and view this and will calmly set down according to the schedules, how many have died of hunger and cold. And both these things are very bad. All cry out upon the instability of our social organization, about the exceptional situation, about revolutionary tendencies. Where lies the root of all this? To what do the revolutionists point? To poverty, to inequality in the distribution of wealth. To what do the conservatives point? To the decline in moral principle. If the opinion of the revolutionists is correct, what must be done? Poverty and the inequality of wealth must be lessened. How is this to be effected? The rich must share with the poor. If the opinion of the conservatives is correct, that the whole evil arises from the decline in moral principle, what can be more immoral and vicious than the consciously indifferent survey of popular sufferings, with the sole object of cataloguing them? What must be done? To the census we must add the work of affectionate intercourse of the idle and cultivated rich, with the oppressed and unenlightened poor. Science will do its work, let us perform ours also. Let us do this. In the first place, let all of us who are occupied with the census, superintendents and census-takers, make it perfectly clear to ourselves what we are to investigate and why. It is the people, and the object is that they may be happy. Whatever may be one's view of life, every one will agree that there is nothing more important than human life, and that there is no more weighty task than to remove the obstacles to the development of this life, and to assist it. This idea, that the relations of men to poverty are at the foundation of all popular suffering, is expressed in the Gospels with striking harshness, but at the same time, with decision and clearness for all. "He who has clothed the naked, fed the hungry, visited the prisoner, that man has clothed Me, fed Me, visited Me," that is, has done the deed for that which is the most important thing in the world. However a man may look upon things, every one knows that this is more important than all else on earth. And this must not be forgotten, and we must not permit any other consideration to veil from us the most weighty fact of our existence. Let us inscribe, and reckon, but let us not forget that if we encounter a man who is hungry and without clothes, it is of more moment to succor him than to make all possible investigations, than to discover all possible sciences. Perish the whole census if we may but feed an old woman. The census will be longer and more difficult, but we cannot pass by people in the poorer quarters and merely note them down without taking any heed of them and without endeavoring, according to the measure of our strength and moral sensitiveness, to aid them. This in the first place. In the second, this is what must be done: All of us, who are to take part in the census, must refrain from irritation because we are annoyed; let us understand that this census is very useful for us; that if this is not cure, it is at least an effort to study the disease, for which we should be thankful; that we must seize this occasion, and, in connection with it, we must seek to recover our health, in some small degree. Let all of us, then, who are connected with the census, endeavor to take advantage of this solitary opportunity in ten years to purify ourselves somewhat; let us not strive against, but assist the census, and assist it especially in this sense, that it may not have merely the harsh character of the investigation of a hopelessly sick person, but may have the character of healing and restoration to health. For the occasion is unique: eighty energetic, cultivated men, having under their orders two thousand young men of the same stamp, are to make their way over the whole of Moscow, and not leave a single man in Moscow with whom they have not entered into personal relations. All the wounds of society, the wounds of poverty, of vice, of ignorance--all will be laid bare. Is there not something re-assuring in this? The census-takers will go about Moscow, they will set down in their lists, without distinction, those insolent with prosperity, the satisfied, the calm, those who are on the way to ruin, and those who are ruined, and the curtain will fall. The census-takers, our sons and brothers, these young men will behold all this. They will say: "Yes, our life is very terrible and incurable," and with this admission they will live on like the rest of us, awaiting a remedy for the evil from this or that extraneous force. But those who are perishing will go on dying, in their ruin, and those on the road to ruin will continue in their course. No, let us rather grasp the idea that science has its task, and that we, on the occasion of this census, have our task, and let us not allow the curtain once lifted to be dropped, but let us profit by the opportunity in order to remove the immense evil of the separation existing between us and the poor, and to establish intercourse and the work of redressing the evil of unhappiness and ignorance, and our still greater misfortune,--the indifference and aimlessness of our life. I already hear the customary remark: "All this is very fine, these are sounding phrases; but do you tell us what to do and how to do it?" Before I say what is to be done, it is indispensable that I should say what is not to be done. It is indispensable, first of all, in my opinion, in order that something practical may come of this activity, that no society should be formed, that there should be no publicity, that there should be no collection of money by balls, bazaars or theatres; that there should be no announcement that Prince A. has contributed one thousand rubles, and the honorable citizen B. three thousand; that there shall be no collection, no calling to account, no writing up,--most of all, no writing up, so that there may not be the least shadow of any institution, either governmental or philanthropic. But in my opinion, this is what should be done instantly: Firstly, All those who agree with me should go to the directors, and ask for their shares the poorest sections, the poorest dwellings; and in company with the census-takers, twenty-three, twenty-four or twenty-five in number, they should go to these quarters, enter into relations with the people who are in need of assistance, and labor for them. Secondly: We should direct the attention of the superintendents and census-takers to the inhabitants in need of assistance, and work for them personally, and point them out to those who wish to work over them. But I am asked: What do you mean by _working over them_? I reply; Doing good to people. The words "doing good" are usually understood to mean, giving money. But, in my opinion, doing good and giving money are not only not the same thing, but two different and generally opposite things. Money, in itself, is evil. And therefore he who gives money gives evil. This error of thinking that the giving of money means doing good, arose from the fact, that generally, when a man does good, he frees himself from evil, and from money among other evils. And therefore, to give money is only a sign that a man is beginning to rid himself of evil. To do good, signifies to do that which is good for man. But, in order to know what is good for man, it is necessary to be on humane, i.e., on friendly terms with him. And therefore, in order to do good, it is not money that is necessary, but, first of all, a capacity for detaching ourselves, for a time at least, from the conditions of our own life. It is necessary that we should not be afraid to soil our boots and clothing, that we should not fear lice and bedbugs, that we should not fear typhus fever, diphtheria, and small-pox. It is necessary that we should be in a condition to seat ourselves by the bunk of a tatterdemalion and converse earnestly with him in such a manner, that he may feel that the man who is talking with him respects and loves him, and is not putting on airs and admiring himself. And in order that this may be so, it is necessary that a man should find the meaning of life outside himself. This is what is requisite in order that good should be done, and this is what it is difficult to find. When the idea of assisting through the medium of the census occurred to me, I discussed the matter with divers of the wealthy, and I saw how glad the rich were of this opportunity of decently getting rid of their money, that extraneous sin which they cherish in their hearts. "Take three hundred--five hundred rubles, if you like," they said to me, "but I cannot go into those dens myself." There was no lack of money. Remember Zaccheus, the chief of the Publicans in the Gospel. Remember how he, because he was small of stature, climbed into a tree to see Christ, and how when Christ announced that he was going to his house, having understood but one thing, that the Master did not approve of riches, he leaped headlong from the tree, ran home and arranged his feast. And how, as soon as Christ entered, Zaccheus instantly declared that he gave the half of his goods to the poor, and if he had wronged any man, to him he would restore fourfold. And remember how all of us, when we read the Gospel, set but little store on this Zaccheus, and involuntarily look with scorn on this half of his goods, and fourfold restitution. And our feeling is correct. Zaccheus, according to his lights, performed a great deed. He had not even begun to do good. He had only begun in some small measure to purify himself from evil, and so Christ told him. He merely said to him: "To-day is salvation come nigh unto this house." What if the Moscow Zaccheuses were to do the same that he did? Assuredly, more than one milliard could be collected. Well, and what of that? Nothing. There would be still greater sin if we were to think of distributing this money among the poor. Money is not needed. What is needed is self-sacrificing action; what is needed are people who would like to do good, not by giving extraneous sin-money, but by giving their own labor, themselves, their lives. Where are such people to be found? Here they are, walking about Moscow. They are the student enumerators. I have seen how they write out their charts. The student writes in the night lodging-house, by the bedside of a sick man. "What is your disease?"--"Small-pox." And the student does not make a wry face, but proceeds with his writing. And this he does for the sake of some doubtful science. What would he do if he were doing it for the sake of his own undoubted good and the good of others? When children, in merry mood, feel a desire to laugh, they never think of devising some reason for laughter, but they laugh without any reason, because they are gay; and thus these charming youths sacrifice themselves. They have not, as yet, contrived to devise any means of sacrificing themselves, but they devote their attention, their labor, their lives, in order to write out a chart, from which something does or does not appear. What would it be if this labor were something really worth their while? There is and there always will be labor of this sort, which is worthy of the devotion of a whole life, whatever the man's life may be. This labor is the loving intercourse of man with man, and the breaking-down of the barriers which men have erected between themselves, so that the enjoyment of the rich man may not be disturbed by the wild howls of the men who are reverting to beasts, and by the groans of helpless hunger, cold and disease. This census will place before the eyes of us well-to-do and so-called cultivated people, all the poverty and oppression which is lurking in every corner of Moscow. Two thousand of our brothers, who stand on the highest rung of the ladder, will come face to face with thousands of people who stand on the lowest round of society. Let us not miss this opportunity of communion. Let us, through these two thousand men, preserve this communion, and let us make use of it to free ourselves from the aimlessness and the deformity of our lives, and to free the condemned from that indigence and misery which do not allow the sensitive people in our ranks to enjoy our good fortune in peace. This is what I propose: (1) That all our directors and enumerators should join to their business of the census a task of assistance,--of work in the interest of the good of these people, who, in our opinion, are in need of assistance, and with whom we shall come in contact; (2) That all of us, directors and enumerators, not by appointment of the committee of the City Council, but by the appointment of our own hearts, shall remain in our posts,--that is, in our relations to the inhabitants of the town who are in need of assistance,--and that, at the conclusion of the work of the census, we shall continue our work of aid. If I have succeeded in any degree in expressing what I feel, I am sure that the only impossibility will be getting the directors and enumerators to abandon this, and that others will present themselves in the places of those who leave; (3) That we should collect all those inhabitants of Moscow, who feel themselves fit to work for the needy, into sections, and begin our activity now, in accordance with the hints of the census-takers and directors, and afterwards carry it on; (4) That all who, on account of age, weakness, or other causes, cannot give their personal labor among the needy, shall intrust the task to their young, strong, and willing relatives. (Good consists not in the giving of money, it consists in the loving intercourse of men. This alone is needed.) Whatever may be the outcome of this, any thing will be better than the present state of things. Then let the final act of our enumerators and directors be to distribute a hundred twenty-kopek pieces to those who have no food; and this will be not a little, not so much because the hungry will have food, but because the directors and enumerators will conduct themselves in a humane manner towards a hundred poor people. How are we to compute the possible results which will accrue to the balance of public morality from the fact that, instead of the sentiments of irritation, anger, and envy which we arouse by reckoning the hungry, we shall awaken in a hundred instances a sentiment of good, which will be communicated to a second and a third, and an endless wave which will thus be set in motion and flow between men? And this is a great deal. Let those of the two thousand enumerators who have never comprehended this before, come to understand that, when going about among the poor, it is impossible to say, "This is very interesting;" that a man should not express himself with regard to another man's wretchedness by interest only; and this will be a good thing. Then let assistance be rendered to all those unfortunates, of whom there are not so many as I at first supposed in Moscow, who can easily be helped by money alone to a great extent. Then let those laborers who have come to Moscow and have eaten their very clothing from their backs, and who cannot return to the country, be despatched to their homes; let the abandoned orphans receive supervision; let feeble old men and indigent old women, who subsist on the charity of their companions, be released from their half-famished and dying condition. (And this is very possible. There are not very many of them.) And this will also be a very, very great deal accomplished. But why not think and hope that more and yet more will be done? Why not expect that that real task will be partially carried out, or at least begun, which is effected, not by money, but by labor; that weak drunkards who have lost their health, unlucky thieves, and prostitutes who are still capable of reformation, should be saved? All evil may not be exterminated, but there will arise some understanding of it, and the contest with it will not be police methods, but by inward modes,--by the brotherly intercourse of the men who perceive the evil, with the men who do not perceive it because they are a part of it. No matter what may be accomplished, it will be a great deal. But why not hope that every thing will be accomplished? Why not hope that we shall accomplish thus much, that there shall not exist in Moscow a single person in want of clothing, a single hungry person, a single human being sold for money, nor a single individual oppressed by the judgment of man, who shall not know that there is fraternal aid for him? It is not surprising that this should not be so, but it is surprising that this should exist side by side with our superfluous leisure and wealth, and that we can live on composedly, knowing that these things are so. Let us forget that in great cities and in London, there is a proletariat, and let us not say that so it must needs be. It need not be this, and it should not, for this is contrary to our reason and our heart, and it cannot be if we are living people. Why not hope that we shall come to understand that there is not a single duty incumbent upon us, not to mention personal duty, for ourselves, nor our family, nor social, nor governmental, nor scientific, which is more weighty than this? Why not think that we shall at last come to apprehend this? Only because to do so would be too great a happiness. Why not hope that some the people will wake up, and will comprehend that every thing else is a delusion, but that this is the only work in life? And why should not this "some time" be now, and in Moscow? Why not hope that the same thing may happen in society and humanity which suddenly takes place in a diseased organism, when the moment of convalescence suddenly sets in? The organism is diseased this means, that the cells cease to perform their mysterious functions; some die, others become infected, others still remain in perfect condition, and work on by themselves. But all of a sudden the moment comes when every living cell enters upon an independent and healthy activity: it crowds out the dead cells, encloses the infected ones in a living wall, it communicates life to that which was lifeless; and the body is restored, and lives with new life. Why should we not think and expect that the cells of our society will acquire fresh life and re-invigorate the organism? We know not in what the power of the cells consists, but we do know that our life is in our own power. We can show forth the light that is in us, or we may extinguish it. Let one man approach the Lyapinsky house in the dusk, when a thousand persons, naked and hungry, are waiting in the bitter cold for admission, and let that one man attempt to help, and his heart will ache till it bleeds, and he will flee thence with despair and anger against men; but let a thousand men approach that other thousand with a desire to help, and the task will prove easy and delightful. Let the mechanicians invent a machine for lifting the weight that is crushing us--that is a good thing; but until they shall have invented it, let us bear down upon the people, like fools, like _muzhiki_, like peasants, like Christians, and see whether we cannot raise them. And now, brothers, all together, and away it goes! THOUGHTS EVOKED BY THE CENSUS OF MOSCOW. [1884-1885.] And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then? He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise--LUKE iii. 10. 11. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?--MATT. vi. 19-25. Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? Or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.--MATT. vi. 31-34. For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.--MATT. xix. 24; MARK x. 25; LUKE xviii. 25. CHAPTER I. I had lived all my life out of town. When, in 1881, I went to live in Moscow, the poverty of the town greatly surprised me. I am familiar with poverty in the country; but city poverty was new and incomprehensible to me. In Moscow it was impossible to pass along the street without encountering beggars, and especially beggars who are unlike those in the country. These beggars do not go about with their pouches in the name of Christ, as country beggars are accustomed to do, but these beggars are without the pouch and the name of Christ. The Moscow beggars carry no pouches, and do not ask for alms. Generally, when they meet or pass you, they merely try to catch your eye; and, according to your look, they beg or refrain from it. I know one such beggar who belongs to the gentry. The old man walks slowly along, bending forward every time he sets his foot down. When he meets you, he rests on one foot and makes you a kind of salute. If you stop, he pulls off his hat with its cockade, and bows and begs: if you do not halt, he pretends that that is merely his way of walking, and he passes on, bending forward in like manner on the other foot. He is a real Moscow beggar, a cultivated man. At first I did not know why the Moscow beggars do not ask alms directly; afterwards I came to understand why they do not beg, but still I did not understand their position. Once, as I was passing through Afanasievskaya Lane, I saw a policeman putting a ragged peasant, all swollen with dropsy, into a cab. I inquired: "What is that for?" The policeman answered: "For asking alms." "Is that forbidden?" "Of course it is forbidden," replied the policeman. The sufferer from dropsy was driven off. I took another cab, and followed him. I wanted to know whether it was true that begging alms was prohibited and how it was prohibited. I could in no wise understand how one man could be forbidden to ask alms of any other man; and besides, I did not believe that it was prohibited, when Moscow is full of beggars. I went to the station-house whither the beggar had been taken. At a table in the station-house sat a man with a sword and a pistol. I inquired: "For what was this peasant arrested?" The man with the sword and pistol gazed sternly at me, and said: "What business is it of yours?" But feeling conscious that it was necessary to offer me some explanation, he added: "The authorities have ordered that all such persons are to be arrested; of course it had to be done." I went out. The policeman who had brought the beggar was seated on the window-sill in the ante-chamber, staring gloomily at a note-book. I asked him: "Is it true that the poor are forbidden to ask alms in Christ's name?" The policeman came to himself, stared at me, then did not exactly frown, but apparently fell into a doze again, and said, as he sat on the window- sill:-- "The authorities have so ordered, which shows that it is necessary," and betook himself once more to his note-book. I went out on the porch, to the cab. "Well, how did it turn out? Have they arrested him?" asked the cabman. The man was evidently interested in this affair also. "Yes," I answered. The cabman shook his head. "Why is it forbidden here in Moscow to ask alms in Christ's name?" I inquired. "Who knows?" said the cabman. "How is this?" said I, "he is Christ's poor, and he is taken to the station-house." "A stop has been put to that now, it is not allowed," said the cab-driver. On several occasions afterwards, I saw policemen conducting beggars to the station house, and then to the Yusupoff house of correction. Once I encountered on the Myasnitzkaya a company of these beggars, about thirty in number. In front of them and behind them marched policemen. I inquired: "What for?"--"For asking alms." It turned out that all these beggars, several of whom you meet with in every street in Moscow, and who stand in files near every church during services, and especially during funeral services, are forbidden to ask alms. But why are some of them caught and locked up somewhere, while others are left alone? This I could not understand. Either there are among them legal and illegal beggars, or there are so many of them that it is impossible to apprehend them all; or do others assemble afresh when some are removed? There are many varieties of beggars in Moscow: there are some who live by this profession; there are also genuine poor people, who have chanced upon Moscow in some manner or other, and who are really in want. Among these poor people, there are many simple, common peasants, and women in their peasant costume. I often met such people. Some of them have fallen ill here, and on leaving the hospital they can neither support themselves here, nor get away from Moscow. Some of them, moreover, have indulged in dissipation (such was probably the case of the dropsical man); some have not been ill, but are people who have been burnt out of their houses, or old people, or women with children; some, too, were perfectly healthy and able to work. These perfectly healthy peasants who were engaged in begging, particularly interested me. These healthy, peasant beggars, who were fit for work, also interested me, because, from the date of my arrival in Moscow, I had been in the habit of going to the Sparrow Hills with two peasants, and sawing wood there for the sake of exercise. These two peasants were just as poor as those whom I encountered on the streets. One was Piotr, a soldier from Kaluga; the other Semyon, a peasant from Vladimir. They possessed nothing except the wages of their body and hands. And with these hands they earned, by dint of very hard labor, from forty to forty-five kopeks a day, out of which each of them was laying by savings, the Kaluga man for a fur coat, the Vladimir man in order to get enough to return to his village. Therefore, on meeting precisely such men in the streets, I took an especial interest in them. Why did these men toil, while those others begged? On encountering a peasant of this stamp, I usually asked him how he had come to that situation. Once I met a peasant with some gray in his beard, but healthy. He begs. I ask him who is he, whence comes he? He says that he came from Kaluga to get work. At first he found employment chopping up old wood for use in stoves. He and his comrade finished all the chopping which one householder had; then they sought other work, but found none; his comrade had parted from him, and for two weeks he himself had been struggling along; he had spent all his money, he had no saw, and no axe, and no money to buy anything. I gave him money for a saw, and told him of a place where he could find work. I had already made arrangements with Piotr and Semyon, that they should take an assistant, and they looked up a mate for him. "See that you come. There is a great deal of work there." "I will come; why should I not come? Do you suppose I like to beg? I can work." The peasant declares that he will come, and it seems to me that he is not deceiving me, and that he intents to come. On the following day I go to my peasants, and inquire whether that man has arrived. He has not been there; and in this way several men deceived me. And those also deceived me who said that they only required money for a ticket in order to return home, and who chanced upon me again in the street a week later. Many of these I recognized, and they recognized me, and sometimes, having forgotten me, they repeated the same trick on me; and others, on catching sight of me, beat a retreat. Thus I perceived, that in the ranks of this class also deceivers existed. But these cheats were very pitiable creatures: all of them were but half-clad, poverty-stricken, gaunt, sickly men; they were the very people who really freeze to death, or hang themselves, as we learn from the newspapers. CHAPTER II. When I mentioned this poverty of the town to inhabitants of the town, they always said to me: "Oh, all that you have seen is nothing. You ought to see the Khitroff market-place, and the lodging-houses for the night there. There you would see a regular 'golden company.'" {21a} One jester told me that this was no longer a company, but a _golden regiment_: so greatly had their numbers increased. The jester was right, but he would have been still more accurate if he had said that these people now form in Moscow neither a company nor a regiment, but an entire army, almost fifty thousand in number, I think. [The old inhabitants, when they spoke to me about the poverty in town, always referred to it with a certain satisfaction, as though pluming themselves over me, because they knew it. I remember that when I was in London, the old inhabitants there also rather boasted when they spoke of the poverty of London. The case is the same with us.] {21b} And I wanted to have a sight of this poverty of which I had been told. Several times I set out in the direction of the Khitroff market-place, but on every occasion I began to feel uncomfortable and ashamed. "Why am I going to gaze on the sufferings of people whom I cannot help?" said one voice. "No, if you live here, and see all the charms of city life, go and view this also," said another voice. In December three years ago, therefore, on a cold and windy day, I betook myself to that centre of poverty, the Khitroff market-place. This was at four o'clock in the afternoon of a week-day. As I passed through the Solyanka, I already began to see more and more people in old garments which had not originally belonged to them, and in still stranger foot-gear, people with a peculiar, unhealthy hue of countenance, and especially with a singular indifference to every thing around them, which was peculiar to them all. A man in the strangest of all possible attire, which was utterly unlike any thing else, walked along with perfect unconcern, evidently without a thought of the appearance which he must present to the eyes of others. All these people were making their way towards a single point. Without inquiring the way, with which I was not acquainted, I followed them, and came out on the Khitroff market-place. On the market-place, women both old and young, of the same description, in tattered cloaks and jackets of various shapes, in ragged shoes and overshoes, and equally unconcerned, notwithstanding the hideousness of their attire, sat, bargained for something, strolled about, and scolded. There were not many people in the market itself. Evidently market-hours were over, and the majority of the people were ascending the rise beyond the market and through the place, all still proceeding in one direction. I followed them. The farther I advanced, the greater in numbers were the people of this sort who flowed together on one road. Passing through the market-place and proceeding along the street, I overtook two women; one was old, the other young. Both wore something ragged and gray. As they walked they were discussing some matter. After every necessary word, they uttered one or two unnecessary ones, of the most improper character. They were not intoxicated, but merely troubled about something; and neither the men who met them, nor those who walked in front of them and behind them, paid any attention to the language which was so strange to me. In these quarters, evidently, people always talked so. Ascending the rise, we reached a large house on a corner. The greater part of the people who were walking along with me halted at this house. They stood all over the sidewalk of this house, and sat on the curbstone, and even the snow in the street was thronged with the same kind of people. On the right side of the entrance door were the women, on the left the men. I walked past the women, past the men (there were several hundred of them in all) and halted where the line came to an end. The house before which these people were waiting was the Lyapinsky free lodging-house for the night. The throng of people consisted of night lodgers, who were waiting to be let in. At five o'clock in the afternoon, the house is opened, and the people permitted to enter. Hither had come nearly all the people whom I had passed on my way. I halted where the line of men ended. Those nearest me began to stare at me, and attracted my attention to them by their glances. The fragments of garments which covered these bodies were of the most varied sorts. But the expression of all the glances directed towards me by these people was identical. In all eyes the question was expressed: "Why have you, a man from another world, halted here beside us? Who are you? Are you a self- satisfied rich man who wants to enjoy our wretchedness, to get rid of his tedium, and to torment us still more? or are you that thing which does not and can not exist,--a man who pities us?" This query was on every face. You glance about, encounter some one's eye, and turn away. I wished to talk with some one of them, but for a long time I could not make up my mind to it. But our glances had drawn us together already while our tongues remained silent. Greatly as our lives had separated us, after the interchange of two or three glances we felt that we were both men, and we ceased to fear each other. The nearest of all to me was a peasant with a swollen face and a red beard, in a tattered caftan, and patched overshoes on his bare feet. And the weather was eight degrees below zero. {24a} For the third or fourth time I encountered his eyes, and I felt so near to him that I was no longer ashamed to accost him, but ashamed not to say something to him. I inquired where he came from? he answered readily, and we began to talk; others approached. He was from Smolensk, and had come to seek employment that he might earn his bread and taxes. "There is no work," said he: "the soldiers have taken it all away. So now I am loafing about; as true as I believe in God, I have had nothing to eat for two days." He spoke modestly, with an effort at a smile. A _sbiten_{24b}-seller, an old soldier, stood near by. I called him up. He poured out his _sbiten_. The peasant took a boiling-hot glassful in his hands, and as he tried before drinking not to let any of the heat escape in vain, and warmed his hands over it, he related his adventures to me. These adventures, or the histories of them, are almost always identical: the man has been a laborer, then he has changed his residence, then his purse containing his money and ticket has been stolen from him in the night lodging-house; now it is impossible to get away from Moscow. He told me that he kept himself warm by day in the dram- shops; that he nourished himself on the bits of bread in these drinking places, when they were given to him; and when he was driven out of them, he came hither to the Lyapinsky house for a free lodging. He was only waiting for the police to make their rounds, when, as he had no passport, he would be taken to jail, and then despatched by stages to his place of settlement. "They say that the inspection will be made on Friday," said he, "then they will arrest me. If I can only get along until Friday." (The jail, and the journey by stages, represent the Promised Land to him.) As he told his story, three men from among the throng corroborated his statements, and said that they were in the same predicament. A gaunt, pale, long-nosed youth, with merely a shirt on the upper portion of his body, and that torn on the shoulders, and a cap without a visor, forced his way sidelong through the crowd. He shivered violently and incessantly, but tried to smile disdainfully at the peasants' remarks, thinking by this means to adopt the proper tone with me, and he stared at me. I offered him some _sbiten_; he also, on taking the glass, warmed his hands over it; but no sooner had he begun to speak, than he was thrust aside by a big, black, hook-nosed individual, in a chintz shirt and waistcoat, without a hat. The hook-nosed man asked for some _sbiten_ also. Then came a tall old man, with a mass of beard, clad in a great- coat girded with a rope, and in bast shoes, who was drunk. Then a small man with a swollen face and tearful eyes, in a brown nankeen round-jacket, with his bare knees protruding from the holes in his summer trousers, and knocking together with cold. He shivered so that he could not hold his glass, and spilled it over himself. The men began to reproach him. He only smiled in a woe-begone way, and went on shivering. Then came a crooked monster in rags, with pattens on his bare feet; then some sort of an officer; then something in the ecclesiastical line; then something strange and nose-less,--all hungry and cold, beseeching and submissive, thronged round me, and pressed close to the _sbiten_. They drank up all the _sbiten_. One asked for money, and I gave it. Then another asked, then a third, and the whole crowd besieged me. Confusion and a press resulted. The porter of the adjoining house shouted to the crowd to clear the sidewalk in front of his house, and the crowd submissively obeyed his orders. Some managers stepped out of the throng, and took me under their protection, and wanted to lead me forth out of the press; but the crowd, which had at first been scattered over the sidewalk, now became disorderly, and hustled me. All stared at me and begged; and each face was more pitiful and suffering and humble than the last. I distributed all that I had with me. I had not much money, something like twenty rubles; and in company with the crowd, I entered the Lyapinsky lodging-house. This house is huge. It consists of four sections. In the upper stories are the men's quarters; in the lower, the women's. I first entered the women's place; a vast room all occupied with bunks, resembling the third-class bunks on the railway. These bunks were arranged in two rows, one above the other. The women, strange, tattered creatures, both old and young, wearing nothing over their dresses, entered and took their places, some below and some above. Some of the old ones crossed themselves, and uttered a petition for the founder of this refuge; some laughed and scolded. I went up-stairs. There the men had installed themselves; among them I espied one of those to whom I had given money. [On catching sight of him, I all at once felt terribly abashed, and I made haste to leave the room. And it was with a sense of absolute crime that I quitted that house and returned home. At home I entered over the carpeted stairs into the ante-room, whose floor was covered with cloth; and having removed my fur coat, I sat down to a dinner of five courses, waited on by two lackeys in dress-coats, white neckties, and white gloves. Thirty years ago I witnessed in Paris a man's head cut off by the guillotine in the presence of thousands of spectators. I knew that the man was a horrible criminal. I was acquainted with all the arguments which people have been devising for so many centuries, in order to justify this sort of deed. I knew that they had done this expressly, deliberately. But at the moment when head and body were severed, and fell into the trough, I groaned, and apprehended, not with my mind, but with my heart and my whole being, that all the arguments which I had heard anent the death-penalty were arrant nonsense; that, no matter how many people might assemble in order to perpetrate a murder, no matter what they might call themselves, murder is murder, the vilest sin in the world, and that that crime had been committed before my very eyes. By my presence and non-interference, I had lent my approval to that crime, and had taken part in it. So now, at the sight of this hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands of persons, I understood not with my mind, but with my heart and my whole being, that the existence of tens of thousands of such people in Moscow, while I and other thousands dined on fillets and sturgeon, and covered my horses and my floors with cloth and rugs,--no matter what the wise ones of this world might say to me about its being a necessity,--was a crime, not perpetrated a single time, but one which was incessantly being perpetrated over and over again, and that I, in my luxury, was not only an accessory, but a direct accomplice in the matter. The difference for me between these two impressions was this, that I might have shouted to the assassins who stood around the guillotine, and perpetrated the murder, that they were committing a crime, and have tried with all my might to prevent the murder. But while so doing I should have known that my action would not prevent the murder. But here I might not only have given _sbiten_ and the money which I had with me, but the coat from my back, and every thing that was in my house. But this I had not done; and therefore I felt, I feel, and shall never cease to feel, myself an accomplice in this constantly repeated crime, so long as I have superfluous food and any one else has none at all, so long as I have two garments while any one else has not even one.] {28} CHAPTER III. That very evening, on my return from the Lyapinsky house, I related my impressions to a friend. The friend, an inhabitant of the city, began to tell me, not without satisfaction, that this was the most natural phenomenon of town life possible, that I only saw something extraordinary in it because of my provincialism, that it had always been so, and always would be so, and that such must be and is the inevitable condition of civilization. In London it is even worse. Of course there is nothing wrong about it, and it is impossible to be displeased with it. I began to reply to my friend, but with so much heat and ill-temper, that my wife ran in from the adjoining room to inquire what had happened. It appears that, without being conscious of it myself, I had been shouting, with tears in my voice, and flourishing my hands at my friend. I shouted: "It's impossible to live thus, impossible to live thus, impossible!" They made me feel ashamed of my unnecessary warmth; they told me that I could not talk quietly about any thing, that I got disagreeably excited; and they proved to me, especially, that the existence of such unfortunates could not possibly furnish any excuse for imbittering the lives of those about me. I felt that this was perfectly just, and held my peace; but in the depths of my soul I was conscious that I was in the right, and I could not regain my composure. And the life of the city, which had, even before this, been so strange and repellent to me, now disgusted me to such a degree, that all the pleasures of a life of luxury, which had hitherto appeared to me as pleasures, become tortures to me. And try as I would, to discover in my own soul any justification whatever for our life, I could not, without irritation, behold either my own or other people's drawing-rooms, nor our tables spread in the lordly style, nor our equipages and horses, nor shops, theatres, and assemblies. I could not behold alongside these the hungry, cold, and down-trodden inhabitants of the Lyapinsky house. And I could not rid myself of the thought that these two things were bound up together, that the one arose from the other. I remember, that, as this feeling of my own guilt presented itself to me at the first blush, so it persisted in me, but to this feeling a second was speedily added which overshadowed it. When I mentioned my impressions of the Lyapinsky house to my nearest friends and acquaintances, they all gave me the same answer as the first friend at whom I had begun to shout; but, in addition to this, they expressed their approbation of my kindness of heart and my sensibility, and gave me to understand that this sight had so especially worked upon me because I, Lyof Nikolaevitch, was very kind and good. And I willingly believed this. And before I had time to look about me, instead of the feeling of self-reproach and regret, which I had at first experienced, there came a sense of satisfaction with my own kindliness, and a desire to exhibit it to people. "It really must be," I said to myself, "that I am not especially responsible for this by the luxury of my life, but that it is the indispensable conditions of existence that are to blame. In truth, a change in my mode of life cannot rectify the evil which I have seen: by altering my manner of life, I shall only make myself and those about me unhappy, and the other miseries will remain the same as ever. And therefore my problem lies not in a change of my own life, as it had first seemed to me, but in aiding, so far as in me lies, in the amelioration of the situation of those unfortunate beings who have called forth my compassion. The whole point lies here,--that I am a very kind, amiable man, and that I wish to do good to my neighbors." And I began to think out a plan of beneficent activity, in which I might exhibit my benevolence. I must confess, however, that while devising this plan of beneficent activity, I felt all the time, in the depths of my soul, that that was not the thing; but, as often happens, activity of judgment and imagination drowned that voice of conscience within me. At that juncture, the census came up. This struck me as a means for instituting that benevolence in which I proposed to exhibit my charitable disposition. I knew of many charitable institutions and societies which were in existence in Moscow, but all their activity seemed to me both wrongly directed and insignificant in comparison with what I intended to do. And I devised the following scheme: to arouse the sympathy of the wealthy for the poverty of the city, to collect money, to get people together who were desirous of assisting in this matter, and to visit all the refuges of poverty in company with the census, and, in addition to the work of the census, to enter into communion with the unfortunate, to learn the particulars of their necessities, and to assist them with money, with work, by sending them away from Moscow, by placing their children in school, and the old people in hospitals and asylums. And not only that, I thought, but these people who undertake this can be formed into a permanent society, which, by dividing the quarters of Moscow among its members, will be able to see to it that this poverty and beggary shall not be bred; they will incessantly annihilate it at its very inception; then they will fulfil their duty, not so much by healing as by a course of hygiene for the wretchedness of the city. I fancied that there would be no more simply needy, not to mention abjectly poor persons, in the town, and that all of us wealthy individuals would thereafter be able to sit in our drawing-rooms, and eat our five-course dinners, and ride in our carriages to theatres and assemblies, and be no longer annoyed with such sights as I had seen at the Lyapinsky house. Having concocted this plan, I wrote an article on the subject; and before sending it to the printer, I went to some acquaintances, from whom I hoped for sympathy. I said the same thing to every one whom I met that day (and I applied chiefly to the rich), and nearly the same that I afterwards printed in my memoir; proposed to take advantage of the census to inquire into the wretchedness of Moscow, and to succor it, both by deeds and money, and to do it in such a manner that there should be no poor people in Moscow, and so that we rich ones might be able, with a quiet conscience, to enjoy the blessings of life to which we were accustomed. All listened to me attentively and seriously, but nevertheless the same identical thing happened with every one of them without exception. No sooner did my hearers comprehend the question, than they seemed to feel awkward and somewhat mortified. They seemed to be ashamed, and principally on my account, because I was talking nonsense, and nonsense which it was impossible to openly characterize as such. Some external cause appeared to compel my hearers to be forbearing with this nonsense of mine. "Ah, yes! of course. That would be very good," they said to me. "It is a self-understood thing that it is impossible not to sympathize with this. Yes, your idea is a capital one. I have thought of that myself, but . . . we are so indifferent, as a rule, that you can hardly count on much success . . . however, so far as I am concerned, I am, of course, ready to assist." They all said something of this sort to me. They all agreed, but agreed, so it seemed to me, not in consequence of my convictions, and not in consequence of their own wish, but as the result of some outward cause, which did not permit them not to agree. I had already noticed this, and, since not one of them stated the sum which he was willing to contribute, I was obliged to fix it myself, and to ask: "So I may count on you for three hundred, or two hundred, or one hundred, or twenty-five rubles?" And not one of them gave me any money. I mention this because, when people give money for that which they themselves desire, they generally make haste to give it. For a box to see Sarah Bernhardt, they will instantly place the money in your hand, to clinch the bargain. Here, however, out of all those who agreed to contribute, and who expressed their sympathy, not one of them proposed to give me the money on the spot, but they merely assented in silence to the sum which I suggested. In the last house which I visited on that day, in the evening, I accidentally came upon a large company. The mistress of the house had busied herself with charity for several years. Numerous carriages stood at the door, several lackeys in rich liveries were sitting in the ante- chamber. In the vast drawing-room, around two tables and lamps, sat ladies and young girls, in costly garments, dressing small dolls; and there were several young men there also, hovering about the ladies. The dolls prepared by these ladies were to be drawn in a lottery for the poor. The sight of this drawing-room, and of the people assembled in it, struck me very unpleasantly. Not to mention the fact that the property of the persons there congregated amounted to many millions, not to mention the fact that the mere income from the capital here expended on dresses, laces, bronzes, brooches, carriages, horses, liveries, and lackeys, was a hundred-fold greater than all that these ladies could earn; not to mention the outlay, the trip hither of all these ladies and gentlemen; the gloves, linen, extra time, the candles, the tea, the sugar, and the cakes had cost the hostess a hundred times more than what they were engaged in making here. I saw all this, and therefore I could understand, that precisely here I should find no sympathy with my mission: but I had come in order to make my proposition, and, difficult as this was for me, I said what I intended. (I said very nearly the same thing that is contained in my printed article.) Out of all the persons there present, one individual offered me money, saying that she did not feel equal to going among the poor herself on account of her sensibility, but that she would give money; how much money she would give, and when, she did not say. Another individual and a young man offered their services in going about among the poor, but I did not avail myself of their offer. The principal person to whom I appealed, told me that it would be impossible to do much because means were lacking. Means were lacking because all the rich people in Moscow were already on the lists, and all of them were asked for all that they could possibly give; because on all these benefactors rank, medals, and other dignities were bestowed; because in order to secure financial success, some new dignities must be secured from the authorities, and that this was the only practical means, but this was extremely difficult. On my return home that night, I lay down to sleep not only with a presentment that my idea would come to nothing, but with shame and a consciousness that all day long I had been engaged in a very repulsive and disgraceful business. But I did not give up this undertaking. In the first place, the matter had been begun, and false shame would have prevented my abandoning it; in the second place, not only the success of this scheme, but the very fact that I was busying myself with it, afforded me the possibility of continuing to live in the conditions under which I was then living; failure entailed upon me the necessity of renouncing my present existence and of seeking new paths of life. And this I unconsciously dreaded, and I could not believe the inward voice, and I went on with what I had begun. Having sent my article to the printer, I read the proof of it to the City Council (_Dum_). I read it, stumbling, and blushing even to tears, I felt so awkward. And I saw that it was equally awkward for all my hearers. In answer to my question at the conclusion of my reading, as to whether the superintendents of the census would accept my proposition to retain their places with the object of becoming mediators between society and the needy, an awkward silence ensued. Then two orators made speeches. These speeches in some measure corrected the awkwardness of my proposal; sympathy for me was expressed, but the impracticability of my proposition, which all had approved, was demonstrated. Everybody breathed more freely. But when, still desirous of gaining my object, I afterwards asked the superintendents separately: Were they willing, while taking the census, to inquire into the needs of the poor, and to retain their posts, in order to serve as go-betweens between the poor and the rich? they all grew uneasy again. They seemed to say to me with their glances: "Why, we have just condoned your folly out of respect to you, and here you are beginning it again!" Such was the expression of their faces, but they assured me in words that they agreed; and two of them said in the very same words, as though they had entered into a compact together: "We consider ourselves _morally bound_ to do this." The same impression was produced by my communication to the student-census-takers, when I said to them, that while taking our statistics, we should follow up, in addition to the objects of the census, the object of benevolence. When we discussed this, I observed that they were ashamed to look the kind-hearted man, who was talking nonsense, in the eye. My article produced the same impression on the editor of the newspaper, when I handed it to him; on my son, on my wife, on the most widely different persons. All felt awkward, for some reason or other; but all regarded it as indispensable to applaud the idea itself, and all, immediately after this expression of approbation, began to express their doubts as to its success, and began for some reason (and all of them, too, without exception) to condemn the indifference and coldness of our society and of every one, apparently, except themselves. In the depths of my own soul, I still continued to feel that all this was not at all what was needed, and that nothing would come of it; but the article was printed, and I prepared to take part in the census; I had contrived the matter, and now it was already carrying me a way with it. CHAPTER IV. At my request, there had been assigned to me for the census, a portion of the Khamovnitchesky quarter, at the Smolensk market, along the Prototchny cross-street, between Beregovoy Passage and Nikolsky Alley. In this quarter are situated the houses generally called the Rzhanoff Houses, or the Rzhanoff fortress. These houses once belonged to a merchant named Rzhanoff, but now belong to the Zimins. I had long before heard of this place as a haunt of the most terrible poverty and vice, and I had accordingly requested the directors of the census to assign me to this quarter. My desire was granted. On receiving the instructions of the City Council, I went alone, a few days previous to the beginning of the census, to reconnoitre my section. I found the Rzhanoff fortress at once, from the plan with which I had been furnished. I approached from Nikolsky Alley. Nikolsky Alley ends on the left in a gloomy house, without any gates on that side; I divined from its appearance that this was the Rzhanoff fortress. Passing down Nikolsky Street, I overtook some lads of from ten to fourteen years of age, clad in little caftans and great-coats, who were sliding down hill, some on their feet, and some on one skate, along the icy slope beside this house. The boys were ragged, and, like all city lads, bold and impudent. I stopped to watch them. A ragged old woman, with yellow, pendent cheeks, came round the corner. She was going to town, to the Smolensk market, and she groaned terribly at every step, like a foundered horse. As she came alongside me, she halted and drew a hoarse sigh. In any other locality, this old woman would have asked money of me, but here she merely addressed me. "Look there," said she, pointing at the boys who were sliding, "all they do is to play their pranks! They'll turn out just such Rzhanoff fellows as their fathers." One of the boys clad in a great-coat and a visorless cap, heard her words and halted: "What are you scolding about?" he shouted to the old woman. "You're an old Rzhanoff nanny-goat yourself!" I asked the boy: "And do you live here?" "Yes, and so does she. She stole boot-legs," shouted the boy; and raising his foot in front, he slid away. The old woman burst forth into injurious words, interrupted by a cough. At that moment, an old man, all clad in rags, and as white as snow, came down the hill in the middle of the street, flourishing his hands [in one of them he held a bundle with one little _kalatch_ and _baranki_" {39}]. This old man bore the appearance of a person who had just strengthened himself with a dram. He had evidently heard the old woman's insulting words, and he took her part. "I'll give it to you, you imps, that I will!" he screamed at the boys, seeming to direct his course towards them, and taking a circuit round me, he stepped on to the sidewalk. This old man creates surprise on the Arbata by his great age, his weakness, and his indigence. Here he was a cheery laboring-man returning from his daily toil. I followed the old man. He turned the corner to the left, into Prototchny Alley, and passing by the whole length of the house and the gate, he disappeared through the door of the tavern. Two gates and several doors open on Prototchny Alley: those belonging to a tavern, a dram-shop, and several eating and other shops. This is the Rzhanoff fortress itself. Every thing here is gray, dirty, and malodorous--both buildings and locality, and court-yards and people. The majority of the people whom I met here were ragged and half-clad. Some were passing through, others were running from door to door. Two were haggling over some rags. I made the circuit of the entire building from Prototchny Alley and Beregovoy Passage, and returning I halted at the gate of one of these houses. I wished to enter, and see what was going on inside, but I felt that it would be awkward. What should I say when I was asked what I wanted there? I hesitated, but went in nevertheless. As soon as I entered the court-yard, I became conscious of a disgusting odor. The yard was frightfully dirty. I turned a corner, and at the same instant I heard to my left and overhead, on the wooden balcony, the tramp of footsteps of people running, at first along the planks of the balcony, and then on the steps of the staircase. There emerged, first a gaunt woman, with her sleeves rolled up, in a faded pink gown, and little boots on her stockingless feet. After her came a tattered man in a red shirt and very full trousers, like a petticoat, and with overshoes. The man caught the woman at the bottom of the steps. "You shall not escape," he said laughing. "See here, you cock-eyed devil," began the woman, evidently flattered by this pursuit; but catching sight of me, she shrieked viciously, "What do you want?" As I wanted nothing, I became confused and beat a retreat. There was nothing remarkable about the place; but this incident, after what I had witnessed on the other side of the yard, the cursing old woman, the jolly old man, and the lads sliding, suddenly presented the business which I had concocted from a totally different point of view. I then comprehended for the first time, that all these unfortunates to whom I was desirous of playing the part of benefactor, besides the time, when, suffering from cold and hunger, they awaited admission into the house, had still other time, which they employed to some other purpose, that there were four and twenty hours in every day, that there was a whole life of which I had never thought, up to that moment. Here, for the first time, I understood, that all those people, in addition to their desire to shelter themselves from the cold and to obtain a good meal, must still, in some way, live out those four and twenty hours each day, which they must pass as well as everybody else. I comprehended that these people must lose their tempers, and get bored, show courage, and grieve and be merry. Strange as this may seem, when put into words, I understood clearly for the first time, that the business which I had undertaken could not consist alone in feeding and clothing thousands of people, as one would feed and drive under cover a thousand sheep, but that it must consist in doing good to them. And then I understood that each one of those thousand people was exactly such a man,--with precisely the same past, with the same passions, temptations, failings, with the same thoughts, the same perplexities,--exactly such a man as myself, and then the thing that I had undertaken suddenly presented itself to me as so difficult that I felt my powerlessness; but the thing had been begun, and I went on with it. CHAPTER V. On the first appointed day, the student enumerators arrived in the morning, and I, the benefactor, joined them at twelve o'clock. I could not go earlier, because I had risen at ten o'clock, then I had drunk my coffee and smoked, while waiting on digestion. At twelve o'clock I reached the gates of the Rzhanoff house. A policeman pointed out to me the tavern with a side entrance on Beregovoy Passage, where the census- takers had ordered every one who asked for them to be directed. I entered the tavern. It was very dark, ill-smelling, and dirty. Directly opposite the entrance was the counter, on the left was a room with tables, covered with soiled cloths, on the right a large apartment with pillars, and the same sort of little tables at the windows and along the walls. Here and there at the tables sat men both ragged and decently clad, like laboring-men or petty tradesmen, and a few women drinking tea. The tavern was very filthy, but it was instantly apparent that it had a good trade. There was a business-like expression on the face of the clerk behind the counter, and a clever readiness about the waiters. No sooner had I entered, than one waiter prepared to remove my coat and bring me whatever I should order. It was evident that they had been trained to brisk and accurate service. I inquired for the enumerators. "Vanya!" shouted a small man, dressed in German fashion, who was engaged in placing something in a cupboard behind the counter; this was the landlord of the tavern, a Kaluga peasant, Ivan Fedotitch, who hired one- half of the Zimins' houses and sublet them to lodgers. The waiter, a thin, hooked-nosed young fellow of eighteen, with a yellow complexion, hastened up. "Conduct this gentleman to the census-takers; they went into the main building over the well." The young fellow threw down his napkin, and donned a coat over his white jacket and white trousers, and a cap with a large visor, and, tripping quickly along with his white feet, he led me through the swinging door in the rear. In the dirty, malodorous kitchen, in the out-building, we encountered an old woman who was carefully carrying some very bad-smelling tripe, wrapped in a rag, off somewhere. From the out-building we descended into a sloping court-yard, all encumbered with small wooden buildings on lower stories of stone. The odor in this whole yard was extremely powerful. The centre of this odor was an out-house, round which people were thronging whenever I passed it. It merely indicated the spot, but was not altogether used itself. It was impossible, when passing through the yard, not to take note of this spot; one always felt oppressed when one entered the penetrating atmosphere which was emitted by this foul smell. The waiter, carefully guarding his white trousers, led me cautiously past this place of frozen and unfrozen uncleanness to one of the buildings. The people who were passing through the yard and along the balconies all stopped to stare at me. It was evident that a respectably dressed man was a curiosity in these localities. The young man asked a woman "whether she had seen the census-takers?" And three men simultaneously answered his question: some said that they were over the well, but others said that they had been there, but had come out and gone to Nikita Ivanovitch. An old man dressed only in his shirt, who was wandering about the centre of the yard, said that they were in No. 30. The young man decided that this was the most probable report, and conducted me to No. 30 through the basement entrance, and darkness and bad smells, different from that which existed outside. We went down-stairs, and proceeded along the earthen floor of a dark corridor. As we were passing along the corridor, a door flew open abruptly, and an old drunken man, in his shirt, probably not of the peasant class, thrust himself out. A washerwoman, wringing her soapy hands, was pursuing and hustling the old man with piercing screams. Vanya, my guide, pushed the old man aside, and reproved him. "It's not proper to make such a row," said me, "and you an officer, too!" and we went on to the door of No. 30. Vanya gave it a little pull. The door gave way with a smack, opened, and we smelled soapy steam, and a sharp odor of spoilt food and tobacco, and we entered into total darkness. The windows were on the opposite side; but the corridors ran to right and left between board partitions, and small doors opened, at various angles, into the rooms made of uneven whitewashed boards. In a dark room, on the left, a woman could be seen washing in a tub. An old woman was peeping from one of these small doors on the right. Through another open door we could see a red-faced, hairy peasant, in bast shoes, sitting on his wooden bunk; his hands rested on his knees, and he was swinging his feet, shod in bast shoes, and gazing gloomily at them. At the end of the corridor was a little door leading to the apartment where the census-takers were. This was the chamber of the mistress of the whole of No. 30; she rented the entire apartment from Ivan Feodovitch, and let it out again to lodgers and as night-quarters. In her tiny room, under the tinsel images, sat the student census-taker with his charts; and, in his quality of investigator, he had just thoroughly interrogated a peasant wearing a shirt and a vest. This latter was a friend of the landlady, and had been answering questions for her. The landlady herself, an elderly woman, was there also, and two of her curious tenants. When I entered, the room was already packed full. I pushed my way to the table. I exchanged greetings with the student, and he proceeded with his inquiries. And I began to look about me, and to interrogate the inhabitants of these quarters for my own purpose. It turned out, that in this first set of lodgings, I found not a single person upon whom I could pour out my benevolence. The landlady, in spite of the fact that the poverty, smallness and dirt of these quarters struck me after the palatial house in which I dwell, lived in comfort, compared with many of the poor inhabitants of the city, and in comparison with the poverty in the country, with which I was thoroughly familiar, she lived luxuriously. She had a feather-bed, a quilted coverlet, a samovar, a fur cloak, and a dresser with crockery. The landlady's friend had the same comfortable appearance. He had a watch and a chain. Her lodgers were not so well off, but there was not one of them who was in need of immediate assistance: the woman who was washing linen in a tub, and who had been abandoned by her husband and had children, an aged widow without any means of livelihood, as she said, and that peasant in bast shoes, who told me that he had nothing to eat that day. But on questioning them, it appeared that none of these people were in special want, and that, in order to help them, it would be necessary to become well acquainted with them. When I proposed to the woman whose husband had abandoned her, to place her children in an asylum, she became confused, fell into thought, thanked me effusively, but evidently did not wish to do so; she would have preferred pecuniary assistance. The eldest girl helped her in her washing, and the younger took care of the little boy. The old woman begged earnestly to be taken to the hospital, but on examining her nook I found that the old woman was not particularly poor. She had a chest full of effects, a teapot with a tin spout, two cups, and caramel boxes filled with tea and sugar. She knitted stockings and gloves, and received monthly aid from some benevolent lady. And it was evident that what the peasant needed was not so much food as drink, and that whatever might be given him would find its way to the dram-shop. In these quarters, therefore, there were none of the sort of people whom I could render happy by a present of money. But there were poor people who appeared to me to be of a doubtful character. I noted down the old woman, the woman with the children, and the peasant, and decided that they must be seen to; but later on, as I was occupied with the peculiarly unfortunate whom I expected to find in this house, I made up my mind that there must be some order in the aid which we should bestow; first came the most wretched, and then this kind. But in the next quarters, and in the next after that, it was the same story, all the people had to be narrowly investigated before they could be helped. But unfortunates of the sort whom a gift of money would convert from unfortunate into fortunate people, there were none. Mortifying as it is to me to avow this, I began to get disenchanted, because I did not find among these people any thing of the sort which I had expected. I had expected to find peculiar people here; but, after making the round of all the apartments, I was convinced that the inhabitants of these houses were not peculiar people at all, but precisely such persons as those among whom I lived. As there are among us, just so among them; there were here those who were more or less good, more or less stupid, happy and unhappy. The unhappy were exactly such unhappy beings as exist among us, that is, unhappy people whose unhappiness lies not in their external conditions, but in themselves, a sort of unhappiness which it is impossible to right by any sort of bank- note whatever. CHAPTER VI. The inhabitants of these houses constitute the lower class of the city, which numbers in Moscow, probably, one hundred thousand. There, in that house, are representatives of every description of this class. There are petty employers, and master-artisans, bootmakers, brush-makers, cabinet- makers, turners, shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths; there are cab-drivers, young women living alone, and female pedlers, laundresses, old-clothes dealers, money-lenders, day-laborers, and people without any definite employment; and also beggars and dissolute women. Here were many of the very people whom I had seen at the entrance to the Lyapinsky house; but here these people were scattered about among the working-people. And moreover, I had seen these people at their most unfortunate time, when they had eaten and drunk up every thing, and when, cold, hungry, and driven forth from the taverns, they were awaiting admission into the free night lodging-house, and thence into the promised prison for despatch to their places of residence, like heavenly manna; but here I beheld them and a majority of workers, and at a time, when by one means or another, they had procured three or five kopeks for a lodging for the night, and sometimes a ruble for food and drink. And strange as the statement may seem, I here experienced nothing resembling that sensation which I had felt in the Lyapinsky house; but, on the contrary, during the first round, both I and the students experienced an almost agreeable feeling,--yes, but why do I say "almost agreeable"? This is not true; the feeling called forth by intercourse with these people, strange as it may sound, was a distinctly agreeable one. Our first impression was, that the greater part of the dwellers here were working people and very good people at that. We found more than half the inhabitants at work: laundresses bending over their tubs, cabinet-makers at their lathes, cobblers on their benches. The narrow rooms were full of people, and cheerful and energetic labor was in progress. There was an odor of toilsome sweat and leather at the cobbler's, of shavings at the cabinet-maker's; songs were often to be heard, and glimpses could be had of brawny arms with sleeves roiled high, quickly and skilfully making their accustomed movements. Everywhere we were received cheerfully and politely: hardly anywhere did our intrusion into the every-day life of these people call forth that ambition, and desire to exhibit their importance and to put us down, which the appearance of the enumerators in the quarters of well-to-do people evoked. It not only did not arouse this, but, on the contrary, they answered all other questions properly, and without attributing any special significance to them. Our questions merely served them as a subject of mirth and jesting as to how such and such a one was to be set down in the list, when he was to be reckoned as two, and when two were to be reckoned as one, and so forth. We found many of them at dinner, or tea; and on every occasion to our greeting: "bread and salt," or "tea and sugar," they replied: "we beg that you will partake," and even stepped aside to make room for us. Instead of the den with a constantly changing population, which we had expected to find here, it turned out, that there were a great many apartments in the house where people had been living for a long time. One cabinet-maker with his men, and a boot-maker with his journeymen, had lived there for ten years. The boot-maker's quarters were very dirty and confined, but all the people at work were very cheerful. I tried to enter into conversation with one of the workmen, being desirous of inquiring into the wretchedness of his situation and his debt to his master, but the man did not understand me and spoke of his master and his life from the best point of view. In one apartment lived an old man and his old woman. They peddled apples. Their little chamber was warm, clean, and full of goods. On the floor were spread straw mats: they had got them at the apple-warehouse. They had chests, a cupboard, a samovar, and crockery. In the corner there were numerous images, and two lamps were burning before them; on the wall hung fur coats covered with sheets. The old woman, who had star- shaped wrinkles, and who was polite and talkative, evidently delighted in her quiet, comfortable, existence. Ivan Fedotitch, the landlord of the tavern and of these quarters, left his establishment and came with us. He jested in a friendly manner with many of the landlords of apartments, addressing them all by their Christian names and patronymics, and he gave us brief sketches of them. All were ordinary people, like everybody else,--Martin Semyonovitches, Piotr Piotrovitches, Marya Ivanovnas,--people who did not consider themselves unhappy, but who regarded themselves, and who actually were, just like the rest of mankind. We had been prepared to witness nothing except what was terrible. And, all of a sudden, there was presented to us, not only nothing that was terrible, but what was good,--things which involuntarily compelled our respect. And there were so many of these good people, that the tattered, corrupt, idle people whom we came across now and then among them, did not destroy the principal impression. This was not so much of a surprise to the students as to me. They simply went to fulfil a useful task, as they thought, in the interests of science, and, at the same time, they made their own chance observations; but I was a benefactor, I went for the purpose of aiding the unfortunate, the corrupt, vicious people, whom I supposed that I should meet with in this house. And, behold, instead of unfortunate, corrupt, and vicious people, I saw that the majority were laborious, industrious, peaceable, satisfied, contented, cheerful, polite, and very good folk indeed. I felt particularly conscious of this when, in these quarters, I encountered that same crying want which I had undertaken to alleviate. When I encountered this want, I always found that it had already been relieved, that the assistance which I had intended to render had already been given. This assistance had been rendered before my advent, and rendered by whom? By the very unfortunate, depraved creatures whom I had undertaken to reclaim, and rendered in such a manner as I could not compass. In one basement lay a solitary old man, ill with the typhus fever. There was no one with the old man. A widow and her little daughter, strangers to him, but his neighbors round the corner, looked after him, gave him tea and purchased medicine for him out of their own means. In another lodging lay a woman in puerperal fever. A woman who lived by vice was rocking the baby, and giving her her bottle; and for two days, she had been unremitting in her attention. The baby girl, on being left an orphan, was adopted into the family of a tailor, who had three children of his own. So there remained those unfortunate idle people, officials, clerks, lackeys out of place, beggars, drunkards, dissolute women, and children, who cannot be helped on the spot with money, but whom it is necessary to know thoroughly, to be planned and arranged for. I had simply sought unfortunate people, the unfortunates of poverty, those who could be helped by sharing with them our superfluity, and, as it seemed to me, through some signal ill-luck, none such were to be found; but I hit upon unfortunates to whom I should be obliged to devote my time and care. CHAPTER VII. The unfortunates whom I noted down, divided themselves, according to my ideas, into three sections, namely: people who had lost their former advantageous position, and who were awaiting a return to it (there were people of this sort from both the lower and the higher class); next, dissolute women, of whom there are a great many in these houses; and a third division, children. More than all the rest, I found and noted down people of the first division, who had forfeited their former advantageous position, and who hoped to regain it. Of such persons, especially from the governmental and official world, there are a very great number in these houses. In almost all the lodgings which we entered, with the landlord, Ivan Fedotitch, he said to us: "Here you need not write down the lodger's card yourself; there is a man here who can do it, if he only happens not to be intoxicated to-day." And Ivan Fedotitch called by name and patronymic this man, who was always one of those persons who had fallen from a lofty position. At Ivan Fedotitch's call, there crawled forth from some dark corner, a former wealthy member of the noble or official class, generally intoxicated and always undressed. If he was not drunk, he always readily acceded to the task proposed to him, nodded significantly, frowned, set down his remarks in learned phraseology, held the card neatly printed on red paper in his dirty, trembling hands, and glanced round at his fellow-lodgers with pride and contempt, as though now triumphing in his education over those who had so often humiliated him. He evidently enjoyed intercourse with that world in which cards are printed on red paper, and with that world of which he had once formed a part. Nearly always, in answer to my inquiries about his life, the man began, not only willingly, but eagerly, to relate the story of the misfortunes which he had undergone,--which he had learned by rote like a prayer,--and particularly of his former position, in which he ought still to be by right of his education. A great many such people were scattered over all the corners of the Rzhanoff house. But one lodging was densely occupied by them alone--both men and women. After we had already entered, Ivan Fedotitch said to us: "Now, here are some of the nobility." The lodging was perfectly crammed; nearly all of the people, forty in number, were at home. More demoralized countenances, unhappy, aged, and swollen, young, pallid, and distracted, were not to be seen in the whole building. I conversed with several of them. The story was nearly identical in all cases, only in various stages of development. Every one of them had been rich, or his father, his brother or his uncle was still wealthy, or his father or he himself had had a very fine position. Then misfortune had overtaken him, the blame for which rested either on envious people, or on his own kind- heartedness, or some special chance, and so he had lost every thing, and had been forced to condescend to these surroundings to which he was not accustomed, and which were hateful to him--among lice, rags, among drunkards and corrupt persons, and to nourish himself on bread and liver, and to extend his hand in beggary. All the thoughts, desires, memories of these people were directed exclusively to the past. The present appeared to them something unreal, repulsive, and not worthy of attention. Not one of them had any present. They had only memories of the past, and expectations from the future, which might be realized at any moment, and for the realization of which only a very little was required; but this little they did not possess, it was nowhere to be obtained, and this had been ruining their whole future life in vain, in the case of one man, for a year, of a second for five years, and of a third for thirty years. All one needed was merely to dress respectably, so that he could present himself to a certain personage, who was well- disposed towards him another only needed to be able to dress, pay off his debts, and get to Orel; a third required to redeem a small property which was mortgaged, for the continuation of a law-suit, which must be decided in his favor, and then all would be well once more. They all declare that they merely require something external, in order to stand once more in the position which they regard as natural and happy in their own case. Had my mind not been obscured by my pride as a benefactor, a glance at their faces, both old and young, which were mostly weak and sensitive, but amiable, would have given me to understand that their misfortunes were irreparable by any external means, that they could not be happy in any position whatever, if their views of life were to remain unchanged, that they were in no wise remarkable people, in remarkably unfortunate circumstances, but that they were the same people who surround us on all sides, and just like ourselves. I remember that intercourse with this sort of unfortunates was peculiarly difficult for me. I now understand why this was so; in them I beheld myself, as in a mirror. If I had reflected on my own life and on the life of the people in our circle, I should have seen that no real difference existed between them. If those about me dwell in spacious quarters, and in their own houses on the Sivtzevy Vrazhok and on the Dimitrovka, and not in the Rzhanoff house, and still eat and drink dainties, and not liver and herrings with bread, that does not prevent them from being exactly as unhappy. They are just as dissatisfied with their own positions, they mourn over the past, and pine for better things, and the improved position for which they long is precisely the same as that which the inhabitants of the Rzhanoff house long for; that is to say, one in which they may do as little work as possible themselves, and derive the utmost advantage from the labors of others. The difference is merely one of degrees and time. If I had reflected at that time, I should have understood this; but I did not reflect, and I questioned these people, and wrote them down, supposing, that, having learned all the particulars of their various conditions and necessities, I could aid them _later on_. I did not understand that such a man can only be helped by changing his views of the world. But in order to change the views of another, one must needs have better views himself, and live in conformity with them; but mine were precisely the same as theirs, and I lived in accordance with those views, which must undergo a change, in order that these people might cease to be unhappy. I did not see that these people were unhappy, not because they had not, so to speak, nourishing food, but because their stomachs had been spoiled, and because their appetites demanded not nourishing but irritating viands; and I did not perceive that, in order to help them, it was not necessary to give them food, but that it was necessary to heal their disordered stomachs. Although I am anticipating by so doing, I will mention here, that, out of all these persons whom I noted down, I really did not help a single one, in spite of the fact that for some of them, that was done which they desired, and that which, apparently, might have raised them. Three of their number were particularly well known to me. All three, after repeated rises and falls, are now in precisely the same situation in which they were three years ago. CHAPTER VIII. The second class of unfortunates whom I also expected to assist later on, were the dissolute women; there were a very great many of them, of all sorts, in the Rzhanoff house--from those who were young and who resembled women, to old ones, who were frightful and horrible, and who had lost every semblance of humanity. The hope of being of assistance to these women, which I had not at first entertained, occurred to me later. This was in the middle of our rounds. We had already worked out several mechanical tricks of procedure. When we entered a new establishment, we immediately questioned the landlady of the apartment; one of us sat down, clearing some sort of a place for himself where he could write, and another penetrated the corners, and questioned each man in all the nooks of the apartment separately, and reported the facts to the one who did the writing. On entering a set of rooms in the basement, a student went to hunt up the landlady, while I began to interrogate all who remained in the place. The apartment was thus arranged: in the centre was a room six _arshins_ square, {59} and a small oven. From the oven radiated four partitions, forming four tiny compartments. In the first, the entrance slip, which had four bunks, there were two persons--an old man and a woman. Immediately adjoining this, was a rather long slip of a room; in it was the landlord, a young fellow, dressed in a sleeveless gray woollen jacket, a good-looking, very pale citizen. {60} On the left of the first corner, was a third tiny chamber; there was one person asleep there, probably a drunken peasant, and a woman in a pink blouse which was loose in front and close-fitting behind. The fourth chamber was behind the partition; the entrance to it was from the landlord's compartment. The student went into the landlord's room, and I remained in the entrance compartment, and questioned the old man and woman. The old man had been a master-printer, but now had no means of livelihood. The woman was the wife of a cook. I went to the third compartment, and questioned the woman in the blouse about the sleeping man. She said that he was a visitor. I asked the woman who she was. She replied that she was a Moscow peasant. "What is your business?" She burst into a laugh, and did not answer me. "What do you live on?" I repeated, thinking that she had not understood my question. "I sit in the taverns," she said. I did not comprehend, and again I inquired: "What is your means of livelihood?" She made no reply and laughed. Women's voices in the fourth compartment which we had not yet entered, joined in the laugh. The landlord emerged from his cabin and stepped up to us. He had evidently heard my questions and the woman's replies. He cast a stern glance at the woman and turned to me: "She is a prostitute," said he, apparently pleased that he knew the word in use in the language of the authorities, and that he could pronounce it correctly. And having said this, with a respectful and barely perceptible smile of satisfaction addressed to me, he turned to the woman. And no sooner had he turned to her, than his whole face altered. He said, in a peculiar, scornful, hasty tone, such as is employed towards dogs: "What do you jabber in that careless way for? 'I sit in the taverns.' You do sit in the taverns, and that means, to talk business, that you are a prostitute," and again he uttered the word. "She does not know the name for herself." This tone offended me. "It is not our place to abuse her," said I. "If all of us lived according to the laws of God, there would be none of these women." "That's the very point," said the landlord, with an awkward smile. "Therefore, we should not reproach but pity them. Are they to blame?" I do not recollect just what I said, but I do remember that I was vexed by the scornful tone of the landlord of these quarters which were filled with women, whom he called prostitutes, and that I felt compassion for this woman, and that I gave expression to both feelings. No sooner had I spoken thus, than the boards of the bed in the next compartment, whence the laugh had proceeded, began to creak, and above the partition, which did not reach to the ceiling, there appeared a woman's curly and dishevelled head, with small, swollen eyes, and a shining, red face, followed by a second, and then by a third. They were evidently standing on their beds, and all three were craning their necks, and holding their breath with strained attention, and gazing silently at us. A troubled pause ensued. The student, who had been smiling up to this time, became serious; the landlord grew confused and dropped his eyes. All the women held their breath, stared at me, and waited. I was more embarrassed than any of them. I had not, in the least, anticipated that a chance remark would produce such an effect. Like Ezekiel's field of death, strewn with dead men's bones, there was a quiver at the touch of the spirit, and the dead bones stirred. I had uttered an unpremeditated word of love and sympathy, and this word had acted on all as though they had only been waiting for this very remark, in order that they might cease to be corpses and might live. They all stared at me, and waited for what would come next. They waited for me to utter those words, and to perform those actions by reason of which these bones might draw together, clothe themselves with flesh, and spring into life. But I felt that I had no such words, no such actions, by means of which I could continue what I had begun; I was conscious, in the depths of my soul, that I had lied [that I was just like them], {62} and there was nothing further for me to say; and I began to inscribe on the cards the names and callings of all the persons in this set of apartments. This incident led me into a fresh dilemma, to the thought of how these unfortunates also might be helped. In my self-delusion, I fancied that this would be very easy. I said to myself: "Here, we will make a note of all these women also, and _later on_ when we [I did not specify to myself who "we" were] write every thing out, we will attend to these persons too." I imagined that we, the very ones who have brought and have been bringing these women to this condition for several generations, would take thought some fine day and reform all this. But, in the mean time, if I had only recalled my conversation with the disreputable woman who had been rocking the baby of the fever-stricken patient, I might have comprehended the full extent of the folly of such a supposition. When we saw this woman with the baby, we thought that it was her child. To the question, "Who was she?" she had replied in a straightforward way that she was unmarried. She did not say--a prostitute. Only the master of the apartment made use of that frightful word. The supposition that she had a child suggested to me the idea of removing her from her position. I inquired: "Is this your child?" "No, it belongs to that woman yonder." "Why are you taking care of it?" "Because she asked me; she is dying." Although my supposition proved to be erroneous, I continued my conversation with her in the same spirit. I began to question her as to who she was, and how she had come to such a state. She related her history very readily and simply. She was a Moscow _myeshchanka_, the daughter of a factory hand. She had been left an orphan, and had been adopted by an aunt. From her aunt's she had begun to frequent the taverns. The aunt was now dead. When I asked her whether she did not wish to alter her mode of life, my question, evidently, did not even arouse her interest. How can one take an interest in the proposition of a man, in regard to something absolutely impossible? She laughed, and said: "And who would take me in with my yellow ticket?" "Well, but if a place could be found somewhere as cook?" said I. This thought occurred to me because she was a stout, ruddy woman, with a kindly, round, and rather stupid face. Cooks are often like that. My words evidently did not please her. She repeated: "A cook--but I don't know how to make bread," said she, and she laughed. She said that she did not know how; but I saw from the expression of her countenance that she did not wish to become a cook, that she regarded the position and calling of a cook as low. This woman, who in the simplest possible manner was sacrificing every thing that she had for the sick woman, like the widow in the Gospels, at the same time, like many of her companions, regarded the position of a person who works as low and deserving of scorn. She had been brought up to live not by work, but by this life which was considered the natural one for her by those about her. In that lay her misfortune. And she fell in with this misfortune and clung to her position. This led her to frequent the taverns. Which of us--man or woman--will correct her false view of life? Where among us are the people to be found who are convinced that every laborious life is more worthy of respect than an idle life,--who are convinced of this, and who live in conformity with this belief, and who in conformity with this conviction value and respect people? If I had thought of this, I might have understood that neither I, nor any other person among my acquaintances, could heal this complaint. I might have understood that these amazed and affected heads thrust over the partition indicated only surprise at the sympathy expressed for them, but not in the least a hope of reclamation from their dissolute life. They do not perceive the immorality of their life. They see that they are despised and cursed, but for what they are thus despised they cannot comprehend. Their life, from childhood, has been spent among just such women, who, as they very well know, always have existed, and are indispensable to society, and so indispensable that there are governmental officials to attend to their legal existence. Moreover, they know that they have power over men, and can bring them into subjection, and rule them often more than other women. They see that their position in society is recognized by women and men and the authorities, in spite of their continual curses, and therefore, they cannot understand why they should reform. In the course of one of the tours, one of the students told me that in a certain lodging, there was a woman who was bargaining for her thirteen- year-old daughter. Being desirous of rescuing this girl, I made a trip to that lodging expressly. Mother and daughter were living in the greatest poverty. The mother, a small, dark-complexioned, dissolute woman of forty, was not only homely, but repulsively homely. The daughter was equally disagreeable. To all my pointed questions about their life, the mother responded curtly, suspiciously, and in a hostile way, evidently feeling that I was an enemy, with evil intentions; the daughter made no reply, did not look at her mother, and evidently trusted the latter fully. They inspired me with no sincere pity, but rather with disgust. But I made up my mind that the daughter must be rescued, and that I would interest ladies who pitied the sad condition of these women, and send them hither. But if I had reflected on the mother's long life in the past, of how she had given birth to, nursed and reared this daughter in her situation, assuredly without the slightest assistance from outsiders, and with heavy sacrifices--if I had reflected on the view of life which this woman had formed, I should have understood that there was, decidedly, nothing bad or immoral in the mother's act: she had done and was doing for her daughter all that she could, that is to say, what she considered the best for herself. This daughter could be forcibly removed from her mother; but it would be impossible to convince the mother that she was doing wrong, in selling her daughter. If any one was to be saved, then it must be this woman--the mother ought to have been saved; [and that long before, from that view of life which is approved by every one, according to which a woman may live unmarried, that is, without bearing children and without work, and simply for the satisfaction of the passions. If I had thought of this, I should have understood that the majority of the ladies whom I intended to send thither for the salvation of that little girl, not only live without bearing children and without working, and serving only passion, but that they deliberately rear their daughters for the same life; one mother takes her daughter to the taverns, another takes hers to balls. But both mothers hold the same view of the world, namely, that a woman must satisfy man's passions, and that for this she must be fed, dressed, and cared for. Then how are our ladies to reform this woman and her daughter? {66} ] CHAPTER IX. Still more remarkable were my relations to the children. In my _role_ of benefactor, I turned my attention to the children also, being desirous to save these innocent beings from perishing in that lair of vice, and noting them down in order to attend to them _afterwards_. Among the children, I was especially struck with a twelve-year-old lad named Serozha. I was heartily sorry for this bold, intelligent lad, who had lived with a cobbler, and who had been left without a shelter because his master had been put in jail, and I wanted to do good to him. I will here relate the upshot of my benevolence in his case, because my experience with this child is best adapted to show my false position in the _role_ of benefactor. I took the boy home with me and put him in the kitchen. It was impossible, was it not, to take a child who had lived in a den of iniquity in among my own children? And I considered myself very kind and good, because he was a care, not to me, but to the servants in the kitchen, and because not I but the cook fed him, and because I gave him some cast-off clothing to wear. The boy staid a week. During that week I said a few words to him as I passed on two occasions and in the course of my strolls, I went to a shoemaker of my acquaintance, and proposed that he should take the lad as an apprentice. A peasant who was visiting me, invited him to go to the country, into his family, as a laborer; the boy refused, and at the end of the week he disappeared. I went to the Rzhanoff house to inquire after him. He had returned there, but was not at home when I went thither. For two days already, he had been going to the Pryesnensky ponds, where he had hired himself out at thirty kopeks a day in some procession of savages in costume, who led about elephants. Something was being presented to the public there. I went a second time, but he was so ungrateful that he evidently avoided me. Had I then reflected on the life of that boy and on my own, I should have understood that this boy was spoiled because he had discovered the possibility of a merry life without labor, and that he had grown unused to work. And I, with the object of benefiting and reclaiming him, had taken him to my house, where he saw--what? My children,--both older and younger than himself, and of the same age,--who not only never did any work for themselves, but who made work for others by every means in their power, who soiled and spoiled every thing about them, who ate rich, dainty, and sweet viands, broke china, and flung to the dogs food which would have been a tidbit to this lad. If I had rescued him from the _abyss_, and had taken him to that nice place, then he must acquire those views which prevailed in the life of that nice place; but by these views, he understood that in that fine place he must so live that he should not toil, but eat and drink luxuriously, and lead a joyous life. It is true that he did not know that my children bore heavy burdens in the acquisition of the declensions of Latin and Greek grammar, and that he could not have understood the object of these labors. But it is impossible not to see that if he had understood this, the influence of my children's example on him would have been even stronger. He would then have comprehended that my children were being educated in this manner, so that, while doing no work now, they might be in a position hereafter, also profiting by their diplomas, to work as little as possible, and to enjoy the pleasures of life to as great an extent as possible. He did understand this, and he would not go with the peasant to tend cattle, and to eat potatoes and _kvas_ with him, but he went to the zoological garden in the costume of a savage, to lead the elephant at thirty kopeks a day. I might have understood how clumsy I was, when I was rearing my children in the most utter idleness and luxury, to reform other people and their children, who were perishing from idleness in what I called the den of the Rzhanoff house, where, nevertheless, three-fourths of the people toil for themselves and for others. But I understood nothing of this. There were a great many children in the Rzhanoff house, who were in the same pitiable plight; there were the children of dissolute women, there were orphans, there were children who had been picked up in the streets by beggars. They were all very wretched. But my experience with Serozha showed me that I, living the life I did, was not in a position to help them. While Serozha was living with us, I noticed in myself an effort to hide our life from him, in particular the life of our children. I felt that all my efforts to direct him towards a good, industrious life, were counteracted by the examples of our lives and by that of our children. It is very easy to take a child away from a disreputable woman, or from a beggar. It is very easy, when one has the money, to wash, clean and dress him in neat clothing, to support him, and even to teach him various sciences; but it is not only difficult for us, who do not earn our own bread, but quite the reverse, to teach him to work for his bread, but it is impossible, because we, by our example, and even by those material and valueless improvements of his life, inculcate the contrary. A puppy can be taken, tended, fed, and taught to fetch and carry, and one may take pleasure in him: but it is not enough to tend a man, to feed and teach him Greek; we must teach the man how to live,--that is, to take as little as possible from others, and to give as much as possible; and we cannot help teaching him to do the contrary, if we take him into our houses, or into an institution founded for this purpose. CHAPTER X. This feeling of compassion for people, and of disgust with myself, which I had experienced in the Lyapinsky house, I experienced no longer. I was completely absorbed in the desire to carry out the scheme which I had concocted,--to do good to those people whom I should meet here. And, strange to say, it would appear, that, to do good--to give money to the needy--is a very good deed, and one that should dispose me to love for the people, but it turned out the reverse: this act produced in me ill- will and an inclination to condemn people. But during our first evening tour, a scene occurred exactly like that in the Lyapinsky house, and it called forth a wholly different sentiment. It began by my finding in one set of apartments an unfortunate individual, of precisely the sort who require immediate aid. I found a hungry woman who had had nothing to eat for two days. It came about thus: in one very large and almost empty night-lodging, I asked an old woman whether there were many poor people who had nothing to eat? The old woman reflected, and then told me of two; and then, as though she had just recollected, "Why, here is one of them," said she, glancing at one of the occupied bunks. "I think that woman has had no food." "Really? Who is she?" "She was a dissolute woman: no one wants any thing to do with her now, so she has no way of getting any thing. The landlady has had compassion on her, but now she means to turn her out . . . Agafya, hey there, Agafya!" cried the woman. We approached, and something rose up in the bunk. It was a woman haggard and dishevelled, whose hair was half gray, and who was as thin as a skeleton, dressed in a ragged and dirty chemise, and with particularly brilliant and staring eyes. She looked past us with her staring eyes, clutched at her jacket with one thin hand, in order to cover her bony breast which was disclosed by her tattered chemise, and oppressed, she cried, "What is it? what is it?" I asked her about her means of livelihood. For a long time she did not understand, and said, "I don't know myself; they persecute me." I asked her,--it puts me to shame, my hand refuses to write it,--I asked her whether it was true that she had nothing to eat? She answered in the same hurried, feverish tone, staring at me the while,--"No, I had nothing yesterday, and I have had nothing to- day." The sight of this woman touched me, but not at all as had been the case in the Lyapinsky house; there, my pity for these people made me instantly feel ashamed of myself: but here, I rejoiced because I had at last found what I had been seeking,--a hungry person. I gave her a ruble, and I recollect being very glad that others saw it. The old woman, on seeing this, immediately begged money of me also. It afforded me such pleasure to give, that, without finding out whether it was necessary to give or not, I gave something to the old woman too. The old woman accompanied me to the door, and the people standing in the corridor heard her blessing me. Probably the questions which I had put with regard to poverty, had aroused expectation, and several persons followed us. In the corridor also, they began to ask me for money. Among those who begged were some drunken men, who aroused an unpleasant feeling in me; but, having once given to the old woman, I had no might to refuse these people, and I began to give. As long as I continued to give, people kept coming up; and excitement ran through all the lodgings. People made them appearance on the stairs and galleries, and followed me. As I emerged into the court-yard, a little boy ran swiftly down one of the staircases thrusting the people aside. He did not see me, and exclaimed hastily: "He gave Agashka a ruble!" When he reached the ground, the boy joined the crowd which was following me. I went out into the street: various descriptions of people followed me, and asked for money. I distributed all my small change, and entered an open shop with the request that the shopkeeper would change a ten-ruble bill for me. And then the same thing happened as at the Lyapinsky house. A terrible confusion ensued. Old women, noblemen, peasants, and children crowded into the shop with outstretched hands; I gave, and interrogated some of them as to their lives, and took notes. The shopkeeper, turning up the furred points of the collar of his coat, sat like a stuffed creature, glancing at the crowd occasionally, and then fixing his eyes beyond them again. He evidently, like every one else, felt that this was foolish, but he could not say so. The poverty and beggary in the Lyapinsky house had horrified me, and I felt myself guilty of it; I felt the desire and the possibility of improvement. But now, precisely the same scene produced on me an entirely different effect; I experienced, in the first place, a malevolent feeling towards many of those who were besieging me; and in the second place, uneasiness as to what the shopkeepers and porters would think of me. On my return home that day, I was troubled in my soul. I felt that what I had done was foolish and immoral. But, as is always the result of inward confusion, I talked a great deal about the plan which I had undertaken, as though I entertained not the slightest doubt of my success. On the following day, I went to such of the people whom I had inscribed on my list, as seemed to me the most wretched of all, and those who, as it seemed to me, would be the easiest to help. As I have already said, I did not help any of these people. It proved to be more difficult to help them than I had thought. And either because I did not know how, or because it was impossible, I merely imitated these people, and did not help any one. I visited the Rzhanoff house several times before the final tour, and on every occasion the very same thing occurred: I was beset by a throng of beggars in whose mass I was completely lost. I felt the impossibility of doing any thing, because there were too many of them, and because I felt ill-disposed towards them because there were so many of them; and in addition to this, each one separately did not incline me in his favor. I was conscious that every one of them was telling me an untruth, or less than the whole truth, and that he saw in me merely a purse from which money might be drawn. And it very frequently seemed to me, that the very money which they squeezed out of me, rendered their condition worse instead of improving it. The oftener I went to that house, the more I entered into intercourse with the people there, the more apparent became to me the impossibility of doing any thing; but still I did not give up any scheme until the last night tour. The remembrance of that last tour is particularly mortifying to me. On other occasions I had gone thither alone, but twenty of us went there on this occasion. At seven o'clock, all who wished to take part in this final night round, began to assemble at my house. Nearly all of them were strangers to me,--students, one officer, and two of my society acquaintances, who, uttering the usual, "_C'est tres interessant_!" had asked me to include them in the number of the census-takers. My worldly acquaintances had dressed up especially for this, in some sort of hunting-jacket, and tall, travelling boots, in a costume in which they rode and went hunting, and which, in their opinion, was appropriate for an excursion to a night-lodging-house. They took with them special note- books and remarkable pencils. They were in that peculiarly excited state of mind in which men set off on a hunt, to a duel, or to the wars. The most apparent thing about them was their folly and the falseness of our position, but all the rest of us were in the same false position. Before we set out, we held a consultation, after the fashion of a council of war, as to how we should begin, how divide our party, and so on. This consultation was exactly such as takes place in councils, assemblages, committees; that is to say, each person spoke, not because he had any thing to say or to ask, but because each one cudgelled his brain for something that he could say, so that he might not fall short of the rest. But, among all these discussions, no one alluded to that beneficence of which I had so often spoken to them all. Mortifying as this was to me, I felt that it was indispensable that I should once more remind them of benevolence, that is, of the point, that we were to observe and take notes of all those in destitute circumstances whom we should encounter in the course of our rounds. I had always felt ashamed to speak of this; but now, in the midst of all our excited preparations for our expedition, I could hardly utter the words. All listened to me, as it seemed to me, with sorrow, and, at the same time, all agreed in words; but it was evident that they all knew that it was folly, and that nothing would come of it, and all immediately began again to talk about something else. This went on until the time arrived for us to set out, and we started. We reached the tavern, roused the waiters, and began to sort our papers. When we were informed that the people had heard about this round, and were leaving their quarters, we asked the landlord to lock the gates; and we went ourselves into the yard to reason with the fleeing people, assuring them that no one would demand their tickets. I remember the strange and painful impression produced on me by these alarmed night-lodgers: ragged, half-dressed, they all seemed tall to me by the light of the lantern and the gloom of the court-yard. Frightened and terrifying in their alarm, they stood in a group around the foul-smelling out-house, and listened to our assurances, but they did not believe us, and were evidently prepared for any thing, like hunted wild beasts, provided only that they could escape from us. Gentlemen in divers shapes--as policemen, both city and rural, and as examining judges, and judges--hunt them all their lives, in town and country, on the highway and in the streets, and in the taverns, and in night-lodging houses; and now, all of a sudden, these gentlemen had come and locked the gates, merely in order to count them: it was as difficult for them to believe this, as for hares to believe that dogs have come, not to chase but to count them. But the gates were locked, and the startled lodgers returned: and we, breaking up into groups, entered also. With me were the two society men and two students. In front of us, in the dark, went Vanya, in his coat and white trousers, with a lantern, and we followed. We went to quarters with which I was familiar. I knew all the establishments, and some of the people; but the majority of the people were new, and the spectacle was new, and more dreadful than the one which I had witnessed in the Lyapinsky house. All the lodgings were full, all the bunks were occupied, not by one person only, but often by two. The sight was terrible in that narrow space into which the people were huddled, and men and women were mixed together. All the women who were not dead drunk slept with men; and women with two children did the same. The sight was terrible, on account of the poverty, dirt, rags, and terror of the people. And it was chiefly dreadful on account of the vast numbers of people who were in this situation. One lodging, and then a second like it, and a third, and a tenth, and a twentieth, and still there was no end to them. And everywhere there was the same foul odor, the same close atmosphere, the same crowding, the same mingling of the sexes, the same men and women intoxicated to stupidity, and the same terror, submission and guilt on all faces; and again I was overwhelmed with shame and pain, as in the Lyapinsky house, and I understood that what I had undertaken was abominable and foolish and therefore impracticable. And I no longer took notes of anybody, and I asked no questions, knowing that nothing would come of this. I was deeply pained. In the Lyapinsky house I had been like a man who has seen a fearful wound, by chance, on the body of another man. He is sorry for the other man, he is ashamed that he has not pitied the man before, and he can still rise to the succor of the sufferer. But now I was like a physician, who has come with his medicine to the sick man, has uncovered his sore, and examined it, and who must confess to himself that every thing that he has done has been in vain, and that his remedy is good for nothing. CHAPTER XI. This visit dealt the final blow to my self-delusion. It now appeared indisputable to me, that what I had undertaken was not only foolish but loathsome. But, in spite of the fact that I was aware of this, it seemed to me that I could not abandon the whole thing on the spot. It seemed to me that I was bound to carry out this enterprise, in the first place, because by my article, by my visits and promises, I had aroused the expectations of the poor; in the second, because by my article also, and by my talk, I had aroused the sympathies of benevolent persons, many of whom had promised me their co-operation both in personal labor and in money. And I expected that both sets of people would turn to me for an answer to this. What happened to me, so far as the appeal of the needy to me is concerned, was as follows: By letter and personal application I received more than a hundred; these applications were all from the wealthy-poor, if I may so express myself. I went to see some of them, and some of them received no answer. Nowhere did I succeed in doing any thing. All applications to me were from persons who had once occupied privileged positions (I thus designate those in which people receive more from others than they give), who had lost them, and who wished to occupy them again. To one, two hundred rubles were indispensable, in order that he might prop up a failing business, and complete the education of his children which had been begun; another wanted a photographic outfit; a third wanted his debts paid, and respectable clothing purchased for him; a fourth needed a piano, in order to perfect himself and support his family by giving lessons. But the majority did not stipulate for any given sum of money, and simply asked for assistance; and when I came to examine into what was required, it turned out that their demands grew in proportion to the aid, and that there was not and could not be any way of satisfying them. I repeat, that it is very possible that this arose from the fact that I did not understand how; but I did not help any one, although I sometimes endeavored to do so. A very strange and unexpected thing happened to me as regards the co-operation of the benevolently disposed. Out of all the persons who had promised me financial aid, and who had even stated the number of rubles, not a single one handed to me for distribution among the poor one solitary ruble. But according to the pledges which had been given me, I could reckon on about three thousand rubles; and out of all these people, not one remembered our former discussions, or gave me a single kopek. Only the students gave the money which had been assigned to them for their work on the census, twelve rubles, I think. So my whole scheme, which was to have been expressed by tens of thousands of rubles contributed by the wealthy, for hundreds and thousands of poor people who were to be rescued from poverty and vice, dwindled down to this, that I gave away, haphazard, a few scores of rubles to those people who asked me for them, and that there remained in my hands twelve rubies contributed by the students, and twenty-five sent to me by the City Council for my labor as a superintendent, and I absolutely did not know to whom to give them. The whole matter came to an end. And then, before my departure for the country, on the Sunday before carnival, I went to the Rzhanoff house in the morning, in order to get rid of those thirty-seven rubles before I should leave Moscow, and to distribute them to the poor. I made the round of the quarters with which I was familiar, and in them found only one sick man, to whom I gave five rubles. There was no one else there to give any to. Of course many began to beg of me. But as I had not known them at first, so I did not know them now, and I made up my mind to take counsel with Ivan Fedotitch, the landlord of the tavern, as to the persons upon whom it would be proper to bestow the remaining thirty-two rubies. It was the first day of the carnival. Everybody was dressed up, and everybody was full-fed, and many were already intoxicated. In the court- yard, close to the house, stood an old man, a rag-picker, in a tattered smock and bast shoes, sorting over the booty in his basket, tossing out leather, iron, and other stuff in piles, and breaking into a merry song, with a fine, powerful voice. I entered into conversation with him. He was seventy years old, he was alone in the world, and supported himself by his calling of a rag-picker; and not only did he utter no complaints, but he said that he had plenty to eat and drink. I inquired of him as to especially needy persons. He flew into a rage, and said plainly that there were no needy people, except drunkards and lazy men; but, on learning my object, he asked me for a five-kopek piece to buy a drink, and ran off to the tavern. I too entered the tavern to see Ivan Fedotitch, and commission him to distribute the money which I had left. The tavern was full; gayly-dressed, intoxicated girls were flitting in and out; all the tables were occupied; there were already a great many drunken people, and in the small room the harmonium was being played, and two persons were dancing. Out of respect to me, Ivan Fedotitch ordered that the dance should be stopped, and seated himself with me at a vacant table. I said to him, that, as he knew his tenants, would not he point out to me the most needy among them; that I had been entrusted with the distribution of a little money, and, therefore, would he indicate the proper persons? Good-natured Ivan Fedotitch (he died a year later), although he was pressed with business, broke away from it for a time, in order to serve me. He meditated, and was evidently undecided. An elderly waiter heard us, and joined the conference. They began to discuss the claims of persons, some of whom I knew, but still they could not come to any agreement. "The Paramonovna," suggested the waiter. "Yes, that would do. Sometimes she has nothing to eat. Yes, but then she tipples."--"Well, what of that? That makes no difference."--"Well, Sidoron Ivanovitch has children. He would do." But Ivan Fedotitch had his doubts about Sidoron Ivanovitch also. "Akulina shall have some. There, now, give something to the blind." To this I responded. I saw him at once. He was a blind old man of eighty years, without kith or kin. It seemed as though no condition could be more painful, and I went immediately to see him. He was lying on a feather- bed, on a high bedstead, drunk; and, as he did not see me, he was scolding his comparatively youthful female companion in a frightful bass voice, and in the very worst kind of language. They also summoned an armless boy and his mother. I saw that Ivan Fedotitch was in great straits, on account of his conscientiousness, for me knew that whatever was given would immediately pass to his tavern. But I had to get rid of my thirty-two rubles, so I insisted; and in one way and another, and half wrongfully to boot, we assigned and distributed them. Those who received them were mostly well dressed, and we had not far to go to find them, as they were there in the tavern. The armless boy appeared in wrinkled boots, and a red shirt and vest. With this my charitable career came to an end, and I went off to the country; irritated at others, as is always the case, because I myself had done a stupid and a bad thing. My benevolence had ended in nothing, and it ceased altogether, but the current of thoughts and feelings which it had called up with me not only did not come to an end, but the inward work went on with redoubled force. CHAPTER XII. What was its nature? I had lived in the country, and there I was connected with the rustic poor. Not out of humility, which is worse than pride, but for the sake of telling the truth, which is indispensable for the understanding of the whole course of my thoughts and sentiments, I will say that in the country I did very little for the poor, but the demands which were made upon me were so modest that even this little was of use to the people, and formed around me an atmosphere of affection and union with the people, in which it was possible to soothe the gnawing sensation of remorse at the independence of my life. On going to the city, I had hoped to be able to live in the same manner. But here I encountered want of an entirely different sort. City want was both less real, and more exacting and cruel, than country poverty. But the principal point was, that there was so much of it in one spot, that it produced on me a frightful impression. The impression which I experienced in the Lyapinsky house had, at the very first, made me conscious of the deformity of my own life. This feeling was genuine and very powerful. But, notwithstanding its genuineness and power, I was, at that time, so weak that I feared the alteration in my life to which this feeling commended me, and I resorted to a compromise. I believed what everybody told me, and everybody has said, ever since the world was made,--that there is nothing evil in wealth and luxury, that they are given by God, that one may continue to live as a rich man, and yet help the needy. I believed this, and I tried to do it. I wrote an essay, in which I summoned all rich people to my assistance. The rich people all acknowledged themselves morally bound to agree with me, but evidently they either did not wish to do any thing, or they could not do any thing or give any thing to the poor. I began to visit the poor, and I beheld what I had not in the least expected. On the one hand, I beheld in those dens, as I called them, people whom it was not conceivable that I should help, because they were working people, accustomed to labor and privation, and therefore standing much higher and having a much firmer foothold in life than myself; on the other hand, I saw unfortunate people whom I could not aid because they were exactly like myself. The majority of the unfortunates whom I saw were unhappy only because they had lost the capacity, desire, and habit of earning their own bread; that is to say, their unhappiness consisted in the fact that they were precisely such persons as myself. I found no unfortunates who were sick, hungry, or cold, to whom I could render immediate assistance, with the solitary exception of hungry Agafya. And I became convinced, that, on account of my remoteness from the lives of those people whom I desired to help, it would be almost impossible to find any such unfortunates, because all actual wants had already been supplied by the very people among whom these unfortunates live; and, most of all, I was convinced that money cannot effect any change in the life led by these unhappy people. I was convinced of all this, but out of false shame at abandoning what I had once undertaken, because of my self-delusion as a benefactor, I went on with this matter for a tolerably long time,--and would have gone on with it until it came to nothing of itself,--so that it was with the greatest difficulty that, with the help of Ivan Fedotitch, I got rid, after a fashion, as well as I could, in the tavern of the Rzhanoff house, of the thirty-seven rubles which I did not regard as belonging to me. Of course I might have gone on with this business, and have made out of it a semblance of benevolence; by urging the people who had promised me money, I might have collected more, I might have distributed this money, and consoled myself with my charity; but I perceived, on the one hand, that we rich people neither wish nor are able to share a portion of our a superfluity with the poor (we have so many wants of our own), and that money should not be given to any one, if the object really be to do good and not to give money itself at haphazard, as I had done in the Rzhanoff tavern. And I gave up the whole thing, and went off to the country with despair in my heart. In the country I tried to write an essay about all this that I had experienced, and to tell why my undertaking had not succeeded. I wanted to justify myself against the reproaches which had been made to me on the score of my article on the census; I wanted to convict society of its in difference, and to state the causes in which this city poverty has its birth, and the necessity of combating it, and the means of doing so which I saw. I began this essay at once, and it seemed to me that in it I was saying a very great deal that was important. But toil as I would over it, and in spite of the abundance of materials, in spite of the superfluity of them even, I could not get though that essay; and so I did not finish it until the present year, because of the irritation under the influence of which I wrote, because I had not gone through all that was requisite in order to bear myself properly in relation to this essay, because I did not simply and clearly acknowledge the cause of all this,--a very simple cause, which had its root in myself. In the domain of morals, one very remarkable and too little noted phenomenon presents itself. If I tell a man who knows nothing about it, what I know about geology, astronomy, history, physics, and mathematics, that man receives entirely new information, and he never says to me: "Well, what is there new in that? Everybody knows that, and I have known it this long while." But tell that same man the most lofty truth, expressed in the clearest, most concise manner, as it has never before been expressed, and every ordinary individual, especially one who takes no particular interest in moral questions, or, even more, one to whom the moral truth stated by you is displeasing, will infallibly say to you: "Well, who does not know that? That was known and said long ago." It really seems to him that this has been said long ago and in just this way. Only those to whom moral truths are dear and important know how important and precious they are, and with what prolonged labor the elucidation, the simplification, of moral truths, their transit from the state of a misty, indefinitely recognized supposition, and desire, from indistinct, incoherent expressions, to a firm and definite expression, unavoidably demanding corresponding concessions, are attained. We have all become accustomed to think that moral instruction is a most absurd and tiresome thing, in which there can be nothing new or interesting; and yet all human life, together with all the varied and complicated activities, apparently independent, of morality, both governmental and scientific, and artistic and commercial, has no other aim than the greater and greater elucidation, confirmation, simplification, and accessibility of moral truth. I remember that I was once walking along the street in Moscow, and in front of me I saw a man come out and gaze attentively at the stones of the sidewalk, after which he selected one stone, seated himself on it, and began to plane (as it seemed to me) or to rub it with the greatest diligence and force. "What is he doing to the sidewalk?" I said to myself. On going close to him, I saw what the man was doing. He was a young fellow from a meat-shop; he was whetting his knife on the stone of the pavement. He was not thinking at all of the stones when he scrutinized them, still less was he thinking of them when he was accomplishing his task: he was whetting his knife. He was obliged to whet his knife so that he could cut the meat; but to me it seemed as though he were doing something to the stones of the sidewalk. Just so it appears as though humanity were occupied with commerce, conventions, wars, sciences, arts; but only one business is of importance to it, and with only one business is it occupied: it is elucidating to itself those moral laws by which it lives. The moral laws are already in existence; humanity is only elucidating them, and this elucidation seems unimportant and imperceptible for any one who has no need of moral laws, who does not wish to live by them. But this elucidation of the moral law is not only weighty, but the only real business of all humanity. This elucidation is imperceptible just as the difference between the dull and the sharp knife is imperceptible. The knife is a knife all the same, and for a person who is not obliged to cut any thing with this knife, the difference between the dull and the sharp one is imperceptible. For the man who has come to an understanding that his whole life depends on the greater or less degree of sharpness in the knife,--for such a man, every whetting of it is weighty, and that man knows that the knife is a knife only when it is sharp, when it cuts that which needs cutting. This is what happened to me, when I began to write my essay. It seemed to me that I knew all about it, that I understood every thing connected with those questions which had produced on me the impressions of the Lyapinsky house, and the census; but when I attempted to take account of them and to demonstrate them, it turned out that the knife would not cut, and that it must be whetted. And it is only now, after the lapse of three years, that I have felt that my knife is sufficiently sharp, so that I can cut what I choose. I have learned very little that is new. My thoughts are all exactly the same, but they were duller then, and they all scattered and would not unite on any thing; there was no edge to them; they would not concentrate on one point, on the simplest and clearest decision, as they have now concentrated themselves. CHAPTER XIII. I remember that during the entire period of my unsuccessful efforts at helping the inhabitants of the city, I presented to myself the aspect of a man who should attempt to drag another man out of a swamp while he himself was standing on the same unstable ground. Every attempt of mine had made me conscious of the untrustworthy character of the soil on which I stood. I felt that I was in the swamp myself, but this consciousness did not cause me to look more narrowly at my own feet, in order to learn upon what I was standing; I kept on seeking some external means, outside myself, of helping the existing evil. I then felt that my life was bad, and that it was impossible to live in that manner. But from the fact that my life was bad, and that it was impossible to live in that manner, I did not draw the very simple and clear deduction that it was necessary to amend my life and to live better, but I knew the terrible deduction that in order to live well myself, I must needs reform the lives of others; and so I began to reform the lives of others. I lived in the city, and I wished to reform the lives of those who lived in the city; but I soon became convinced that this I could not by any possibility accomplish, and I began to meditate on the inherent characteristics of city life and city poverty. "What are city life and city poverty? Why, when I am living in the city, cannot I help the city poor?" I asked myself. I answered myself that I could not do any thing for them, in the first place, because there were too many of them here in one spot; in the second place, because all the poor people here were entirely different from the country poor. Why were there so many of them here? and in what did their peculiarity, as opposed to the country poor, consist? There was one and the same answer to both questions. There were a great many of them here, because here all those people who have no means of subsistence in the country collect around the rich; and their peculiarity lies in this, that they are not people who have come from the country to support themselves in the city (if there are any city paupers, those who have been born here, and whose fathers and grandfathers were born here, then those fathers and grandfathers came hither for the purpose of earning their livelihood). What is the meaning of this: _to earn one's livelihood in the city_? In the words "to earn one's livelihood in the city," there is something strange, resembling a jest, when you reflect on their significance. How is it that people go from the country,--that is to say, from the places where there are forests, meadows, grain, and cattle, where all the wealth of the earth lies,--to earn their livelihood in a place where there are neither trees, nor grass, nor even land, and only stones and dust? What is the significance of the words "to earn a livelihood in the city," which are in such constant use, both by those who earn the livelihood, and by those who furnish it, as though it were something perfectly clear and comprehensible? I recall the hundreds and thousands of city people, both those who live well and the needy, with whom I have conversed on the reason why they came hither: and all without exception said, that they had come from the country to earn their living; that in Moscow, where people neither sow nor reap,--that in Moscow there is plenty of every thing, and that, therefore, it is only in Moscow that they can earn the money which they require in the country for bread and a cottage and a horse, and articles of prime necessity. But assuredly, in the country lies the source of all riches; there only is real wealth,--bread, and forests, and horses, and every thing. And why, above all, take away from the country that which dwellers in the country need,--flour, oats, horses, and cattle? Hundreds of times did I discuss this matter with peasants living in town; and from my discussions with them, and from my observations, it has been made apparent to me, that the congregation of country people in the city is partly indispensable because they cannot otherwise support themselves, partly voluntary, and that they are attracted to the city by the temptations of the city. It is true, that the position of the peasant is such that, for the satisfaction of his demands made on him in the country, he cannot extricate himself otherwise than by selling the grain and the cattle which he knows will be indispensable to him; and he is forced, whether he will or no, to go to the city in order there to win back his bread. But it is also true, that the luxury of city life, and the comparative ease with which money is there to be earned, attract him thither; and under the pretext of gaining his living in the town, he betakes himself thither in order that he may have lighter work, better food, and drink tea three times a day, and dress well, and even lead a drunken and dissolute life. The cause of both is identical,--the transfer of the riches of the producers into the hands of non-producers, and the accumulation of wealth in the cities. And, in point of fact, when autumn has come, all wealth is collected in the country. And instantly there arise demands for taxes, recruits, the temptations of vodka, weddings, festivals; petty pedlers make their rounds through the villages, and all sorts of other temptations crop up; and by this road, or, if not, by some other, wealth of the most varied description--vegetables, calves, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, eggs, butter, hemp, flax, rye, oats, buckwheat, pease, hempseed, and flaxseed--all passes into the hands of strangers, is carried off to the towns, and thence to the capitals. The countryman is obliged to surrender all this to satisfy the demands that are made upon him, and temptations; and, having parted with his wealth, he is left with an insufficiency, and he is forced to go whither his wealth has been carried and there he tries, in part, to obtain the money which he requires for his first needs in the country, and in part, being himself led away by the blandishments of the city, he enjoys, in company with others, the wealth that has there accumulated. Everywhere, throughout the whole of Russia,--yes, and not in Russia alone, I think, but throughout the whole world,--the same thing goes on. The wealth of the rustic producers passes into the hands of traders, landed proprietors, officials, and factory-owners; and the people who receive this wealth wish to enjoy it. But it is only in the city that they can derive full enjoyment from this wealth. In the country, in the first place, it is difficult to satisfy all the requirements of rich people, on account of the sparseness of the population; banks, shops, hotels, every sort of artisan, and all sorts of social diversions, do not exist there. In the second place, one of the chief pleasures procured by wealth--vanity, the desire to astonish and outshine other people--is difficult to satisfy in the country; and this, again, on account of the lack of inhabitants. In the country, there is no one to appreciate elegance, no one to be astonished. Whatever adornments in the way of pictures and bronzes the dweller in the country may procure for his house, whatever equipages and toilets he may provide, there is no one to see them and envy them, and the peasants cannot judge of them. [And, in the third place, luxury is even disagreeable and dangerous in the country for the man possessed of a conscience and fear. It is an awkward and delicate matter, in the country, to have baths of milk, or to feed your puppies on it, when directly beside you there are children who have no milk; it is an awkward and delicate matter to build pavilions and gardens in the midst of people who live in cots banked up with dung, which they have no means of warming. In the country there is no one to keep the stupid peasants in order, and in their lack of cultivation they might disarrange all this.] {94} And accordingly rich people congregate, and join themselves to other rich people with similar requirements, in the city, where the gratification of every luxurious taste is carefully protected by a numerous police force. Well-rooted inhabitants of the city of this sort, are the governmental officials; every description of artisan and professional man has sprung up around them, and with them the wealthy join their forces. All that a rich man has to do there is to take a fancy to a thing, and he can get it. It is also more agreeable for a rich man to live there, because there he can gratify his vanity; there is some one with whom he can vie in luxury; there is some one to astonish, and there is some one to outshine. But the principal reason why it is more comfortable in the city for a rich man is that formerly, in the country, his luxury made him awkward and uneasy; while now, on the contrary, it would be awkward for him not to live luxuriously, not to live like all his peers around him. That which seemed dreadful and awkward in the country, here appears to be just as it should be. [Rich people congregate in the city; and there, under the protection of the authorities, they calmly demand every thing that is brought thither from the country. And the countryman is, in some measure, compelled to go thither, where this uninterrupted festival of the wealthy which demands all that is taken from him is in progress, in order to feed upon the crumbs which fall from the tables of the rich; and partly, also, because, when he beholds the care-free, luxurious life, approved and protected by everybody, he himself becomes desirous of regulating his life in such a way as to work as little as possible, and to make as much use as possible of the labors of others. And so he betakes himself to the city, and finds employment about the wealthy, endeavoring, by every means in his power, to entice from them that which he is in need of, and conforming to all those conditions which the wealthy impose upon him, he assists in the gratification of all their whims; he serves the rich man in the bath and in the inn, and as cab-driver and prostitute, and he makes for him equipages, toys, and fashions; and he gradually learns from the rich man to live in the same manner as the latter, not by labor, but by divers tricks, getting away from others the wealth which they have heaped together; and he becomes corrupt, and goes to destruction. And this colony, demoralized by city wealth, constitutes that city pauperism which I desired to aid and could not. All that is necessary, in fact, is for us to reflect on the condition of these inhabitants of the country, who have removed to the city in order to earn their bread or their taxes,--when they behold, everywhere around them, thousands squandered madly, and hundreds won by the easiest possible means; when they themselves are forced by heavy toil to earn kopeks,--and we shall be amazed that all these people should remain working people, and that they do not all of them take to an easier method of getting gain,--by trading, peddling, acting as middlemen, begging, vice, rascality, and even robbery. Why, we, the participants in that never-ceasing orgy which goes on in town, can become so accustomed to our life, that it seems to us perfectly natural to dwell alone in five huge apartments, heated by a quantity of beech logs sufficient to cook the food for and to warm twenty families; to drive half a verst with two trotters and two men-servants; to cover the polished wood floor with rugs; and to spend, I will not say, on a ball, five or ten thousand rubles, and twenty-five thousand on a Christmas-tree. But a man who is in need of ten rubles to buy bread for his family, or whose last sheep has been seized for a tax-debt of seven rubles, and who cannot raise those rubles by hard labor, cannot grow accustomed to this. We think that all this appears natural to poor people there are even some ingenuous persons who say in all seriousness, that the poor are very grateful to us for supporting them by this luxury.] {96} But poor people are not devoid of human understanding simply because they are poor, and they judge precisely as we do. As the first thought that occurs to us on hearing that such and such a man has gambled away or squandered ten or twenty thousand rubles, is: "What a foolish and worthless fellow he is to uselessly squander so much money! and what a good use I could have made of that money in a building which I have long been in need of, for the improvement of my estate, and so forth!"--just so do the poor judge when they behold the wealth which they need, not for caprices, but for the satisfaction of their actual necessities, of which they are frequently deprived, flung madly away before their eyes. We make a very great mistake when we think that the poor can judge thus, reason thus, and look on indifferently at the luxury which surrounds them. They never have acknowledged, and they never will acknowledge, that it can be just for some people to live always in idleness, and for other people to fast and toil incessantly; but at first they are amazed and insulted by this; then they scrutinize it more attentively, and, seeing that these arrangements are recognized as legitimate, they endeavor to free themselves from toil, and to take part in the idleness. Some succeed in this, and they become just such carousers themselves; others gradually prepare themselves for this state; others still fail, and do not attain their goal, and, having lost the habit of work, they fill up the disorderly houses and the night-lodging houses. Two years ago, we took from the country a peasant boy to wait on table. For some reason, he did not get on well with the footman, and he was sent away: he entered the service of a merchant, won the favor of his master, and now he goes about with a vest and a watch-chain, and dandified boots. In his place, we took another peasant, a married man: he became a drunkard, and lost money. We took a third: he took to drunk, and, having drank up every thing he had, he suffered for a long while from poverty in the night-lodging house. An old man, the cook, took to drink and fell sick. Last year a footman who had formerly been a hard drinker, but who had refrained from liquor for five years in the country, while living in Moscow without his wife who encouraged him, took to drink again, and ruined his whole life. A young lad from our village lives with my brother as a table-servant. His grandfather, a blind old man, came to me during my sojourn in the country, and asked me to remind this grandson that he was to send ten rubies for the taxes, otherwise it would be necessary for him to sell his cow. "He keeps saying, I must dress decently," said the old man: "well, he has had some shoes made, and that's all right; but what does he want to set up a watch for?" said the grandfather, expressing in these words the most senseless supposition that it was possible to originate. The supposition really was senseless, if we take into consideration that the old man throughout Lent had eaten no butter, and that he had no split wood because he could not possibly pay one ruble and twenty kopeks for it; but it turned out that the old man's senseless jest was an actual fact. The young fellow came to see me in a fine black coat, and shoes for which he had paid eight rubles. He had recently borrowed ten rubles from my brother, and had spent them on these shoes. And my children, who have known the lad from childhood, told me that he really considers it indispensable to fit himself out with a watch. He is a very good boy, but he thinks that people will laugh at him so long as he has no watch; and a watch is necessary. During the present year, a chambermaid, a girl of eighteen, entered into a connection with the coachman in our house. She was discharged. An old woman, the nurse, with whom I spoke in regard to the unfortunate girl, reminded me of a girl whom I had forgotten. She too, ten yeans ago, during a brief stay of ours in Moscow, had become connected with a footman. She too had been discharged, and she had ended in a disorderly house, and had died in the hospital before reaching the age of twenty. It is only necessary to glance about one, to be struck with terror at the pest which we disseminate directly by our luxurious life among the people whom we afterwards wish to help, not to mention the factories and establishments which serve our luxurious tastes. [And thus, having penetrated into the peculiar character of city poverty, which I was unable to remedy, I perceived that its prime cause is this, that I take absolute necessaries from the dwellers in the country, and carry them all to the city. The second cause is this, that by making use here, in the city, of what I have collected in the country, I tempt and lead astray, by my senseless luxury, those country people who come hither because of me, in order in some way to get back what they have been deprived of in the country.] {99} CHAPTER XIV. I reached the same conclusion from a totally different point. On recalling all my relations with the city poor during that time, I saw that one of the reasons why I could not help the city poor was, that the poor were disingenuous and untruthful with me. They all looked upon me, not as a man, but as means. I could not get near them, and I thought that perhaps I did not understand how to do it; but without uprightness, no help was possible. How can one help a man who does not disclose his whole condition? At first I blamed them for this (it is so natural to blame some one else); but a remark from an observing man named Siutaeff, who was visiting me at the time, explained this matter to me, and showed me where the cause of my want of success lay. I remember that Siutaeff's remark struck me very forcibly at the time; but I only understood its full significance later on. It was at the height of my self-delusion. I was sitting with my sister, and Siutaeff was there also at her house; and my sister was questioning me about my undertaking. I told her about it, and, as always happens when you have no faith in your course, I talked to her with great enthusiasm and warmth, and at great length, of what I had done, and of what might possibly come of it. I told her every thing,--how we were going to keep track of pauperism in Moscow, how we were going to keep an eye on the orphans and old people, how we were going to send away all country people who had grown poor here, how we were going to smooth the pathway to reform for the depraved; how, if only the matter could be managed, there would not be a man left in Moscow, who could not obtain assistance. My sister sympathized with me, and we discussed it. In the middle of our conversation, I glanced at Siutaeff. As I was acquainted with his Christian life, and with the significance which he attached to charity, I expected his sympathy, and spoke so that he understood this; I talked to my sister, but directed my remarks more at him. He sat immovable in his dark tanned sheepskin jacket,--which he wore, like all peasants, both out of doors and in the house,--and as though he did not hear us, but were thinking of his own affairs. His small eyes did not twinkle, and seemed to be turned inwards. Having finished what I had to say, I turned to him with a query as to what he thought of it. "It's all a foolish business," said he. "Why?" "Your whole society is foolish, and nothing good can come out of it," he repeated with conviction. "Why not? Why is it a stupid business to help thousands, at any rate hundreds, of unfortunate beings? Is it a bad thing, according to the Gospel, to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry?" "I know, I know, but that is not what you are doing. Is it necessary to render assistance in that way? You are walking along, and a man asks you for twenty kopeks. You give them to him. Is that alms? Do you give spiritual alms,--teach him. But what is it that you have given? It was only for the sake of getting rid of him." "No; and, besides, that is not what we are talking about. We want to know about this need, and then to help by both money and deeds; and to find work." "You can do nothing with those people in that way." "So they are to be allowed to die of hunger and cold?" "Why should they die? Are there many of them there?" "What, many of them?" said I, thinking that he looked at the matter so lightly because he was not aware how vast was the number of these people. "Why, do you know," said I, "I believe that there are twenty thousand of these cold and hungry people in Moscow. And how about Petersburg and the other cities?" He smiled. "Twenty thousand! And how many households are there in Russia alone, do you think? Are there a million?" "Well, what then?" "What then?" and his eyes flashed, and he grew animated. "Come, let us divide them among ourselves. I am not rich, I will take two persons on the spot. There is the lad whom you took into your kitchen; I invited him to come to my house, and he did not come. Were there ten times as many, let us divide them among us. Do you take some, and I will take some. We will work together. He will see how I work, and he will learn. He will see how I live, and we will sit down at the same table together, and he will hear my words and yours. This charity society of yours is nonsense." These simple words impressed me. I could not but admit their justice; but it seemed to me at that time, that, in spite of their truth, still that which I had planned might possibly prove of service. But the further I carried this business, the more I associated with the poor, the more frequently did this remark recur to my mind, and the greater was the significance which it acquired for me. I arrive in a costly fur coat, or with my horses; or the man who lacks shoes sees my two-thousand-ruble apartments. He sees how, a little while ago, I gave five rubles without begrudging them, merely because I took a whim to do so. He surely knows that if I give away rubles in that manner, it is only because I have hoarded up so many of them, that I have a great many superfluous ones, which I not only have not given away, but which I have easily taken from other people. [What else could he see in me but one of those persons who have got possession of what belongs to him? And what other feeling can he cherish towards me, than a desire to obtain from me as many of those rubles, which have been stolen from him and from others, as possible? I wish to get close to him, and I complain that he is not frank; and here I am, afraid to sit down on his bed for fear of getting lice, or catching something infectious; and I am afraid to admit him to my room, and he, coming to me naked, waits, generally in the vestibule, or, if very fortunate, in the ante-chamber. And yet I declare that he is to blame because I cannot enter into intimate relations with him, and because me is not frank. Let the sternest man try the experiment of eating a dinner of five courses in the midst of people who have had very little or nothing but black bread to eat. Not a man will have the spirit to eat, and to watch how the hungry lick their chops around him. Hence, then, in order to eat daintily amid the famishing, the first indispensable requisite is to hide from them, in order that they may not see it. This is the very thing, and the first thing, that we do. And I took a simpler view of our life, and perceived that an approach to the poor is not difficult to us through accidental causes, but that we deliberately arrange our lives in such a fashion so that this approach may be rendered difficult. Not only this; but, on taking a survey of our life, of the life of the wealthy, I saw that every thing which is considered desirable in that life consists in, or is inseparably bound up with, the idea of getting as far away from the poor as possible. In fact, all the efforts of our well- endowed life, beginning with our food, dress, houses, our cleanliness, and even down to our education,--every thing has for its chief object, the separation of ourselves from the poor. In procuring this seclusion of ourselves by impassable barriers, we spend, to put it mildly, nine- tenths of our wealth. The first thing that a man who was grown wealthy does is to stop eating out of one bowl, and he sets up crockery, and fits himself out with a kitchen and servants. And he feeds his servants high, too, so that their mouths may not water over his dainty viands; and he eats alone; and as eating in solitude is wearisome, he plans how he may improve his food and deck his table; and the very manner of taking his food (dinner) becomes a matter for pride and vain glory with him, and his manner of taking his food becomes for him a means of sequestering himself from other men. A rich man cannot think of such a thing as inviting a poor man to his table. A man must know how to conduct ladies to table, how to bow, to sit down, to eat, to rinse out the mouth; and only rich people know all these things. The same thing occurs in the matter of clothing. If a rich man were to wear ordinary clothing, simply for the purpose of protecting his body from the cold,--a short jacket, a coat, felt and leather boots, an under-jacket, trousers, shirt,--he would require but very little, and he would not be unable, when he had two coats, to give one of them to a man who had none. But the rich man begins by procuring for himself clothing which consists entirely of separate pieces, and which is fit only for separate occasions, and which is, therefore, unsuited to the poor man. He has frock-coats, vests, pea- jackets, lacquered boots, cloaks, shoes with French heels, garments that are chopped up into bits to conform with the fashion, hunting-coats, travelling-coats, and so on, which can only be used under conditions of existence far removed from poverty. And his clothing also furnishes him with a means of keeping at a distance from the poor. The same is the case, and even more clearly, with his dwelling. In order that one may live alone in ten rooms, it is indispensable that those who live ten in one room should not see it. The richer a man is, the more difficult is he of access; the more porters there are between him and people who are not rich, the more impossible is it to conduct a poor man over rugs, and seat him in a satin chair. The case is the same with the means of locomotion. The peasant driving in a cart, or a sledge, must be a very ill-tempered man when he will not give a pedestrian a lift; and there is both room for this and a possibility of doing it. But the richer the equipage, the farther is a man from all possibility of giving a seat to any person whatsoever. It is even said plainly, that the most stylish equipages are those meant to hold only one person. It is precisely the same thing with the manner of life which is expressed by the word cleanliness. Cleanliness! Who is there that does not know people, especially women, who reckon this cleanliness in themselves as a great virtue? and who is not acquainted with the devices of this cleanliness, which know no bounds, when it can command the labor of others? Which of the people who have become rich has not experienced in his own case, with what difficulty he carefully trained himself to this cleanliness, which only confirms the proverb, "Little white hands love other people's work"? To-day cleanliness consists in changing your shirt once a day; to-morrow, in changing it twice a day. To-day it means washing the face, and neck, and hands daily; to-morrow, the feet; and day after to-morrow, washing the whole body every day, and, in addition and in particular, a rubbing- down. To-day the table-cloth is to serve for two days, to-morrow there must be one each day, then two a day. To-day the footman's hands must be clean; to-morrow he must wear gloves, and in his clean gloves he must present a letter on a clean salver. And there are no limits to this cleanliness, which is useless to everybody, and objectless, except for the purpose of separating oneself from others, and of rendering impossible all intercourse with them, when this cleanliness is attained by the labors of others. Moreover, when I studied the subject, I because convinced that even that which is commonly called education is the very same thing. The tongue does not deceive; it calls by its real name that which men understand under this name. What the people call culture is fashionable clothing, political conversation, clean hands,--a certain sort of cleanliness. Of such a man, it is said, in contradistinction to others, that he is an educated man. In a little higher circle, what they call education means the same thing as with the people; only to the conditions of education are added playing on the pianoforte, a knowledge of French, the writing of Russian without orthographical errors, and a still greater degree of external cleanliness. In a still more elevated sphere, education means all this with the addition of the English language, and a diploma from the highest educational institution. But education is precisely the same thing in the first, the second, and the third case. Education consists of those forms and acquirements which are calculated to separate a man from his fellows. And its object is identical with that of cleanliness,--to seclude us from the herd of poor, in order that they, the poor, may not see how we feast. But it is impossible to hide ourselves, and they do see us. And accordingly I have become convinced that the cause of the inability of us rich people to help the poor of the city lies in the impossibility of our establishing intercourse with them; and that this impossibility of intercourse is caused by ourselves, by the whole course of our lives, by all the uses which we make of our wealth. I have become convinced that between us, the rich and the poor, there rises a wall, reared by ourselves out of that very cleanliness and education, and constructed of our wealth; and that in order to be in a condition to help the poor, we must needs, first of all, destroy this wall; and that in order to do this, confrontation after Siutaeff's method should be rendered possible, and the poor distributed among us. And from another starting-point also I came to the same conclusion to which the current of my discussions as to the causes of the poverty in towns had led me: the cause was our wealth.] {108} CHAPTER XV. I began to examine the matter from a third and wholly personal point of view. Among the phenomena which particularly impressed me, during the period of my charitable activity, there was yet another, and a very strange one, for which I could for a long time find no explanation. It was this: every time that I chanced, either on the street on in the house, to give some small coin to a poor man, without saying any thing to him, I saw, or thought that I saw, contentment and gratitude on the countenance of the poor man, and I myself experienced in this form of benevolence an agreeable sensation. I saw that I had done what the man wished and expected from me. But if I stopped the poor man, and sympathetically questioned him about his former and his present life, I felt that it was no longer possible to give three or twenty kopeks, and I began to fumble in my purse for money, in doubt as to how much I ought to give, and I always gave more; and I always noticed that the poor man left me dissatisfied. But if I entered into still closer intercourse with the poor man, then my doubts as to how much to give increased also; and, no matter how much I gave, the poor man grew ever more sullen and discontented. As a general rule, it always turned out thus, that if I gave, after conversation with a poor man, three rubles or even more, I almost always beheld gloom, displeasure, and even ill-will, on the countenance of the poor man; and I have even known it to happen, that, having received ten rubles, he went off without so much as saying "Thank you," exactly as though I had insulted him. And thereupon I felt awkward and ashamed, and almost guilty. But if I followed up a poor man for weeks and months and years, and assisted him, and explained my views to him, and associated with him, our relations became a torment, and I perceived that the man despised me. And I felt that he was in the right. If I go out into the street, and he, standing in that street, begs of me among the number of the other passers-by, people who walk and ride past him, and I give him money, I then am to him a passer-by, and a good, kind passer-by, who bestows on him that thread from which a shirt is made for the naked man; he expects nothing more than the thread, and if I give it he thanks me sincerely. But if I stop him, and talk with him as man with man, I thereby show him that I desire to be something more than a mere passer-by. If, as often happens, he weeps while relating to me his woes, then he sees in me no longer a passer-by, but that which I desire that he should see: a good man. But if I am a good man, my goodness cannot pause at a twenty-kopek piece, nor at ten rubles, nor at ten thousand; it is impossible to be a little bit of a good man. Let us suppose that I have given him a great deal, that I have fitted him out, dressed him, set him on his feet so that the can live without outside assistance; but for some reason or other, though misfortune or his own weakness or vices, he is again without that coat, that linen, and that money which I have given him; he is again cold and hungry, and he has come again to me,--how can I refuse him? [For if the cause of my action consisted in the attainment of a definite, material end, on giving him so many rubles or such and such a coat I might be at ease after having bestowed them. But the cause of my action is not this: the cause is, that I want to be a good man, that is to say, I want to see myself in every other man. Every man understands goodness thus, and in no other manner.] {111} And therefore, if he should drink away every thing that you had given him twenty times, and if he should again be cold and hungry, you cannot do otherwise than give him more, if you are a good man; you can never cease giving to him, if you have more than he has. And if you draw back, you will thereby show that every thing that you have done, you have done not because you are a good man, but because you wished to appear a good man in his sight, and in the sight of men. And thus in the case with the men from whom I chanced to recede, to whom I ceased to give, and, by this action, denied good, I experienced a torturing sense of shame. What sort of shame was this? This shame I had experienced in the Lyapinsky house, and both before and after that in the country, when I happened to give money or any thing else to the poor, and in my expeditions among the city poor. A mortifying incident that occurred to me not long ago vividly reminded me of that shame, and led me to an explanation of that shame which I had felt when bestowing money on the poor. [This happened in the country. I wanted twenty kopeks to give to a poor pilgrim; I sent my son to borrow them from some one; he brought the pilgrim a twenty-kopek piece, and told me that he had borrowed it from the cook. A few days afterwards some more pilgrims arrived, and again I was in want of a twenty-kopek piece. I had a ruble; I recollected that I was in debt to the cook, and I went to the kitchen, hoping to get some more small change from the cook. I said: "I borrowed a twenty-kopek piece from you, so here is a ruble." I had not finished speaking, when the cook called in his wife from another room: "Take it, Parasha," said he. I, supposing that she understood what I wanted, handed her the ruble. I must state that the cook had only lived with me a week, and, though I had seen his wife, I had never spoken to her. I was just on the point of saying to her that she was to give me some small coins, when she bent swiftly down to my hand, and tried to kiss it, evidently imaging that I had given her the ruble. I muttered something, and quitted the kitchen. I was ashamed, ashamed to the verge of torture, as I had not been for a long time. I shrank together; I was conscious that I was making grimaces, and I groaned with shame as I fled from the kitchen. This utterly unexpected, and, as it seemed to me, utterly undeserved shame, made a special impression on me, because it was a long time since I had been mortified, and because I, as an old man, had so lived, it seemed to me, that I had not merited this shame. I was forcibly struck by this. I told the members of my household about it, I told my acquaintances, and they all agreed that they should have felt the same. And I began to reflect: why had this caused me such shame? To this, something which had happened to me in Moscow furnished me with an answer. I meditated on that incident, and the shame which I had experienced in the presence of the cook's wife was explained to me, and all those sensations of mortification which I had undergone during the course of my Moscow benevolence, and which I now feel incessantly when I have occasion to give any one any thing except that petty alms to the poor and to pilgrims, which I have become accustomed to bestow, and which I consider a deed not of charity but of courtesy. If a man asks you for a light, you must strike a match for him, if you have one. If a man asks for three or for twenty kopeks, or even for several rubles, you must give them if you have them. This is an act of courtesy and not of charity.] {113} This was the case in question: I have already mentioned the two peasants with whom I was in the habit of sawing wood three yeans ago. One Saturday evening at dusk, I was returning to the city in their company. They were going to their employer to receive their wages. As we were crossing the Dragomilovsky bridge, we met an old man. He asked alms, and I gave him twenty kopeks. I gave, and reflected on the good effect which my charity would have on Semyon, with whom I had been conversing on religious topics. Semyon, the Vladimir peasant, who had a wife and two children in Moscow, halted also, pulled round the skirt of his kaftan, and got out his purse, and from this slender purse he extracted, after some fumbling, three kopeks, handed it to the old man, and asked for two kopeks in change. The old man exhibited in his hand two three-kopek pieces and one kopek. Semyon looked at them, was about to take the kopek, but thought better of it, pulled off his hat, crossed himself, and walked on, leaving the old man the three-kopek piece. I was fully acquainted with Semyon's financial condition. He had no property at home at all. The money which he had laid by on the day when he gave three kopeks amounted to six rubles and fifty kopeks. Accordingly, six rubles and twenty kopeks was the sum of his savings. My reserve fund was in the neighborhood of six hundred thousand. I had a wife and children, Semyon had a wife and children. He was younger than I, and his children were fewer in number than mine; but his children were small, and two of mine were of an age to work, so that our position, with the exception of the savings, was on an equality; mine was somewhat the more favorable, if any thing. He gave three kopeks, I gave twenty. What did he really give, and what did I really give? What ought I to have given, in order to do what Semyon had done? he had six hundred kopeks; out of this he gave one, and afterwards two. I had six hundred thousand rubles. In order to give what Semyon had given, I should have been obliged to give three thousand rubles, and ask for two thousand in change, and then leave the two thousand with the old man, cross myself, and go my way, calmly conversing about life in the factories, and the cost of liver in the Smolensk market. I thought of this at the time; but it was only long afterwards that I was in a condition to draw from this incident that deduction which inevitably results from it. This deduction is so uncommon and so singular, apparently, that, in spite of its mathematical infallibility, one requires time to grow used to it. It does seem as though there must be some mistake, but mistake there is none. There is merely the fearful mist of error in which we live. [This deduction, when I arrived at it, and when I recognized its undoubted truth, furnished me with an explanation of my shame in the presence of the cook's wife, and of all the poor people to whom I had given and to whom I still give money. What, in point of fact, is that money which I give to the poor, and which the cook's wife thought I was giving to her? In the majority of cases, it is that portion of my substance which it is impossible even to express in figures to Semyon and the cook's wife,--it is generally one millionth part or about that. I give so little that the bestowal of any money is not and cannot be a deprivation to me; it is only a pleasure in which I amuse myself when the whim seizes me. And it was thus that the cook's wife understood it. If I give to a man who steps in from the street one ruble or twenty kopeks, why should not I give her a ruble also? In the opinion of the cook's wife, such a bestowal of money is precisely the same as the flinging of honey-cakes to the people by gentlemen; it furnishes the people who have a great deal of superfluous cash with amusement. I was mortified because the mistake made by the cook's wife demonstrated to me distinctly the view which she, and all people who are not rich, must take of me: "He is flinging away his folly, i.e., his unearned money." As a matter of fact, what is my money, and whence did it come into my possession? A portion of it I accumulated from the land which I received from my father. A peasant sold his last sheep or cow in order to give the money to me. Another portion of my money is the money which I have received for my writings, for my books. If my books are hurtful, I only lead astray those who purchase them, and the money which I receive for them is ill-earned money; but if my books are useful to people, then the issue is still more disastrous. I do not give them to people: I say, "Give me seventeen rubles, and I will give them to you." And as the peasant sells his last sheep, in this case the poor student or teacher, or any other poor man, deprives himself of necessaries in order to give me this money. And so I have accumulated a great deal of money in that way, and what do I do with it? I take that money to the city, and bestow it on the poor, only when they fulfil my caprices, and come hither to the city to clean my sidewalk, lamps, and shoes; to work for me in factories. And in return for this money, I force from them every thing that I can; that is to say, I try to give them as little as possible, and to receive as much as possible from them. And all at once I begin, quite unexpectedly, to bestow this money as a simple gift, on these same poor persons, not on all, but on those to whom I take a fancy. Why should not every poor person expect that it is quite possible that the luck may fall to him of being one of those with whom I shall amuse myself by distributing my superfluous money? And so all look upon me as the cook's wife did. And I had gone so far astray that this taking of thousands from the poor with one hand, and this flinging of kopeks with the other, to those to whom the whim moved me to give, I called good. No wonder that I felt ashamed.] {116} Yes, before doing good it was needful for me to stand outside of evil, in such conditions that I might cease to do evil. But my whole life is evil. I may give away a hundred thousand rubles, and still I shall not be in a position to do good because I shall still have five hundred thousand left. Only when I have nothing shall I be in a position to do the least particle of good, even as much as the prostitute did which she nursed the sick women and her child for three days. And that seemed so little to me! And I dared to think of good myself! That which, on the first occasion, told me, at the sight of the cold and hungry in the Lyapinsky house, that I was to blame for this, and that to live as I live is impossible, and impossible, and impossible,--that alone was true. What, then, was I to do? CHAPTER XVI. It was hard for me to come to this confession, but when I had come to it I was shocked at the error in which I had been living. I stood up to my ears in the mud, and yet I wanted to drag others out of this mud. What is it that I wish in reality? I wish to do good to others. I wish to do it so that other people may not be cold and hungry, so that others may live as it is natural for people to live. [I wish this, and I see that in consequence of the violence, extortions, and various tricks in which I take part, people who toil are deprived of necessaries, and people who do not toil, in whose ranks I also belong, enjoy in superabundance the toil of other people. I see that this enjoyment of the labors of others is so arranged, that the more rascally and complicated the trickery which is employed by the man himself, or which has been employed by the person from whom he obtained his inheritance, the more does he enjoy of the labors of others, and the less does he contribute of his own labor. First come the Shtiglitzy, Dervizy, Morozovy, the Demidoffs, the Yusapoffs; then great bankers, merchants, officials, landed proprietors, among whom I also belong; then the poor--very small traders, dramshop- keepers, usurers, district judges, overseers, teachers, sacristans, clerks; then house-porters, lackeys, coachmen, watch-carriers, cab-drivers, peddlers; and last of all, the laboring classes--factory-hands and peasants, whose numbers bear the relation to the first named of ten to one. I see that the life of nine-tenths of the working classes demands, by reason of its nature, application and toil, as does every natural life; but that, in consequence of the sharp practices which take from these people what is indispensable, and place them in such oppressive conditions, this life becomes more difficult every year, and more filled with deprivations; but our life, the life of the non-laboring classes, thanks to the co-operation of the arts and sciences which are directed to this object, becomes more filled with superfluities, more attractive and careful, with every year. I see, that, in our day, the life of the workingman, and, in particular, the life of old men, of women, and of children of the working population, is perishing directly from their food, which is utterly inadequate to their fatiguing labor; and that this life of theirs is not free from care as to its very first requirements; and that, alongside of this, the life of the non-laboring classes, to which I belong, is filled more and more, every year, with superfluities and luxury, and becomes more and more free from anxiety, and has finally reached such a point of freedom from care, in the case of its fortunate members, of whom I am one, as was only dreamed of in olden times in fairy-tales,--the state of the owner of the purse with the inexhaustible ruble, that is, a condition in which a man is not only utterly released from the law of labor, but in which he possesses the possibility of enjoying, without toil, all the blessings of life, and of transferring to his children, or to any one whom he may see fit, this purse with the inexhaustible ruble. I see that the products of the people's toil are more and more transformed from the mass of the working classes to those who do not work; that the pyramid of the social edifice seems to be reconstructed in such fashion that the foundation stones are carried to the apex, and the swiftness of this transfer is increasing in a sort of geometrical ratio. I see that the result of this is something like that which would take place in an ant-heap if the community of ants were to lose their sense of the common law, if some ants were to begin to draw the products of labor from the bottom to the top of the heap, and should constantly contract the foundations and broaden the apex, and should thereby also force the remaining ants to betake themselves from the bottom to the summit. I see that the ideal of the Fortunatus' purse has made its way among the people, in the place of the ideal of a toilsome life. Rich people, myself among the number, get possession of the inexhaustible ruble by various devices, and for the purpose of enjoying it we go to the city, to the place where nothing is produced and where every thing is swallowed up. The industrious poor man, who is robbed in order that the rich may possess this inexhaustible ruble, yearns for the city in his train; and there he also takes to sharp practices, and either acquires for himself a position in which he can work little and receive much, thereby rendering still more oppressive the situation of the laboring classes, or, not having attained to such a position, he goes to ruin, and falls into the ranks of those cold and hungry inhabitants of the night-lodging houses, which are being swelled with such remarkable rapidity. I belong to the class of those people, who, by divers tricks, take from the toiling masses the necessaries of life, and who have acquired for themselves these inexhaustible rubles, and who lead these unfortunates astray. I desire to aid people, and therefore it is clear that, first of all, I must cease to rob them as I am doing. But I, by the most complicated, and cunning, and evil practices, which have been heaped up for centuries, have acquired for myself the position of an owner of the inexhaustible ruble, that is to say, one in which, never working myself, I can make hundreds and thousands of people toil for me--which also I do; and I imagine that I pity people, and I wish to assist them. I sit on a man's neck, I weigh him down, and I demand that he shall carry me; and without descending from his shoulders I assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him, and that I desire to ameliorate his condition by all possible means, only not by getting off of him. Surely this is simple enough. If I want to help the poor, that is, to make the poor no longer poor, I must not produce poor people. And I give, at my own selection, to poor men who have gone astray from the path of life, a ruble, or ten rubles, or a hundred; and I grasp hundreds from people who have not yet left the path, and thereby I render them poor also, and demoralize them to boot. This is very simple; but it was horribly hard for me to understand this fully without compromises and reservations, which might serve to justify my position; but it sufficed for me to confess my guilt, and every thing which had before seemed to me strange and complicated, and lacking in cleanness, became perfectly comprehensible and simple. But the chief point was, that my way of life, arising from this interpretation, became simple, clear and pleasant, instead of perplexed, inexplicable and full of torture as before.] {122a} Who am I, that I should desire to help others? I desire to help people; and I, rising at twelve o'clock after a game of _vint_ {122b} with four candles, weak, exhausted, demanding the aid of hundreds of people,--I go to the aid of whom? Of people who rise at five o'clock, who sleep on planks, who nourish themselves on bread and cabbage, who know how to plough, to reap, to wield the axe, to chop, to harness, to sew,--of people who in strength and endurance, and skill and abstemiousness, are a hundred times superior to me,--and I go to their succor! What except shame could I feel, when I entered into communion with these people? The very weakest of them, a drunkard, an inhabitant of the Rzhanoff house, the one whom they call "the idler," is a hundred-fold more industrious than I; [his balance, so to speak, that is to say, the relation of what he takes from people and that which they give him, stands on a thousand times better footing than my balance, if I take into consideration what I take from people and what I give to them.] {122a} And these are the people to whose assistance I go. I go to help the poor. But who is the poor man? There is no one poorer than myself. I am a thoroughly enervated, good-for-nothing parasite, who can only exist under the most special conditions, who can only exist when thousands of people toil at the preservation of this life which is utterly useless to every one. And I, that plant-louse, which devours the foliage of trees, wish to help the tree in its growth and health, and I wish to heal it. I have passed my whole life in this manner: I eat, I talk and I listen; I eat, I write or read, that is to say, I talk and listen again; I eat, I play, I eat, again I talk and listen, I eat, and again I go to bed; and so each day I can do nothing else, and I understand how to do nothing else. And in order that I may be able to do this, it is necessary that the porter, the peasant, the cook, male or female, the footman, the coachman, and the laundress, should toil from morning till night; I will not refer to the labors of the people which are necessary in order that coachman, cooks, male and female, footman, and the rest should have those implements and articles with which, and over which, they toil for my sake; axes, tubs, brushes, household utensils, furniture, wax, blacking, kerosene, hay, wood, and beef. And all these people work hard all day long and every day, so that I may be able to talk and eat and sleep. And I, this cripple of a man, have imagined that I could help others, and those the very people who support me! It is not remarkable that I could not help any one, and that I felt ashamed; but the remarkable point is that such an absurd idea could have occurred to me. The woman who served the sick old man, helped him; the mistress of the house, who cut a slice from the bread which she had won from the soil, helped the beggar; Semyon, who gave three kopeks which he had earned, helped the beggar, because those three kopeks actually represented his labor: but I served no one, I toiled for no one, and I was well aware that my money did not represent my labor. CHAPTER XVII. {124} Into the delusion that I could help others I was led by the fact that I fancied that my money was of the same sort as Semyon's. But this was not the case. A general idea prevails, that money represents wealth; but wealth is the product of labor; and, therefore, money represents labor. But this idea is as just as that every governmental regulation is the result of a compact (_contrat social_). Every one likes to think that money is only a medium of exchange for labor. I have made shoes, you have raised grain, he has reared sheep: here, in order that we may the more readily effect an exchange, we will institute money, which represents a corresponding quantity of labor, and, by means of it, we will barter our shoes for a breast of lamb and ten pounds of flour. We will exchange our products through the medium of money, and the money of each one of us represents our labor. This is perfectly true, but true only so long as, in the community where this exchange is effected, the violence of one man over the rest has not made its appearance; not only violence over the labors of others, as happens in wars and slavery, but where he exercises no violence for the protection of the products of their labor from others. This will be true only in a community whose members fully carry out the Christian law, in a community where men give to him who asks, and where he who takes is not asked to make restitution. But just so soon as any violence whatever is used in the community, the significance of money for its possessor loses its significance as a representative of labor, and acquires the significance of a right founded, not on labor, but on violence. As soon as there is war, and one man has taken any thing from any other man, money can no longer be always the representative of labor; money received by a warrior for the spoils of war, which he sells, even if he is the commander of the warriors, is in no way a product of labor, and possesses an entirely different meaning from money received for work on shoes. As soon as there are slave-owners and slaves, as there always have been throughout the whole world, it is utterly impossible to say that money represents labor. Women have woven linen, sold it, and received money; serfs have woven for their master, and the master has sold them and received the money. The money is identical in both cases; but in the one case it is the product of labor, in the other the product of violence. In exactly the same way, a stranger or my own father has given me money; and my father, when he gave me that money, knew, and I know, and everybody knows, that no one can take this money away from me; but if it should occur to any one to take it away from me, or even not to hand it over at the date when it was promised, the law would intervene on my behalf, and would compel the delivery to me of the money; and, again, it is evident that this money can in no wise be called the equivalent of labor, on a level with the money received by Semyon for chopping wood. So that in any community where there is any thing that in any manner whatever controls the labor of others, or where violence hedges in, by means of money, its possessions from others, there money is no longer invariably the representative of labor. In such a community, it is sometimes the representative of labor, and sometimes of violence. Thus it would be where only one act of violence from one man against others, in the midst of perfectly free relations, should have made its appearance; but now, when centuries of the most varied deeds of violence have passed for accumulations of money, when these deeds of violence are incessant, and merely alter their forms; when, as every one admits, money accumulated itself represents violence; when money, as a representative of direct labor, forms but a very small portion of the money which is derived from every sort of violence,--to say nowadays that money represents the labor of the person who possesses it, is a self-evident error or a deliberate lie. It may be said, that thus it should be; it may be said, that this is desirable; but by no means can it be said, that thus it is. Money represents labor. Yes. Money does represent labor; but whose? In our society only in the very rarest, rarest of instances, does money represent the labor of its possessor, but it nearly always represents the labor of other people, the past or future labor of men; it is a representative of the obligation of others to labor, which has been established by force. Money, in its most accurate and at the same the simple application, is the conventional stamp which confers a right, or, more correctly, a possibility, of taking advantage of the labors of other people. In its ideal significance, money should confer this right, or this possibility, only when it serves as the equivalent of labor, and such money might be in a community in which no violence existed. But just as soon as violence, that is to say, the possibility of profiting by the labors of others without toil of one's own, exists in a community, then that profiting by the labors of other men is also expressed by money, without any distinction of the persons on whom that violence is exercised. The landed proprietor has imposed upon his serfs natural debts, a certain quantity of linen, grain, and cattle, or a corresponding amount of money. One household has procured the cattle, but has paid money in lieu of linen. The proprietor takes the money to a certain amount only, because he knows that for that money they will make him the same quantity of linen, (generally he takes a little more, in order to be sure that they will make it for the same amount); and this money, evidently, represents for the proprietor the obligation of other people to toil. The peasant gives the money as an obligation, to he knows not whom, but to people, and there are many of them, who undertake for this money to make so much linen. But the people who undertake to make the linen, do so because they have not succeeded in raising sheep, and in place of the sheep, they must pay money; but the peasant who takes money for his sheep takes it because he must pay for grain which did not bear well this year. The same thing goes on throughout this realm, and throughout the whole world. A man sells the product of his labor, past, present or to come, sometimes his food, and generally not because money constitutes for him a convenient means of exchange. He could have effected the barter without money, but he does so because money is exacted from him by violence as a lien on his labor. When the sovereign of Egypt exacted labor from his slaves, the slaves gave all their labor, but only their past and present labor, their future labor they could not give. But with the dissemination of money tokens, and the credit which had its rise in them, it became possible to sell one's future toil for money. Money, with co-existent violence in the community, only represents the possibility of a new form of impersonal slavery, which has taken the place of personal slavery. The slave-owner has a right to the labor of Piotr, Ivan, and Sidor. But the owner of money, in a place where money is demanded from all, has a right to the toil of all those nameless people who are in need of money. Money has set aside all the oppressive features of slavery, under which an owner knows his right to Ivan, and with them it has set aside all humane relations between the owner and the slave, which mitigated the burden of personal thraldom. I will not allude to the fact, that such a condition of things is, possibly, necessary for the development of mankind, for progress, and so forth,--that I do not contest. I have merely tried to elucidate to myself the idea of money, and that universal error into which I fell when I accepted money as the representative of labor. I became convinced, after experience, that money is not the representative of labor, but, in the majority of cases, the representative of violence, or of especially complicated sharp practices founded on violence. Money, in our day, has completely lost that significance which it is very desirable that it should possess, as the representative of one's own labor; such a significance it has only as an exception, but, as a general rule, it has been converted into a right or a possibility of profiting by the toil of others. The dissemination of money, of credit, and of all sorts of money tokens, confirms this significance of money ever more and more. Money is a new form of slavery, which differs from the old form of slavery only in its impersonality, its annihilation of all humane relations with the slave. Money--money, is a value which is always equal to itself, and is always considered legal and righteous, and whose use is regarded as not immoral, just as the right of slavery was regarded. In my young days, the game of loto was introduced into the clubs. Everybody rushed to play it, and, as it was said, many ruined themselves, rendered their families miserable, lost other people's money, and government funds, and committed suicide; and the game was prohibited, and it remains prohibited to this day. I remember to have seen old and unsentimental gamblers, who told me that this game was particularly pleasing because you did not see from whom you were winning, as is the case in other games; a lackey brought, not money, but chips; each man lost a little stake, and his disappointment was not visible . . . It is the same with roulette, which is everywhere prohibited, and not without reason. It is the same with money. I possess a magic, inexhaustible ruble; I cut off my coupons, and have retired from all the business of the world. Whom do I injure,--I, the most inoffensive and kindest of men? But this is nothing more than playing at loto or roulette, where I do not see the man who shoots himself, because of his losses, after procuring for me those coupons which I cut off from the bonds so accurately with a strictly right-angled corner. I have done nothing, I do nothing, and I shall do nothing, except cut off those coupons; and I firmly believe that money is the representative of labor! Surely, this is amazing! And people talk of madmen, after that! Why, what degree of lunacy can be more frightful than this? A sensible, educated, in all other respects sane man lives in a senseless manner, and soothes himself for not uttering the word which it is indispensably necessary that he should utter, with the idea that there is some sense in his conclusions, and he considers himself a just man. Coupons--the representatives of toil! Toil! Yes, but of whose toil? Evidently not of the man who owns them, but of him who labors. Slavery is far from being suppressed. It has been suppressed in Rome and in America, and among us: but only certain laws have been abrogated; only the word, not the thing, has been put down. Slavery is the freeing of ourselves alone from the toil which is necessary for the satisfaction of our demands, by the transfer of this toil to others; and wherever there exists a man who does not work, not because others work lovingly for him, but where he possesses the power of not working, and forces others to work for him, there slavery exists. There too, where, as in all European societies, there are people who make use of the labor of thousands of men, and regard this as their right,--there slavery exists in its broadest measure. And money is the same thing as slavery. Its object and its consequences are the same. Its object is--that one may rid one's self of the first born of all laws, as a profoundly thoughtful writer from the ranks of the people has expressed it; from the natural law of life, as we have called it; from the law of personal labor for the satisfaction of our own wants. And the results of money are the same as the results of slavery, for the proprietor; the creation, the invention of new and ever new and never- ending demands, which can never be satisfied; the enervation of poverty, vice, and for the slaves, the persecution of man and their degradation to the level of the beasts. Money is a new and terrible form of slavery, and equally demoralizing with the ancient form of slavery for both slave and slave-owner; only much worse, because it frees the slave and the slave-owner from their personal, humane relations.] CHAPTER XVIII. I am always surprised by the oft-repeated words: "Yes, this is so in theory, but how is it in practice?" Just as though theory were fine words, requisite for conversation, but not for the purpose of having all practice, that is, all activity, indispensably founded on them. There must be a fearful number of stupid theories current in the world, that such an extraordinary idea should have become prevalent. Theory is what a man thinks on a subject, but its practice is what he does. How can a man think it necessary to do so and so, and then do the contrary? If the theory of baking bread is, that it must first be mixed, and then set to rise, no one except a lunatic, knowing this theory, would do the reverse. But it has become the fashion with us to say, that "this is so in theory, but how about the practice?" In the matter which interests me now, that has been confirmed which I have always thought,--that practice infallibly flows from theory, and not that it justifies it, but it cannot possibly be otherwise, for if I have understood the thing of which I have been thinking, then I cannot carry out this thing otherwise than as I have understood it. I wanted to help the unfortunate only because I had money, and I shared the general belief that money was the representative of labor, or, on the whole, something legal and good. But, having begun to give away this money, I saw, when I gave the bills which I had accumulated from poor people, that I was doing precisely that which was done by some landed proprietors who made some of their serfs wait on others. I saw that every use of money, whether for making purchases, or for giving away without an equivalent to another, is handing over a note for extortion from the poor, or its transfer to another man for extortion from the poor. I saw that money in itself was not only not good, but evidently evil, and that it deprives us of our highest good,--labor, and thereby of the enjoyment of our labor, and that that blessing I was not in a position to confer on any one, because I was myself deprived of it: I do not work, and I take no pleasure in making use of the labor of others. It would appear that there is something peculiar in this abstract argument as to the nature of money. But this argument which I have made not for the sake of argument, but for the solution of the problem of my life, of my sufferings, was for me an answer to my question: What is to be done? As soon as I grasped the meaning of riches, and of money, it not only became clear and indisputable to me, what I ought to do, but also clear and indisputable what others ought to do, because they would infallibly do it. I had only actually come to understand what I had known for a long time previously, the theory which was given to men from the very earliest times, both by Buddha, and Isaiah, and Lao-Tze, and Socrates, and in a peculiarly clear and indisputable manner by Jesus Christ and his forerunner, John the Baptist. John the Baptist, in answer to the question of the people,--What were they to do? replied simply, briefly, and clearly: "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise" (Luke iii. 10, 11). In a similar manner, but with even greater clearness, and on many occasions, Christ spoke. He said: "Blessed are the poor, and woe to the rich." He said that it is impossible to serve God and mammon. He forbade his disciples to take not only money, but also two garments. He said to the rich young man, that he could not enter into the kingdom of heaven because he was rich, and that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. He said that he who should not leave every thing, houses and children and lands, and follow him, could not be his disciple. He told the parable of the rich man who did nothing bad, like our own rich men, but who only arrayed himself in costly garments, and ate and drank daintily, and who lost his soul thereby; and of poor Lazarus, who had done nothing good, but who was saved merely because he was poor. This theory was sufficiently familiar to me, but the false teachings of the world had so obscured it that it had become for me a theory in the sense which people are fond of attributing to that term, that is to say, empty words. But as soon as I had succeeded in destroying in my consciousness the sophisms of worldly teaching, theory conformed to practice, and the truth with regard to my life and to the life of the people about me became its conclusion. I understood that man, besides life for his own personal good, is unavoidably bound to serve the good of others also; that, if we take an illustration from the animal kingdom,--as some people are fond of doing, defending violence and conflict by the conflict for existence in the animal kingdom,--the illustration must be taken from gregarious animals, like bees; that consequently man, not to mention the love to his neighbor incumbent on him, is called upon, both by reason and by his nature, to serve other people and the common good of humanity. I comprehended that the natural law of man is that according to which only he can fulfil destiny, and therefore be happy. I understood that this law has been and is broken hereby,--that people get rid of labor by force (like the robber bees), make use of the toil of others, directing this toil, not to the common weal, but to the private satisfaction of swift-growing desires; and, precisely as in the case of the robber bees, they perish in consequence. [I understood that the original form of this disinclination for the law is the brutal violence against weaker individuals, against women, wars and imprisonments, whose sequel is slavery, and also the present reign of money. I understood that money is the impersonal and concealed enslavement of the poor. And, once having perceived the significance of money as slavery, I could not but hate it, nor refrain from doing all in my power to free myself from it.] {135} When I was a slave-owner, and comprehended the immorality of my position, I tried to escape from it. My escape consisted in this, that I, regarding it as immoral, tried to exercise my rights as slave-owner as little as possible, but to live, and to allow other people to live, as though that right did not exist. And I cannot refrain from doing the same thing now in reference to the present form of slavery,--exercising my right to the labor of others as little as possible, i.e., hiring and purchasing as little as possible. The root of every slavery is the use of the labor of others; and hence, the compelling others to it is founded indifferently on my right to the slave, or on my possession of money which is indispensable to him. If I really do not approve, and if I regard as an evil, the employment of the labor of others, then I shall use neither my right nor my money for that purpose; I shall not compel others to toil for me, but I shall endeavor to free them from the labor which they have performed for me, as far as possible, either by doing without this labor or by performing it for myself. And this very simple and unavoidable deduction enters into all the details of my life, effects a total change in it, and at one blow releases me from those moral sufferings which I have undergone at the sight of the sufferings and the vice of the people, and instantly annihilates all three causes of my inability to aid the poor, which I had encountered while seeking the cause of my lack of success. The first cause was the herding of the people in towns, and the absorption there of the wealth of the country. All that a man needs is to understand how every hiring or purchase is a handle to extortion from the poor, and that therefore he must abstain from them, and must try to fulfil his own requirements; and not a single man will then quit the country, where all wants can be satisfied without money, for the city, where it is necessary to buy every thing: and in the country he will be in a position to help the needy, as has been my own experience and the experience of every one else. The second cause is the estrangement of the rich from the poor. A man needs but to refrain from buying, from hiring, and, disdaining no sort of work, to satisfy his requirements himself, and the former estrangement will immediately be annihilated, and the man, having rejected luxury and the services of others, will amalgamate with the mass of the working people, and, standing shoulder to shoulder with the working people, he can help them. The third cause was shame, founded on a consciousness of immorality in my owning that money with which I desired to help people. All that is required is: to understand the significance of money as impersonal slavery, which it has acquired among us, in order to escape for the future from falling into the error according to which money, though evil in itself, can be an instrument of good, and in order to refrain from acquiring money; and to rid one's self of it in order to be in a position to do good to people, that is, to bestow on them one's labor, and not the labor of another. CHAPTER XIX. [I saw that money is the cause of suffering and vice among the people, and that, if I desired to help people, the first thing that was required of me was not to create those unfortunates whom I wished to assist. I came to the conclusion that the man who does not love vice and the suffering of the people should not make use of money, thus presenting an inducement to extortion from the poor, by forcing them to work for him; and that, in order not to make use of the toil of others, he must demand as little from others as possible, and work as much as possible himself.] {138} By dint of a long course of reasoning, I came to this inevitable conclusion, which was drawn thousands of years ago by the Chinese in the saying, "If there is one idle man, there is another dying with hunger to offset him. [Then what are we to do? John the Baptist gave the answer to this very question two thousand years ago. And when the people asked him, "What are we to do?" he said, "Let him that hath two garments impart to him that hath none, and let him that hath meat do the same." What is the meaning of giving away one garment out of two, and half of one's food? It means giving to others every superfluity, and thenceforth taking nothing superfluous from people. This expedient, which furnishes such perfect satisfaction to the moral feelings, kept my eyes fast bound, and binds all our eyes; and we do not see it, but gaze aside. This is precisely like a personage on the stage, who had entered a long time since, and all the spectators see him, and it is obvious that the actors cannot help seeing him, but the point on the stage lies in the acting characters pretending not to see him, and in suffering from his absence.] {139} Thus we, in our efforts to recover from our social diseases, search in all quarters, governmental and anti-governmental, and in scientific and in philanthropic superstitions; and we do not see what is perfectly visible to every eye. For the man who really suffers from the sufferings of the people who surround us, there exists the very plainest, simplest, and easiest means; the only possible one for the cure of the evil about us, and for the acquisition of a consciousness of the legitimacy of his life; the one given by John the Baptist, and confirmed by Christ: not to have more than one garment, and not to have money. And not to have any money, means, not to employ the labor of others, and hence, first of all, to do with our own hands every thing that we can possibly do. This is so clear and simple! But it is clear and simple when the requirements are simple. I live in the country. I lie on the oven, and I order my debtor, my neighbor, to chop wood and light my fire. It is very clear that I am lazy, and that I tear my neighbor away from his affairs, and I shall feel mortified, and I shall find it tiresome to lie still all the time; and I shall go and split my wood for myself. But the delusion of slavery of all descriptions lies so far back, so much of artificial exaction has sprung up upon it, so many people, accustomed in different degrees to these habits, are interwoven with each other, enervated people, spoiled for generations, and such complicated delusions and justifications for their luxury and idleness have been devised by people, that it is far from being so easy for a man who stands at the summit of the ladder of idle people to understand his sin, as it is for the peasant who has made his neighbor build his fire. It is terribly difficult for people at the top of this ladder to understand what is required of them. [Their heads are turned by the height of this ladder of lies, upon which they find themselves when a place on the ground is offered to them, to which they must descend in order to begin to live, not yet well, but no longer cruelly, inhumanly; for this reason, this clear and simple truth appears strange to these people. For the man with ten servants, liveries, coachmen, cooks, pictures, pianofortes, that will infallibly appear strange, and even ridiculous, which is the simplest, the first act of--I will not say every good man--but of every man who is not wicked: to cut his own wood with which his food is cooked, and with which he warms himself; to himself clean those boots with which he has heedlessly stepped in the mire; to himself fetch that water with which he preserves his cleanliness, and to carry out that dirty water in which he has washed himself.] {140} But, besides the remoteness of people from the truth, there is another cause which prevents people from seeing the obligation for them of the simplest and most natural personal, physical labor for themselves: this is the complication, the inextricability of the conditions, the advantage of all the people who are bound together among themselves by money, in which the rich man lives: My luxurious life feeds people. What would become of my old valet if I were to discharge him? What! we must all do every thing necessary,--make our clothes and hew wood? . . . And how about the division of labor?" [This morning I stepped out into the corridor where the fires were being built. A peasant was making a fire in the stove which warms my son's room. I went in; the latter was asleep. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. To-day is a holiday: there is some excuse, there are no lessons. The smooth-skinned, eighteen-year-old youth, with a beard, who had eaten his fill on the preceding evening, sleeps until eleven o'clock. But the peasant of his age had been up at dawn, and had got through a quantity of work, and was attending to his tenth stove, while the former slept. "The peasant shall not make the fire in his stove to warm that smooth, lazy body of his!" I thought. But I immediately recollected that this stove also warmed the room of the housekeeper, a woman forty years of age, who, on the evening before, had been making preparations up to three o'clock in the morning for the supper which my son had eaten, and that she had cleared the table, and risen at seven, nevertheless. The peasant was building the fire for her also. And under her name the lazybones was warming himself. It is true that the interests of all are interwoven; but, even without any prolonged reckoning, the conscience of each man will say on whose side lies labor, and on whose idleness. But although conscience says this, the account-book, the cash-book, says it still more clearly. The more money any one spends, the more idle he is, that is to say, the more he makes others work for him. The less he spends, the more he works.] {142} But trade, but public undertakings, and, finally, the most terrible of words, culture, the development of sciences, and the arts,--what of them? [If I live I will make answer to those points, and in detail; and until such answer I will narrate the following.] {142} CHAPTER XX. LIFE IN THE CITY. Last year, in March, I was returning home late at night. As I turned from the Zubova into Khamovnitchesky Lane, I saw some black spots on the snow of the Dyevitchy Pole (field). Something was moving about in one place. I should not have paid any attention to this, if the policeman who was standing at the end of the street had not shouted in the direction of the black spots,-- "Vasily! why don't you bring her in?" "She won't come!" answered a voice, and then the spot moved towards the policeman. I halted and asked the police-officer, "What is it?" He said,--"They are taking a girl from the Rzhanoff house to the station- house; and she is hanging back, she won't walk." A house-porter in a sheepskin coat was leading her. She was walking forward, and he was pushing her from behind. All of us, I and the porter and the policeman, were dressed in winter clothes, but she had nothing on over her dress. In the darkness I could make out only her brown dress, and the kerchiefs on her head and neck. She was short in stature, as is often the case with the prematurely born, with small feet, and a comparatively broad and awkward figure. "We're waiting for you, you carrion. Get along, what do you mean by it? I'll give it to you!" shouted the policeman. He was evidently tired, and he had had too much of her. She advanced a few paces, and again halted. The little old porter, a good-natured fellow (I know him), tugged at her hand. "Here, I'll teach you to stop! On with you!" he repeated, as though in anger. She staggered, and began to talk in a discordant voice. At every sound there was a false note, both hoarse and whining. "Come now, you're shoving again. I'll get there some time!" She stopped and then went on. I followed them. "You'll freeze," said the porters "The likes of us don't freeze: I'm hot." She tried to jest, but her words sounded like scolding. She halted again under the lantern which stands not far from our house, and leaned against, almost hung over, the fence, and began to fumble for something among her skirts, with benumbed and awkward hands. Again they shouted at her, but she muttered something and did something. In one hand she held a cigarette bent into a bow, in the other a match. I paused behind her; I was ashamed to pass her, and I was ashamed to stand and look on. But I made up my mind, and stepped forward. Her shoulder was lying against the fence, and against the fence it was that she vainly struck the match and flung it away. I looked in her face. She was really a person prematurely born; but, as it seemed to me, already an old woman. I credited her with thirty years. A dirty hue of face; small, dull, tipsy eyes; a button-like nose; curved moist lips with drooping corners, and a short wisp of harsh hair escaping from beneath her kerchief; a long flat figure, stumpy hands and feet. I paused opposite her. She stared at me, and burst into a laugh, as though she knew all that was going on in my mind. I felt that it was necessary to say something to her. I wanted to show her that I pitied her. "Are your parents alive?" I inquired. She laughed hoarsely, with an expression which said, "he's making up queer things to ask." "My mother is," said she. "But what do you want?" "And how old are you?" "Sixteen," said she, answering promptly to a question which was evidently customary. "Come, march, you'll freeze, you'll perish entirely," shouted the policeman; and she swayed away from the fence, and, staggering along, she went down Khamovnitchesky Lane to the police-station; and I turned to the wicket, and entered the house, and inquired whether my daughters had returned. I was told that they had been to an evening party, had had a very merry time, had come home, and were in bed. Next morning I wanted to go to the station-house to learn what had been done with this unfortunate woman, and I was preparing to go out very early, when there came to see me one of those unlucky noblemen, who, through weakness, have dropped from the gentlemanly life to which they are accustomed, and who alternately rise and fall. I had been acquainted with this man for three years. In the course of those three years, this man had several times made way with every thing that he had, and even with all his clothes; the same thing had just happened again, and he was passing the nights temporarily in the Rzhanoff house, in the night-lodging section, and he had come to me for the day. He met me as I was going out, at the entrance, and without listening to me he began to tell me what had taken place in the Rzhanoff house the night before. He began his narrative, and did not half finish it; all at once (he is an old man who has seen men under all sorts of aspects) he burst out sobbing, and flooded has countenance with tears, and when he had become silent, turned has face to the wall. This is what he told me. Every thing that he related to me was absolutely true. I authenticated his story on the spot, and learned fresh particulars which I will relate separately. In that night-lodging house, on the lower floor, in No. 32, in which my friend had spent the night, among the various, ever-changing lodgers, men and women, who came together there for five kopeks, there was a laundress, a woman thirty years of age, light-haired, peaceable and pretty, but sickly. The mistress of the quarters had a boatman lover. In the summer her lover kept a boat, and in the winter they lived by letting accommodations to night-lodgers: three kopeks without a pillow, five kopeks with a pillow. The laundress had lived there for several months, and was a quiet woman; but latterly they had not liked her, because she coughed and prevented the women from sleeping. An old half-crazy woman eighty years old, in particular, also a regular lodger in these quarters, hated the laundress, and imbittered the latter's life because she prevented her sleeping, and cleared her throat all night like a sheep. The laundress held her peace; she was in debt for her lodgings, and was conscious of her guilt, and therefore she was bound to be quiet. She began to go more and more rarely to her work, as her strength failed her, and therefore she could not pay her landlady; and for the last week she had not been out to work at all, and had only poisoned the existence of every one, especially of the old woman, who also did not go out, with her cough. Four days before this, the landlady had given the laundress notice to leave the quarters: the latter was already sixty kopeks in debt, and she neither paid them, nor did the landlady foresee any possibility of getting them; and all the bunks were occupied, and the women all complained of the laundress's cough. When the landlady gave the laundress notice, and told her that she must leave the lodgings if she did not pay up, the old woman rejoiced and thrust the laundress out of doors. The laundress departed, but returned in an hour, and the landlady had not the heart to put her out again. And the second and the third day, she did not turn her out. "Where am I to go?" said the laundress. But on the third day, the landlady's lover, a Moscow man, who knew the regulations and how to manage, sent for the police. A policeman with sword and pistol on a red cord came to the lodgings, and with courteous words he led the laundress into the street. It was a clear, sunny, but freezing March day. The gutters were flowing, the house-porters were picking at the ice. The cabman's sleigh jolted over the icy snow, and screeched over the stones. The laundress walked up the street on the sunny side, went to the church, and seated herself at the entrance, still on the sunny side. But when the sun began to sink behind the houses, the puddles began to be skimmed over with a glass of frost, and the laundress grew cold and wretched. She rose, and dragged herself . . . whither? Home, to the only home where she had lived so long. While she was on her way, resting at times, dusk descended. She approached the gates, turned in, slipped, groaned and fell. One man came up, and then another. "She must be drunk." Another man came up, and stumbled over the laundress, and said to the potter: "What drunken woman is this wallowing at your gate? I came near breaking my head over her; take her away, won't you?" The porter came. The laundress was dead. This is what my friend told me. It may be thought that I have wilfully mixed up facts,--I encounter a prostitute of fifteen, and the story of this laundress. But let no one imagine this; it is exactly what happened in the course of one night (only I do not remember which) in March, 1884. And so, after hearing my friend's tale, I went to the station-house, with the intention of proceeding thence to the Rzhanoff house to inquire more minutely into the history of the laundress. The weather was very beautiful and sunny; and again, through the stars of the night-frost, water was to be seen trickling in the shade, and in the glare of the sun on Khamovnitchesky square every thing was melting, and the water was streaming. The river emitted a humming noise. The trees of the Neskutchny garden looked blue across the river; the reddish-brown sparrows, invisible in winter, attracted attention by their sprightliness; people also seemed desirous of being merry, but all of them had too many cares. The sound of the bells was audible, and at the foundation of these mingling sounds, the sounds of shots could be heard from the barracks, the whistle of rifle- balls and their crack against the target. I entered the station-house. In the station some armed policemen conducted me to their chief. He was similarly armed with sword and pistol, and he was engaged in taking some measures with regard to a tattered, trembling old man, who was standing before him, and who could not answer the questions put to him, on account of his feebleness. Having finished his business with the old man, he turned to me. I inquired about the girl of the night before. At first he listened to me attentively, but afterwards he began to smile, at my ignorance of the regulations, in consequence of which she had been taken to the station- house; and particularly at my surprise at her youth. "Why, there are plenty of them of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen years of age," he said cheerfully. But in answer to my question about the girl whom I had seen on the preceding evening, he explained to me that she must have been sent to the committee (so it appeared). To my question where she had passed the night, he replied in an undecided manner. He did not recall the one to whom I referred. There were so many of them every day. In No. 32 of the Rzhanoff house I found the sacristan already reading prayers over the dead woman. They had taken her to the bunk which she had formerly occupied; and the lodgers, all miserable beings, had collected money for the masses for her soul, a coffin and a shroud, and the old women had dressed her and laid her out. The sacristan was reading something in the gloom; a woman in a long wadded cloak was standing there with a wax candle; and a man (a gentleman, I must state) in a clean coat with a lamb's-skin collar, polished overshoes, and a starched shirt, was holding one like it. This was her brother. They had hunted him up. I went past the dead woman to the landlady's nook, and questioned her about the whole business. She was alarmed at my queries; she was evidently afraid that she would be blamed for something; but afterwards she began to talk freely, and told me every thing. As I passed back, I glanced at the dead woman. All dead people are handsome, but this dead woman was particularly beautiful and touching in her coffin; her pure, pale face, with closed swollen eyes, sunken cheeks, and soft reddish hair above the lofty brow,--a weary and kind and not a sad but a surprised face. And in fact, if the living do not see, the dead are surprised. On the same day that I wrote the above, there was a great ball in Moscow. That night I left the house at nine o'clock. I live in a locality which is surrounded by factories, and I left the house after the factory-whistles had sounded, releasing the people for a day of freedom after a week of unremitting toil. Factory-hands overtook me, and I overtook others of them, directing their steps to the drinking-shops and taverns. Many were already intoxicated, many were women. Every morning at five o'clock we can hear one whistle, a second, a third, a tenth, and so forth, and so forth. That means that the toil of women, children, and of old men has begun. At eight o'clock another whistle, which signifies a breathing-spell of half an hour. At twelve, a third: this means an hour for dinner. And a fourth at eight, which denotes the end of the day. By an odd coincidence, all three of the factories which are situated near me produce only articles which are in demand for balls. In one factory, the nearest, only stockings are made; in another opposite, silken fabrics; in the third, perfumes and pomades. It is possible to listen to these whistles, and connect no other idea with them than as denoting the time: "There's the whistle already, it is time to go to walk." But one can also connect with those whistles that which they signify in reality; that first whistle, at five o'clock, means that people, often all without exception, both men and women, sleeping in a damp cellar, must rise, and hasten to that building buzzing with machines, and must take their places at their work, whose end and use for themselves they do not see, and thus toil, often in heat and a stifling atmosphere, in the midst of dirt, and with the very briefest breathing- spells, an hour, two hours, three hours, twelve, and even more hours in succession. They fall into a doze, and again they rise. And this, for them, senseless work, to which they are driven only by necessity, is continued over and over again. And thus one week succeeds another with the breaks of holidays; and I see these work-people released on one of these holidays. They emerge into the street. Everywhere there are drinking-shops, taverns, and loose girls. And they, in their drunken state, drag by the hand each other, and girls like the one whom I saw taken to the station-house; they drag with them cabmen, and they ride and they walk from one tavern to another; and they curse and stagger, and say they themselves know not what. I had previously seen such unsteady gait on the part of factory-hands, and had turned aside in disgust, and had been on the point of rebuking them; but ever since I have been in the habit of hearing those whistles every day, and understand their meaning, I am only amazed that they, all the men, do not come to the condition of the "golden squad," of which Moscow is full, {152a} [and the women to the state of the one whom I had seen near my house]. {152b} Thus I walked along, and scrutinized these factory-hands, as long as they roamed the streets, which was until eleven o'clock. Then their movements began to calm down. Some drunken men remained here and there, and here and there I encountered men who were being taken to the station-house. And then carriages began to make their appearance on all sides, directing their course toward one point. On the box sits a coachman, sometimes in a sheepskin coat; and a footman, a dandy, with a cockade. Well-fed horses in saddle-cloths fly through the frost at the rate of twenty versts an hour; in the carriages sit ladies muffled in round cloaks, and carefully tending their flowers and head-dresses. Every thing from the horse-trappings, the carriages, the gutta-percha wheels, the cloth of the coachman's coat, to the stockings, shoes, flowers, velvet, gloves, and perfumes,--every thing is made by those people, some of whom often roll drunk into their dens or sleeping- rooms, and some stay with disreputable women in the night-lodging houses, while still others are put in jail. Thus past them in all their work, and over them all, ride the frequenters of balls; and it never enters their heads, that there is any connection between these balls to which they make ready to go, and these drunkards at whom their coachman shouts so roughly. These people enjoy themselves at the ball with the utmost composure of spirit, and assurance that they are doing nothing wrong, but something very good. Enjoy themselves! Enjoy themselves from eleven o'clock until six in the morning, in the very dead of night, at the very hour when people are tossing and turning with empty stomachs in the night-lodging houses, and while some are dying, as did the laundress. Their enjoyment consists in this,--that the women and young girls, having bared their necks and arms, and applied bustles behind, place themselves in a situation in which no uncorrupted woman or maiden would care to display herself to a man, on any consideration in the world; and in this half-naked condition, with their uncovered bosoms exposed to view, with arms bare to the shoulder, with a bustle behind and tightly swathed hips, under the most brilliant light, women and maidens, whose chief virtue has always been modesty, exhibit themselves in the midst of strange men, who are also clad in improperly tight-fitting garments; and to the sound of maddening music, they embrace and whirl. Old women, often as naked as the young ones, sit and look on, and eat and drink savory things; old men do the same. It is not to be wondered at that this should take place at night, when all the common people are asleep, so that no one may see them. But this is not done with the object of concealment: it seems to them that there is nothing to conceal; that it is a very good thing; that by this merry-making, in which the labor of thousands of toiling people is destroyed, they not only do not injure any one, but that by this very act they furnish the poor with the means of subsistence. Possibly it is very merry at balls. But how does this come about? When we see that there is a man in the community, in our midst, who has had no food, or who is freezing, we regret our mirth, and we cannot be cheerful until he is fed and warmed, not to mention the impossibility of imagining people who can indulge in such mirth as causes suffering to others. The mirth of wicked little boys, who pitch a dog's tail in a split stick, and make merry over it, is repulsive and incomprehensible to us. In the same manner here, in these diversions of ours, blindness has fallen upon us, and we do not see the split stick with which we have pitched all those people who suffer for our amusement. [We live as though there were no connection between the dying laundress, the prostitute of fourteen, and our own life; and yet the connection between them strikes us in the face. We may say: "But we personally have not pinched any tail in a stick;" but we have no right, to deny that had the tail not been pitched, our merry- making would not have taken place. We do not see what connection exists between the laundress and our luxury; but that is not because no such connection does exist, but because we have placed a screen in front of us, so that we may not see. If there were no screen, we should see that which it is impossible not to see.] {154} Surely all the women who attended that ball in dresses worth a hundred and fifty rubles each were born not in a ballroom, or at Madame Minanguoit's; but they have lived in the country, and have seen the peasants; they know their own nurse and maid, whose father and brother are poor, for whom the earning of a hundred and fifty rubles for a cottage is the object of a long, laborious life. Each woman knows this. How could she enjoy herself, when she knew that she wore on her bared body at that ball the cottage which is the dream of her good maid's father and brother? But let us suppose that she could not make this reflection; but since velvet and silk and flowers and lace and dresses do not grow of themselves, but are made by people, it would seem that she could not help knowing what sort of people make all these things, and under what conditions, and why they do it. She cannot fail to know that the seamstress, with whom she has already quarrelled, did not make her dress in the least out of love for her; therefore, she cannot help knowing that all these things were made for her as a matter of necessity, that her laces, flowers, and velvet have been made in the same way as her dress. But possibly they are in such darkness that they do not consider this. One thing she cannot fail to know,--that five or six elderly and respectable, often sick, lackeys and maids have had no sleep, and have been put to trouble on her account. She has seen their weary, gloomy faces. She could not help knowing this also, that the cold that night reached twenty-eight degrees below zero, {155} and that the old coachman sat all night long in that temperature on his box. But I know that they really do not see this. And if they, these young women and girls, do not see this, on account of the hypnotic state superinduced in them by balls, it is impossible to condemn them. They, poor things, have done what is considered right by their elders; but how are their elders to explain away this their cruelty to the people? The elders always offer the explanation: "I compel no one. I purchase my things; I hire my men, my maid-servants, and my coachman. There is nothing wrong in buying and hiring. I force no one's inclination: I hire, and what harm is there in that?" I recently went to see an acquaintance. As I passed through one of the rooms, I was surprised to see two women seated at a table, as I knew that my friend was a bachelor. A thin, yellow, old-fashioned woman, thirty years of age, in a dress that had been carelessly thrown on, was doing something with her hands and fingers on the table, with great speed, trembling nervously the while, as though in a fit. Opposite her sat a young girl, who was also engaged in something, and who trembled in the same manner. Both women appeared to be afflicted with St. Vitus' dance. I stepped nearer to them, and looked to see what they were doing. They raised their eyes to me, but went on with their work with the same intentness. In front of them lay scattered tobacco and paper cases. They were making cigarettes. The woman rubbed the tobacco between her hands, pushed it into the machine, slipped on the cover, thrust the tobacco through, then tossed it to the girl. The girl twisted the paper, and, making it fast, threw it aside, and took up another. All thus was done with such swiftness, with such intentness, as it is impossible to describe to a man who has never seen it done. I expressed my surprise at their quickness. "I have been doing nothing else for fourteen years," said the woman. "Is it hard?" "Yes: it pains my chest, and makes my breathing hard." It was not necessary for her to add this, however. A look at the girl sufficed. She had worked at this for three years, but any one who had not seen her at this occupation would have said that here was a strong organism which was beginning to break down. My friend, a kind and liberal man, hires these women to fill his cigarettes at two rubles fifty kopeks the thousand. He has money, and he spends it for work. What harm is there in that? My friend rises at twelve o'clock. He passes the evening, from six until two, at cards, or at the piano. He eats and drinks savory things; others do all his work for him. He has devised a new source of pleasure,--smoking. He has taken up smoking within my memory. Here is a woman, and here is a girl, who can barely support themselves by turning themselves into machines, and they pass their whole lives inhaling tobacco, and thereby running their health. He has money which he never earned, and he prefers to play at whist to making his own cigarettes. He gives these women money on condition that they shall continue to live in the same wretched manner in which they are now living, that is to say, by making his cigarettes. I love cleanliness, and I give money only on the condition that the laundress shall wash the shirt which I change twice a day; and that shirt has destroyed the laundress's last remaining strength, and she has died. What is there wrong about that? People who buy and hire will continue to force other people to make velvet and confections, and will purchase them, without me; and no matter what I may do, they will hire cigarettes made and shirts washed. Then why should I deprive myself of velvet and confections and cigarettes and clean shirts, if things are definitively settled thus? This is the argument which I often, almost always, hear. This is the very argument which makes the mob which is destroying something, lose its senses. This is the very argument by which dogs are guided when one of them has flung himself on another dog, and overthrown him, and the rest of the pack rush up also, and tear their comrade in pieces. Other people have begun it, and have wrought mischief; then why should not I take advantage of it? Well, what will happen if I wear a soiled shirt, and make my own cigarettes? Will that make it easier for anybody else? ask people who would like to justify their course. If it were not so far from the truth, it would be a shame to answer such a question, but we have become so entangled that this question seems very natural to us; and hence, although it is a shame, it is necessary to reply to it. What difference will it make if I wear one shirt a week, and make may own cigarettes, or do not smoke at all? This difference, that some laundress and some cigarette-maker will exert their strength less, and that what I have spent for washing and for the making of cigarettes I can give to that very laundress, or even to other laundresses and toilers who are worn out with their labor, and who, instead of laboring beyond their strength, will then be able to rest, and drink tea. But to this I hear an objection. (It is so mortifying to rich and luxurious people to understand their position.) To this they say: "If I go about in a dirty shirt, and give up smoking, and hand over this money to the poor, the poor will still be deprived of every thing, and that drop in the sea of yours will help not at all." Such an objection it is a shame to answer. It is such a common retort. {158} If I had gone among savages, and they had regaled me with cutlets which struck me as savory, and if I should learn on the following day that these savory cutlets had been made from a prisoner whom they had slain for the sake of the savory cutlets, if I do not admit that it is a good thing to eat men, then, no matter how dainty the cutlets, no matter how universal the practice of eating men may be among my fellows, however insignificant the advantage to prisoners, prepared for consumption, may be my refusal to eat of the cutlets, I will not and I can not eat any more of them. I may, possibly, eat human flesh, when hunger compels me to it; but I will not make a feast, and I will not take part in feasts, of human flesh, and I will not seek out such feasts, and pride myself on my share in them. LIFE IN THE COUNTRY. But what is to be done? Surely it is not we who have done this? And if not we, who then? We say: "We have not done this, this has done itself;" as the children say, when they break any thing, that it broke itself. We say, that, so long as there is a city already in existence, we, by living in it, support the people, by purchasing their labor and services. But this is not so. And this is why. We only need to look ourselves, at the way we have in the country, and at the manner in which we support people there. The winter passes in town. Easter Week passes. On the boulevards, in the gardens in the parks, on the river, there is music. There are theatres, water-trips, walks, all sorts of illuminations and fireworks. But in the country there is something even better,--there are better air, trees and meadows, and the flowers are fresher. One should go thither where all these things have unfolded and blossomed forth. And the majority of wealthy people do go to the country to breathe the superior air, to survey these superior forests and meadows. And there the wealthy settle down in the country, and the gray peasants, who nourish themselves on bread and onions, who toil eighteen hours a day, who get no sound sleep by night, and who are clad in blouses. Here no one has led these people astray. There have been no factories nor industrial establishments, and there are none of those idle hands, of which there are so many in the city. Here the whole population never succeeds, all summer long, in completing all their tasks in season; and not only are there no idle hands, but a vast quantity of property is ruined for the lack of hands, and a throng of people, children, old men, and women, will perish through overstraining their powers in work which is beyond their strength. How do the rich order their lives there? In this fashion:-- If there is an old-fashioned house, built under the serf _regime_, that house is repaired and embellished; if there is none, then a new one is erected, of two or three stories. The rooms, of which there are from twelve to twenty, and even more, are all six arshins in height. {161a} Wood floors are laid down. The windows consist of one sheet of glass. There are rich rugs and costly furniture. The roads around the house are macadamized, the ground is levelled, flower-beds are laid out, croquet- grounds are prepared, swinging-rings for gymnastics are erected, reflecting globes, often orangeries, and hotbeds, and lofty stables always with complicated scroll-work on the gables and ridges. And here, in the country, an honest educated official, or noble family dwells. All the members of the family and their guests have assembled in the middle of June, because up to June, that is to say, up to the beginning of mowing-time, they have been studying and undergoing examinations; and they live there until September, that is to say, until harvest and sowing-time. The members of this family (as is the case with nearly every one in that circle) have lived in the country from the beginning of the press of work, the suffering time, not until the end of the season of toil (for in September sowing is still in progress, as well as the digging of potatoes), but until the strain of work has relaxed a little. During the whole of their residence in the country, all around them and beside them, that summer toil of the peasantry has been going on, of whose fatigues, no matter how much we may have heard, no matter how much we may have heard about it, no matter how much we may have gazed upon it, we can form no idea, unless we have had personal experience of it. And the members of this family, about ten in number, live exactly as they do in the city. At St. Peter's Day, {161b} a strict fast, when the people's food consists of kvas, bread, and onions, the mowing begins. The business which is effected in mowing is one of the most important in the commune. Nearly every year, through the lack of hands and time, the hay crop may be lost by rain; and more or less strain of toil decides the question, as to whether twenty or more per cent of hay is to be added to the wealth of the people, or whether it is to rot or die where it stands. And additional hay means additional meat for the old, and additional milk for the children. Thus, in general and in particular, the question of bread for each one of the mowers, and of milk for himself and his children, in the ensuing winter, is then decided. Every one of the toilers, both male and female, knows this; even the children know that this is an important matter, and that it is necessary to strain every nerve to carry the jug of kvas to their father in the meadow at his mowing, and, shifting the heavy pitcher from hand to hand, to run barefooted as rapidly as possible, two versts from the village, in order to get there in season for dinner, and so that their fathers may not scold them. Every one knows, that, from the mowing season until the hay is got in, there will be no break in the work, and that there will be no time to breathe. And there is not the mowing alone. Every one of them has other affairs to attend to besides the mowing: the ground must be turned up and harrowed; and the women have linen and bread and washing to attend to; and the peasants have to go to the mill, and to town, and there are communal matters to attend to, and legal matters before the judge and the commissary of police; and the wagons to see to, and the horses to feed at night: and all, old and young, and sickly, labor to the last extent of their powers. The peasants toil so, that on every occasion, the mowers, before the end of the third stint, whether weak, young, or old, can hardly walk as they totter past the last rows, and only with difficulty are they able to rise after the breathing-spell; and the women, often pregnant, or nursing infants, work in the same way. The toil is intense and incessant. All work to the extreme bounds of their strength, and expend in this toil, not only the entire stock of their scanty nourishment, but all their previous stock. All of them--and they are not fat to begin with--grow gaunt after the "suffering" season. Here a little association is working at the mowing; three peasants,--one an old man, the second his nephew, a young married man, and a shoemaker, a thin, sinewy man. This hay-harvest will decide the fate of all of them for the winter. They have been laboring incessantly for two weeks, without rest. The rain has delayed their work. After the rain, when the hay has dried, they have decided to stack it, and, in order to accomplish this as speedily as possible, that two women for each of them shall follow their scythes. On the part of the old man go his wife, a woman of fifty, who has become unfit for work, having borne eleven children, who is deaf, but still a tolerably stout worker; and a thirteen-year-old daughter, who is short of stature, but a strong and clever girl. On the part of his nephew go his wife, a woman as strong and well-grown as a sturdy peasant, and his daughter-in-law, a soldier's wife, who is about to become a mother. On the part of the shoemaker go his wife, a stout laborer, and her aged mother, who has reached her eightieth year, and who generally goes begging. They all stand in line, and labor from morning till night, in the full fervor of the June sun. It is steaming hot, and rain threatens. Every hour of work is precious. It is a pity to tear one's self from work to fetch water or kvas. A tiny boy, the old woman's grandson, brings them water. The old woman, evidently only anxious lest she shall be driven away from her work, will not let the rake out of her hand, though it is evident that she can barely move, and only with difficulty. The little boy, all bent over, and stepping gently, with his tiny bare feet, drags along a jug of water, shifting it from hand to hand, for it is heavier than he. The young girl flings over her shoulder a load of hay which is also heavier than herself, advances a few steps, halts, and drops it, without the strength to carry it. The old woman of fifty rakes away without stopping, and with her kerchief awry she drags the hay, breathing heavily and tottering. The old woman of eighty only rakes the hay, but even this is beyond her strength; she slowly drags along her feet, shod with bast shoes, and, frowning, she gazes gloomily before her, like a seriously ill or dying person. The old man has intentionally sent her farther away than the rest, to rake near the cocks of hay, so that she may not keep in line with the others; but she does not fall in with this arrangement, and she toils on as long as the others do, with the same death-like, gloomy countenance. The sun is already setting behind the forest; but the cocks are not yet all heaped together, and much still remains to do. All feel that it is time to stop, but no one speaks, waiting until the others shall say it. Finally the shoemaker, conscious that his strength is exhausted, proposes to the old man, to leave the cocks until the morrow; and the old man consents, and the women instantly run for the garments, jugs, pitchforks; and the old woman immediately sits down just where she has been standings and then lies back with the same death-like look, staring straight in front of her. But the women are going; and she rises with a groan, and drags herself after them. And this will go on in July also, when the peasants, without obtaining sufficient sleep, reap the oats by night, lest it should fall, and the women rise gloomily to thresh out the straw for the bands to tie the sheaves; when this old woman, already utterly cramped by the labor of mowing, and the woman with child, and the young children, injure themselves overworking and over-drinking; and when neither hands, nor horses, nor carts will suffice to bring to the ricks that grain with which all men are nourished, and millions of poods {165} of which are daily required in Russia to keep people from perishing. And we live as though there were no connection between the dying laundress, the prostitute of fourteen years, the toilsome manufacture of cigarettes by women, the strained, intolerable, insufficiently fed toil of old women and children around us; we live as though there were no connection between this and our own lives. It seems to us, that suffering stands apart by itself, and our life apart by itself. We read the description of the life of the Romans, and we marvel at the inhumanity of those soulless Luculli, who satiated themselves on viands and wines while the populace were dying with hunger. We shake our heads, and we marvel at the savagery of our grandfathers, who were serf-owners, supporters of household orchestras and theatres, and of whole villages devoted to the care of their gardens; and we wonder, from the heights of our grandeur, at their inhumanity. We read the words of Isa. v. 8: "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! (11.) Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them! (12.) And the harp and the viol, and tabret and pipe, and wine are in their feasts; but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of his hands. (18.) Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart- rope. (20.) Woe unto then that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (21.) Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight--(22.) Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink." We read these words, and it seems to us that this has no reference to us. We read in the Gospels (Matt. iii. 10): "And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." And we are fully convinced that the good tree which bringeth forth good fruit is ourselves; and that these words are not spoken to us, but to some other and wicked people. We read the words of Isa. vi. 10: "Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert and be healed. (11.) Then said I: Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate." We read, and are fully convinced that this marvellous deed is not performed on us, but on some other people. And because we see nothing it is, that this marvellous deed is performed, and has been performed, on us. We hear not, we see not, and we understand not with our heart. How has this happened? Whether that God, or that natural law by virtue of which men exist in the world, has acted well or ill, yet the position of men in the world, ever since we have known it, has been such, that naked people, without any hair on their bodies, without lairs in which they could shelter themselves, without food which they could find in the fields,--like Robinson {167} on his island,--have all been reduced to the necessity of constantly and unweariedly contending with nature in order to cover their bodies, to make themselves clothing, to construct a roof over their heads, and to earn their bread, that two or three times a day they may satisfy their hunger and the hunger of their helpless children and of their old people who cannot work. Wherever, at whatever time, in whatever numbers we may have observed people, whether in Europe, in America, in China, or in Russia, whether we regard all humanity, or any small portion of it, in ancient times, in a nomad state, or in our own times, with steam-engines and sewing-machines, perfected agriculture, and electric lighting, we behold always one and the same thing,--that man, toiling intensely and incessantly, is not able to earn for himself and his little ones and his old people clothing, shelter, and food; and that a considerable portion of mankind, as in former times, so at the present day, perish through insufficiency of the necessaries of life, and intolerable toil in the effort to obtain them. Wherever we have, if we draw a circle round us of a hundred thousand, a thousand, or ten versts, or of one verst, and examine into the lives of the people comprehended within the limits of our circle, we shall see within that circle prematurely-born children, old men, old women, women in labor, sick and weak persons, who toil beyond their strength, and who have not sufficient food and rest for life, and who therefore die before their time. We shall see people in the flower of their age actually slain by dangerous and injurious work. We see that people have been struggling, ever since the world has endured, with fearful effort, privation, and suffering, against this universal want, and that they cannot overcome it . . . {168} ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE AND ART. CHAPTER I. . . . {169} The justification of all persons who have freed themselves from toil is now founded on experimental, positive science. The scientific theory is as follows:-- "For the study of the laws of life of human societies, there exists but one indubitable method,--the positive, experimental, critical method "Only sociology, founded on biology, founded on all the positive sciences, can give us the laws of humanity. Humanity, or human communities, are the organisms already prepared, or still in process of formation, and which are subservient to all the laws of the evolution of organisms. "One of the chief of these laws is the variation of destination among the portions of the organs. Some people command, others obey. If some have in superabundance, and others in want, this arises not from the will of God, not because the empire is a form of manifestation of personality, but because in societies, as in organisms, division of labor becomes indispensable for life as a whole. Some people perform the muscular labor in societies; others, the mental labor." Upon this doctrine is founded the prevailing justification of our time. Not long ago, their reigned in the learned, cultivated world, a moral philosophy, according to which it appeared that every thing which exists is reasonable; that there is no such thing as evil or good; and that it is unnecessary for man to war against evil, but that it is only necessary for him to display intelligence,--one man in the military service, another in the judicial, another on the violin. There have been many and varied expressions of human wisdom, and these phenomena were known to the men of the nineteenth century. The wisdom of Rousseau and of Lessing, and Spinoza and Bruno, and all the wisdom of antiquity; but no one man's wisdom overrode the crowd. It was impossible to say even this,--that Hegel's success was the result of the symmetry of this theory. There were other equally symmetrical theories,--those of Descartes, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schopenhauer. There was but one reason why this doctrine won for itself, for a season, the belief of the whole world; and this reason was, that the deductions of that philosophy winked at people's weaknesses. These deductions were summed up in this,--that every thing was reasonable, every thing good; and that no one was to blame. When I began my career, Hegelianism was the foundation of every thing. It was floating in the air; it was expressed in newspaper and periodical articles, in historical and judicial lectures, in novels, in treatises, in art, in sermons, in conversation. The man who was not acquainted with Hegal had no right to speak. Any one who desired to understand the truth studied Hegel. Every thing rested on him. And all at once the forties passed, and there was nothing left of him. There was not even a hint of him, any more than if he had never existed. And the most amazing thing of all was, that Hegelianism did not fall because some one overthrew it or destroyed it. No! It was the same then as now, but all at once it appeared that it was of no use whatever to the learned and cultivated world. There was a time when the Hegelian wise men triumphantly instructed the masses; and the crowd, understanding nothing, blindly believed in every thing, finding confirmation in the fact that it was on hand; and they believed that what seemed to them muddy and contradictory there on the heights of philosophy was all as clear as the day. But that time has gone by. That theory is worn out: a new theory has presented itself in its stead. The old one has become useless; and the crowd has looked into the secret sanctuaries of the high priests, and has seen that there is nothing there, and that there has been nothing there, save very obscure and senseless words. This has taken place within my memory. "But this arises," people of the present science will say, "from the fact that all that was the raving of the theological and metaphysical period; but now there exists positive, critical science, which does not deceive, since it is all founded on induction and experiment. Now our erections are not shaky, as they formerly were, and only in our path lies the solution of all the problems of humanity." But the old teachers said precisely the same, and they were no fools; and we know that there were people of great intelligence among them. And precisely thus, within my memory, and with no less confidence, with no less recognition on the part of the crowd of so-called cultivated people, spoke the Hegelians. And neither were our Herzens, our Stankevitches, or our Byelinskys fools. But whence arose that marvellous manifestation, that sensible people should preach with the greatest assurance, and that the crowd should accept with devotion, such unfounded and unsupportable teachings? There is but one reason,--that the teachings thus inculcated justified people in their evil life. A very poor English writer, whose works are all forgotten, and recognized as the most insignificant of the insignificant, writes a treatise on population, in which he devises a fictitious law concerning the increase of population disproportionate to the means of subsistence. This fictitious law, this writer encompasses with mathematical formulae founded on nothing whatever; and then he launches it on the world. From the frivolity and the stupidity of this hypothesis, one would suppose that it would not attract the attention of any one, and that it would sink into oblivion, like all the works of the same author which followed it; but it turned out quite otherwise. The hack-writer who penned this treatise instantly becomes a scientific authority, and maintains himself upon that height for nearly half a century. Malthus! The Malthusian theory,--the law of the increase of the population in geometrical, and of the means of subsistence in arithmetical proportion, and the wise and natural means of restricting the population,--all these have become scientific, indubitable truths, which have not been confirmed, but which have been employed as axioms, for the erection of false theories. In this manner have learned and cultivated people proceeded; and among the herd of idle persons, there sprung up a pious trust in the great laws expounded by Malthus. How did this come to pass? It would seem as though they were scientific deductions, which had nothing in common with the instincts of the masses. But this can only appear so for the man who believes that science, like the Church, is something self-contained, liable to no errors, and not simply the imaginings of weak and erring folk, who merely substitute the imposing word "science," in place of the thoughts and words of the people, for the sake of impressiveness. All that was necessary was to make practical deductions from the theory of Malthus, in order to perceive that this theory was of the most human sort, with the best defined of objects. The deductions directly arising from this theory were the following: The wretched condition of the laboring classes was such in accordance with an unalterable law, which does not depend upon men; and, if any one is to blame in this matter, it is the hungry laboring classes themselves. Why are they such fools as to give birth to children, when they know that there will be nothing for the children to eat? And so this deduction, which is valuable for the herd of idle people, has had this result: that all learned men overlooked the incorrectness, the utter arbitrariness of these deductions, and their insusceptibility to proof; and the throng of cultivated, i.e., of idle people, knowing instinctively to what these deductions lead, saluted this theory with enthusiasm, conferred upon it the stamp of truth, i.e., of science, and dragged it about with them for half a century. Is not this same thing the cause of the confidence of men in positive critical-experimental science, and of the devout attitude of the crowd towards that which it preaches? At first it seems strange, that the theory of evolution can in any manner justify people in their evil ways; and it seems as though the scientific theory of evolution has to deal only with facts, and that it does nothing else but observe facts. But this only appears to be the case. Exactly the same thing appeared to be the case with the Hegelian doctrine, in a greater degree, and also in the special instance of the Malthusian doctrine. Hegelianism was, apparently, occupied only with its logical constructions, and bore no relation to the life of mankind. Precisely this seemed to be the case with the Malthusian theory. It appeared to be busy itself only with statistical data. But this was only in appearance. Contemporary science is also occupied with facts alone: it investigates facts. But what facts? Why precisely these facts, and no others? The men of contemporary science are very fond of saying, triumphantly and confidently, "We investigate only facts," imagining that these words contain some meaning. It is impossible to investigate facts alone, because the facts which are subject to our investigation are _innumerable_ (in the definite sense of that word),--innumerable. Before we proceed to investigate facts, we must have a theory on the foundation of which these or those facts can be inquired into, i.e., selected from the incalculable quantity. And this theory exists, and is even very definitely expressed, although many of the workers in contemporary science do not know it, or often pretend that they do not know it. Exactly thus has it always been with all prevailing and guiding doctrines. The foundations of every doctrine are always stated in a theory, and the so-called learned men merely invent further deductions from the foundations once stated. Thus contemporary science is selecting its facts on the foundation of a very definite theory, which it sometimes knows, sometimes refuses to know, and sometimes really does not know; but the theory exists. The theory is as follows: All mankind is an undying organism; men are the particles of that organism, and each one of them has his own special task for the service of others. In the same manner, the cells united in an organism share among them the labor of fight for existence of the whole organism; they magnify the power of one capacity, and weaken another, and unite in one organ, in order the better to supply the requirements of the whole organism. And exactly in the same manner as with gregarious animals,--ants or bees,--the separate individuals divide the labor among them. The queen lays the egg, the drone fructifies it; the bee works his whole life long. And precisely this thing takes place in mankind and in human societies. And therefore, in order to find the law of life for man, it is necessary to study the laws of the life and the development of organisms. In the life and development of organisms, we find the following laws: the law of differentiation and integration, the law that every phenomenon is accompanied not by direct consequences alone, another law regarding the instability of type, and so on. All this seems very innocent; but it is only necessary to draw the deductions from all these laws, in order to immediately perceive that these laws incline in the same direction as the law of Malthus. These laws all point to one thing; namely, to the recognition of that division of labor which exists in human communities, as organic, that is to say, as indispensable. And therefore, the unjust position in which we, the people who have freed ourselves from labor, find ourselves, must be regarded not from the point of view of common- sense and justice, but merely as an undoubted fact, confirming the universal law. Moral philosophy also justified every sort of cruelty and harshness; but this resulted in a philosophical manner, and therefore wrongly. But with science, all this results scientifically, and therefore in a manner not to be doubted. How can we fail to accept so very beautiful a theory? It is merely necessary to look upon human society as an object of contemplation; and I can console myself with the thought that my activity, whatever may be its nature, is a functional activity of the organism of humanity, and that therefore there cannot arise any question as to whether it is just that I, in employing the labor of others, am doing only that which is agreeable to me, as there can arise no question as to the division of labor between the brain cells and the muscular cells. How is it possible not to admit so very beautiful a theory, in order that one may be able, ever after, to pocket one's conscience, and have a perfectly unbridled animal existence, feeling beneath one's self that support of science which is not to be shaken nowadays! And it is on this new doctrine that the justification for men's idleness and cruelty is now founded. CHAPTER II. This doctrine had its rise not so very long--fifty years--ago. Its principal founder was the French _savant_ Comte. There occurred to Comte,--a systematist, and a religious man to boot,--under the influence of the then novel physiological investigations of Biche, the old idea already set forth by Menenius Agrippa,--the idea that human society, all humanity even, might be regarded as one whole, as an organism; and men as living parts of the separate organs, having each his own definite appointment to serve the entire organism. This idea so pleased Comte, that upon it he began to erect a philosophical theory; and this theory so carried him away, that he utterly forgot that the point of departure for his theory was nothing more than a very pretty comparison, which was suitable for a fable, but which could by no means serve as the foundation for science. He, as frequently happens, mistook his pet hypothesis for an axiom, and imagined that his whole theory was erected on the very firmest of foundations. According to his theory, it seemed that since humanity is an organism, the knowledge of what man is, and of what should be his relations to the world, was possible only through a knowledge of the features of this organism. For the knowledge of these qualities, man is enabled to take observations on other and lower organisms, and to draw conclusions from their life. Therefore, in the fist place, the true and only method, according to Comte, is the inductive, and all science is only such when it has experiment as its basis; in the second place, the goal and crown of sciences is formed by that new science dealing with the imaginary organism of humanity, or the super-organic being,--humanity,--and this newly devised science is sociology. And from this view of science it appears, that all previous knowledge was deceitful, and that the whole story of humanity, in the sense of self- knowledge, has been divided into three, actually into two, periods: the theological and metaphysical period, extending from the beginning of the world to Comte, and the present period,--that of the only true science, positive science,--beginning with Comte. All this was very well. There was but one error, and that was this,--that the whole edifice was erected on the sand, on the arbitrary and false assertion that humanity is an organism. This assertion was arbitrary, because we have just as much right to admit the existence of a human organism, not subject to observation, as we have to admit the existence of any other invisible, fantastic being. This assertion was erroneous, because for the understanding of humanity, i.e., of men, the definition of an organism was incorrectly constructed, while in humanity itself all actual signs of organism,--the centre of feeling or consciousness, are lacking. {178} But, in spite of the arbitrariness and incorrectness of the fundamental assumption of positive philosophy, it was accepted by the so-called cultivated world with the greatest sympathy. In this connection, one thing is worthy of note: that out of the works of Comte, consisting of two parts, of positive philosophy and of positive politics, only the first was adopted by the learned world,--that part which justifieth, on new promises, the existent evil of human societies; but the second part, treating of the moral obligations of altruism, arising from the recognition of mankind as an organism, was regarded as not only of no importance, but as trivial and unscientific. It was a repetition of the same thing that had happened in the case of Kant's works. The "Critique of Pure Reason" was adopted by the scientific crowd; but the "Critique of Applied Reason," that part which contains the gist of moral doctrine, was repudiated. In Kant's doctrine, that was accepted as scientific which subserved the existent evil. But the positive philosophy, which was accepted by the crowd, was founded on an arbitrary and erroneous basis, was in itself too unfounded, and therefore unsteady, and could not support itself alone. And so, amid all the multitude of the idle plays of thought of the men professing the so-called science, there presents itself an assertion equally devoid of novelty, and equally arbitrary and erroneous, to the effect that living beings, i.e., organisms, have had their rise in each other,--not only one organism from another, but one from many; i.e., that in a very long interval of time (in a million of years, for instance), not only could a duck and a fish proceed from one ancestor, but that one animal might result from a whole hive of bees. And this arbitrary and erroneous assumption was accepted by the learned world with still greater and more universal sympathy. This assumption was arbitrary, because no one has ever seen how one organism is made from another, and therefore the hypothesis as to the origin of species will always remain an hypothesis, and not an experimental fact. And this hypothesis was also erroneous, because the decision of the question as to the origin of species--that they have originated, in consequence of the law of heredity and fitness, in the course of an interminably long time--is no solution at all, but merely a re-statement of the problem in a new form. According to Moses' solution of the question (in the dispute with whom the entire significance of this theory lies), it appears that the diversity of the species of living creatures proceeded according to the will of God, and according to His almighty power; but according to the theory of evolution, it appears that the difference between living creatures arose by chance, and on account of varying conditions of heredity and surroundings, through an endless period of time. The theory of evolution, to speak in simple language, merely asserts, that by chance, in an incalculably long period of time, out of any thing you like, any thing else that you like may develop. This is no answer to the problem. And the same problem is differently expressed: instead of will, chance is offered, and the co-efficient of the eternal is transposed from the power to the time. But this fresh assertion strengthened Comte's assertion. And, moreover, according to the ingenuous confession of the founder of Darwin's theory himself, his idea was aroused in him by the law of Malthus; and he therefore propounded the theory of the struggle of living creatures and people for existence, as the fundamental law of every living thing. And lo! only this was needed by the throng of idle people for their justification. Two insecure theories, incapable of sustaining themselves on their feet, upheld each other, and acquired the semblance of stability. Both theories bore with them that idea which is precious to the crowd, that in the existent evil of human societies, men are not to blame, and that the existing order of things is that which should prevail; and the new theory was adopted by the throng with entire faith and unheard-of enthusiasm. And behold, on the strength of these two arbitrary and erroneous hypotheses, accepted as dogmas of belief, the new scientific doctrine was ratified. Spencer, for example, in one of his first works, expresses this doctrine thus:-- "Societies and organisms," he says, "are alike in the following points:-- "1. In that, beginning as tiny aggregates, they imperceptibly grow in mass, so that some of them attain to the size of ten thousand times their original bulk. "2. In that while they were, in the beginning, of such simple structure, that they can be regarded as destitute of all structure, they acquire during the period of their growth a constantly increasing complication of structure. "3. In that although in their early, undeveloped period, there exists between them hardly any interdependence of parts, their parts gradually acquire an interdependence, which eventually becomes so strong, that the life and activity of each part becomes possible only on condition of the life and activity of the remaining parts. "4. In that life and the development of society are independent, and more protracted than the life and development of any one of the units constituting it, which are born, grow, act, reproduce themselves, and die separately; while the political body formed from them, continues to live generation after generation, developing in mass in perfection and functional activity." The points of difference between organisms and society go farther; and it is proved that these differences are merely apparent, but that organisms and societies are absolutely similar. For the uninitiated man the question immediately presents itself: "What are you talking about? Why is mankind an organism, or similar to an organism?" You say that societies resemble organisms in these four features; but it is nothing of the sort. You only take a few features of the organism, and beneath them you range human communities. You bring forward four features of resemblance, then you take four features of dissimilarity, which are, however, only apparent (according to you); and you thence conclude that human societies can be regarded as organisms. But surely, this is an empty game of dialectics, and nothing more. On the same foundation, under the features of an organism, you may range whatever you please. I will take the fist thing that comes into my head. Let us suppose it to be a forest,--the manner in which it sows itself in the plain, and spreads abroad. 1. Beginning with a small aggregate, it increases imperceptibly in mass, and so forth. Exactly the same thing takes place in the fields, when they gradually seed themselves down, and bring forth a forest. 2. In the beginning the structure is simple: afterwards it increases in complication, and so forth. Exactly the same thing happens with the forest,--in the first place, there were only bitch- trees, then came brush-wood and hazel-bushes; at first all grow erect, then they interlace their branches. 3. The interdependence of the parts is so augmented, that the life of each part depends on the life and activity of the remaining parts. It is precisely so with the forest,--the hazel-bush warms the tree-boles (cut it down, and the other trees will freeze), the hazel-bush protects from the wind, the seed-bearing trees carry on reproduction, the tall and leafy trees afford shade, and the life of one tree depends on the life of another. 4. The separate parts may die, but the whole lives. Exactly the case with the forest. The forest does not mourn one tree. Having proved that, in accordance with this theory, you may regard the forest as an organism, you fancy that you have proved to the disciples of the organic doctrine the error of their definition. Nothing of the sort. The definition which they give to the organism is so inaccurate and so elastic that under this definition they may include what they will. "Yes," they say; "and the forest may also be regarded as an organism. The forest is mutual re-action of individuals, which do not annihilate each other,--an aggregate; its parts may also enter into a more intimate union, as the hive of bees constitutes itself an organism." Then you will say, "If that is so, then the birds and the insects and the grass of this forest, which re-act upon each other, and do not destroy each other, may also be regarded as one organism, in company with the trees." And to this also they will agree. Every collection of living individuals, which re-act upon each other, and do not destroy each other, may be regarded as organisms, according to their theory. You may affirm a connection and interaction between whatever you choose, and, according to evolution, you may affirm, that, out of whatever you please, any other thing that you please may proceed, in a very long period of time. And the most remarkable thing of all is, that this same identical positive science recognizes the scientific method as the sign of true knowledge, and has itself defined what it designates as the scientific method. By the scientific method it means common-sense. And common-sense convicts it at every step. As soon as the Popes felt that nothing holy remained in them, they called themselves most holy. As soon as science felt that no common-sense was left in her she called herself sensible, that is to say, scientific science. CHAPTER III. Division of labor is the law of all existing things, and, therefore, it should be present in human societies. It is very possible that this is so; but still the question remains, Of what nature is that division of labor which I behold in my human society? is it that division of labor which should exist? And if people regard a certain division of labor as unreasonable and unjust, then no science whatever can convince men that that should exist which they regard as unreasonable and unjust. Division of labor is the condition of existence of organisms, and of human societies; but what, in these human societies, is to be regarded as an organic division of labor? And, to whatever extent science may have investigated the division of labor in the cells of worms, all these observations do not compel a man to acknowledge that division of labor to be correct which his own sense and conscience do not recognize as correct. No matter how convincing may be the proofs of the division of labor of the cells in the organisms studied, man, if he has not parted with his judgment, will say, nevertheless, that a man should not weave calico all his life, and that this is not division of labor, but persecution of the people. Spencer and others say that there is a whole community of weavers, and that the profession of weaving is an organic division of labor. There are weavers; so, of course, there is such a division of labor. It would be well enough to speak thus if the colony of weavers had arisen by the free will of its member's; but we know that it is not thus formed of their initiative, but that we make it. Hence it is necessary to find out whether we have made these weavers in accordance with an organic law, or with some other. Men live. They support themselves by agriculture, as is natural to all men. One man has set up a blacksmith's forge, and repaired his plough; his neighbor comes to him, and asks him to mend his also, and promises him in return either work or money. A third comes, and a fourth; and in the community formed by these men, there arises the following division of labor,--a blacksmith is created. Another man has instructed his children well; his neighbor brings his children to him, and requests him to teach them also, and a teacher is created. But both blacksmith and teacher have been created, and continue to be such, merely because they have been asked; and they remain such as long as they are requested to be blacksmith and teacher. If it should come to pass that many blacksmiths and teachers should set themselves up, or that their work is not requited, they will immediately, as common-sense demands and as always happens when there is no occasion for disturbing the regular course of division of labor,--they will immediately abandon their trade, and betake themselves once more to agriculture. Men who behave thus are guided by their sense, their conscience; and hence we, the men endowed with sense and conscience, all assert that such a division of labor is right. But if it should chance that the blacksmiths were able to compel other people to work for them, and should continue to make horse-shoes when they were not wanted, and if the teachers should go on teaching when there was no one to teach, then it is obvious to every sane man, as a man, i.e., as a being endowed with reason and conscience, that this would not be division, but appropriation, of labor. And yet precisely that sort of activity is what is called division of labor by scientific science. People do that which others do not think of requiring, and demand that they shall be supported for so doing, and say that this is just because it is division of labor. That which constitutes the cause of the economical poverty of our age is what the English call over-production (which means that a mass of things are made which are of no use to anybody, and with which nothing can be done). It would be odd to see a shoemaker, who should consider that people were bound to feed him because he incessantly made boots which had been of no use to any one for a long time; but what shall we say of those men who make nothing,--who not only produce nothing that is visible, but nothing that is of use for people at large,--for whose wares there are no customers, and who yet demand, with the same boldness, on the ground of division of labor, that they shall be supplied with fine food and drink, and that they shall be dressed well? There may be, and there are, sorcerers for whose services a demand makes itself felt, and for this purpose there are brought to them pancakes and flasks; but it is difficult to imagine the existence of sorcerers whose spells are useless to every one, and who boldly demand that they shall be luxuriously supported because they exercise sorcery. And it is the same in our world. And all this comes about on the basis of that false conception of the division of labor, which is defined not by reason and conscience, but by observation, which men of science avow with such unanimity. Division of labor has, in reality, always existed, and still exists; but it is right only when man decides with his reason and his conscience that it should be so, and not when he merely investigates it. And reason and conscience decide the question for all men very simply, unanimously, and in a manner not to be doubted. They always decide it thus: that division of labor is right only when a special branch of man's activity is so needful to men, that they, entreating him to serve them, voluntarily propose to support him in requital for that which he shall do for them. But, when a man can live from infancy to the age of thirty years on the necks of others, promising to do, when he shall have been taught, something extremely useful, for which no one asks him; and when, from the age of thirty until his death, he can live in the same manner, still merely on the promise to do something, for which there has been no request, this will not be division of labor (and, as a matter of fact, there is no such thing in our society), but it will be what it already is,--merely the appropriation, by force, of the toil of others; that same appropriation by force of the toil of others which the philosophers formerly designated by various names,--for instance, as indispensable forms of life,--but which scientific science now calls the organic division of labor. The whole significance of scientific science lies in this alone. It has now become a distributer of diplomas for idleness; for it alone, in its sanctuaries, selects and determines what is parasitical, and what is organic activity, in the social organism. Just as though every man could not find this out for himself much more accurately and more speedily, by taking counsel of his reason and his conscience. It seems to men of scientific science, that there can be no doubt of this, and that their activity is also indubitably organic; they, the scientific and artistic workers, are the brain cells, and the most precious cells in the whole organism. Ever since men--reasoning beings--have existed, they have distinguished good from evil, and have profited by the fact that men have made this distinction before them; they have warred against evil, and have sought the good, and have slowly but uninterruptedly advanced in that path. And divers delusions have always stood before men, hemming in this path, and having for their object to demonstrate to them, that it was not necessary to do this, and that it was not necessary to live as they were living. With fearful conflict and difficulty, men have freed themselves from many delusions. And behold, a new and a still more evil delusion has sprung up in the path of mankind,--the scientific delusion. This new delusion is precisely the same in nature as the old ones; its gist lies in secretly leading astray the activity of our reason and conscience, and of those who have lived before us, by something external. In scientific science, this external thing is--investigation. The cunning of this science consists in this,--that, after pointing out to men the coarsest false interpretations of the activity of the reason and conscience of man, it destroys in them faith in their own reason and conscience, and assures them that every thing which their reason and conscience say to them, that all that these have said to the loftiest representatives of man heretofore, ever since the world has existed,--that all this is conventional and subjective. "All this must be abandoned," they say; "it is impossible to understand the truth by the reason, for we may be mistaken. But there exists another unerring and almost mechanical path: it is necessary to investigate facts." But facts must be investigated on the foundation of scientific science, i.e., of the two hypotheses of positivism and evolution, which are not borne out by any thing, and which give themselves out as undoubted truths. And the reigning science announces, with delusive solemnity, that the solution of all problems of life is possible only through the study of facts, of nature, and, in particular, of organisms. The credulous mass of young people, overwhelmed by the novelty of this authority, which has not yet been overthrown or even touched by criticism, flings itself into the study of natural sciences, into that sole path, which, according to the assertion of the reigning science, can lead to the elucidation of the problems of life. But the farther the disciples proceed in this study, the farther and farther does not only the possibility, but even the very idea, of the solution of the problems of life withdraw from them, and the more and more do they become accustomed, not so much to investigate, as to believe in the assertions of other investigators (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the fourth condition of bodies, and so forth); the more and more does the form veil the contents from them; the more and more do they lose the consciousness of good and evil, and the capacity of understanding those expressions and definitions of good and evil which have been elaborated through the whole foregoing life of mankind; and the more and more do they appropriate to themselves the special scientific jargon of conventional expressions, which possesses no universally human significance; and the deeper and deeper do they plunge into the _debris_ of utterly unilluminated investigations; the more and more do they lose the power, not only of independent thought, but even of understanding the fresh human thought of others, which lies beyond the bounds of their Talmud. But the principal thing is, that they pass their best years in getting disused to life; they grow accustomed to consider their position as justifiable; and they convert themselves physically into utterly useless parasites, and mentally they dislocate their brains and become mental eunuchs. And in precisely the same manner, according to the measure of their folly, do they acquire self-conceit, which deprives them forever of all possibility of return to a simple life of toil, to a simple, clear, and universally human train of reasoning. Division of labor always has existed in human communities, and will probably always exist; but the question for us lies not in the fact that it has existed, and that it will exist, but in this,--how are we to govern ourselves so that this division shall be right? But if we take investigation as our rule of action, we by this very act repudiate all rule; then in that case we shall regard as right every division of labor which we shall descry among men, and which appears to us to be right--to which conclusion the prevailing scientific science also leads. Division of labor! Some are busied in mental or moral, others in muscular or physical, labor. With what confidence people enunciate this! They wish to think so, and it seems to them that, in point of fact, a perfectly regular exchange of services does take place. But we, in our blindness, have so completely lost sight of the responsibility which we have assumed, that we have even forgotten in whose name our labor is prosecuted; and the very people whom we have undertaken to serve have become the objects of our scientific and artistic activity. We study and depict them for our amusement and diversion. We have totally forgotten that what we need to do is not to study and depict them, but to serve them. To such a degree have we lost sight of this duty which we have taken upon us, that we have not even noticed that what we have undertaken to perform in the realm of science and art has been accomplished not by us, but by others, and that our place has turned out to be occupied. It proves that while we have been disputing, one about the spontaneous origin of organisms, another as to what else there is in protoplasm, and so on, the common people have been in need of spiritual food; and the unsuccessful and rejected of art and science, in obedience to the mandate of adventurers who have in view the sole aim of profit, have begun to furnish the people with this spiritual food, and still so furnish them. For the last forty years in Europe, and for the last ten years with us here in Russia, millions of books and pictures and song-books have been distributed, and stalls have been opened, and the people gaze and sing and receive spiritual nourishment, but not from us who have undertaken to provide it; while we, justifying our idleness by that spiritual food which we are supposed to furnish, sit by and wink at it. But it is impossible for us to wink at it, for our last justification is slipping from beneath our feet. We have become specialized. We have our particular functional activity. We are the brains of the people. They support us, and we have undertaken to teach them. It is only under this pretence that we have excused ourselves from work. But what have we taught them, and what are we now teaching them? They have waited for years--for tens, for hundreds of years. And we keep on diverting our minds with chatter, and we instruct each other, and we console ourselves, and we have utterly forgotten them. We have so entirely forgotten them, that others have undertaken to instruct them, and we have not even perceived it. We have spoken of the division of labor with such lack of seriousness, that it is obvious that what we have said about the benefits which we have conferred on the people was simply a shameless evasion. CHAPTER IV. Science and art have arrogated to themselves the right of idleness, and of the enjoyment of the labor of others, and have betrayed their calling. And their errors have arisen merely because their servants, having set forth a falsely conceived principle of the division of labor, have recognized their own right to make use of the labor of others, and have lost the significance of their vocation; having taken for their aim, not the profit of the people, but the mysterious profit of science and art, and delivered themselves over to idleness and vice--not so much of the senses as of the mind. They say, "Science and art have bestowed a great deal on mankind." Science and art have bestowed a great deal on mankind, not because the men of art and science, under the pretext of a division of labor, live on other people, but in spite of this. The Roman Republic was powerful, not because her citizens had the power to live a vicious life, but because among their number there were heroic citizens. It is the same with art and science. Art and science have bestowed much on mankind, but not because their followers formerly possessed on rare occasions (and now possess on every occasion) the possibility of getting rid of labor; but because there have been men of genius, who, without making use of these rights, have led mankind forward. The class of learned men and artists, which has advanced, on the fictitious basis of a division of labor, its demands to the right of using the labors of others, cannot co-operate in the success of true science and true art, because a lie cannot bring forth the truth. We have become so accustomed to these, our tenderly reared or weakened representatives of mental labor, that it seems to us horrible that a man of science or an artist should plough or cart manure. It seems to us that every thing would go to destruction, and that all his wisdom would be rattled out of him in the cart, and that all those grand picturesque images which he bears about in his breast would be soiled in the manure; but we have become so inured to this, that it does not strike us as strange that our servitor of science--that is to say, the servant and teacher of the truth--by making other people do for him that which he might do for himself, passes half his time in dainty eating, in smoking, in talking, in free and easy gossip, in reading the newspapers and romances, and in visiting the theatres. It is not strange to us to see our philosopher in the tavern, in the theatre, and at the ball. It is not strange in our eyes to learn that those artists who sweeten and ennoble our souls have passed their lives in drunkenness, cards, and women, if not in something worse. Art and science are very beautiful things; but just because they are so beautiful they should not be spoiled by the compulsory combination with them of vice: that is to say, a man should not get rid of his obligation to serve his own life and that of other people by his own labor. Art and science have caused mankind to progress. Yes; but not because men of art and science, under the guise of division of labor, have rid themselves of the very first and most indisputable of human obligations,--to labor with their hands in the universal struggle of mankind with nature. "But only the division of labor, the freedom of men of science and of art from the necessity of earning them living, has rendered possible that remarkable success of science which we behold in our day," is the answer to this. "If all were forced to till the soil, those _vast_ results would not have been attained which have been attained in our day; there would have been none of those _striking_ successes which have so greatly augmented man's power over nature, were it not for these astronomical discoveries _which are so astounding to the mind of man_, and which have added to the security of navigation; there would be no steamers, no railways, none of those _wonderful_ bridges, tunnels, steam-engines and telegraphs, photography, telephones, sewing-machines, phonographs, electricity, telescopes, spectroscopes, microscopes, chloroform, Lister's bandages, and carbolic acid." I will not enumerate every thing on which our age thus prides itself. This enumeration and pride of enthusiasm over ourselves and our exploits can be found in almost any newspaper and popular pamphlet. This enthusiasm over ourselves is often repeated to such a degree that none of us can sufficiently rejoice over ourselves, that we are seriously convinced that art and science have never made such progress as in our own time. And, as we are indebted for all this marvellous progress to the division of labor, why not acknowledge it? Let us admit that the progress made in our day is noteworthy, marvellous, unusual; let us admit that we are fortunate mortals to live in such a remarkable epoch: but let us endeavor to appraise this progress, not on the basis of our self-satisfaction, but of that principle which defends itself with this progress,--the division of labor. All this progress is very amazing; but by a peculiarly unlucky chance, admitted even by the men of science, this progress has not so far improved, but it has rather rendered worse, the position of the majority, that is to say, of the workingman. If the workingman can travel on the railway, instead of walking, still that same railway has burned down his forest, has carried off his grain under his very nose, and has brought his condition very near to slavery--to the capitalist. If, thanks to steam-engines and machines, the workingman can purchase inferior calico at a cheap rate, on the other hand these engines and machines have deprived him of work at home, and have brought him into a state of abject slavery to the manufacturer. If there are telephones and telescopes, poems, romances, theatres, ballets, symphonies, operas, picture-galleries, and so forth, on the other hand the life of the workingman has not been bettered by all this; for all of them, by the same unlucky chance, are inaccessible to him. So that, on the whole (and even men of science admit this), up to the present time, all these remarkable discoveries and products of science and art have certainly not ameliorated the condition of the workingman, if, indeed, they have not made it worse. So that, if we set against the question as to the reality of the progress attained by the arts and sciences, not our own rapture, but that standard upon the basis of which the division of labor is defended,--the good of the laboring man,--we shall see that we have no firm foundations for that self-satisfaction in which we are so fond of indulging. The peasant travels on the railway, the woman buys calico, in the _isba_ (cottage) there will be a lamp instead of a pine-knot, and the peasant will light his pipe with a match,--this is convenient; but what right have I to say that the railway and the factory have proved advantageous to the people? If the peasant rides on the railway, and buys calico, a lamp, and matches, it is only because it is impossible to forbid the peasant's buying them; but surely we are all aware that the construction of railways and factories has never been carried out for the benefit of the lower classes: so why should a casual convenience which the workingman enjoys lead to a proof of the utility of all these institutions for the people? There is something useful in every injurious thing. After a conflagration, one can warm one's self, and light one's pipe with a firebrand; but why declare that the conflagration is beneficial? Men of art and science might say that their pursuits are beneficial to the people, only when men of art and science have assigned to themselves the object of serving the people, as they now assign themselves the object of serving the authorities and the capitalists. We might say this if men of art and science had taken as their aim the needs of the people; but there are none such. All scientists are busy with their priestly avocations, out of which proceed investigations into protoplasm, the spectral analyses of stars, and so on. But science has never once thought of what axe or what hatchet is the most profitable to chop with, what saw is the most handy, what is the best way to mix bread, from what flour, how to set it, how to build and heat an oven, what food and drink, and what utensils, are the most convenient and advantageous under certain conditions, what mushrooms may be eaten, how to propagate them, and how to prepare them in the most suitable manner. And yet all this is the province of science. I am aware, that, according to its own definition, science ought to be useless, i.e., science for the sake of science; but surely this is an obvious evasion. The province of science is to serve the people. We have invented telegraphs, telephones, phonographs; but what advances have we effected in the life, in the labor, of the people? We have reckoned up two millions of beetles! And we have not tamed a single animal since biblical times, when all our animals were already domesticated; but the reindeer, the stag, the partridge, the heath-cock, all remain wild. Our botanists have discovered the cell, and in the cell protoplasm, and in that protoplasm still something more, and in that atom yet another thing. It is evident that these occupations will not end for a long time to come, because it is obvious that there can be no end to them, and therefore the scientist has no time to devote to those things which are necessary to the people. And therefore, again, from the time of Egyptian and Hebrew antiquity, when wheat and lentils had already been cultivated, down to our own times, not a single plant has been added to the food of the people, with the exception of the potato, and that was not obtained by science. Torpedoes have been invented, and apparatus for taxation, and so forth. But the spinning-whined, the woman's weaving-loom, the plough, the hatchet, the chain, the rake, the bucket, the well-sweep, are exactly the same as they were in the days of Rurik; and if there has been any change, then that change has not been effected by scientific people. And it is the same with the arts. We have elevated a lot of people to the rank of great writers; we have picked these writers to pieces, and have written mountains of criticism, and criticism on the critics, and criticism on the critics of the critics. And we have collected picture- galleries, and have studied different schools of art in detail; and we have so many symphonies and orchestras and operas, that it is becoming difficult even for us to listen to them. But what have we added to the popular _bylini_ [the epic songs], legends, tales, songs? What music, what pictures, have we given to the people? On the Nikolskaya books are manufactured for the people, and harmonicas in Tula; and in neither have we taken any part. The falsity of the whole direction of our arts and sciences is more striking and more apparent in precisely those very branches, which, it would seem, should, from their very nature, be of use to the people, and which, in consequence of their false attitude, seem rather injurious than useful. The technologist, the physician, the teacher, the artist, the author, should, in virtue of their very callings, it would seem, serve the people. And, what then? Under the present _regime_, they can do nothing but harm to the people. The technologist or the mechanic has to work with capital. Without capital he is good for nothing. All his acquirements are such that for their display he requires capital, and the exploitation of the laboring- man on the largest scale; and--not to mention that he is trained to live, at the lowest, on from fifteen hundred to two thousand a year, and that, therefore, he cannot go to the country, where no one can give him such wages,--he is, by virtue of his very occupation, unfitted for serving the people. He knows how to calculate the highest mathematical arch of a bridge, how to calculate the force and transfer of the motive power, and so on; but he is confounded by the simplest questions of a peasant: how to improve a plough or a cart, or how to make irrigating canals. All this in the conditions of life in which the laboring man finds himself. Of this, he neither knows nor understands any thing,--less, indeed, than the very stupidest peasant. Give him workshops, all sorts of workmen at his desire, an order for a machine from abroad, and he will get along. But how to devise means of lightening toil, under the conditions of labor of millions of men,--this is what he does not and can not know; and because of his knowledge, his habits, and his demands on life, he is unfitted for this business. In a still worse predicament is the physician. His fancied science is all so arranged, that he only knows how to heal those persons who do nothing. He requires an incalculable quantity of expensive preparations, instruments, drugs, and hygienic apparatus. He has studied with celebrities in the capitals, who only retain patients who can be cured in the hospital, or who, in the course of their cure, can purchase the appliances requisite for healing, and even go at once from the North to the South, to some baths or other. Science is of such a nature, that every rural physic-man laments because there are no means of curing working-men, because he is so poor that he has not the means to place the sick man in the proper hygienic conditions; and at the same time this physician complains that there are no hospitals, and that he cannot get through with his work, that he needs assistants, more doctors and practitioners. What is the inference? This: that the people's principal lack, from which diseases arise, and spread abroad, and refuse to be healed, is the lack of means of subsistence. And here Science, under the banner of the division of labor, summons her warriors to the aid of the people. Science is entirely arranged for the wealthy classes, and it has adopted for its task the healing of the people who can obtain every thing for themselves; and it attempts to heal those who possess no superfluity, by the same means. But there are no means, and therefore it is necessary to take them from the people who are ailing, and pest-stricken, and who cannot recover for lack of means. And now the defenders of medicine for the people say that this matter has been, as yet, but little developed. Evidently it has been but little developed, because if (which God forbid!) it had been developed, and that through oppressing the people,--instead of two doctors, midwives, and practitioners in a district, twenty would have settled down, since they desire this, and half the people would have died through the difficulty of supporting this medical staff, and soon there would be no one to heal. Scientific co-operation with the people, of which the defenders of science talk, must be something quite different. And this co-operation which should exist has not yet begun. It will begin when the man of science, technologist or physician, will not consider it legal to take from people--I will not say a hundred thousand, but even a modest ten thousand, or five hundred rubles for assisting them; but when he will live among the toiling people, under the same conditions, and exactly as they do, then he will be able to apply his knowledge to the questions of mechanics, technics, hygiene, and the healing of the laboring people. But now science, supporting itself at the expense of the working-people, has entirely forgotten the conditions of life among these people, ignores (as it puts it) these conditions, and takes very grave offence because its fancied knowledge finds no adherents among the people. The domain of medicine, like the domain of technical science, still lies untouched. All questions as to how the time of labor is best divided, what is the best method of nourishment, with what, in what shape, and when it is best to clothe one's self, to shoe one's self, to counteract dampness and cold, how best to wash one's self, to feed the children, to swaddle them, and so on, in just those conditions in which the working- people find themselves,--all these questions have not yet been propounded. The same is the case with the activity of the teachers of science,--pedagogical teachers. Exactly in the same manner science has so arranged this matter, that only wealthy people are able to study science, and teachers, like technologists and physicians, cling to money. And this cannot be otherwise, because a school built on a model plan (as a general rule, the more scientifically built the school, the more costly it is), with pivot chains, and globes, and maps, and library, and petty text-books for teachers and scholars and pedagogues, is a sort of thing for which it would be necessary to double the taxes in every village. This science demands. The people need money for their work; and the more there is needed, the poorer they are. Defenders of science say: "Pedagogy is even now proving of advantage to the people, but give it a chance to develop, and then it will do still better." Yes, if it does develop, and instead of twenty schools in a district there are a hundred, and all scientific, and if the people support these schools, they will grow poorer than ever, and they will more than ever need work for their children's sake. "What is to be done?" they say to this. The government will build the schools, and will make education obligatory, as it is in Europe; but again, surely, the money is taken from the people just the same, and it will be harder to work, and they will have less leisure for work, and there will be no education even by compulsion. Again the sole salvation is this: that the teacher should live under the conditions of the working-men, and should teach for that compensation which they give him freely and voluntarily. Such is the false course of science, which deprives it of the power of fulfilling its obligation, which is, to serve the people. But in nothing is this false course of science so obviously apparent, as in the vocation of art, which, from its very significance, ought to be accessible to the people. Science may fall back on its stupid excuse, that science acts for science, and that when it turns out learned men it is laboring for the people; but art, if it is art, should be accessible to all the people, and in particular to those in whose name it is executed. And our definition of art, in a striking manner, convicts those who busy themselves with art, of their lack of desire, lack of knowledge, and lack of power, to be useful to the people. The painter, for the production of his great works, must have a studio of at least such dimensions that a whole association of carpenters (forty in number) or shoemakers, now sickening or stifling in lairs, would be able to work in it. But this is not all; he must have a model, costumes, travels. Millions are expended on the encouragement of art, and the products of this art are both incomprehensible and useless to the people. Musicians, in order to express their grand ideas, must assemble two hundred men in white neckties, or in costumes, and spend hundreds of thousands of rubles for the equipment of an opera. And the products of this art cannot evoke from the people--even if the latter could at any time enjoy it--any thing except amazement and _ennui_. Writers--authors--it appears, do not require surroundings, studios, models, orchestras, and actors; but it then appears that the author needs (not to mention comfort in his quarters) all the dainties of life for the preparation of his great works, travels, palaces, cabinets, libraries, the pleasures of art, visits to theatres, concerts, the baths, and so on. If he does not earn a fortune for himself, he is granted a pension, in order that he may compose the better. And again, these compositions, so prized by us, remain useless lumber for the people, and utterly unserviceable to them. And if still more of these dealers in spiritual nourishment are developed further, as men of science desire, and a studio is erected in every village; if an orchestra is set up, and authors are supported in those conditions which artistic people regard as indispensable for themselves,--I imagine that the working-classes will sooner take an oath never to look at any pictures, never to listen to a symphony, never to read poetry or novels, than to feed all these persons. And why, apparently, should art not be of service to the people? In every cottage there are images and pictures; every peasant man and woman sings; many own harmonicas; and all recite stories and verses, and many read. It is as if those two things which are made for each other--the lock and the key--had parted company; they have sprung so far apart, that not even the possibility of uniting them presents itself. Tell the artist that he should paint without a studio, model, or costumes, and that he should paint five-kopek pictures, and he will say that that is tantamount to abandoning his art, as he understands it. Tell the musician that he should play on the harmonica, and teach the women to sing songs; say to the poet, to the author, that he ought to cast aside his poems and romances, and compose song-books, tales, and stories, comprehensible to the uneducated people,--they will say that you are mad. The service of the people by science and art will only be performed when people, dwelling in the midst of the common folk, and, like the common folk, putting forward no demands, claiming no rights, shall offer to the common folk their scientific and artistic services; the acceptance or rejection of which shall depend wholly on the will of the common folk. It is said that the activity of science and art has aided in the forward march of mankind,--meaning by this activity, that which is now called by that name; which is the same as saying that an unskilled banging of oars on a vessel that is floating with the tide, which merely hinders the progress of the vessel, is assisting the movement of the ship. It only retards it. The so-called division of labor, which has become in our day the condition of activity of men of science and art, was, and has remained, the chief cause of the tardy forward movement of mankind. The proofs of this lie in that confession of all men of science, that the gains of science and art are inaccessible to the laboring masses, in consequence of the faulty distribution of riches. The irregularity of this distribution does not decrease in proportion to the progress of science and art, but only increases. Men of art and science assume an air of deep pity for this unfortunate circumstance which does not depend upon them. But this unfortunate circumstance is produced by themselves; for this irregular distribution of wealth flows solely from the theory of the division of labor. Science maintains the division of labor as a unalterable law; it sees that the distribution of wealth, founded on the division of labor, is wrong and ruinous; and it affirms that its activity, which recognizes the division of labor, will lead people to bliss. The result is, that some people make use of the labor of others; but that, if they shall make use of the labor of others for a very long period of time, and in still larger measure, then this wrongful distribution of wealth, i.e., the use of the labor of others, will come to an end. Men stand beside a constantly swelling spring of water, and are occupied with the problem of diverting it to one side, away from the thirsty people, and they assert that they are producing this water, and that soon enough will be collected for all. But this water which has flowed, and which still flows unceasingly, and nourishes all mankind, not only is not the result of the activity of the men who, standing at its source, turn it aside, but this water flows and gushes out, in spite of the efforts of these men to obstruct its flow. There have always existed a true science, and a true art; but true science and art are not such because they called themselves by that name. It always seems to those who claim at any given period to be the representatives of science and art, that they have performed, and are performing, and--most of all--that they will presently perform, the most amazing marvels, and that beside them there never has been and there is not any science or any art. Thus it seemed to the sophists, the scholastics, the alchemists, the cabalists, the talmudists; and thus it seems to our own scientific science, and to our art for the sake of art. CHAPTER V. "But art,--science! You repudiate art and science; that is, you repudiate that by which mankind lives!" People are constantly making this--it is not a reply--to me, and they employ this mode of reception in order to reject my deductions without examining into them. "He repudiates science and art, he wants to send people back again into a savage state; so what is the use of listening to him and of talking to him?" But this is unjust. I not only do not repudiate art and science, but, in the name of that which is true art and true science, I say that which I do say; merely in order that mankind may emerge from that savage state into which it will speedily fall, thanks to the erroneous teaching of our time,--only for this purpose do I say that which I say. Art and science are as indispensable as food and drink and clothing,--more indispensable even; but they become so, not because we decide that what we designate as art and science are indispensable, but simply because they really are indispensable to people. Surely, if hay is prepared for the bodily nourishment of men, the fact that we are convinced that hay is the proper food for man will not make hay the food of man. Surely I cannot say, "Why do not you eat hay, when it is the indispensable food?" Food is indispensable, but it may happen that that which I offer is not food at all. This same thing has occurred with our art and science. It seems to us, that if we add to a Greek word the word "logy," and call that a science, it will be a science; and, if we call any abominable thing--like the dancing of nude females--by a Greek word, choreography, that that is art, and that it will be art. But no matter how much we may say this, the business with which we occupy ourselves when we count beetles, and investigate the chemical constituents of the stars in the Milky Way, when we paint nymphs and compose novels and symphonies,--our business will not become either art or science until such time as it is accepted by those people for whom it is wrought. If it were decided that only certain people should produce food, and if all the rest were forbidden to do this, or if they were rendered incapable of producing food, I suppose that the quality of food would be lowered. If the people who enjoyed the monopoly of producing food were Russian peasants, there would be no other food than black bread and cabbage-soup, and so on, and kvas,--nothing except what they like, and what is agreeable to them. The same thing would happen in the case of that loftiest human pursuit, of arts and sciences, if one caste were to arrogate to itself a monopoly of them: but with this sole difference, that, in the matter of bodily food, there can be no great departure from nature, and bread and cabbage-soup, although not very savory viands, are fit for consumption; but in spiritual food, there may exist the very greatest departures from nature, and some people may feed themselves for a long time on poisonous spiritual nourishment, which is directly unsuitable for, or injurious to, them; they may slowly kill themselves with spiritual opium or liquors, and they may offer this same food to the masses. It is this very thing that is going on among us. And it has come about because the position of men of science and art is a privileged one, because art and science (in our day), in our world, are not at all a rational occupation of all mankind without exception, exerting their best powers for the service of art and science, but an occupation of a restricted circle of people holding a monopoly of these industries, and entitling themselves men of art and science, and who have, therefore, perverted the very idea of art and science, and have lost all the meaning of their vocation, and who are only concerned in amusing and rescuing from crushing _ennui_ their tiny circle of idle mouths. Ever since men have existed, they have always had science and art in the simplest and broadest sense of the term. Science, in the sense of the whole of knowledge acquired by mankind, exists and always has existed, and life without it is not conceivable; and there is no possibility of either attacking or defending science, taken in this sense. But the point lies here,--that the scope of the knowledge of all mankind as a whole is so multifarious, ranging from the knowledge of how to extract iron to the knowledge of the movements of the planets, that man loses himself in this multitude of existing knowledge,--knowledge capable of _endless_ possibilities, if he have no guiding thread, by the aid of which he can classify this knowledge, and arrange the branches according to the degrees of their significance and importance. Before a man undertakes to learn any thing whatever, he must make up his mind that that branch of knowledge is of weight to him, and of more weight and importance than the countless other objects of study with which he is surrounded. Before undertaking the study of any thing, a man decides for what purpose he is studying this subject, and not the others. But to study every thing, as the men of scientific science in our day preach, without any idea of what is to come out of such study, is downright impossible, because the number of subjects of study is _endless_; and hence, no matter how many branches we may acquire, their acquisition can possess no significance or reason. And, therefore, in ancient times, down to even a very recent date, until the appearance of scientific science, man's highest wisdom consisted in finding that guiding thread, according to which the knowledge of men should be classified as being of primary or of secondary importance. And this knowledge, which forms the guide to all other branches of knowledge, men have always called science in the strictest acceptation of the word. And such science there has always been, even down to our own day, in all human communities which have emerged from their primal state of savagery. Ever since mankind has existed, teachers have always arisen among peoples, who have enunciated science in this restricted sense,--the science of what it is most useful for man to know. This science has always had for its object the knowledge of what is the true ground of the well-being of each individual man, and of all men, and why. Such was the science of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, of Mahomet, and of others; such is this science as they understood it, and as all men--with the exception of our little circle of so-called cultured people--understand it. This science has not only always occupied the highest place, but has been the only and sole science, from which the standing of the rest has been determined. And this was the case, not in the least because, as the so-called scientific people of our day think, cunning priestly teachers of this science attributed to it such significance, but because in reality, as every one knows, both by personal experience and by reflection, there can be no science except the science of that in which the destiny and welfare of man consist. For the objects of science are _incalculable_ in number,--I undermine the word "incalculable" in the exact sense in which I understand it,--and without the knowledge of that in which the destiny and welfare of all men consist, there is no possibility of making a choice amid this interminable multitude of subjects; and therefore, without this knowledge, all other arts and branches of learning will become, as they have become among us, an idle and hurtful diversion. Mankind has existed and existed, and never has it existed without the science of that in which the destiny and the welfare of men consist. It is true that the science of the welfare of men appears different on superficial observation, among the Buddhists, the Brahmins, the Hebrews, the Confucians, the Tauists; but nevertheless, wherever we hear of men who have emerged from a state of savagery, we find this science. And all of a sudden it appears that the men of our day have decided that this same science, which has hitherto served as the guiding thread of all human knowledge, is the very thing which hinders every thing. Men erect buildings; and one architect has made one estimate of cost, a second has made another, and a third yet another. The estimates differ somewhat; but they are correct, so that any one can see, that, if the whole is carried out in accordance with the calculations, the building will be erected. Along come people, and assert that the chief point lies in having no estimates, and that it should be built thus--by the eye. And this "thus," men call the most accurate of scientific science. Men repudiate every science, the very substance of science,--the definition of the destiny and the welfare of men,--and this repudiation they designate as science. Ever since men have existed, great minds have been born into their midst, which, in the conflict with reason and conscience, have put to themselves questions as to "what constitutes welfare,--the destiny and welfare, not of myself alone, but of every man?" What does that power which has created and which leads me, demand of me and of every man? And what is it necessary for me to do, in order to comply with the requirements imposed upon me by the demands of individual and universal welfare? They have asked themselves: "I am a whole, and also a part of something infinite, eternal; what, then, are my relations to other parts similar to myself, to men and to the whole--to the world?" And from the voices of conscience and of reason, and from a comparison of what their contemporaries and men who had lived before them, and who had propounded to themselves the same questions, had said, these great teachers have deduced their doctrines, which were simple, clear, intelligible to all men, and always such as were susceptible of fulfilment. Such men have existed of the first, second, third, and lowest ranks. The world is full of such men. Every living man propounds the question to himself, how to reconcile the demands of welfare, and of his personal existence, with conscience and reason; and from this universal labor, slowly but uninterruptedly, new forms of life, which are more in accord with the requirements of reason and of conscience, are worked out. All at once, a new caste of people makes its appearance, and they say, "All this is nonsense; all this must be abandoned." This is the deductive method of ratiocination (wherein lies the difference between the deductive and the inductive method, no one can understand); these are the dogmas of the technological and metaphysical period. Every thing that these men discover by inward experience, and which they communicate to one another, concerning their knowledge of the law of their existence (of their functional activity, according to their own jargon), every thing that the grandest minds of mankind have accomplished in this direction, since the beginning of the world,--all this is nonsense, and has no weight whatever. According to this new doctrine, it appears that you are cells: and that you, as a cell, have a very definite functional activity, which you not only fulfil, but which you infallibly feel within you; and that you are a thinking, talking, understanding cell, and that you, for this reason, can ask another similar talking cell whether it is just the same, and in this way verify your own experience; that you can take advantage of the fact that speaking cells, which have lived before you, have written on the same subject, and that you have millions of cells which confirm your observations by their agreement with the cells which have written down their thoughts,--all this signifies nothing; all this is an evil and an erroneous method. The true scientific method is this: If you wish to know in what the destiny and the welfare of all mankind and of all the world consists, you must, first of all, cease to listen to the voices of your conscience and of your reason, which present themselves in you and in others like you; you must cease to believe all that the great teachers of mankind have said with regard to your conscience and reason, and you must consider all this as nonsense, and begin all over again. And, in order to understand every thing from the beginning, you must look through microscopes at the movements of amoebae, and cells in worms, or, with still greater composure, believe in every thing that men with a diploma of infallibility shall say to you about them. And as you gaze at the movements of these cells, or read about what others have seen, you must attribute to these cells your own human sensations and calculations as to what they desire, whither they are directing themselves, how they compare and discuss, and to what they have become accustomed; and from these observations (in which there is not a word about an error of thought or of expression) you must deduce a conclusion by analogy as to what you are, what is your destiny, wherein lies the welfare of yourself and of other cells like you. In order to understand yourself, you must study not only the worms which you see, but microscopic creatures which you can barely see, and transformations from one set of creatures into others, which no one has ever beheld, and which you, most assuredly, will never behold. And the same with art. Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent. Ever since men have been in existence, they have been in the habit of deducing, from all pursuits, the expressions of various branches of learning concerning the destiny and the welfare of man, and the expression of this knowledge has been art in the strict sense of the word. Ever since men have existed, there have been those who were peculiarly sensitive and responsive to the doctrine regarding the destiny and welfare of man; who have given expression to their own and the popular conflict, to the delusions which lead them astray from their destinies, their sufferings in this conflict, their hopes in the triumph of good, them despair over the triumph of evil, and their raptures in the consciousness of the approaching bliss of man, on viol and tabret, in images and words. Always, down to the most recent times, art has served science and life,--only then was it what has been so highly esteemed of men. But art, in its capacity of an important human activity, disappeared simultaneously with the substitution for the genuine science of destiny and welfare, of the science of any thing you choose to fancy. Art has existed among all peoples, and will exist until that which among us is scornfully called religion has come to be considered the only science. In our European world, so long as there existed a Church, as the doctrine of destiny and welfare, and so long as the Church was regarded as the only true science, art served the Church, and remained true art: but as soon as art abandoned the Church, and began to serve science, while science served whatever came to hand, art lost its significance. And notwithstanding the rights claimed on the score of ancient memories, and of the clumsy assertion which only proves its loss of its calling, that art serves art, it has become a trade, providing men with something agreeable; and as such, it inevitably comes into the category of choreographic, culinary, hair-dressing, and cosmetic arts, whose practitioners designate themselves as artists, with the same right as the poets, printers, and musicians of our day. Glance backward into the past, and you will see that in the course of thousands of years, out of milliards of people, only half a score of Confucius', Buddhas, Solomons, Socrates, Solons, and Homers have been produced. Evidently, they are rarely met with among men, in spite of the fact that these men have not been selected from a single caste, but from mankind at large. Evidently, these true teachers and artists and learned men, the purveyors of spiritual nourishment, are rare. And it is not without reason that mankind has valued and still values them so highly. But it now appears, that all these great factors in the science and art of the past are no longer of use to us. Nowadays, scientific and artistic authorities can, in accordance with the law of division of labor, be turned out by factory methods; and, in one decade, more great men have been manufactured in art and science, than have ever been born of such among all nations, since the foundation of the world. Nowadays there is a guild of learned men and artists, and they prepare, by perfected methods, all that spiritual food which man requires. And they have prepared so much of it, that it is no longer necessary to refer to the elder authorities, who have preceded them,--not only to the ancients, but to those much nearer to us. All that was the activity of the theological and metaphysical period,--all that must be wiped out: but the true, the rational activity began, say, fifty years ago, and in the course of those fifty years we have made so many great men, that there are about ten great men to every branch of science. And there have come to be so many sciences, that, fortunately, it is easy to make them. All that is required is to add the Greek word "logy" to the name, and force them to conform to a set rubric, and the science is all complete. They have created so many sciences, that not only can no one man know them all, but not a single individual can remember all the titles of all the existing sciences; the titles alone form a thick lexicon, and new sciences are manufactured every day. They have been manufactured on the pattern of that Finnish teacher who taught the landed proprietor's children Finnish instead of French. Every thing has been excellently inculcated; but there is one objection,--that no one except ourselves can understand any thing of it, and all this is reckoned as utterly useless nonsense. However, there is an explanation even for this. People do not appreciate the full value of scientific science, because they are under the influence of the theological period, that profound period when all the people, both among the Hebrews, and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Greeks, understood every thing that their great teachers said to them. But, from whatever cause this has come about, the fact remains, that sciences and arts have always existed among mankind, and, when they really did exist, they were useful and intelligible to all the people. But we practise something which we call science and art, but it appears that what we do is unnecessary and unintelligible to man. And hence, however beautiful may be the things that we accomplish, we have no right to call them arts and sciences. CHAPTER VI. "But you only furnish a different definition of arts and sciences, which is stricter, and is incompatible with science," I shall be told in answer to this; "nevertheless, scientific and artistic activity does still exist. There are the Galileos, Brunos, Homers, Michael Angelos, Beethovens, and all the lesser learned men and artists, who have consecrated their entire lives to the service of science and art, and who were, and will remain, the benefactors of mankind." Generally this is what people say, striving to forget that new principle of the division of labor, on the basis of which science and art now occupy their privileged position, and on whose basis we are now enabled to decide without grounds, but by a given standard: Is there, or is there not, any foundation for that activity which calls itself science and art, to so magnify itself? When the Egyptian or the Grecian priests produced their mysteries, which were unintelligible to any one, and stated concerning these mysteries that all science and all art were contained in them, I could not verify the reality of their science on the basis of the benefit procured by them to the people, because science, according to their assertions, was supernatural. But now we all possess a very simple and clear definition of the activity of art and science, which excludes every thing supernatural: science and art promise to carry out the mental activity of mankind, for the welfare of society, or of all the human race. The definition of scientific science and art is entirely correct; but, unfortunately, the activity of the present arts and sciences does not come under this head. Some of them are directly injurious, others are useless, others still are worthless,--good only for the wealthy. They do not fulfil that which, by their own definition, they have undertaken to accomplish; and hence they have as little right to regard themselves as men of art and science, as a corrupt priesthood, which does not fulfil the obligations which it has assumed, has the right to regard itself as the bearer of divine truth. And it can be understood why the makers of the present arts and sciences have not fulfilled, and cannot fulfil, their vocation. They do not fulfil it, because out of their obligations they have erected a right. Scientific and artistic activity, in its real sense, is only fruitful when it knows no rights, but recognizes only obligations. Only because it is its property to be always thus, does mankind so highly prize this activity. If men really were called to the service of others through artistic work, they would see in that work only obligation, and they would fulfil it with toil, with privations, and with self-abnegation. The thinker or the artist will never sit calmly on Olympian heights, as we have become accustomed to represent them to ourselves. The thinker or the artist should suffer in company with the people, in order that he may find salvation or consolation. Besides this, he will suffer because he is always and eternally in turmoil and agitation: he might decide and say that that which would confer welfare on men, would free them from suffering, would afford them consolation; but he has not said so, and has not presented it as he should have done; he has not decided, and he has not spoken; and to-morrow, possibly, it will be too late,--he will die. And therefore suffering and self-sacrifice will always be the lot of the thinker and the artist. Not of this description will be the thinker and artist who is reared in an establishment where, apparently, they manufacture the learned man or the artist (but in point of fact, they manufacture destroyers of science and of art), who receives a diploma and a certificate, who would be glad not to think and not to express that which is imposed on his soul, but who cannot avoid doing that to which two irresistible forces draw him,--an inward prompting, and the demand of men. There will be no sleek, plump, self-satisfied thinkers and artists. Spiritual activity, and its expression, which are actually necessary to others, are the most burdensome of all man's avocations; a cross, as the Gospels phrase it. And the sole indubitable sign of the presence of a vocation is self-devotion, the sacrifice of self for the manifestation of the power that is imposed upon man for the benefit of others. It is possible to study out how many beetles there are in the world, to view the spots on the sun, to write romances and operas, without suffering; but it is impossible, without self-sacrifice, to instruct people in their true happiness, which consists solely in renunciation of self and the service of others, and to give strong expression to this doctrine, without self-sacrifice. Christ did not die on the cross in vain; not in vain does the sacrifice of suffering conquer all things. But our art and science are provided with certificates and diplomas; and the only anxiety of all men is, how to still better guarantee them, i.e., how to render the service of the people impracticable for them. True art and true science possess two unmistakable marks: the first, an inward mark, which is this, that the servitor of art and science will fulfil his vocation, not for profit but with self-sacrifice; and the second, an external sign,--his productions will be intelligible to all the people whose welfare he has in view. No matter what people have fixed upon as their vocation and their welfare, science will be the doctrine of this vocation and welfare, and art will be the expression of that doctrine. That which is called science and art, among us, is the product of idle minds and feelings, which have for their object to tickle similar idle minds and feelings. Our arts and sciences are incomprehensible, and say nothing to the people, for they have not the welfare of the common people in view. Ever since the life of men has been known to us, we find, always and everywhere, the reigning doctrine falsely designating itself as science, not manifesting itself to the common people, but obscuring for them the meaning of life. Thus it was among the Greeks the sophists, then among the Christians the mystics, gnostics, scholastics, among the Hebrews the Talmudists and Cabalists, and so on everywhere, down to our own times. How fortunate it is for us that we live in so peculiar an age, when that mental activity which calls itself science, not only does not err, but finds itself, as we are assured, in a remarkably flourishing condition! Does not this peculiar good fortune arise from the fact that man can not and will not see his own hideousness? Why is there nothing left of those sciences, and sophists, and Cabalists, and Talmudists, but words, while we are so exceptionally happy? Surely the signs are identical. There is the same self-satisfaction and blind confidence that we, precisely we, and only we, are on the right path, and that the real thing is only beginning with us. There is the same expectation that we shall discover something remarkable; and that chief sign which leads us astray convicts us of our error: all our wisdom remains with us, and the common people do not understand, and do not accept, and do not need it. Our position is a very difficult one, but why not look at it squarely? It is time to recover our senses, and to scrutinize ourselves. Surely we are nothing else than the scribes and Pharisees, who sit in Moses' seat, and who have taken the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and will neither go in ourselves, nor permit others to go in. Surely we, the high priests of science and art, are ourselves worthless deceivers, possessing much less right to our position than the most crafty and depraved priests. Surely we have no justification for our privileged position. The priests had a right to their position: they declared that they taught the people life and salvation. But we have taken their place, and we do not instruct the people in life,--we even admit that such instruction is unnecessary,--but we educate our children in the same Talmudic-Greek and Latin grammar, in order that they may be able to pursue the same life of parasites which we lead ourselves. We say, "There used to be castes, but there are none among us." But what does it mean, that some people and their children toil, while other people and their children do not toil? Bring hither an Indian ignorant of our language, and show him European life, and our life, for several generations, and he will recognize the same leading, well-defined castes--of laborers and non-laborers--as there are in his own country. And as in his land, so in ours, the right of refusing to labor is conferred by a peculiar consecration, which we call science and art, or, in general terms, culture. It is this culture, and all the distortions of sense connected with it, which have brought us to that marvellous madness, in consequence of which we do not see that which is so clear and indubitable. CHAPTER VII. Then, what is to be done? What are we to do? This question, which includes within itself both an admission that our life is evil and wrong, and in connection with this,--as though it were an exercise for it,--that it is impossible, nevertheless, to change it, this question I have heard, and I continue to hear, on all sides. I have described my own sufferings, my own gropings, and my own solution of this question. I am the same kind of a man as everybody else; and if I am in any wise distinguished from the average man of our circle, it is chiefly in this respect, that I, more than the average man, have served and winked at the false doctrine of our world; I have received more approbation from men professing the prevailing doctrine: and therefore, more than others, have I become depraved, and wandered from the path. And therefore I think that the solution of the problem, which I have found in my own case, will be applicable to all sincere people who are propounding the same question to themselves. First of all, in answer to the question, "What is to be done?" I told myself: "I must lie neither to other people nor to myself. I must not fear the truth, whithersoever it may lead me." We all know what it means to lie to other people, but we are not afraid to lie to ourselves; yet the very worst downright lie, to other people, is not to be compared in its consequences with the lie to ourselves, upon which we base our whole life. This is the lie of which we must not be guilty if we are to be in a position to answer the question: "What is to be done?" And, in fact, how am I to answer the question, "What is to be done?" when every thing that I do, when my whole life, is founded on a lie, and when I carefully parade this lie as the truth before others and before myself? Not to lie, in this sense, means not to fear the truth, not to devise subterfuges, and not to accept the subterfuges devised by others for the purpose of hiding from myself the deductions of my reason and my conscience; not to fear to part company with all those who surround me, and to remain alone in company with reason and conscience; not to fear that position to which the truth shall lead me, being firmly convinced that that position to which truth and conscience shall conduct me, however singular it may be, cannot be worse than the one which is founded on a lie. Not to lie, in our position of privileged persons of mental labor, means, not to be afraid to reckon one's self up wrongly. It is possible that you are already so deeply indebted that you cannot take stock of yourself; but to whatever extent this may be the case, however long may be the account, however far you have strayed from the path, it is still better than to continue therein. A lie to other people is not alone unprofitable; every matter is settled more directly and more speedily by the truth than by a lie. A lie to others only entangles matters, and delays the settlement; but a lie to one's self, set forth as the truth, ruins a man's whole life. If a man, having entered on the wrong path, assumes that it is the true one, then every step that he takes on that path removes him farther from his goal. If a man who has long been travelling on this false path divines for himself, or is informed by some one, that his course is a mistaken one, but grows alarmed at the idea that he has wandered very far astray and tries to convince himself that he may, possibly, still strike into the right road, then he never will get into it. If a man quails before the truth, and, on perceiving it, does not accept it, but does accept a lie for the truth, then he never will learn what he ought to do. We, the not only wealthy, but privileged and so-called cultivated persons, have advanced so far on the wrong road, that a great deal of determination, or a very great deal of suffering on the wrong road, is required, in order to bring us to our senses and to the acknowledgment of the lie in which we are living. I have perceived the lie of our lives, thanks to the sufferings which the false path entailed upon me, and, having recognized the falseness of this path on which I stood, I have had the boldness to go at first in thought only--whither reason and conscience led me, without reflecting where they would bring me out. And I have been rewarded for this boldness. All the complicated, broken, tangled, and incoherent phenomena of life surrounding me, have suddenly become clear; and my position in the midst of these phenomena, which was formerly strange and burdensome, has become, all at once, natural, and easy to bear. In this new position, my activity was defined with perfect accuracy; not at all as it had previously presented itself to me, but as a new and much more peaceful, loving, and joyous activity. The very thing which had formerly terrified me, now began to attract me. Hence I think, that the man who will honestly put to himself the question, "What is to be done?" and, replying to this query, will not lie to himself, but will go whither his reason leads, has already solved the problem. There is only one thing that can hinder him in his search for an issue,--an erroneously lofty idea of himself and of his position. This was the case with me; and then another, arising from the first answer to the question: "What is to be done?" consisted for me in this, that it was necessary for me to repent, in the full sense of that word,--i.e., to entirely alter my conception of my position and my activity; to confess the hurtfulness and emptiness of my activity, instead of its utility and gravity; to confess my own ignorance instead of culture; to confess my immorality and harshness in the place of my kindness and morality; instead of my elevation, to acknowledge my lowliness. I say, that in addition to not lying to myself, I had to repent, because, although the one flows from the other, a false conception of my lofty importance had so grown up with me, that, until I sincerely repented and cut myself free from that false estimate which I had formed of myself, I did not perceive the greater part of the lie of which I had been guilty to myself. Only when I had repented, that is to say, when I had ceased to look upon myself as a regular man, and had begun to regard myself as a man exactly like every one else,--only then did my path become clear before me. Before that time I had not been able to answer the question: "What is to be done?" because I had stated the question itself wrongly. As long as I did not repent, I put the question thus: "What sphere of activity should I choose, I, the man who has received the education and the talents which have fallen to my shame? How, in this fashion, make recompense with that education and those talents, for what I have taken, and for what I still take, from the people?" This question was wrong, because it contained a false representation, to the effect that I was not a man just like them, but a peculiar man called to serve the people with those talents and with that education which I had won by the efforts of forty years. I propounded the query to myself; but, in reality, I had answered it in advance, in that I had in advance defined the sort of activity which was agreeable to me, and by which I was called upon to serve the people. I had, in fact, asked myself: "In what manner could I, so very fine a writer, who had acquired so much learning and talents, make use of them for the benefit of the people?" But the question should have been put as it would have stood for a learned rabbi who had gone through the course of the Talmud, and had learned by heart the number of letters in all the holy books, and all the fine points of his art. The question for me, as for the rabbi, should stand thus: "What am I, who have spent, owing to the misfortune of my surroundings, the year's best fitted for study in the acquisition of grammar, geography, judicial science, poetry, novels and romances, the French language, pianoforte playing, philosophical theories, and military exercises, instead of inuring myself to labor; what am I, who have passed the best years of my life in idle occupations which are corrupting to the soul,--what am I to do in defiance of these unfortunate conditions of the past, in order that I may requite those people who during the whole time have fed and clothed, yes, and who even now continue to feed and clothe me?" Had the question then stood as it stands before me now, after I have repented,--"What am I, so corrupt a man, to do?" the answer would have been easy: "To strive, first of all, to support myself honestly; that is, to learn not to live upon others; and while I am learning, and when I have learned this, to render aid on all possible occasions to the people, with my hands, and my feet, and my brain, and my heart, and with every thing to which the people should present a claim." And therefore I say, that for the man of our circle, in addition to not lying to himself or to others, repentance is also necessary, and that he should scrape from himself that pride which has sprung up in us, in our culture, in our refinements, in our talents; and that he should confess that he is not a benefactor of the people and a distinguished man, who does not refuse to share with the people his useful acquirements, but that he should confess himself to be a thoroughly guilty, corrupt, and good-for-nothing man, who desires to reform himself and not to behave benevolently towards the people, but simply to cease wounding and insulting them. I often hear the questions of good young men who sympathize with the renunciatory part of my writings, and who ask, "Well, and what then shall I do? What am I to do, now that I have finished my course in the university, or in some other institution, in order that I may be of use?" Young men ask this, and in the depths of their soul it is already decided that the education which they have received constitutes their privilege and that they desire to serve the people precisely by means of thus superiority. And hence, one thing which they will in no wise do, is to bear themselves honestly and critically towards that which they call their culture, and ask themselves, are those qualities which they call their culture good or bad? If they will do this, they will infallibly be led to see the necessity of renouncing their culture, and the necessity of beginning to learn all over again; and this is the one indispensable thing. They can in no wise solve the problem, "What to do?" because this question does not stand before them as it should stand. The question must stand thus: "In what manner am I, a helpless, useless man, who, owing to the misfortune of my conditions, have wasted my best years of study in conning the scientific Talmud which corrupts soul and body, to correct this mistake, and learn to serve the people?" But it presents itself to them thus: "How am I, a man who has acquired so much very fine learning, to turn this very fine learning to the use of the people?" And such a man will never answer the question, "What is to be done?" until he repents. And repentance is not terrible, just as truth is not terrible, and it is equally joyful and fruitful. It is only necessary to accept the truth wholly, and to repent wholly, in order to understand that no one possesses any rights, privileges, or peculiarities in the matter of this life of ours, but that there are no ends or bounds to obligation, and that a man's first and most indubitable duty is to take part in the struggle with nature for his own life and for the lives of others. And this confession of a man's obligation constitutes the gist of the third answer to the question, "What is to be done?" I tried not to lie to myself: I tried to cast out from myself the remains of my false conceptions of the importance of my education and talents, and to repent; but on the way to a decision of the question, "What to do?" a fresh difficulty arose. There are so many different occupations, that an indication was necessary as to the precise one which was to be adopted. And the answer to this question was furnished me by sincere repentance for the evil in which I had lived. "What to do? Precisely what to do?" all ask, and that is what I also asked so long as, under the influence of my exalted idea of any own importance, I did not perceive that my first and unquestionable duty was to feed myself, to clothe myself, to furnish my own fuel, to do my own building, and, by so doing, to serve others, because, ever since the would has existed, the first and indubitable duty of every man has consisted and does consist in this. In fact, no matter what a man may have assumed to be his vocation,--whether it be to govern people, to defend his fellow-countrymen, to divine service, to instruct others, to invent means to heighten the pleasures of life, to discover the laws of the world, to incorporate eternal truths in artistic representations,--the duty of a reasonable man is to take part in the struggle with nature, for the sustenance of his own life and of that of others. This obligation is the first of all, because what people need most of all is their life; and therefore, in order to defend and instruct the people, and render their lives more agreeable, it is requisite to preserve that life itself, while my refusal to share in the struggle, my monopoly of the labors of others, is equivalent to annihilation of the lives of others. And, therefore, it is not rational to serve the lives of men by annihilating the lives of men; and it is impossible to say that I am serving men, when, by my life, I am obviously injuring them. A man's obligation to struggle with nature for the acquisition of the means of livelihood will always be the first and most unquestionable of all obligations, because this obligation is a law of life, departure from which entails the inevitable punishment of either bodily or mental annihilation of the life of man. If a man living alone excuses himself from the obligation of struggling with nature, he is immediately punished, in that his body perishes. But if a man excuses himself from this obligation by making other people fulfil it for him, then also he is immediately punished by the annihilation of his mental life; that is to say, of the life which possesses rational thought. In this one act, man receives--if the two things are to be separated--full satisfaction of the bodily and spiritual demands of his nature. The feeding, clothing, and taking care of himself and his family, constitute the satisfaction of the bodily demands and requirements; and doing the same for other people, constitutes the satisfaction of his spiritual requirements. Every other employment of man is only legal when it is directed to the satisfaction of this very first duty of man; for the fulfilment of this duty constitutes the whole life of man. I had been so turned about by my previous life, this first and indubitable law of God or of nature is so concealed in our sphere of society, that the fulfilment of this law seemed to me strange, terrible, even shameful; as though the fulfilment of an eternal, unquestionable law, and not the departure from it, can be terrible, strange, and shameful. At first it seemed to me that the fulfilment of this matter required some preparation, arrangement or community of men, holding similar views,--the consent of one's family, life in the country; it seemed to me disgraceful to make a show of myself before people, to undertake a thing so improper in our conditions of existence, as bodily toil, and I did not know how to set about it. But it was only necessary for me to understand that this is no exclusive occupation which requires to be invented and arranged for, but that this employment was merely a return from the false position in which I found myself, to a natural one; was only a rectification of that lie in which I was living. I had only to recognize this fact, and all these difficulties vanished. It was not in the least necessary to make preparations and arrangements, and to await the consent of others, for, no matter in what position I had found myself, there had always been people who had fed, clothed and warmed me, in addition to themselves; and everywhere, under all conditions, I could do the same for myself and for them, if I had the time and the strength. Neither could I experience false shame in an unwonted occupation, no matter how surprising it might be to people, because, through not doing it, I had already experienced not false but real shame. And when I had reached this confession and the practical deduction from it, I was fully rewarded for not having quailed before the deductions of reason, and for following whither they led me. On arriving at this practical deduction, I was amazed at the ease and simplicity with which all the problems which had previously seemed to me so difficult and so complicated, were solved. To the question, "What is it necessary to do?" the most indubitable answer presented itself: first of all, that which it was necessary for me to do was, to attend to my own samovar, my own stove, my own water, my own clothing; to every thing that I could do for myself. To the question, "Will it not seem strange to people if you do this?" it appeared that this strangeness lasted only a week, and after the lapse of that week, it would have seemed strange had I returned to my former conditions of life. With regard to the question, "Is it necessary to organize this physical labor, to institute an association in the country, on my land?" it appeared that nothing of the sort was necessary; that labor, if it does not aim at the acquisition of all possible leisure, and the enjoyment of the labor of others,--like the labor of people bent on accumulating money,--but if it have for its object the satisfaction of requirements, will itself be drawn from the city to the country, to the land, where this labor is the most fruitful and cheerful. But it is not requisite to institute any association, because the man who labors, naturally and of himself, attaches himself to the existing association of laboring men. To the question, whether this labor would not monopolize all my time, and deprive me of those intellectual pursuits which I love, to which I am accustomed, and which, in my moments of self-conceit, I regard as not useless to others? I received a most unexpected reply. The energy of my intellectual activity increased, and increased in exact proportion with bodily application, while freeing itself from every thing superfluous. It appeared that by dedicating to physical toil eight hours, that half of the day which I had formerly passed in the oppressive state of a struggle with _ennui_, eight hours remained to me, of which only five of intellectual activity, according to my terms, were necessary to me. For it appeared, that if I, a very voluminous writer, who had done nothing for nearly forty years except write, and who had written three hundred printed sheets;--if I had worked during all those forty years at ordinary labor with the working-people, then, not reckoning winter evenings and leisure days, if I had read and studied for five hours every day, and had written a couple of pages only on holidays (and I have been in the habit of writing at the rate of one printed sheet a day), then I should have written those three hundred sheets in fourteen years. The fact seemed startling: yet it is the most simple arithmetical calculation, which can be made by a seven-year-old boy, but which I had not been able to make up to this time. There are twenty-four hours in the day; if we take away eight hours, sixteen remain. If any man engaged in intellectual occupations devote five hours every day to his occupation, he will accomplish a fearful amount. And what is to be done with the remaining eleven hours? It proved that physical labor not only does not exclude the possibility of mental activity, but that it improves its quality, and encourages it. In answer to the question, whether this physical toil does not deprive me of many innocent pleasures peculiar to man, such as the enjoyment of the arts, the acquisition of learning, intercourse with people, and the delights of life in general, it turned out exactly the reverse: the more intense the labor, the more nearly it approached what is considered the coarsest agricultural toil, the more enjoyment and knowledge did I gain, and the more did I come into close and loving communion with men, and the more happiness did I derive from life. In answer to the question (which I have so often heard from persons not thoroughly sincere), as to what result could flow from so insignificant a drop in the sea of sympathy as my individual physical labor in the sea of labor ingulfing me, I received also the most satisfactory and unexpected of answers. It appeared that all I had to do was to make physical labor the habitual condition of my life, and the majority of my false, but precious, habits and my demands, when physically idle, fell away from me at once of their own accord, without the slightest exertion on my part. Not to mention the habit of turning day into night and _vice versa_, my habits connected with my bed, with my clothing, with conventional cleanliness,--which are downright impossible and oppressive with physical labor,--and my demands as to the quality of my food, were entirely changed. In place of the dainty, rich, refined, complicated, highly-spiced food, to which I had formerly inclined, the most simple viands became needful and most pleasing of all to me,--cabbage-soup, porridge, black bread, and tea _v prikusku_. {238} So that, not to mention the influence upon me of the example of the simple working-people, who are content with little, with whom I came in contact in the course of my bodily toil, my very requirements underwent a change in consequence of my toilsome life; so that my drop of physical labor in the sea of universal labor became larger and larger, in proportion as I accustomed myself to, and appropriated, the habits of the laboring classes; in proportion, also, to the success of my labor, my demands for labor from others grew less and less, and my life naturally, without exertion or privations, approached that simple existence of which I could not even dream without fulfilling the law of labor. It proved that my dearest demands from life, namely, my demands for vanity, and diversion from _ennui_, arose directly from my idle life. There was no place for vanity, in connection with physical labor; and no diversions were needed, since my time was pleasantly occupied, and, after my fatigue, simple rest at tea over a book, or in conversation with my fellows, was incomparably more agreeable than theatres, cards, conceits, or a large company,--all which things are needed in physical idleness, and which cost a great deal. In answer to the question, Would not this unaccustomed toil ruin that health which is indispensable in order to render service to the people possible? it appeared, in spite of the positive assertions of noted physicians, that physical exertion, especially at my age, might have the most injurious consequences (but that Swedish gymnastics, the massage treatment, and so on, and other expedients intended to take the place of the natural conditions of man's life, were better), that the more intense the toil, the stronger, more alert, more cheerful, and more kindly did I feel. Thus it undoubtedly appeared, that, just as all those cunning devices of the human mind, newspapers, theatres, concerts, visits, balls, cards, journals, romances, are nothing else than expedients for maintaining the spiritual life of man outside his natural conditions of labor for others,--just so all the hygienic and medical devices of the human mind for the preparation of food, drink, lodging, ventilation, heating, clothing, medicine, water, massage, gymnastics, electric, and other means of healing,--all these clever devices are merely an expedient to sustain the bodily life of man removed from its natural conditions of labor. It turned out that all these devices of the human mind for the agreeable arrangement of the physical existence of idle persons are precisely analogous to those artful contrivances which people might invent for the production in vessels hermetically sealed, by means of mechanical arrangements, of evaporation, and plants, of the air best fitted for breathing, when all that is needed is to open the window. All the inventions of medicine and hygiene for persons of our sphere are much the same as though a mechanic should hit upon the idea of heating a steam- boiler which was not working, and should shut all the valves so that the boiler should not burst. Only one thing is needed, instead of all these extremely complicated devices for pleasure, for comfort, and for medical and hygienic preparations, intended to save people from their spiritual and bodily ailments, which swallow up so much labor,--to fulfil the law of life; to do that which is proper not only to man, but to the animal; to fire off the charge of energy taken win in the shape of food, by muscular exertion; to speak in plain language, to earn one's bread. Those who do not work should not eat, or they should earn as much as they have eaten. And when I clearly comprehended all this, it struck me as ridiculous. Through a whole series of doubts and searchings, I had arrived, by a long course of thought, at this remarkable truth: if a man has eyes, it is that he may see with them; if he has ears, that he may hear; and feet, that he may walk; and hands and back, that he may labor; and that if a man will not employ those members for that purpose for which they are intended, it will be the worse for him. I came to this conclusion, that, with us privileged people, the same thing has happened which happened with the horses of a friend of mine. His steward, who was not a lover of horses, nor well versed in them, on receiving his master's orders to place the best horses in the stable, selected them from the stud, placed them in stalls, and fed and watered them; but fearing for the valuable steeds, he could not bring himself to trust them to any one, and he neither rode nor drove them, nor did he even take them out. The horses stood there until they were good for nothing. The same thing has happened with us, but with this difference: that it was impossible to deceive the horses in any way, and they were kept in bonds to prevent their getting out; but we are kept in an unnatural position that is equally injurious to us, by deceits which have entangled us, and which hold us like chains. We have arranged for ourselves a life that is repugnant both to the moral and the physical nature of man, and all the powers of our intelligence we concentrate upon assuring man that this is the most natural life possible. Every thing which we call culture,--our sciences, art, and the perfection of the pleasant thing's of life,--all these are attempts to deceive the moral requirements of man; every thing that is called hygiene and medicine, is an attempt to deceive the natural physical demands of human nature. But these deceits have their bounds, and we advance to them. "If such be the real human life, then it is better not to live at all," says the reigning and extremely fashionable philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. If such is life, 'tis better for the coming generation not to live," say corrupt medical science and its newly devised means to that end. In the Bible, it is laid down as the law of man: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, and in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;" but "_nous avons change tout ca_," as Moliere's character says, when expressing himself with regard to medicine, and asserting that the liver was on the left side. We have changed all that. Men need not work in order to eat, and women need not bear children. A ragged peasant roams the Krapivensky district. During the war he was an agent for the purchase of grain, under an official of the commissary department. On being brought in contact with the official, and seeing his luxurious life, the peasant lost his mind, and thought that he might get along without work, like gentlemen, and receive proper support from the Emperor. This peasant now calls himself "the Most Serene Warrior, Prince Blokhin, purveyor of war supplies of all descriptions." He says of himself that he has "passed through all the ranks," and that when he shall have served out his term in the army, he is to receive from the Emperor an unlimited bank account, clothes, uniforms, horses, equipages, tea, pease and servants, and all sorts of luxuries. This man is ridiculous in the eyes of many, but to me the significance of his madness is terrible. To the question, whether he does not wish to work, he always replies proudly: "I am much obliged. The peasants will attend to all that." When you tell him that the peasants do not wish to work, either, he answers: "It is not difficult for the peasant." He generally talks in a high-flown style, and is fond of verbal substantives. "Now there is an invention of machinery for the alleviation of the peasants," he says; "there is no difficulty for them in that." When he is asked what he lives for, he replies, "To pass the time." I always look on this man as on a mirror. I behold in him myself and all my class. To pass through all the ranks (_tchini_) in order to live for the purpose of passing the time, and to receive an unlimited bank account, while the peasants, for whom this is not difficult, because of the invention of machinery, do the whole business,--this is the complete formula of the idiotic creed of the people of our sphere in society. When we inquire precisely what we are to do, surely, we ask nothing, but merely assert--only not in such good faith as the Most Serene Prince Blokhin, who has been promoted through all ranks, and lost his mind--that we do not wish to do any thing. He who will reflect for a moment cannot ask thus, because, on the one hand, every thing that he uses has been made, and is made, by the hands of men; and, on the other side, as soon as a healthy man has awakened and eaten, the necessity of working with feet and hands and brain makes itself felt. In order to find work and to work, he need only not hold back: only a person who thinks work disgraceful--like the lady who requests her guest not to take the trouble to open the door, but to wait until she can call a man for this purpose--can put to himself the question, what he is to do. The point does not lie in inventing work,--you can never get through all the work that is to be done for yourself and for others,--but the point lies in weaning one's self from that criminal view of life in accordance with which I eat and sleep for my own pleasure; and in appropriating to myself that just and simple view with which the laboring man grows up and lives,--that man is, first of all, a machine, which loads itself with food in order to sustain itself, and that it is therefore disgraceful, wrong, and impossible to eat and not to work; that to eat and not to work is the most impious, unnatural, and, therefore, dangerous position, in the nature of the sin of Sodom. Only let this acknowledgement be made, and there will be work; and work will always be joyous and satisfying to both spiritual and bodily requirements. The matter presented itself to me thus: The day is divided for every man, by food itself, into four parts, or four stints, as the peasants call it: (1) before breakfast; (2) from breakfast until dinner; (3) from dinner until four o'clock; (4) from four o'clock until evening. A man's employment, whatever it may be that he feels a need for in his own person, is also divided into four categories: (1) the muscular employment of power, labor of the hands, feet, shoulders, back,--hard labor, from which you sweat; (2) the employment of the fingers and wrists, the employment of artisan skill; (3) the employment of the mind and imagination; (4) the employment of intercourse with others. The benefits which man enjoys are also divided into four categories. Every man enjoys, in the first place, the product of hard labor,--grain, cattle, buildings, wells, ponds, and so forth; in the second place, the results of artisan toil,--clothes, boots, utensils, and so forth; in the third place, the products of mental activity,--science, art; and, in the forth place, established intercourse between people. And it struck me, that the best thing of all would be to arrange the occupations of the day in such a manner as to exercise all four of man's capacities, and myself produce all these four sorts of benefits which men make use of, so that one portion of the day, the first, should be dedicated to hard labor; the second, to intellectual labor; the third, to artisan labor; and the forth, to intercourse with people. It struck me, that only then would that false division of labor, which exists in our society, be abrogated, and that just division of labor established, which does not destroy man's happiness. I, for example, have busied myself all my life with intellectual labor. I said to myself, that I had so divided labor, that writing, that is to say, intellectual labor, is my special employment, and the other matters which were necessary to me I had left free (or relegated, rather) to others. But this, which would appear to have been the most advantageous arrangement for intellectual toil, was precisely the most disadvantageous to mental labor, not to mention its injustice. All my life long, I have regulated my whole life, food, sleep, diversion, in view of these hours of special labor, and I have done nothing except this work. The result of this has been, in the first place, that I have contracted my sphere of observations and knowledge, and have frequently had no means for the study even of problems which often presented themselves in describing the life of the people (for the life of the common people is the every-day problem of intellectual activity). I was conscious of my ignorance, and was obliged to obtain instruction, to ask about things which are known by every man not engaged in special labor. In the second place, the result was, that I had been in the habit of sitting down to write when I had no inward impulse to write, and when no one demanded from me writing, as writing, that is to say, my thoughts, but when my name was merely wanted for journalistic speculation. I tried to squeeze out of myself what I could. Sometimes I could extract nothing; sometimes it was very wretched stuff, and I was dissatisfied and grieved. But now that I have learned the indispensability of physical labor, both hard and artisan labor, the result is entirely different. My time has been occupied, however modestly, at least usefully and cheerfully, and in a manner instructive to me. And therefore I have torn myself from that indubitably useful and cheerful occupation for my special duties only when I felt an inward impulse, and when I saw a demand made upon me directly for my literary work. And these demands called into play only good nature, and therefore the usefulness and the joy of my special labor. Thus it turned out, that employment in those physical labors which are indispensable to me, as they are to every man, not only did not interfere with my special activity, but was an indispensable condition of the usefulness, worth, and cheerfulness of that activity. The bird is so constructed, that it is indispensable that it should fly, walk, peek, combine; and when it does all this, it is satisfied and happy,--then it is a bird. Just so man, when he walks, turns, raises, drags, works with his fingers, with his eyes, with his ears, with his tongue, with his brain,--only then is he satisfied, only then is he a man. A man who acknowledges his appointment to labor will naturally strive towards that rotation of labor which is peculiar to him, for the satisfaction of his inward requirements; and he can alter this labor in no other way than when he feels within himself an irresistible summons to some exclusive form of labor, and when the demands of other men for that labor are expressed. The character of labor is such, that the satisfaction of all a man's requirements demands that same succession of the sorts of work which renders work not a burden but a joy. Only a false creed, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], to the effect that labor is a curse, could have led men to rid themselves of certain kinds of work; i.e., to the appropriation of the work of others, demanding the forced occupation with special labor of other people, which they call division of labor. We have only grown used to our false comprehension of the regulation of labor, because it seems to us that the shoemaker, the machinist, the writer, or the musician will be better off if he gets rid of the labor peculiar to man. Where there is no force exercised over the labor of others, or any false belief in the joy of idleness, not a single man will get rid of physical labor, necessary for the satisfaction of his requirements, for the sake of special work; because special work is not a privilege, but a sacrifice which man offers to inward pressure and to his brethren. The shoemaker in the country, who abandons his wonted labor in the field, which is so grateful to him, and betakes himself to his trade, in order to repair or make boots for his neighbors, always deprives himself of the pleasant toil of the field, simply because he likes to make boots, because he knows that no one else can do it so well as he, and that people will be grateful to him for it; but the desire cannot occur to him, to deprive himself, for the whole period of his life, of the cheering rotation of labor. It is the same with the _starosta_ [village elder], the machinist, the writer, the learned man. To us, with our corrupt conception of things, it seems, that if a steward has been relegated to the position of a peasant by his master, or if a minister has been sent to the colonies, he has been chastised, he has been ill-treated. But in reality a benefit has been conferred on him; that is to say, his special, hard labor has been changed into a cheerful rotation of labor. In a naturally constituted society, this is quite otherwise. I know of one community where the people supported themselves. One of the members of this society was better educated than the rest; and they called upon him to read, so that he was obliged to prepare himself during the day, in order that he might read in the evening. This he did gladly, feeling that he was useful to others, and that he was performing a good deed. But he grew weary of exclusively intellectual work, and his health suffered from it. The members of the community took pity on him, and requested him to go to work in the fields. For men who regard labor as the substance and the joy of life, the basis, the foundation of life will always be the struggle with nature,--labor both agricultural and mechanical, and intellectual, and the establishment of communion between men. Departure from one or from many of these varieties of labor, and the adoption of special labor, will then only occur when the man possessed of a special branch, and loving this work, and knowing that he can perform it better than others, sacrifices his own profit for the satisfaction of the direct demands made upon him. Only on condition of such a view of labor, and of the natural division of labor arising from it, is that curse which is laid upon our idea of labor abrogated, and does every sort of work becomes always a joy; because a man will either perform that labor which is undoubtedly useful and joyous, and not dull, or he will possess the consciousness of self-abnegation in the fulfilment of more difficult and restricted toil, which he exercises for the good of others. But the division of labor is more profitable. More profitable for whom? It is more profitable in making the greatest possible quantity of calico, and boots in the shortest possible time. But who will make these boots and this calico? There are people who, for whole generations, make only the heads of pins. Then how can this be more profitable for men? If the point lies in manufacturing as much calico and as many pins as possible, then this is so. But the point concerns men and their welfare. And the welfare of men lies in life. And life is work. How, then, can the necessity for burdensome, oppressive toil be more profitable for people? For all men, that one thing is more profitable which I desire for myself,--the utmost well-being, and the gratification of all those requirements, both bodily and spiritual, of the conscience and of the reason, which are imposed upon me. And in my own case I have found, that for my own welfare, and for the satisfaction of these needs of mine, all that I require is to cure myself of that folly in which I had been living, in company with the Krapivensky madman, and which consisted in presupposing that some people need not work, and that certain other people should direct all this, and that I should therefore do only that which is natural to man, i.e., labor for the satisfaction of their requirements; and, having discovered this, I convinced myself that labor for the satisfaction of one's own needs falls of itself into various kinds of labor, each one of which possesses its own charm, and which not only do not constitute a burden, but which serve as a respite to one another. I have made a rough division of this labor (not insisting on the justice of this arrangement), in accordance with my own needs in life, into four parts, corresponding to the four stints of labor of which the day is composed; and I seek in this manner to satisfy my requirements. These, then, are the answers which I have found for myself to the question, "What is to be done?" _First_, Not to lie to myself, however far removed my path in life may be from the true path which my reason discloses to me. _Second_, To renounce my consciousness of my own righteousness, my superiority especially over other people; and to acknowledge my guilt. _Third_, To comply with that eternal and indubitable law of humanity,--the labor of my whole being, feeling no shame at any sort of work; to contend with nature for the maintenance of my own life and the lives of others. ON LABOR AND LUXURY. I concluded, after having said every thing that concerned myself; but I cannot refrain, from a desire to say something more which concerns everybody, from verifying the deductions which I have drawn, by comparisons. I wish to say why it seems to me that a very large number of our social class ought to come to the same thing to which I have come; and also to state what will be the result if a number of people should come to the same conclusion. I think that many will come to the point which I have attained: because if the people of our sphere, of our caste, will only take a serious look at themselves, then young persons, who are in search of personnel happiness, will stand aghast at the ever-increasing wretchedness of their life, which is plainly leading them to destruction; conscientious people will be shocked at the cruelty and the illegality of their life; and timid people will be terrified by the danger of their mode of life. _The Wretchedness of our Life_:--However much we rich people may reform, however much we may bolster up this delusive life of ours with the aid of our science and art, this life will become, with every year, both weaker and more diseased; with every year the number of suicides, and the refusals to bear children, will increase; with every year we shall feel the growing sadness of our life; with every generation, the new generations of people of this sphere of society will become more puny. It is obvious that in this path of the augmentation of the comforts and the pleasures of life, in the path of every sort of cure, and of artificial preparations for the improvements of the sight, the hearing, the appetite, false teeth, false hair, respiration, massage, and so on, there can be no salvation. That people who do not make use of these perfected preparations are stronger and healthier, has become such a truism, that advertisements are printed in the newspapers of stomach-powders for the wealthy, under the heading, "Blessings for the poor," {252} in which it is stated that only the poor are possessed of proper digestive powers, and that the rich require assistance, and, among other various sorts of assistance, these powders. It is impossible to set the matter right by any diversions, comforts, and powders, whatever; only a change of life can rectify it. _The Inconsistency of our Life with our Conscience_:--however we may seek to justify our betrayal of humanity to ourselves, all our justifications will crumble into dust in the presence of the evidence. All around us, people are dying of excessive labor and of privation; we ruin the labor of others, the food and clothing which are indispensable to them, merely with the object of procuring diversion and variety for our wearisome lives. And, therefore, the conscience of a man of our circle, if even a spark of it be left in him, cannot be lulled to sleep, and it poisons all these comforts and those pleasures of life which our brethren, suffering and perishing in their toil, procure for us. But not only does every conscientious man feel this himself,--he would be glad to forget it, but this he cannot do. The new, ephemeral justifications of science for science, of art for art, do not exclude the light of a simple, healthy judgment. The conscience of man cannot be quieted by fresh devices; and it can only be calmed by a change of life, for which and in which no justification will be required. Two causes prove to the people of the wealthy classes the necessity for a change of life: the requirements of their individual welfare, and of the welfare of those most nearly connected with them, which cannot be satisfied in the path in which they now stand; and the necessity of satisfying the voice of conscience, the impossibility of accomplishing which is obvious in their present course. These causes, taken together, should lead people of the wealthy classes to alter their mode of life, to such a change as shall satisfy their well-being and their conscience. And there is only one such change possible: they must cease to deceive, they must repent, they must acknowledge that labor is not a curse, but the glad business of life. "But what will be the result if I do toil for ten, or eight, or five hours at physical work, which thousands of peasants will gladly perform for the money which I possess?" people say to this. The first, simplest, and indubitable result will be, that you will become a more cheerful, a healthier, a more alert, and a better man, and that you will learn to know the real life, from which you have hidden yourself, or which has been hidden from you. The second result will be, that, if you possess a conscience, it will not only cease to suffer as it now suffers when it gazes upon the toil of others, the significance of which we, through ignorance, either always exaggerate or depreciate, but you will constantly experience a glad consciousness that, with every day, you are doing more and more to satisfy the demands of your conscience, and you will escape from that fearful position of such an accumulation of evil heaped upon your life that there exists no possibility of doing good to people; you will experience the joy of living in freedom, with the possibility of good; you will break a window,--an opening into the domain of the moral world which has been closed to you. "But this is absurd," people usually say to you, for people of our sphere, with profound problems standing before us,--problems philosophical, scientific, artistic, ecclesiastical and social. It would be absurd for us ministers, senators, academicians professors, artists, a quarter of an hour of whose time is so prized by people, to waste our time on any thing of that sort, would it not?--on the cleaning of our boots, the washing of our shirts, in hoeing, in planting potatoes, or in feeding our chickens and our cows, and so on; in those things which are gladly done for us, not only by our porter or our cook, but by thousands of people who value our time? But why should we dress ourselves, wash and comb our hair? why should we hand chairs to ladies, to guests? why should we open and shut doors, hand ladies, into carriages, and do a hundred other things which serfs formerly did for us? Because we think that it is necessary so to do; that human dignity demands it; that it is the duty, the obligation, of man. And the same is the case with physical labor. The dignity of man, his sacred duty and obligation, consists in using the hands and feet which have been given to him, for that for which they were given to him, and that which consumes food on the labor which produces that food; and that they should be used, not on that which shall cause them to pine away, not as objects to wash and clean, and merely for the purpose of stuffing into one's mouth food, drink, and cigarettes. This is the significance that physical labor possesses for man in every community; but in our community, where the avoidance of this law of labor has occasioned the unhappiness of a whole class of people, employment in physical labor acquires still another significance,--the significance of a sermon, and of an occupation which removes a terrible misfortune that is threatening mankind. To say that physical labor is an insignificant occupation for a man of education, is equivalent to saying, in connection with the erection of a temple: "What does it matter whether one stone is laid accurately in its place?" Surely, it is precisely under conditions of modesty, simplicity, and imperceptibleness, that every magnificent thing is accomplished; it is impossible to plough, to build, to pasture cattle, or even to think, amid glare, thunder, and illumination. Grand and genuine deeds are always simple and modest. And such is the grandest of all deeds which we have to deal with,--the reconciliation of those fearful contradictions amid which we are living. And the deeds which will reconcile these contradictions are those modest, imperceptible, apparently ridiculous ones, the serving one's self, physical labor for one's self, and, if possible, for others also, which we rich people must do, if we understand the wretchedness, the unscrupulousness, and the danger of the position into which we have drifted. What will be the result if I, or some other man, or a handful of men, do not despise physical labor, but regard it as indispensable to our happiness and to the appeasement of our conscience? This will be the result, that there will be one man, two men, or a handful of men, who, coming into conflict with no one, without governmental or revolutionary violence, will decide for ourselves the terrible question which stands before all the world, and which sets people at variance, and that we shall settle it in such wise that life will be better to them, that their conscience will be more at peace, and that they will have nothing to fear; the result will be, that other people will see that the happiness which they are seeking everywhere, lies there around them; that the apparently unreconcilable contradictions of conscience and of the constitution of this world will be reconciled in the easiest and most joyful manner; and that, instead of fearing the people who surround us, it will become necessary for us to draw near to them and to love them. The apparently insoluble economical and social problem is merely the problem of Kriloff's casket. {256} The casket will simply open. And it will not open, so long as people do not do simply that first and simple thing--open it. A man sets up what he imagines to be his own peculiar library, his own private picture-gallery, his own apartments and clothing, he accumulates his own money in order therewith to purchase every thing that he needs; and the end of it all is, that engaged with this fancied property of his, as though it were real, he utterly loses his sense of that which actually constitutes his property, on which he can really labor, which can really serve him, and which will always remain in his power, and of that which is not and cannot be his own property, whatever he may call it, and which cannot serve as the object of his occupation. Words always possess a clear significance until we deliberately attribute to them a false sense. What does property signify? Property signifies that which has been given to me, which belongs to me exclusively; that with which I can always do any thing I like; that which no one can take away from me; that which will remain mine to the end of my life, and precisely that which I am bound to use, increase, and improve. Now, there exists but one such piece of property for any man,--himself. Hence it results that half a score of men may till the soil, hew wood, and make shoes, not from necessity, but in consequence of an acknowledgment of the fact that man should work, and that the more he works the better it will be for him. It results, that half a score of men,--or even one man, may demonstrate to people, both by his confession and by his actions, that the terrible evil from which they are suffering is not a law of fate, the will of God, or any historical necessity; but that it is merely a superstition, which is not in the least powerful or terrible, but weak and insignificant, in which we must simply cease to believe, as in idols, in order to rid ourselves of it, and in order to rend it like a paltry spider's web. Men who will labor to fulfil the glad law of their existence, that is to say, those who work in order to fulfil the law of toil, will rid themselves of that frightful superstition of property for themselves. If the life of a man is filled with toil, and if he knows the delights of rest, he requires no chambers, furniture, and rich and varied clothing; he requires less costly food; he needs no means of locomotion, or of diversion. But the principal thing is, that the man who regards labor as the business and the joy of his life will not seek that relief from his labor which the labors of others might afford him. The man who regards life as a matter of labor will propose to himself as his object, in proportion as he acquires understanding, skill, and endurance, greater and greater toil, which shall constantly fill his life to a greater and greater degree. For such a man, who sees the meaning of his life in work itself, and not in its results, for the acquisition of property, there can be no question as to the implements of labor. Although such a man will always select the most suitable implements, that man will receive the same satisfaction from work and rest, when he employs the most unsuitable implements. If there be a steam-plough, he will use it; if there is none, he will till the soil with a horse-plough, and, if there is none, with a primitive curved bit of wood shod with iron, or he will use a rake; and, under all conditions, he will equally attain his object. He will pass his life in work that is useful to men, and he will therefore win complete satisfaction. And the position of such a man, both in his external and internal conditions, will be more happy than that of the man who devotes his life to the acquisition of property. Such a man will never suffer need in his outward circumstances, because people, perceiving his desire to work, will always try to provide him with the most productive work, as they proportion a mill to the water-power. And they will render his material existence free from care, which they will not do for people who are striving to acquire property. And freedom from anxiety in his material conditions is all that a man needs. Such a man will always be happier in his internal conditions, than the one who seeks wealth, because the first will never gain that which he is striving for, while the latter always will, in proportion to his powers. The feeble, the aged, the dying, according to the proverb, "With the written absolution in his hands," will receive full satisfaction, and the love and sympathy of men. What, then, will be the outcome of a few eccentric individuals, or madmen, tilling the soil, making shoes, and so on, instead of smoking cigarettes, playing whist, and roaming about everywhere to relieve their tedium, during the space of the ten leisure hours a day which every intellectual worker enjoys? This will be the outcome: that these madmen will show in action, that that imaginary property for which men suffer, and for which they torment themselves and others, is not necessary for happiness; that it is oppressive, and that it is mere superstition; that property, true property, consists only in one's own head and hands; and that, in order to actually exploit this real property with profit and pleasure, it is necessary to reject the false conception of property outside one's own body, upon which we expend the best efforts of our lives. The outcome us, that these men will show, that only when a man ceases to believe in imaginary property, only when he brings into play his real property, his capacities, his body, so that they will yield him fruit a hundred-fold, and happiness of which we have no idea,--only then will he be so strong, useful, and good a man, that, wherever you may fling him, he will always land on his feet; that he will everywhere and always be a brother to everybody; that he will be intelligible to everybody, and necessary, and good. And men looking on one, on ten such madmen, will understand what they must all do in order to loose that terrible knot in which the superstition regarding property has entangled them, in order to free themselves from the unfortunate position in which they are all now groaning with one voice, not knowing whence to find an issue from it. But what can one man do amid a throng which does not agree with him? There is no argument which could more clearly demonstrate the terror of those who make use of it than this. The _burlaki_ {260} drag their bark against the current. There cannot be found a _burlak_ so stupid that he will refuse to pull away at his towing-rope because he alone is not able to drag the bark against the current. He who, in addition to his rights to an animal life, to eat and sleep, recognizes any sort of human obligation, knows very well in what that human obligation lies, just as the boatman knows it when the tow-rope is attached to him. The boatman knows very well that all he has to do is to pull at the rope, and proceed in the given direction. He will seek what he is to do, and how he is to do it, only when the tow-rope is removed from him. And as it is with these boatmen and with all people who perform ordinary work, so it is with the affairs of all humanity. All that each man needs is not to remove the tow-rope, but to pull away on it in the direction which his master orders. And, for this purpose, one sort of reason is bestowed on all men, in order that the direction may be always the same. And this direction has obviously been so plainly indicated, that both in the life of all the people about us, and in the conscience of each individual man, only he who does not wish to work can say that he does not see it. Then, what is the outcome of this? This: that one, perhaps two men, will pull; a third will look on, and will join them; and in this manner the best people will unite until the affair begins to start, and make progress, as though itself inspiring and bidding thereto even those who do not understand what is being done, and why it is being done. First, to the contingent of men who are consciously laboring in order to comply with the law of God, there will be added the people who only half understand and who only half confess the faith; then a still greater number of people who admit the same doctrine will join them, merely on the faith of the originators; and finally the majority of mankind will recognize this, and then it will come to pass, that men will cease to ruin themselves, and will find happiness. This will happen,--and it will be very speedily,--when people of our set, and after them a vast majority, shall cease to think it disgraceful to pay visits in untanned boots, and not disgraceful to walk in overshoes past people who have no shoes at all; that it is disgraceful not to understand French, and not disgraceful to eat bread and not to know how to set it; that it is disgraceful not to have a starched shirt and clean clothes, and not disgraceful to go about in clean garments thereby showing one's idleness; that it is disgraceful to have dirty hands, and not disgraceful not to have hands with callouses. All this will come to pass when the sense of the community shall demand it. But the sense of the community will demand this when those delusions in the imagination of men, which have concealed the truth from them, shall have been abolished. Within my own recollection, great changes have taken place in this respect. And these changes have taken place only because the general opinion has undergone an alteration. Within my memory, it has come to pass, that whereas it used to be disgraceful for wealthy people not to drive out with four horses and two footmen, and not to keep a valet or a maid to dress them, wash them, put on their shoes, and so forth; it has now suddenly become discreditable for one not to put on one's own clothes and shoes for one's self, and to drive with footmen. Public opinion has effected all these changes. Are not the changes which public opinion is now preparing clear? All that was necessary five and twenty years ago was to abolish the delusion which justified the right of serfdom, and public opinion as to what was praiseworthy and what was discreditable changed, and life changed also. All that is now requisite is to annihilate the delusion which justifies the power of money over men, and public opinion will undergo a change as to what is creditable and what is disgraceful, and life will be changed also; and the annihilation of the delusion, of the justification of the moneyed power, and the change in public opinion in this respect, will be promptly accomplished. This delusion is already flickering, and the truth will very shortly be disclosed. All that is required is to gaze steadfastly, in order to perceive clearly that change in public opinion which has already taken place, and which is simply not recognized, not fitted with a word. The educated man of our day has but to reflect ever so little on what will be the outcome of those views of the world which he professes, in order to convince himself that the estimate of good and bad, by which, by virtue of his inertia, he is guided in life, directly contradict his views of the world. All that the man of our century has to do is to break away for a moment from the life which runs on by force of inertia, to survey it from the one side, and subject it to that same standard which arises from his whole view of the world, in order to be horrified at the definition of his whole life, which follows from his views of the world. Let us take, for instance, a young man (the energy of life is greater in the young, and self-consciousness is more obscured). Let us take, for instance, a young man belonging to the wealthy classes, whatever his tendencies may chance to be. Every good young man considers it disgraceful not to help an old man, a child, or a woman; he thinks, in a general way, that it is a shame to subject the life or health of another person to danger, or to shun it himself. Every one considers that shameful and brutal which Schuyler relates of the Kirghiz in times of tempest,--to send out the women and the aged females to hold fast the corners of the _kibitka_ [tent] during the storm, while they themselves continue to sit within the tent, over their _kumis_ [fermented mare's-milk]. Every one thinks it shameful to make a week man work for one; that it is still more disgraceful in time of danger--on a burning ship, for example,--being strong, to be the first to seat one's self in the lifeboat,--to thrust aside the weak and leave them in danger, and so on. All men regard this as disgraceful, and would not do it upon any account, in certain exceptional circumstances; but in every-day life, the very same actions, and others still worse, are concealed from them by delusions, and they perpetrate them incessantly. The establishment of this new view of life is the business of public opinion. Public opinion, supporting such a view, will speedily be formed. Women form public opinion, and women are especially powerful in our day. TO WOMEN. As stated in the Bible, a law was given to the man and the woman,--to the man, the law of labor; to the woman, the law of bearing children. Although we, with our science, _avons change tout ca_, the law for the man, as for woman, remains as unalterable as the liver in its place, and departure from it is equally punished with inevitable death. The only difference lies in this, that departure from the law, in the case of the man, is punished so immediately in the future, that it may be designated as present punishment; but departure from the law, in the case of the woman, receives its chastisement in a more distant future. The general departure of all men from the law exterminates people immediately; the departure from it of all women annihilates it in the succeeding generation. But the evasion by some men and some women does not exterminate the human race, and only deprives those who evade it of the rational nature of man. The departure of men from this law began long ago, among those classes who were in a position to subject others, and, constantly spreading, it has continued down to our own times; and in our own day it has reached folly, the ideal consisting in evasion of the law,--the ideal expressed by Prince Blokhin, and shared in by Renan and by the whole cultivated world: "Machines will work, and people will be bundles of nerves devoted to enjoyment." There was hardly any departure from the law in the part of women, it was expressed only in prostitution, and in the refusal to bear children--in private cases. The women belonging to the wealthy classes fulfilled their law, while the men did not comply with theirs; and therefore the women became stronger, and continued to rule, and must rule, over men who have evaded the law, and who have, therefore, lost their senses. It is generally stated that woman (the woman of Paris in particular is childless) has become so bewitching, through making use of all the means of civilization, that she has gained the upper hand over man by this fascination of hers. This is not only unjust, but precisely the reverse of the truth. It is not the childless woman who has conquered man, but the mother, that woman who has fulfilled her law, while the man has not fulfilled his. That woman who deliberately remains childless, and who entrances man with her shoulders and her locks, is not the woman who rules over men, but the one who has been corrupted by man, who has descended to his level,--to the level of the vicious man,--who has evaded the law equally with himself, and who has lost, in company with him, every rational idea of life. From this error springs that remarkable piece of stupidity which is called the rights of women. The formula of these rights of women is as follows: "Here! you man," says the woman, "you have departed from your law of real labor, and you want us to bear the burden of our real labor. No, if this is to be so, we understand, as well as you do, how to perform those semblances of labor which you exercise in banks, ministries, universities, and academies; we desire, like yourselves, under the pretext of the division of labor, to make use of the labor of others, and to live for the gratification of our caprices alone." They say this, and prove by their action that they understand no worse, if not better, than men, how to exercise this semblance of labor. This so-called woman question has come up, and could only come up, among men who have departed from the law of actual labor. All that is required is, to return to that, and this question cannot exist. Woman, having her own inevitable task, will never demand the right to share the toil of men in the mines and in the fields. She could only demand to share in the fictitious labors of the men of the wealthy classes. The woman of our circle has been, and still is, stronger than the man, not by virtue of her fascinations, not through her cleverness in performing the same pharisaical semblance of work as man, but because she has not stepped out from under the law that she should undergo that real labor, with danger to her life, with exertion to the last degree, from which the man of the wealthy classes has excused herself. But, within my memory, a departure from this law on the part of woman, that is to say, her fall, has begun; and, within my memory, it has become more and more the case. Woman, having lost the law, has acquired the belief that her strength lies in the witchery of her charms, or in her skill in pharisaical pretences at intellectual work. And both things are bad for the children. And, within my memory, women of the wealthy classes have come to refuse to bear children. And so mothers who hold the power in their hands let it escape them, in order to make way for the dissolute women, and to put themselves on a level with them. The evil is already wide-spread, and is extending farther and farther every day; and soon it will lay hold on all the women of the wealthy classes, and then they will compare themselves with men: and in company with them, they will lose the rational meaning of life. But there is still time. If women would but comprehend their destiny, their power, and use it for the salvation of their husbands, brothers, and children,--for the salvation of all men! Women of the wealthy classes who are mothers, the salvation of the men of our world from the evils from which they are suffering, lies in your hands. Not those women who are occupied with their dainty figures, with their bustles, their hair-dressing, and their attraction for men, and who bear children against their will, with despair, and hand them over to nurses; nor those who attend various courses of lectures, and discourse of psychometric centres and differentiation, and who also endeavor to escape bearing children, in order that it may not interfere with their folly which they call culture: but those women and mothers, who, possessing the power to refuse to bear children, consciously and in a straightforward way submit to this eternal, unchangeable law, knowing that the burden and the difficulty of such submission is their appointed lot in life,--these are the women and mothers of our wealthy classes, in whose hands, more than in those of any one else, lies the salvation of the men of our sphere in society from the miseries that oppress them. Ye women and mothers who deliberately submit yourselves to the law of God, you alone in our wretched, deformed circle, which has lost the semblance of humanity, you alone know the whole of the real meaning of life, according to the law of God; and you alone, by your example, can demonstrate to people that happiness in life, in submission to the will of God, of which they are depriving themselves. You alone know those raptures and those joys which invade the whole being, that bliss which is appointed for the man who does not depart from the law of God. You know the happiness of love for your husbands,--a happiness which does not come to an end, which does not break off short, like all other forms of happiness, and which constitutes the beginning of a new happiness,--of love for your child. You alone, when you are simple and obedient to the will of God, know not that farcical pretence of labor which the men of our circle call work, and know that the labor imposed by God on men, and know its true rewards, the bliss which it confers. You know this, when, after the raptures of love, you await with emotion, fear, and terror that torturing state of pregnancy which renders you ailing for nine months, which brings you to the verge of death, and to intolerable suffering and pain. You know the conditions of true labor, when, with joy, you await the approach and the increase of the most terrible torture, after which to you alone comes the bliss which you well know. You know this, when, immediately after this torture, without respite, without a break, you undertake another series of toils and sufferings,--nursing,--in which process you at one and the same time deny yourselves, and subdue to your feelings the very strongest human need, that of sleep, which, as the proverb says, is dearer than father or mother; and for months and years you never get a single sound, unbroken might's rest, and sometimes, nay, often, you do not sleep at all for a period of several nights in succession, but with failing arms you walk alone, punishing the sick child who is breaking your heart. And when you do all this, applauded by no one, and expecting no praises for it from any one, nor any reward,--when you do this, not as an heroic deed, but like the laborer in the Gospel when he came from the field, considering that you have done only that which was your duty, then you know what the false, pretentious labor of men performed for glory really is, and that true labor is fulfilling the will of God, whose command you feel in your heart. You know that if you are a true mother it makes no difference that no one has seen your toil, that no one has praised you for it, but that it has only been looked upon as what must needs be so, and that even those for whom your have labored not only do not thank you, but often torture and reproach you. And with the next child you do the same: again you suffer, again you undergo the fearful, invisible labor; and again you expect no reward from any one, and yet you feel the sane satisfaction. If you are like this, you will not say after two children, or after twenty, that you have done enough, just as the laboring man fifty years of age will not say that he has worked enough, while he still continues to eat and to sleep, and while his muscles still demand work; if you are like this, your will not cast the task of nursing and care-taking upon some other mother, just as a laboring man will not give another man the work which he has begun, and almost completed, to finish: because into this work you will throw your life. And therefore the more there is of this work, the fuller and the happier is your life. And when you are like this, for the good fortune of men, you will apply that law of fulfilling God's will, by which you guide your life, to the lives of your husband, of your children, and of those most nearly connected with you. If your are like this, and know from your own experience, that only self-sacrificing, unseen, unrewarded labor, accompanied with danger to life and to the extreme bounds of endurance, for the lives of others, is the appointed lot of man, which affords him satisfaction, then you will announce these demands to others; you will urge your husband to the same toil; and you will measure and value the dignity of men acceding to this toil; and for this toil you will also prepare your children. Only that mother who looks upon children as a disagreeable accident, and upon love, the comforts of life, costume, and society, as the object of life, will rear her children in such a manner that they shall have as much enjoyment as possible out of life, and that they shall make the greatest possible use of it; only she will feed them luxuriously, deck them out, amuse them artificially; only she will teach them, not that which will fit them for self-sacrificing masculine or feminine labor with danger of their lives, and to the last limits of endurance, but that which will deliver them from this labor. Only such a woman, who has lost the meaning of her life, will sympathize with that delusive and false male labor, by means of which her husband, having rid himself of the obligations of a man, is enabled to enjoy, in her company, the work of others. Only such a woman will choose a similar man for the husband of her daughter, and will estimate men, not by what they are personally, but by that which is connected with them,--position, money, or their ability to take advantage of the labor of others. But the true mother, who actually knows the will of God, will fit her children to fulfil it also. For such a mother, to see her child overfed, enervated, decked out, will mean suffering; for all this, as she well knows, will render difficult for him the fulfilment of the law of God in which she has instructed him. Such a mother will teach, not that which will enable her son and her daughter to rid themselves of labor, but that which will help them to endure the toils of life. She will have no need to inquire what she shall teach her children, for what she shall prepare them. Such a woman will not only not encourage her husband to false and delusive labor, which has but one object, that of using the labors of others; but she will bear herself with disgust and horror towards such an employment, which serves as a double temptation to her children. Such a woman will not choose a husband for her daughter on account of the whiteness of his hands and the refinement of manner; but, well aware that labor and deceit will exist always and everywhere, she will, beginning with her husband, respect and value in men, and will require from them, real labor, with expenditure and risk of life, and she will despise that deceptive labor which has for its object the ridding one's self of all true toil. Such a mother, who brings forth children and nurses them, and will herself, rather than any other, feed her offspring and prepare their food, and sew, and wash, and teach her children, and sleep and talk with them, because in this she grounds the business of her life,--only such a mother will not seek for her children external guaranties in the form of her husband's money, and the children's diplomas; but she will rear them to that same capacity for the self-sacrificing fulfilment of the will of God which she is conscious of herself possessing,--a capacity for enduring toil with expenditure and risk of life,--because she knows that in this lies the sole guaranty, and the only well-being in life. Such a mother will not ask other people what she ought to do; she will know every thing, and will fear nothing. If there can exist any doubt for the man and for the childless woman, as to the path in which the fulfilment of the will of God lies, this path is firmly and clearly defined for the woman who is a mother; and if she has complied with it in submissiveness and in simplicity of spirit, she, standing on that loftiest height of bliss which the human being is permitted to attain, will become a guiding-star for all men who are seeking good. Only the mother can calmly say before her death, to Him who sent her into this world, and to Him whom she has served by bearing and rearing children more dear than herself,--only she can say calmly, having served Him who has imposed this service upon her: "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." And this is the highest perfection, towards which, as towards the highest bliss, men are striving. Such are the women, who, having fulfilled their destiny, reign over powerful men; such are the women who prepare the new generations of people, and fix public opinion: and, therefore, in the hands of these women lies the highest power of saving men from the prevailing and threatening evils of our times. Yes, ye women and mothers, in your hands, more than in those of all others, lies the salvation of the world! Footnotes: {21a} The fine, tall members of a regiment, selected and placed together to form a showy squad. {21b} [] Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition printed in Russia, in the set of Count Tolstoi's works. {24a} Reaumur. {24b} A drink made of water, honey, and laurel or salvia leaves, which is drunk as tea, especially by the poorer classes. {28} [] Omitted by the censor from the authorized edition published in Russia in the set of count Tolstoi's works. The omission is indicated thus . . . {39} _Kalatch_, a kind of roll: _baranki_, cracknels of fine flour. {59} An _arshin_ is twenty-eight inches. {60} A _myeshchanin_, or citizen, who pays only poll-tax and not a guild tax. {62} Omitted in authorized edition. {66} Omitted by the censor in the authorized edition. {94} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {96} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {99} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {108} Omitted by the Censor from the authorized edition. {111} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {113} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition {116} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {122a} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {122b} A very complicated sort of whist. {124} The whole of this chapter is omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition, and is there represented by the following sentence: "And I felt that in money, in money itself, in the possession of it, there was something immoral; and I asked myself, What is money?" {135} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {138} Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition. {139} The above passage is omitted in the authorized edition, and the following is added: "I came to the simple and natural conclusion, that, if I pity the tortured horse upon which I am riding, the first thing for me to do is to alight, and to walk on my own feet." {140} Omitted in the authorized edition. {142} Omitted in the authorized edition. {152a} "Into a worse state," in the authorized edition. {152b} Omitted in the authorized edition. {154} Omitted in the authorized edition. {155} Reaumur. {158} In the Moscow edition (authorized by the Censor), the concluding paragraph is replaced by the following:--"They say: The action of a single man is but a drop in the sea. A drop in the sea! "There is an Indian legend relating how a man dropped a pearl into the sea, and in order to recover it he took a bucket, and began to bail out, and to pour the water on the shore. Thus he toiled without intermission, and on the seventh day the spirit of the sea grew alarmed lest the man should dip the sea dry, and so he brought him his pearl. If our social evil of persecuting man were the sea, then that pearl which we have lost is equivalent to devoting our lives to bailing out the sea of that evil. The prince of this world will take fright, he will succumb more promptly than did the spirit of the sea; but this social evil is not the sea, but a foul cesspool, which we assiduously fill with our own uncleanness. All that is required is for us to come to our senses, and to comprehend what we are doing; to fall out of love with our own uncleanness,--in order that that imaginary sea should dry away, and that we should come into possession of that priceless pearl,--fraternal, humane life." {161a} An arshin is twenty-eight inches. {161b} The fast extends from the 5th to the 30th of June, O.S. (June 27 to July 12, N.S.) {165} A pood is thirty-six pounds. {167} Robinson Crusoe. {168} Here something has been omitted by the Censor, which I am unable to supply.--TRANS. {169} An omission by the censor, which I am unable to supply. TRANS. {178} We designate as organisms the elephant and the bacterian, only because we assume by analogy in those creatures the same conjunction of feeling and consciousness that we know to exist in ourselves. But in human societies and in humanity, this actual sign is absent; and therefore, however many other signs we may discover in humanity and in organism, without this substantial token the recognition of humanity as an organism is incorrect. {238} _v prikusku_, when a lump of sugar is held in the teeth instead or being put into the tea. {252} In English in the text. {256} An excellent translation of Kriloff's Fables, by Mr. W. R. S. Ralston, is published in London. {260} _Burlak_, pl. _burlaki_, is a boatman on the River Volga. 
46029	----	VOL. XXI JANUARY 2, 1909 NO. 14 CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY [Illustration] A JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTIVE PHILANTHROPY PUBLISHED BY THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK ROBERT W. DEFOREST, President; OTTO T. BANNARD, Vice-President; J. P. MORGAN, Treasurer; EDWARD T. DEVINE, General Secretary 105 EAST TWENTY-SECOND STREET, NEW YORK 174 ADAMS STREET, CHICAGO THIS ISSUE TWENTY-FIVE CENTS TWO DOLLARS A YEAR ENTERED AT THE POST OFFICE, NEW YORK, AS SECOND CLASS MATTER Telephones { 1646 } Stuyvesant { 1647 } ==Millard & Company Stationers and Printers 12 East 16th Street== (Bet. Fifth Ave. & Union Square) ==New York== ENGRAVING LITHOGRAPHING BLANK BOOK MAKING CATALOG AND PAMPHLET WORK AT REASONABLE PRICES * * * * * =We can print your Book as easily as though you were in our own city= =Books and Reports ARE OUR SPECIALTY= ¶ Let us have your manuscript or full information and we will send you an estimate and samples of our work. =WM. F. FELL CO. PRINTERS 1220-24 SANSOM STREET PHILADELPHIA= * * * * * ==The.... Sheltering Arms= =William R. Peters .... President= 92 WILLIAM STREET =Herman C. Von Post ... Secretary= 32 WEST 57TH STREET =Charles W. Maury .... Treasurer= 504 WEST 129TH STREET * * * * * OBJECTS OF THE ASSOCIATION= "THE SHELTERING ARMS" was opened October 6th, 1864, and receives children between six and ten years of age, for whom no other institution provides. Children placed at "THE SHELTERING ARMS" are not surrendered to the Institution, but are held subject to the order of parents or guardians. The children attend the neighboring public school. The older boys and girls are trained to household and other work. * * * * * Application for admission should be addressed to MISS RICHMOND, at "THE SHELTERING ARMS," 129th Street, corner Amsterdam Avenue. * * * * * =SPECIAL SALE= * * * * * During JANUARY and FEBRUARY we offer you your choice of all $19.00, $20.00, $22.00, $23.00 or $25.00 SUITINGS or OVERCOATINGS TO ORDER AT $18.00 and all $27.00, $28.00, $30.00, $32.00 or $35.00 SUITINGS or OVERCOATINGS TO ORDER AT $25.00 All prices marked in plain figures. =DEVINE & CO.= Formerly DEVINE & RONAN =150 Nassau Street= ROOMS 1611, 1612, 1613. * * * * * Please mention CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS when writing to advertisers. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ AS MEN SEE AMERICA. I. THE FIRST OF THREE FRONTISPIECES.] THE COMMON WELFARE EVERY CITY NEEDS A CITY PLAN NOW The congestion exhibit in New York last spring proved one of the most effective and startling means of making a contented community sit up and think about its "other half." It formulated questions half formed in many minds and demanded answers. Its influence was felt over the whole country, and its discussions have bobbed up here and there and everywhere ever since in articles, conferences and addresses. That the congestion exhibit answered questions as well as asked them, and that it has a constructive program to offer not only to New York but to the whole country are amply proved by the decision just reached, and announced to-day for the first time, to hold an exhibit and conference of city planning next March. "Every American city needs a city plan now," is the conclusion of the committee, and the steps by which it has arrived at this conclusion are interestingly set forth in its announcement. While the organization bears the name of the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York, its scope and purpose are much wider. The program approved by its executive committee is "to obtain a plan for the development of Greater New York, and other American cities, along economic, hygienic and aesthetic lines; and to promote the better distribution of population throughout city, state and nation." To establish the need for such a program, the committee offers as "admitted facts" the following: Many American cities with a population of over 50,000 have congestion of population, factories and offices; such congestion creates problems for which we cannot find solutions; no city should use all the land within its boundaries as intensively as is necessary in its most congested areas,--to do so perpetuates congestion; no American city yet has a legal right to prescribe the height and use of buildings in its various sections; no city can develop normally without a plan which anticipates its growth for twenty-five or fifty years. As a means of stimulating consideration of the subject and of promoting farsighted planning for the future, the committee has adopted as its slogan the statement, "Every American city needs a city plan now." It will show, it announces, the cost of the lack of a city plan in New York, the city planning which has been done in some American and foreign cities, and the pressing need for a city plan in New York to-day. The conference on city planning in March will include an exhibit of the best developments from all over the world. Both exhibit and conference will be keyed up to two major considerations: "the concentration of one-half the population of a great state in one city makes the problem of statewide importance; the concentration of one-nineteenth of a nation's population in one city gives the problem national bearing." There will be study of the best methods for distribution of population, for promoting feasible methods of locating factories and industrial colonies, and an educational campaign to show the advantages of migration from congested centers. EMPLOYERS PAY FOR SANATORIUM CARE Massachusetts, almost invariably a leader in preventive measures, is developing this year a most unique and promising kind of co-operative effort in the prevention of tuberculosis. Massachusetts was the first state to organize a board of health, dating from 1869. It was the first state to choose its factory inspectors from the medical profession, this dating from 1906, and out of these two farsighted provisions of the law has grown during the past two months a plan by which manufacturers are assuming a part of the financial burden in seeing to it that operatives in their factories, found to have tuberculosis in the incipient stage, are sent to the Rutland Sanatorium and given the best possible opportunity for cure. The plan originated in Worcester which, with a string of neighboring towns and villages, forms one of the sixteen inspection districts into which the state is divided. As a result of the activity of Dr. M. G. Overlock, the state inspector of health in charge, seventy manufacturing plants, employing more than 20,000 hands, have followed the example of David H. Fanning, president of the Royal Worcester Corset Company, in agreeing to pay a part of the maintenance cost of any of their employes sent to Rutland. The cost in the sanatorium is nine dollars a week. Of this the state pays five dollars and the company four dollars. The term usually agreed upon is three months. At the end of that time, a large number of the cases have been so far restored that they can be taken to nearby, supervised boarding houses and farms and make room for new patients,--a plan hit upon to relieve the great pressure upon this institution which accepts only incipient cases. The employer continues his contribution. The boarding houses, conducted along approved lines, have sprung up all over the surrounding hills much as they have at Saranac Lake in New York. The factory inspection has been keyed up to take the greatest possible advantage of the co-operation of employers. Frequent visits are made to all plants, but to those in which the work rooms are full of dust, or where there are other conditions favoring tuberculosis, Dr. Overlock makes a visit once a month. All minors on the working staff are taken before him, and required to furnish a full family history. If there has been tuberculosis in the family, even remote, a medical examination is at once made. The others are examined more superficially, but the least trace of suspicious symptoms is at once seized upon as cause for an examination. In this way, it is believed, incipient cases among minors will be caught in their earliest stages. The system will later be extended to adults. An extension of the plan to secure the interest and help of employers has begun in some other inspection districts, and will eventually be introduced throughout the state. But the carefully laid plans to detect and ward off incipient cases comprise only one part of the Massachusetts plan to fight tuberculosis. In May three homes for advanced cases will be opened, and the development of the plan calls for additional homes, scattered through the state, until it shall have made complete provision for all cases, early or advanced. In view of the almost unanimously expressed opinion at the recent International Tuberculosis Congress, that the strategic point of attack in the campaign is in isolating advanced cases, the provision of these homes is, perhaps, the most important plank in the Massachusetts health platform. Governor Guild is much interested in the whole plan. In a recent letter to Dr. Overlock he wrote: "It has been a great pleasure for me to inaugurate the new policy of the commonwealth of provision for all cases of tuberculosis, not merely as at present the care of the curable, but the care of the incurable as well." SALARY LOANS IN CINCINNATI The business of lending money on salaries and wages has received a practical knockout blow in Cincinnati through the _Commercial Tribune_, which instituted the crusade, with the co-operation of the officials of the city and of various private organizations. Aided by an ordinance which orders the licensing of salary loan offices and which makes a weekly report to the city auditor necessary, the campaigners have already been able to put one office out of business entirely, and to sew up all the others in the courts in such a way that it now seems very likely that most of these will retire rather than face the storm which awaits them. D. H. Tolman is more deeply involved in Cincinnati than he has ever been before. His son, E. E. Tolman, who is said to be connected with the business of his father, is under arrest and is now waiting a hearing in the police court. His manager has been arrested and convicted on three counts. Although these cases have been appealed to a higher court, an application for an order to restrain the further interference with the Tolman business has thus far been refused. D. H. Tolman has ordered his manager in Cincinnati to refuse to comply with the ordinance and unless the courts do issue this order the manager will be arrested every week. The _Commercial Tribune_ has secured all of the Tolman forms from a former manager. These have all been printed together with a letter from the ex-manager in which the latter makes a complete exposé of the methods pursued behind the doors of one of his offices. The auditor of Cincinnati has declared his purpose of keeping up the fight. He has forced ten salary loan offices to pay a license fee and to comply with the provisions of the local ordinance. Agents have been permanently employed by the official to watch the loan offices and to ferret out any new agents who may attempt to operate secretly. The Legal Aid Society which was recently formed to advise the poor, has made it its business to impress upon all who seek its meetings the futility of borrowing money from the salary loan people and has furnished a list of the companies which are classified as "loan sharks," to every man and woman whom it could reach. In this way people who never read the newspapers are given information which they otherwise would probably never receive. The Legal Aid Society is also at work on a code of laws which will be submitted to the General Assembly at its coming session and which it is hoped will solve the question of loaning money on salaries and chattels in Ohio for all time. The attorneys of the society promise a law which will set a fixed rate, which will include interest and expenses, on all such loans. It is said now that this rate will be either three or four per cent. The contemplated law will also contain a provision which will make the recovery of usury possible. It is further planned to have a provision in the law similar to the Massachusetts statute, requiring the signatures of the wife, when a borrower is married, and of his employer. Some of the best attorneys in Cincinnati including former Prosecuting Attorney Benton Oppenheimer, are at work on these laws. Another movement now on foot is the founding of a salary loan office on the same basis as several chattel loan offices which are now operating in the country, whose stockholders are philanthropists and men of wealth. Cincinnati has such a chattel loan company and the men who are now fighting the salary loan business there are urging the stockholders of this company to take up the other work. The most gratifying thing of the Cincinnati campaign has been the falling off of business in the loan offices. The companies admit this and one broker left for Florida after explaining that his business had decreased seventy-five per cent during the campaign. FOR A COURT OF DOMESTIC RELATIONS One of the interesting bills to be brought before the 1909 session of the New York Legislature is that drawn by Bernhard Rabbino, relating to a special domestic relations court. Mr. Rabbino believes that if we have courts for the purpose of divorce, for separating mothers from children and children from fathers, we should have a separate tribunal to which families in discord could appeal. There are probably from 12,000 to 15,000 domestic trouble cases handled yearly in Manhattan and the Bronx alone, but as no records are kept of summons cases,--and these come under that head,--it is not possible to compute the exact number. Probably it is greater than the number of cases handled by the children's court, and a domestic relations court is justified by Mr. Rabbino, additionally, on the ground that it precedes the children's court, having for its fundamental purpose the preservation of the family as a unit, with an opportunity for fathers and mothers to secure the same expert and individual attention that is given to the children. Domestic affairs are admittedly out of place in a general police court. The unfortunate participants are not in any sense criminals, and yet they are surrounded by thieves, pickpockets, drunkards, disorderly persons,--the regular rabble of the criminal court,--and an outraged self-respect is the consequence of such treatment. The present organization of magistrates' courts contemplates that the magistrate shall sit one-half of the day on the bench and the other half shall be in chambers for the settlement of just such cases as Mr. Rabbino would bring before the domestic relations court. As a matter of practice, however, so congested are the courts and so pressing their work, that there is no time for this personal consideration which the law contemplates. The magistrate does what he can in the face of tremendous difficulties, but he has not the time to investigate these cases, and without proper attention there can be no adjustment of them. Divorce and separation are the natural results. The idea of such a court would be to prevent litigation as a whole and particularly to safeguard the homes of the poor, for the poor are those who are obliged to resort to police courts. The better-off take their affairs to the Supreme Court. It is very possible that these lower courts might develop into something higher, and many matrimonial difficulties which now cause a permanent rupture of relations be peaceably adjusted with judicial assistance. Such a court might also have a marked effect on juvenile crime, for any force that makes for better home conditions is preventive of crime. The bill requires also that the court of domestic relations have exclusive jurisdiction over all cases of abandonment, non-support, and the non-support of poor relatives as provided by law. The bill as drawn would make this domestic relations court part of the city magistrates' courts, on the lines of the children's courts now being generally established throughout the country. The idea, however, would be to have a special court altogether, and if successful, this would probably be done. The introduction of this bill in the Legislature may bring to sharp discussion the whole question of division of jurisdiction in the city courts. The present established principle is that such courts should be divided geographically, covering a certain borough or section of a borough. The children's court differs radically from this and introduces a functional division. It is an open question whether, with the police courts crowded as they are, such a functional division has not become necessary for more cases than those of delinquent children,--whether the separation of special kinds of cases into children's courts and into courts of domestic relations will not prove more effective than a further division of territory. THE YEAR IN MUNICIPAL EVENTS A review of municipal events and tendencies for the past year, which might be the title of Clinton Rogers Woodruff's report as secretary of the National Municipal League, centers around efficiency and honesty in government as a result of clear accounting systems and understandable statistics; wide-spread efforts at charter revision; a constantly growing sentiment for nomination reform; and a militant desire, evident in many sections, to tackle the problems which have grown up around the saloon in politics. The Massachusetts Bureau of Municipal Statistics, the first of its kind, has already resulted, Mr. Woodruff believes, in a number of cities reconstructing their accounts on a sounder and more substantial basis. The first year's report shows a confusing lack of system in handling the receipts and disbursements of towns and cities; a wide variety of dates for closing the fiscal year; many defects in the treasurers' methods of accounting; and the need for consolidation of the administration of trust funds. In many instances, money left to the community for special purposes has been used by the town trustees for general purposes. But "the movement for uniform accounting proceeds without interruption." Originated by the National Municipal League, it was given momentum by the Census Bureau and by legislation in Ohio and Massachusetts. Accounting investigations and reforms are being made the basis for an approach to the solution of important problems in Boston, in New York by the conspicuous work of the Bureau of Municipal Research, and in Minneapolis. The point of attack in Minneapolis has been the administration of the school fund "which seems to have been particularly inadequate and inefficient." A grand jury found "a startling and deplorably loose state of affairs." The investigation was made by trained men from San Francisco and other Pacific Coast cities. In Wilmington there has been a thoroughgoing examination of municipal account. Legislative reference bureaus are being established to help in this movement, of particular value to Chicago which "is on the threshold of an era of public improvement which will call for the most intelligent direction from the city government." Mr. Woodruff predicts that "we may expect within the next half dozen years to find a series of similar bureaus established in all the leading cities, gathering for their respective municipalities information concerning improvement; and, moreover, we may expect a further development, in that all of these bureaus and libraries will be so co-ordinated, each with the others, as to form a strong chain of information that will banish from the halls of legislation and the offices of administration, the dense ignorance that all too frequently found a welcome lodgement." Charter changes are pressed every year more strongly to the front. It is true now that wherever a good government organization of any sort is found, there will be accompanying it a campaign either for a new charter or for amendments to the existing one. Perhaps the most noticeable tendency of the movement is a demand for a greater degree of home rule for the cities which have been "subjected to a degree of legislative buffeting that has well nigh destroyed the cherished ideal of self-government." Nomination reform has been much discussed, and a number of laws providing for direct nominations have become effective during the year. Mr. Woodruff holds that the results of direct nominations have, on the whole, "recommended themselves to those who are striving for the elimination of nomination monopoly and for the inauguration of a simpler and more direct form of election machinery." Further, he holds that "it is now generally conceded, except by a very small and diminishing group of men, that the preparation and distribution of the ballots at the general election is a proper state function and expense." The objections to direct nominations are discussed at length and finally dismissed with the conclusion: "We must realize that we are living in a democracy, and that the election machinery must be democratic and must record the wishes of the people and be responsive to their desires. Direct nominations are a step in advance because they enable the people directly to express their wishes. No doubt they have made their mistakes, and will continue to make them; but they have had to bear the brunt of them in the past, and they must continue to bear them in the future; and this in the long run will prove to be the most effective way of building up an enlightened and efficient democracy." The initiative and referendum are advocated, because "they are unquestionably proving effective in breaking down some of the privileges and monopolies that have characterized political organizations for many years." TO STIMULATE PARKS AND PLAY The Council of One Hundred, an auxiliary to the Parks and Playgrounds Association of New York, has been fully organized by Miss Pauline Robinson and Seth Thayer Stewart, with a membership of well known men and women who are interested in playground activities and civic improvement. At the first meeting of the council at the home of Mrs. Charles B. Alexander, in December, Richard Watson Gilder presided, introducing Mrs. George C. Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), who read a valuable paper. Eugene A. Philbin, president of the Parks and Playgrounds Association, outlined the development of that organization, which is the union of the Brooklyn Society for Parks and Playgrounds and the Metropolitan Parks Association. Howard Bradstreet, the secretary of the association, gave through lantern slides a synopsis of the active work in conducting playgrounds and baseball centers during the last season. Seth Thayer Stewart sketched a possible plan for the extension of the recreation idea throughout the city, and Dr. Luther H. Gulick spoke briefly on recreation for girls. The Council of One Hundred, of which Mr. Gilder is president, Jacob H. Schiff, George D. Pratt, Mrs. Frederick W. Whitridge and Mrs. Samuel Bowne Duryea, vice-presidents; and Miss Pauline Robinson, secretary and treasurer, will meet two or three times a year. Its purpose is to assist individually and as a body in the active work of the Parks and Playgrounds Association. While much is being done by the city through park and school in the way of offering play facilities to children, nevertheless, so great is their number in New York, that only a small percentage of the possibilities have as yet been realized. With a million children of school age or under, occupied only a small part of the time, the street must be the chief resort for the large majority. The experience of last summer showed both the feasibility and the good result of organizing the children of the street by play leaders who appreciate the value of free play, and are acquainted with child nature. The plan of work as outlined calls for the placing of such play leaders in various sections of the city; the encouraging of the establishment of places for recreation by different organizations and neighborhood committees, and for the provision and maintenance of various forms of play throughout the year in sections otherwise neglected. During the summer the association maintained eight vacant lots as playgrounds, eleven baseball centers and a camp for boys. The neighbors of several of these grounds have asked to have them extended during the winter, and the association will undertake to do so early in the new year. NEW YORK STATE TRADE SCHOOL PLANS Much significance is attached to the recent organization of the New York state branch of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. The passage of the industrial education bill last year opened up to the state possibilities in the way of industrial education which it has not thus far been able to measure. A volunteer body of some sort has been needed to awaken interest and stir up the whole state. Particular opportunity offers among the up-state cities and it was with this in mind that the officers and advisory board were elected, for as the list shows, the members are representative of the state as a whole as well as of many lines of industrial and educational activity. The officers are: President, James P. McElroy, manager of the Consolidated Car Heating Company, Albany; vice-president, Dr. Andrew S. Draper, state commissioner of education, Albany; secretary-treasurer, Arthur L. Williston, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Additional members of the executive committee are: V. Everit Macy, chairman of Board of Trustees, Teachers' College, New York; Joseph R. Campbell, president Diamond Saw and Stamping Works, Buffalo; Thomas D. Fitzgerald, president Allied Printing Trades Council of New York State, Albany; Frank L. Babbott, manufacturer and member of the School Board, Brooklyn. At a public meeting following the formation of the branch, considerable enthusiasm was developed and a number of interesting papers were read. Of these, perhaps the most substantial contribution to the discussion of the evening was by Dr. William H. Maxwell, city superintendent of schools, New York, who presided. Among other things Dr. Maxwell said: Certain things may be taken as demonstrated with regard to industrial education: First, trade schools are needed. They are needed for the sake of our industrial wealth and efficiency. They are needed for the sake of the boys and girls of this city. The best preparation for a trade is the manual training high school where, in connection with elements of a liberal education, students receive instruction in drawing, in tools, and in applications of art to industry. But these schools breed engineers, not journeymen. Hence we need schools to give training that will shorten and enrich the period of apprenticeship for the journeyman. Second, such schools must be a part of the public school system and must articulate directly and closely with the elementary schools, to the end that boys and girls between fourteen and eighteen, or at least sixteen, may obtain that training which will enable them to be of use in a shop; because it is in the public schools that the boys and girls are found who need such training. Third, to carry out this articulation, elementary schools should have manual training to discover these boys and girls who have an aptitude for mechanical pursuits. Brains are as necessary in mechanical pursuits as in law or theology. Certain difficulties stand in our way: First, apathy of manufacturers who have shown little desire to obtain really skilled American workmen, as for example, the firm which established a school to train apprentices and found that they were taken away by other firms as soon as they had learned a few tricks of the trade. Second, apathy of the financial authorities of the city who have just cut out the amount asked for by the Board of Education for shops and kitchens, and given only $22,000 for a trade school. It is encouraging, however, to remember that the first annual appropriation for manual training in Brooklyn was only $5,000. If we make good use of the small appropriation, the demonstration will secure larger appropriations in the future. Third, the foolish or nebulous arguments of many of those who have been advocating trade schools. Arguments have been foolish when they became pleas for the elimination of existing high schools and the conversion of these institutions into trade schools. Those that have not been foolish have been largely nebulous, vapory exhortations to establish trade schools, without the substance of a well considered plan. Such a well considered plan is now the great desideratum. While the advocates of trade schools have been talking, the Board of Education has established and maintained five prosperous and useful evening trade schools which are patronized largely by apprentices. Those evening trade schools confine their operations chiefly to the building and machinists' trades. Shall we stop there? Will our friends not give us a plan for teaching our three largest trades, clothing, beer brewing, and sugar refining? What we need farther is a well thought-out plan of co-operation between the school and the manufacturer, such as that at Fitchburg, Mass. For these reasons,--the apathy of manufacturers, the apathy of the financial authorities of our city, and the need of definite, coherent plans,--the cause of trade schools stands sorely in need of the aid of this local branch of the national society. The time is surely opportune when the Board of Education has appointed a standing committee on this subject and when the state, through the industrial education bill, passed last winter by the Legislature, has decided to give substantial financial assistance to any community that established trade schools. TO RESTRAIN HOLIDAY BEGGING The mummery and begging in which the children of New York city so generally indulge Thanksgiving Day and other holidays have long been matters of concern and alarm to those who are interested in educational work with young people. Many articles have appeared denouncing the custom. On the morning of Thanksgiving, the New York _Times_ contained an especially well directed effort to protest against this growing evil. The children of Asacog Social Settlement, 52 Sands street, Brooklyn, partake very generally in these holiday mummeries, masquerading and begging. The harmful results have long been realized, but the efforts heretofore used to modify the custom have been quite ineffective. It was resolved this year to undertake a different method of modifying the nuisance. It was found in all cases that the children had no idea why they should choose Thanksgiving for begging, beyond the fact that people gave them money on that day and all their playmates chose this method of "having fun," so of course it was necessary to be in the game. So with "having a good time" in mind, parents, young people, children, were invited to a festival on Thanksgiving eve. It seemed quite necessary to draw a moral lesson in the attempt to overthrow such a deeply seated custom, and this was done through a series of tableaus and dances with connecting narrative. The probable historical setting of the Thanksgiving custom was presented through scenes of the Dutch in Holland, during the troublesome times of William of Orange, when the sea beggars made their famous pledge. Two tableaus showing the court scene and the banquet of the beggars were followed by a costume dance by small boys, which was called the "beggars' march." The English contribution to the celebrations was in tableaus from the history of the Guy Fawkes plot. The Dutch and English transferred to America were shown by Peter Stuyvesant and his surrender; the southern scenes with their harvest ideas through a colored plantation sketch; the Puritans and Indians by tableaus and Indian squaw dances. Then followed the times of the Revolution, with the tyranny of the British, the spirit of '76, and the Evacuation Day celebration on November 25, 1783. The tableaus were given in costume by the young people and children, about seventy-five taking part. The members of the Civic Club, composed of mothers and neighborhood women did a great deal in preparing the costumes and dressing the actors. The settlement had the valuable help of Miss Mari R. Hofer in preparing Dutch and Indian dances, and of Howard Bradstreet, the narrator of the evening. Admission was by tickets given in clubs and classes, and the seating capacity of three hundred and twenty-five was taxed to over five hundred. But the carnival spirit was in the midst and no one minded the necessity of standing on a chair with a friend or two in order to catch an occasional glimpse of the stage. Several of the star performers became so interested in the audience that it was necessary to snatch the nearest boys or girls as the occasion demanded, hustle them to the improvised "green" room, hastily dress them in remaining fragments of costumes far removed from the historic time, and with impromptu coaching from the wings, an attitude was struck worthy of any Dutch patriot or Puritan dignitary. The most gratifying results of the performance were that the begging on the street was greatly diminished. Many of the children did dress up and beg, for of course we could not expect a complete reformation on Sands street. But up to eleven o'clock not a begging child had been seen on Asacog corner. Later in the day little beggars began to appear but in smaller numbers and at three o'clock in the afternoon, a very lively hour, all the children on the block were out playing their ordinary street games, and but one child was in fancy costume. From one tenement from which twenty children begged last year, but two indulged this year, one mother having been to the festival, and really beginning to realize the dangers of street gaieties for the first time, refused to permit her eight year old girl to parade in fancy dress, at which the child volunteered to stay in bed, feeling life was too dull for words, and besides she was tired from the night before, the carnival spirit having worked itself out. In reality it was the "day after the fun." FOLK DANCES IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL The pupils in the Lincoln School, situated in the suburbs of Burlington, Iowa, feel no restraint from want of room to play, for the school grounds are as large as a small park, and stretches of prairie land roll before and behind the building. Beautiful oaks and elms form tiny forests round about, a brook rushes through the outskirts, and in each season nature calls so loudly to the boy that it requires all the ingenuity of teachers and truant officers to keep him in school. Many nationalities have congregated in this part of the city, for it is a factory district, and each September there are enrolled little Germans, Russians, Swiss and Irish who are instinctively antagonistic to one another. The teachers of Lincoln School have found it advisable to be present during the noon hour, as well as during recess, to prevent the playing of rough games in which many children were injured, or which resulted in fighting. [Illustration] [Illustration] About ten years ago a may-pole was introduced, which revolutionized the school. A small organ was carried into the yard and as many as forty children took part in this dance at the same time. About five years ago, fearing that this dance would become monotonous, other folk dances were introduced, and now one may see during all intermissions, groups of boys and girls dancing the _gavotte der kaiserin_, Irish reel, Highland fling, sword dance, dance of the Alpine peasants and the minuet. In order that even these should not become uninteresting, costumes have been provided for each dance, and this is bound to be the greatest aid in discipline; for what boy will play truant when he can impersonate Washington in the minuet or some Scottish hero in the sword dance or Highland fling. To defray the expense of the costumes, a play was given,--Spyri's Heidi. This met with such success that they now have a dramatic club, whose members have presented Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins and Little Baron to large audiences in the Opera House. Many unruly boys have become docile, after impersonating some genuinely honest boy character. The manners and dress of both boys and girls have been much improved since they have taken part in these plays. The folk-dances have been used in this school for so many years that all are prepared to say that they are a success with the boys in as great a degree as they are with the girls. A boy seldom refuses to join in the dances. The most enjoyable period during the session is the time of the rhythmic play. They need no other punishment for disobedience than to threaten to refuse to play for the folk dances. THE STANDARD FOR A CITY'S SURVEY GRAHAM TAYLOR Social research on a city-wide scale is a contemporary product. Appropriately old London was the first to have its living conditions comprehensively investigated. To Charles Booth belongs the credit of having initiated and set the type of such enquiry. His great work in seventeen volumes on Life and Labor in London standardized methods and results in some lines of civic investigation. Its data were almost entirely derived from secondary documentary sources furnished by official records and the reports of voluntary agencies, but the originality with which it is everywhere stamped lies in the handling and verifying of the material thus acquired. The whole great analysis and synthesis of the largest city population of the world, thus attempted for the first time, deserves to be ranked as one of the greatest achievements of the closing decade of the nineteenth century. That this brave pioneering was attempted by one of London's great shippers, and that it was so successfully carried through to completion at a cost of twenty years of labor and a quarter million of dollars, also sets a standard of self-exacting citizenship worthy alike of the world's greatest city and of one of its most modest and personally resourceful citizens. The extent to which this survey of London afforded intelligent incentive and basis for the reconstructive civic spirit and work which attended and followed it is demonstrated by contemporary history. The voluntary efforts to improve conditions, and the London County Council's achievement in increasing open and street spaces and in furnishing housing and other equipment for city life, were on a scale befitting the foundation in fact substantially laid by Mr. Booth's monumental work. Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham and many provincial cities received impetus and direction in their heroic efforts to ascertain and improve their own conditions. Seebohm Rowntree followed Mr. Booth's example in his study of poverty in York, but went beyond his methods in making a first hand investigation of the facts. Robert W. deForest and Lawrence Veiller set the type for American enquiry into city conditions by their investigation and reports of the Tenement House Problem in New York. And now the Pittsburgh Survey registers the most inclusive standard thus far set in ascertaining the facts of living conditions in a typical industrial community. In cooperating to carry through this constructive survey the Russell Sage Foundation and this magazine achieve the most noteworthy fulfilment of their common purpose to improve social and living conditions in the United States. PREACHING AND PRACTICE JACOB A. RIIS [Illustration] These two Christmas stamps are next of kin. Our Red Cross stamp is the youngest child of the Danish _Julemarke_ which sprang out of a country postmaster's brain to take its place among the most effective weapons in the world-wide fight with the white plague. Of what stout stock the family are,--it is a big family by this time, with sons and daughters in many lands,--this year's issue of the Danish stamp tells at a glance. For the big building pictured in it is the "Christmas Stamp Sanatorium," built for tuberculous children out of the half pennies the Danish people have given these five years as their contribution to the great campaign. [Illustration] Denmark is a little country. All in all it has not much more than half as many people as the Greater New York, if indeed it has so many. Yet in so short a time it has wrought so great a tangible result. What it has further wrought in the way of arousing public interest and guiding public education in this matter is beyond calculation. For the last is the biggest end of the work of the Christmas stamp, wherever it goes. In New York city two years ago we raised a great outcry about child cripples, made so by tuberculosis. We counted five thousand or more in the tenements of the metropolis and decided that their one chance of life lay in building a hospital on the seashore, on the lines of the little one now run on Coney Island by the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. Forthwith money was raised, a quarter of a million of dollars, to build a much bigger one with, and architects were set to work to draw plans. The city appropriated a site in a great seashore park, to be laid out for the people. Then there happened what so often happens in New York when a great public enterprise is to be carried out. It ran into a rut, somehow. Money became tight, the controller could not find the funds, park and hospital were side-tracked and stayed so. They are side-tracked yet. The money kind-hearted New Yorkers gave for the children is in the bank. The little cripples still crawl around their tenements. The winds blow over the ocean and waste their healing balm. The park is as far away as ever. And the purses of the charitable snap with an extra twist of tightness when they think of it all. Next time we shall plead the children's cause in vain. That is the way of New York. The picture above tells the way of poor little Denmark. No doubt there is an excuse, or a string of them, for the American city. But excuses do not mend aching joints and wasted frames. How long before New York will catch up with Denmark? Would it not be fine if this lusty son of a worthy sire, the Red Cross Christmas stamp, were to help get us started again? RAILWAY ACCIDENTS EMORY R. JOHNSON University of Pennsylvania The Confessions of a Railroad Signalman by J. O. Fagan is an exceptionally able book, worthy of the serious attention of every student of the causes of railroad accidents.[1] The author gives his qualifications for writing the book by saying that he "has been a telegraph operator and tower-man for twenty-seven years and part of the time chief clerk to a railroad superintendent," and he further adds that "the extent of territory covered by this experience is even wider than one would suppose. For a telegraph operator is, of necessity, one of the best posted men in the service." In addition to this experience from which a knowledge of the subject has been gained, the author possesses a remarkably well trained mind and has command of exceptionally clean English. [1] The Confessions of a Railroad Signalman, J. O. Fagan. Pp. 182. Price $1.00, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1908. This book may be obtained at publisher's price through the offices of CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS. The main thesis of the book is that accidents are due mainly to non-observance of rules. "Railroad managers, therefore, sooner or later will come to understand that the one thing needed in the railroad service at the present day is to educate employes to appreciate the fact that successful and safe railroading in the future will have to depend, not upon the multiplication of safety devices or the reconstruction of rules, but upon the personal effort and conduct of conscientious, alert, and careful men." Furthermore, the author has "arrived at the conclusion that on our railroads the interests of the community have become secondary to those of the employe and his organization." Mr. Fagan also maintains that "it is actually a matter of reasonable demonstration that at least seventy-five per cent of the casualties might be avoided by increase of interest on the part of the employe, and the earnest concentration of his best thought on the subject." [Illustration: FROM CONFESSIONS OF A RAILROAD SIGNALMAN] The natural remedy for the situation, as stated by Mr. Fagan, would lie in the observance by employes of the company's rules and regulations, in the discipline by the management of all employes for each and every non-observance of any rule, and the enforcement of discipline with appropriate penalties regardless of the personality of those subjected to discipline. The enforcement of discipline, moreover, should not be made to depend upon consequences resulting from non-observance of rules. Employes should be penalized by loss of pay for their disregard of the rules or regulations whether their actions do or do not result in casualties. Mr. Fagan, however, believes, and brings convincing evidence to show, that the above remedy is beyond hope. The organizations of which the railroad employes are members take the position that the member who violates a rule is to be defended against condemnation by the public or discipline by the management. Instead of taking the view that the interests of the public are paramount to those of any individual railroad employe, the railroad employes' organization seeks invariably to shield its members against the consequences of their actions. Furthermore, the managers of most railroads have decided that the strict enforcement of the rules and the punishment of those who do not observe the rules result in so many controversies with the labor unions and are so destructive of harmonious relations between the company and the unions, that it is better to strive for harmony rather than to enforce discipline. In other words, discipline and the safety of the public are made subsidiary to the maintenance of harmonious relations with the employes. Such being the situation, Mr. Fagan believes that reform is not to be expected within railway management but must come from the outside as the result of the exercise of governmental authority. The government must punish employes for non-observance of rules and penalize railroad officers for the non-enforcement of their regulations. The analyses and arguments of the book are convincing. The position taken by Mr. Fagan is one the accuracy of which will doubtless be vigorously denied by the organizations of railroad employes and will be to some extent questioned by the responsible management of railroads. However, it seems to the author of this review that Mr. Fagan has established his thesis. INDUSTRIAL ITALY ARTHUR P. KELLOGG The simple Italian peasant, he whose meager village life was so accurately drawn by Mr. Mangano in earlier issues of this magazine, is familiar in every city in this country, and we have in America what is probably a fair appreciation of his poverty, his hardships and the longing for better things which send great blocks of the population of rural provinces flocking across the Atlantic. Of industrial Italy we know less, having few sources of information. If the life of the factory towns is really as bad as The Forewarners,[2] by Giovanni Cena, makes it,--if wages are as low, work as hard, housing as squalid and amusements as few,--then we have in the book a story of remarkable growth in wretchedness, for the manufacturing towns of northern Italy are, as Mrs. Humphry Ward points out in the introduction to the English translation, only forty years old. [2] The Forewarners, Giovanni Cena, 1908, New York, Doubleday, Page and Company. Price $1.50. This book may be ordered at publisher's price through the office of CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS. The book makes clear the source of the socialist vote in the Italian Parliament and the human stuff which the railway and other big strikes are made of. It is, supposedly, the life story of a Turin printer. Starting as the son of a clay digger, he graduates into the working world after a childhood spent in an orphanage. Having some little education more than his fellows, he becomes a proofreader for a house which is putting on the Italian market the standard works of science and philosophy in all languages. This gives him stronger meat than a weak body and an overwrought mind can digest, and he becomes oppressed with the wrongs of his class, with the grind of the factory and the squalid life of the house where he has a tiny cell in the garret. There he piles up, in proof sheets, a library of the greatest books in the world. Pouring over them by night, half-fed, unsociable, brooding, his mind slips gradually from its moorings and he throws his life away as a sacrifice, for this book, the story of his life and the story of his class, is hidden in his bosom. A tragic death, he believes, will cause it to be published and set afoot nothing short of a revolution. The book does not tell the manner of his death, but it implies that he threw himself in front of the King's automobile, which he often met in his wanderings outside the city. It typified to him the oppression which he felt,--"the griefs of others I have such a longing to relieve that the desire becomes a torment to me, and I cannot shake myself free from it except by action." Of the automobile drivers he had written: "Whilst the nobility are trying to draw in their claws so as not to exasperate us, here come these bourgeoise parvenus to insult us in our own house. Yes, in our own house, for the highroad belongs to the peasant and the poor man." His studies, which put him above the other workmen, were themselves his undoing, for the substance of Tolstoi and Spencer became so much more to him than the form, that his work grew bad and worse until he was discharged,--an incident convincing to one who has attempted to read proof with an eye to things greater than commas and spelling. Out of it all he worked a scheme of things as they ought to be, which, whether it came from the proofreader or from the author who takes a proofreader's smarting sense of wrong as his theme, makes an interesting program: A king who has a lofty ideal of society wishes to lead his subjects up to it by his methods of government, and is willing to abdicate when he feels that they are really free. His chief instruments in the work of redemption are doctors and school teachers. On the one hand freedom, on the other action. Freedom from error whilst doing everything to favor and afford sufficient light. A tendency to abolish all forms of restraint, from the material ones for criminals to the moral ones for all men; from handcuffs to laws. The gradual abolition of hereditary rights of property; every human being to have the needful, and everything to return to a common fund at his death. The legal personality of women, and the equality of the sexes, to be recognized as steps to the conquest of individuality, liberty, happiness. Each to be free to develop to the utmost his own life, his own affections. Birth and education to be protected. Rest to be ensured to old age. Public hygiene to be watched over till disease be eliminated. Every facility to be afforded to manufactures, commerce and science, so as to encourage man to conquer himself, the earth, the heavens. Faith in progress, as if it were not,--and it is not,--destined to die with our earth. The worship of life. Such a scheme and the style and force of the book are difficult to associate with the neurasthenic proofreader, skilfully as the author has drawn the background and made the man's thought develop over his proof table. But whether the character be drawn convincingly or not, the book gives a wonderfully clear and sharp-cut picture of the environment of such a worker. Some bits of description stand out above the others, one of them the Turin tenement, where "from the first flights of stairs, carpeted and warmed by hot air pipes, to the bare flight of our top floor, the steps grew ever steeper and steeper. Each evening we passed through all the social zones, hot, temperate and cold; we were lodged in the arctic regions." There were 142 of these steps to the top floor, where naught but poverty dwelt,--a penniless poet with a sister who supported him, a lonely working girl, a woman of the streets, a drunkard and his screaming, beaten wife and half-witted children, and Cimisin, a cobbler, who always "was whistling at full speed to the accompaniment of his hammer. The tears of women, the curses of drunkards, had for so many years mingled with the merriment of that harmless madman." His history of the printing shop is complete and modern, even to the point where the men went back to their cases after a strike, only to find that long rows of linotypes with women operators had displaced them. These women, he thought, might have among them one fitted to be his mate, but he was too shy to seek her out. He could see them only as workers at the almost human machines, or where "the cylinders revolved with a loud din, the sheets rained out one on top of the other, the women in their long overalls kept on repeating their monotonous movements, feeding the sheets into the press or collecting them into piles. On two side platforms the women were in constant motion. A hundred women and a hundred men. It was impossible to imagine that relations other than those existing between the several parts of a machine might be formed between these beings created for a mutual understanding." Still he wonders vaguely if perhaps in this uniformity of action, foreign to and apart from the monotonous toil which exhausts them, something exists, smiles, shines? Have some got a small bird singing in their hearts whilst their hands grow grimy at the wheel?... No love of their work,--that is to say of their life,--inspired them; each of them constantly saw the work of an hour, a mere fragment, leave his hands anonymously and forever, and none of them could ever say of anything, "That is my work!" What will remain of them at the end of their lives to prove that they have lived? In truth, they have not lived. Of the women in his tenement, girls who were not harnessed to a factory, he found even less of life, though perhaps more of womanhood. Going with his friend to see the latter's young sister in a maternity hospital, he reflects that this is the way with many of them,--"love leads to the hospital." The patients there are mostly unmarried girls. The married ones have few children now. "How talk of love, of family life, in a society which deals out the same ration to the single man and to the father of a family?" His friend starves, the sister dies, the drunkard's wife, mother of six, takes her life,--everyone whom he knew, it seems, all the associates high up in the attic of the "aëropolis," come to grief and misery and death. He greatly admires the woman, a physician, who visits them. "She picks up, joins, straightens out innumerable threads; she seems to be weaving a tapestry of which she will only complete a tiny bit, a work which she has inherited from one generation and will transmit to another." She offers him a part in her work, but he feels "incapable of giving myself in small doses." He is impatient, irritable for "something ready to hand, swift as lightning," that shall right all wrongs and ease all pain at a stroke. He cannot work with others, or for others, and so he tucks his story into his bosom and starts out to meet the King's car. Almost at the last he confesses, "I have passed beside life." SCHOOL REPORTS[3] Reviewed by ROLAND P. FALKNER To the great majority of people the school report is the only tangible evidence of what the school administration is doing. The citizens generally cannot be expected to know what goes on in the school rooms or in the meetings of boards of education, nor what is taking shape in the back of the superintendent's head. Even were they afforded the utmost opportunity and gifted with such unusual perception, it is not likely that without convenient summaries and condensed statements they could form any idea of the public school system as a whole. [3] School Reports and School Efficiency by David S. Snedden and William H. Allen for the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children. New York, 1908. Pp. 183. This book will be sent by CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS postpaid for $1.50. If the school report is at once the evidence and test of the school administration, it is clear that its ideal is such a marshalling of the facts regarding the schools of the city as will give the reasonably intelligent citizen a clear notion of just how well the schools are performing the duties entrusted to them. The book before us is a study of the school reports for the purpose of ascertaining how far and in what manner they seek to embody such ideal. It is a study in comparative administration. This study reveals so wide a diversity among school reports as to preclude the idea of any consensus of opinion as to what they should contain. While uniformity of scope and treatment is not to be expected, it might reasonably be anticipated that the similar purposes of the school administration in different places would give to these reports a certain family resemblance. In so far as such a resemblance can be traced, it does not appear to be so much the result of parallel internal development as the product of external compulsion or suggestion. State educational departments charged with allotment of state school funds according to a fixed unit in school work, have led to an emphasis upon such units. A similar influence has been exerted by the United States Bureau of Education in its request for information along certain definite lines. Apart from these influences tending toward a certain uniformity, there are other forces working in the same direction though less effectively. The trend of present discussion in educational affairs is not without its influence, and when certain facts are needed to point a moral or adorn a tale the experience of other cities points to investigations or arrangements of material which are new to the city in question. Conscious effort to promote uniform treatment of statistical data, a theme which has been discussed almost to weariness by the National Education Association and kindred organizations, has been singularly fruitless. With these general considerations by way of introduction, the work takes up its main theme, the scope of educational statistics. In them we find the condensation of educational experience, and here more than in other parts of the text we should expect the experience and practice of one city to be helpful to another. Too often, indeed almost universally, the tables of facts are isolated from the text of the report, and no effort is made to explain their meaning or set forth the salient features which they present. In view of the volume of tabular matter there is a painful poverty of interpretation. The method pursued by the author in his record of the facts, is to furnish a specimen table from the different reports in regard to each matter touched upon, a selection of the simpler and then the more detailed statements to be found in them. The following heads are treated in this way: School plant, expenditure, census, attendance, age of pupils, promotions, survival, compulsory attendance, high schools, vacation schools, libraries, medical inspection, teachers and summaries. The variety of forms exhibited is highly instructive although, it may be confessed, somewhat bewildering. The author has confined himself so strictly to a study of methods that he is disposed to let the tables speak for themselves. There is here, too, an absence of interpretation. Tables of figures may speak for themselves but to understand them one must know their language. One cannot help but feel that in many cases some explanation why the detailed tables are to be regarded as superior, other than the fact that they are more detailed, would have been more illuminating and would have relieved somewhat the monotony of this important chapter for the general reader. No attempt is made to outline a model report. We have instead in chapter 5 a series of questions which might be answered in a school report. The list does not pretend to be exhaustive but in reality it constitutes a somewhat formidable program, if it be assumed that the greater part of these questions should receive attention. Conscious of the fact that somewhat staggering demands are made on the school administration, the discussion of "suggested economies and improvement" comes as an antidote. This is a brief discussion of short cuts and methods to get at desired results. It looks to a simplification of records and such forms and registers as will supply the needed information, without excessive work. This is a very vital point and the suggestions as far as they go are admirable. While the subject presented in these pages is thoroughly technical, the work may be commended most heartily to school authorities and to all who are interested in the progress of our schools. It is an appeal for exact information and should not be passed by without a hearing. Such information in regard to our schools,--one of the most important branches of our government,--is painfully lacking. It has too often been assumed that the management of schools was a matter for experts of which outsiders could not properly judge. Within certain limits this is true, but it does not distinguish between the scholastic and the administrative sides of school work. We undoubtedly need both among our school authorities, and in the public at large a keener perception of the requisites of a sound and effective administration. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that there is no great business enterprise of the people of which they know so little as they do of their schools. In private affairs such ignorance on the part of directors and stockholders would lead to bankruptcy. The authorship of the several chapters of the book is distinctly stated. The general considerations herein briefly noted are the work of Dr. Snedden; the particular application to the city of New York is the work of Dr. Allen. Those who are familiar with Dr. Allen's work answer that he can always be relied upon for a readable and spicy statement. But in view of the predominantly local interest of his discussion and the inexorable limits of space, it has seemed best in the foregoing notice to lay the greater emphasis on those large aspects of the subject which are from the pen of Dr. Snedden. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._] HYMN OF PITTSBURGH BY RICHARD REALF My father was mighty Vulcan, I am Smith of the land and sea, The cunning spirit of Tubal Cain Came with my marrow to me; I think great thoughts strong-winged with steel, I coin vast iron acts, And weld the impalpable dream of Seers Into utile lyric facts. I am monarch of all the forges, I have solved the riddle of fire, The Amen of Nature to need of Man, Echoes at my desire; I search with the subtle soul of flame, The heart of the rocky earth, And out from my anvils the prophecies Of the miracle years blaze forth. I am swart with the soot of my chimneys, I drip with the sweats of toil, I quell and scepter the savage wastes And charm the curse from the soil; I fling the bridges across the gulfs, That hold us from the To Be, And build the roads for the bannered march Of crowned Humanity. Published in the _National Labor Tribune_, Saturday, February 23, 1878. [Illustration: _Chautauqua Photographic Co._ PITTSBURGH. THE POINT, AS SEEN FROM THE HEIGHTS OF THE SOUTH SIDE.] [Illustration: THE PITTSBURGH ARCH SESQUI-CENTENNIAL WEEK.] THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY PAUL U. KELLOGG Engineers have a simple process by which in half an hour's time they strike off a "blue print" from a drawing into which has gone the imagination of a procession of midnights, and the exacting work of a vast company of days. God and man and nature,--whosoever you will,--have draughted a mighty and irregular industrial community at the headwaters of the Ohio; they have splashed, as Kipling puts it, at a ten league canvas with brushes of comet's hair. Under the name of the Pittsburgh Survey, Charities Publication Committee has carried on a group of social investigations in this great steel district. In a sense, we have been blue-printing Pittsburgh. Our findings will be published in a series of special numbers of which this is the first, covering in order: I.--The People; II.--The Place; III.--The Work. Full reports are to be published later in a series of volumes by the Russell Sage Foundation and, throughout, the text will be reinforced with such photographs, pastels, maps, charts, diagrams and tables as will help give substance and reality to our presentations of fact. In this sense, then, it is a blue print of Pittsburgh, that we attempt. At least the analogy of the draughting room may make it clear that the work, as we conceive it, lies, like the blue print, within modest outlay and reasonable human compass. Our presentation must frankly lack the mechanical fidelity and inclusiveness of the engineer's negative; but we can endeavor to bring out in relief the organic truth of the situation by giving body and living color, as we see them, to what would otherwise be but the thin white tracings of a town. Occasional articles have been published during the year, but the results of the Survey are put forward for the first time as a consecutive whole in the pages that follow. Here is the place, then, for a simple statement of the drive and scope of the work as conceived by those who have carried it forward: The Pittsburgh Survey has been a rapid, close range investigation of living conditions in the Pennsylvania steel district. It has been carried on by a special staff organized under the national publication committee which prints this magazine. It has been financed chiefly by three grants, of moderate amount, from the Russell Sage Foundation for the Improvement of Living Conditions. It has been made practicable by co-operation from two quarters,--from a remarkable group of leaders and organizations in social and sanitary movements in different parts of the United States, who entered upon the field work as a piece of national good citizenship; and from men, women and organizations in Pittsburgh who were large-minded enough to regard their local situation as not private and peculiar, but a part of the American problem of city building. The outcome has been a spirited piece of inter-state co-operation in getting at the urban fact in a new way. For consider what has already been done in this field in America. We have counted our city populations regularly every ten years,--in some states every five. We have known that the country has grown and spread out stupendously within the century, and that within that period our cities have spread out and filled up with even greater resistlessness. How goes it with them? What more do we know? True, we have profited by incisive analyses of one factor or another which enters into social well-being,--tuberculosis, factory legislation, infant mortality, public education, to name examples; and we have heard the needs of particular neighborhoods described by those who know them. But there is something further, synthetic and clarifying, to be gained by a sizing up process that reckons at once with many factors in the life of a great civic area, not going deeply into all subjects, but offering a structural exhibit of the community as a going concern. This is what the examining physician demands before he accepts us as an insurance risk, what a modern farmer puts his soils and stock through before he plants his crops, what the consulting electrician performs as his first work when he is called in to overhaul a manufacturing plant. And this, in the large, has been the commission undertaken by the Pittsburgh Survey. The main work was set under way in September, 1907, when a company of men and women of established reputation as students of social and industrial problems, spent the month in Pittsburgh. On the basis of their diagnosis, a series of specialized investigations was projected along a few of the lines which promised significant results. The staff has included not only trained investigators but also representatives of the different races who make up so large a share of the working population dealt with. Limitations of time and money set definite bounds to the work, which will become clear as the findings are presented. The experimental nature of the undertaking, and the unfavorable trade conditions which during the past year have reacted upon economic life in all its phases, have set other limits. Our inquiries have dealt with the wage-earners of Pittsburgh (a) in their relation to the community as a whole, and (b) in their relation to industry. Under the former we have studied the genesis and racial make-up of the population; its physical setting and its social institutions; under the latter we have studied the general labor situation; hours, wages, and labor control in the steel industry; child labor, industrial education, women in industry, the cost of living, and industrial accidents. From the first, the work of the investigations has been directed to the service of local movements for improvement. For, as stated in a mid-year announcement of the Survey, we have been studying the community at a time when nascent social forces are asserting themselves. Witness the election of an independent mayor three years ago, and Mr. Guthrie's present fight to clear councils of graft. Within the field of the Survey and within one year, the Pittsburgh Associated Charities has been organized; the force of tenement inspectors has been doubled and has carried out a first general housing census, and a scientific inquiry, under the name of the Pittsburgh Typhoid Commission, has been instituted into the disease which has been endemic in the district for over a quarter of a century. A civic improvement commission, representative in membership and perhaps broader in scope than any similar body in the country, is now in process of formation. A display of wall maps, enlarged photographs, housing plans, and other graphic material was the chief feature of a civic exhibit held in Carnegie Institute in November and December, following the joint conventions in Pittsburgh of the American Civic Association and the National Municipal League. The local civic bearings of the Survey were the subject of the opening session of these conventions. Its economic aspects were brought forward at a joint session of the American Economic Association and the American Sociological Society at Atlantic City in December. [Illustration: SCHEME OF THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY. From Pittsburgh Civic Exhibit, Carnegie Institute, November-December, 1908.] The present issue is frankly introductory. It deals with the city as a community of people. Pittsburgh is usually defined in other terms. First among American cities in the production of iron and steel, we are told that it ranks fifth as a general manufacturing center. There are forty-seven furnaces within forty miles of the heart of the city, with an annual capacity of over seven million tons of pig iron,--more than twenty-five per cent of the total production in the United States. Statistics of the American iron trade for 1907 show that Allegheny county produced a fourth of all Bessemer steel and a third of all open hearth steel, a fifth of all rails rolled in the United States, a third of all plates and sheets, and very nearly a half of all structural shapes. Pittsburgh proper ranked fourth in foundry and machine shop products, second in brick and tile, pottery and fire clay, and first in electrical apparatus and supplies. In coal and coke, tin plate, glass, cork, and sheet metal,--in products as varied as the fifty-seven varieties of the pickles in which it excels,--its output is a national asset. Pittsburgh stands tenth in postal receipts and fifth in bank deposits. Its banking capital exceeds that of the banks of the North Sea empires and its payroll that of whole groups of American states. Here is a town, then, big with its works. [Illustration: BLAST FURNACES AT NIGHT.] Again, there is a temptation to define Pittsburgh in terms of the matrix in which the community is set, and the impress of this matrix on the soul of its people no less than on the senses of the visitor. Pipe lines that carry oil and gas, waterways that float an acreage of coal barges, four track rails worn bright with weighty ore cars, wires surcharged with a ruthless voltage or delicately sensitive to speech and codes, bind here a district of vast natural resources into one organic whole. The approaching traveller has ample warning. Hillsides and valleys are seamed with rows of coke ovens, gaunt tipples bend above mine mouths, derricks and bull-wheels stand over fuel wells, and low lying mill buildings, sided with corrugated iron, rear their clusters of stacks like the pipes of huge swarthy Pans. Then comes the city with its half-conquered smoke cloud, with its high, bare hills and its hunch of imposing structures. The place to see Pittsburgh from is a much whittled little stand on the high bluff of Mt. Washington, where votaries of the national game assemble on a clear afternoon and spy upon a patch of green in Allegheny City, hundreds of feet below them, and more than a mile away across the Ohio River. Their business is with Honus Wagner and the three-bagger he is going to knock out. But yours can be with the great Y of the rivers, churned by stern-wheeled steamers and patched here and there with black fleets of coal barges. Below you to the right is the South Side; to the left across the rivers, is Allegheny City, and between them is a little trowel of land piled high with office buildings. This is the "Point," cut short as it is by the "Hump" and by higher hills behind; and flanked by narrow river banks that grudge a foothold to the sounding workshops and lead up and down to the mill towns. You are looking at commercial Pittsburgh. From the Herron Hill reservoir, mid-way between the forks of the Y, you get a panorama of the other side of the community,--Shenley Park to the right of you, with the Carnegie buildings and the ample residences of the East End, and to the left, long swales of small, thickly built houses that make up Lawrenceville and the adjoining home areas. But it is at night that the red and black of the Pittsburgh flag marks the town for its own. The lines of coke ovens seen from the car windows have become huge scythes, saw-edged with fire. The iron-sheathed mills are crated flame. Great fans of light and shadow wig-wag above furnaces and converters. From Cliff street, the lamps of Allegheny lie thick and clustered like a crushed sky, but from the bridges that span the Monongahela between the mills,--where choleric trains shuttle on either bank, and the rolls are at thumping war with the sliding, red billets,--the water welds the sparks and the yellow tumult, and you feel as if here were the forges of the sunrise, where beam and span and glowing plate are fabricating into the framework of dawns that shall "come up like thunder." Here,--if we doubted it before,--is a town that works; and that works in a big way. But the people, rather than the product or the setting, concern us. In December, 1907, Pittsburgh and Allegheny were merged, and the Greater City entered the class of Baltimore, St. Louis and Boston. This is the half-million class. Last September, Pittsburgh celebrated its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and a street pageant exhibited both the industrial vigor of the community, and the variety of its people. There was a company of Corn Planter Indians, descendants of the aboriginal Pittsburghers; there were floats representing the early settlers; there were Scotchmen with kilts and bagpipes; nor were they all. A wagon load of Italians bore a transparency,--"Romans dig your sewers," and Polish, Slovak and other racial organizations marched in the costumes of their native countries. For the life of the city has become intricate and rich in the picturesque. That old man you passed on the street was a Morgan raider, and behind him trudged a common soldier of the Japanese War. Here is an American whose Pittsburgh is the marble corridors of an office building, and the night desks of the men in shirt sleeves and green eye shades; and here, one whose Pittsburgh reaches back to a stately old parlor with gilt-framed mirrors and spindling Chippendale. Here is "Belle," who exchanges her winter in the workhouse for a summer in a jon-boat, which she reaches by a plank. Here is the _gazda_ who ruined himself that his boarders might not starve. And here, the inventor who works with many men in a great laboratory and scraps a thousand dollars' worth of experimentation at the turn of a hand. Here is a gallery of miners pounding their grimy fists at a speech by Haywood in the old town hall; and here a bunch of half-sobered Slavs in the Sunday morning police court. You do not know the Pittsburgh District until you have heard the Italians twanging their mandolins round a construction campfire, and seen the mad whirling of a Slovak dance in a mill town lodge hall; until you have watched the mill hands burst out from the gates at closing time; or thrown confetti on Fifth avenue on a Halloween. Within a few blocks of the skyscrapers of the Point, I have seen a company of Syrians weaving almost unceasingly for four days a desert dance that celebrated the return of one of them to Jerusalem. (An Irishman thought it a wake.) A possum swings by the tail at Christmastide in front of that Negro store in Wylie avenue; long bearded Old Believers play bottle pool in that Second avenue barroom; a Yiddish father and five children lie sick on the floor of this tenement; this old Bohemian woman cleaned molds as a girl in the iron works of Prague; that itinerant cobbler made shoes last winter for the German children of the South Side, who were too poor to pay for them, and stuffed the soles with thick cardboard when he was too poor to buy leather. Here is a Scotch Calvinist, and there a Slavic free thinker; here a peasant, and there a man who works from a blue print; engineers, drag outs, and furnace-men from the mill district; yeggs and floppers and '69ers from the lower reaches of the city; strippers and core makers and coffin buffers. There a Russian exile with a price on his head, and here a Shaker of old Pennsylvania stock! You have heard of Shakespeare's London, of the port of Lisbon in the days of the Spanish Main, of the mixtures of caste and race and faith on the trade routes of the East. They are of the ilk of Pittsburgh. How to get orderly plans of social betterment out of the study of such a community is at first sight a staggering question. But the clue to its answer is that same fact that stood out when we looked at Pittsburgh as a city of tonnage and incandescence. These people are here to work. This fact once grasped in its bearings and we get a foothold for estimating Pittsburgh. The wage earners become a fairly well-defined belt in the population. What the issues of life and labor mean to them will help us in understanding the trend of conditions in industrial communities generally. First, you have the mere fact of aggregation. Pittsburgh has as many people as the whole state of Pennsylvania had at the opening of the last century; Allegheny county as many as at that time the commonwealths of Massachusetts and New York combined. The Greater City has twice as many as all the future cities of the United States had in 1800; as many as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, combined, in 1850. Here, then, is a community worthy of as serious statesmanship as that which has served whole commonwealths at critical periods in our national advance. Now in all history, cities have never reproduced themselves. They draw on the country districts to replace the stock that they burn out. But when one-third of the total population comes to live in cities, they can no longer do this. It becomes vitally important that city people live well, else the race lapses. At risk, then, of going over old ground, let us look at some of the dynamic influences that affect the life of this particular community. No American city presents in a more clear-cut way than Pittsburgh the abrupt change from British and Teutonic immigration. Sociologists tell us that in the mid-eastern valleys of Europe successive waves of broad-headed, long-headed, dark and fair peoples gathered force and swept westward to become Kelt and Saxon and Swiss and Scandinavian and Teuton. They were the bulwark which obstructed the march of Hun and Goth and Turk and Tartar, sweeping in from the East. It is from Slavs and mixed people of this old midland, with racial and religious loves and hates seared deep, that the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to work out civilization under tense conditions. A vineyard blighted, a pogrom, torture, persecution, crime, poverty, dislodge them, and they come. Further, the sociologists tell us that by mixed peoples the greatest advances have been made. It was in Amsterdam, Venice, London, and the Hanse towns, places of mart which brought together the blood and cultures of distant races,--it was here that democracy gathered head and the arts flourished. But in Pittsburgh are the elements of a mixture yet more marvelous. A common fund of Slavic words, almost a Pittsburgh dialect, is finding currency. The Pole still speaks Polish, but he makes an adaptation of his words, and the Slovak understands. The Syrian and Arabian peddlers know these words and use them in selling their wares in the courts and settlements,--a contrast to the great gulfs that still separate the Slav and the English-speaking. Furthermore, the city is the frontier of to-day. We have appropriated and parcelled out most of our free land. The edge of settlement is no longer open as a safety valve for foot-loose rebels against the fixity of things. They come to the cities. They swarm in new hives. To Pittsburgh especially where men deal with devil-may-care risks and great stakes, come the adventurous and the unreckoning. A smack of the mining camp is in the air about the mill yards. The life to which these people come is different from that known of any previous generations. We have seen how in Pittsburgh traction lines, tunnels, inclines, telephone wires, weave a city of a size and on a site which would have been impossible in the old days. The householder is far removed from the sources of his food supply. He lives two or three families deep and many to the acre. The very aggregation of people breeds disease, a complication which in turn may yet be balanced by those revolutions in medical science which have brought glad, new optimism to sanitarian and physician. [Illustration: SOURCES OF IMMIGRANT LABOR FORCE, CARNEGIE STEEL CO. Each dot a man. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: 10421 INCLUDING: SLOVAKS 6477 POLES 611 BOHEMIANS 45 GERMANS 135 CROATIANS 1239 HUNGARIANS 1323 ROUMANIANS 410 RUSSIA: 2577 INCLUDING: POLES 1644 LITHUANIANS 476 BRITISH ISLES: 2010 INCLUDING: ENGLAND 1456 IRELAND 257 SCOTLAND 137 WALES 100 SWEDEN: 287 BULGARIA 58 FRANCE 52 TURKEY IN EUROPE 26 ROUMANIA 24] The work to which these people come is not the work of their fathers. The discipline of the mill is not the discipline of the field. Human nature is put to new and exacting tests. It works unremittingly as it has not worked before,--eight, ten, twelve hours a day, seven days in the week, with the chance of twenty-four hours once in the fortnight. It works by artificial light and at night. It works in great plants and creates and puts together in fierce new ways. Of that growing share of the population of Pittsburgh which is continental born, a large proportion is from the country and small villages. This is no less true of the influx of southern Negroes,--a north-bound movement here and in other cities, the final outcome of which we do not know. The newcomers, it is true, may be groomed in passage. A railroad may open up a Hungarian back country and the peasant get his first training there; a Ruthenian may work on the plantations and sugar beet factories of Bessarabia before coming on; a southern Negro may hire out in the mills of Alabama before starting north; or a Slovak may work as a slate picker or miner's helper in the anthracite fields on his way westward. The drift through it all none the less is from field to mill. New stock, then, a mixed people, venturesome, country-bred,--so much the sociologist has pointed out to us; the economist has other things to tell. He sees about him the potent aftermath of those great changes from household and domestic forms of production to the factory system. As each new peasantry leaves the soil, the history of the industrial revolution is repeated, but processes are accelerated and the experience of a generation is taken at a jump. With this has occurred a great lateral stratification of industry. There is no longer the feudal loyalty to a particular concern, but to the men of a particular trade. Unions have sprung up, and have grown or broken. The thing above all others which has tended in Pittsburgh to their undoing in certain great trades has been the subdivision of labor. The flea on the hair of the tail of the dog of the wild man of Borneo just come to town, is an entity large and complete compared with the processes which occupy many men in the electrical works and car shops. This change has multiplied product, and set unskilled labor to busy itself at a thousand stints; but it has fore-shortened trade knowledge and ousted much craftsmanship. Along with it has come another physical change. The skilled men of the old time hammers and anvils work with electric cranes and at continuous processes that reach from the heat of great ovens and the jaws of soaking pits to the piled and finished product. An intricate dovetailing of flagmen, brakemen, engineers and train despatchers makes up a train to carry huge dynamos and steel structural shapes across the continent. This fact has a new and vital social significance. Its essence is team play. Its reactions upon the psychology of associated effort have yet to be explored. Once again, new and unheard of crafts are ushered in, to engage their quota of the time and strength of the working force, and to put it to new tests of adaptability. Take the implications of the steel industry itself, in the building trades. The old time carpenter and builder gives way to the house-smith and the structural steel worker. [Illustration: INDUSTRIAL TOWNS OF ALLEGHENY CO. PA. PERCENTAGE OF NATIVE & FOREIGN BORN WHITES IN CITIES & BOROUGHS HAVING 2500 INHABITANTS OR MORE 1900] In Pittsburgh, too, we have a stupendous example of the influence upon the wage earners' city of a mighty fiscal change in industry, combining in one corporation all processes from the ore to the completed bridge. Work is organized nationally. The steel center like the mill town is not a thing by itself. It is a step in a bigger process managed from without and owned by a multitude of nonresident stockholders. Pittsburgh must build up an active, native citizenship or be merely an industrial department. The community and the workshop are at issue. Finally,--in our roster of dominating influences,--within the last twenty-five years, has come the invasion of women into industry. This is not a simple thing, nor a little one. It can directly affect half the population. Pittsburgh is not primarily a woman's town, yet 22,000 women engage in the trades, and each year they invade a new department. These women workers are affected by all the forces noted and in turn affect and complicate those forces. These are some of the dominant influences that affect wage-earners in cities assembled. One element runs through their complications and brings us clear-seeing and hope. It is the element of change and flow. In the Royal Museum at Munich are the miniatures of a group of medieval towns carved out of wood. The spires of the churches, the walls and gates of the city, markets, houses, outbuildings and gardens are reproduced with a fidelity that has stood these centuries. They embody the old idea of a town, of the fixity of things. A man was his father's son. He worked as his father worked. He was burgher, or freeman, or serf as his father was burgher, or freeman, or serf. His looms and his spinning wheels and vats were as his fathers had contrived them. He lived in the house of his father as his father had lived and it served him well. Pittsburgh is the antithesis of such a town. It is all motion. The modern industrial city is a flow, not a tank. The important thing is not the capacity of a town, but the volume and currents of its life and, by gauging these, we can gauge the community. We must gauge at the intake,--the children, the immigrant, the countrymen who come in; gauge at the outlets; and gauge at the stages in the course of the working life. If there be unnecessary death, if strong field hands are crippled or diseased through their manner of living or working, if the twelve hour man sees everything gray before his eyes in the morning, if women work in new ways that cost their strength or the strength of their young, if school children are drafted off as laborers before they are fit; if boys grow into manhood without training for the trades of this generation,--then we have a problem in social hydraulics to deal with. We must put old social institutions and usages to the test of these changing tides. Herein lies the essence of constructive philanthropy. In this light, tenement house legislation is no more than an adaptation of domestic necessities and customs to the difficulties of living three stories deep, and factory acts no more than an effort to work out the law of skull crackers, freight yards, and electrically driven mines. We have to fashion a city not alone for the hereditary householder, but for the mobile and transient and half-assimilated, for workers with multiple tools and above all for people on an upward trend. Faced with its great task of production, Pittsburgh has not set itself to the thrift of self-knowledge. When half a thousand people were dying each year from typhoid fever, the movement to clear the water supply was blocked and exploited at every turn. Half a thousand workmen are now killed each year in the industries of Allegheny county, and yet the public has not taken the trouble to sift the accidents through and see which can be prevented. Nobody knows how many men are seriously injured every year; nobody knows how many men and women are beset with trade diseases. Nobody knows how much the community is paying for such wastes as these. Nobody knows how far the seeping off of human integers into hospitals, and jails, insane asylums, brothels, and orphanages, could be checked; the guesses of the town's best men are that much is needless. Pittsburgh is a town which does not know the number of its children of school age, nor, the physical status of the children of its classes; it is a town which, for five years, did not so much as demand a report from its health department. In such an arraignment, we must bear in mind that there are notable exceptions in one phase of social concern or another to this lack in Pittsburgh's self-knowledge, and that Pittsburgh is not merely a scapegoat city. It is the capital of a district representative of untrammeled industrial development, but of a district which, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, for vigor, waste and optimism, is rampantly American. The Pittsburgh Survey has been carried out with such a working conception of the field it had before it. We have brought to one city people of special experience in others, to gauge its needs. We have measured its institutions against standards worked out in this city or in that, or in other local enterprises; and we have estimated civic and industrial conditions by their effect on groups of individual families. In the present issue we put forward the composite situation as reflected in the lives of two groups--the immigrant and the Negro. Later issues will go into the social bearings of courts and schools, hospitals, houses and factories. But such individual problems have no reality unless seen in their human relations and for this reason, this issue begins with an interpretation of the genesis of the community by a native Pittsburgher, who has become one of the civic leaders of New England. We have an estimate of new immigration by a Welshman from the Anthracite region, who is representative of the old, and an estimate of his fellows by one of the Slavs. The outlook of the steel mill worker is appraised by a man whose eyes have known the broad sweep of prairies of the American Northwest. A description of the working women whose hours and wages and conditions of employment will next concern us, and of the families into whose lives come the tragedies of industrial accidents, are included. And finally, the issues of life in a representative mill town are put forth, standing out more isolated and clear cut for the purposes of analysis than it is possible to find them in the more intricate operations of the Greater City. * * * * * One of my earliest recollections of a canvas covered geography is the prime fact which is Pittsburgh,--that here the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers unite to form the Ohio. Huge economic foundations buttress this fact (oil and gas and clay and iron and coal). History in the making has rolled it into new shapes and a changing significance. The junction is the great left fist of the Father of Waters. The three rivers give the town common cause and intercourse with the Atlantic coast ranges to the east, and the mid-continental bottom lands, north and south, to the west. Their waters carry the ores and fill the boilers and douse the hissing billets of the steel makers. They are not easy overlords, this triumvirate of rivers. They carry fever which scotches one town and the next. They rise a bit too far and the fires are out, the streets flooded. But grudgingly and inevitably, they yield mastery. They are dammed and sluiced and boiled and filtered to suit the demands of navigation and power and temperature and thirst. The mastery they yield is to another current--the eddying peoples which make up the community and all its works--a current more powerful and mysterious than the bulk of brown waters. The War Department engineers can tell you the exact number of cubic feet which slide past either side of the Point every minute. The sanitarians can give you the number of bacteria, friendly or plague-besetting, which infect any cubic centimeter. The weather man in a high building can forecast the exact stage which the water will register hours hence. But what of the people?--they have largely taken themselves for granted. They have rarely taken the time to test their own needs or consciously gauge the destination of the currents that possess them. They are here--the strong, the weak, the cowed, the ambitious, the well equipped and the pitiful. They jostle and work and breed. For the most part they run a splendid course. But they do not keep tally, and their ignorance means sorrow and death and misunderstanding. * * * * * To give a little help to those who are trying to understand, and measure these currents, and deal with them as intelligently as the locks and channels of the rivers are dealt with, has been the purpose of the Pittsburgh Survey. Such chartings as we have attempted have been of these living waters. [Illustration: COKE OVENS AT NIGHT] PITTSBURGH AN INTERPRETATION OF ITS GROWTH ROBERT A. WOODS HEAD OF SOUTH END HOUSE, BOSTON Pittsburgh has always been unique among American towns. Known as the dingy capital of a "black country," during all but the latest period of its growth it has attracted few visitors save those whose business motive brought them. The nucleus of its population is different from that of any other of our large centers. Its situation at the gateway of the Middle West was sure to bring it into significance as the center of the country's population and activity shifted, but the Allegheny mountains were for a long time a barrier against the easy movement of population in this direction. It is the varied mineral resources of western Pennsylvania, and the pertinacity of the chief element among its inhabitants in developing them, which has created a new metropolitan district, having virtually a population of a million, to be added to the seven or eight urban centers which now dominate different sections of the United States. Beginning as a little hamlet about the fortifications used first by the French, then by the English, at the junction where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers form the Ohio, the settlement developed from a trading post to a market town. It would have been limited to the career of such a place much longer if, in spite of the excellent soil of the surrounding region, the farmers had not found it difficult to compete in the matter of the staple crops with the slave-tilled plantations of the South. It was as a sort of forced alternative that small iron-working plants began to spring up along the rivers. The ore was brought down from the Alleghenies. Bituminous coal,--the distinguishing asset of the coming industrial center,--had already been discovered by the French in the river valleys. The "town beyond the mountains" again found itself embarrassed in marketing its commodities,--not by competition this time, so far as America was concerned, but by the heights over which its ponderous new output must be carried. This obstacle was overcome by a system of canals with inclined cable portage lines up the mountain slopes. Meanwhile the great trade with the West for the supply of its incipient civilization was being established through the river traffic as well as by newly dug canals. Some of the first citizens of the town after the revolutionary days were naturally men who had been prominently engaged in the war. Two of them were Irishmen who had leaped to the opportunity to fight England. At the close of hostilities they had foresight to discern that large developments were to come at the juncture of the rivers. The descendants of these men,--some of whom by a curious irony are English and have never seen this country,--are at the present moment the greatest holders of Pittsburgh real estate. The great bulk of the early immigrants into the town were Scotch-Irish, who began to come in large numbers early in the nineteenth century, and almost two generations before the inrush of the southern Irish. Until recent great developments, when the skyscrapers began to appear, the older part of the city in its aspect was distinctly suggestive of British towns of the same size and character. Two of its local sections were very naturally called Birmingham and Manchester, names which have almost passed out of use among the American born generations. The manners and customs of the people showed about equally the traces of pioneer days in the Ohio valley and the traditions of the old country. Unlike the large cities that have grown up along the Great Lakes, Pittsburgh owes nothing to successive waves of migration from New England. It is only in very recent years, with the varied developments of technical and educational interests, that there have been enough New Englanders living in the city to develop any of the organized front which they maintain in all other northern cities. It is natural therefore that, though Pittsburgh was strongly loyal for the union during the Civil War, the spirit of the city should in many respects suggest the South rather than the North. Around the nucleus of Scotch-Irish, gathered, as time went on, large numbers of southern Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Germans and German Jews. But these different types are still to a noticeable degree always considered as being marked off by themselves as against the dominant Scotch-Irish. It is only as individuals from among them gain a position of influence by special achievement that they are considered a part of the bone and sinew of the city. The Scotch-Irish with their contrasted traits of sturdiness and ardor, have two great separate interests in life,--industry and religion. The other nationalities have either had the same traits in good measure, or by process of selection individuals have caught the spirit and have come to the front while the rest have fallen to the rear. Yet those who fell back have in most cases found a reasonable opportunity in the great material progress of the town. Pittsburgh is all the more characteristically American for having been built up from first to last by immigrant stock, not merely by unsettled natives. It remains to this day a sort of natural selection of enterprising spirits from out of every European nation and tribe, Americanized not by any tradition or other educational process than that of having the typical American experiences in what still remains the heart of the country. Pittsburgh has never been a place to emigrate from. It has held its own, and constantly invites each nationality to bring more of its kind. The only deserters were those who found it in them to care for a reasonable measure of cultivated life, difficult to secure in a town where there was not a library worthy of the name until 1895 and where a whole winter would sometimes pass without a single lecture on a significant theme intelligently treated. It was natural that in the formative period there were some who sought more congenial associations in the seacoast cities. In religion until comparatively recent days it could be said that there was not a more Calvinistic atmosphere about Edinburgh, Glasgow or Belfast. The early Pittsburghers had almost as strong a tradition of what it means to fight for their faith as the Puritans themselves, and this sense has not had time yet altogether to fade. The orthodox spirit of the town has all along palpably affected the religion of the other racial types. So it is hardly surprising to find that certain regulations of the Catholic Church seem to be more insistently promulgated and more rigorously observed in Pittsburgh than in other places. There is not a city in the country, and probably not in the world, where strict Sabbath and liquor legislation is more strenuously put into effect. Unusually genial people to those who do well, they are summary and even relentless with those who would lower the moral decorum of the city. But as is very likely to happen where there is a rigid ethical creed, there is here a very anomalous double standard. The amount of Sunday work in the steel mills is appalling. There is a certain sanctity in the operations of business which enables it in specific ways to nullify the precepts of religion, as when the over-strain of seven days' work a week is measured in the gradual destruction of the religious sense in great sections of the population. Local option sentiment is easily bewildered by political cross-currents. Though the Brooks law maintains a severe standard as to the conduct of the saloon business, applied by the county judges to whom a complaint is _prima facie_ adverse evidence; yet Pennsylvania remains, in the midst of an unexampled national temperance movement, among the small and ignoble company of states marked black on the reformers' map. Few cities have had a greater degree of political machine control, and the prime sources of this corruption have been nowhere else than among the Scotch-Irish. Ever since the days of Simon Cameron a clan-like political organization has dominated the state of Pennsylvania; and the city of Pittsburgh has been only a less important headquarters for its operations than Philadelphia. The condition of politics in Pennsylvania has led many to think that the people of the state were characterized by a generally lax moral sense. On the contrary, and in Pittsburgh particularly, this situation is because of a too intense and therefore too restricted ethical motive. The passage and enforcement of certain types of legislation having an immediate and obvious ethical bearing satisfies this restricted ethical demand, and sidetracks tendencies which might check the indirect causes of great underlying demoralization. A long list of charities each year receives substantial appropriations from the Legislature. The 20,000 earnest and influential people in Pennsylvania who are members of managing boards of philanthropic institutions receiving state subsidies, are by the same token so much less inclined and less able to be alert and watchful against such matters as the theft of millions from the state treasury and from banks which carry state accounts. The difficulty with Pennsylvania, and emphatically with Pittsburgh, is not degeneracy; it is simply public moral adolescence, and the confusion that inevitably accompanies it. The materialism of Pittsburgh is that of the overwrought, not of the over-indulgent. No one can study the life of the city without feeling a mighty under-current of moral capacity not yet in any sufficient degree brought to the surface. Its religion cultivates definite restraints and reassurances, rather than aspiration and moral enterprise. This is, however, always the case when a community's moral powers are absorbed in the subduing of nature and the achieving of a great material destiny. The spirit of adventure in Pittsburgh has been thus far economic. The moral movement of this people in any case is slow: but it is unyielding always; and once fully aroused knows how to be irresistible. The situation can hardly seem abnormal when one realizes the unsurpassed material resources of the Pittsburgh district and the pressure which has been laid upon a single community by the whole world for the products out of which the foundations of world enlightenment are laid. It is of particular importance in the case of Pittsburgh, that the social student should take the full measure of the function of the city as the almost limitless and tireless creator of the solid means of civilized existence, for this and other nations. The simple fact that it is the first city in the country in the tonnage of its product, and the second city of the country in banking capital, largely on account of its great wage payments, will suggest both the service which it renders and the power which it has achieved. It is significant that in this district the two greatest individual fortunes in history have been amassed and the two most gigantic concentrations of economic power built up. Without in the least abating the test of moral and legal standards upon the policy of industrial leadership in the great activities of western Pennsylvania, it can hardly be doubted that later generations will include the leaders in such enterprise among the master builders of modern civilization. The place of Pittsburgh in the American system of life is that of the city which in an altogether unparalleled way is made up of producers, of those whose purposes are focused in bringing to pass the creation of durable and indispensable utilities. Contrasted with Pittsburgh, every other city in the country is rather a market-place, made more refined but in some sense less noble by the dominance of traders and consumers. It is one of the curious anomalies of American legislation that it should have so zealously guarded against foreign competition in price standards, while withholding all protection against competitors bringing with them a low wage standard. Pittsburgh, in its larger estate, may be said to be a monument to this anomaly. Severe restrictive protection against foreign steel, and unlimited immigration, have enabled Pittsburgh, well-enough otherwise provided, to throw the reins upon the neck of her prosperity. And it must be borne in mind that the protective system, for years tacitly acknowledged by Pittsburgh manufacturers to be unnecessary, is yet clung to as an exclusive and powerful tribal fetich, from whose point of view every question as to the welfare of the nation must first be considered. The fresh constructive moral aspects of politics and patriotism impress Pittsburgh probably less easily than any other community in the country. So great and continuous has been the tide of immigration, that the insistence of the new immigrants for employment on any terms has made it comparatively easy for industrial captains to control industrial administration, to the exclusion of all substantial efforts on the part of the workmen to organize in their own behalf. Beginning with the British operatives and coming down through the successive types to the present southeast Europeans, each type up to the present has gradually raised its demands, made some headway, organized to reach still higher ground, lost by attack from both front and rear, and disappeared up and down the social scale in the general community. This very costly process has been thought necessary to industrial prosperity. There is, of course, no doubt that the holding down of the wage standard, like the artificial maintenance of the price standard, has conduced largely to the making of some of the great personal fortunes; but it is certain that the future historian will find this checking of the normal and typically American aspirations of successive waves of newcomers, to have been distinctly detrimental to the economic, quite as well as to the social and political well-being of the Pittsburgh community. This unthrift in the matter of the prime essential productive force and economic value is again partly accounted for by the very pressure of opportunity afforded by unlimited resources and the insatiable demand of the world market. There has not even been sufficient time for consideration of many economies in process and administration whose value to manufactures would be unquestioned. It is to the point here to remember that the two great fortunes just mentioned began to be great as individual fortunes through special privileges gained in railroad rates. The topographical convergence of the Great Lake region on the one side and the Ohio river valley on the other to a territory less than a hundred miles wide, brought all the chief means of transportation between the West and the Atlantic seaboard through this particular territory. These exceptional facilities for transportation gave a culminating stimulus to industrial progress. The intense localization of resources and transportation facilities led almost inevitably to the phenomenal concentration of industrial capital, followed by highly centralized industrial administration. This process has in a sense been its own undoing, so far as Pittsburgh is concerned, because the financial and even the administrative center of the great combinations have inevitably gravitated to New York, and the old type of self-reliant leader of industry is fast disappearing. Yet the lesson of the large spirit of associated production is constantly being inwrought into the consciousness of the community. A later article in this series will show that the statesmanlike initiative, which until recent days had been inevitably swung into the strategy of business, is beginning to express itself in many promising forms of public spirited activity. Physical environment, no less than racial stock and economic factors, condition the development of public sentiment in a community. The growth of Pittsburgh as a center of population under the pressure of business opportunity would have been very greatly hampered if electric transit had not prepared the way. The ground plan runs up and down almost impossible foldings of hill and valley. The electric cars make possible the utilizing of all the slopes and hilltops for homes. This has weakened the inevitable centripetal force of urban growth, and led to the building up of suburbs very accessible to the central business section, and comparing for attractiveness and comfort with those of any other city in the country. Such a transfer of well-to-do population has made possible other important shiftings both of poorer population and of business, by which the business center has gained in area and in the character and adaptability of its structures. Pittsburgh has grown into an industrial metropolis with outlying manufacturing towns reaching along the rivers, and following the course of all the railroads for a distance of thirty or forty miles. The time is soon coming when all the large industries will be eliminated from the city, and Pittsburgh proper will become simply the commercial and cultural headquarters of its district. Meanwhile all these methods of expansion and relief have not been sufficient to give adequate room in the downtown section either for industry, trade or housing. This area, which is closely hemmed in by the rivers and the hills, now includes the great central commercial activities, the railroad terminals, several large industrial plants and numerous smaller ones, together with the homes of the unskilled population which finds employment within it. The congestion within these tight limits brings out, in a peculiarly acute way, the breakdown of many branches of the social administration of the city, from the point of view of the welfare of its population as a whole. Here not only the unfitness of hundreds of houses under existing conditions for human habitation, but the actual and serious shortage of roofs under which to shelter the lower grades of the industrial population, is most strikingly seen. Here typhoid fever, for which Pittsburgh has these many years held a tragic pre-eminence, is at its highest rate. Here the actual congestion of machinery within industrial plants which cannot get land to expand upon, is particularly conducive to the diseases, and to accidents which are associated with the different branches of industry. In this situation appears another of the strange contrasts of Pittsburgh life. The problem of the downtown district is further complicated by the fact that great sections of it are held under a landlord system like that of the old world. Thirty-three million dollars' worth of real estate located almost wholly in the downtown district is held by five estates, some of the holders living abroad permanently, others traveling much of the time. Commercial enterprise is handicapped by the difficulty of securing an independent title to real estate. Much of the most objectionable tenement house property is held by two of these estates. Absentee landlordism thus oddly parallels absentee capitalism. To the fact that the industrial authorities are remote and, by controlling many plants, can take the fiscal rather than the close range administrative view of industry, must be largely traced that stern reprobation of any equity on the part of the workman in his work, which has on occasion made, and will again make Pittsburgh the country's chief point of social unrest and danger. The anti-trade-union policy tends strongly to fix and standardize the immigrant rate of wages, and has given strong cumulative force to the personal profit-reapings of the past two decades. Recognizing clearly the serious limitations of trade unionism as part of the organization of a tumultuous industry like that of Pittsburgh, it must still be said that there is substantial evidence to believe that the community cheats itself when it keeps up a glutted labor market and a lower than standard wage. However this may be, the Pittsburgh employers' point of view, more than that of any other city of the country, is like that of England in the early days of the factory system,--holding employes guilty of a sort of impiety, and acting with sudden and sure execution, if they undertake to enforce their claims in such way as to embarrass the momentum of great business administration. A sound standard of living for the workman and his right by organized competition to win it, Pittsburgh must eventually recognize as fundamental to the country's economic and political welfare. Should she persist in excluding trade unionism, European experience shows that her hordes of immigrants will quickly learn to carry their alien types of unrest to the ballot box. The backwardness of Pittsburgh in the development of culture and public spirit, must be traced in part to the negative attitude of a serious minded people toward the amenities of life, and their distrust of the process of government. There has been no sufficient tradition in the city of more balanced and varied human interests. The city's population, instead of finding an increasing social unity, has been increasingly sectionalized by the overwhelming influx of every type of immigrant. There has not been leisure for the consideration and discussion of public questions. The very ground plan of the city, which scatters all of its responsible citizens through the suburbs at night, tends to deprive the city of their disinterested co-operation out of office hours toward raising its tone and standards. But other American cities have shown how, when many of their people began to be released from the treadmill of the purely industrial stage of their growth, it is possible to take advantage of the experience of older communities and move by long strides toward a humanized type of urban life. From the foremost absentee capitalist and the foremost absentee landlord have come as gifts the two epoch-making improvements toward the finer public life of the city. Schenley Park and the Carnegie institutions located at its entrance form a civic center whose possibilities of civic influence are very great. It may be noted that the coming in of these improvements was coincident with the work of a city engineer who, indifferent to the political principles under which the city was administered, and acting as a kind of despot within his domain, carried through many great improvements in the layout of the new districts of the city, and with the first move in the direction of a great hospital, which is one day to be built with money left for the purpose by the man who for many years was the political master of the city. The effect upon the city of benefits wrought out in this undemocratic fashion will of course be subject to heavy abatements; but it would be a strange doctrinaire who could not see that these specific steps represent most substantial net gains in the life of the community. There is indeed a distinct undertone of feeling that such benefactions represent simply a return to the city of what the city itself has produced. One can find comparatively few indications that the park, the library and the rest have placed the city under the depressing bonds of patronage. The existence and service of these institutions, in any case, give a new and strong focus to the rising city sense, and the evidence goes to show that, rather than weakening the spirit of collective initiative on the part of the citizens themselves, they have conduced to give shape and force to it. There are several instructive ways in which this growth of civic consciousness is expressing itself. The movement for a greater Pittsburgh now consummated in the union of Pittsburgh and Allegheny with a few adjacent towns, arises no doubt in the general effort toward power and prestige; but the step toward inclusiveness is entirely normal, and has gathered up into a public movement aggressive impulses which had never before run in that channel. Happily the expansion was preceded by the election for the first time in a generation of a reform mayor. The movement came directly as a result of the impudent interference of the state machine in unseating a mayor who had been elected by an opposing local faction. This action, carried out under the forms of legislation, brought Pittsburgh people into a new feeling of municipal self-respect, and led to their electing on a democratic ticket George W. Guthrie, who is in every respect one of Pittsburgh's first citizens and has for many years been earnestly interested in the cause of municipal reform. The date 1898 may be taken as marking a kaleidoscopic shifting in the Pittsburgh ensemble. Then the city emerged into the day of large things,--into the great concentration of capital, and the incidental liquidation which gave many families overpowering fortunes of cash in hand; the assembling of vast heterogeneous multitudes of laborers to keep up with the demands of a period of unparalleled prosperity; the ampler civic sense signalized by the Carnegie institutions with their unusual cultural opportunities, and embodied after a time in solid municipal reform and progress, in a truly enlightened Chamber of Commerce, and in excellent forms of social service. On the one hand, irresponsible individuals have gone forth with boundless power to represent the city to the world at her worst. On the other, Pittsburgh is gradually and quietly taking to herself the world's lessons in the making of the modern city and in the building up of citizenship. The former phenomenon, in which to many this city is allegorized, is but the froth and the scum; the latter has the beginnings of a tidal energy behind it. [Illustration] THE NEW PITTSBURGHERS SLAVS AND KINDRED IMMIGRANTS IN PITTSBURGH PETER ROBERTS INDUSTRIAL DEPARTMENT, INTERNATIONAL YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION The day laborer of a generation ago is gone,--a change which has been swifter and more complete in Pittsburgh than in many other of our industrial centers. "Where are your Irish? your Welsh? your Germans? your Americans?" I asked an old mill hand. "Go to the city hall and the police station," he said. "Some of them are still in the better paid jobs in the mills; but mostly you'll have to look for them among the doctors and lawyers and office holders; among clerks and accountants and salesmen. You'll find them there." The day laborer in the mills to-day is a Slav. The foreign-born of the steel district comprise, it is true, every European nation, but I shall deal here only with the races from southeastern Europe, which for twenty years have been steadily displacing the Teutonic and Keltic peoples in the rough work of the industries. The tendency of the Italians is to go into construction and railroad work, a few entering the mines, rather than into the plants and yards; and my group narrows itself down to the dominant Slav and Lithuanian. What I have to say of them in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City is in the main representative of the manufacturing towns of the whole district. Roughly speaking, one-quarter of the population of Pittsburgh is foreign-born. The foreigner is nowhere more at home than here, and nowhere has he been more actively welcomed by employers. The conflict of customs and habits, varying standards of living, prejudices, antipathies, all due to the confluence of representatives of different races of men, may be witnessed here. The most backward of these foreigners are superstitious and ignorant and are the victims of cunning knaves and unscrupulous parasites. On the other hand, the whole territory is thrown into a stern struggle for subsistence and wage-standards by the displacements due to these resistless accretions to the ranks of the workers. The moral and religious life of the city is not less affected by this inflow of peoples. Their religious training differs widely from that of peoples of Protestant antecedents, and institutions that were dear to the founders of the city are fast undermined by the customs of immigrants from southeastern Europe. Yet as a whole, they bring with them physical and cultural resources which the English-speaking community fails to elicit or thoughtlessly wastes. Such an exhaustive study as could be made of the immigrant population of the steel district is outside the possibilities of this paper. I shall set down only what a month brought me as I visited the lodging-houses and the courts and the mills of Greater Pittsburgh; as I talked with priest and leader, policeman and doctor, banker and labor boss, the immigrants themselves and those who live close to them; but I shall put it before you in the light of many years' residence in the anthracite coal communities, where in another section of Pennsylvania, at Mahanoy City and Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, I have known the Slav and the Lett and their efforts to gain a foothold in America. I shall deal with the situation, not as I have seen it in my visits of the past year, during which the immigrants have returned home by thousands, but as I came to know it in the heyday of prosperity, the early fall of 1907, when conditions were as they are likely to be again when industrial prosperity returns. This is the situation which we must reckon with in a permanent way. In 1880, Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians did not form one per cent of the population in either Pittsburgh or Allegheny. By 1890, they had reached four per cent, and out of an army of 90,000 wage earners, one in every ten was an immigrant from southeastern Europe. By 1900, one-third of the foreign-born were of this new immigration, and the movement of the Teutonic and Keltic races had practically ceased. We must wait until the census enumeration of 1910 before we may definitely know what proportion these newcomers form to-day, but it may safely be assumed that the percentage of foreign-born in the greater city will equal that of 1900, thirty per cent, or roughly, 200,000, half of whom will be from southeastern Europe. Poles, Italians and Jewish immigrants lead the list. Lithuanians, Croatians, Servians, Slovaks and Ruthenians are numbered by the thousands, and Magyars, Greeks, Bohemians and Roumanians are here in lesser groups. The representatives of these nations touch elbows in the streets so that the languages heard when the people are marketing in the foreign quarters on Saturday night are as numerous as those of a seaport town. Twenty dialects are spoken. Yet the polyglot mass that confuses the visitor and induces pessimistic impressions as to the future of the city, is each morning marshalled without tumult. The discipline of the industrial establishments converts this babel of tongues into one of the chief forces of production. Therein lies an appraisal not only of the American _entrepreneur_, but also of these men coming from nations of low efficiency, who are able so quickly to fall into line and keep step in an industrial army of remarkable discipline and output. There is no way of knowing the annual inflow of immigrants into Pittsburgh, for the city is a distributing point. The records of the ports of entry show that in 1907, 187,618 persons gave Pittsburgh as their destination, but many of these scattered to the neighboring Pennsylvania towns and many undoubtedly went to the mills and mines of Eastern Ohio. Every day brings its quota of immigrants in normal times; occasionally they come by the carloads. Owing to the shifting of the newcomers, however, the outflow may often equal the inflow. Conditions of the local industries determine which of these two currents runs the swifter. During the first seven years of the century, the city possibly added 15,000 annually by immigration. Before taking up the living conditions in Pittsburgh as they especially affect these immigrant laborers, let us consider for a moment certain characteristics of these people, and their relation to the general economic situation. First, it is the wages that bring them here. The workers in the mills of Galicia, the vine-lands of Italy, and the factories of Kiev, earn from twenty-five cents to fifty cents in a day of from twelve to sixteen hours. When the American immigrant writes home that he works only nine, ten, or twelve hours and earns from $1.50 to $2.00, the able-bodied wage earner in the fatherland who hears this will not be satisfied until he also stands where the shorter day and the higher wages govern. It is these home-going letters more than all else which recruit the labor force. They are efficient promoters of immigration. "There are no able-bodied men," said Big Sam to me, "between the ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town in Servia; they have all come to America." [Illustration: DIRECT FROM THE FIELDS OF MID-EUROPE.] Up to September, 1907, the men in charge of furnaces, foundries, forges and mills, in the Pittsburgh district, could not get the help they needed. The cry everywhere was, "Give us men." A foreman, therefore, could assure Pietro and Melukas that if their brothers or cousins, or friends were sent for, they would get work as soon as they arrived. More than that, the Slav and Italian are no longer dependent on the English boss in the matter of finding work for their countrymen. The inflow of immigration from southeastern Europe has assumed such proportions in the industries of the cities that superintendents have, in some instances, appointed Italian and Polish and Lithuanian foremen; and with these, as with German and Irish, blood is thicker than water. They employ their fellow countrymen. They know the condition of the labor market and can by suggestion stimulate or retard immigration. The tonnage industries of Pittsburgh have expanded tremendously in the last two decades. Such industries need manual laborers as do no others. The Slavs have brawn for sale. Herein, at bottom, is the drawing force which accounts for such a moving in of peoples and the readiness with which they find their places in the specialized industries of the district. Pittsburgh has clamorous need for these men. Take the average Lithuanian, Croatian, Ruthenian, or Slovak, and his physique would compare favorably with that of any people. Most of the immigrants are from agricultural communities. Their food in the fatherland was coarse, their habits simple, their cares few. They had an abundance of vegetable diet, pure water, pure air and sunshine, and they developed strong physical organisms. Taking them as a whole, we get the best of the agricultural communities. The day has not yet come when the weak emigrate and the strong stay at home. No ship agents, however active, can reverse the natural order of the tide of immigration, and natural selection added to federal scrutiny gives us a body of men physically most fit for the development of our industries. Nowhere has this been better illustrated than in Pittsburgh. These men come to be "the hewers of wood and carriers of water." There are representatives of each race far removed from the lowest industrial stratum, but taking these people as a whole, it is safe to say that the bulk of the unskilled labor in the city,--the digging and carrying in the streets, the heavy labor in the mill, the loading and unloading of raw material on railroad and river, the rough work around forge and foundry, the coarse work around factories, and the lifting necessary in machine shops,--all is performed by them. [Illustration: YOUNG SLOVAK.] This is the level at which they enter the economic order. What trade equipment do they bring into the work with them? Their industrial efficiency is low and I should estimate that ninety-five per cent have no knowledge of modern machinery or methods of modern production; they are children in factory training. Further, those who have trades find themselves in an industrial environment where their previous training is of little value. They are in ignorance of the English language, and the few mechanics and tradesmen among them can do no better than join the ranks of the common laborers. We must bear in mind, however, that those of them who know how to use tools, once they are put to work that requires some skill, adapt themselves quickly to the situation. Hence we meet not a few Slavs and Lithuanians who execute work of a semi-skilled nature. Sons, also, of men of these nationalities who settled in the city a generation ago have risen to positions of standing in the industries. Thus it is not unusual to hear of this man or that who has become a foreman in the mills or taken a place in business or in the professions. But on several counts the average Slav, Lithuanian and Italian are not as acceptable as day laborers as were the immigrants from northwestern Europe. The common opinion of American employers is that they are stupid and that the supervisory force must be much larger than if they had English speaking help. Many employers would no doubt, prefer the latter; but they cannot get them for the wages offered; they must take the Slav or run short handed. The United States commissioner of immigration in Pittsburgh is constantly besieged by employers of labor who need help. Many stories are told of one firm stealing a group of laborers marshalled at the ports of entry and forwarded to another. [Illustration: YOUNG SERVIAN.] I have spoken of the influence which letters and money sent home have in recruiting immigrant workmen. These people make little or no use of labor agencies unless the saloon and the small bank may be so denominated. There are men in each nationality, acknowledged leaders, who play the part of intermediaries between superintendents and their people. But such investigations as I have made at Ellis Island do not lead me to believe that the employers of labor in Pittsburgh violate the contract labor law. Labor agencies in New York city make a specialty of distributing Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians to firms in need of hands. The leader who supplies men to a mill or mining concern gets so much for each man supplied. Whatever contract there may be is executed this side of the water. For instance, a leading Croatian had a specific understanding with one of the mills of Pittsburgh that all men he brings will find employment. No contract was executed and in the opinion of the local immigration agent, there was in it no violation of the contract labor law. [Illustration: YOUNG CROATIAN.] I have noted the drawbacks to the new day laborer as such. On the other hand, it is a common opinion in the district that some employers of labor give the Slavs and Italians preference because of their docility, their habit of silent submission, their amenability to discipline, and their willingness to work long hours and over time without a murmur. Foreigners as a rule earn the lowest wages and work the full stint of hours. I found them in the machine shops working sixty hours a week; at the blast furnaces working twelve hours a day for seven days in the week. The common laborer in and around the mills works seventy-two hours a week. The unit of wages is an hour rate for day labor and a Slav is willing to take the longer hours (twelve hours a day for men who work fourteen and sixteen in the fatherland) with extra work on Sundays, especially in connection with clearing the yards and repairing. Possibly sixty to seventy per cent of the laborers in the mills come out Sundays and the mechanics and other laborers on occasions work thirty-six hours in order that the plant may start on time. In one mill I found Russians (Greek Orthodox) in favor for the reason that they gladly worked on Sundays. [Illustration: YOUNG SERVIAN.] My belief is that certain employers of labor have reaped advantage from racial antipathies. The Pole and the Lithuanian have nothing in common and each of them despises the Slovak. Foremen know this and use their knowledge when foreigners are likely to reach a common understanding upon wages or conditions of labor. All these considerations have helped make it less difficult for factory operators to keep open or non-union shop in Pittsburgh. The constant influx of raw material from backward nations into the industries of the city has had somewhat the same effect as the flow of water at an estuary when the tide is rising. All is commotion. It will continue to be so as long as the inflow of Slavs and Italians continues as it has in the last decade. But when they have become permanently placed and their average intelligence and grasp of American conditions rise, racial prejudices will give way to common interests. When this time comes, Pittsburgh will witness the rise of stronger labor organizations than were ever effected by Teuton and Kelt. We have seen, then, the Slavic day laborers coming into the steel district in vast numbers. Of their strength and lack of skill at the outset there is no doubt, and we have noted some of the snap judgments that are current about them; such as, that they are stupid, and submissive. All this puts us in better position to consider more in detail my first statement that it is the wages that bring them to Pittsburgh, and to see what advances they make once they have gained a foothold. The Slav enters the field at a rate of pay for day labor which is higher than that which brought the Germans and the Kelts. The lowest wage I found Slavs working for was thirteen and one-half cents an hour. The wage of common labor in the average mill is fifteen or sixteen and a half cents. The day laborer around the furnaces gets from $1.65 to $1.98 a day. But the newcomers know nothing of a standard wage, and when work is scarce, they will offer to work for less than is paid for common labor. Such was the case of a band of Croatians who offered their services to a firm in Pittsburgh for $1.20 a day. When the superintendent heard it, he said, "My God, what is the country coming to? How can a man live in Pittsburgh on $1.20 a day?" The foreman replied, "Give them rye bread, a herring, and beer, and they are all right." [I have known a coal operator in the anthracite fields to pay Italians and Slovaks ninety cents a day, and ask neither what was the country coming to nor how they could subsist.] More, the Slavs will consciously cut wages in order to get work. A man who knows something about blacksmithing or carpentering will work at a trade for $1.65 or $1.75 when the standard wage may be $2.50. They count their money in the denominations of the fatherland and estimate its value according to old country standards. I have known foremen to take advantage of this. Again, those who are skilled will at the command of the boss render menial services without a murmur. "These fellows have no pride," said an American craftsman to me, "they are not ruled by custom. When the foreman demands it they will throw down the saw or hammer and take the wheelbarrow." So the Slav gains his foothold in the Pittsburgh industries, and in the doing of it, he undermines the income of the next higher industrial groups and gains the enmity of the Americans. Shrewd superintendents are known not only to take advantage of the influx of unskilled labor to keep down day wages, but to reduce the pay of skilled men by a gradually enforced system of promoting the Slavs. In the place of six men at ten dollars a day, one will be employed at fifteen dollars, with five others at half, or less than half, the old rate, who will work under the high-priced man. Inventions, changes in processes, new machines, a hundred elements tend to complicate the situation and render it difficult to disentangle the influence of any one element. But this much is clear, the new immigration is a factor which is influencing the economic status of the whole wage-earning population in Pittsburgh; it is bound to be a permanent factor; and its influence will be more and not less. My estimate is that possibly twenty per cent of these laborers from southeastern Europe now work at machines which require a week or two weeks to acquire the skill needed in their operation. To be sure, they are machines "so simple that a child could operate them, and so strong that a fool cannot break them." Many Slovaks work in the Pressed Steel Car Company in Allegheny, as riveters, punchers, and pressmen, while others are fitters, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Some Croatians and Servians are rising and are found in the steel mills as roughers and catchers. I saw Ruthenians feeding machines with white heated bars of steel. It was simple, mechanical work, but of a higher grade than that of scrap-carrier. The Poles who in recent years emigrated from Russia and Austria-Hungary are as industrially efficient as any group of immigrants and work in both mills and foundries. A foreigner who has a chance to become a machine operator generally goes into piece work and earns from $2 to $2.50 a day. But all men at the machines are not on piece work. A foreman explained this to me as follows: "If the machine depends upon the man for speed, we put him on piece work; if the machine drives the man, we pay him by the day." The man operating a machine by the day gets from $1.75 to $2. Many boys and young women of Slavic parentage work in the spike, nut and bolt, and steel wire factories. They sit before machines and pickling urns for ten hours for from seventy-five cents to $1 a day. The Slovak riveters, punchers, shears-men and pressmen in the Pressed Steel Car Company's plant are paid by the piece, and for the most part make from $35 to $50 in two weeks. Fitters, carpenters, blacksmiths and painters are getting from $2 to $2.50 by the day. Mr. Bozic, the banker, told me of Croatians and Servians who made as high as $70 in two weeks, and others who made between $3 and $4 a day--many of them in positions which once paid English-speaking workmen twice those sums. High and low are relative terms and they signify very different standards to a Slav and to an American. But it is a mistake to imagine that the Slav or Lithuanian cannot adapt himself to modern industrial conditions. There is considerable of prophecy in the thousands of them already doing efficient work in the mills. The sooner the English-speaking workers recognize this and make friends of these workers, the better. No class of work is now monopolized by Teutons and Kelts, and the service rendered by the Slav and Lithuanian will before many years equal theirs in market value. With this rapid statement of the economic position of the Slavs, we can more intelligently approach the problem of their living conditions. But first let us bear sharply in mind that their work is often cast among dangers; is often inimical to health. Many work in intense heat, the din of machinery and the noise of escaping steam. The congested condition of most of the plants in Pittsburgh adds to the physical discomforts for an out-of-doors people; while their ignorance of the language and of modern machinery increases the risk. How many of the Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians are injured in Pittsburgh in one year is not known. No reliable statistics are compiled. In their absence people guess, and the mischief wrought by contradictory and biased statements is met on all hands. When I mentioned a plant that had a bad reputation to a priest, he said, "Oh, that is the slaughter-house; they kill them there every day." I quote him not for his accuracy, but to show how the rumors circulate and are real to the people themselves. It is undoubtedly true, that exaggerated though the reports may be, the waste in life and limb is great, and if it all fell upon the native born a cry would long since have gone up which would have stayed the slaughter. In the matter of compensation for injuries, the foreign-speaking are often subjected to hardships and injustice. If the widow of a man killed in a mine or mill of Pennsylvania lives in Europe, she cannot recover any damages, although the accident may be entirely due to the neglect of the company. Because of this ruling, certain strong companies in the Pittsburgh district seldom pay a cent to the relatives of the deceased if they dwell beyond the seas. I asked a leader among the Italians, "Why do you settle the serious cases for a few hundred dollars?" He replied: "We find it best after much bitter experience. The courts are against us; a jury will not mulct a corporation to send money to Europe; the relatives are not here to bewail their loss in court; the average American cares nothing for the foreigner. Every step of the way we meet with prejudices and find positive contempt, from those in highest authority in the courts down to the tip-staff. When I settle for $200, I can do nothing better." The influence of the industries reaches still further into the lives of the immigrants. Each people has a tendency to colonize in one section of the city and work in some one mill. The Bohemians are strong in Allegheny City, but few of them are found in Pittsburgh. The Slovaks predominate in McKees Rocks and Allegheny City, and many of them are found in the Soho district of Pittsburgh. The Poles are numerous in many parts of the greater city. The Lithuanians live in large numbers on the South Side, and near the National Tube Works and the American Steel and Wire Company. Many Ruthenians work in the Oliver Steel Works, while the Croatians and Servians have worked for the most part in the Jones and Laughlin plants. My information is that foremen try to get one nationality in assigning work to a group of laborers, for they know that a homogeneous group will give best results. National pride also enters into selection. In talking to a Lithuanian of the serious loss of life which occurred when a furnace blew up, I asked, "Were any of your people killed in that accident?" He answered quickly, "No; catch our people do such work as that! There you find the Slovak." Of the grades of unskilled labor, the Slovak, Croatian, Servian and Russian (Greek Orthodox) may be said to perform the roughest and most risky, and the most injurious to health. There is, then, a more or less natural selection of peoples in the neighborhoods of the different great mills. The geographical contour of the region has also had its influence in keeping the foreign population within certain limited districts. The two rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, have cut their beds in the Allegheny range, leaving a narrow strip of land on either side of their banks which offers limited sites for dwellings, mills and factories. The lowlands were preempted long ago, and the contest for parts of them between the mills and the homes has been intense. There is an advantage to the employer, however, in having his crude labor force within easy call, and night work and the cost of carfare help keep the mass of men employed in common labor near the mills and on the congested lowlands. The deplorable conditions I found among them I shall describe, but let me say here that all the houses on the flats are not the same. I visited homes of Slavs and Lithuanians which were clean, well furnished, and equal in comfort to those of Americans of the same economic level. These foreigners have been in the country many years and their children have risen to the American standard. But our first concern is with the recent comers, who too often live in lodgings that are filthy; whose peasant habits seem to us uncouth; and whose practices are fatal to decency and morality in a thickly settled district. Yet the foreigner pays a higher rent than does the "white man." In Bass street, Allegheny City, I found English-speaking tenants paying fifteen dollars a month for four rooms, where Slavs were charged twenty dollars. Landlords who received ten dollars and twelve dollars a month for houses rented to the English-speaking, were getting seventeen and eighteen dollars from the Slavs. On Penn avenue a Slav paid seventeen dollars for three rooms, while a family renting eight rooms in the front of the building paid but thirty-three dollars a month. As nearly as I could estimate, the average monthly rent paid by the foreigner in Pittsburgh is more than four dollars a room. I found one family paying nine dollars and a half for one large room in an old residence on the South Side; another paid ten dollars for two rooms, another sixteen dollars for three; and on Brandt street I found a man who paid twenty-two dollars a month for four. The rent is not always fixed by the landlord. Where lodgers are taken, it is sometimes regulated by the number the "boarding-boss" can crowd in, the landlord getting one dollar a month extra for each boarder. Houses of from eight to twelve rooms have in them to-day anywhere from three to six families. They were built for one family, and until the owners are forced by the Bureau of Health to install sanitary appliances, have equipment for but one. Too many landlords when they rent to foreigners have apparently one dominating passion,--rent. They make no repairs, and with the crowded condition above described the houses soon bear marks of ill usage. Whenever foreigners invade a neighborhood occupied by English-speaking tenants, property depreciates. The former occupants get out, the invaders multiply, and very often the properties pass into the hands of speculators. Houses once occupied by Slavs can seldom be rented again to Anglo-Saxons. Foreigners under stress for room use cellars as bed rooms, and it is against these that the health bureau within the last year has taken action. I saw one of these beside which a common stable would have been a parlor. [Illustration: NIGHT SCENE IN A SLAVIC LODGING HOUSE. Three men in the far bed, two in the others, twelve in the room. In some of these lodgings day workers sleep nights in beds occupied by night workers in the daytime.] But it is in the immigrant lodging houses that conditions are worst. These conditions are not always the choice of the men. The Croatians, Servians, Roumanians and Greeks have only from five to ten per cent of women among them; hence the men of these nationalities have but few boarding houses conducted by their own people to go to, and crowding is inevitable. English-speaking and German families will not open their doors to them. Single men in groups of from six to twenty go into one house in charge of a boarding-boss and his wife. Each man pays from seventy-five cents to a dollar a week for room to sleep in and the little cooking and washing that are to be done. Food for the company is bought on one book, and every two weeks the sum total is divided equally among the boarders, each man paying his _pro rata_ share. The bill for two weeks will hardly amount to three dollars a man, so that the average boarder will spend ten dollars a month on room rent and maintenance. The mania for saving results in many cases in skimping the necessaries of life. A priest told me of a Lithuanian who lived on ten cents a day, and by helping the landlady in her house work, the man saved room rent. I found Russians (Greek Orthodox) on Tustine street who were paying three dollars a month for room rent. They buy bread made by Russian Jews, get a herring and a pot of beer, and live,--not always,--in peace. When they pay three dollars and fifty cents for room rent, soup is included in the contract. Domestic tragedies sometimes invade these communal households, such as a case of assault and battery which came up in an alderman's office. The complainant was a single man who appeared with a ghastly scalp wound. When this boarding-boss presented his bill at the end of two weeks, the charges were five dollars more than the man thought they ought to be. He protested and the boarding-boss took a hatchet to silence him. The Italians are close livers; but possibly the worst conditions I saw were among the Armenians in the neighborhood of Basin alley. In these boarding establishments as a general rule, the kitchen is commonly used as a bedroom. When the boarding boss rents two rooms, he and his wife sleep in the kitchen, and the boarders take the other room. It is not unusual for a boarding-boss to rent but one room. He and his wife put their bed in one corner; the stove in another; and the boarders take the remainder. Sometimes the rooms are so crowded that the boss and his wife sleep on the floor; and I repeatedly found cases where beds were being worked double shift,--night and day. The city Bureau of Health has endeavored to reduce the number of beds in a room, but it does not follow that the people occupying that room get out,--they sleep on the floor minus the bed. Here as elsewhere the problem is one of the hardest for sanitary inspectors to cope with. [Illustration: SLAVIC LODGING HOUSE ON THE SOUTH SIDE. Four beds; two in a bed. The young fellow at the table was writing home. Before him were pictures of his mother and sisters in immaculate peasant costumes.] Sometimes four or six men rent a house and run it themselves, doing their own cooking and washing and occasionally bringing in a woman to do a little cleaning. They may stand this for about six months and then get out when the room is past the cleaning stage. Such crowding is very prevalent in the low lying parts of the South Side, in the neighborhood of Penn avenue in the city proper, and in sections of Allegheny. Among the Russians of Tustine street I found thirty-three persons living in one house in six rooms and an attic. These were distributed among three families. The Croatians also are bad crowders. A milk dealer told me of twenty-eight who lived in a house in Carey alley. When I asked, "How do they live?" his reply was, "I don't know and don't care if I get my money for my milk." In Pork House row and near Eckert street in Allegheny, things were no better, and some blocks of houses under the California avenue bridge were as bad as any thing I saw. Before we condemn immigrants for the filth of their lodgings, we must remember that they are largely rural peoples unused to such city barracks. This fact is illustrated especially in their ignorance regarding that terror which has waited upon foreigners in the Pittsburgh district,--typhoid fever. Dr. Leon Sadowski estimated that as high as fifty per cent of all young foreigners who come to Pittsburgh contract typhoid fever within two years of their coming. Dr. Maracovick told me that in four years no less than 100 Croatians in the neighborhood of Smallman street had come down with the fever, and that most of them died. "You cannot make the foreigner believe that Pittsburgh water is unwholesome," said Dr. Welsh of Bellevue. "He comes from rural communities where contamination of water is unknown." Physicians told me of men who had been warned, deliberately going to the Allegheny to quench their thirst. Where so many single men are huddled together the laws of decency and morality are hard to observe. The boarding boss seldom has a family and, in going the round of these houses, the absence of children is conspicuous. A physician among them told me, "The average boarding-boss's wife cannot get any,--the moral condition makes it a physical impossibility." This stands in striking contrast with the average Slavic woman who in her natural environment, is the mother of children. These mid-European peoples are not so passionate as the Italians, but many of the single men, as the case is in all barracks life, fall into vice. A physician told me that gonorrhea is very prevalent among the Croatians and Servians. Another physician said of the Slavs in general, "They frequent cheap houses and come out diseased and robbed." Many bawdy houses are known in Pittsburgh as "Johnny Houses," for the reason that they are frequented by foreigners whose proper names are unpronounceable and who go by the name of "John." The number entering these on a "wide-awake" (pay) Saturday night is large. A man who knows this section fairly well, said, "Sometimes these men have to wait their turn." These are houses of the cheapest kind given over to prostitutes in the last stage. The presence of young immigrant women in the immigrant lodging houses adds to the seriousness of the situation. Here again it is a question of wages that brings them to this country. They do the drudgery in the hotels and restaurants which English-speaking girls will not do; and they are to be found in factories working under conditions their English-speaking sisters would resent. If any persons need protection, these young women do. There is no adequate inspection of the labor employment agencies in Pittsburgh which solicit patronage among them, often to wrong them. Not only do some of these agencies take their money but they send girls to places unfit for them. An innocent girl may learn the character of the house only when it is too late. And even in the boarding houses their lot is a hard one, especially when the men of the place are on a carouse. The Slavs and Lithuanians are fond of drink and spend their money freely on it. Some spend more money on beer than they do on food. The evidences of drink in the homes are apparent on all sides; and not only do national customs and national tastes and usages make for drunkenness, but the undeniable fact that the liquor interests are the only American institutions which effectively reach the great mass of the non-English speaking immigrants. Where else does the stranger find opportunity for recreation at his very hand? Empty beer kegs and bottles are to be seen everywhere among the houses of the immigrant lodgers. In Latimore alley, on a September morning, I counted twenty empty kegs in the yard; and in another corner there was a pile of empty bottles. It is nothing unusual for a beer wagon on Saturday to deliver into one of these boarding houses from eight to twelve cases of beer. When a keg is open the boarders feel that they must drain it. "It won't keep," they say. Sunday is the day for drinking. One man often drinks from fifteen to twenty bottles; while he who drinks from the keg does away with from two to three gallons. No social gathering is complete without drink. Marriages, baptisms, social occasions, holidays are all celebrated with beer and liquor. There is no good time and no friendship without it. The Slavs usually rent a hall to celebrate their weddings. The scenes of debauchery with which such festivities sometimes end are discountenanced by the respectable element among these people. Pool rooms afford loafing places for the young men of the worst sort. The cheap vaudeville shows, nickelodeons, and skating rinks are run for profit and not for the sake of clean recreation such as the community should in some way provide. But such places cannot be eliminated unless the craving of young people for amusement is met intelligently and sanely. [Illustration: SLOVAK GIRL.] Where the environment of the home is unsanitary and repulsive, and where opportunities for recreation are limited and sordid, crime is bound to flourish. Approximately one-fifth of the persons incarcerated in Allegheny county in recent years have been immigrants from southeastern Europe. A visit to the police stations of the South Side on Sunday morning when the police magistrate dispenses justice after a "wide-awake" Saturday night, is a thing never to be forgotten. In such a section the foreigners form a majority of the offenders. On one of my visits to a South Side court, a young Pole was brought up who said he wanted to be arrested just to find out how it felt. The judge asked him, "How do you like it?" "All right," he said laughing. He got a full taste by being sent to jail for ten days. Another young Slav had violated a city ordinance. He could not speak English. The judge asked him how long he had been in the country. "Four years," he replied. "And you cannot talk English?" said the judge. "Don't you know that you ought to learn English that you may know we have laws and ordinances which must be obeyed?" In the judge's remark there was more of a commentary on civic duties unfulfilled than he perhaps realized. But who was to blame? Was it the Slav boy? Or was it the community which had failed to meet him halfway? Here it is well to point out that the public school authorities have not made any strenuous effort to open evening schools for foreign adults in the city. The notable exception to this rule has been the work carried on by Principal Anthony among the Jewish people of the hill district, which grew out of classes carried on at Columbian Settlement. Another evening school, in the establishment of which a priest was the prime mover, met with fair success, but the foreigners dropped out very quickly. When asked why the school was given up, one of the school officials said that the pupils did not want it to continue; but their hours of work and changing shifts are probably still more important factors. Kingsley House, Woods Run and Columbian Settlement have carried on successful classes for foreigners, and the Y. M. C. A.'s of the districts are entering the field of civic and language instruction. The development of the evening courses of the Carnegie Technical Schools has been significant, but as yet they do not reach many unskilled immigrants, who need a nearby elementary help. The camp schools carried on by the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants, at Aspinwall and Ambridge, have illustrated what could be done, and the response which comes from the immigrants themselves. More important, they were the means of securing the passage of legislation enabling local school authorities to open classes for adults. But in Greater Pittsburgh, it remains true that the school authorities are not yet awake to the importance of opening schools for foreign-speaking people and inducing them to attend. There could be no greater service rendered these young foreigners (or the city that harbors them) than that of aiding them to form clubs, and of engaging competent men to teach them English and give them some idea of the history and laws of the country. In police station No. 3 on Penn avenue, the cases averaged four hundred and forty-five a month during the ten months I studied them. Drunkenness and disorderly conduct formed sixty-eight per cent of these cases, and the foreigners from southeastern Europe were charged with twenty-seven per cent of them. Three-quarters of the criminals were single men, and the large number of single men among the foreigners who lack decent homes, doubtless partly accounts for the frequency of their arrests. Similar proportions governed at police station No. 7 on Carson street. A study of the docket of the Aldermen's Court on the South Side, in a prescribed area where Slavs and Lithuanians form an essential part of the population, showed a total of 167, or 39.5 per cent for these nationalities; but these cases varied greatly from those in the police stations. 48.3 per cent were cases of assault and battery and 45.6 per cent of the culprits were foreigners. The cases of fornication and bastardy, adultery and rape, numbered seventeen, more than half of which were to be laid at the door of the foreigners. Cases of larceny, disturbance of the peace, and disorderly conduct were about equally divided between the English-speaking and the non-English-speaking of southeastern Europe. Out of thirty-one cases of desertion and non-support, not a Slav, Lithuanian or Italian was implicated. [Illustration: SERVIAN GIRL.] A closer study of this list indicated that aldermen were giving preference to cases where the returns were sure. Pittsburgh suffers under a system of petty aldermen's courts such as Chicago only recently put an end to, and from which Philadelphia is exempted by constitutional provision. The aldermen are dependent upon their fees and the immigrants, ofttimes innocent, are the special prey of such as may be unscrupulous. Profits are not what they used to be for those who prey upon ignorance, as I gathered from the constable who told me, "The foreigner knows too much now; old times are past." In the good old times he had made from fifteen to twenty dollars a day. But even if the most flagrant abuses are now infrequent and if some of the aldermen are of unquestionable character, the system is wrong and the foreigner is its most grievous sufferer. [Illustration: LITHUANIAN GIRL.] But we must not over-estimate the lawlessness among these people. We have seen the manner of life of the single men, and the dangers that beset them. In the Pittsburgh situation what encouragement is there to the immigrant who seriously wants to get ahead in life? I have it from a priest that one-tenth of the young men of his race who come to this district go to the bad; the other nine-tenths may drink more or less, but they manage to save money and in time acquire property. Of the Lithuanian families of Pittsburgh more than ten per cent own their own homes. Many Poles and Slovaks also have purchased their own homes. When an Italian resolves to stay in this country, he buys a house. But as yet few Croatians, Ruthenians and Servians own real estate in Pittsburgh. While the wages of the day laborers in the district are high for the single man who lives on the boarding boss system, the foreigner who brings his family here and pays American prices for the necessities of life, faces a different situation. The father of a family cannot hope to get accommodations for less than twelve or fifteen dollars a month, and then he has only two or three rooms. The Slav, as we have seen, has to pay more than the English-speaking man for the same house. The man who earns thirty-seven dollars a month and has to pay twelve dollars in rent has not a large fund on which to raise a family. He belongs to one or two lodges which means an outlay of a dollar to a dollar and a half each month. He must pay fifty cents a month to his church, and he is compelled to send his children to the parochial school at, say, another fifty cents a head, or three for a dollar. He must buy the school books needed by the child; this may amount yearly to from three to four dollars. Is it surprising, then, that the children are sent to work at an early age and that many are raised in cramped and dirty quarters? But this question of the children, of their health and education, we must leave to later issues. When the mills are working regularly and the father is able to work each day, the family manages to get along. But when sickness comes or work ceases, then the pinch of hunger is felt. Mrs. Lippincott of the Society for the Improvement of the Poor tells me that in good times but few Slavs or Lithuanians apply for aid; that only when the father is killed or injured, is aid needed, and that then it is for medicine and proper food for the patient.[4] [4] A study of the records of the charity department of Pittsburgh and Allegheny indicated that the percentage of foreign born dependents exceeds by perhaps ten per cent the percentage of foreign born in the population. I refer to the city home, the city hospital, the poor houses, the tuberculosis camp and outdoor relief. In the institutions for the insane as many as forty-nine per cent were foreign born and of the $311,470 appropriated for their maintenance on a given year, half was thus bestowed upon the foreign born. It must be remembered that influential men among the Slavs and Lithuanians are prosperous and live in residential sections of Pittsburgh. Some Poles and Italians are in the professions and some Lithuanians are well to do business men. All these people, however, do business among their own countrymen, and as yet their influence is largely restricted to this circle. Sections of the city where foreigners live are well supplied with banking facilities, which are generally conducted by men of those nationalities. The leading banks of Pittsburgh have learned that the immigrants save their money, and many of them have a foreign exchange department at the head of which is put a foreign-speaking man who is a leader among his countrymen. In this connection, it is interesting to examine more closely what might be called the personal ledger of the Slavic day laborer in Pittsburgh. [Illustration: A SLAVIC HOUSEHOLD.] We have seen that more than half the Italians, Croatians, Servians and Ruthenians are single men, and that a large proportion of the other races are similarly placed. Many are married but their wives are across the seas. Their policy is to make all they can and spend as little as possible. We have also seen that the wages of common labor are from $1.35 to $1.65 a day and that those who have acquired a little skill earn from $1.75 to $2.25. The monthly expenditure of single men bent on saving will not exceed ten dollars a month. Some Russians complain when their monthly bill amounts to eight dollars. The drinking bill will not exceed five dollars a month; and the sum spent on clothing will hardly equal that. Hence a common laborer can save from ten to fifteen dollars a month; the semi-skilled workers from twenty to twenty-five dollars; and boarding bosses accumulate what is to them a competence. A banker doing business among the Servians of the South Side stated that each pay day he sent back between $20,000 and $25,000 to the old country on deposit. In September of 1907, one of the banks on the South Side where the foreigners do business had $600,000 on deposit. Such a showing has come only after a vigorous campaign on the part of the banks of Pittsburgh to overcome the mistrust which foreigners feel toward private institutions. Individual small banks conducted by men of their own nationality were the rule for many years. The institutions were ephemeral and the impression prevailed among the laborers that they were schemes of sinister men to wheedle their money from them. Some men still secrete their savings, trusting no one. Through the kindness of one of the Pittsburgh bankers, this table of twelve representative Slavic depositors is given: _Single Men._ _Married Men._ =============================================+========================= 1906-1907. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | 1 2 3 4 5 ---------------------------------------------+------------------------- Sept.-Nov. $95 $103 $45 $35 $110 $100 $60 | $240 $70 $100 $105 Dec.-Feb. 115 63 25 135 60 100 60 | 150 190 50 March-May 20 93 25 95 60 100 60 | 50 145 100 200 90 June-Aug. 207 76 105 73 50 55 | 115 120 200 140 40 ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- | ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Totals $437 $335 $200 $338 $280 $300 $265 | $555 $525 $300 $440 $285 =============================================+========================= [Illustration: UNIFORMED NATIONAL SOCIETIES IN SESQUI-CENTENNIAL PARADE.] [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ IN THE CHURCH OF THE DOUBLE CROSS.] [Illustration: A CHURCH OF THE DOUBLE CROSS.] The fraternal organizations also among the Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians provoke an increasing amount of thrift and provide various forms of insurance. They are the dominant form of social organization and afford opportunities for leadership to the stronger men. The National Slovak Society, for instance, has a membership of 50,000, and the Polish National Alliance one of 75,000. Pittsburgh has some thirty locals of the latter alone, each with a list of from forty to 300 members. The lodge organizations of these people cannot be discussed in detail in such a paper as this; here it is sufficient to note that in case of sickness and death they look after their members; they provide social centers for the more thrifty of the people, and tend generally to raise the standard of life. Outside these lodges, the Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians have their organizations for enjoyment and amusement. Among the Poles there are societies for self-culture, such as dramatic clubs and singing societies. There is reason to believe that the home governments of these people foster the formation of organizations along racial lines; the church also fosters these national societies. In so far as such organizations perpetuate national customs and habits in America, they tend to make assimilation difficult. A strong people swayed by racial consciousness on foreign soil will either thrust its own concepts and ideals into the social elements around it and modify them; or it will build around itself a wall which the customs and habits of the country will find difficulty in penetrating. This is seen going on in Pittsburgh. The Poles and Italians form a city within a city; their customs and habits are distinctly Polish and Italian. When we come to political life, we must accord leadership to other than the Slavic groups,--to the Italians. A political leader among them in Pittsburgh claims that four fifths of all Italians who have been in the country five years are naturalized. He held that the Italians of Pittsburgh poll about 5,000 votes which are scattered over eleven wards. Next to the Italians come the Poles. Many of them have been voters for years, but of the influx that has come to Pittsburgh in the last ten years not twenty per cent are naturalized. The Polish vote is set at 4,000 and the Poles have two or three political clubs. Political clubs are also found among the Lithuanians and Croatians. Too frequently these racial leaders,--often saloon keepers,--are the satellites of some English-speaking politician, and through them he controls "the foreign vote." Some of the more intelligent of the foreign-speaking are dissatisfied with this manipulation of their people; among these are rising young men with political aspirations. It will not be long before the city will feel their presence. If the Polish and Italian votes were to be crystallized in some fifteen wards, the leaders there would have the balance of power and control them. Slavs, Lithuanians and Italians have a strong religious element in their make-up which plays a never-ending part in such racial communities as are to be found in the Pittsburgh district. Unless this element is reckoned with they are not to be understood. The vast majority belong to the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants are found among each of the races, but they form only a small percentage.[5] Certain of the Southern Slavs are subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Russians maintain a Greek Orthodox church. Religious ceremonies and observances have strong hold upon the Poles and Lithuanians, the Croatians and Servians.[6] We have seen that the number of males far exceeds that of females among the immigrants from southeastern Europe. This the church attendance corroborates. I have seen in Pittsburgh a congregation of one thousand men, all in the prime of life, so intent upon the religious exercises that the least movement of the priest at the altar found immediate response in every member of the audience. The ritual of the church has a deep hold upon Slav and Lithuanian; often the men go to confession at six in the morning that they may go to communion the day following. When men are so employed that they cannot attend mass on Sundays, they will attend one on Saturdays. The home must be consecrated once a year, and hundreds take their baskets laden with provisions to church on Easter morning that the priest may bless the feast they hope to enjoy that day. [5] The Protestant denominations in the city are conducting mission work among the Slavs and Italians. Several missionaries, colporteurs and Bible readers are employed. There are among the Slovaks, Lithuanians, Magyars and Italians, adherents of various Protestant churches. [6] The Roman Catholic Church has not the influence over the Bohemians and Italians that it has over the above mentioned people. The Bohemians are many of them free thinkers. The Italians are deeply religious but for the most part lukewarm in their attitude toward the church, and their edifices do not compare with those of the Poles. [Illustration: GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH.] [Illustration: A GREEK ORTHODOX PRIEST.] If we measure the efficiency of the Roman Catholic Church among the Slavs and Lithuanians in Pittsburgh by money spent on buildings and maintenance, it cannot be equalled either by American Catholicism or Protestantism. The people give freely of their hard earnings to erect costly church edifices and support the priesthood. The Slavs and Lithuanians have been on the South Side of Pittsburgh only for the last twenty years, but to-day they possess church property valued at three-quarters of a million dollars, and most of it is paid for. They also give toward the erection of parochial schools and maintain them. The priests have great power over the lives of their people. Some of them are charged with accumulating riches, but taken as a whole, I view them as a body of men loyal to their vows and honoring the profession wherein they serve. With the great numbers constantly coming from Europe, it is surprising how carefully they keep in touch with the newcomers. Slav and Lithuanian priests whose parishes are constantly changing take a census each year. They know the affairs of their people. They know their housing conditions, their hardships in mine and mill; are familiar with the wrongs they suffer. In trouble the priests are their counselors; they sympathize with them in their struggles; they institute and manage insurance societies against sickness and accident. Some of the priests found and control building and loan associations. They at all times stimulate their people to rise to the level of other people around them. The priests are busy men. A parish of two thousand or three thousand means endless activities. With the influx of Slavs and Lithuanians into the country, and the necessity of organizing parishes where many of them settle, the difficulty has been to secure properly qualified priests to take charge of the work. Hence, many of the Slav and Lithuanian clergy are overworked and no assistance can be furnished them. Their influence lies first with the adults who come from the fatherland. The children are not as amenable to the discipline of the church; neither do they give their earnings as freely to its support. The growing problem of the church is to meet the religious needs of people of Slavic blood raised in a new country. * * * * * This sketch,--brief though it is,--of the foreign-speaking peoples of Pittsburgh shows clearly how dependent the industries are upon a supply of able bodied men from Europe. The enterprising from agricultural communities freely bring their strength to the expansion of American industries, and never was there an army more docile and willing than these newcomers. They believe in mutual protection and organize and conduct various societies for this purpose. They find their pleasure in many crude ways. They are loyal to their church, and the many churches owned by them represent offerings made by men who literally earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. Many of them save money and the number of those who own their homes is annually increasing. There are imperative needs of this element of the city's population which must be met if the cause of civilization is to be served. The fatal and non-fatal injuries of the mills fall heavily upon these peoples. Each week a tale of wrong and suffering, agony and death, is sent across the water, which seriously reflects upon the industrial life of America. The value placed on human life here will not bear comparison with that of older countries whose civilization we say is lower than ours. The great need of the hour is a current and detailed record of the serious accidents of the district, that the public may know exactly at what cost of life and limb industry is carried on, and may exhaust every means for lessening the sacrifice. [Illustration: A SLAVIC LABORER.] We saw that the housing conditions of many of these peoples are a disgrace to civilization. The insufficiency of houses, the greed of landlords, the exigencies of some foreigners and the penury of others, bring about this condition. There should be stricter regulation of immigrant boarding houses. Men who coin money in shacks and those foreign born who are too greedy to pay for decent quarters, should feel the firm hand of the law. Crowding, dirt and filth are not American and should not be tolerated in any American city. But negative work is not enough; positive and aggressive work must be done if the foreign-speaking are to rise to the measure of their opportunity. Every nationality has its aesthetic side, and Pittsburgh has done nothing to bring this to the fore. Other cities have fostered the national dance, have encouraged works of art, and have induced the foreigner to show the artistic side of his nature. Cannot this be done in Pittsburgh? Give these people a chance to bring out their needle-work, to show their artistic skill, to sing their national songs, and to dance their native dances, and the life of the city will be richer and stronger. Then why should the people who gave Lafayette a welcome that has become historical, and who championed the cause of Kossuth, not go forth in sympathy to these people of Slav and Iberic extraction? They are left in ignorance of our language, our laws, our government, and our history. This rich inheritance we cherish, and we believe it is more excellent than any of which the older countries of Europe can boast. If this be so, is it not our privilege and duty to train these peoples of southeastern Europe in the principles of democracy? Thousands of these peoples yearn for a knowledge of our language and an insight into that form of government that has made America great among the nations of the earth, and we should be willing to go half way and meet the need. The public school can take up this work with greater zeal; the social agencies of all sorts can stretch the cords of their tents and take in the men who are anxious to learn. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. IN THE LIGHT OF A FIVE-TON INGOT.] SOME PITTSBURGH STEEL WORKERS[7] JOHN ANDREWS FITCH FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN It is estimated that between 70,000 and 80,000 men are employed in the manufacture of steel in Allegheny county. Their homes are clustered about the mills along the rivers, they are clinging to the bluffs of the South Side, and they are scattered over Greater Pittsburgh, from Woods Run to the East End. Up the Monongahela valley are the mill-towns,--Homestead of Pinkerton fame, Braddock with its record-breaking mills and furnaces, Duquesne where the unit of weight is a hundred tons, and McKeesport, home of the "biggest tube works on earth." Here are countrymen of Kossuth and Kosciusko, still seeking the blessings of liberty, but through a different channel,--high wages and steady employment. Here are English, German and Scandinavian workmen, full of faith in the new world democracy; and here are Americans,--great-grandsons of Washington's troopers, and sons of men who fought at Gettysburg. [7] This is a description of leading types of steel workers. A discussion of the labor problem in the steel industry is reserved for a later number. Fully sixty-five per cent of these men are unskilled, but the remaining thirty-five per cent, the skilled and semi-skilled, are the men who give character to the industry. This is the class from which foremen and superintendents and even the steel presidents have been recruited, and it is the class that furnishes the brains of the working force. It is of them that I write. To know these men you must see them at work; you must stand beside the open-hearth helper as he taps fifty tons of molten steel from his furnace, you must feel the heat of the Bessemer converters as you watch the vessel-men and the steel pourer, and above the crash and roar of the blooming mills you must talk with rollers and hookers, while five-and ten-ton steel ingots plunge madly back and forth between the rolls. You must see the men working in hoop mills and guide mills, where the heat is intense and the work laborious; you must see them amid ladles of molten steel, among piles of red hot bars, or bending over the straightening presses at the rail mills. But to know them best you should see them at home. There the muscular feats of the heater's helper and the rough orders of the furnace boss are alike forgotten, and you find a kindly, open-hearted, human sort of men. You grow into an understanding of them as they tell of hopes and plans or mistakes and failures, and understanding becomes sympathy as it comes home to you how close some half-spoken disappointment presses in upon them. It was in this way that for nine or ten months I lived among the steel workers, and came to number some of them as friends. The skilled workers are generally of Anglo-Saxon, German or Keltic origin, the largest proportion being American born. They are not educated, so far as school and university training are concerned, but they are post graduates in the school of experience. The visitor in a steel mill sees only faces reddened by the glare of fire and hot steel, muscles standing out in knots and bands on bare arms, clothing frayed with usage and begrimed by machinery. The men do not differ materially from other workmen, and the visitor passes on and forgets them. The world is full of men in greasy overalls. But a workman is not merely a workman, any more than a business man is merely a business man. He is also a man, whether he works in a mill or sits at a desk. So I shall introduce some of these men and let them talk to you, as they talked to me. Bear in mind that the things they talk about could be taken up from another point of view. In the following interviews I am making no interpretation of the workers from the employer's standpoint. These are the issues of life as seen by the men themselves. [Illustration: _Courtesy Carnegie Steel Co._ POURING MOLTEN IRON, JUST TAPPED FROM BLAST FURNACE, INTO BESSEMER CONVERTER.] Jack Griswold is a Scotch-Irish furnace boss who came to America and got a laborer's position at a Pittsburgh blast furnace, when the common labor force was largely Irish. Those were the days before the advent of the "furriners." I sat in Griswold's sitting room in his four-room cottage one evening and he told me about the men who work at the furnaces, and about the "long turn." "Mighty few men have stood what I have, I can tell you. I've been twenty years at the furnaces and been workin' a twelve-hour day all that time, seven days in the week. We go to work at seven in the mornin' and we get through at night at six. We work that way for two weeks and then we work the long turn and change to the night shift. The long turn is when we go on at seven Sunday mornin' and work through the whole twenty-four hours up to Monday mornin'. That puts us onto the night turn for the next two weeks, and the other crew onto the day. The next time they get the long turn and we get twenty-four hours off, but it don't do us much good. I get home at about half past seven Sunday mornin' and go to bed as soon as I've had breakfast. I get up about noon so as to get a bit o' Sunday to enjoy, but I'm tired and sleepy all the afternoon. Now, if we had eight hours it would be different. I'd start to work, say, at six and I'd be done at two and I'd come home, and after dinner me and the missus could go to the park if we wanted to, or I could take the childer to the country where there ain't any saloons. That's the danger,--the childer runnin' on the streets and me with no time to take them any place else. That's what's driven the Irish out of the industry. It ain't the Hunkies,--they couldn't do it,--but the Irish don't have to work this way. There was fifty of them here with me sixteen years ago and now where are they? I meet 'em sometimes around the city, ridin' in carriages and all of them wearin' white shirts, and here I am with these Hunkies. They don't seem like men to me hardly. They can't talk United States. You tell them something and they just look and say 'Me no fustay, me no fustay.' That's all you can get out of 'em. And I'm here with them all the time, twelve hours a day and every day and I'm all alone,--not a mother's son of 'em that I can talk to. Everybody says I'm a fool to stay here,--I dunno, mebbe I am. It don't make so much difference though. I'm gettin' along, but I don't want the kids ever to work this way. I'm goin' to educate them so they won't have to work twelve hours." There is a considerable difference between a blast furnace foreman and a Bessemer steel pourer. The furnace man gets rather low wages, while the steel pourer is well paid and works eight hours a day for six days in the week. It was Jerry Flinn who told me how he had worked up from his first job as laborer, to a position as steel pourer. I met him just as he got home from the mill one day, and I asked how he managed to work only an eight-hour shift when other men had to work twelve. He told me that attempts have been made to introduce a twelve-hour day in the converting department but without success. Two Pittsburgh mills have tried it and both went back to eight hours because the heat is so great as to make it impossible for the men to work that long. "It must be hard," said Flinn, "for the twelve-hour men to have to work alongside of us eight-hour men. During the twelve hours of their day they work with all three crews of the eight-hour men. One crew gets through and goes home soon after the twelve-hour men come out, the next crew works its eight hours and goes home, and the third crew comes out before those twelve-hour fellows can quit. The eight-hour men get a lot more pleasure out of life than the twelve-hour men do. We can go to entertainments and social affairs as we couldn't if we had to get up next morning and go to work at six o'clock." Flinn is fifty-two years old, and tells you his strength is not up to what it was, say fifteen years ago. The men who went to work with him as young men are nearly all dead, and to-day he is one of the oldest men in his mill. He speaks lightly of the danger of accidents, and says that he has encountered only the minor ones. Once when they were changing stoppers, the crane dropped the old one just as it swung clear of the edge of the ladle. It fell on him, burning him and breaking his leg. At another time he failed to lower the stopper in time, and the stream of molten steel struck the edge of a mold as the train was shifted; it splashed onto the platform, burning his legs so severely that, for six weeks afterwards, he was unable to turn over in bed. It is a common thing for metal to fly that way; the sparks strike his face, they lodge in his nose or his ears, and once he nearly lost the sight of an eye. He refers to these things as trifles. What I said of the half concealed disappointments which are real and tragic in the life of a steel worker, would have been clear to you had you heard the story of Robert Smith, as he told it himself. As a boy he went to work in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania and did not get into the mills until he was about thirty years old. Then he came to Pittsburgh, took a laborer's position, and began to work up slowly year after year until he occupied a place of some importance, though not in the first class of skilled men. After he had been there a few years, there was a labor difficulty in this mill and he left and went to another plant where he took a position similar to his last one. As a new man he could not advance as rapidly as he might have done in the old mill, and before he could get into the best of standing, he was thrown out of work by further labor troubles. He secured a position in another mill where he remained for two years till forced out by a strike to seek work in a fourth mill. Here he remained for ten years in a subordinate position. At the end of that time, he was promoted and became for the first time in his life, the first man in the crew. Then, in some way, he incurred the dislike of the superintendent, and the man on the opposite shift worked against him because he wanted Smith's job for a friend. So, after working for three years in a position for which, as he said, he had served a ten years' apprenticeship, Smith again lost his place and was obliged to apply for work in still another mill. He had been a leader in the union, and it was a feeling almost religious in its devotion that bound him to it. To get into this new mill he had to agree to give up his union card. To-day he says that he is a strong union man at heart, but his connection with it is over. Now, at nearly sixty years of age, he is working in a semi-skilled position, although fitted to take his place among the men of the best skill and to handle a crew. Smith is a man of more than ordinary intelligence. He is a man of religious inclinations and a church member. He regrets the twelve-hour day now chiefly on the ground that it keeps the young men away from church. If he had not become a church-member when he had an eight-hour day, he doesn't see how he ever could have become interested in religious matters. He lives in a comfortable home which he owns and where he spends most of his time when not in the mill. After supper he sits down to read for a short time before going to bed, but he told me with considerable regret that he was unable to do any systematic reading. A few years ago he read several of Shakespeare's plays, but he had to force himself to do it, he gets sleepy so soon after supper. Since that time he has not attempted anything more serious than the daily paper. Of course, the question of organized labor suggests a number of other considerations. The old union attitude towards employers is not of consequence now in Pittsburgh, for most of the steel mills of the district have been non-union for ten or fifteen years. This fact, however, makes it all the more worth while to consider the present attitude of the men as individuals. Jim Barr is a man thirty-five years old who came from England when he was a small boy. It has been only during the last ten years or so that Barr has worked in a steel mill, but he has lived in the steel district longer than that. He occupies a skilled position in one of the mills where he works every day but Sundays from seven in the morning until six in the evening, and on alternate Sundays he has the long turn of twenty-four hours. This Sunday work, he told me, came in after the union had been driven out, and the twelve-hour day is more general now than it was under unionism. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. OF THE OLD TIME IRISH IMMIGRATION.] "Tell me, how can a man get any pleasure out of life working that way?" Barr asked me almost with a challenge. We were sitting before the grate in his comfortable and tastefully furnished parlor. There were pictures on the wall, a carpet on the floor, and the piano in the corner spoke of other things than endless drudgery. He seemed to interpret my swift glance about the room, for he went on, "I've got as good a home here as a man could want. It's comfortable and I enjoy my family. But I only have these things to think about, not to enjoy. I'm at work most of the day, and I'm so tired at night that I just go to bed as soon as I've eaten supper. I have ideas of what a home ought to be, all right, but the way things are now I just eat and sleep here." Barr works in a position where he encounters considerable heat, and he says that alone is very exhausting even when a man does not do hard physical labor. There is great danger, too, in the sweat that keeps a man's clothing wet all of the time. If he gets into a draught he is likely to contract a cold or pneumonia. Working under such conditions shortens a man's life, to Barr's mind, and although he is but thirty-five years old he tells you he feels a decline in his strength. The men find that it costs more to live, too, when working in the mills, for they need the best of food and the warmest clothing in order to keep going. The little chance for recreation leads them to the saloons as the natural place for relaxation. They go there much oftener, in his opinion, than they would if they had more time for social enjoyment; and of course there is a good deal of money spent there that is needed for other things. He says that men frequently spend twenty dollars in a single night after payday. But the thing on which Barr seems to have the strongest convictions is the plan of the United States Steel Corporation of issuing stock to employes. "The men have been fooled by this proposition," he declared, "and they really believe that the corporation wants to do big things for them in offering such liberal dividends. But let me tell you something that maybe you haven't noticed. The first stock issued in 1903 was followed by a slashing cut in wages in 1904, and it amounted to a lot more than the extra dividends. It's only a scheme to fool the men. They take away in wages more than what they give in dividends and they will do that every time, so that the corporation is always ahead of the game. But that isn't the only thing; it ties the employes down to the corporation. They've got to stay in its employ at least five years from the time of getting the stock in order to enjoy all of the benefits, and even then they won't get the extra dividends unless they have shown what the corporation calls a 'proper interest' in its affairs. It's a fine scheme for keeping out unionism and keeping the men from protesting against bad conditions." Now, just by way of contrast, listen to the story of George Hudson, who occupies a position similar to that of Barr, and has been in mill work about the same length of time. After having tried another line and found it unsatisfactory, Hudson came to the mills at about thirty years of age. He did what American young men dislike very much to do,--he took a common laborer's position along with the "Hunkies." Being a man of perseverance and some education, he worked up very rapidly until he now occupies a skilled position. "The Steel Corporation is a fine one to work for," said Hudson to me with enthusiasm. "It gives every man a chance for promotion, and listens to every workman who has a plan for improvement. All the intelligent men are satisfied. If you can find any dissatisfied men, you will find that they are men who would be discontented anywhere you put them. Take the way they loan money to men who want to build homes. A good many men have their own cottages now just because the company helped them. The company has a savings department too, and it pays five per cent on all deposits, and that is more than the savings banks pay. Then, on the other hand, it charges only five per cent interest on the money that is loaned, and that is a lower rate than you can get anywhere else. The company owns houses which it rents to employes at thirty per cent or more below what other people charge. I pay twenty-five dollars rent, and I've got a friend in a company house which is better than mine, and he only pays eighteen." Hudson is ambitious and he was very proud that his department during recent months had succeeded in beating all previous records known. To turn to the second question raised by Smith in our talk before his fire,--if number of organizations is any criterion the churches in the mill towns must be strong. I found a considerable number of loyal church members among the steel workers. Those of them who have to work on Sunday chafe under the necessity that drives them to such a disregarding of the Sabbath. Especially does this bear heavily on the wife who must attend church alone, while her husband is in the mill or at the furnaces. A Scotch Presbyterian mother at a home where I called one afternoon just as the man was preparing to go to the mill for the night, spoke regretfully of having left Scotland. They might not have been able to live so well there, but "Oh, man, we could have brought up the children in the fear o' God and in a land where men reverence the Sabbath." There are men like Smith, too, who fear the effect of twelve-hour work on the lives of the boys. In spite of this religious sentiment that exists among the workers there is, on the other hand, a good deal of feeling that the churches do not understand the needs of the workingmen. Frank Robinson, for instance, believes that the churches are not interested in some problems that are to him very real. "There are a good many churches in this borough," he said to me one day, "and they are supported generally by the women. The preachers don't have any influence in securing better conditions for the men,--they don't try to have. They never visit the mills, and they don't know anything about the conditions the men have to face. They think the men ought to go to church after working twelve hours Saturday night. The preachers could accomplish a lot if they would try to use their influence in the right direction; let them quit temperance reform until they get better conditions for the men. It's no time to preach to a man when he's hungry; feed him first, then preach to him. The same thing with a workingman; get a decent working day with decent conditions, then ask him to stop drinking. Let the preachers go into the mills and see the men at work in the heat, and outside the mills let them notice the men with crushed hands or broken arms or with a leg missing. If they would stop their preaching long enough to look around a little they could do something for us, if they wanted to try." There seems to be some reason for such a feeling. I talked with ministers in some of the mill towns who knew very little of the problems of the workingmen or of the conditions under which they work. Some of them said that they had never been inside the mills, and, of course, such men cannot be entirely sympathetic. Of a different sort was another minister whom I met who had been a mill-man himself. He had gone into mill work as a boy and had worked up through a common laborer's position to a skilled job before he left the mill to go to college. I have met few men with more understanding and sympathy for the working-men's problems. Unionism is not entirely dead in the mill towns; at least the spirit of it is to be found among the men, though the form is absent. Some of them expect to see an organization in the mills again. Others have given up hope of gaining shorter hours or higher wages through collective bargaining, and are looking for government interference and a legal eight-hour day. There is considerable variety of opinion as to how this is to be brought about. Pittsburgh steel workers are traditionally republican in politics; Speaker Cannon himself does not fear "tinkering" with the tariff more than they. The majority of them have been hoping that their representatives would get time after a while to consider and pass the labor legislation that the workingmen desire. However, there has been much loss of faith in the last few years. A good many men in the mills are socialists at heart, and though they still vote the republican ticket, they would vote with the socialists if that party were to manifest strength enough to give it a chance at carrying an election. A considerable number of others have gone the whole way and are active working socialists. One of these is Ed. Jones, a skilled steel worker. He was left an orphan, came to Pittsburgh from New York as a boy of eighteen years, and worked for a short time as a laborer in one of the mills. After trying his hand at several unskilled trades he went back to a small mill in New York, where his wages were $1.25 a day. He was determined to work up in the industry, and after a year or so as a laborer he found himself in a semi-skilled position with wages correspondingly better. A year or two later he returned to Pittsburgh and became a full fledged skilled man at $5 a day. Since then, in spite of reverses, he has worked up slowly until now he holds one of the most important positions in his mill. Jones has never been a union man. He says he does not believe in unions because they accomplish things only in prosperous times, and go to pieces in a panic. "It is no use for them to try to regulate wages, anyhow," he says, "for labor is a commodity and its price is regulated by supply and demand. The only way out for the laboring men is to get together in a labor party,"--and this to him means the socialist party. "We must go back to the condition when workmen owned their own tools," declares Jones. "We must own the instruments of production. Labor is now the helpless victim of capital, and capital must be overthrown. The workman is given enough to buy food and clothes for himself, and no more if the capitalist can help himself. They keep these workmen employed twelve hours a day at some work, while if every man in the country would work two hours a day, all the labor that would be necessary to support the population of the country could be performed. Now all of this excess, these ten hours over the necessary amount, goes to the employer in profits, and many people throughout the country are living in idleness because other people are working overtime for them." Jones is in comfortable circumstances himself; he owns his house and he owns some United States Steel stock, but he says he is one out of thirty-eight men in his whole plant who could have done as well. One of the near-socialists who hopes for both unionism and for governmental relief, gave me a statement of his belief one Sunday afternoon as I sat in a comfortable chair in his little parlor. "I think there will be a labor organization in the mills again," he said. "It may not come in our day, but it is bound to come; the men will be driven to it. There would be a union now but for the foolishness of the men. They begin to talk as soon as a movement is started, and of course the news reaches the ears of the bosses before the organization is really on its feet. Then the men, who are not in a position to resist, are threatened with discharge. That has happened in this very mill. It may be that political action will be necessary before a union will be possible. There are two things that we've got to have: an eight-hour day and restriction of immigration. I think that we will have to get together in a labor party. I'm not a socialist, myself, though quite a good many of the mill men are, and there are a good many things about socialism that I like, all right. I would vote with them if I thought they were going to win and there are others who feel the same way. I used to vote the republican ticket, but I'm tired of it. They haven't done much for the workingmen when you consider the length of time they've been in power. I'm disgusted with the whole thing and I haven't voted at all for several years." Several of the men had said to me: "Go to see Joe Reed; he can tell you more about the mills than anyone else." So one day I climbed the hill to his home, and found him. I had been led to expect a good deal and was not disappointed, though he was just recovering from an illness and was unable to talk as much as I had hoped. Reed is just the man that one would pick as a leader,--six feet tall, broad shouldered, with strong intellectual features,--and he was in truth a leader of the Amalgamated Association years ago, before the steel mills became non-union. He took a prominent part in a strike that was of considerable importance in the steel district. He is a skilled man and if he had cast his lot with the company in the dispute, it is quite likely that he would have best served his own interests. But he stayed by the men and when the strike was lost, Reed left the steel district. He might have had his former position again, but he was too proud to ask for it, and lived away from Pittsburgh until the bitterness engendered by the struggle had begun to die out. After several years he came back and got a job again in a Pittsburgh steel mill. It is a non-union mill and of course Reed is a non-union man. Reed told me some of his experiences and how during the strike he had received letters of encouragement from all over the country, from men prominent in many walks of life. I asked him what he had done with them. He shook his head. "I burned them," he said, "when I came back to the mills. I have nothing in my possession now which would suggest in any way that I ever had connection with the union. When I came back here, I knew I was coming to a non-union mill and I took a job in good faith as a non-union man. That is a chapter in the history of my life that is ended. The whole matter of unionism is a thing of the past and as an employe in this mill, I have no part in it." This fine sense of honor in conforming to the new regime is not so unusual among this class as one might expect. So these are the steel workers. I have not chosen extreme cases; on the contrary, it has been my aim to select men who are typical of a class,--the serious, clear-headed men, rather than the irresponsibles,--and with one exception, each case is fairly representative of a large group. The exception is the man whom I called Hudson. Not over three men out of the hundred and more with whom I talked at length indicated like sentiments, and he is the only one who gave them such full expression. It should be understood that these are the skilled men,--it is only among the skilled that opinion is so intelligently put forth. The number of positions requiring skill is not large, relatively speaking, and competition for them is keen. The consequence is that the skilled workers are a picked body of men. Through a course of natural selection the unfit have been eliminated and the survivors are exceptionally capable and alert of mind, their wits sharpened by meeting and solving difficulties. Such a disciplinary process has developed men like John Jarrett, consul at Birmingham during Harrison's administration; Miles Humphreys, for two terms chief of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics, one-time nominee of the Republican party for mayor of Pittsburgh, and now chief of the fire department of the Smoky City; M. M. Garland, collector of customs for Pittsburgh, under both McKinley and Roosevelt; A. R. Hunt, general superintendent at Homestead; and Taylor Alderdice, vice-president of the National Tube Company. In telling about their fellows who are numbered to-day among the rank and file, I have tried to introduce the leading types,--the twelve-hour man with the eight-hour man, the embittered man and the contented man, the man who is at outs with the church, the union man and the socialist. There are many others who talk and think like Flinn and Smith and Robinson, and I could furnish examples of much more radical thought and speech. These are typical cases representing different degrees of skill and different shades of opinion. It is highly significant that there are such men as these in the Pittsburgh mills. In a discussion of the labor problem in the steel industry, it must be borne in mind that these men are more than workers; they are thinkers, too, and must be reckoned with. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. BRITISH BORN.] THE TEMPER OF THE WORKERS UNDER TRIAL CRYSTAL EASTMAN MEMBER STAFF PITTSBURGH SURVEY To study industrial accidents from the "home" side has been my business for a year. To acquaint myself daily with households doubly disabled by sickness and loss of income, to see strong men, just learning to face life maimed, to visit home after home, where sudden death has visited,--a dreadful business, you might say. Yet it has left with me impressions of personality, character, and spirit, which make the year's work a precious experience. The first thing brought home to me was that working people do not have "the luxury of grief." The daily tyranny of hard work in their lives, leaves little time for pondering the unanswerable "Why?" of sorrow. For instance, Mrs. Dennison, the widow of a brakeman who was killed on the Pennsylvania Railroad, spent no quiet days of solitary mourning. She was left with six children, the oldest eleven. All the money she had was $500 from the Railroad Relief Association,[8] to which her husband had belonged, $450 which the men on her husband's division raised, and $30 which his own crew gave. The company gave her $20 toward the funeral. [8] The company pays the running expenses of this association. With some of this money she rented and stocked up a little candy and notion store, using the three rooms in the back to live in. Here she tended store, and cooked, and sewed, and ironed, for herself and the six. She would have done her own washing too, she told me, but she couldn't leave the store long enough to hang her clothes up in the yard. She made a reasonable success of the enterprise, enough to pay for rent and food, until the hard times came. After that she steadily lost money. So now she has put in her application for a chance to clean cars for the railroad at $1.21 a day. For this privilege she must wait her turn among the other widows; and when she gets it she must leave her children in one another's care from six in the morning till six at night. They are now two, four, six, eight, ten, and twelve, respectively. Mrs. Dennison will not have time to sit down and grieve over the death of her husband for many years to come. One mother, whose thin face haunts me, has been able to endure her tragedy only through this necessity of work. She had a daughter, just seventeen, who was employed in the dressmaking department of one of the big stores in Pittsburgh. This girl, Ella, was eager and gay, with a heart full of kindness. She was everybody's favorite in the workroom; at home she meant laughter and good will for them all. To her mother, Ella was joy and gladness,--life itself. One morning this little dressmaker, after leaving her wraps on the eleventh floor, found that she was a few moments late. She ran for the elevator to go to her workroom above. The elevator was just starting up, with the door half closed. Ella tried to make it, slipped, and fell down the shaft. This tragedy demoralized the working force of the store for two days. In the hunted, suffering eyes of the mother one reads that she cannot forget, night or day. She feels that Ella's employers were generous in giving her $500, but it would make no difference "if they gave her the whole store." In the back of her mind are always two visions alternating,--the merry girl who sat eating her breakfast at a corner of the kitchen table that morning, laughing and teasing her mother, and then, as she ran out to take the car, looked back to smile and say goodbye,--this is one. The other,--that unthinkable fall down eleven stories and the crash at the bottom of the shaft. I felt that nothing but the daily insistence of work,--cooking and washing for her husband and two grown sons, and caring for the two younger children,--had saved this mother's reason. Another striking instance of the pressure of work in poor people's lives was in the family of Harry Nelson. They lived on the South Side, near the Jones and Laughlin Steel Works, where the father and two grown sons and Harry, who was nineteen, were employed. Two younger boys were in school. One Sunday night, on the way home after his twelve hours' work, Harry said to his father that he'd "give a lot" not to go back to the mill that night. (There was another twelve hours' work to come before he could sleep, for this was Harry's "double shift.") He didn't tell his mother he was tired, because he knew she would beg him not to go back to work. Harry was ambitious; he was an electrician's helper, getting fifteen dollars a week, and he did not want to lose his job. At 7:30 he was back in the mill, and at 8:00 he was up on an electric crane, making some repairs. When he was through he started along the narrow run-way of the crane to a place where he could climb down. The air was full of steam; some say that he was blinded by this; others, that he must have been a little dizzy. At any rate, to steady himself, he reached for an electric wire that was strung along there. He happened to touch a part that was not insulated, got a slight shock, and fell thirty-five feet to the floor of the mill. After Harry was killed, the two older boys left the mill and looked for work in another city. But the father had no choice; he was too old to find new work. His fifteen a week was all the more indispensable now because Harry had given all his money to his mother, and the two older boys had paid generously for board. In three days the father was back in his old place at the cold saw, within sight of the place where Harry fell. Thus work may be a cruelty as well as a blessing. But in any case it leaves the workers little time to dwell upon their misfortunes. When they do speak of them, it is almost always in a "matter-of-course" way. This is not, I think, because they lack feeling, but because they are so used to trouble that the thought of it has ceased to rouse them. That poor people are used to trouble is a commonplace. I mean by "trouble," the less subtle disappointments of life, those which come with disease, injury and premature death. Of all these rougher blows of fortune, the poor family gets more than an even share. This stands to reason, if experience has not already convinced one of it. To the ordinary causes of sickness,--unsanitary dwellings, overcrowding, undue exposure, overwork, lack of necessary vacation, work under poisonous conditions,--to all these poor people are much more constantly exposed than others. To injury and death caused by accident they are also more exposed. Poor people's children play in dangerous places, on the street, near railroad tracks. The poor man's dwelling is not often fire-proof. Poor people do most of the hazardous work in the world, and the accidents connected with work form the majority of all accidents. Moreover, the poor family is, in a material way, less able to meet these disasters when they come, than the well-to-do family. This is in some degree due to ignorance, for ignorance, whether as cause or result, almost always goes with poverty. In a very large degree, however, it is due to poverty itself. It is because they have no reserve fund to fall back on in emergencies. Suppose a young steel worker with a family gets a long, sharp chip of steel in his eye. He cannot go to the best specialist, to the man who knows all that anybody knows about saving eyes. Through ignorance or lack of interest on the part of the doctor who treats him, he loses his eye. Thus an injury which might mean but a few weeks of fearful anxiety to a well-to-do man, may result in lasting misery to a poor man. In the same way, too, what might often be in a well-to-do family a short struggle with disease, crowned with success, is more likely to be in a poor family an unrelieved tragedy. Thus are the poor, by reason of their very poverty, not only more open to attack from these bodily foes, but also, and again by reason of their poverty, less equipped to fight and conquer them. "St. George killed the dragon; St. George wore the finest armor of his day and his sword was tested steel." With these workers whom I met,--poor people, not as the charity visitor knows them, but poor, as the rank and file of wage earners are poor,--misfortune is almost part of the regular course of things. They are used to hard knocks, if not yet in their own lives, then in the lives of their relatives, friends, and neighbors. Consequently, there is often in their attitude toward trouble a certain matter-of-fact calmness, which looks like indifference. Thus, I have had a mother tell me about her sixteen-year-old son's losing two fingers in the mill. She couldn't remember exactly how or when it happened; she thought he had lost only a week's work; and she had no comment upon it but that it might have been worse. An old steel worker whom I questioned about his injuries answered, "I never got hurt any to speak of." After persistent inquiry, however, he recalled that he had once fractured his skull, that a few years later he had lost half of a finger, and that only three years ago he was laid up for nine weeks with a crushed foot. Troubles like these are the common lot; they are not treasured up and remembered against fate. Often I have found in young women a surprisingly "middle-aged" way of looking at trouble. I remember, for instance, Mrs. Coleman, whose husband was a freight conductor. They had been married nine years, and had made out pretty well up to the last two years, although the wife, as she somewhat proudly explained, had had three children, two miscarriages, and an operation, during this time. On Christmas night, 1903, Coleman had his arm crushed in a railroad accident. He was disabled for three months, and went back to work with a partially crippled arm. Three weeks later, as he was numbering cars, an iron bar rolled off the load and broke his nose. This laid him up again for five weeks, and left his face permanently disfigured. He has been troubled ever since with nose-bleeding, so that he has to lay off every little while, and the doctor says he must have an operation before he can be cured. Since this second injury, a fourth child has come. When I saw her, Mrs. Coleman was just recovering from a bad attack of grip, which had increased their expenses. To help along in this hard luck time they took two railroad men to lodge and board in their three room flat; one of these men had been killed on the road the week before I called. Here are troubles enough, and yet this young woman had no special complaint against fortune. "Yes," she said, as she rose to open the door for me, the last baby dangling over one arm,--"we've had a bad time these last two years, and now with him only working two or three days a week, I guess it'll be worse. But then,"--with a smile, "what can you do about it?" On the same day I talked with a much older woman. She was too worn out to smile at her troubles, but she had the same "everyday" attitude toward them. Ten months ago they had been doing well. Her husband was earning ten dollars a week at odd jobs; two sons, twenty and seventeen, were getting fifteen dollars a week each as lead buffers in a coffin works; she and her daughter kept house and did a little sewing; and they all lived happily together. Then one day her husband was brought home with a smashed foot and a leg broken in two places, as a result of a bad fall. He had been on a ladder, painting, when the cornice gave way and he jumped to save himself. For five months they kept him at the hospital free of charge, and for four months more he went back on crutches for treatment. Finally they told him to come back for an operation, but on the day after the operation they sent him away again with a bill of three dollars for the time he had been there. His wife had to help him home, and he was in bed when I called. The doctor had said it would be better for him to stay at the hospital, but the superintendent decided that they could not treat him in the ward for nothing any longer. The wife laughed a little grimly when she told me this. "Why," she said, "I can't pay a dollar and a half a day to that hospital. Ever since he got hurt I've been cleaning offices. All I can make is six dollars a week and I have to pay car fares out of that." "Well," I said, "how about your sons? They are making good wages." "Oh, they were," she answered, "but Harry, the oldest one, has been home for five months. He's got gastritis, and the doctor says it's from lead poisoning. You know he's a lead buffer on coffins. He don't seem to get much better." "And the other boy," I said, "does he go right on doing the same work?" "Yes, Charlie,--I don't know what we'd do if he lost his job. He's been on half time now for three months, and that means only $7.50 a week." To add to the general desolation in this home, the flood had been in and covered the lower floor, leaving everything smeared with a dry, muddy paste. In the midst of it all sat this tired woman of fifty, who had just come home from her five early morning hours of office scrubbing; and she was less concerned with the bitterness of her struggle with life than she was with the immediate problem of how to get her maimed old man up to the hospital every other day for treatment. This unquestioning acceptance of misfortune does not often amount to either a commendable cheerfulness or a deplorable apathy. Occasionally, however, it approaches heroism. I think the most courageous person I met during the year was Mrs. Herman Baum, a German woman of forty-five or thereabouts, who, after nine years of disappointment and defeat, still meets the days as they come with an unbroken spirit. She came to America as a girl of nineteen and went out to service. At twenty-three she married. Her "man" turned out ugly; he drank and was always mean to her. His parents, who thought he had married beneath him, took a dislike to her and joined him in making her unhappy. They lived along in this way for fifteen years, during which time she bore him seven children. One day, in his work as a moulder, he received a slight injury, from which blood poisoning set in. After this his mind was affected; he became silent, morose, and uglier than ever, giving his wife hardly a moment, day or night, when she was not in fear of him. After a year or so during which he grew steadily worse, he shot himself one night, leaving her with the seven children, another one coming, and no resources except a heavily mortgaged house and $800 insurance. She had no relatives; her father had been run over by a train, soon after coming to America, and her only brother had been drowned in river work a few years before. It was in August, 1906, that Mrs. Baum's husband killed himself. In September a baby was born, only to die before winter. The two older children got work and brought in ten dollars a week between them, while Mrs. Baum took in washing and made two or three dollars a week. Thus things went pretty well until June, 1907, when the second boy, Harry, the jolly one, who "kept all their spirits up with his jokes," was all but killed in an elevator accident at the box factory where he worked. When, after four months at the hospital, he came home with a permanent lameness, and strict orders never again to do heavy work, he turned to selling papers, and is now making about $1.40 a week. After half their small income was cut off by this accident, Mrs. Baum tried to run a grocery store in the front part of her house, but she lost money at it and was forced to give it up. When I saw her, she was hanging somebody's washing up in the yard. She took me into her spotless kitchen and told me this story, not eagerly, as if pouring out her troubles, but only after many questions, rather reluctantly, and with sometimes an apologetic smile. Here, I thought, is a heroine of modern realistic tragedy; the dramatist would have her lost in bitter retrospect. But she was not; she sat there smiling a bit ruefully, and wondered whether she must put aside her sturdy German pride next week, and go to the Poor Board for help. Some people, especially the Irish, even get amusement out of the number and variety of their troubles. This is true of the Learys, whose six years of married life have been crowded with disasters. To begin with, Andy, the husband, who is a brakeman, has had nine accidents on the road in five years, so many that his wife could not distinguish in her memory the one of a year ago which I had come to inquire about. Twice he has been near death. Once the priest performed the last offices, but Andy pulled through after all. Besides all these injuries, none of them less severe than a broken bone, he accidentally shot himself one day and nearly died from that. "And look at him now!" said Mrs. Leary. (Andy is a handsome Irishman, and the picture of health.) In addition to all this, they have lost two children by diphtheria. Mrs. Leary's outlook on life seems to be a mingling of humor and superstition. She told me, with incongruous awesomeness in her Irish brogue, how she had heard the "death whistle" outside the door three times on the night that her little boy died. And one night, when Andy had to stay at home to take care of her, the brakeman sent in his place was killed. She thinks this is a "sign," and has no doubt of Andy's ultimate fate. "Oh yis," said she, "the docthers say ye can't kill Andy,--but I know betther. He'll be a-comin' home dead soon. Ivery time I hear a knock at the dhoor, I thinks to mesilf, 'There now,--it's thim, comin' to tell me Andy's kil't.' Andy, he jokes about it. Ony this marnin' afther I'd been givin' him his breakfast, he starts to go to work out the back dhoor, an' I says, 'Andy, why don't you niver go out the front dhoor?' 'Oh, Leary;' says he,--(that's what he calls me--Leary) 'Leary,' says he, 'the back dhoor's good enough for me. I'll be a-comin' by the front dhoor soon enough, an' I won't be walkin'." With so many misfortunes the Learys have not been able to save anything. Four times Andy tried to join the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, but each time after his papers were made out and he had paid down his dollar, and the day had come to join, he couldn't get together the necessary nine dollars for the first payment. With all this, there is an unfailing humor and philosophy in the Leary household which is irresistible. Among railroad men generally there is a certain laughing, soldier spirit. It is part of the faith; no true "railroader" is without it. Perhaps this spirit leans to recklessness with some of the younger ones, but I believe it is just as essential to the running of a railroad as is the executive skill of the Hills and Harrimans. This spirit stands by the men in danger and makes them meet death bravely. It stands often a harder test; you will not break the spirit of a railroader by cutting off his arm or giving him a wooden leg. Out of fifteen railroad men I visited, who had received permanent injuries, all but four have gone back to the road. Two of the four are totally unable to do work of any kind. Another has gone home for a few weeks until he can "get used to his wooden leg," when he will be ready for any job the road will give him. The other, a twenty-year-old boy who lost his right arm at the shoulder, has learned to write with his left hand and is studying telegraphy as hard as he can, in order to stick by the railroad. Of the eleven who are back on the road, nine were able to go into the same work and pay, but two had to take lower jobs on account of partial disability. This meant in each case five or six dollars a week less, but neither man complained; he took it as part of the day's work. What the railroader dreads is having to quit the road altogether. A watchman's job will be accepted with a good deal of cheer. Notice the spirit of the one-legged watchman at your crossing, who is very likely a man dropped from an active, exciting occupation at eighty dollars a month to flagging a crossing for forty. He is still in the game. But try to retire a railroader on a pension while he is able to work, and you will break his heart. To a large extent, the railroaders' wives reflect this spirit. They are quite resigned to the risks and dangers of the "mister's" trade. But with the mothers, especially those whose husbands have followed more quiet callings, it is different. They lead an anxious life. In every dangerous occupation there is not this sustaining common courage to help a man endure gaily a lifelong deprivation. A certain degree of independence and fraternity in a group is necessary to bring it about. Many go forth from the steel mills maimed for life, who have no such spirit to uphold them. I remember one night in Homestead seeing a boy on crutches, with one leg gone. He was about nineteen, with blue eyes and a shock of yellow hair falling down low on his forehead. In his face was that desperate look of defiance which comes with a recent deformity. He was trying with all his young will to be indifferent to the stares of the crowd, while in every nerve he felt them. All this and a weary hopelessness were written in his sullen child-face. I have shown how grief is crowded out of the lives of working people, and how their frequent experience of trouble gives them an ordinary manner in speaking of it. These things largely account for the opinion held by many, that working people do not feel their sorrows as keenly as others do. Furthermore, I found among working people almost no pretence of feeling where none exists. This too, might give rise to such an opinion. Where the death of a husband has meant merely a loss of income, with the attending problems of struggle and adjustment, there is no effort to have it appear otherwise. Where it has aroused only a feeling of bitterness toward the employer, this is not concealed either. But where the death of the bread-winner, has meant not merely an economic problem, not merely a legal battle, but heartache and emptiness,--that is written, real and unmistakable, in the faces of those left. And in the case of sons, where there may be no question of income, it is often possible to tell in the first glance at the mother whether this boy who was killed was "one of her children," or the child of her heart. There is an outspoken genuineness about these people which allows them neither to make a show of grief where there is none, nor to hide real suffering, even from a stranger. Mrs. Leary took the accidents of "Andy" lightly. If he should happen to be killed some day her heart would not be broken. She spoke of the death of her baby three months before without feeling, mentioning the doctor's bills. But when I asked her to tell me about her oldest boy who died two years ago of diphtheria, I could see at once that I was on different ground. Her eyes filled with tears, and there was grief and longing in her voice as she talked about him. You see he was only five, but they understood each other. When she was unhappy he knew it. He would climb up in her lap, she said, and put his arms around her neck and say, "Don't cry, Mommy; I love you." Mrs. Burns, a pretty Irish widow, whose husband was crushed while coupling cars, is obviously well satisfied with the $4,000 insurance he left. She takes boarders and is carefully saving the insurance money for her little girl's education. Her affections are set on this child. She has a tender memory of her Tom as he started off to work whistling that last morning, but she makes no pretence to mourn for him. She frankly admits that her marriage was not successful enough to make her risk it again. Thus it is with Mrs. Andrews, a woman whose husband was killed in the mill. I found her smiling and contented a year later. Her man had been good and faithful while he lived, but after he died, her brother came to live with her and help her raise her two boys. He earned just as much, and she was perfectly satisfied with the situation. On the other hand, I knew of a six months' bride who shot herself three weeks after her husband was killed. And a young German woman, whose father had been run over by a dinky engine in the mill, said to me in a choking voice, "Oh, when it comes to tellin' how he died, it breaks my heart." I have seen mothers and fathers in middle life who had become broken and old in a year after the death of a son, and a few women whom I visited eighteen months after such a tragedy, were literally unable to speak of it. There was one wild-eyed little Scotch woman, Mrs. MacGregor, who refused to talk with me at all. I learned from a neighbor that she had twice been insane. Some years ago, when they had lived near the railroad, a little three-year-old girl of hers, who was playing before the house, ran in front of a train. The mother reached the child just in time to touch her dress as the engine tore her away. The mother lost her reason and was sent to an asylum. After six or eight months she recovered and came home. Then, one morning two years later, she got word to come at once to the hospital, that her son was dying. He was a lineman at Edgar Thompson, and had left home to go to work as usual two hours before. In some way,--no one ever knew how,--he had fallen from a ladder and broken his skull. After this second blow the mother was again insane. Then there was an old father, Macdougal, who had had three sons. One died of smallpox, and one was killed in a steel mill. The third was a railroad engineer. On the night of March 13, 1907, he was taking a heavy freight across a bridge at Deer Creek, Harmarsville. The creek was high and the pier gave way; the engine and first cars went crashing into the water below, carrying three men to death. The bodies of the fireman and conductor were recovered next day, but young Macdougal, the engineer, was never found. They say the old man's hair turned white in twenty-four hours, and that he can still be found on fair days walking along the banks of the creek, looking for his son. But for the most part mothers and fathers do not lose their hold on things. Their lives go on as before. You can know perhaps only from a weary sadness in the mother's eyes that the light of their lives has gone out. Death does not always mean sorrow, and these working people, it seems to me, feel no pressure of convention upon them to appear sorrowful when they are not. But where affection is strong and love is deep, tragedies are as real with them as with any people I have known. Wherever love is found there is the chance of grief; there is potential tragedy. And it is in poor families, I think, that one finds the most close and lasting affection. So often, in looking up a fatal accident case, I would come upon an intimate and devoted family group. The case of Will Gordon, for instance,--there was a holiday drama I shall not soon forget. The Gordon family was a large one. Father and mother were living, and three working sons lived at home, besides four younger children. Then there were two married daughters, who lived near by and kept in close touch with the family. Will, the oldest son, although he was twenty-eight, was the greatest "home boy" of them all. He still handed every pay envelope over to his mother, unopened, as he had done when a child. His working life had been varied. First he tried the railroad, but he was slight, and the work was too much for him. Then for a while he did river work with one of his younger brothers who was on a government job. But in this he soon developed a chronic cough, and his mother was afraid of consumption. So finally he got a job with the Pressed Steel Car Company, as a pipe fitter's helper. Here the work was lighter and seemed to agree with him. Every two weeks he brought home twenty-five dollars and handed it over to his mother. Meanwhile his father, who was fifty, had taken a job at the Oil Refinery, firing boilers at night. The boys considered this a dangerous job for the old man, and almost every night one of them would go with him. Will felt most strongly about it and was always begging his father to give it up. On Christmas evening, 1906, the son's arguments prevailed and his father promised to give up the job. This made them all especially happy on the next day, when the two married daughters came home with their families to celebrate Christmas. During the day they planned that the whole family should gather at the oldest daughter's house for New Year's. All the boys were to have a holiday except Will, and he promised to get off at noon, if he could, to eat the New Year's dinner with them. The day came, the family was gathered and the dinner was ready. With much joking and laughter and good-humored impatience, they were waiting for Will. In the midst of it came a boy with a scared face to say that Will had been killed at the works. He had been sent to repair a leak in a pipe. The steam was left on; the pipe burst; and he and Wilson, the pipe fitter, were scalded to death. The father put on his coat and hurried down to the mill to keep them from sending his boy's body to the morgue. This family affection shows its true nature in times of trouble. Barring what seemed to me an unusual number of deserting husbands, I was impressed with the faithfulness of these people to one another in struggle and distress. There was Mrs. Frederick, for instance, a Swiss woman whose husband was killed in a runaway, while driving for a wholesale liquor dealer. Just a week before the accident they had bought a small house with a $600 mortgage on it, and Mr. Frederick said to his wife, as they were looking over the deed: "Now we can begin to get along, and lift up our heads, and stop worrying." Since her husband's death, even with the $1,000 insurance, it has been hard to keep things going and continue payments on the house. There are four children and only one is old enough to work. Just in this troublous time, too, the family burdens have increased. Mrs. Frederick's mother has come from Switzerland, old, feeble and without income; and her step-daughter, who had been away from home and independent for years, after lying in a hospital six weeks with a fever, has now come home, weak and helpless, to stay until she is able to work. Mrs. Frederick does not for a moment question the rightfulness of these burdens. The old grandmother and the convalescent daughter help her around the house; she takes in washing; the boy's wages are good. On the whole she is cheerful. The last thing she said to me, as she stood in the open door, was, "Oh, we'll get on somehow. We'll all work together, and if we have to, we'll starve together." Another pathetic and almost humorous instance of family loyalty is the case of a man named Benson. I was hunting for the wife of a brakeman, who had been killed in the same wreck with the engineer Macdougal of whom I have spoken. I was told that I could learn about her at this Benson's house. I went there and found it a tumble-down, three-room shanty with a small shed for a kitchen, crowded in between brick tenements. There was no carpet on the floor and only a bare table and two kitchen chairs in the living room. The man's wife was unspeakably slovenly and, I think, half-witted. When Benson came in, however, I could see that he was different. He was only twenty-six. His father had been a river-man, and he himself was born in a "shanty-boat." Owing to his mother's early carelessness he had lost one eye. When he grew up, he left the river and became a teamster, and in good times he made a living. At the time I saw him, however, he had had only one or two days' work a week for four months. The hard times, and the wife, I am sure,--not any natural shiftlessness in the man,--accounted for the desolation of his home. There was something fine in Benson's face, a certain modest look of steadfastness and pride,--the pride of the "family protector." This protector-ship extended even to the remote connections by marriage of the miserable creature who was his wife, for I found that the brakeman's widow, whom he had taken in and cared for after her husband's death, was his wife's sister-in-law. Further questioning revealed that this widow had an old mother who had also been dependent on the earnings of the brakeman. "And what has become of the mother?" I asked. "Oh," he said, "she lives here, too. She makes her home with me." There he sat, this one-eyed teamster, in his barren, rented, three-room castle, and told me in a simple, serious way, as though it were to be expected in good families, that his wife's sister-in-law's mother "made her home with him." It is not uncommon to find a loyalty like this in relations where one would least expect it. I have quite lost faith in the unkind stepmother of fairy-tale tradition. It is a step-daughter whom Mrs. Frederick, the Swiss woman, is caring for in the midst of her struggle. Three or four times I found a woman utterly uncomforted after the loss of a stepson. There was Conley, for instance, a car inspector who was killed in a wreck. A stepmother had brought him up since he was ten years old, loving him as few mothers love their own sons. And he gave her back a real devotion. When his friends would ask him why he didn't have some fun with his money instead of giving it all to his folks, he used to say, "Well, fellows, home ain't a boarding house." It is not unusual to find young men giving up their own prospects, to take up the burden of the family at the sudden death of the father. But the most memorable instance I remember of self-sacrifice on the part of a son was that of James Brennan, a switchman, who was killed on the Baltimore and Ohio in November, 1906. He, too, was only stepson and stepbrother to the family he fathered. Thomas Brennan, an Englishman, had married in the seventies and come to America, where his wife bore him two sons and then died. Soon after, he went back to England and married a sister of his first wife and brought her here to take care of his children. He soon proved worthless as a provider. He lived off and on with his family, but contributed less and less to their support, and finally left them entirely. The second wife was not strong, and after the birth of her last child, became an invalid. The burden of the family thus fell upon the shoulders of the two boys, her nephews and stepsons. They went to work at eleven and twelve. Arthur, the younger, was drowned at eighteen, leaving James, the older son, as the only support. This young man never deserted his post. During the later years his burden increased. His stepsister made a runaway marriage at eighteen and in two years was deserted by her husband and came home with a child. A feeble old grandmother of eighty-eight came over from England to be taken care of. His stepmother became crippled with rheumatism and lay in bed for two years. In June of the year he was killed, he sent her away to a sanatorium to get well. She had been there for five months, had gained twelve pounds and was doing well when the telegram came to tell her of his death. She came home to face the struggle of life without him,--an aged mother on her hands, a boy of ten, and an in-consequent daughter with a baby,--and she herself an invalid, suffering constantly. One would say that the mere problem of existence would be all absorbing for that woman. Yet, when I found her a year later, it was the emptiness of her life without this son rather than the loss of his income that was her tragedy. There are all kinds of people everywhere. This is the only final conclusion. It is not easy therefore, to describe the spirit in which the working people meet trouble. They meet it in all the ways there are. But most of those I met, had an "everyday" attitude toward misfortune. This seems to support the opinion many hold, that poor people do not feel their tragedies deeply. But I think it is to be explained rather by the fact that they are too busy to entertain grief, that trouble is too common among them to arouse exclamation, and that they make no show of feeling where there is none. That they know the deepest sorrow, is obvious to one who has seen the loyalties and lasting affections which make up so much of their lives. I found usual in families, a generous affection which could rise to self-sacrifice and devotion in time of trial; and sometimes between two members of a family, a rare love, exclusive and complete, so that the death of one left the other in an empty world. * * * * * Tales of trouble like these are worth listening to, chiefly as they reveal the spirit of the people who suffered. It is with this thought that I have told them. But if by revealing a dreary recurrence of the same kind of misfortune in home after home, these stories have roused in the reader's mind a question, perhaps a protest, this too, is worth while. In a later issue, by a study of these work accidents in their happening, by a counting of the cost to the worker and his family, to the employer, and to society,--as at present the cost is distributed,--we hope to answer that question. Possibly we shall justify that protest. THE WORKING WOMEN OF PITTSBURGH ELIZABETH BEARDSLEY BUTLER FORMER SECRETARY NEW JERSEY STATE CONSUMERS LEAGUE It requires a moment's readjustment of our angle of vision to see Pittsburgh as a city of working women. To dig crude ores, to fuse and forge them, are not among the lighter handicrafts at which women can readily be employed. The old cry of the dwarfs under the earth, the first metal smiths, rings out in Pittsburgh in the tap of the miner's tools and in the shouts of gangs of furnace-men and engine crews in the winding recesses of the mill. Yet even in a city whose prosperity is founded in steel and iron and coal, there has come into being beside the men a group of co-laborers. If we listen again, we hear the cry of the dwarfs (the productive forces of earth) not only in the shouts of gangs of furnace-men, but from the mobile group of workers at the screw and bolt works, and among the strong-armed women who make sand-cores in rooms planned like Alberich's smithy in the underworld. Listen still more closely, and we hear the dwarf voices in the hum of machines in a garment factory, in the steady turn of metal rolls in a laundry, and even in the clip of the stogy roller's knife in the tiny workroom of a tenement loft. Side by side with the men, the women workers have found a place in the industry of the steel district in the Alleghenies. In a district that calls pre-eminently for strength in its workmen, and if not for strength, for a high degree of training and skill, there is yet place in the congregate activity of factories and shops for women. Individual and group necessities have forced them out into an increasing number of occupational ways and byways, winding net-like over the city. [Illustration: STOGY SWEATSHOP WORKERS ON "THE HILL."] To understand fully the place that women have taken in the industries of Pittsburgh, we should need to know the history of the "forks of the Ohio," from trading post, frontier settlement, mill-town, to the growing, complex city of to-day. We should need to follow the women's share in the life of the district from the time of the woman pioneer, who was herself a producer of goods and of values, on through the active days of life in a small and struggling town, and later, into the ramifications of the industrial city, when the days came that English speaking labor did not suffice and a new immigrant population was brought in. We know a little of the life of the frontier women and the work that they did. We have hints here and there, of the home industries of intermediate decades, of the weaving and the stogy making[9] especially, of production for the use of the individual home, that helped to make the lives of women in miners' households active and significant. There are gaps in our recorded knowledge of the process of change, of the forces that little by little have been a call to the high-strung girl of American birth, to the unconquerable exiled Russian, to the field worker from Austria, and to the fair-haired Pole,--a call away from the four walls that sheltered the industries of the home, and toward factory and shop, toward division of labor and specialization of work at a machine. The census in the first half of the nineteenth century is small help to us. Even in later years, we can learn from it comparatively little about the industrial life in individual cities. [9] See Jour. Pol. Econ. 5: 1-25. One fact significant of the situation in Pittsburgh to-day is that according to the last census, the excess of male over female population is a trifle less than 10,000. When the industries of the district grew to a magnitude that drew on foreign labor forces, it was the men of Ireland and Germany, of Italy, Austria and Poland who came. Later, in smaller numbers, the women followed. They came because their husbands and brothers were here; not often for the purpose of forging out a life of their own. The women of the later immigrant races, the Slavs and the southern Europeans, are lagging behind. Giuseppina is still keeping the little Italian cottage with the thought that Pietro will return or will have made his way more surely before he sends for her. Life in America for her is not a settled destiny. It is a probability of growing importance for those populations whose need exceeds the productive power of the soil; but even to the strong it is something of an experiment, something for which women,--not industrially adjusted,--must await the issue before they too follow in numbers equal to the men. In the different districts of the city, one can trace something of the effect of this varying feeling of permanence on the ways of life among earlier and later immigrants. Irish and German, in fact, we no longer think of as immigrants. They are as much wrought into the fabric of the nation as those whom we are pleased to call American. The Jewish immigrants from Austria, Germany, and Russia, while their coming has been hastened by religious persecution, have yet been part of the life of the city for so long, that among them there is a distinct family grouping; and there is a normal proportion between men and women. This is in part due to race tradition as well as to length of settlement, but the latter has unquestionably served to diminish the proportion of single men, who from this race as from others, have come to make a place for themselves in the new country. In the congested Italian neighborhoods, on the other hand, women are but an unimportant factor in the industrial life of the city. In the midst of the city itself, there are to be sure streets of Italian families; streets where the women still honor the custom of life in their households. A scattered few roll paste-smeared tobacco leaves into tobies after the Italian fashion, or follow with painstaking docility the signs of the forewoman in a garment workshop. But there are not many of these pioneers of congregate activity. The ties of tradition that keep the girl to her house and early marriage are still too strong for more than the very few to break. There is small opportunity in this smoke-filled city among the hills for the Italian girl to preserve her self-respect by staying at home, and at the same time to increase her income by sewing or making flowers. Flowers of delicate tints and fine embroidered fabrics, belong rather to the trade of eastern cities. The garment industry here is of a different sort from that which has nourished and given employment to its thousands of out-workers in New York city. Such outwork as there is dates to a time before the Italian women were here in numbers, or had grouped themselves into particular districts, and it fell naturally into the hands of Irish and Germans whose homes were, and still remain, in the early settled regions in the coal filled hills. [Illustration: A CANNERY GIRL--BOTTLING PICKLES WITH A GROOVED STICK.] Leave "the hill," and go down toward the mills and to some of the outlying sections, and you will find still fewer women in the colonies of young Italian laborers, advance guards from their native towns. Some of these men are workers on the railroads, others are day-laborers in the mills. They bring up the numbers of the Italian population and contribute to the excess male population of the entire city. Among still later immigrants, this situation is intensified. Near the Pressed Steel Car Works, there are streets of low unpainted houses, each exactly like the other, each filled with its family of "boarders,"--single men who club together and rent a house or hire a bed by turns in order to make their pay serve both for their own support and for the help of those at home in the old country. They are Slavs,--"Hunkies." They are the under-workmen in mill and mine and machine shop, who have helped push the earlier comers a step higher and push themselves into the subordinate jobs. Some of the first comers have since brought their families. Some few sisters and friends with the desire to try new fortune have come, too, leaving their families behind. But the bulk of the "boarding house" population is made up of single men, immigrants of this race. Where families and single women have come, they have tended to settle in the glass-making district, or near the manufactories of iron and steel products that can use quick fingers as well as strong untrained arms. [Illustration: ONE OF THE SOUTH SIDE GLASS-WORKERS.] The Polish women have not the conservatism which keeps the Italian girl at home. They have not the same standard of close-knit family relationship. There is a flexibility in their attitude toward life and toward their part in it. In numbers and in kind of work, they are an element of industrial importance. Altogether, 22,185 women wage earners outside of agricultural, professional, and domestic service, are employed in Pittsburgh. These figures are based on a careful census of the women-employing trades made during the winter of 1907-8. This working force is distributed in 448 factories and shops, and can be arranged according to the numerical importance of the different trade groups as shown in the accompanying table. TABLE SHOWING DISTRIBUTION IN TRADE GROUPS. 1 MERCANTILE HOUSES 7540 2 FOOD PRODUCTION: CANNERIES CONFECTIONERY CRACKERS MOLASSES 2726 3 CLEANING INDUSTRIES: DYEING AND CLEANING LAUNDRIES 2685 4 STOGY INDUSTRY 2611 5 METAL TRADES 1954 6 MISCELLANEOUS: CORK PAPER BOXES SOAP CASKETS PAINT BROOMS AND BRUSHES TRUNKS AND SUIT-CASES 1137 7 NEEDLE TRADES: GARMENTS AWNINGS MATTRESS AND BEDDING GLOVES 1088 8 LAMPS AND GLASS 864 9 TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH 777 10 MILLINERY (WHOLESALE) 406 11 PRINTING TRADES 397 ------ TOTAL WOMEN WORKERS 22185 In the U. S. census of 1900, women's work is grouped under the headings: Agricultural Pursuits, Domestic and Personal Service, Professional Service, Trade and Transportation, Manufacturing and Mechanical Pursuits. In the accompanying table, agricultural pursuits, and professional service are excluded. Under domestic and personal service come only the cleaning industries, with 2,685 women, 12.10 per cent of the number under consideration. Under trade and transportation, come saleswomen and telephone and telegraph operators to the number of 8,317 (37.48 per cent). The remainder, 11,183 women (50.4 per cent), are included in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits. It is worth while to consider not only the broad groupings and the characteristics of the several trades, but the women whom they have called to them, old and young, native born, or from the fields and towns of another country. Each trade has its characteristic racial group, and in some cases a secondary racial group; and on the other hand one racial group may be found in several trades. When the work room is a mercantile house, there is small need to describe it. We know something of the work and of its demands; we know, too, that no other occupation seems so desirable as "clerking" to the girl with some personal ambition but without the training necessary for an office position. A majority of the girls are native-born of Irish or German parents, but there is a scattering of bright Jewish girls who have a characteristic dislike for the noise of machines. The mercantile houses, the stogy factories and the garment factories are employers of Jewish girls. In all three industries many Americans are to be found, but they are in the more desirable positions, in shops of the better class, with provision for light and air. These girls have the nervous readiness to learn new ways, the adaptability, the measure of skill, which tend to bring them the best work, the better workplaces. But where the cheap, hustling business is done, the Jewish girls predominate. They endure the drive in the rarely cleaned upper room, where between narrow walls, faint daylight finds its way toward the machines and where drifting lint and ten hours' stooping over a power-driven needle, have their effect in time on a girl even with the strength of rugged generations behind her. Newcomers cannot choose either workshop or wages. With the subordination of the industrially unadjusted, they crave a chance to learn, whether it be by the whirr of the needle or by team work at cheap mold stogies to supply the workingman's demand. In one or two of the small box factories on "the hill," one finds occasionally a Jewish girl. Box makers paste the bright colored strips of paper along the box edges. They stay the corners by the clamp of a machine. For heavier boxes they glue into place the wooden supports. Such work for a Jewish girl is exceptional, however, and in violence to tradition. The three industries mentioned above make up her circle of possible choices. [Illustration: TOBACCO STRIPPERS IN A HILL SWEATSHOP. WORKERS OF THE LOWEST INDUSTRIAL GRADE.] Yet each industry, notably stogy making and the needle trades, has drawn upon a second racial element in response to a specific industrial demand. When the garment makers, spurred to production by the presence of an army of laborers in mills and mines, began to increase and cheapen their output, they gave the jeans and railroad jumpers to Irish and German women who would make them at home. The sweating system, as old and older than the ready-made trade, has adapted itself to the city, and has taken a form scarcely recognizable to one familiar with the contract shops on New York's East Side. There is no contract system here. Outwork entrenched itself in individual homes before Italians and immigrant Russians had settled into districts, and the only available out-workers were the wives of Irish and German workingmen in Carrick and Lower St. Clair. Even to-day, it takes a rambling journey along muddy foot-paths, across brooks and fields and along the edges of the barren hills to bring you to the sweated district. The workroom here is not a crowded tenement, but a small wooden house with six machines someway placed in the living room, and there is occupation for the whole family, from father to baby. The family has to pay the driver a percentage on every dozen garments that he brings, according to the distance from town. As the driver knows the people and often gives them the chance to work, his position is in some respects that of a middleman. The workers are obliged to meet his terms or to turn to some other means of livelihood. A seemingly inaccessible hill country within city limits, wooden shacks swarming with chickens and children, a whirr of machines audible from the field below,--these contradictions characterize the sweating system of Pittsburgh. [Illustration: STOGY WORKERS TRANSPLANTED TO AMERICA.] We have seen that Jewish and American girls are in the garment factories, while Irish and German women, the hill-dwelling wives of the miners, hold the subordinate place in the trade. In the stogy industry, the Polish women, some of them married and others immigrant girls, have the inferior and unpleasant work. The least desirable occupation for women in stogy factories is tobacco stripping, pulling the stems out of the moist leaves and weighing and tying them in pounds for the rollers. In tenement shops, one may find the strippers in a cellar, their backs against a damp wall, working by the light of a flaring gas jet. In a large factory, one will see them sitting in their low stalls, row behind row, stemming and weighing and throwing the waste to one side. "They would work all night," one foreman said, "if I would give them the chance. We never have any trouble with them; we can't give them enough work to do." They were married women in this case; but the rule holds good and there is seldom trouble with the Polish hands in a stogy factory. They are there too much on sufferance for grievances to be worth their while. They have entrenched themselves in the stripping rooms and are found now and then at a bunching machine or rolling stogies at the suction table, but this more skilled work is still largely in the hands of American and Jewish girls. [Illustration: A LAUNDRY WORKER AT A BODY IRONING MACHINE. ONE OF THE SKILLED HANDS.] The Polish women have pushed their way into a wider circle of industries than have the Jewish girls. They are limited by lack of training and by trade indifference, as well as by the stolid physical poise that cannot be speeded at the high pressure to which an American girl will respond. They have not an industrial standard that would tend to react progressively upon the character of their work and the arrangement of the workrooms. They accept factory positions that girls of other races regard as socially inferior. They consent to do the rough and unpleasant work, the work that leads and can lead to nothing except coarsening of fiber and a final break in strength. They change from one place to another with an irresponsibility, an independence, born perhaps of long-slumbering memories of revolution in their own land. In canneries and cracker factories, we find Polish girls who are lighter-handed, fairer, more delicately built than those of the metal trades and the glass houses. These girls have rapid work to do. They have the nervous energy to pack or to fill cans at high speed. They stand beside the travelling conveyor which carries cans of beans, and slip a bit of pork into each can as it passes. Without turning their heads or changing their position, working with high concentration and intensity, they can keep pace with the chains. While they do much of the mechanical work, the hulling and stemming of berries, the preparing of fruit, the filling and labeling of cans, they are found too among the bottling girls on whom responsibility for the appearance of the finished product largely rests. These latter place each pickle or piece of preserved fruit after the model design taught them in the beginning. They use a grooved stick to slip the pickles into place, and are obliged to be accurate as well as quick, for they work under inspection on a piece basis. A piece of onion misplaced in a bottle of mixed pickles is held sufficient ground for requiring the bottler to do the work over at the expense of her own time. The odor of vinegar and of preserves, an odor that seems to have saturated the air in nearby streets, has made the cannery unpopular among Americans who have acquired fastidiousness in the choice of a trade. It is possible that between the Polish women in this latter industrial group and those in the metal trades, there is the difference between the child of the city and the child whose life and the life of whose parents has been near the earth. At any rate, there is the general difference between the small, slight, fair-haired girl, and the rough-skinned stolid women, whom even a piece-rate scarcely avails to keep up to the pace of the machine. These latter are the women who with knee and hand and metal-centered glove, open the sheets of tin still warm from the furnaces of the sheet and tin plate mill; these are the women who screw nuts on bolts by a fish-oil process, and these are the women who carry trays of sand-cores in the foundries where they have displaced men. They are the packers in glass factories, the riveters and foot-press operators in lamp works. They have a hundred miscellaneous things to do, no one of which is a trade, or can be a trade so long as a shifting group of women, women with muscular strength and the readiness to do disagreeable things, is at hand for the odd jobs about a factory. They learn to operate one machine, but they are not among the hands who know the ways of the shop, and work up to better occupations. Either through the barrier of language, or in part through their own indifference, they are used for the least desirable work in those occupations which in a measure they have made their own. Polish girls of both types are to be found in laundries, but in most cases they are employed in the mangle room only. Their work is to feed in sheets under the metal rolls, to shake them out before feeding, or to receive and fold them at the other end while steam rises from the hot metal and from the huge washing cylinders below. There remain unaccounted for the workers in the candy industry, in many of the miscellaneous trades, in telephone and telegraph offices, in the wholesale millinery houses, and in press rooms and bookbinderies. Here there is variation as the individual and the location rather than as the trade group. In large measure, the employes are of American birth. Telephone and telegraph work share with mercantile houses the advantage of social esteem, and by reason of this, claim the American girl. The same is true of the millinery workroom, in spite of its irregular hours and short seasons. Perhaps a reflected "odor of sanctity," an association by proxy with clerical work, has made press rooms and binderies favored above more obviously manufacturing pursuits. Perhaps, too, the location of the binderies in the business section of the city has given them a force of American employes, for the Polish girl, like her Jewish co-worker, is limited in her imaginings to factories and shops within the few streets that make up the sum of her experience. Yet to an extent press rooms and binderies employ girls of foreign birth, and in the cork factory, many of the sorters are Poles. For some reason, the candy trade is largely in the hands of Americans, and is in high esteem among women workers. [Illustration: SEMI-SKILLED AMERICAN GIRLS IN A GLASS DECORATING FACTORY.] Surveying the city, then, we see American and German girls holding the positions for which a few months' training is needed, a knowledge of English, or of reading and writing. We see them yielding the inferior and unpleasant work to newcomers from Poland and Russia and we see these same newcomers, sometimes by sheer physical strength, sometimes by personal indifference and a low standard, competing on the basis of lower wages with men. Work that otherwise would never have been given to girls to do has come into the hands of Polish women. Workrooms that would not long be tolerated by Americans,--they have been regarded with indifference, perhaps because of inability to share the sensations of a foreigner. The place of the Polish women, scrubbing floors and sorting onions in a cannery, packing crackers, stripping tobacco for the stogy makers, or making sand-cores in a machine shop,--this place is lowest industrially among the women workers of Pittsburgh. It is the place of the woman who is fighting her way but has not yet thought whither she is going. A determination to work and to earn is uppermost. Marriage is not suffered to act as a hindrance. There is notable absence of standard as to conditions of work and rate of wages. With light foothold here and there, the Italian girl scarcely figures, but within a limited circle of industries immigrant Jewesses hold positions beside girls of native birth. From trading post and frontier settlement, from ambitious mill-town, Pittsburgh has come to be a city whose workrooms number a force of over 22,000 women. From home industry and from household work, the younger generation of girls has entered the field of collective service. From doing the whole of a thing and from knowing the user, the younger generation has gradually found its work more and more minutely subdivided; the individual worker makes not even a whole hinge but a tenth part of it, and knows neither the use nor the destination of the finished product. She does not know the relation of her fraction of the work to the other fractions or to the interwoven threads of industry that make up the plant. These younger women have pushed past the traditional activities of cleaning and cooking and sewing; even the congregate form of these industries engages but a few of them. They have not only gone into press rooms and binderies, into cork factories, and into workrooms where candies are made and where fruit is preserved, but they help finish the glass tumblers that the men in the next room blow, they make the cores for the foundry-men, and they are among the shapers of metal for lamps and for hinges and bolts and screws. In a city that is preeminent for the making of steel and iron and the products of steel and iron, women have taken to-day a place in industries that seemed wholly in the province of men. [Illustration] It means readjusting our angle of vision, but it is not a difficult readjustment, to see Pittsburgh as a city of working women. From river to river, women have their share in its industrial life. More than a theory, more than a reform movement, is needed to turn back a tide that is twenty-two thousand strong, that has its roots deep in commercial methods and commercial success. Change in industrial method, when such change makes for cheapness or for efficiency or for the utilization of a hitherto only partially utilized labor force, cannot be stayed by any theory as to its inappropriateness. Industrial forces, in that they are the forces of production, are still dominant in America. There is nothing in the Pittsburgh situation that looks toward undoing the change that has come about in the industrial position of women; but we can find out more exactly in this steel city how the work of women is related to that of men, how far women have reached the point of being self-supporting and independent, and what the social effect of labor under these new conditions seems to be. Through change in some of these conditions, much that seems evil in the nature of women's work may be undone and the real value of it released as a permanent and useful factor in industrial life. IMMIGRANT TYPES IN THE STEEL DISTRICT PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEWIS W. HINE [Illustration: GOING HOME FROM WORK.] [Illustration: CROATIAN.] [Illustration: LITHUANIAN.] [Illustration: _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._ ITALIAN.] [Illustration: RUSSIAN.] [Illustration: SERVIAN.] [Illustration: SLOVAK.] [Illustration: A YOUNG SLAV.] THE SLAV'S A MAN FOR A' THAT ALOIS B. KOUKOL SECRETARY SLAVONIC IMMIGRANT SOCIETY Above one of the busiest corners in Pittsburgh, an immense advertisement in Croatian solicits patronage for an American bank. In the railroad stations and on the principal thoroughfares you can see groups of people who bear unmistakably the Slavic physiognomy. But the Slav is reserved; even the Southern Slav lacks the unrestrained animation so characteristic of the Italian. He is slow in making an impress on the imagination of the community. Though the Slavs are one of the three largest racial elements that immigration is adding to our population, though in the Pittsburgh district they constitute over one-half of the workers in the steel mills, yet in spite of their large numbers and their importance as an industrial and business factor, there is, I believe, little actual understanding and appreciation of them on the part of Americans. The bosses know them chiefly as sturdy, patient, and submissive workmen; their American fellow-workmen hate and despise them largely because of this patience and submissiveness to the bosses and their willingness at the outset to work at any wages and under any conditions; the public at large knows the Slavs by their most obtrusive and objectionable traits,--especially by the newspaper stories of their rows and fights when they get drunk on payday or when celebrating a wedding or a christening. Few people realize that the "Hunkie" in spite of his proclaimed "stolidity" is capable of all the finer emotions,--that his aspirations are the same in character, though as yet not so ambitious nor so definitely formulated as those of his neighbor Americans. It is my design in this article to present the immigrant Slavs as they have not yet been generally seen,--as human beings even if crude, with some virtues along with their widely recognized vices,--to present something of their spirit, their character, their attitude toward America, and the effect on them of the conditions under which as in Pittsburgh and the neighboring mill towns they live and work. For this design I feel I have at least the qualification of knowledge; in preparation for this immediate task I visited some two hundred families; moreover, I am a Slav by birth, and all my life I have lived and worked among the Slavic people. [Illustration] The natural question rising in one's mind is, Why did these great hordes come to America and to Pittsburgh? Let me answer in terms of men. The main cause is of course economic. On the one side there is the old world surplus of labor accompanied by low wages, the barrenness of the land which every year becomes more insufficient to support growing populations, and economic disasters affecting sometimes individuals and sometimes whole communities; on the other side, the stories of the wealth of some bolder pioneers and of the great opportunities in this country, confirmed and exaggerated by the crafty agents of transportation companies. An illustration of this economic impetus is the simple story of Grigory Leshkoff. Grigory comes from a Russian peasant family in which there were seven sons and twenty poor acres of land. "What were we to do at home?" Grigory demanded of me with a shrug. "Just look at one another,--hey?" One by one these sons left the crowded farm and sought work in the few mines and factories located near them. Grigory's younger brother was the first from the village to seek America, coming here in 1902. But soon others followed him, "and now," said Grigory, "there are in Homestead at least fifty young men from our village." Grigory, by the way, is a veteran of the Japanese war, having come to America immediately after its close. But he has little to say about this one of the great conflicts of modern times; in fact, he looks upon his experience upon battle fields as quite commonplace compared with his experience in the steel mills. From the first he emerged without a scratch; in the second he lost a leg. When I saw him he was deeply concerned with what a strong man of twenty-seven with only one leg was going to do with his future,--and the simple peasant was not seeing much hope ahead. Grigory came from Chernigov. From this government, and from Minsk and Grodno, where the soil is exhausted and where the shares of the villagers in the communes grow less with each redistribution of the land, the Russians are setting out in increasing numbers. Not altogether dissimilar causes operate in certain districts of Austria-Hungary. Pribich used to be one of the richest wine growing regions in Croatia, but some fifteen years ago the vines were devastated by a blight, necessitating replanting with American stock. In this way hundreds of once prosperous farmers were reduced to poverty. Many of them came to the United States in the hope of earning enough money to pay for the necessary replanting of their vineyards. Lazo Milutich, who gave me this information, was himself one of those affected by the calamity. He came to Allegheny about twelve years ago, where he tried different jobs, and after two years wandering landed at Wilmerding. Here he has worked for the last ten years in the same foundry. Other causes than economic pressure have of course played their part in this great migration. Political oppression is one. I have met a number of political refugees among the older Slavs, many now persons of importance. And another is the blandishment and trickery of the steamship agent. John Godus, a Slovak living in Braddock, is one of a group of twelve young men brought here in 1901, by the last influence. To their village came a man dressed as a common workingman. We can imagine him in high boots, wearing an embroidered shirt, and smoking a long-stemmed pipe. He was a steamship agent, thus disguised to escape the attention of the gendarmerie. He quietly found out what young men were at the age when one has to present himself for conscription in the army,--for such youths he had discovered, were the easiest induced to be customers; secretly argued with them that it would be foolishness to give three of their best years to the army, where they would be slapped, kicked and cursed; and in the end sold them all tickets. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. LAD FROM HERZEGOVINA.] It is perhaps but natural that Pittsburghers should believe that the fame of their industries should draw these Slavs straight from their villages to Pittsburgh. Yet this is rarely true,--true only in exceptional cases, such as that of Joseph Sabata, a Bohemian. He was an iron-worker at home and was employed in a large rolling mill in Moravia. Their machinery was imported mostly from the United States and he, noticing the name of an Allegheny firm on some of the pieces, thought that in that city he could learn more about his business; and so five years ago decided to come over. After being landed at Ellis Island, he discovered while in line waiting to be questioned, that everybody was asked to show an address. Such an address he did not have, but he does have quick wits; he hastily scribbled on a piece of paper "Allegheny," and the name of a cousin still in the old country who had probably never even heard the name of that city. He was readily admitted, went straight to Allegheny, and when I saw him was earning $2.75 a day in a machine shop. In another case I met with, the coming straight to Pittsburgh was quite accidental. Václav Málek, a Bohemian, who came here with his parents eighteen years ago when a lad of sixteen, had intended to settle with the rest of the family on a farm in Wisconsin. But on the way across the ocean they became acquainted with another Bohemian family, bound for Pittsburgh, who had been robbed of their money, and to these people Málek's father loaned eighty dollars. In order not to lose the money they decided to keep near their debtors and they too came to Pittsburgh. John even to this day is sorry they didn't go on a farm,--and for a double reason: first, he has a natural preference for farm labor which is never to be gratified; second, in the course of his work for an Allegheny company, an accident crippled him for life. In the vast majority of cases the Slavs in Pittsburgh had not the slightest intention of settling there when they first came to America. Usually their location there has been preceded by a period of a year or two or even longer during which they have wandered hither and thither, from one factory to another, from town to town, looking for the right place to settle. Large numbers of the Slovaks come to Pittsburgh by way of the anthracite fields. At the time of the strike,--and for several years before when conditions were bad in hard coal mining, half-time, and the like of that, the Slavic mineworkers drifted west,--across the state to the steel mill district. The experience of a Ruthenian named Koval is typical of a great number of men. He came to America three years ago, and was sent by an immigrant home in New York to work in the forests of West Virginia as a woodcutter. The wages there were only fifty cents a day, and in other ways the conditions were so bad that he and three other men ran away. They wandered through the woods until they came to a little settlement with a saw mill, where they were offered work and stayed for about two months, earning $1.50 a day. Then a surveyor came to the village, who spoke Polish, and told them that in Allegheny they could earn a good deal more money than in the woods, so to Allegheny they decided to go. There they obtained work as laborers in the locomotive works at $1.50 for a day of ten hours. Such a wanderer also, was Smulkstis, a Lithuanian who started life as a messenger boy in the telegraph service in St. Petersburg. He came to a friend in Wilmerding four years ago, but, unable to get the kind of work he wanted, he sought out another friend in Worcester, Mass., where he got a job in a woolen mill. The next spring found him back in Pittsburgh as a machine operator in an electrical plant. To-day,--he is still only twenty-two,--he is a crane man in the Homestead steel mills. Similarly, a Croatian who was spending the winter in Duquesne, was a type of the migratory railroad laborer, who drifts from one contractor's gang to another. He had been all over Indiana, Ohio and the Middle West and had taken his wife and children with him. They made shift in cars and shanties and construction camps of all sorts. One fact that was continually striking me in Pittsburgh was the number of ordinary men, earning low wages, who seem to be fitting themselves permanently to their new environment. John Gerza, an engine cleaner in the Fort Wayne yards, and his family impressed me as having, in their five years in this country, adapted themselves very readily to the atmosphere and to the life of Pittsburgh. There are no regrets nor looking backward, nothing to draw him away from the present life. The explanation for this adaptation is the explanation in so many other cases that it is worth setting down. Gerza lived in a Moravian village where till sixteen years ago there had been no impulse to move away from the soil. The villagers were rooted to their ancient homes; they thought only of the land, and they tilled it in the same old, primitive manner of their forefathers. Then a railroad was built through the country, and factories sprang up. These drew agricultural laborers from the villages, and thereby unsettled the population; unsettled the old conditions of life, and practically destroyed that love for, that almost physical kinship with, the soil and the old home which I found so strong among the Slavs in general. Gerza's wife used to work in a sugar factory at home; he himself used to be a brakeman on a freight train. With them it was not the severe and wrenching change from farm to factory, with the involved breaking away from loved surroundings; it was the comparatively simple change from one industrial pursuit to a comparatively similar industrial pursuit. Palinski, a Russian Pole of forty-five who has been in America eighteen years, is another example of that really considerable class of ordinary, low-paid workmen who have made a small success,--if owning a home and having a happy family and being content is termed success. The highest pay Palinski has ever received was $1.65 a day, and yet, though he has five children, he managed five years ago to buy in conjunction with his brother the house in which they live. They paid $1,600 for the property, and now Jones and Laughlin want to buy it and Palinski expects to sell for at least $3,000. The oldest child, a girl of fifteen, is kept in public school, and the three other children of school age are sent to the parochial school where tuition must be paid. The house is strikingly clean and well arranged. Palinski seems to be well satisfied with himself, his family and his work. It was a marvel to me how a man with Palinski's wages could own such a pleasant home, raise so large a family of children, educate them, and keep them well-dressed and healthy. The explanation lies in a great measure outside Palinski. He is a good man, but, as in so many of the cases where the Slavs have wrought pleasant homes out of little wages, the credit is largely due to the wife. Mrs. Palinski must have been a wonderful manager; even to the casual eye, she was neat, bright and energetic. In estimating the worth to America of this pair, one must not consider alone the hardworking husband and the able wife; one must consider their contribution of healthy, educated children. These men are fixtures; in a generation or two their children and children's children are likely to be an indistinguishable part of that conglomerate product, the American citizen. In contrast to these men are the great numbers who are not content, who are not fixtures,--whose great dream it is some day to get back to their native village, live out their years there and, what is no small consideration with many, be laid at rest in friendly soil. Why these men, even though successful here, have this yearning and take this action, presents a rather tough question to most persons. That question, I think, I can best answer by reciting the case of Mike Hudak. Hudak is a Slovak who came to this country seventeen years ago when a youth of nineteen. He is a fine type of a man in every way; physically he could almost be classed as a giant, for he stands six feet two, is deep of chest and broad of shoulders. He works in the Pennsylvania repair shops at Oliver, earning eighty dollars a month, which is good pay for a Slav when one considers that the work is regular and not dangerous. He seems to be quite a figure in his neighborhood, for when I walked home with him one day he was addressed from all sides in tones that showed liking and respect. He dresses neatly and has a fluent command of English. If there is any type of immigrant that we need above all others it struck me that Mike Hudak is that type. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. OLD WORLDS IN NEW.] I first discovered his yearning by asking him why he was not a citizen. "Why should I forswear myself," said he. I did not understand and asked for an explanation. "As I am going back to my old country, it would not be right to give up my allegiance there and make myself a citizen here." I pressed him for his reasons for going back, and he gave them to me,--reasons that fit thousands and thousands of cases. With him that preliminary process of being separated from the soil had not taken place, as with John Gerza. He was a farmer by age-old instinct; his love for the land was a part of his being, was a yearning which would leave him only with death. Now, since over here he had been plunged straight into industry, the only land he had ever known in a way to become attached to it was the land in which he was born, and when the time came when he was able to gratify his longing for land his thoughts went only to the land in his old country. So, though socially as well off as he would be there, and economically much better off, he was going back. Undoubtedly he, too, would be a fixture in America could he have gone on a farm immediately upon his arrival here,--for then his instinctive land-love would have been weaned from the old country and fixed upon America. Few Slavs who settle upon the land ever change back to Europe. The Slavs are strong, willing workers, and are generally considered by the steel mill officials the best laborers they get,--but now and then there is a man who is too slow for America. One of these was John Kroupa, a Bohemian who has been here twenty-two years. Faithful, strong, willing, it wasn't in him to keep up the race. He was in his earlier years here employed in a steel mill, but he was dropped. As he frankly said to me, "You have to be pretty quick in those mills, and it isn't a job for a man like me." Later he got a job as watchman on a Pennsylvania Railroad crossing in Woods Run, and there he worked for sixteen years, his wages forty dollars a month for a twelve hour day and a seven day week. (In the last two years, forty-four dollars.) All this while he hoped for promotion, but it did not come and this non-recognition rankled within him. "Other men, who were all sore from sitting down so much, were promoted," exclaimed he, "but I, who was always hustling, was never thought of, and I can tell you it wasn't an easy job to watch that no accident happened, as more than 300 trains passed that way every day and very often at full speed, disregarding the city ordinances,--thirty or forty miles an hour." Three years ago the crossing was abolished, the tracks having been elevated. The superintendent came to him at that time. "Well, John, I am sorry for you; going to lose your happy home. But you'll get another just as good." This was too much for John; his long smoldering disappointment burst out. "Go to hell!" said he, "A happy home! I could just as well have been in the penitentiary over there; I would have been much better off, without the responsibility and worry I have here. During sixteen years I didn't have a single day off. Sundays and weekdays both I have to be here for twelve hours. Do you call that a happy home?" He refused the new-old job. He now keeps a little store in Woods Run, which he has established out of his savings and with the help of his children,--a store which might have served Dickens for one of his grotesque backgrounds, for here are on sale hardware, candy, crackers, bacon, eggs, molasses. Kroupa cannot be classed as a failure, for he has managed to buy a home and raise and educate a good sized family, but he has not made the success that his qualities of constancy, honesty and sobriety should have won him. His inborn slowness was too great a handicap. Among the Slavs the Slovaks strike me as the most ambitious and pushing. This is all the more surprising when one remembers that the conditions out of which they come are as bad as the conditions surrounding any of the Slavs, and worse than most. The Slovaks when they come here, are poor, illiterate, have no training, are inured to oppression; yet they have pluck, perseverance, enterprise and courage. From their ranks are recruited many of the foremen in the mills and an ever increasing number of merchants. In the Woods Run district, with which I happen to be best acquainted,--a low-lying mill neighborhood along the Ohio in Allegheny City, probably one-half of the stores and saloons are in the hands of Slovaks, or their close neighbors, the Hungarian Rusnaks. They were all common laborers at one time. Most of the stores are well kept and, in general, prosperous-looking, and among their customers are not only Slavs, but Americans as well. A type of this class of men, the men who succeed, is John Mlinek. When I first saw him I had not the least thought that he was a Slav, so well-dressed and thoroughly Americanized did he seem, and such good English did he speak. He came to America thirteen years ago when only fifteen years old. He worked successively as a breaker-boy and driver in the mines at Mahanoy City, then in the iron-works at Elizabeth, New Jersey, then as a riveter in the Pressed Steel Car Company at Allegheny, where he was soon making three to four dollars a day. As he neither drank nor indulged in any other form of dissipation he saved considerable money. In 1905, he married a Slovak girl born and brought up in this country who for several years before her marriage, had clerked in a store where they had foreign customers. She is a little more refined than the average English-speaking girl of the working class, and holds a high position in her own circle. She is quite ambitious and induced her husband to start a store in Woods Run. He sells cigars and candy and is doing very well; from what I could gather, they already must have several thousand dollars saved. These young people seem to be much liked in the community; they are prominent both in their social circle and in their church, and Mlinek is an influential man among the Slovak societies, though he does not at all push himself to the front. Mlinek, I would say, is at the beginning of a considerable success; his prospects and his personality favor his achieving it; only some untoward set of circumstances can keep him down. A few paragraphs back, in the case of Hudak, I spoke of the powerful call their native bit of earth makes upon so many of the immigrants. But frequently when men go back, intending to stay, in response to this call, the old country is not strong enough to hold them. Such was the case with this same John Mlinek. It was his ambition to be a well-to-do farmer in Hungary in a few years, and recently he and his wife made a preliminary visit to his old home and bought a farm. They remained a few weeks,--but those few weeks were quite enough. He came back quite cured. "Every little clerk in the village looked down on me, because I didn't speak the official language, Magyar," Mlinek said to me. "He was an official while I was just a peasant. He didn't earn a quarter of what I do, yet I had to bow to him. That made me sore. In America I'm a free man. Besides, I've got a better chance to do well than in the old country. Yes, America is good enough for me." Mike Mamaj is another successful man; he also returned to Hungary, expecting to live there, and he also turned his back on his native country and came again to America, this time to stay. He has learned to speak, read and write English, and he is full of energy, though rather rude and domineering in his manner. During the early part of his career in America (he came here twenty years ago) he had a hard time, but for the last seven years he has been a foreman in the car shops at Woods Run. He has seventy men working under him, and part of the time he has earned $100 a month. He owns the house in which he lives, worth about $2,500, has property in the old country to the value of $1,500, and has money in the bank. Mamaj is proud of his success, of his home, of his children. So proud that, on the occasion of our first meeting, though the bed-time hour of nine had come, he dragged me off to show me the evidence of what he had done in America. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. IMMIGRANT OUT OF WORK.] First I had to inspect his home, which was neat and well-furnished. Then he ordered his children (three daughters, eight, ten and thirteen) who were going to bed, to dress and recite their lessons for the stranger. While the girls rather sleepily displayed some of their English learning, Mamaj stood by, hands in his pockets, and nodded proudly. A quality that I have noted again and again among the Slavs is their readiness to help their countrymen,--already instanced by the case of Málek's father loaning money to a robbed fellow immigrant. Sometimes this generosity shows itself amid the most adverse circumstances, as it did with Koval. Koval (the same man that I mentioned as having wandered about before settling in Pittsburgh) has himself had enough misfortune during his three years in America to drive all unselfish feeling for others out of a man's heart. Two years ago he sent for his family and his younger brother. Immediately upon their arrival his three children and his brother fell sick with typhoid fever. They were no sooner well than Koval himself went down with the fever. This illness, since it drained their resources, forced them to fill their home with boarders,--which was a hardship on the slight wife, all the more keenly felt because keeping boarders had been no part of their original plan. Then all three of the children were taken ill with the croup. The usual price for a doctor's call is one dollar, but the doctor charged three dollars each visit inasmuch as he had three patients; Koval protested, but had to pay. Two of the children died, and Koval, by this time financially exhausted, had to go in debt to the undertaker for the funerals. And then amid these last disasters came the financial crash, with its misery of unemployment. Certainly enough to sour the milk of human kindness in any man. But the penniless Koval did not drive out his penniless boarders, now only a burden. Instead, he gave them a sleeping place, divided with them the food he could get on credit from the grocery, for since he was a steady man and a householder Koval still had some credit; and for the rest of the food, he and his boarders would go and stand in the bread line, which had been established in Woods Run. Not only did Koval not throw out the penniless boarders, who already encumbered him, but he took in seven additional people who were in distress. Two of these latter were young men from his native village who had landed in Pittsburgh in the midst of the depression; two were Russians who had been found wandering through the streets, nearly frozen, by a policeman, who brought them to Koval; the others were a countryman, his wife and child of six, and to accommodate these Koval had to give up his own bed. During the period of my acquaintance with him Koval was supporting twelve boarders, only one of whom was paying him a cent. What he was doing seemed quite the natural thing to Koval; he hardly seemed conscious of his generosity. "Why do you keep all these people?" I asked him. "Why, what else could I do?" he returned. "They have no work and no other place to go. I cannot throw a man into the street. They will go themselves when they can." Frequently circumstances throw the burden of the home upon the child. In looking into an accident case I called at a home in Saw Mill alley,--a cheerless, dingy neighborhood that is flooded every year by the high water. I was received in the kitchen by a slight Polish girl of fifteen, and soon discovered that she was the real head of the home. Annie had just finished the wash, and at such a time even the best of houses are apt to be in disorder, but here everything was neat and clean. She told me her story willingly enough. Her father, who had been a laborer in one of the mills, had been killed by an engine while working in the yard at night. Her mother had remarried, and soon had herself been killed by the explosion of a kerosene lamp. Annie was now keeping house for a brother and her stepfather. As the seventeen-year-old brother was rather shy, and as the stepfather was a night-watchman, naturally a man of no authority and allowed by his work little opportunity to exercise it even had he possessed it, the main control of the household has passed into Annie's hands. That authority she was using well, as was shown not only by the tidiness of the house, but by the fact that it is chiefly through her influence that her brother is attending night school. She has energy, determination and character. She reads and writes both English and Polish. She said she liked to read books, history especially, but that she hadn't the time. Annie's stepfather is soon to marry a widow, but this further complication of her already complicated family relations does not seem to trouble her in the least. In fact she was quite enthusiastic over her future stepmother. "She came to see me the other day," she said, "and she was awful nice. Oh, she's fine all right, and she's rich!" "Rich? How rich?" I asked. "Oh, she's got a lot o' money! It's a benefit she got from a society when her first man died. She's got $1,200!" One deplorable trait I frequently met with among the Slavs was contempt for American law. The existence of this trait is largely due to the teaching of experience,--and experience of one particular sort. The story of Vilchinsky, a Ruthenian boarding-boss, is such a common one, it illustrates so well a wide-spread condition in the administration of law by the petty aldermen's courts of the Pennsylvania industrial districts, that it is worth repeating for the sake of its general significance. October 14, 1907, one of the boarders was celebrating his patron saint's day. This meant a lot of drinking by all, and during the festivities they got more or less under the influence of liquor, but they were in their own home, there was no public disturbance, and toward midnight they all went to bed. About two o'clock in the morning, however, when they were all asleep, policemen came to the house, wakened everybody and loaded them into patrol wagons and buggies and took them to a police station. The boarding-boss, four girls and three men were all taken before the magistrate, charged with disorderly conduct. Without any regular hearing,--none of them could speak English and there was no interpreter,--the squire asked for twenty dollars apiece for the boarders and fifty dollars for the boarding-boss. All but two girls paid the fine immediately, and these two were then sentenced to the county jail. During the following day, their friends succeeded in collecting enough money to pay their fines and the $1.50 extra for board in the jail. Abuses such as this are generated by the fact that aldermen and constables obtain fees out of the fines, which makes it to the financial interest of these officials to get as many cases into court as possible. Many men I have talked with have stated that the constables often provoke disorder when none exists for the sake of the profit in the arrests. The Slavs know that they are victimized, and at the same time they realize their helplessness; the natural result is a bitter contempt for law. "Huh!" sneered Vilchinsky, "the police are busy enough all right stopping disorder when the men have got money. But when there's hard times, like there is now, a man can make all the noise he pleases and the police won't arrest him. They know he hasn't money to pay a heavy fine and costs. It ain't law they think about. It's money." There are plenty of Slavs who are quarrelsome, just as there are among other races; and when you have a combination of Slavic ill-temper and the above-mentioned judicial practice, then there is basis for trouble indeed. Zavatsky and Yeremin, Russians, and neighbors in a steel town, drank more than was good for them one Saturday afternoon in a saloon, and at last Zavatsky spoke his mind about Yeremin's wife, whom he did not consider as good-looking as she should be, and indulged in drunken threats against her if she did not stop throwing ashes on his side of the yard. Yeremin repeated to his wife these threats and remarks and Mrs. Yeremin, being a choleric woman, went to the squire in spite of the fact that it was very late in the evening. But as it was payday, he was in his office ready for business. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. RUSSIAN.] A constable was sent to Zavatsky's house to arrest him. The constable went into the kitchen and, finding nobody there or in the next room, went upstairs. Here there were a number of boarders talking, but they were not drunk. The constable, seeing these men, thought it would be wisest to have assistance, so he brought two policemen and then went for Zavatsky. They broke open the door of the room where Zavatsky was sleeping, dragged him out of bed and told him to get up. He was in a drunken stupor and claims that he did not resist the constable, in fact, scarcely knew what was going on; but the constable felled him with so heavy a blow that it made a scalp wound and the blood rushed out and blinded him. While on the floor, Zavatsky remembered a revolver under his pillow, and raised his hand and got it. The constable wrested it from him and according to Mrs. Zavatsky's version, he exclaimed, "I'll give you a revolver, you son of a gun," and shot Zavatsky in the chest. Mrs. Zavatsky, catching up a hammer, rushed at the constable, but he knocked her unconscious by a blow on the head and she fell down in a swoon. Before that, she had screamed to the men, "Come down, boys, come down, they're killing the gazda!" One of the first to come to Zavatsky's assistance was his kum, (the kum is one who is godfather to one's children, or one to whose children one is godfather; a very close relationship,--generally the dearest friend). As the kum tried to rush into the room, the two officers gave him several violent blows on the head. The other men rushed down, but they were all seized by the officers, with the exception of one whose flight was suddenly stopped by a shot in the leg. As a result of the melee, the whole household of ten men and one woman was taken in patrol wagons to the squire's court and committed to jail, charged with disorderly conduct, felonious assault and interference with an officer in performance of his duty. Zavatsky and the boarder who was shot in the leg were sent to the hospital for treatment. At first it looked as if Zavatsky were not going to live. After a hearing four days later they were all committed to the grand jury, and my reports say that they were all sentenced to jail for varying periods. None of the policemen or the constable had even a scratch to show, although they charged these ten men with felonious assault. The house, when I saw it just following the affair, looked like the day after a battle. Not even so brief a sketch as this would be complete without an instance or two of the men who have been handicapped by industrial accident. Such men are met everywhere in Pittsburgh,--they are so common as to excite no comment. In proportion to their numbers, the Slavs are the greatest sufferers from accident in the Pittsburgh region, for to their lot falls the heaviest and most dangerous work. The report for 1905-1906 of the National Croatian Society, to give a general example of what industrial accident means to the Slav, shows that out of its membership which averaged about 17,000 for that period ninety-five men were killed by accident [almost a third of the deaths from all causes] and that ninety-seven died from consumption, the inception of which is often traceable to the character of their work. In addition, eighty-five other men were permanently disabled. Andrew Jurik's job was to run a "skull-cracker" in the Homestead mill. This is a contrivance to break up scrap so that it can be easier melted, and its main feature is a heavy steel ball which is hoisted into the air and then allowed to drop upon the scrap which has been heaped beneath it. This crash of the ball throws pieces of the scrap in all directions. The work is very dangerous, especially at night when it is hard to see and dodge the flying scrap. One Monday night [the day before he had worked on a twenty-four hour shift] Jurik failed to see and dodge. A chunk of scrap weighing four or five hundred pounds struck his leg and so crushed it that it had to be amputated. Almost a year after the accident I went to visit Jurik, and found a mild-faced, kindly-looking, not very intelligent man of forty, sitting in his landlady's kitchen rocking his landlady's baby. That was Jurik's job now, to take care of his landlady's children in part payment for his board; and that was all he was good for yet, for he had only a leg and a stump. He had been paid $150 by the Carnegie Relief Fund; of this he had sent fifty dollars to his wife in Hungary and had used the balance to pay his board. The company had promised him an artificial leg and light work as soon as he was able to get around, but as his stump was not yet entirely healed, as he had not a cent, as his wife was writing him letters begging for money for the children, Jurik seemed worried. Jurik looks at the future blankly, helplessly. He had at first planned to bring his family here, but now he can never get the money for that. Nor can he go back to them. He would be more useless, more helpless, on a farm than here. The only solution Jurik can see to the lifelong problem suddenly thrust upon him by that flying piece of scrap, is for him and his family to remain indefinitely apart: he working at whatever poor job and at whatever low wage he can get, and sending a little to Hungary to help out,--his wife to continue working as a laborer on a farm at twelve or fifteen cents a day. Often the handicapped man's problem is thrust directly upon the wife for solution, as it has been upon the wife of John Hyrka. Hyrka is a Ruthenian of thirty; his wife is twenty-eight. He was making fair wages in the Duquesne mills; they were both healthy and strong, and they had high hopes for the future as is natural with the young. But May 26, 1907, John, who was working on a platform directly over a limestone mill, stepped on a rotten plank and both his legs shot down into the mill. Before he could be extricated the flesh had been torn from the soles of both his feet. Since then (or at least up to the time of my last report) Hyrka had been in the McKeesport hospital, where attempts were made to graft flesh upon his soles. When I last heard about him his feet were still not healed, and it was practically certain that the grafting would be a failure and that he would be a cripple for life. When this tragedy descended upon Mrs. Hyrka she was within a month of confinement. Into this grim situation entered the baby, adding its cares. Until months after the accident she was in no condition to work, and when she did regain her strength the demands of the infant would not permit her to take up regular employment. For six months she lived upon thirty dollars a month the company paid her, then the company cut off this allowance, and after she had felt the pinch of want for a time, she demanded a final settlement. They offered her $600, she to pay all further hospital bills, which up to then had been paid by the company. She talked the matter over with John, and between them they decided that to have the flesh scraped from your feet and to be a lifelong cripple ought to be worth as much as $1,000. But this seemed an exorbitant estimate to the company, and as Mrs. Hyrka held firm to her own figures, the matter was still unsettled when I left Pittsburgh. She was then living on what she could borrow; the high hopes of twenty-eight were all blasted; she knew she had a cripple on her hands for all his life, thirty or forty years perhaps, and she was wondering, desperately wondering, how she was going to be able to support him. * * * * * In citing these various types I have not tried to make out the Slavs as better than they are. I have, to repeat my opening statement, merely tried to show that these generally unknown people are above all human beings,--that they have not alone vices and undesirable qualities, but virtues,--that though crude, they have their possibilities. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. THE STRENGTH OF THE NEW STOCK.] THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH HELEN A. TUCKER FORMER MEMBER TEACHING STAFF OF HAMPTON INSTITUTE To-day it is the young north-bound Negro with whom we reckon in Pittsburgh. Seldom is a white-headed Negro seen on the street; but rather the man on the sand cart hard at work. That with every year there is an increasing migration from the South to our northern cities is known in a general way; but if our estimate of these newcomers is to be worth anything, it should be based upon something more than impressions gained from those we notice on the street-cars (the best are too well-behaved to be conspicuous), from loafers at saloon doors, and from newspaper accounts of Negro crime. Here, too often, the knowledge of white people ends. Of the industrious, ambitious Negroes, they know little; and of the home life of those who are refined, nothing at all. As a man who officially comes into daily contact with the criminal Negro said to me, "All must bear the reproach for the doings of this police-court ten per cent." Anyone who is sufficiently interested to desire more accurate information as to Pittsburgh's Negroes than may be gained by a walk down Wylie avenue will readily find signs enough of the differentiation that is rapidly taking place among the members of this race. While with the increasing influx a class of idle, shiftless Negroes is coming, who create problems and increase prejudice, a far larger number are taking advantage of the abundance of work and of the good wages, and are rapidly bettering themselves. There is here a chance, such as perhaps few northern cities give, for the industrious Negro to succeed, and he is improving his opportunity. There was a considerable Negro population in Allegheny county before the Civil War. Both Pittsburgh and Allegheny were important stations of the "underground railroad" and many a man and woman sought refuge here from the nearby slave states. In Allegheny a school was founded for them before the end of the half century. The growth of the Negro population is shown by the following chart: YEAR | NUMBER -----+------- 1850 | 3431 ==== 1860 | 2725 === 1870 | 4459 ===== 1880 | 7876 ======== 1890 | 13501 ============== 1900 | 27853 ============================ These figures show a steady increase except from 1850 to 1860, gradually reaching the point where the Negro population doubles in a decade. The marked increases from 1870 to 1880 and 1890 to 1900 are probably due to the fact that in those periods more Negroes were able to get work in the steel mills. The percentage of Negroes in the total population of the county was 2.2 per cent in 1880, 2.4 per cent in 1890, and 3.6 per cent in 1900. Three-quarters of the Negroes in the county live in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City. Since 1900, the migration of Negroes to Pittsburgh has been greater than before. It is estimated that there are not less than 50,000 in Allegheny county and at least 35,000 of these are in Pittsburgh and Allegheny. In 1900 considerably more than half of these were males, and Pittsburgh was one of three cities in the United States (the others were Chicago and Boston) with a population of 10,000 or more Negroes, to have an excess of males. In general this migration has been from the middle southern states. The greater number, fully one-half, has come from Virginia and West Virginia; others have come from Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, with a few from Ohio and states further west. Some of those from Alabama and Tennessee have already been "broken in" in the new mill districts of those states. As in the migration to other northern cities most of these people, when they come north, are in their best working years,--between eighteen and forty. According to the census of 1900, over seventy per cent of the Pittsburgh Negroes were between fifteen and fifty-four years of age; less than five per cent were over fifty years, while but fourteen per cent, about 2,400, were children of school age, between five and fourteen. Many of the children remain in the South, and many of the old people go back there, so that the city of Pittsburgh is under little expense for educating the children and less for caring for the aged. * * * * * The principal Negro street is Wylie avenue. This leads up to the "Hill District" which, forty years ago, was a well-conditioned section. Now it is given over largely to Negroes and European immigrants. Forty-eight per cent of the Negroes in Pittsburgh live in wards seven, eight, eleven and thirteen. In 1900, sixteen per cent were in the thirteenth ward, and the number has increased since then. They constituted fourteen per cent of the total population of the ward in that year. How fast this movement into the thirteenth ward is taking place is indicated by what a colored woman told me who keeps a grocery store on Wylie avenue near Francis street. When she opened there three years ago, there was scarcely a colored family in the district. Now there is another grocery store, a shoe store and two confectionery stores, kept by colored people. Horton street near by is filled with colored people who have recently come from the South. There is a tendency on the part of the Negroes, however, to get out from the center of the city, and fully a quarter of them lives further out in wards nineteen, twenty and twenty-one. In all, sixty-two per cent of the Negroes lived in 1900 in six wards. In these wards there is a large foreign element. In the seventh, eighth and eleventh wards there are many Russian Jews. A Negro church in the eighth ward was sold last fall for a Jewish synagog, and the Negro congregation is building in the thirteenth ward. In the twelfth ward where many of the Negroes live who work in the mills, they have for neighbors the Poles and Slavs. The well-to-do Negroes of the city are moving out towards the East End. Two or three apartment houses have been built especially for Negroes, but in general, though living in certain localities, they are not segregated. This does not mean that there are not some Negro streets, but very often a row of from three to seven houses will be found in which Negroes are living, while the rest of the street is filled with white people. Again, a single Negro family may live between two white families. When Negroes gain a foothold in a new street in any numbers, the Americans move away; but the Jewish immigrants do not seem to object to living near them, sometimes in the same house. And this is true of more than the poorest of them. In a way the Jews have been a help to the Negroes, for they will rent houses to them in localities where they could not otherwise go. In many cases the Jews have bought or built houses, filled them with Negro tenants at high rents, and thus paid for them. But the Negroes have learned from these experiences and many of them have started to buy homes. They have decided that they might as well buy houses for themselves as for the Jews. The poorer Negroes live in a network of alleys on either side of Wylie avenue in the seventh and eighth wards. For years the conditions here have been very bad from every point of view. There are respectable people living here, but the population consists chiefly of poor Negroes and a low class of whites. As a result, there is much immorality in this section,--speak easies, cocaine joints and disorderly houses abound. I think I never saw such wretched conditions as in three shanties on Poplar alley. Until a year ago many of the landlords had not complied with the law requiring flush closets, and I found old fashioned vaults full of filth. Where the flush closets had been put in they were in many cases out of repair. In some alleys there were stables next to the houses and while the odor was bad at any time, after a rain the stench from these and from the dirt in the streets was almost unendurable. The interiors of very many of the houses in which the Negroes live were out of repair,--paper torn off, plastering coming down, and windows broken. The tenants told me they had complained to the landlords and had tried to get something done, but without success. The twelfth ward near the mills also has some bad conditions. In Parke row and Spruce alley, on the day of my visit, the rubbish, which is removed only every two weeks, was piled high. On top of one pile was an old dirty mattress. The houses I visited in Parke row were so dark that it was necessary to use a lamp even at midday. There were also depressing conditions among the Negro homes on Rose, Charles and Soho streets. While some of the more ambitious are moving out from these unhealthy localities, many who would like to move have not the opportunity. One of these said to me, "The only place where there is plenty of room for Negroes is in the alleys." Yet even the very poorest Negro homes are usually clean inside and have a homelike air. It would surprise one who has never visited such homes to see with what good taste they are furnished. There is always some attempt at ornamentation, oftenest expressed by a fancy lamp, which is probably never lighted. Almost every family except the very poorest has a piano. The best Negro houses,--usually not in Negro districts,--are what people of the same means have everywhere. I was fortunate enough to visit at least a dozen of these comfortable, well-furnished, attractive homes and in them I met courteous, gracious and refined women. Only in Spruce alley and Parke row did I find disorder and a general indifference to dirt and there were some exceptions even there. The hopelessness of keeping clean in such a location may have had something to do with these conditions. Compared with certain of the foreigners, the Negroes do not overcrowd their houses, but they do often shelter too many people for comfort or decency. I visited a house of three rooms where a man and wife, five children and a boarder were living. In another house, also of three rooms, there were a man and his wife, her mother, two children and a lodger. These I think are not unusual cases. I also found a family of ten in four rooms, and another family of seven and a boarder in three rooms. Where a house of four rooms is taken by two families, they do not often take lodgers, but if one family takes such a house it usually cannot meet the expense alone. What is more serious than the number of people in a house, is the carelessness in allowing young girls to sleep in the same room with men lodgers. Such a case was that reported by a probation officer of the Juvenile Court, of a girl of fifteen who slept in the same room with her father, two brothers and a lodger. It was "nothing," she told the court; the man was "an old friend of the family." The suggestion that she occupy the vacant room in the house plainly surprised her. * * * * * The low ebb of living conditions in a Negro neighborhood is illustrated by Jack's Run, a narrow, deep ravine leading down to the Ohio river between Bellevue and Allegheny. Here, during the past six or seven years, about one hundred and seventy-five colored people from the rural districts of North Carolina and Virginia have found lodgement. Engaged chiefly in domestic service and common labor, they have settled here because the rents are cheap. Mixed in with them is a class of low whites, and the standards of civilization are sucked down by immorality and neglect, for the run is practically isolated from the rest of the world. A mission Sunday school connected with the white Presbyterian church in Bellevue has been held there for about five years. The superintendent of this mission, who is a colored man, has endeavored to reach the children of the run. As he feels the Sunday school alone cannot do this, he is working to get a day school there. To be sure, the children are enrolled in Bellevue or Allegheny, but he says they really do not attend. A long climb up the hills shuts them off, and the white children pester them when they show themselves. It is hard to know what could be done to better the conditions in a place like Jack's Run, but up to the present time, with the exception of this one man, few people have tried to find out. The run has few visitors, and these are not altruists. "I have seen a politician here," the superintendent told me, "and an insurance collector; but never a preacher." One of the most encouraging signs of the economic progress of the Pittsburgh Negroes is found in the variety of occupations in which they are engaged. In 1900, 146 were engaged in professions: actors, artists, clergymen, dentists, engineers, lawyers, physicians and others. Domestic and personal service, house servants, barbers, janitors, hotel and restaurant keepers, soldiers, policemen, etc., employed 6,618; while in trade, and transportation, clerks, teamsters, merchants, railway employes, telephone operators, etc., there were 1,612. Manufacturing and mechanical pursuits employed 1,365. There was a total of 10,456 Negro wage earners: 8,382 males and 2,074 females. The proportion of those engaged in professional pursuits is small,--only a little over one per cent; and, with one exception, the number does not seem to be increasing. In Pittsburgh and the vicinity there are now eighteen Negro physicians, about three times as many as in 1900. Six were graduated from Harvard University, five from the Western University of Pennsylvania, two from Shaw, and one each from Ohio State, Medico-Chirurgical, and Western Reserve. Four of these men took also the degree of A. B. Ten have practiced five years or less. Among the five practicing lawyers is one graduate of the Harvard Law School, one from New York University Law School and one from Harvard University Law School. Two of these lawyers were admitted to the bar in 1891. They were the first Negroes to be admitted in Western Pennsylvania, as all who had applied up to that time had been turned down. There are four Negro dentists. Most of the men in these three professions have some practice among white people. A young physician who has been in Allegheny about three years, and who at first had such difficulty in renting an office in a suitable location that he almost gave up in despair, has now a number of white patients. One of the first was a German girl to whom he was called at the time of an accident because he happened to live near by, and through her family he has been recommended to other white people. Newspapers conducted by Negroes have not flourished in Pittsburgh but last year there were two,--the _Pioneer_, a small sheet run in the interests of the Baptists, and the _Progressive Afro-American_, a weekly. Twenty per cent of the men follow manufacturing and mechanical pursuits. Because of the abundance of work good Negro mechanics have no difficulty in keeping busy, though they have made little headway in the unions. An occasional Negro is a union member, as, for instance, four or five carpenters, a few stone-masons and a few plasterers. Here, as elsewhere, they gain admission easily only to the hardest kinds of work. The Negro hod carriers indeed make up the greater part of the hod carriers union. In McKeesport there are but two white hod carriers. In Pittsburgh and the vicinity there are over a thousand colored hod carriers. The colored stationary engineers and firemen have a union of their own, the National Association of Afro-American Steam and Gas Engineers and Skilled Laborers, incorporated June, 1903. It was once a part of a white organization. It has three locals in Pittsburgh and it has been allied with other labor organizations and represented in central labor bodies, but it is yet rather weak. Three or four colored contractors hire plasterers and masons. Early in the seventies a few colored men found work in some of the mills. One of the first to employ Negroes was the Black Diamond Mill on Thirtieth street. There were a few here before 1878. In that year, through a strike, Negro puddlers were put in, and since then the force of puddlers has been made up largely of Negroes. About the same time Negroes were taken into the Moorhead Mill at Sharpsburg, and also through a strike, Negroes got into the Clark Mills on Thirty-fifth street. Since 1892, there have been Negroes in the Carnegie Mills at Homestead. It is the prevailing impression that numbers of Negro strike-breakers were imported at the time of the "big strike," but I have been told by an official of the Carnegie company, by a leading colored resident of Homestead, and by a Negro who went to work in the Homestead Mills in 1892, that this was not so. Word was given out that anyone could find work who would come, the Negroes with the rest. Negroes were brought up from the South at this time to take the place of strikers in the Clark Mills. But Negroes already worked there and some of them who went out at that time eventually went back to work. Unquestionably Negro strike-breakers have been brought to Pittsburgh, but I judge not in any large numbers. When the mills were last running full there were about one hundred and twenty Negroes at the Clark Mills; one hundred and twenty-six at Homestead, and about 100 in the other mills of the Carnegie company, making in all the Carnegie works three hundred and forty-six colored men. A conservative estimate would put those at the Black Diamond and Moorhead Mills as at least three hundred more. Many of these mill men are unskilled, but at the Clark Mills two-thirds, and at Homestead nearly half are skilled or semi-skilled. It is possible for a man of ability to work up to a good position. A small but increasing number of Negroes are on the city's payroll. On the date of my inquiry there were in the employ of the city of Pittsburgh 127 persons of Afro-American descent, or one out of every 237 of the Negro population, while a total of 635 directly profited by the $91,942 paid annually in salaries to colored persons. These city employes include laborers, messengers, janitors, policemen, detectives, firemen, letter carriers and postal clerks, and their salaries range from $550 to $1,500 a year. * * * * * The first Negroes to set up establishments of their own, dating back twenty years and more, were the barbers and hairdressers. Formerly these had much of the white patronage, but they are gradually losing it. With a few exceptions, notably the Negro barber in the Union Station, their shops are now found on Wylie avenue and in other Negro localities, and are patronized by Negroes. A partial list of Negro business enterprises,[10] with the number employed is as follows: _No. of Persons_ _Firms Employed_ Barbers 20 78 Restaurants and hotels 12 66 Groceries, poultry, etc. 8 9 Tailors 7 19 Pool rooms 6 6 Hauling and excavating 5 170 Saloons and cafés 3 15 Printers 3 19 Pharmacies 4 8 Undertakers and livery 3 14 Confectioners and bakeries 3 2 Caterers 3 6 to 30 Miscellaneous 8 105 -- -------- 85 514-547 [10] Furnished by R. R. Wright, Jr., of the Armstrong Association, Philadelphia, who investigated the Negro in Business in Pennsylvania for the Carnegie Institution. The number employed does not include the proprietors, so that over six hundred persons are earning a living from these shops. Not counting the barber shops, saloons or restaurants, there are certainly over one hundred small stores kept by Negroes and until the financial depression new ones were opening each month. Three or four drug stores were opened in 1907. One of the Negro hotels doubled its capacity in a year. The nine business enterprises listed under "miscellaneous" include an insurance company, a stationery and book store, a men's furnishing store, a photographer's gallery, a real estate company, a loan company, a shoe store and repairing shop, and a manufactory of a hair growing preparation, which has sent out sixty-five agents. The insurance company has twenty-eight agents, all of whom are colored. Several of the barbers have laundry agencies and boot-blacking stands and some have baths. There are at least a dozen men who own their horses and wagons and take contracts for hauling and excavating. One of the largest of these Negro contractors was employing 135 men. Another employs thirty men for hauling and also works 100 to 200 men on asphalt paving. There are many more men who own a horse or two and do general expressing. One of these told me that he spent his first one hundred and fifty dollars saved after coming to Pittsburgh for a horse, which left him with a capital of seventy-five cents. He now owns four horses. A Negro has had one of the stalls in the Allegheny Market for many years and there is another in the Diamond Market. One of the most successful Negro business men lives in Homestead. As a small boy he moved from Virginia to Ohio, and came to Homestead in 1879. Up to 1890 he was an engineer on the river, the only Negro to hold a chief engineer's license. Then he went into boat building and built twenty-one river steamboats. Five years ago he organized the Diamond Coke and Coal Company, in which he is now master of transportation. There are ten men in this company; the others are white. They own a mine, docks, and steamboats, and employ about a thousand men. This colored man owns considerable property. He lives in a large comfortable house and owns one on either side which he rents. His older son entered Penn Medical School last fall. His younger son was captain of the Homestead High School football team. His daughter, who graduated from the high school and had an additional three years at the California Normal School, is teaching in the South. She could not get a school in Homestead. It is noticeable that the Pittsburgh Negroes show an encouraging variety in their independent business enterprises as well as in their general occupations. Of course they have usually been able to go into only those that require small capital. The Negro who comes to Pittsburgh or any northern city with no capital, no business experience and no business traditions, and succeeds even in a small way in the midst of such competition as he must face, is doing remarkably well. But the mass of the Negroes in Pittsburgh are found in the same occupations that are open to them in most northern cities with perhaps fewer men (fifty-eight per cent) and rather more women (ninety per cent) in domestic and personal service, and more men in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits than is usual. This shifting of the men's activities is due to the nature of the industries in Pittsburgh, to the fact that the city is rapidly growing and consequently that there is much building going on in which labor can be utilized, and to the fact that Negroes gained a foothold in some of the mills during the strike periods. While the largest and best hotels no longer have colored waiters, many are still employed in hotels, restaurants and cafés. Comparatively few Negroes are employed as porters and helpers in stores while large numbers are employed as teamsters, probably more now than in 1900, as most of the sand wagons and other hauling carts are driven by them. There are also many coachmen and chauffeurs. * * * * * While the Negro men find a varied field for their labor, comparatively few occupations are open to colored women. There is one woman who has conducted a very successful hairdressing establishment for twenty years and a half dozen others have opened little shops. A dozen or so find work as clerks and stenographers in offices and stores of colored men, but most are working as maids or laundresses. There are about a hundred dressmakers and seamstresses. That there is not a greater variety of openings for colored women works a great hardship. There is no hospital where they can be trained as nurses; there is no place for them in the department stores, except for a few as maids; they can look forward to no positions in the public schools. Many who would stay and graduate from the high school drop out because they see nothing ahead. They are, of course, unwise in doing this, for more than most girls they need to take advantage of every educational opportunity. A woman who is a stenographer in a Negro insurance office, said her father thought she was very foolish to study stenography as he was sure she could never get a chance to use it. She went into this office to write policies. When the agent found she was competent to do the higher work, he let his white stenographer go and gave her the place. Another woman told me that her daughter seriously objected to going to the high school; she said she could never use what she would learn there. But her parents felt able to send her, and insisted that she graduate. She is now employed in the court house at a salary of $600 a year. * * * * * In 1900 the Negroes of Allegheny county paid taxes on property valued at $963,000. Since that time wage-earning Negroes have commenced to buy homes in still larger numbers. They usually pay something down and the rest as rent until the entire sum is paid. In Beltzhoover there is a settlement of a hundred or more families more than half of whom are buying homes. To buy a house of any kind on small wages means industry and many little sacrifices. One couple whom I visited in Beltzhoover were buying a house of five rooms with a piazza and a generous sized front yard. The husband, when he was married, had saved $300, which went for the first payment. In the four years since then they had paid $800 and they had $1,000 more to pay. He was a janitor getting forty-eight dollars a month, while his wife made six dollars a week as a seamstress. To increase their income, they rented out a room to a man and his wife who paid them ten dollars a month. They also raised and sold chickens which brought in additional money. Most of the houses which colored people of this class are buying are valued at from $2,500 to $3,300. On Francis street, near Wylie avenue, there is a group of five six-room houses occupied by Negroes. Three of these families were buying their houses. One of the men was a waiter, one a porter in a bank, and one owned a horse and wagon and did expressing. The following experience, told me by a Tuskegee graduate, is an example of what may be done in Pittsburgh by an industrious Negro who is ambitious to establish a home: "I came to Pittsburgh in March, 1900," he said, "on a freight train, arriving about three A. M. I asked for the police station, but they wouldn't let me stay there when they found I had fifty cents in my pocket. I was turned up Wylie avenue and finally came to a colored lodging house. All the beds were full, but they said that I could sit in the rocking chair for the balance of the night for a quarter. The next morning I started out to look for work and found it in a brick yard where I worked until August. Meanwhile I sent for my wife and child. My wife, who is a dressmaker, soon found work. She happened to sew for the wife of the manager of one of the steel mills. He asked about me and said he thought he could give me something good in the mill. I went there in August and have been there ever since. Now I am a heater. All you see here was gotten together in the last seven years." This man and his wife have paid $4,400 for a six-room house and have furnished it attractively. * * * * * The churches have the same prominent place in Negro life in Pittsburgh as elsewhere. They include one Presbyterian, one Protestant Episcopal, one Congregational, one Roman Catholic church, ten Methodist churches and between thirty and thirty-five Baptist churches and missions. The largest is the Bethel A. M. E. Church on Wylie avenue, which has recently been built at a cost of $50,000. Colored slaters and roofers, colored plasterers and three colored carpenters were employed in the building of it. The interior decorations were in charge of a Negro firm. The building together with the land, is valued at not less than $110,000. The people give liberally to the churches; Bethel raised over $10,000 in ten months toward paying off its mortgage. But there is a large number not reached by the church in any real sense. Though the new Bethel Church is in a district where the alleys and all the bad conditions they imply are numerous, the pastor's plans for the year as he outlined them were: first to pay the debt on the church, second to have a revival to fill it up. Not a word was said of the great need for active social work at its very doors. The rank and file of the forty or fifty Negro ministers in Pittsburgh and Allegheny have not a very high order of equipment or ethics. There are notable exceptions. I met one minister who seemed filled with the desire to work for the betterment of the Negroes of his neighborhood. In connection with the new church which he was building he was planning to have a day nursery and kindergarten and, if possible, a gymnasium. He hoped to have a deaconess to visit the homes and was also trying to organize a colored Y. M. C. A. At a meeting last fall in his church, the following subjects were discussed: "What is the influence of the Sunday School on the children?" "Is the church accomplishing the desired end toward the masses?" "Practical education and character making for the masses." * * * * * Some of the laymen among the colored people, especially the women, are working in similar directions. In 1880, in a small six-room house, a group of these started a Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Women. The present beautiful home on Lexington avenue was built in 1900 at a cost of $42,500. It contains twenty-one rooms, six bath rooms and a hospital room. The furnishings cost about $28,000. Several rooms were furnished by the different Negro women's social clubs. The home is attractive, cheery, clean and well-managed. The Working Girls' Home was similarly started three years ago by some colored women who realized how much it was needed. Girls coming to the city not only found it difficult to get boarding places, but they were sometimes directed to undesirable houses. In three years after it opened, the home had cared for forty to fifty girls. As most of these girls go out to service, they do not remain long at the home, but by paying a dollar a month a girl may store her trunk if she wishes, and may come back there to spend Sundays and other days "out," and to receive her callers. This is an arrangement which is much appreciated by the girls, and its introduction in other places might help solve the servant problem. A few girls who are seamstresses live in the house. They pay $1.25 a week, buy their own provisions, and have the use of the kitchen and gas range. The home has had a struggle financially. Last year the Legislature granted it an appropriation of $3,000 and it moved into a somewhat larger, though still too small house. For this house, by the way, it had to pay thirty-two dollars a month though the rent had formerly been twenty-five and the house had been empty for some time. The State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs formed five years ago, is raising money to establish a colored orphan's home in New Castle, Pennsylvania. A year ago these twenty-eight clubs had already raised enough to make the first payment on seven acres of land. The Colored Orphans' Home in Allegheny is under white management, and the colored women are ambitious to have one of their own; a colored auxiliary to the Juvenile Court Association was formed in 1906 to care for colored boys and girls between nine and twelve years of age who are brought to the court. The auxiliary also pays board for a group of colored children who are in institutions outside the state. One member is a faithful volunteer at the Juvenile Court. More than twenty-five social clubs are formed of colored women. The leading social organization for men is the Loendi Club. Besides this and other private associations there are many such orders as the Odd Fellows, Masons, Elks, Knights of Pythias and True Reformers. * * * * * Since 1874, when separate schools for Negroes were abolished, the colored children have attended the public schools with the white children, and all the educational agencies of the city are open to them. I was told that while a few stood well in their classes, the majority lacked concentration. One principal attributed this to the impoverished home conditions, lack of food and housing,--while another principal to whose school came many of the children from the alleys, laid their backwardness largely to their irregular attendance and immoral tendencies. It was agreed that the average colored child requires about two years longer than the white child to finish the grammar grades. The total enrollment at the high school for the year 1906-7 was about 2,300, and of these only forty were colored. Forty-two were enrolled last year, twenty boys and ten girls[11]. Few of these colored students graduate. Five who were graduated in 1907 ranked well in their class. [11] Transcriber 20 + 10 obviously does not equal 42 Thirty colored students attended the evening high school last year. Two girls are in the day classes, and four in the night classes at the Carnegie Technical Schools, and they have three colored boys. Five or six boys have been graduated from the Schwab Manual Training School in Homestead. In writing of the Negroes of Chicago, Mr. Wright says "What Chicago Negroes need is a great industrial school to teach Negroes domestic science and the skilled trades." Greater Pittsburgh has a school that should do this work. As early as 1849, Charles Avery, a Methodist minister of Quaker descent, who was much interested in the colored people, established for them in Allegheny the Avery College Trade School. At his death he left the institution an endowment of $60,000 which has since increased in value, and it has also received a yearly appropriation from the state. The school is controlled by a board of trustees, of whom six are colored, three white. The principal and teachers are colored. The courses which have been offered include millinery, dressmaking, tailoring, music, some English courses and some domestic science. Last spring, a hospital department was organized under separate charter and offers a training course. There is no doubt that the Avery school is not fulfilling the purpose for which it was founded. It is inferior in equipment and in methods and does not employ trained teachers. It is not reaching the colored boys and girls of Pittsburgh and giving them the up-to-date training which they so sorely need in those trades in which they can earn a livelihood. It should be crowded and would be if it were offering what the people want. Instead the enrollment at the end of the school year is about one-third what it was at the beginning. There is no difficulty in placing responsibility for success or failure, for the superintendent is also secretary and treasurer. The colored people have brought many complaints to the trustees in regard to the management of Avery but no action has been taken. Here is a clear cut illustration of a badly managed trust fund. Mr. Avery also left twelve scholarships of $100 each to be awarded to colored boys in the college and engineering departments of the University of Pittsburgh, where a total of nineteen colored students is enrolled. * * * * * Of the 1,124 cases brought before the Juvenile Court in 1906, 168 (14.9 per cent), dealt with colored children. The court records show most miserable conditions in the homes from which such children come. Usually both mother and father are working away from home all day, so that out of school hours there is no one to look after the children. They stop going to school and begin to stay out late at night and the descent to petty thieving and other offenses is swift and easy. On the morning of my visit to the Juvenile Court several colored children were brought before the judge. Harry D., a boy of eleven years, was under arrest for his second offense. Twice he had broken into a chapel, the last time stealing a lamp. The probation officer reported that on investigation, she found Harry had scarcely been in school for a year. His mother worked all day, earning three dollars a week and many days she came home only early in the morning to cook. With three brothers and a sister this boy slept on a cot in one room in which there was no other furniture except two plush chairs and a plush sofa. An uncle who lived with the children had taken to drinking and had not worked for some weeks. The neighbors also bore testimony that Harry was neglected rather than bad. Following Harry came a group of four colored boys on the charge that on the previous Sunday they had broken into a liquor store and done much mischief, such as turning on the spigots, breaking bottles full of beer and smearing pretty much everything in the store, including some cats, with black paint. The next morning they were arrested in a new house near by where they were stealing lead pipe. Eugene, the youngest boy, nine years old, had been in court two months before on the charge of incorrigibility. His father was dead but his mother, by working out by the day, managed to keep the home fairly clean and comfortable. But Eugene was a truant; he stayed out nights and was in the habit of stealing. For the lack of a more suitable solution, this nine-year-old child was committed to the reformatory at Morganza. Two of these boys, thirteen and eleven, were brothers. Their mother was dead; their father was at work in a blast furnace, while their nineteen-year-old sister, who might have kept the home, had left soon after the mother died because she thought her father was too strict. The younger boy had been staying out nights and playing truant. The older boy had never been in trouble before. He had a good reputation and claimed, as did the fourth boy, that he was not stealing but was trying to get the others away. In other cases that came before the judge the parents were themselves immoral and it is safe to say that the colored children who reach the Juvenile Court have, as a rule, seen little but the seamy side of life. A ready market for any bottle or piece of junk that these children can beg or steal is found among the numerous junk dealers. The children will be under a constant temptation to petty thieving for the sake of a few pennies so long as this kind of exchange with juveniles is allowed. The percentage of commitments among the adult Negroes (fourteen per cent), is all out of proportion to their percentage in the population (three and six-tenths). Women are most commonly arrested for disorderly conduct; men for fighting and cutting, petit larceny and for gambling, of which craps is the favorite form. There is much drunkenness. For some time the police department of Pittsburgh has been warring against the sale of cocaine. To the mind of the warden of the Allegheny county jail the greatest single cause of crime committed by Negro men and women is the use of this drug. * * * * * It is evident that the Negroes of Pittsburgh are making commendable progress along industrial lines. Some few have been conspicuously successful while many more are earning a comfortable living and attaining property. Negroes of this class present no special problems, for they are usually good citizens and are educating and training their children to be good citizens likewise. Their needs are the needs of the rest of the community. They would be benefited by better housing, better schools, better sanitation and a clearer atmosphere. But the problems in connection with the poor, ignorant, incompetent or vicious Negroes are many and pressing. We have seen the need for eradicating the sale of cocaine, which drags men under; and we have seen the need for rousing and equipping the ambitious among them through industrial training, comparable to that offered the southern Negro by Tuskegee and Hampton. A few of the more obvious needs of the people who live in the alleys are day nurseries to care for the babies of mothers who must go out to work; some sort of supervised play after school hours, either in connection with the schools or at playgrounds, for the older children of these same families, settlements; and most pressing of all, a building on lower Wylie avenue for social purposes with free baths, club rooms, a gymnasium and other amusements as a counteracting influence to the saloons and pool rooms that abound in this neighborhood. There is now no place in Pittsburgh where a young colored man, coming a stranger to the city, as so many are coming every year, may find innocent diversion and helpful companionship. It is becoming increasingly clear that these needs must be met by the Negroes themselves. A few, singly or in small groups, are already working for social betterment, but so far there has been no concerted, organized action. Left to themselves the Negroes are slow or unable to organize but until they do, much of their efforts as individuals will be wasted and but little definite good can be accomplished. If the white people who have had greater experience in dealing with civic and social needs realized this and extended to them their co-operation, the community as a whole, no less than the Negroes, would be richly repaid. THE JEWISH IMMIGRANTS OF TWO PITTSBURGH BLOCKS ANNA REED COLUMBIAN SCHOOL AND SETTLEMENT, PITTSBURGH The greater part of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh is situated in what is known as the Hill District. This immigration brings with it characteristics so entirely its own that much that is significant of the common life was found summed up in a study of the families of two blocks in the heart of this district. A census of them proved more surely than even those of us who had long been residents in the neighborhood would have anticipated, the permanence and stability of this new element in the population. The two blocks reflected the sort of foothold which is open to this distinctive people in what is for most purposes, a purely industrial center; what relation their new occupations bear to their training and experience in the old countries of Europe; and what, as measured in terms of livelihood and accomplishment, comes to them in this new setting. The blocks selected were two adjoining Center avenue at different points on the incline of the hill. Pittsburgh has no really large tenement houses. These homes were originally built for two families, and while some still contain but two, many have been converted so as to house a great many more. In the process of rebuilding, downstairs front-rooms have been changed into small stores where grocers, butchers and tailors supply the needs of the neighborhood. The houses are of brick, and many are garnished by a government license sign, which indicates that somewhere in these already crowded quarters, a small stogy-factory is located which sells in the larger market. The many synagogs where the men still wear the old time praying shawls, and each repeats for himself in monotonous, low, musical tones the ancient Hebrew prayers, bring into this capital of the steel district, the wonderful and fascinating spirit of the East. The Cheders where the Hebrew language, which every hardworking father and mother, no matter what else is sacrificed, feel must be taught to the boys, and the Kosher butcher-shops, where the dietary laws are still observed, are all distinctive of a people, which though it adopts American customs, still keeps many of the traditions in its own communal life. There were 1,080 people in these blocks, 817 of whom were Jewish. Of the 143 Jewish families, 110 were from Russia, twenty-seven from Roumania, five from Austria-Hungary and one from Germany,--all largely from small towns. Among them there were very nearly three hundred children of school age or younger. A third of these families had been in America over ten years and two-thirds over five years. Of course, the fact that the census was taken in a year of industrial depression may have had a large influence on the comparatively small number of more recent immigrants in residence in the neighborhood, for these would have less resources to keep them in Pittsburgh during a period of hard times. But the actual number of stable family groups was very considerable as shown in the following classification: _Under 2_, _2 to 5_, _5 to 10_, _10 to 20_, _20 to 40_ Years in America 10 33 50 32 18 Years in Pittsburgh 12 36 49 29 17 This permanence as an element in the citizenship of Pittsburgh is in contrast to an uninterrupted shifting among them as tenants. On the one hand, the latter is merely a reflex of the success of particular families in making their way and raising their standard of life; but the greater part of it is due to the lack of proper houses at a fair rental in Pittsburgh. It is a common occurrence for a family to move from place to place in an effort to secure more livable quarters. One family went through the torture of moving six times in one year. Two have lived from ten to twenty years in the same place, eight from five to ten, forty-six over two, while eighty-seven had been living in their present homes less than two years. Unsuspected by the casual visitor, there is a background of tragedy and national crises to such a neighborhood. Among the great nations of Europe, Russia and Roumania have absolutely refused political and industrial freedom to their Jewish subjects. The concrete forms which oppression and restriction assume are very real: prohibitions against their owning land, their exclusion in one part of Russia from the learned professions, in another from taking part in a government contract, and in whole districts from owning their own homes. Here in these blocks there are many families who have lived and traded in daily terror of an outbreak or of the tyranny of an unscrupulous governor; who have been deprived of the rights and privileges of citizens and yet subjected to the full strain of military law and the brunt of religious persecution. You chance to meet a man in the corner grocery,--he is tall and gaunt; his long beard is well sprinkled with grey. On talking with him you find he has served in the Russo-Turkish War, that his only son served for four years in the Russian army, and that a "pogrom" finally drove him to leave everything behind and flee to these shores. One man was robbed and his family outraged,--a son and brother-in-law killed in a recent massacre; another man already past forty, had to take up his burden, and, like the pilgrims of old, go forth and search for a new home, because the edict had been given in Moscow. It was found that forty-one of the families had come for purely religious and political reasons, ninety-two to better their economic condition and thirty-four had followed relatives, friends and townsmen who either sent for them or urged them to make the journey. Indeed, this personal relationship is on many counts the most important factor in swelling the population of a Jewish neighborhood. As a rule, no matter how poor the immigrant may be, he saves, often by the most drastic measures, to send for some loved ones. Such was the experience of a young man, educated in the public schools of Roumania, who had suffered in the uprisings there. His first employment in Pittsburgh was with a local druggist. He went through the usual apprenticeship, and soon another brother had come over and was working as a barber. They saved and sent part of their earnings to their parents in the old country, while the first, by work and study, prepared himself for entrance into the local college of pharmacy, was graduated and his earning capacity thereby increased. Then, the parents, a sister and two brothers were brought over and, when an opportunity for buying a drug store offered itself to him, the combined forces of the family made the purchase possible. To-day, after eight years of hard work, he owns a well-established business, is married and the entire family seems well started on the road to success. The question of what a man does, when he comes here an uninterpreted stranger, is interestingly reflected in these two blocks. The stogy industry and peddling are dominant; of those who have become stogy-makers, four were students, two grocers, one was a peddler, one a tailor, one a lumber trader, one a merchant and another a butcher. The peddlers represent an even larger variety of skilled trades and other occupations. A jewelry peddler and a rag peddler were printers; a weaver, two lumber dealers, a gardener and a grocer have become peddlers of clothing; a carpenter sells pictures; two blacksmiths, a tailor and a farmer are peddling rags. Of those who were skilled, a goldsmith has become a presser, a shoemaker is working at iron beds, an umbrella-maker runs a pool room and a Hebrew teacher is now an egg-candler. In contrast, and much more encouraging, are the six blacksmiths, eleven tailors, three barbers, two bakers, three shoemakers, two printers and a locksmith, a machinist, a plumber and a glazier, who started and continue to use the trades they learned in the old country. One of the most interesting facts brought out was that the number of peddlers, grew from ten in the old country to twenty-eight on their arrival in America and to thirty-two as the first work in Pittsburgh, dropping again to seventeen who are peddling at the present time. The following table compares occupations in the old country with those practiced in the new: _Old New_ _Country. Country._ Store keepers 20 20 Craftsmen 37 28 Laborers 4 7 Peddlers 10 17 Hucksters 4 16 Factory workers 1 9 Factory owners 1 5 Restaurant keepers 2 4 Lumber dealers 3 .. Gardeners, farmers, etc. 7 .. Clerks 1 4 Travelling Salesmen .. 2 Miscellaneous 2 7 NOTE.--Under miscellaneous were classed a foreman, manager, agent, contractor, collector. The meaning of this table will be made clearer by telling two stories, one of a man who is succeeding, and one of a man who has known the keen anguish that to the great masses of men is involved in the words "hard times." For the results of an industrial depression show themselves with promptness in such an immigrant neighborhood. One man, married and the father of three children, was employed as a porter in a downtown store. He was thrown out of work, and to the terrors of rent was added the fact that his wife was soon to give birth to another child. Four weeks afterward, the landlord levied on the furniture for the unpaid rent and the weak, under-nourished mother became temporarily insane. She was placed in a sanatorium, two of the children were sent to a day nursery and the youngest child,--too young to be taken by the nursery,--was sent to a private family. And then, for the man, began the struggle to get work. He bought a small quantity of fruit and peddled it in a basket from house to house. He was arrested one morning, in a freight yard where he was charged by the yard policeman with stealing. He was acquitted at the trial and the police sergeant claimed that cases of injustice of this kind were not infrequent. Next, he secured work as janitor in a hospital at five dollars a week, and after a time, his wife's condition improved and he was able to reunite his family. Thereupon, he borrowed ten dollars and bought a second-hand pushcart with a license, and now he is once more trading in fruits and vegetables in his struggle against odds to care for them. Another man, forty-eight years old and the father of eleven children, had spent his early life in a small town. His first job on coming to New York was that of a clothing operator. The over-strain of the sweatshop caused the only too frequent breakdown in health. Two years later he came to the Pittsburgh District, where, as a peddler in the country towns, he gradually regained his strength. To-day, he owns his home and has a paying grocery business. Of the 263 non-Jews in these blocks, nine out of ten were Negroes; and among them four questionable houses were found. Such an environment, with the change from former surroundings and conditions, does not always work out satisfactorily; the higher cost of living, the severe struggle for existence, the sudden transition from oppression to freedom, often have a deteriorating influence. They result in cases of wife-desertion, in laxity of religious observances, in gambling sessions at the coffee-houses, in occasional moral lapses, and in contempt for the ideals, customs and beauties of the traditional family and religious life of the old country. Yet, as a whole, we know the people of these blocks, and of the hill, as immigrants who have suffered oppression and borne ridicule; who in the face of insult and abuse have remained silent, but who have stamped on their countenances a look of stubborn patience and hope,--always hope,--and of capacity to overcome. [Illustration: HOMESTEAD FROM THE HILL BEHIND THE TOWN.] [Illustration: THE STREET--HOMESTEAD'S ONLY PLAYGROUND.] [Illustration: MUNHALL HOLLOW.] [Illustration: HOMESTEAD.] HOMESTEAD A STEEL TOWN AND ITS PEOPLE MARGARET F. BYINGTON ASSOCIATE SECRETARY FIELD DEPARTMENT FOR THE EXTENSION OF ORGANIZED CHARITY Seven miles from Pittsburgh, up the valley of the Monongahela River, lie the town of Homestead and the largest steel plant in the world. Seventeen years ago, Homestead was, for a time, the center of national interest, while the men and the Carnegie Steel Company fought to the finish one of the most dramatic battles in the history of the labor movement. The men failed,--public interest died out,--but the mill has gone on growing steadily and the town has kept pace, until now it numbers about 25,000. Throughout this time, the corporation, through its practically unquestioned decisions as to wages and hours of labor, has in large measure determined the conditions under which the men shall live. There is only one other industry in the town, the Mesta Machine Company, and little other work except in providing for the needs of the mill workers. We may consider then that the conditions resulting when a great organized industry creates about it, without a definite plan, a town dependent solely upon it for development, are fairly represented in Homestead. For, after all, the town is to be considered in part as a product of the steel industry, as well as the rails and armor plate shipped in the great freight trains that puff away down the river, and the success of the corporation must be estimated, in part, by its share in creating the homes and moulding the lives of the workers. Thirty years ago, two farms occupied the land now covered by the vast plant and the homes of hundreds of workers. In 1881, when Klomans built the mill, now a part of the United States Steel Corporation, the change began. The very aspect of Homestead shows how during the twenty-seven years that have passed, the plant has been the unifying and dominating force in the town. The mill has now stretched itself for over a mile along the river and the level space between the river and a hill rising steeply behind, which was the original site of both mill and town, has been entirely shut off from the water front. The smoke from the many furnaces and from the two railroads which cross the town settles heavily, making the section gloomy even on the brightest days. Wash day for some must wait for a west wind, if the clothes are not to come in blacker than when they went into the tub, and mothers find it a problem to keep children even reasonably clean in a place where the grass itself is covered with oily dust. This level space was originally large enough to accommodate the houses as well as the mill, but with the growth of the town, the homes have spread up the hill, and even out into the region beyond. For the English speaking people who were earlier comers, have been glad to leave the level, smoke-hidden section to the more recent immigrants. Here, in houses huddled together, where the totally inadequate sanitary provisions and overcrowding are comparable to the worst sections of a great city, we find now the homes of the Slavs. Courts where seventy-five, or even in a few instances more than a hundred people, are dependent for water supply on one hydrant, and houses with an average of four or five persons to each room are frequent. These facts will be considered more in detail in another article, exemplifying as they do conditions existing in many small industrial centers. Though there are no definite figures available as to the composition of the population of Homestead, the nationality of the men employed in the mill in July, 1907, will serve as a clue to the make up of the town as a whole. Of 6,772 employes, 3,601 or more than half were Slavs, 1,925 were native whites, 121 colored, 397 English, 259 Irish, 129 Scotch, 176 German, and 164 were of other Europeans. Aside from the Slavs, there is almost no tendency among the different nationalities to live in separate sections. The more desirable part of the town, which includes aside from the upper part of Homestead proper the politically independent boroughs of West Homestead and Munhall, is occupied by the whole English speaking group and it is with their life that this paper deals. Parallel to the main thoroughfare, along the side of the hill, runs street after street lined with simple frame houses. These stand detached from one another, though often with only a passageway between. There is usually a porch in front and a small yard where growing flowers or shrubs give a cheerful homelike air. The streets are full of merry children, coasting in winter down the steep hillsides, or in summer playing marbles and jumping rope. The hill lifts this section out of some of the smoke, but even here the sky is seldom really bright, and the outlook is over the stacks of the mills with their plumes of smoke. In general arrangement, the town shows an absence of interest in future development on the part of its original planners. The avenues, which run parallel from east to west with alleys between, are crossed at right angles by the main streets, cutting the town into rectangular blocks. Here and there are beds of old water courses down the hillside, on whose banks small houses, hardly more than shanties, have been built. The narrow lots of the original plan have had, moreover, a bad effect on the houses built on them. These houses are small, usually consisting of four or five rooms, but the middle room in the latter case opens only on the passage between the buildings, which is of necessity very narrow, and is never reached by sunshine. Moreover, the narrow lot which limits decidedly the choice in plans has resulted in a uniformity of design and a lack of artistic quality in the houses. This, especially in winter when there are no flowers to relieve it, gives to the streets an air of monotony. As Homestead grew, houses were built to the east of it on property outside the borough limits, owned by the Carnegie Land Company, a constituent part of the United States Steel Corporation. This district and a section including most of the mill property were formed into the separate borough of Munhall, said to be the richest one in Pennsylvania. From the beginning the mill officials have taken a marked interest in its development, and the general effect of Munhall shows the results. In the center stand side by side, the imposing library with its little park, the gift of Mr. Carnegie, and the handsome residence of the superintendent of the mill. Behind are the houses of the minor officials, whose wide lawns are kept in beautiful condition by men in the employ of the company. On the streets farther back, where the employes live, are many attractive houses, and on Sixteenth avenue cottages of varying design set back from the street, show the possibility of securing effective yet inexpensive plans. But neither the presence of the mill nor the dull sameness of the streets can hamper the sense of home-likeness which the workmen feel as they step across their own doorsteps. The burden of creating this falls on the shoulders of the housewife. Usually in these homes there is that proof of an upward social trend, a "front room," which with its comfortable furniture and piano or other musical instrument is the real center of the life and amusement of the family. As one woman said, "The children don't realize how much it costs to keep up the parlor, but they want it to look nice so they can bring their friends in, and as long as it keeps them home I'll manage it somehow." And no outsider can understand the sacrifices involved, the ceaseless economies if parlor curtains and pianos are to be evolved from a wage of fifteen dollars a week. [Illustration: SIXTEENTH AVENUE, MUNHALL.] Of course extremes of thrift and inefficiency are met. In one home, where the man earns but $1.65 a day and there are six to feed, they had not only managed to buy an organ and give one of the girls lessons, but had saved enough to tide them through the hard winter of 1908. But the wife, the daughter of a Pennsylvania farmer, had learned the thrifty ways of such a household. For this is skill amounting to genius and cannot be expected of all. I remember, in contrast, a kitchen where all is wretched, the children unwashed, the woman untidy, the room unswept. In such a scene, it is not surprising to have the woman complain that the man always goes to Pittsburgh with a crowd to spend the evening. Though he earns nearly twice what the other man does, his wife, who had been trained as a servant in a wealthy home and had learned extravagant ways, realized in a helpless sort of way her inability to "get caught up" financially, or to display any efficiency in managing her home and training her children. Between these two types is that of the average family, where the effort to make life wholesome meets with mingled successes and failures. [Illustration: GLEN ALLEY, HOMESTEAD.] The recognition among the people of the value of home life, finds perhaps no more striking proof than the zeal shown by many of them in purchasing their houses. According to the census figures of 1900, 567 families owned homes in the borough, 27.3 per cent of the entire number of houses, and 268 of these were free from encumbrance. Such business organizations as the Homestead Realty Company have met the needs of those wishing to buy on a slender income by a system of selling on the instalment plan, which in large measure takes the place of building and loan associations. The initial payment is small, sometimes as low as $150 for a house of four rooms, the real estate company assumes the obligations for insurance, taxes, and interest on the mortgage, and the buyer pays a monthly instalment large enough to cover all this and make a small reduction on the principal. For example, one family I know bought a four-room house worth about $1,750. Of this, they paid down $150, and thereafter a monthly instalment of sixteen dollars, which was little more than they would have had to pay for rent. Though it has taken fifteen years to buy the house, they now have a home of their own; and without unreasonable sacrifice. No phase of this attitude towards saving was to me more interesting than the reasons given for and against buying. Two sisters were typical of these different opinions. One with six children, whose husband made something over three dollars a day, said: "I didn't try to buy, because I wanted to give my children everything that was coming to them, and I wouldn't stint them." So, as far as she could, she had given them what the other children in school had, and truly three dollars goes but a little way in a town where the rent is four dollars a room and food-stuffs are said to be the highest in the country. The other, wiser perhaps, had begun early to buy her home. Though she has been married only five years, to a man whose income is about the same as the brother-in-law, and there are two little ones to care for, they have already made the initial payment on their home. It is a neat five-room house on one of the good streets, with running water in the kitchen and a bath-room, and is worth about $3,000. Of this they paid $300 down, and their monthly instalment is twenty-five dollars. Since their family is small, by subletting two rooms for eight dollars a month, they reduce the monthly expenditure to about an ordinary rent. While it will take some years to pay off the indebtedness, by the time that the children are large enough to need the other rooms, they plan to be well on their way toward accomplishing this. With many, however, the initial purchase is only the beginning of their home making, and, as soon as the house is paid for, the family take the most genuine pleasure in its improvement. Sometimes it is the addition of a bath-room; sometimes it is the repapering which the busy mother finds time to do in the spring; sometimes the building of a wash-house in the yard. But wherever such improvements are made it means always the development of the sense of family life and its common interests. In home buying there lurks, of course, an undeniable danger to the workman: the danger of putting all his savings into a house, when death, discharge, or a season of hard times may mean the necessity of a forced sale with its inevitable loss. That the owning of a home tends to lessen the mobility of labor is a factor to be considered in upholding it as a desirable form of thrift. In Homestead, however, this danger has been minimized by what has otherwise been a disadvantage to the town, the lack of a sufficient number of houses.[12] Buildings have not been erected fast enough to keep pace with the town's growth, and consequently rents have risen and desirable houses are hard to secure. This situation, while it stimulates people to buy their own homes, also makes it possible to sell at almost any time. [12] During the depression of 1907-8 there was an abundance of houses, as families were doubling up to save rent, but this was only a temporary situation. There are many, however, to whom these real homes are not possible. There rises to my mind, in contrast, a two-room tenement down in the grimy corner where the mill joins the town. Here a woman was trying to support four little children by sewing and washing. Her husband had died after eight years of semi-invalidism resulting from an accident in the mill. With his small wages they had not been able to save, and as the injury had occurred so long ago, she was not eligible for a benefit from the Carnegie Relief Fund. The kitchen was small and hot and the younger children noisy, and the not unnatural consequence was that the oldest girl drifted to the streets, mixed with a gay crowd, and eventually became a charge of the Juvenile Court. The girl was not bad at heart, and had there been a cheerful home where her friends could come, the end might have been different. [Illustration: BACK YARD POSSIBILITIES IN HOMESTEAD--I.] This instance illustrates the fact, more or less true of the whole town, that local conditions are such as to lay too large a responsibility for providing enjoyment on the skill of the wife and mother. Where she succeeds, the home becomes the center of the family's happiness, yet even so, we should look to the town itself for those wider opportunities for mental and physical relaxation which help maintain a normal life. But to the stranger approaching Homestead, the town speaks more eloquently of toil than of pleasure. The river, elsewhere so often a source of endless enjoyment, is muddy and swift. Moreover, one bank is preempted by the railroad, the other by the long and unsightly stretches of mill yard. In the second ward, near the river, which is almost solidly built up, the only place for the children to play is the street or the alley. That the boys do not find these a wholly satisfactory playground is shown by the following clipping from the local newspaper: BOYS CLAIM THEIR RIGHTS ARE BEING INTERFERED WITH. The boys of Homestead want to know why they cannot play basketball on the street, and they want to know what they can do. Burgess please answer in Monday's _Messenger_. On the top of the hill there are open places where the bigger boys find room for recreation, but it is a long climb, too long for the small children in the section where a place for play is most needed. The two recreation parks within a five-cent fare of the town, owned by the street railway, are the scenes of many school and church picnics and lodge gatherings. Here the young people find the skating rinks and dancing pavilions and the shrill music of the merry-go-rounds, while tired mothers seek quiet grass plots where they may sit and watch the children play, and where they may have the rare chance to gossip with their neighbors. In Homestead itself the two popular forms of amusement are the skating rink and the nickelodeon. The former fills the papers with advertisements for moonlight skating parties, a "marriage on rollers," and other devices for attracting patronage. The gaiety and swing of this pastime, which appeal to the young and vigorous, have made it in general very popular. It offers, however, those dangers common to the indiscriminate meeting of young people, which make some mothers hesitate to let their girls go unless with "our own crowd." [Illustration: BACK YARD POSSIBILITIES IN HOMESTEAD--II.] The nickelodeon, whose small cost brings it within the financial reach of most families, is perhaps the most popular entertainment. You are admitted to a room the size of a small store, with rows of chairs, a small stage, and an atmosphere that is soon unbearably close. Here you witness for five cents a show lasting about fifteen minutes. On the Saturday afternoon when I attended, there was a series of moving pictures illustrating a story on the same theme as Camille, and two sentimental songs illustrated by colored slides. While none of them was of a high grade of amusement they evidently really entertained the audience, at least half of whom were workingmen. To them the nickelodeon seems to make a special appeal since it offers the variety they crave after long days in the mill. This limited range of amusement offered is almost the only entertainment which is available for older people, or which can be enjoyed in common by them and by the young and active members of the community. While this lack is met, in a degree, by the entertainments which lodges and churches give, the latter are rather sedate. The festivities which appeal to young people are all money-making enterprises, with the abuses likely to result under such conditions. Many of the clergymen expressed their belief that there was need of a better kind of amusement, a need which might be met by such institutions as the public recreation centers of Chicago. Among the causes contributing to this lack of amusement is the possibility for those with more money and leisure of securing the better class of entertainment in Pittsburgh. Still as it is a forty-five minutes' ride to the city, mothers tied down by the care of children, and men wearied by the day's work seldom avail themselves of what Pittsburgh offers. Another cause is found in the fact that the owners of the mill are non-residents, and give neither money nor influence to help the everyday normal development of the town. There is a marked contrast in this between Homestead's situation and that of independent towns of similar size. In the latter, where there is a larger proportion of the well-to-do who are dependent for entertainment on what the town offers, it is possible to secure fairly good theatrical performances, as well as concerts and lectures. [Illustration: EIGHTH AVENUE AT NIGHT, HOMESTEAD.] Two additions to the opportunities for relaxation have, however, been made by prominent officials of the steel corporation. At the Carnegie Library there is a club providing classes for musical training which give occasional concerts, as well as a gymnasium with a swimming pool, bowling alleys, etc. This club, which is open to all on payment of two dollars a year, is popular with the young men, especially those on the clerical force. A series of entertainments, however, given during the winter of 1907-8 under the management of a lecture bureau was not successful. [Illustration: A NICKELODEON AUDIENCE IN HOMESTEAD.] The second, the gift from Mr. Frick of a small formal park transformed from an ugly hole at the end of one of the ravines, is the source of much pride to the town. A need which it does not supply, however, was shown by a visit there one hot afternoon. Three or four men were sitting in the sun on the benches set along the cement paths. The grass had recently been cut and in a pile which lay on the edge of the street, half a dozen little chaps were turning somersaults and revelling in the coolness. For them, the park with its set flower beds and well-kept lawn offered few inducements. They would prefer a real playground. The chief obstacle to the development of amusements is, doubtless, the hours and nature of mill work. Every other week the men work on night turn. Then they get home early in the morning and are ready, right after breakfast, for the much needed sleep; at four o'clock in the afternoon they must be called, and after an early supper they are off to the mill for the long night. That week there is no chance for outside festivities, nor chance even for the family to have quiet evenings together. Sometimes when sons who are also in the mill are on the opposite shift, the family is not able to meet even for meals. This irregularity not only tends to break into the family life, but also by making regular engagements impossible, lessens the interest in outside things. Even when the men are on day turn and are through work at half-past five, the ten hours of heavy labor in the mill leave them little ambition to seek out amusements. The exhausting nature of the work, coupled with the lack of sleep due to this constant change of habits, makes them weary enough, as they show by the slow steps and bent shoulders of the homeward procession. Change of thought and genuine relaxation are nevertheless a necessity, if the men are to maintain even mere physical efficiency. The spirit of the mill is the spirit of work. We have found that the town itself provides for the men little opportunity for genuine relaxation after the strain of the day's work; and when we turn to the town again, seeking whether it offers any stimulus to mental activity, we find in it the same failure to help in the development of a normal life. There is the Carnegie Library to be sure, which has classes in metallurgy, and provides expensive periodicals dealing with the steel trade as well as general reading matter. But as many a man said to me, "Oh what's the use of a library when a man works twelve hours a day?" Although efforts towards a reorganization of the union are practically at an end, because of the opposition of the mill officials, there is earnest thinking going on among some of the men about the great corporation which controls wages and hours, and so much of the rest of life as is dependent upon them. One man, who during the recent hard times was not earning enough to pay his rent, said, "I don't blame the superintendent here for our being out of work, but the men in New York could help it, only they don't know or don't care what a cut in wages means to us." That the changes in wage scale or the decisions to work but half time last winter, which came to them without explanation, were related to an industrial depression which affected a whole continent, was but dimly understood. They knew of dividends, and they knew of wage-cuts. With the feeling that they are impotent to change conditions, some of the more thoughtful men are turning to socialism for the larger solution it seems to offer. I was surprised to hear socialism advocated by the wife of a mill clerk making two dollars a day. She and her husband were thrifty people who had just succeeded in buying a piece of property,--not at all the typical socialists of a conservative man's fears. But in their twenty years of married life, the clerk's wages had been cut fifteen per cent. With a growing family, needs had increased, and only stringent economies, the cutting out even of five cents for the nickelodeon, had made their home what it was. And now with mills idle and their little savings rapidly going, a sense of social injustice was making itself felt. [Illustration: GOING HOME FROM WORK. This picture grimly sums up Homestead--the mill at the left, the Carnegie library on the hill in the center, and the mean houses of the second ward to the right.] Recently considerable agitation in regard to the subject was aroused by the preaching of a minister, who is a Christian-socialist. While many of the men were keenly interested in his theories, there was so much opposition among the conservative members of the congregation, that finally he was obliged to leave. I was told that in one of the first committee meetings to discuss the situation, his position was approved by the workingmen members, while opposition was expressed by two men who served corporations in a professional capacity. Again, a Scotchman, feeling the capitalist's lack of sympathy for the working man's problems, expressed surprise that a number of wealthy Scotchmen had joined in the celebration of Burns's birthday. "How can they," he said, "when they think of his social theories? I should think they would be ashamed to." To him, Burns was the man who wrote A Man's a Man for A' That. But men such as these are the exceptions. One of the most intelligent men I know, an ardent socialist, told me of his exasperation because his fellows were, he held, so unintelligent and were so unwilling to talk about social questions. This he thought was due to the long hours and hard work, since it took the other twelve hours to rest from the day's labor. Most of them, truly, are both too tired to think and too conscious of the dominance of the corporation to believe it worth while to seek a solution of these problems. Neither is there much within the mill to develop intellectual keenness. The men, it is true, are encouraged to invent improvements, but though these undoubtedly influence their promotion it is currently reported that the men receive no direct reward. The general feeling, moreover, that promotion is due to favoritism, lessens the stimulus to study and work up. With the attitude of the mill officials toward trade unionism, men are more or less afraid to discuss industrial questions with one another. An old resident gave me this as a current maxim, "If you want to talk in Homestead you must talk to yourself." In one respect, however, the men do unite to meet conditions arising under the industry. The work in the mills brings them constantly face to face with the danger of accident. Almost daily, occur minor accidents: a foot bruised by a heavy weight, a hand lacerated by a machine; accidents not serious enough to prevent work for any length of time, or perhaps to justify damages. But where the margin is small, two weeks or even one of enforced idleness means a serious problem in family finances. While the men injured are eligible to the Carnegie Relief Fund, this fund gives assistance only when a man has been disabled for a year or more, and consequently is of no help in minor accidents. In order to meet these emergencies, then, the men have utilized the fraternal orders which form one of the chief centers of interest in Homestead life. There are more than forty lodges, and while it was impossible to learn the exact membership, twenty-three lodges report a total membership of 3,663, of whom 3,400 are men. The strongest of these is the Odd Fellows, with a membership of over 1,000, most of whom are steel workers. In all but two out of twenty-seven, concerning which data were secured, there are benefit features; a sick benefit usually of five dollars a week for three months with a smaller sum thereafter; and a small death benefit of only $150 or so. The fraternal insurance orders, which vary the assessments with the amount of the benefit, give as high as $5,000. Sometimes both regular and lodge insurance policies are carried. In sixty-three families investigated, only nine of the heads of families were uninsured, while eighteen carried both kinds. What this insurance means, however, is but feebly shown by the amounts involved. One woman, speaking of her early struggles, told how in the first year of her married life, her husband was seriously burned in the mill and for three months was unable to do a stroke of work. Fortunately, from the three benefit orders to which he belonged came $12.50 a week, which supported the family. "My baby came then," she added feelingly, "and if it had not been for that money, I could have bought no clothes for her." In addition to this benefit feature, the lodge offers an opportunity for the development of sympathy and the consciousness of social solidarity. A woman, who was a rather recent comer to Homestead, had been a member of one of these lodges in another town. Her little baby became ill and died, and where otherwise she would have been alone in her grief, her fellow members came at once to watch with her during his sickness, and to console her after his death. "Why, they were like my own sisters," she said, and it was this which counted rather than the twenty-five dollars which helped meet the funeral expenses. The lodge also affords an opportunity to show that interest in outside matters, which otherwise finds scanty means of expression. I saw one day a half bushel of fine potatoes ready for baking, which a woman told me were her contribution to a supper being given for an emergency hospital in Homestead. "We don't need that hospital," she said, "because my man isn't in a dangerous place in the mill, but I'm glad to help even if most of them are 'Hunkies.'" During the winter of 1907-8, almost every lodge in town gave some sort of entertainment for the benefit of this hospital. Aroused by the suffering of men seriously injured in the mill, who have to be taken on the train to Pittsburgh, the whole town united in a determination to meet this need of their community. While the individual contributions of the workingmen would have been discouragingly small, their real interest could express itself through the existing lodge organizations. In fact, aside from the church, the lodge seems to offer the one possibility of co-operative effort. Many men also find here their one chance of meeting other men socially. All the lodges, even the purely insurance ones, have social features, and often at special meetings the whole family go together. While these features of fraternal orders are of course common in all communities, in Homestead, with its danger of accident and its limitation as to other amusements, they play an especially important role. [Illustration: ITEMS FROM THE HOMESTEAD "MESSENGER." Illustrating how accidents become everyday happenings in a steel town. Period: two weeks when the mills were running slack.] Yet life needs some outlook for the future other than preparation to meet its disasters. With the increase in the size of the corporation, the days are passing when a rise to a position of eminence is possible for a poor boy, so that personal ambition has become a negative factor. But to the parents who seek for their children a better position, more education and more of the refinements of life, the future is full of interest. One woman complained that her neighbor was "all right, only she talks too much about her children," but when one realized how much the mother's interest and devotion had done to make her sons successful, it was easy to forgive her. Another woman, of natural sweetness and grace of manner, told of her efforts to teach her little girls those formal niceties in which she had not been trained. "I bought a book on manners," she said, "so as to teach the children, and I make myself do the things so they will. It's awfully hard to say 'excuse me' when I leave the table, but if I don't they'll never learn," and the greeting given a stranger by the little daughter showed how well this mother was succeeding. The center of interest, especially to the fathers, is in the future of their sons. Often the sons go ahead of their fathers in the race, and one elderly man told me with pride that he owed his easy job to his son who had become an assistant superintendent. Sometimes parents, most frequently the mothers, are unwilling that their boys should enter the mill, for the fear of accident makes the long nights a time of terror. Many a woman has said, "When I was first married, I couldn't sleep when the 'mister' was on night turn, but, of course, I'm used to it now." Still when their sons grow up, they begin again to dread the danger. The great mill, however, has a fascination of its own, so that most of the boys "follow the stacks." They then live at home, contributing their share to the family income, and we find that economic bond which Mrs. Bosenquet has pointed out as so dominant a factor in strengthening family life in England. This mutual affection is undoubtedly the most potential factor in keeping pure the moral life of the town. Morally the town is an average one. Along one of the railroads is a section comparable in a small way to some of the dark parts of a great city, and there gambling, immorality and drunkenness have their meeting place, but in the districts where most of the workmen have their homes, the former two evils are practically unknown. A doctor in a position to know the situation well, believes that in the main this town is clean morally, and his statement is confirmed by clergymen and other physicians. Intemperance, on the other hand, is a serious factor. In Munhall there are no saloons, but in Homestead, there are fifty, eight in a single block on Eighth avenue next to the mill entrance. As one resident summed up the situation, "I think we have at least sixty-five saloons, ten wholesale liquor stores, a number of beer agents, innumerable speak-easies and a dozen or more drug stores,"--and this in a town of 25,000. In addition to their usual attractions of light and jollity, the saloons appeal to the thirst engendered by hours of work in the heat. Though this heat-thirst is frequently offered as an excuse for drinking, men who do not drink are emphatic in their belief that alcohol lessens their ability to withstand the extreme temperature. While intoxication is not very frequent, the saloons do a thriving business and their patrons were among the first to feel the hardships of the industrial depression. A clergyman assured me that preaching against intemperance did no good and that substitutes must be offered, but so far none has been developed. The library, which is on the hill out of the men's way, cannot be reckoned as a counter attraction, for they are too tired to be often tempted by it. The church, too, finds it hard to hold them. The fact that they usually have to work either Saturday night or Sunday night, and some men during Sunday as well, affects the attitude of the whole town towards Sunday keeping. A clergyman who complained because a certain store was open on Sunday, was told that as the mill ran that day, nothing could be done about closing the store. "We can't take the little fish and let the big one go." The men feel the inconsistency in being urged to attend church when they have to work hard part of the day. Then too, they are often very tired. One big, jovial colored man told me how he came home Sunday morning from the mill expecting to go to church, but fell fast asleep while waiting for the hour of service. The churches, however, play an important part in the life of those, especially the women and young people, who are actually connected with them. The thirty churches represent all denominations, some of them preserving their original race distinctions. Two Welsh churches still have their service in the Keltic language. There are a number of missions, among them one on the main street, whose transparency bearing the legend, "The Wages of Sin Is Death," suggests a Bowery type. The Salvation Army, while it has a short muster roll, has a strong grip on the community which seems impressed by its earnestness, simplicity and poverty. For whatever its intellectual limitations there is throughout the town a profound respect for genuine spiritual devotion. During the winter most of the churches, in addition to their regular weekly services, held special revival meetings. These, while they have little of the tense excitement sometimes associated with such meetings, seem to be a strong force in developing the real spiritual power of the churches. The church, moreover, meets certain of the social needs of the town through its wholesome festivities. All winter the stores were full of signs of "chicken and waffle suppers," and the papers told of socials of all the varieties that a small church evolves. These were usually to raise funds, sometimes for church expenses, sometimes for charity, and in one instance, I remember, to help send out a foreign missionary. But, whatever the object, they serve to increase the happiness of life under wholesome conditions. [Illustration: KENNYWOOD PARK AT NIGHT.] [Illustration: A.--Profile of line A. B. in map opposite, showing slope on which Homestead is built.--B.] So the church plays its part, both spiritually and socially, in helping its members to a fuller individual life. It does not, however, furnish an opportunity for that discussion of matters of everyday concern to the men, which might serve to arouse their interest in the whole life of the church and to quicken their sense of civic responsibility. Moreover, in a town where industrial questions are of paramount importance, the church is only beginning to take an interest in them. In the larger question of leadership in civic life, the churches seem also to have missed a great opportunity. Though they took some action in the local option campaign, this was an isolated instance, and in general they do not appear to have accepted their full responsibility in arousing men to a realization of the duties of citizenship. [Illustration: HOMESTEAD VS. MUNHALL. The town-site back of the mills is divided into two boroughs. Munhall embraces most of the property of the U. S. Steel Corporation: the tax rate is 8-1/2 mills and the corporation pays $40,000 in taxes. In Homestead, where most of the workmen have their homes, the tax rate is 15 mills, and the corporation pays $7,000.] That a sense of civic responsibility is needed, is emphasized by those who know the life of the town, and who find there a serious political situation. In Homestead, which is by far the largest and most important of the three boroughs, the political conditions are worst. The borough government consists of a burgess elected every three years, and a council, which is also elective. Of the two important committees, the Board of Health is appointed by the burgess with the consent of the council, and the School Board is chosen directly by the people. In spite of the possibility of influencing some of the local conditions through these elected representatives, there is general indifference in regard to local politics. In one matter where their direct family interests are concerned, the people have demanded and received an efficient administration. They are proud of their schools and the personnel of the School Board, and certainly this is the best service given to the people of the town. But while the men all agree that the situation is dominated by the wholesale liquor interests, schemes for political reform arouse little enthusiasm. In spite of years of casual agitation against inadequately guarded railroad crossings, it was not till the summer of 1908 that any effective protest was made. People still pay a neighbor fifty cents a month for the privilege of getting good water from his well, instead of insisting that it be provided by the borough. A river, polluted by the sewage of many towns above it, and by chemicals from the mills strong enough to kill all the fish, furnishes the drinking water for the town. To a certain extent at least, mental sluggishness due, as we have seen, to the conditions under which men work, is at the root of their indifference. It is, of course, true that the mill is not the source of all the undesirable conditions in Homestead. Many of the disadvantages of the town are similar to those of other suburban and industrial centers that are less definitely influenced by a great industry. But for a large part of the evil the mill must be considered responsible. There was its influence, for example, in making Munhall into a separate borough, thus securing a lower tax for its plant and real estate and by that much adding to the burdens of the majority of its working people. For in Homestead, the mill owns little property. In Munhall, the tax rate is eight and one-half mills and the mill pays $40,000 a year in taxes, while in Homestead, where the larger part of the workers live, the tax rate is fifteen mills and the mill pays a tax of but $7,000. The mill has, moreover, done nothing to give the town an effective leadership, the most striking need of the situation. On the one hand by the destruction of the union it has removed the one force by which workingmen could have been trained for leadership; on the other hand, since its owners are scattered throughout the country, it has not supplied such a group of educated men with free time and public interest as have been the strong influences in developing normal communities. When I asked, in discussing the sanitary condition of the Slavic courts, if anything could be done to improve the situation I was assured that only a man of strong local influence could accomplish such a reform; but no one could suggest the man. In contrast then to the wonderful development of the industry itself, with its splendid organization, its capable management, its efficient methods, we find a town which lacks sound political organization, which lacks true leadership, which lacks the physical and moral efficiency which can come only through leisure to think and to enjoy. The only genuine interest we find centers about the individual home life, and, in spite of outward physical disadvantages, the hindrance of inadequate income, the lack of proper training in household economics, and the limited outlook which the town affords, the men and the women are creating real homes. That many fail against these odds is not surprising. "Life, work, and happiness, these three are bound together." The mill offers the second, indifferent whether it is under conditions that make the other two possible. THE CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES OF DEMOCRACY IN AN INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT[13] PAUL U. KELLOGG American spread-eagleism has matured notably in the past ten years, but there is still youth and ginger enough in it to make my first postulate simply this,--that the civic responsibilities of democracy in an industrial district are to come abreast of and improve upon any community standards reached under any other system of government; and, second, to do this in a democratic way as distinct from a despotic or paternalistic way. [13] An address given before the Joint Convention of the American Civic Association and the National Municipal League, Pittsburgh, Nov. 16, outlining some of the findings of the Pittsburgh Survey and drawing upon data secured in various fields of investigation. It was my good fortune to spend a week the past summer in Essen and other industrial towns of the Rhenish-Westphalia district of Germany, following something over a year spent in the Pittsburgh district. I fancy that in our attitude toward the old countries, we are inclined to regard their cities as long established and to find justification for any lapses of our own in the newness of America. But Essen, for instance, as an industrial center is new. The chronology of the development of the steel industry there is not altogether different from that of the same industry in Pittsburgh; and one of the great problems of Fried. Krupp was to mobilize and hold within reach of his furnaces and rolls a large and efficient working population. Entering the industrial field generations later than England, German manufacturers have not had a trained working force ready to hand. Krupp had to draw his men from the country districts,--healthy, unskilled peasants, unused to the quick handling of their muscles, unused to working indoors, unused to machinery, unused to living in large communities. The wages offered, as against the wages of agricultural districts, drew them there; he must keep them there out of reach of his competitors, and he must see that they worked at the top notch of their efficiency. It was a loss to Herr Krupp when a man with five years' training in his works left Essen, or was sick, or was maimed. As a town, Essen was unprepared to absorb this great new industrial population. There were not houses enough; the newcomers were sheltered abominably and charged exorbitant rents by the local landlords. There weren't food supplies enough within reach of the growing city, and the workers had to buy poor bread and bad meat, and to pay heavily for them. The town had not enough sanitary appliances to dispose of the waste which a congregation of individuals sloughs off and which, if not properly disposed of, breeds disease. The rents and high provisions pared away most of the incentive in the wages which must attract this working force to Essen; poor houses and poor food made directly for stupid, half-roused workers and for poor work. Primarily as a business proposition, then, Herr Krupp started that group of social institutions which have since been expanded from one motive or another, until they supply an infinite variety of wants to the Essen workers. The firm bought up successive plots of land, laid them out, sewered them, parked them, and to-day, at the end of fifty years, over thirty thousand persons are living in houses belonging to the Essen works (ten thousand of the sixty thousand Krupp employes are thus supplied). There has been a growth in quality as well as in numbers of houses. The buildings of the first workmen's colony, West End, are rough, crude boxes; the new colonies of Alfredshof and Friedrichshof are beautiful, with their red roofs, graceful lines, lawns, housekeeping conveniences and modest rents. Not less than seventy-seven Krupp supply stores, operated on a profit-sharing basis, sell meat, bread, manufactured goods and household furniture. One of the greatest bakeries in Germany is operated on a cost basis, and there are slaughter houses, flour mills, ice making establishments, tailor shops, etc. Hospitals, convalescent homes, pensions, and invalidity and accident funds have been instituted, and have since been fortified and expanded under the imperial scheme of industrial insurance, which governs throughout Germany. This welfare work of the Krupps has not succeeded in keeping either trade unionism or socialism out of the ranks of the working force; it has tended to put the workers in a position of semi-feudal dependence for comforts and to sap their initiative; and in those bearings it is not in accord with American ideas; but it has served to gather at Essen, to keep there, and to keep there at a high standard of working efficiency, one of the most remarkable labor forces in Germany. It is solely the latter aspect of the case that concerns us here. I think it is agreed that when it comes to armor plate, I-beams, tubes, or rails, the Pittsburgh steel plants can beat the world. But a week's stay among the Krupp colonies at Essen brings with it the conviction that we in America have considerable distance to go if we are to match the Germans in the science of improved community conditions. The question is how some of these higher standards can be worked out in an American industrial district where one corporation does not dominate; where you are dealing with a much greater aggregation of people spread over a much greater territory, and where you must work out your solution in democratic ways through democratic agencies. It must be borne in mind that much that I say of Pittsburgh is true of practically all our industrial centers; our severest criticism of any one comes not from a comparison with its fellows, but from a comparison of the haphazard development of its social institutions with the splendid organic development of its industrial enterprises. And more, in the methods and scope of progressive business organizations we have some of the most suggestive clues as to ways for municipal progress. My first point has to do with administrative areas. The most effective city administration cannot act to advantage unless the units through which it operates are workable and bear some relation to the function they are designed to perform. The radius of the old time city, as one English writer has pointed out, was the distance you could walk from your work in the center to a home convenient in the outskirts. To-day, for most purposes, a city is a rapid transit proposition. For most purposes, a municipal area can be governed most effectively if it includes all such districts as can be reached by city workers, by subway, steam, or surface lines. The movement for a greater Pittsburgh, which, within the last year, has been advanced by the merging of Allegheny and the movement for a greater Birmingham, which is now in progress in the corresponding English industrial center, are recognitions of this fact. The police, fire,--in fact, every department of municipal activity is cramped and rendered less effective by restricted bounds. But for certain functional activities much wider areas must be covered. The sanitary inspection force of Cleveland, for instance, inspects dairies and slaughter-houses throughout all that part of Ohio that supplies the Cleveland market; in contrast with the Pittsburgh inspection service which is at present able to inspect supplies only as they come into the city and sources in the immediate neighborhood. Again, the sewer and water problem of Pittsburgh is a water-shed problem. One hundred and twenty-nine towns and boroughs are dumping their sewage into the rivers which run past Pittsburgh and from which Pittsburgh must draw its water. No one of these governmental units can work out its sanitary problem alone. Close co-ordination of sanitary work is needed throughout the whole river district. There is necessity, then, for increasing our municipal administrative areas and for relating them to the functions which must be performed through them; and this very fact raises the distinctive civic problem of creating this enlarged municipal machinery, without sacrificing that local loyalty and interest which in neighborhoods and smaller districts make for good government. In Pittsburgh we have a central city,--a market and office center with groups of outlying mill towns and half-agricultural districts between. The opponents of city congestion would break up all our big urban centers into such an open work structure; and if the citizenship of the Pittsburgh steel district can work out effective methods of government and high standards of community well-being for this ganglion of working communities, it will have made an original contribution to municipal science. * * * * * But let us look more carefully at this question of area as applied to the functioning of particular social institutions. We have the theory in America, for instance, that common school education should be supplied by the public, and to this end, besides state subsidies and other revenues, a general millage is laid on all taxable property in Pittsburgh for the salaries of teachers and for other general expenses. But the actual operation of the schools continues on an old vestry system of ward control,--a system given up by Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities of Pittsburgh's class, because the ward has proved an ineffective administrative unit. Let us see how it works in Pittsburgh. Each ward lays and collects a tax on property within its limits for the erection and maintenance of school buildings. Thus, ward two in the business district, with a total of only 363 pupils, can draw on property with an assessed valuation of $37,491,708; while ward fourteen, with 2,423 children, can draw on property worth $34,264,077 (less taxable property and seven times as many children); while ward thirty-one has 1,173 children and only $3,074,085 in assessed property (or three times as many children as ward two and not one-tenth the taxable property). No wonder, then, that the valuation of school buildings and equipment ranges from approximately $41 per school child in the thirty-first ward to $1,033 per school child in the second; and the income for maintenance of buildings, etc., from $6 per school child in the thirty-fifth ward to $84 per school child in the first. No wonder, then, that in these ward-school buildings and their equipment there is the utmost divergence. Our investigators found buildings every room of which was overcrowded, with children sitting on benches, with chairs in the aisles; wards in which basement rooms were thrown into commission without adequate heat, light, desks or ventilation; schools unconnected with the sewer; schools without fireproofing, without fire escapes, without fire drills;--all these in contrast to progressive schools in other wards with first-rate equipment, small classes, good plumbing and adequate light. Wards which have the most children, whose children have the least cultural environment and stimulus at home, have, many of them, the least resources to tax for school purposes. By an out-worn system of ward control and taxation, then, the teaching force of Pittsburgh is supplied in districts where the work is hardest with schoolhouses and other tools which are least effective. Some districts have schools which in equipment and spirit rank with any in the country; while in some the school plants ought to be scrapped offhand. Turn to another social institution,--the hospitals. We may conceive that the first service of hospitals is to be accessible to the sick and injured, and that an adequate hospital system should be at all times quickly available to the people who may have use for it. We may compare it with the efficiency of the telephone company which, through sub-exchanges, centrals and private connections, effectively reaches every district. How stands the case with the hospitals of Pittsburgh? The city is served by a group of private institutions, many of them adequately equipped and progressively managed; but there is no system of co-ordination between them, either in the operation of their free wards or in the maintenance of an effective ambulance service. New hospitals are erected under the eaves of old hospitals. Sick and injured people are carried long, unnecessary distances at great risk. Seven new hospitals are going up in Pittsburgh and yet, when they are all completed and other changes which have been decided upon are carried out, there will be a great belt of river wards, thickly populated, without a convenient hospital plant,--wards in which we shall see disease is most rife. This failure of a co-ordination of hospital work in Pittsburgh is appreciated by a number of the most progressive superintendents, and no one would welcome more than they a movement to interlock the hospital service of the city in some effective way. * * * * * Another point of contrast between Pittsburgh, the industrial center, and Pittsburgh, the community, lies in the progressiveness and invention which have gone into the details of one and the other; for instance, aldermen's courts which dispense justice to the working population of Pittsburgh and deal with the minor civil business of a city of half a million. They serve very well in an agricultural district. They are of the vintage of the village blacksmith. But with the exception of a few well conducted courts, the forty or more ward courts may be said to clutter up and befog the course of minor justice, and to be an exasperation in the conduct of civil business. They add to rather than subtract from the business of the higher courts, and there is no effective supervision of their operation. They compare with the new municipal courts of Chicago about as the open forges of King John's time compare with a Bessemer converter. Again,--Pittsburgh is the second city in Pennsylvania in point of population; in some respects it is the center of the most marvelous industrial district in the world. Thousands of men and women are engaged in hundreds of processes. But the state factory inspection department has not so much as an office in this city. There are inspectors, but they are not easily get-at-able for the workingman who may be laboring under unsanitary conditions or with unprotected machinery, or for the citizen who may know of violations of the factory acts which he conceives it his duty to report. My conception of an adequate labor department office in Pittsburgh is more than that of an industrial detective bureau. My conception is rather that of a headquarters, with an adequate force of technical experts and physicians who would be constantly studying the work processes of the district with the idea of eliminating wherever possible, those conditions which make for disease; with laboratory facilities for experiment and demonstration of protective devices calculated to reduce accidents; drawing, to this end, upon the industrial experience of the whole world. The factory inspector's office in Birmingham, for instance, is in close co-operation with courts, with employers and with workmen. Within three years, its suggestions have reduced the number of deaths due to one variety of crane from twenty-one to three. The old time city built a wall about it. That kept out invaders. The invaders of a modern city are infectious diseases. In the development of sanitary service and bureaus of health of wide powers and unquestioned integrity, the modern city is erecting its most effective wall. In Pittsburgh, the health authority is still a subordinate bureau without control over appointments under the civil service, and without that final authority which should go with its supreme responsibility toward the health of 500,000 people. Until the present incumbent was appointed, there had seldom or never been a physician at the head of this bureau. For five years there had not been so much as an annual report. Two-thirds of the appropriations to the Pittsburgh Health Bureau are to-day engrossed in a garbage removal contract; only one-third is free for general health purposes. With such an inadequate barricade, we can imagine that disease has sacked Pittsburgh throughout the years; and comparison of death rates with four cities of corresponding size,--Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis,--for five years, shows this to have been the case. In her average death rate per 100,000 for typhoid fever, for diarrhoea and for enteritis, Pittsburgh was first and highest. Pittsburgh was only fourth or next to the lowest in the list in pulmonary tuberculosis; but in pneumonia, in bronchitis and in other diseases of the respiratory system; and in violence other than suicide, Pittsburgh was highest. To retrieve the lost ground of years of neglect of health conditions has been a task upon which the present superintendent of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health has entered, but it is a task in which the city must invest increasing resources. For such work it needs more than a health bureau. It needs a health department. My point, then, is that democracy must overhaul the social machinery through which it operates if it would bring its community conditions up to standards comparable to those maintained by its banks, its insurance companies and its industrial corporations. * * * * * There are at least two tests to which the community can put such social machinery. The first is that of operating efficiency. In hospitals, in schools, in municipal departments, units of work and output can be worked out as definitely as are the tons of the steel workers, the voltage of the electricians, the dollars and cents of the banks. By vigorous systems of audit and intelligent systems of budget-making, understandable to the ordinary citizen, the community can see to it that the output of these social institutions is comparable with the investment it makes in them; that the taxpayer gets his money's worth. The Bureau of Municipal Research in New York embodies this idea in its program. There is another, equally intensive test to which social institutions and sanitary conditions can be put. It is conceivable that the tax payer may get his money's worth from the municipal government, while the families of the wage earning population and householders may be suffering from another and irreparable form of taxation, which only increased municipal expenditure along certain lines could relieve. So it is that while I subscribe to the movement for stiffer standards of municipal accounting as a basis for effective government, for knowing the waste of a city's money, I subscribe further to the movement for such methods of social bookkeeping as will show us the larger waste of human life and private means; and will stand out not only for honesty and efficiency, but for the common well-being. Let me illustrate by the case of typhoid fever which has been epidemic in Pittsburgh for twenty-five years. To eliminate typhoid Pittsburgh has erected a 5-1/2 million dollar filtration plant,[14] for the years of delay in the erection of which the city has suffered a terrible toll of deaths and misery. There were 5,421 cases of typhoid fever in Pittsburgh last year and 622 deaths. Computing death rate per 100,000 population for the larger cities having the highest rates in 1901, Pittsburgh was first with 124, New Haven second, Allegheny third; in 1902, Pittsburgh was first, Allegheny second, Washington third; in 1903, Pittsburgh first, Cleveland was second, Allegheny third; in 1904, Columbus was first, Pittsburgh second, Allegheny third; in 1905, Allegheny was first, Pittsburgh second and Columbus third; in 1906, Pittsburgh was first, and Allegheny second. But even these figures, startling as they are, fail to afford a grasp of the meaning of this typhoid scourge in the lives of the wage earners of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Survey undertook to gauge this. In co-operation with Columbian Settlement, we collected data as to 1,029 cases in six wards reported in one year; 448 cases were found and studied. Of these 26 died. 187 wage earners lost 1,901 weeks' work. Other wage earners, not patients, lost 322 weeks,--a total loss in wages of $28,899. The cost of 90 patients treated in hospitals at public or private expense was $4,165; of 338 patients cared for at home, $21,000 in doctors' bills, nurses, ice, foods, medicines; of 26 funerals, $3,186; a total cost of $57,250 in less than half the cases of six wards in one year,--wards in which both income and sickness expense were at a minimum. But there were other even more serious drains which do not admit of tabulation. A girl of twenty-two, who worked on stogies, was left in a very nervous condition, not as strong as before, and consequently she could not attain her former speed. A blacksmith will probably never work at his trade with his former strength. A sixteen-year-old girl who developed tuberculosis was left in a weakened physical condition. A tailor who cannot work as long hours as before, was reduced $1 a week in wages. A boy of eight was very nervous; he would not sit still in school and was rapidly becoming a truant. A mother developed a case of pneumonia from over-exposure in caring for children who had the fever, and she has not been well since. So the story goes,--very real to the lives of the many who are so intimately concerned. The money losses can be replaced. My figures include no estimate of the value of human lives lost. And it is impossible to compute in terms of dollars and cents, what it means to a family to have the father's health so broken that he cannot work at his old job, but has to accept easier work at less pay. It is impossible to put in tabulated form the total value to a family of a mother's health, and strike a proper balance when typhoid has left her a physical or nervous wreck. It is impossible to estimate what is the cost to a boy or girl who is obliged to leave school in order to help support the family, because typhoid has incapacitated the natural bread-winners. Such facts as these show the drain that typhoid has been on the vital forces of the community. It is only one of such drains. [14] In October there were but ninety-six cases of typhoid in Greater Pittsburgh, as against 503 for October, 1907. Such facts as these bring home concretely to the average workingman his stake in good government. * * * * * It is not possible here to enter into a discussion, even briefly, of the democratic methods by which a community can improve the quality and lessen the cost of its food supplies as an integral part of the program for building up a vigorous working population. There is a direct bearing between these costs of living and the holding power of the wages paid in the Pittsburgh District. * * * * * But there is one necessity of which there is a paramount shortage; that is shelter. I should like you to compare the efficiency to perform the function for which it is devised of a modern blast furnace and the shacks which house some of the families in the Pittsburgh District. The output of the one is pig iron; the output of the other, home life and children. According to the tenement house census carried on by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health the past summer, there are 3,364 tenement houses in the greater city. Nearly fifty per cent of these are old dwellings built and constructed to accommodate one family and as a rule without conveniences for the multiple households now crowded into them. Let me give you an example,--a house on Bedford avenue, with three families in the front and three in the rear, Negroes and whites. The owner was notified over a year ago that the building must be repaired and certain alterations made, but nothing has been done, and by the veto of the governor of Pennsylvania of a bill which passed the last Legislature, the Bureau of Health has no power to condemn such unsanitary dwellings. In this building, two-room apartments rent for twelve dollars a month. Water has to be obtained from a hydrant in the yard, shared by eleven families; the foul privy vaults are also shared by neighboring families. Under Dr. Edwards's administration 5,063 such privy vaults have been filled and abandoned in Pittsburgh and 8,281 sanitary water closets installed in their place. The work is less than half done. The census of only the first twenty wards of the older city shows a total of nearly 6,000 vaults still existing in these wards alone. Consider the contrast,--these old, ramshackle, unwholesome, disease breeding appliances of the back country here in Pittsburgh, the city of the great engineers, of mechanical invention and of progress. In a typhoid-ridden neighborhood, a vault is an open menace to health. Investigations in army camps and in given neighborhoods in Chicago have proved that insects carry disease from such places to the tables and living rooms of the people. There are three points which I should like you to consider in connection with this problem of shelter. The first is that the Bureau of Health, however efficient in its supervisory work, cannot meet it single handed. Even if through the activities of the Health Bureau, Tammany Hall, Yellow Row and other old shacks have been torn down, even if the owners of other old buildings are made to install sanitary appliances, the situation is still unmet, unless new houses,--vast quantities of new houses,--are erected to care for the increased population which has flooded into Pittsburgh in the last ten years and which, there is every indication, will multiply as greatly in the next ten. Real estate dealers and builders have not been inactive in Pittsburgh, but the situation is so serious as to demand the development of a constructive public policy that will comprehend such elements as town planning, tax reform, and investment at "five per cent and the public good." My second point is that this haphazard method of letting the housing supply take care of itself is a monetary drawback to the merchants of the city. In the first place, it radically reduces the margin which the workingman's family has to spend for commodities. Especially is this true of immigrant tenants, who are obliged to pay more than English-speaking. For instance, on Bass street, Allegheny, we found Slavs paying twenty dollars a month for four rooms, as against fifteen dollars paid by Americans. In the second place, it puts a premium on the single men, drifters, lodgers, as against the man with a family. The immigrant boarders who rent from a boarding-boss, and sleep eight or ten in a room or sleep at night in the beds left vacant by the night workers who have occupied them throughout the day,--such fellows can make money in the Pittsburgh district. But the immigrant who wants to make his stake here, bring his family over, create a household, must pay ten or fifteen dollars a month for rooms; and must pay high prices for all the other necessities of life. If I were asked by what means the merchants of Pittsburgh could increase the volume of purchases of the buying public, I should say that no one thing would affect that so impressively as the multiplication of households, through the multiplication of low cost, low rental, sanitary houses to meet the needs of stable family groups as against the transient lodger. My third point is that the housing problem is not a city problem alone. It is repeated in each of the mill towns. I could cite instances in Braddock, Duquesne, McKeesport, Sharpsburg, where old buildings are filthy and overcrowded and where new buildings are put up in violation of every canon of scientific housing,--back-to-back houses such as were condemned in England seventy-five years ago as breeding places of disease. Homestead, for instance, has no ordinance against overcrowding, no ordinance requiring adequate water supply, or forbidding privy vaults in congested neighborhoods. The foreigners live in the second ward between the river and the railroads. In twenty-two courts studied in this district, only three houses had running water inside. One hundred and ten people were found using one yard pump. Fifty-one out of 239 families lived in one room each. Twenty-six of the two-room apartments are used by eight or more people; one two-room apartment sheltered thirteen; two, twelve; two, eleven. A crude reflection of the effect of these conditions is indicated by the death rate in this second ward. Of every three children born there one dies before it reaches two years of age, as against one in every six in the rest of Homestead, where detached, and livable dwellings prevail. * * * * * This comparison of health conditions in a small town is true in a large, cruel way of Pittsburgh itself. In co-operation with the Typhoid Fever Commission we have analyzed by wards the death certificates of people dying in Pittsburgh for the past five years. We have grouped these wards into districts, the living conditions of which are more or less of a kind. Let me compare the mortality figures of wards nine and ten and twelve,--a group of river wards in the old city, near the mills, peopled for the most part with a wage-earning population of small income,--compare these wards with ward twenty-two, a new residential district in the East End. What are the chances of life of the men, women and children living in the one and in the other? The chance of a man's dying of bronchitis in the river wards is two and a half as against one in the East End; it is four of his dying from pneumonia as against one in the East End, five of his dying of typhoid as against one in the East End, six of his dying a violent death as against one in the East End. These are rough proportions merely, but they are of terrific significance. Our American boast that everybody has an equal chance falls flat before them. The dice are loaded in Pittsburgh when it comes to a man's health; his health is the workingman's best asset; and the health and vigor of its working population are in the long run the vital and irrecoverable resources of an industrial center. This brings us to a point where we can define more concretely the plain civic responsibility of democracy in an industrial district. That responsibility is to contrive and to operate the social machinery of the community, and to make living conditions in the district, such as will attract and hold a strong and vigorous labor force, for the industries on which the prosperity of the district must depend. Here lie the responsibility of the community to the individual manufacturer,--and the responsibility of the community to its own future:--that the efficiency of its workers shall not be mortgaged before they go to work in the morning. * * * * * This carries a counter responsibility. In the interests of the community as a whole, in the interests of all the industries as against the interests of any single one, the public cannot afford to have such a working force impaired or wasted by unsanitary or health-taxing conditions during the working hours. What I mean will perhaps be clearest by illustrating in the case of industrial accidents. Pittsburgh cannot afford to have over 500 workingmen killed every year in the course of employment, or the unknown number of men who are seriously injured. During the past year, the Pittsburgh Survey has made an intensive inquiry into the facts surrounding the deaths of the entire roster of men killed in industry during twelve months, and of the accident cases treated in the hospitals of the district during three months,--not with the idea of raising anew the question of responsibility for particular accidents, but to see if there are any indications as to whether these accidents could be prevented and whether the burden of them falls where in justice it should. The work has been done by a staff of five people, including a lawyer, an engineer and interpreters, and we have had the co-operation of claim agents, superintendents, foremen, trade union officials and others. We found that of the 526 men killed in the year studied in Allegheny county, the accidents fell on Americans as well as foreigners; 224 were native born. The ranks of steel workers and train men suffer most,--the pick of the workmen in the district. There were 195 steel workers killed, 125 railroad men, seventy-one mine workers, and 135 in other occupations. It was found that it was the young men of the district who went down in the course of industry. Eighty-two were under twenty years of age, 221 between twenty and thirty. Over half the men killed were earning less than fifteen dollars a week, a fact which raises the question if the law is fair in assuming, as it does in Pennsylvania, that wages cover risk. Fifty-one per cent of the men killed were married with families to support; an additional thirty per cent were single men, partly, or wholly, supporting a family. It was shown that the greatest losses were not due to the spectacular accidents, but to everyday causes. In the steel industry, for instance, forty-two deaths were due to the operation of electric cranes, thirty-one to the operation of broad and narrow gauge railroads in the mills and yards, and twenty-four to falls from a height or into pits, vats, etc. Pittsburgh has stamped out smallpox; its physicians are fighting tuberculosis; the municipality is checking typhoid. Cannot engineers, foremen, employers and workmen come together in a campaign to reduce accidents? Considerable has already been done in this direction by progressive employers. The problem is that of bringing up the whole district to progressive standards. On the other hand we have put these industrial accident cases to that same test of human measurement which we found of such significance in gauging the losses due to typhoid fever. This steady march of injury and death means an enormous economic loss. Is the burden of this loss justly distributed? What takes the place of the wages of these bread-winners? What resources of their own have these families to fall back on? What share of the loss is shouldered by the employer? What share falls in the long run upon the community itself, in the care of the sick and dependent? Is the Pennsylvania law fair that exempts the employer from paying anything to the family of a killed alien if that family lives in a foreign country? Are the risks which the law supposes that the workman assumes when he hires out for wages, fair risks under modern conditions of production? Is it in the long run, to the interest of the employer to leave to the haphazard, embittered gamble of damage suits, this question of meeting in a fair way the human loss which with even the best processes and the greatest care, is involved in the production of utilities? I am not in a position here to put forward the economic facts brought out by our inquiries; but I can say that on every hand, among employers and claim agents and workmen, there is profound dissatisfaction and an increasing open-mindedness toward some such sane and equitable system of working-men's compensation as those in operation in Germany and in England. But this question of industrial accidents is only part of another and larger question of the relation of industry to health. The workers of Pittsburgh are dealing not with simple ploughs and wash tubs and anvils, but with intricate machines or in great work rooms where hundreds work side by side; dealing with poisons, with voltage, with heat, with a hundred new and but half mastered agents of production. Are the conditions under which some of this work is carried on directly inimical to health? Could they be bettered without serious loss to the trades and with great gain to the workers? In the rapid development of factories in America, we have only begun to devise our plants with reference to the health of the worker as well as with reference to output. Let me illustrate from the women employing trades. In only two of the twenty-eight commercial laundries in Pittsburgh, is the wash room on the upper floor. In twenty-six, rising steam and excessive heat not only cause discomfort in the other departments, but tend to induce diseases of the respiratory organs. Tobacco dried in many of the stogy sweatshops, makes the air heavy with nicotine, fills the room with fine dust and increases the danger, always present in the tobacco trades, from tuberculosis. In foundries and machine shops, the custom of placing annealing ovens in the rooms where the cores are made, causes excessive heat in the work room and fill the air with a black dust. We have the statements of old employes that not more than twenty-five girls of the 300 in the coil winding room in one of the Pittsburgh electrical industries have been in the plant as long as three or four years. The speeding-up tends to make the girls nervous, weak and easily overcome by illness. Apart from dangers of accident, of speeding and of injurious processes, the health of a working force bears a direct relation to the length of the working day. The tendency with respect to both hours and Sunday work in the steel industry in Pittsburgh has been, for fifteen years, towards an increase, and there is no indication that the end has yet been reached. There is not the opportunity here to analyze the time schedule of the varied departments of the steel industry, but in a majority of them the day of twenty-four hours is split between two shifts of workers; and the men work not six days, but seven a week. And a very considerable share of them, once a fortnight in changing shifts, work a long turn of twenty-four hours. Employers may differ as to whether they can get the most work and the most effective work out of a man if he works twelve hours a day, or ten, or eight. But I hold that the community has something at stake here. How much citizenship does Pittsburgh get out of a man who works twelve hours a day seven days a week? How much of a father can a man be who may never see his babies except when they are asleep; or who never gets a chance to go off into the country for a rollick with his boys? The community has a claim on the vigor and intelligence of its people, on their activity in civic affairs, which I believe it is letting go by default. It is getting only the tired out leavings of some of its best men. My argument, then, is that if the civic responsibilities of democracy in an industrial district are to be met, the community should do what a first-rate industrial concern would do, figure out the ground it can cover effectively and gear its social machinery so to cover it. By social machinery I mean hospitals, schools, courts and departments the city structure, and all that wide range of activities that have a direct bearing on the living conditions of a people. Second, to hold these agencies as closely accountable as are enterprises in the business world; and to bring them to the ultimate touchstone of their effect on the welfare of the average citizen. Unless a wage-earning population is so insured against disease, its vigor and effectiveness so conserved, the community is not meeting its responsibilities toward the industries which must depend upon these workers for output and profit. In turn, the public should see to it that the industries do not cripple nor exploit the working force which constitutes the great asset of the community. And further, if such a program is to be carried out in an American and democratic way, the workers themselves must have greater leeway and leisure in which to bear their share of the burdens and responsibilities of American democracy. I bear a message to Pittsburgh from John Burns, president of the Local Government Board of England, one of the foremost labor leaders of Great Britain, who has been hailed this fall as one of the conserving forces of the present Liberal ministry in dealing with the vast economic problems which are facing the British Empire. He has visited America and Pittsburgh as a member of various commissions, and it was on the basis of his knowledge of our situation here that I asked him for suggestions as to ways of advance, which would lead to the improvement of civic and labor conditions in the Pittsburgh steel district. "Six days work a week instead of seven," he said. "Three shifts of eight hours instead of two shifts of twelve; no twenty-four hour shifts; better housing; counter-attractions to the saloon; more parks,--open spaces; the improvement of the river front;--the humanizing of labor instead of the brutalization of toil. There you are. Those are Pittsburgh's marching orders." Pittsburgh's three rivers and the great mineral resource's they tap brought the people here. Environment is inevitable as a selective agency; but the people once here, can by their willing, mould and perpetuate or destroy the holding power of the district. Other cities have large admixtures of clerks and trading classes. I doubt if there is such another working force in the country as that which peoples these valleys. Therein lies a civic resource worth conserving to the utmost of its potential goods. Will Pittsburgh as a community, as a democratic community, meet that responsibility? Will the industrial communities of the nation, as democratic communities, meet their responsibility? THE TREND OF THINGS The working woman is coming up as a result of her invasion of commercial pursuits. While the department store pays poorer wages than the factory or domestic service, it has a standing, its girls a position due to their dress and their surroundings, which the others do not give. Grant it every evil ever charged against it, say Mr. Hard and Mrs. Dorr in the third article of their series on The Woman's Invasion, in the January _Everybody's_, make the case out as bad as long hours, poor pay, Christmas rush time, the need for expensive clothes, can total. Still it is superior socially; its hours are shorter; it draws the American as against the foreign-born girl; it offers better opportunity for marriage, and all these things appeal to a girl because she is not, consciously at least, in industry to stay, but to pass the time until marriage. That's why "a store can get for six dollars the kind of girl that will earn ten dollars in a shoe factory." Low as the wages are,--and they are set by this social advantage and by the predominant number of department store clerks who are not wholly dependent on themselves,--there is a chance for real advancement. Woman has been in factory work for a century, but she remains an operative except for occasional forewomen, and as a result of piece work she quickly reaches her maximum earning capacity and afterwards declines. But in the department store, where she has been only a few years, she has advanced to positions of real responsibility, particularly as a buyer, and sometimes draws a salary of from $1,500 to $6,000; her wages go steadily up, and the clerks in some departments draw good, living wages with the ever-present example of the buyer and her kind just ahead, elevated from their own ranks. The article, in parts, in a stirring description of the life of the 20,000 department store clerks on State street, Chicago, and one of the best parts of it is the contrast of the girl clerk who sells handkerchiefs, and the girl machine operative who makes handkerchiefs, the clerk "getting handkerchiefs out of boxes for querulous, exacting customers, putting handkerchiefs back in boxes for querulous, exacting stock inspectors, taking parcels to the cage of the wrapper girl, pacifying purchasers waiting for their change, attracting new purchasers coming down the aisle, discriminating between 'buyers' and 'shoppers,' drawing the 'buyers' on, edging the 'shoppers' off, rearranging the counter,--from eight or half-past in the morning to half past five in the afternoon;" the factory girl sitting before a counter on which there are a blue cross, a red cross and a machine with a clutching hand, who "takes a handkerchief, places it on the blue cross, pushes it over to the red cross, and the claw of the machine snatches it away. She takes a second handkerchief, places it on the blue cross, pushes it over to the red cross, and the machine snatches it away. She takes a third handkerchief, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, two a second, 120 a minute, 7,200 an hour, all the morning hours, all the afternoon hours, of every week, all the working weeks of every year.... The wide prevalence of this kind of sub-human toil in factories is one of the two great reasons why department store managers can often pay sub-human wages." * * * * * Mrs. Dorr has an article along very similar lines in the January _Hampton's Broadway Magazine_, using with effect little stories of women workers in many trades. Girls come out of school at fourteen and go to work; after a short apprenticeship they are put at the machines, and quickly earn the most they ever will earn. Gradually their nerves, their muscles, their eyes, their efficiency decline, their wages follow. Later they stand beside the young apprentices, earning the minimum wages after a life spent in a factory. Women do hard, manual work, too, much as we have been accustomed to think of that as peculiar to some European and Asiatic countries. Indian squaws no longer till the fields and do the heavy work in America, but Mrs. Dorr has found a modern substitute: "Go into the iron and metal working factories of American cities and see Polish women working in the heat of horrible furnaces, handling heavy weights, doing work fit only for strong men. Go into the rubber factories of Boston and see Greek and Armenian women drunk in the fumes of naphtha. See them in non-union hat factories with the skin scalded from their hands as they shrink the felt in streams of boiling water. We do not want to see American women doing such things. Yet not a year ago, in the first months of the panic of 1907, I received a letter from an American woman out of employment, asking if it were not possible for her to obtain work as a street cleaner. That work, she said, seemed to her easier than the office scrubbing she was doing then." But to return to the factory girl, Mrs. Dorr declares she is not arraigning those who own and operate factories, for they are keen for skilled workers to replace the unskilled girls who must be driven at a pace set by the machines; but rather the system under which our industries are run and by which we make our workers. The skilled worker can be made only by training, and in that she finds the keynote to the whole situation. Let us establish a great network of industrial training schools, such as the Manhattan Trade School for Girls and the Hebrew Technical School for Girls in New York, and the school maintained by the Woman's Industrial and Educational Union in Boston. Then we shall have not only skilled workers, earning fair wages, but we shall be safeguarding the mothers of to-morrow and the Children of the day after. * * * * * "The doctor," says Rudyard Kipling in the January _Ladies' Home Journal_, "can hoist a yellow flag over a center of civilization and turn it into a desert; he can hoist a red cross in the desert and turn it into a center of civilization." He can break the speed limit, go unmolested through riotous crowds, forbid any ship to enter any port in the world and order whole quarters of cities to be pulled down or burned up. These are some of his conspicuous privileges. On the other hand, "in all times of flood, fire, plague, pestilence, famine, murder and sudden death it is required of the doctor that he report himself for duty, and remain on duty till his strength fails him or his conscience relieves him,--whichever shall be the longer period." There is no eight-hour law for the physician, no one cares whether he is "in his bath, or his bed, or on his holiday, or at a theater." It is pretty well worth while, though, for "every sane human being agrees that this fight for time which we call Life is one of the most important things in the world, if not the most important. It follows, then, that the doctors who plan and conduct and who re-enforce this fight are among the most important men in the world." * * * * * The Immigration Department of the International Committee of the Young Men's Christian Association has issued two attractive little pamphlets for the newly arrived immigrant. The policy of the association is neither to encourage nor to discourage immigration but to give a helping hand to those who have fully made up their minds to immigrate or are already in this country. The two new books are entitled The Country to Which You Go, giving an elementary outline of some of our political and social institutions, and How to Become a Citizen of the United States, which gives the immigrant a clear idea of the process to be undergone in order to become a voter. Oscar Straus, secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor, says of the work of the Immigration Department, "No nobler, better or more practical work can be done by the Young Men's Christian Association than to teach our young men, be they either native-born or alien, a proper understanding of the basic principles of our government." * * * * * The last issue of _The Outlook for the Blind_, published by the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind and edited by Charles F. F. Campbell, contains a chart showing in detail all educational institutions for the blind in the United States and Canada, with information of the training offered, the number of pupils, number of instructors, and other information. Presented in this form, the information is graphic and may readily be compared by states. The same issue contains articles on industrial training for the blind, a new typewriter for the blind, conferences here and abroad, reports of work in different states, and some splendidly printed illustrations. Such an issue seems indispensable to any one interested in the sightless. * * * * * It is to be expected that an anti-suffragist should take the particular attitude toward woman clearly manifested by Dr. Lyman Abbott in The Home Builder.[15] In speaking of the wife he says, "Her one dominating desire is, not to be independent, but to be dependent on the man she loves." It is true that Dr. Abbott speaks of the widest and most perfect unity between man and wife but it is ever the attitude of the dependent, the chattel, the possession of man as the end and aim of the woman's existence. It is hardly a modern ideal for either the daughter, the wife, the mother, the housekeeper or even the philanthropist, as some of the headings are called. One of the most valuable points which Dr. Abbott does bring out, however, is the preservation of the sense of humor through all of the vicissitudes of the woman's life. If the book is intended for a quaint old lady, far away from the confines of civilization, it might meet her placid requirements. But it hardly possesses the philosophy that the modern, active woman of the larger communities can find use for. [15] The Home Builder by Lyman Abbott. Small 12 mo. Boards. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 75 cents. Pp. 129. This book may be obtained at publisher's price through CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS. Life Insurance satisfies the conscience, eases the mind, banishes worry and gives old age a chair of contentment. [Illustration] Metropolitan Policies are the Standards of Life Insurance Excellence [Illustration] Metropolitan Life Insurance Company 1 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK (Incorporated by the State of New York. Stock Company.) * * * * * TYRREL PRINT, NEW YORK. IT IS SUMMER IN California, Arizona, Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, You can Motor, Drive, Ride, Fish, Hunt, Bathe, Climb, Coach, Canoe, Yacht, Golf, Every Day in the Year Points in these States best reached via the Southern Pacific Sunset Route THE NATURAL WINTER GATEWAY THE OPEN WINDOW ROUTE Rock-Ballast Roadbed--Automatic Block Signals--Oil-Burning Locomotives--Superior Equipment. Ten days' Stopover at New Orleans on all Tickets. For free illustrated pamphlet address: L. H. NUTTING, G. E. P. A., 349 Broadway, New York, or Southern Pacific Agent at CHICAGO, 120 Jackson Blvd. NEW ORLEANS, Magazine St. BOSTON, 170 Washington St. PHILADELPHIA, 632 Chestnut St. SYRACUSE, 212 W. Washington St. BALTIMORE, 29 W. Baltimore St. * * * * * Please mention CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS when writing to advertisers. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Simple typographical and spelling errors were corrected. Italics words are denoted by _underscores_. Bold words are denoted by =equals=. P. 606 added transcriber footnote "[Footnote 1: Transcriber 20 + 10 obviously does not equal 42]." Obviously the total or the boy or girl numbers are incorrect. 
22241	----	THE GHOST IN THE WHITE HOUSE SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO HOW A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE (WHO ARE SUPPOSED IN A VAGUE, HELPLESS WAY TO HAUNT THE WHITE HOUSE) CAN MAKE THEMSELVES FELT WITH A PRESIDENT--HOW THEY CAN BACK HIM UP--EXPRESS THEMSELVES TO HIM, BE EXPRESSED BY HIM, AND GET WHAT THEY WANT By GERALD STANLEY LEE Author of "Crowds" and "Inspired Millionaires" "_The White House is haunted by a vague helpless abstraction,--by a kind of ghost of the nation, called The People_" NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & CO. 681 FIFTH AVENUE Copyright, 1920 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY _All Rights Reserved_ First printing May, 1920 Printed in the United States of America TO JENNETTE LEE Transcriber's Note: Chapter XXII in Book II was printed without a title. CONTENTS BOOK I WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE I Gist 3 II The Lonesomest Job on Earth 4 III The President and the Ghost 6 IV Real Folks and the Ghost 12 V The Ghost Receives an Invitation 16 VI What a Body for the Ghost Would be Like 20 VII The Ghost gets Down to Business 25 VIII Three Rights of Man in a Democracy--The Right to Think 27 IX The Right to be Waited On 32 X The Right to Whisper 36 XI The Right to Whisper Together 39 XII The Right to Trust Somebody 41 XIII The Right to Vote All Day 46 XIV The Skilled Consumer 48 XV Sample Democracies 51 XVI The Town Pendulum 54 XVII The National Listening Machine 58 XVIII How the National Listening Machine Will Work 62 XIX Making a Right Start 64 XX Up to the People 66 XXI The Way for a Nation to Speak Up 68 BOOK II WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF I G. S. L. to Himself 75 II If I Were a Nation 78 III What the Mahogany Desk is Going to Do 81 IV Rules for Being Lied to 85 V Getting One Man Right 87 VI Getting Fifty Men Right 89 VII Engineers in Folks 91 VIII The Great New Profession 92 IX Getting People to Notice Facts 97 X The Fool Killers 100 XI The Whisperers 102 XII Mr. Dooley, Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers 103 XIII Fooling Onseself in Politics 108 XIV Swearing Off from Oneself in Time 112 XV Technique for not Being Fooled by Oneself 117 XVI The Autobiography of a Letter 120 XVII The Man Fifty Three Thousand Post Offices Failed On 124 XVIII Causes of Being Fooled About Oneself 126 XIX Loco-Mindedness 128 XX Flat-Thinking. Thinking in Me Flat 131 XXI Lost-Mindedness 133 XXII 137 XXIII Self-Discipline by Proxy 139 XXIV Machine Mindedness 142 XXV New Brain Tracks in Business 143 BOOK III TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY I Big in Little 147 II Conscious Control of Brain Tracks 149 III What is Called Thinking 151 IV Living Down Cellar in One's Own Mind 156 V Being Helped up the Cellar Stairs 160 VI Reflections on the Stairs 166 VII Helping Other People up the Cellar Stairs 169 VIII Helping a Nation up the Cellar Stairs 173 IX Technique for Labor in Getting its Way 175 X Technique for Capital in Getting its Way 179 XI Philandering and Alexandering 183 XII The Factory that Lay Awake All Night 185 XIII Listening to Jim 191 XIV The New Company 196 XV The Fifty-Cent Dollar 198 XVI The Business Man, the Professional Man and the Artist 200 XVII The News-Man 203 XVIII W. J. 205 XIX The Look-Up Club Looks Up 207 XX Propagandy People 211 XXI The Skilled Consumers of Publicity 213 BOOK IV THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY I Fourth of July All the Year Round 217 II The Vision and the Body 219 III The Call of a Hundred Million People 222 IV The Call of a World 227 V Missouri 232 VI A Victory Loan Advertisement 236 BOOK V THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN I Reconstruction 243 II National Biology 245 III The Air Line League 247 IV The Look-Up Club Looks Up 250 (1) For Instance 250 (2) Why The Look-Up Club Looks Up 255 V The Try-Out Club Tries Out 257 (1) I + You = We 257 (2) The Engineer at Work 260 (3) The Engineer and the Game 262 (4) The American Business Sport 264 VI The Put-Through Clan Puts Through 270 (1) What 270 (2) How 272 (3) Psycho-Analysis 273 (4) Psycho-Analysis for a Town 276 (5) To-Morrow 280 (6) Who 281 (7) The Town Fireplace 286 (8) The Sign on the World 288 BOOK VI WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT I The Big Brother of the People 293 II The Man Who Carries the Bunch of Keys for the Nation 300 III The President's Temperament 302 IV The President's Religion 306 V The Red Flag and the White House 309 INTRODUCTION THE MOTION BEFORE THE HOUSE This is a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. I am nominating in this book--in the presence of the people, the next President of the United States. The name is left blank. I am nominating a man not a name. I am presenting a program and a sketch of what the next President will be like, of what he will be like as a fellow human being, and I leave the details--his name, the color of his eyes and the party he belongs to, to be filled in by people later. Here is his program, his faith in the people, his vision for the people and his vision for himself. * * * * * No one has ever nominated a President in a book before. I do it because a book can be more quiet, more sensible and thoughtful, more direct and human, and closer to the hearts of the people, than a convention can. A book can be more public too--can be attended by more people than a convention. Only a few thousand people can get into a convention. A hundred million can get into a book. All in the same two hours, by twenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowd into a book. So in this book, as I have said, I am merely acting as the secretary or employee of the hundred million people. I am writing a book a hundred million people would write if they could, expressing for them the kind of President for the next four years of our nation--the most colossal four years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts. We are weary of politicians' politicians. We want ours. Politicians may not be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done as well as most people. In the dead-earnest of the war, with our Liberty Loan and Red Cross and Council of Defense, and our dollar a year men we have half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awed by the regular political practitioners or government tinkerers. They are not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass on them and have come to see through them--at least the worst ones and many thousands of them--all these busy little worms of public diplomacy building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by themselves. Unless the more common run of our typical politicians see through themselves before the conventions come, and see that the people see through them, and see it quick, their days are numbered. Instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind their hands about us, their time has come now--in picking out the next President to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to begin listening to the people's prayer to God. The people are a new people since the war. Out of the crash of empires, out of threats in every man's door-yard the people are praying to God. And they are voting to God, too. The sooner the two great political parties reckon with this, the sooner they push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny little would-be Presidents, and all the little shan't-be politicians running around like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great people picking up tidbits they dare to believe--and put forward instead a live believing hot and cold human being, a man who will give up being President for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselves with a President on their hands that can be elected. Whichever party it is that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one that will be underwritten by the people. The people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that will come up in them. We are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate the majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-hearted people, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and keeping from being fooled with the other and we want our public men to have courage and vision for themselves and for us. We give notice that thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddly politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by the people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. This nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike moment any nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of forty nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appalling hope, to be trifled with. So far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest way to get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the real spirit of the people, to loom up the face of the people before their eyes and make them suddenly take the people more seriously than they take themselves, is with a book. In a book a President can be nominated by acclamation--by a kind of silent acclamation. In a book, without giving any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a President can be ordered by a people. We will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and the wills of the people. Then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them when they meet. In a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into covers across a nation another, the people with one single national stroke can put what they want before the country--a hundred million people in a book can rise to make a motion. We will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention to which we cannot go. We will not wait to be told three months too late, to pick out--out of two men we did not want, the man we will have to take. The short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take the initiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe our line, instead of toeing theirs, is for the people to blurt out the truth, write a book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with both great parties and tell them whatever his name is, whatever his party is, the kind of President they want. So here it is, such as it is, the book, a little politically innocent-looking thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks instead of like politicians, just engaged in being human--in letting a nation speak and act as a human being speaks and acts, in a great simple sublime human crisis in which with forty nations looking on, we are making democracy work--making a loophole for the fate of the world. * * * * * I am trying to answer three questions. What shall the new President believe about the people and expect of the people? What shall the new people--people made new by this war, expect of themselves and expect of their new President? What kind of a President, with what kind of a personality or temperament do the people feel would be the best kind of a President to pull them together, to help the people do what the people have to do? I have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new President will expect the people to do, can be done by the people. What the people want done, especially with regard to the Red Flag, predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot be done by the President for them, and they are not going to do it themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together. BOOK I WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PEOPLE I GIST The Crowd is my Hero. The Hero of this book is a hundred million people. I have come to have the feeling--especially in regard to political conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions just now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make themselves more substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall really have in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as a whole, feel important in it--like a Senator for instance--like Senator Lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like Trusts that won't trust, and Congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't work--I am thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people can come to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to somebody what they wanted and what they thought--ways in which the hundred million people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a Profiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,--get what they want. II THE LONESOMEST JOB ON EARTH What is going to happen to the next President the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night? The Ghost in the White House. The White House is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people. The only way the Nation, in the White House, gets in, is as a spirit. The man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a Generalization. What we really do with a President is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the White House, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with An Average, to be the consort day and night of Her Who Never Was, and Who Never Is--a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, Terrible Angel called the People. Just a kind of light in Her eyes at times. That is all there is to Her. It is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the Aurora Borealis to 2 and 2 = 4, to go into the White House for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in Lady. It does not give any real satisfaction to anybody--either to the hundred million people or to the President. It certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a President--to be a Ghost. It is not efficient. Naturally--much of the time anyway, all the Ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the Ghost of a President. III THE PRESIDENT AND THE GHOST There are a number of things about going into the White House the next four years and being the Head Employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth. The new President on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the Head Employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his Employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world. Absent-mindedness. Non-committalness. Halfness, or double personality. Bodilessness. Big, impressive-looking Fool Moments. Cumulus clouds of Slow Sure Conceit with Sudden Flops of Humility. General Irresponsibleness. And perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the Employer--like some strange, kindly, big Innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry. The man who is conscientious in the White House has an Employer whose immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in the hope that he will be thanked afterwards. Once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the Owner of the Line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in. The restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being responsible, is lacking in the White House, where one is practically expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and one's own employer. But while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the President's Employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous ones for the country. I am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about them. I have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the moment the Employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are making it for the President to do anything for him. Bodilessness is the worst. The man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their Head Employee, is not only never going to see his Employer, but he has an Employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with It. Serving It is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a fog of human nature, an Abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the People. It is this bodilessness in the Employer--this very simple rudimentary whiffling communion the Employer has with his usually distinguished and accomplished Head Employee, which the Head Employee finds it hardest to bear. The only thing his Employer ever says to him directly is (once in four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. He says deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of other nations, "Here is the man I would a little rather have than not." That is all. Then he coops him up in the White House, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work. Any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an Employer like this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the people one is being The Head Employee of (in the other party) expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's Employer--keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will be small wonder if the man in the White House feels he has--especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth. The Prime Minister of England has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. This special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our President. He has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and be President of all of us. It may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on earth and, of course, when Theodore Roosevelt had it, the job of being President considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world America is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our next President, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy, senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations abroad, the man we put in the White House next is going to have what will be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand years--except the one that began in Nazareth--the one the new President is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which little, old, queer, bent, eager St. Paul with his prayers in Rome and his sermons in Athens, never dreamed of. It does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our President to have a ghost for an Employer. All any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a President, is to stop and think. If you have an employer who cannot collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all you do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him up--what is there--what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent action is there, after all, the man in The White House can take in his employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling him what he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? What can the man in the White House hope to accomplish for a people with whom it is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as this? I have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have a lonely President the next four years. The first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next election a man for the White House a great-hearted direct and free people will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things that will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and not let him feel lonely with us. The feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness--the feeling the Public has every day in the White House and in the Senate, of being treated, and treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works as badly one way as it does the other. The President does not want a Ghost. The people do not want to be treated as a Ghost. The object of this book is to resent--to expose to everybody as unfair and untrue and destroy forever the title I have written across the front of it, "The Ghost in The White House." The object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering Ghost in its own House. There must be things--broad simple things about Capital and Labor people can do and do every day in this country, that will make a President timidly stop guessing what they want. It ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a President or a seer for a President to know what the people want. A man of genius--a seer, a man who can read the heart of a nation--especially in politics, comes not only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly unlikely when he does that the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party in America will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in the White House. The best the people can hope for in America now is to have a body--to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word--express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our President, our Politicians--even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the Senate--the kind of men who can feel happy and in their element in a place like Congress will see what the People--the real people in this country are like. I am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so that we the people in America, at last, in the days that lie ahead, instead of being a Ghost in our own House, shall have things that we can do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to prove to a President what we are like and what we want--so that each man of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a President with--something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl (like an Autumn leaf) at him, once in four years. IV REAL FOLKS AND THE GHOST When a man speaks of The City National Bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant. When the same man in the same breath speaks of The People, watch him bewhiffle it. When a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of Business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the Country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of The Invisible. Business talks bass. Patriotism is an �olian harp. During the war this was changed. We found ourselves every day treating America, treating The Country, treating The People as a bodily fact. I would like to see what can be done now in the next President's next four years, to give America this magnificent sense of a body in peace. Why is it that we have in America a body for Germans, and then wilt down in a minute after Château-Thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat The People, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of The People as a Ghost--unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless--just a light in its eyes--just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet. Millions of people every day in this country are very particular to salute the flag, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and ship Bolshevists, but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like the Steel Trust or the Pennsylvania Railroad and they act as if something were there. Bring up the Body-Politic and it's a whiff. It ought to be considered treason to think or to speak of The Country in this vague, breathy way. The next immediate, imperative need of America is to see what can be done and done in the next President's next four years to make the Body-Politic people take the Body-Politic and what happens to the Body-Politic as if it were as substantial as a coal strike--as what happened at Ypres, Cambrai and Château-Thierry. Otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the Germans and the rest of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy. I believe that the best things the Old World has said about us and hoped for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of idealists, are true to the American character and real. But they are not actual. We are the world's colossal tragic Adolescent. Forty nations are depending on us--are waiting for us--in the world's long desperate minutes--waiting for America to grow up. This nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its daily producing, buying and selling, and no more. Any big beautiful evaporated Body-Politic we have or try to think we can have aside from this body--this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracy and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean and threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate of a world. All really religious men and all real patriots know this. In a democracy like ours a religion which is not occupied all day every day in this year of our Lord 1920 in making democracy work, a religion that loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, a religion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go to hell in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in hell already, is not a religion at all. And a nation that sheds tears over three hundred thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobs and sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finally managed to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the three hundred thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what it means--in just one simple item--for a hundred million people, to try to be good without a body. But it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the President I am groping in these pages for a body for the Public. The reason that the Public in dealing in its daily business with powerful persons of any kind--whether good or bad, whether a President or anybody, is taken advantage of and does not get what it wants, is that the Public is a Ghost. Theoretically all powerful persons, predatory Trusts, profiteering labor unions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to the Public, but when they want something that belongs to the Public they find the Public is an Abstraction and help themselves. They act when with the Public, as if the Public was not there. The only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make a spontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a body for people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in dealing with their politicians, their trusts and labor unions, less bodilessness. We propose to give a hundred million people a face, a voice, a presence, a backbone, a grip. Then all the people we ask things of who think we can be whoofed away, will pay attention to us. V THE GHOST RECEIVES AN INVITATION Being allowed to live a week to-day means as much as being allowed to live a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now. We are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of the world. International war ending to-night. To-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a thousand nations--between classes--unless we all do our seeing and do our living swiftly and do it together swiftly to-day. When one-tenth of the people of America tell the President of the United States and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any coal unless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of the people tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, and another one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear until the one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic America is than Germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody should suppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. The idea of getting what you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by capital, is now getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and by everybody. The really great immediate universal emergency to-day in America is the holdup. We get rid of one Kaiser other people have three thousand miles away, to get instead five thousand Kaisers we have to live with next door here at home, that we have to ask things of and say "please" to every time we cook, every time we eat, every time we buy something to wear. The emergency is not only immediate but it is universal, all the people are concerned in meeting it all the time. We have said to one another and to everybody for four years that what we have all been sacrificing for and dying for these four years is to make the world safe for democracy. This was our emergency. We were right. The emergency we are meeting now is to make democracy safe for the world. If the Kaiser wanted to dream his wildest dream of autocratic sneer and autocratic hate he would have dreamed US; he would have dreamed what we will be unless the men and women of America--especially the men and women of America formerly active in the Red Cross, shall meet the emergency and undertake in behalf of the people to prove to the people how (if anybody will go about and look it up) industrial democracy in America in distinction from industrial autocracy, really works. If it works for some of us in some places, let twenty million people--Red Cross people get up and say across this land in every village, town and city, it shall work now in all places for all of us. And then take steps--all of them every morning, every afternoon, getting together as they did in the Red Cross, to see to it that the whole town and everybody in it does something about it. When the soldiers of the American army we were all helping in the Red Cross stop fighting the Germans, come home, divide off into classes and begin fighting one another, why--because now the soldiers we have been helping need us more, because now all day every day they need us more than they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely fighting Germans--why should we stop helping them? On the day after the armistice--the very day when our war with just Germans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more desperate war Germany had precipitated upon all nations with themselves, begins, why should the men and women who had been working every afternoon for the men of this nation, in the Red Cross, talk about reducing to a peace basis? The people in the Red Cross have been having in the last three years the vision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for the liberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now--before the same people--that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is the vision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and children fighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting for the liberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and to wear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the Germans is the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of democracy in the world. I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made the Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trusted representative of American democracy in all nations, who now find themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime, most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to a world, I will not believe that these men and women are going to lose their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they have helped before. The logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the Red Cross to do--the thing they alone have the record, the teamwork-drill, the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is to keep on following the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters moving on with their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people not to be bullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of people not to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another. VI WHAT A BODY FOR THE GHOST WOULD BE LIKE I have always wanted to write a book an employer and a workman could read looking over each other's shoulders. I would have two chapters on every subject. In one chapter I would tell the employer things his workman wants him to know, and in the next chapter I would tell the workman things that for years the employer has been trying to get him to notice. I would begin each chapter in such a way that no employer or workman would ever know which was which, or which was his chapter, until he had got in quite a little way; and I would do my best to have everybody read each other's chapters all through the book. An employer would be reading along in his chapter as innocent as you please, and slap his leg and say, "THAT'S IT! THAT'S IT! It does me good to think my workmen are reading this!" And then he would turn over the leaf and he would come plump full head on into three paragraphs about himself and about how the public feels about him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about what God is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book are going to help God to do to him, that will make him think. The first thing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. Then before he knows it he will see another of those things he wants his workmen to read softly poking itself out of the page at him. Then he will slap his leg and think how I am making his workmen think. So he will go through the book slapping his leg and shouting "Amen" in one chapter, and sitting still and thinking in the next. This is the gist of what I propose a new organization shall do on a national scale. It may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what I propose a great aggregation of American men and women on the scale of the Red Cross, should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the technique of what I have in mind--in miniature, is in it. It is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an author to prove to employers and employees that they could get on better together than they could apart, even if they got on together better only in a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and it is true that a book in which I could make an employer and an employee work their minds together through my own little fountain pen would count some. I would at least be dramatizing my idea in ink. But people do not believe ideas dramatized in ink. The thing for an author or a man who has ideas to do if he must use words, is to use words to make his ideas happen. Then let him use words about them and write books about them to advertise that they have happened. People are more impressed with things that have happened than they are with things that are perhaps going to. Instead of having employers and employees go over the same ideas together in a book, I propose that twenty million people, in ten thousand cities shall make them go over the same ideas together in the shop. Are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get what they want when six million dead men, still almost warm in their graves, have died to prove that the holdup, or German way of getting things, does not work? What the new League will be for will be to put before the world, before every nation, before every village and city in its local branch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups of people can get what they want out of each other by trying things out together, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to each other instead of blowing out each other's brains. The way to keep in place our Bolshevists of America is to show them that we the combined people of America, combined and acting together as one in the organization I am sketching in this book, know what they want, and that we can get the thing they essentially want for them better than they can get it. The three great groups in American life--the employing class, the laboring class, and the consumer--have all belonged to the Red Cross together, they have all worked together and sacrificed themselves, and sacrificed their class, to work for the Red Cross. What the New League will stand for in the name of all of them will be the thing that they have already demonstrated in the Red Cross that they can do. Three classes can get a thing for one class better than one class can get it. This is the content of the League's vision of action. The method of it will be advertising with enormous campaigns never dreamed of before what the three-class vision is and how it works. Then we will have factories dramatize it. Then we will advertise the factories. Then when we have democracy working in a thousand factories, we will advertise and transplant our working democracy, our factory democracies, abroad. People who have learned that democracy works in their daily work can be trusted to believe democracy will work even in their religion, even in their politics. * * * * * The idea I have in mind is already foreshadowed in the city of Cleveland. The spirit of the people of Cleveland has already rebelled against being treated as a ghost--against being whoofed at by Labor unions and trusts. Always before this, when incompetent manufacturers and incompetent labor unions, for the mere reason that they had not the patience to try very hard and were incompetent to understand one another and do their job, held up the whole city--five hundred thousand people--and calmly made them pay for it, the city of Cleveland like any other city would venture to step in sweetly and kindly, look spiritual and intangible a minute, suggest wistfully that they did feel capital and labor were not being quite fair to Cleveland and would they not please stop interrupting Cleveland several million dollars a day. All that ever would come of it would be the yowls of Labor at the Ghost of Cleveland, the noble whines of manufacturers at the Ghost of Cleveland. Cleveland was treated as if it was not there. Cleveland now swears off from being a ghost and proposes to deal bodily and in behalf of all, with its own lockouts and its own strikes in much the same way I am hoping the nation will, according to the news in my paper this morning. With Mr. Paul Pfeiss, an eminently competent manufacturer, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as partly responsible for the holdups practiced on the city and with Mr. Warren S. Stone, an eminently competent labor union leader, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as being also partly responsible--with these two men, one the official representative of the Capital group, and the other the official representative of the Labor group, both championing the Public group and standing out for Cleveland against themselves, taking the initiative and acting respectively as President and Secretary of the Public group, the Ghost of the city of Cleveland publicly swears off from being a ghost and begins precipitating a body for itself. I do not wish to hamper my own statement of my idea of a body for the people of the United States by linking it up with a definite undertaking in Cleveland which may or may not prove to be as good an illustration of it as I hope, but the spirit and the understanding of what has got to happen, seems to be in Cleveland--and I stop in the middle of my chapter with greetings to Paul Pfeiss and to Warren Stone. In my book the Ghost of the People of Cleveland salutes the Ghost of the People of the United States! VII THE GHOST GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS A body usually begins with an embryo, and the tissue and skeleton come afterwards. A book does, too. I prefer not exposing a skeleton much, myself, and am inclined to feel that the ground plan of a book like the ground plan of a man, should be illustrated and used, should be presented to people with the flesh on, that a skeleton should be treated politely as an inference. But I am dealing with the body of democracy. And people are nervous about democracy just now, so much boneless democracy is being offered to them. So I begin with the principles--the skeleton of the body of democracy for which this book stands. The outstanding features of the body of democracy are the brain, the heart and the hand. With the brain of democracy goes the right to think. With the heart goes the right to live. With the hand goes the right to be waited on. With these three rights go three greater rights, or three duties, some people call them. With the right to think goes the right to let others think. With the right to live goes the right to let others live. With the right to be waited on, goes the right to serve. To call the right to serve a duty is an understatement. I doubt if the people who have succeeded best and who have really attained the largest amount of their three greater rights, have thought of them very often as duties. I end this chapter with the three questions America is in the world to-day to ask, to find out her own personal three answers to in the sight of the nations. I am putting with the three questions the three answers I am hoping to hear my country give, before I die. What determines what proportion of his right to think, each man shall have? His power to get attention and let others think. What determines what proportion of his right to live, each man shall have? His power to let others live. What determines what proportion of his right to be waited on, each man shall have? His power to serve. These are the principles of the new League--the voluntary, spontaneous organization of the men and women of America to meet the emergency in America of our war with ourselves, on the same scale and in the same spirit as the Red Cross met the emergency of our war with other nations, an organization which I hope to show ought to be formed, and which I am rising to make the motion to form, in this book. I put these principles forward as the by-laws of America's faith in itself, as the principles that should govern the brain, the heart and the hand of each man in a democracy, toward all other men and that should govern all other men toward him--the skeleton of the body of the people. VIII THREE RIGHTS OF MAN IN A DEMOCRACY I--THE RIGHT TO THINK I am entitled to one one-hundred millionth of President Wilson's time in a year. 1/100,000,000th. If I want 2/100,000,000ths of President Wilson's time in a year I must show him why. I must also show the other 99,999,999 people who think I deserve no more than my regular 1/100,000,000th why I should have two. Not allowing for the President's sleeping nights, my precise share of his time would be one-third of a second once a year. Why should I have two-thirds of a second? I have to show. The success of democracy as a working institution turns on salesmanship--upon every man's selling himself--his right to the attention of the Government. A democracy which considers itself a queue of a hundred million people standing before the window of the President's attention to be waited upon by the President in the order in which they are born or in which they come up, would be a helpless institution. The success of democracy--that is, the success of a government in serving the will of the hundred million people in the queue, turns on sorting people in the queue out, turns on giving attention to what some people in the queue want before others. The man who gets out of line and walks up ahead of people who have been standing in line longer than he has, must get the permission of the queue. He must make the people in the queue feel he represents them with the President if he steps up ahead. Then they let him have their turn. They are glad to let him have hours with the President if they feel he is giving hours' worth of representation to their minutes. All each man wants to feel is that in letting Gompers, for instance, or Schwab, go up ahead, he is getting with the President a minute an hour long. Miles of people in rows say to a man like this, who can give them and their interests with the President a minute an hour long, "You first, please." Political democracy, if it works, turns on getting the attention of the queue and then going with it to the window. Political democracy, in other words, turns on advertising. So does industrial democracy. Industrial democracy in a factory of five thousand men consists in making arrangements for the five thousand men to appreciate each other, appreciate the Firm, and to feel the Firm appreciating them; arrangements for having the five thousand men get each other's attention in the right proportions at the right time so that they work as one. The next thing that is coming in industrial democracy is getting skilled capital and skilled labor to appreciate each other's skill. A skilled capitalist can not fairly be called a skilled capitalist or, now that this war is over, unless he knows how to keep his queue appreciating his skill, keep his five thousand men standing in line for his attention cheerfully. The difference between an industrial autocracy and an industrial democracy is that in an industrial autocracy you keep your queue in line with a club, or with threats of bread and butter, and in an industrial democracy you have your queue of five thousand men, each man in the row cheering you while he sees you giving one minute a week of your attention to him and one hour a day of your attention to others. Still you find him cheering you. The skilled employer is the employer who so successfully advertises his skill to his employees and so successfully advertises their skill to themselves and to one another that they hand over to him in their common interest the right to sort them over. They hand over to him deliberately, in other words, in their own interests, the right not to treat them alike. Democracy consists in keeping people in line without a club. Democracy is a queueful of people cutting in ahead of one another fairly and in a way that the queue stands for. If a man standing in a queue before a ticket window wants to cut in ahead of five people, the way for him to do it is to show the five people something in his hand that makes them say, "You first, please." He must show why he should go first, and that he is doing it in their interest. The other day as I was standing in a long line of people before the ticket window in the Northampton station, I noticed on a guess that half a dozen of the people were standing in line to buy a ticket to New York on the express due in half an hour, and a dozen and a half were standing in line to buy tickets to Springfield on the local going in three minutes. I was number thirteen. I wanted to get a ticket for Springfield. The thing for me to do, of course, to rise to the crisis and make democracy work, was to jump up on my suitcase and address the queue who were ahead of me: "Ladies and gentlemen! Eighteen or twenty of you in this line ahead of me want tickets to Springfield on the train going in three minutes, and the rest of you want tickets on the train going in half an hour. If you people who are hoping you can get your tickets in time to go to Springfield will let me cut in ahead of you out of my turn and get my ticket, I will buy tickets for all of you with this ten dollar bill in thirty seconds, and you can get your tickets of me on the train, and in this way we will all catch it." I did not do it, of course, but it would have been what I call democracy if I had. The whole problem of labor and capital, and of political and industrial freedom, from now on after this war would have been solved in miniature before that window--if I had. My invention for the future of the Red Cross is that it should do what I tried to do at that window, for the American people. * * * * * Democracy is a form of government in which the people are essentially autocrats. The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is that the people select their autocrats. The more autocracy the more efficiency. A people can not have the autocracy they need to get what they want unless they are willing to give over to their representatives the necessary trust pro tem., the necessary ex officio right to be autocrats in their behalf. Democracy is autocracy of the people, for the people, by the people--that is, by the people in spirit to their representatives who express their spirit. The representatives of the people can not keep the people's autocracy for them unless they keep in touch with the people--that is, unless they advertise to the people and the people feel that they can advertise to them. In an autocracy the autocracy of the ruler is based on forcing people's attention. In a democracy the autocracy is based on touching men's imaginations, on making people want to fall into line in the right order. If the Kaiser had done this in Germany, Germany would have been the greatest democracy in the world and the greatest nation. If the Kaiser had had the power and genius for advertising of the modern kind, if he had had the power of making people want things in distinction from making them meek and making them take them whether they wanted them or not, he would have invented and set up a working model for America. Obviously, the more the people desire to form in line the better and more successful all the people in the line will be in getting what they want at the window. The more autocracy people know enough to give their representatives, the better democracy works. In the last analysis the fate of democracy in modern life turns on having autocrats on probation--autocrats selected for their positions by advertising, and kept in position as autocrats as long as they can advertise to the people and as long as the people feel that they can advertise to them. IX II--THE RIGHT TO BE WAITED ON Democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in the way kings are, and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves. * * * * * Three Rights to Be Waited on 1. Skilled labor has the right to be waited on by skilled capital. Skilled labor, being preoccupied as it naturally is by its highly specialized knowledge and skill, can not take the time off to do for itself what skilled capital could do in providing work, and providing markets for skilled labor. It cannot, on the other hand, take the time off to understand skilled capital and what it is doing in detail. Even if it could take the time off, and if five thousand hands in a factory all devoted themselves all day to understanding the work the Office is doing, the five thousand would make poor work of understanding. Arrangements have got to be made in one way or another for skilled labor's trusting the Office, for its feeling that the autocracy it intrusts to the Office is being used fairly in its interest. The first and most important skill of skilled capital, of course, is its skill in doing for its employees and for its customers what it is supposed to do. But the second skill of capital must be skill in being believed in and finding means of being believed in by its employees. The more it is believed in, the more power to serve will be accorded to it. In other words, the second function of skilled capital is advertising to its skilled labor, and in making exchange arrangements with its skilled labor, for being advertised to. 2. Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled labor. The first skill of skilled labor must be with its machines and its tools, and in making its product, but the second skill must be its skill in being believed in. The skilled capital it is supposed to be waited on by is preoccupied with its skill, and unless labor makes special and very thorough provision to be understood and to keep understood by skilled capital, and by the public and the people who buy the goods, and unless skilled labor tries to keep in touch all around and do teamwork all around with all concerned so that it can do its work, it can not fairly be called skilled labor at all. Skilled labor has to have skill in putting its skill with others to produce a result. In other words, the second skill of skilled labor is skill in making arrangements for being believed in and believing in others. Its second skill is in advertising and in being advertised to. 3. The other group concerned in industry is one which I like to call the Skilled Consumers. The people have a right to have capital skilled in considering them, and labor skilled in considering them, at every point. The people are the employers of all employers and of all employees. The saying among business men and merchants in case of quarrel, "The customer is always right," has to be in the long run treated in a democracy as if it were approximately true. What the consumers have to do in a democracy, however, in a singular degree is to live up to it. The consumers must make, and I believe are going to make, elaborate arrangements for being skilled consumers. Skilled capital has organized. Skilled labor has organized. And now the consumers, or the people, if they are to be skilled, and if they are to get out of skilled capital and skilled labor what they want, will organize their skill to get it. They will organize to help the best skilled capital at the expense of the worst, to help the best skilled labor at the expense of the worst. In other words, the secret of industrial democracy and of making industrial democracy work, lies in making the people skilled in conveying their wishes to the skilled capital and skilled labor waiting on them. Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will support it when it is right and punish it when it is wrong, by the way they buy and sell. Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will defend it from skilled capital that pretends to be skilled and is not. True and sincere skilled capital and true and sincere skilled labor cannot keep on doing what they try to do as long as the supposedly skilled consumers they have a right to, back away from their job and lazily and foolishly buy and sell in the markets in such a way as to reward capital for doing wrong to labor, or labor for doing wrong to capital. In other words, the second function of the skilled consumers after telling skilled capital and labor what they want to eat and wear, is to make arrangements to advertise to capital and labor and to have capital and labor advertise to them, so that they can be skilled in knowing how to help them work together, and skilled in buying in such a way as to help in making capital and labor more skilled instead of less in dealing with themselves and one another and with the people. I have summed up the three Rights to Be Waited On. All of these rights turn on skilled advertising and on the science of being believed in, the science of being allowed to be autocrats, the science of being allowed by the people to make their democracy work. I would like to illustrate this in the next chapter. X III--THE RIGHT TO WHISPER The employees in the stockyards in ---- have been trying to get the attention of Mr. John Doe, the young man who inherited the business, to the fact that the least a family can live on now is $1388 a year. Mr. Doe, who has never tried being bitterly poor and whose attention can not be got to what can be done in a year for a wife and five children with $1388 until he tries it, is rather discouraging to deal with. There is no known way of getting him to try it, and in the meantime he thinks he knows without trying, and he thinks his attention is got when it is not. He tells the workmen that two pairs of shoes ought to last a child a year--and goes home in his limousine. That is the end of it. It ought not to be the end of it. Who can get Mr. Doe's attention? Why is it that Mr. Doe's employees do not succeed in getting Mr. Doe's attention? Why is it that Mr. Doe has so little difficulty in getting theirs? Why is it that Mr. Doe's employees, when he speaks of the two pairs of shoes a year, hang on his words? Because Mr. John Doe is their employer. Who are the people whose words Mr. Doe would hang on and would be obliged to hang on? Mr. Doe's employers. Who are Mr. Doe's employers? All the people in America who eat meat. Of course if one had just come from Mars yesterday and was looking about studying things, the first thing one would ask would be, Why do not the people in America who eat meat, and who keep on Mr. Doe in his position, at once mention to him that they wish him to look into the matter of the two pairs of shoes a year? Because the People Who Eat Meat--Mr. Doe's employers--have no way of mentioning it to Mr. Doe. If the People Who Eat Meat would but barely whisper to Mr. Doe it would get his attention as much as a whole year's shouting would from his workmen. But the People Who Eat Meat in America have no whisper. In other words, it is because Mr. Doe's employers are absolutely dumb, and Mr. Doe is absolutely deaf to any one except his employers, that two pairs of shoes are not enough for the workmen's children. It is for the purpose of letting the People Who Eat Meat in America--whisper and learn to whisper in this country that the new League organized to operate as a kind of People's Advertising Guild or Consumers' Advertising Club, with its national office in New York and its local branches in ten thousand towns and cities, now offers its services to all people who eat meat in America. The employers of America have organized to do anything with their business, and anything with their workmen, and anything with the country that they like. The workmen of America have organized to do now, and are deliberately planning to do anything with their work, and anything with their employers, and anything with the country that they like. The new national League is now to be organized as the voice of the American people, as the whisper of the will of the consumer in every industry in America. The people to get the attention of employers are the employers of the employers. Every civil war we are having in this country can be settled and the attention of the fighters on both sides can be got, and the country can work as one man in making democracy safe for the world, the moment the employers of the employers whisper. * * * * * The way I would like to end this chapter--with the blanks filled in, of course, would be this. Anybody who wants to be a part of this whisper, who knows of any industry he would like to see a whisper from the people tried in, or who wishes as an Associate Member to join the Air Line League--a League for the direct action of the people in what concerns them all, is invited to send five dollars as membership fee and his name and address, to ----, Treasurer National Office of The Air Line League, Number ---- Street, New York. But the chapter cannot end in this way. This is merely the pattern of the way I would like to have it end later, and while I have put the name--The Air Line League--down and am going to use it for the convenience of this book, I only do so, leaving it open to the people who have the vision of The League and who put the vision into action, to change the name if they want to. XI THE RIGHT TO WHISPER TOGETHER Every man like all Gaul is divided into three parts. He is an employee of somebody, an employer of somebody, and a consumer. The natural employer left to himself is apt to suppose, if he is making shoes, that his consumers ought to pay more for shoes, and that his employees ought to be paid less. As regards hats, and umbrellas, and overcoats, and underwear, the same man is a rather noble impartial person towards employers and employees. He wants them to listen to each other and lower the cost of living by not having strikes and lockouts, and by not fighting each other ten hours a day. In 999 out of 1000 labor quarrels a consumer is naturally a fair-minded person and the best-located person to control and determine how any particular business shall be run. The League proposed is planned to operate in its national and local functions as a national Consumers' Club, with working branches in every town which shall be engaged in doing specific things every day toward making the employers and employees in that town listen to each other in the interests of the consumer public. It is always to the interests of the consumer-public to see to it that people who have particular interests in a business should be compelled to listen to the others' interests. Consumers naturally prefer experts to run things for them, but if they do not run them for them, they are the natural people to make them do it. In the last resort the right to control is with the consumers. We are going to look to them very soon now as the natural Central Telephone Exchange in business. It is the consumers who connect everybody up. They are the switchboard of the World. XII THE RIGHT TO TRUST SOMEBODY Democracy--as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before--democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves. I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling I have--in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the yellow pencil--is the feeling that this country is being governed with. I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country--he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other. As a democrat and as a believer in crowds I resent the idea that being stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot know anything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I do something no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every man knows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket--Smiths and Browns and Smiths and Smiths--it is a thing I want to have done for me, I want experts--engineers in human nature that I and my fellow citizens can hire to pick out my employees, _i.e._, the employees of the state that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we don't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so many subjects and detectives toward so many people. We don't want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do, to vote on expert questions we don't even want to know anything about, huge laundry-lists of people that God only knows or could know and that can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees who devote their time to it. If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day and night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people we put in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. Perhaps I should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say that it is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men in prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and easily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What I demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other sixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have a right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect intelligently to do it for us--by men we have all looked through and through and trust. The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications a week from the ---- Railway which has been trying to make me over into an expert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I had time to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are so arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don't take a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroads and the Government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be any Government. But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent having a pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help the Government to be fair to the railroads--or the railroads to be fair to the Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don't want to be jerked into a judge--or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter. Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads tell everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand--time-tables for instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sunday trains on Monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor's job in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitent railroads--with all the details about their poor insides--and with all their back bills and things? There must be other voters who feel about this as I do. Is this Democracy? This is what Democracy is to me--Democracy is a belief in the faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their power to select great and true leaders. The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face of the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like--as if the main qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I am living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that will take being a statesman seriously--as a special and skilled profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting things out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great and true leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fate in picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In our politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody can see it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leader we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long enough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite of what she looks like, and will bring America out. And America instead of being a kind of big slovenly adolescent, perpetually thirteen-year-old nation going around with its big innocent mouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, will be a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knows what it wants, and gets it--and does not say much. XIII THE RIGHT TO VOTE ALL DAY This principle which I have applied in this last chapter to political democracy applies still more forcibly to democracy in industry, and to the right of the people to be waited on by skilled labor and by skilled capital. I do not wish to bother to know everything about how everything I buy every day is made, but I do want to have arrangements made through a national league to which I belong, for instance, so that I can practically know about the conditions under which anything is made, the moment I wish to. There should be as it were a card catalogue or authority in my town that I can go to and consult, which represents me and a hundred million people. This is my conception of what the National League through its local branches could do and do for everybody. It would only cost a few cents more to have a hundred million men know about a particular article what ten, twenty or a hundred or a thousand know, the moment they happen to need it, by looking it up in the League's national opinion of it and national experience with it, in a card catalogue or what would operate practically as a card catalogue. We all have the right in this country to spend our money intelligently. If people want to get our thousand dollars a year, or two thousand a year, or three, five, or ten thousand a year, they must show cause why they should have it, dollar for dollar. We want our dollars to help people to help us, laborers who are helping the country and capitalists who are helping the country. Every time I spend ten cents I want to know that I am getting ten cents' worth of democracy, ten cents' worth of skilled capital and skilled labor working for all of us. I propose to vote with my money on the fate of my country and the fate of democracy with silver coins and with dollar bills every day. The other kind of ballot, the paper ballot, I can only use in the nature of the case once or twice a year. XIV THE SKILLED CONSUMER The way to control the world and govern the well-being of men is not through the time they have left over, or the time they choose to lay one side for it, but directly and through their most important engagements and things they do and are sure to do all the time. A man's first important engagement in this world is with his own breath. His second engagement is with his own stomach. His third is with the night and with sleep. His fourth is with posterity, with the unborn, with his children and children's children. His fifth is with his ancestors and with God. In nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand things a man needs to have to keep these engagements--things he has to have if he is alive at all, he is a consumer. What the new League will say to the consumer is something like this: "In nine hundred and ninety-nine things out of a thousand you have to have to live, the Air Line League is organized to stand by you, express you and get the attention of everybody to what you want; and in the one thing you make for everybody it is going to express everybody to you and get your attention to what everybody wants of you." This would seem to most of us to be fair all around. When one thinks of it, why should one-thousandth part of what a man has and has to have, in order to live his life--the part he makes himself--be seen everywhere in this world in every man's life holding up and bullying, making him pay high prices for, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths? Let the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of a man's life take possession of the one thousandth part of him. Then we will have a civilization. Or at least the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of him will persuade the one thousandth of him to coöperate. We have had autocracy of capital because on the whole in the world until machinery came in, capital kept close enough to labor and to the consumer to know what the workmen and the people wanted. Now that Capital has lost its grip, Labor announces that it is going to be after this war the autocrat, and represent capital and the consumer. The Air Line League is here to ask, Why should not the consumer represent himself? Capital has tried and failed and has said, "Let the public be damned." Now Labor has tried and failed, and is saying hoarsely in a thousand cities, "Let the public be damned." What the Air Line League is for is to advertise the people together, and let the consumers represent themselves. What we have been fighting for essentially in this war is the control of the consumers in the world in all nations. When we speak of democracy and of organizing the will of the people, what we really mean is organizing the will of the consumers. Organizing the will of the consumers is not a holdup. A holdup by all the people of all the people for all the people is Liberty. XV SAMPLE DEMOCRACIES I do not want to delay or bother people with my definition of democracy, but I do not mind confiding to them where I have seen some. One is always coming upon bits or dots of democracy in America. It is these bits or dots of rough more or less unfinished democracy we have in America which make most of us believe in the people of this country. Everybody in America knows of them. There are at least forty-four dots of democracy--little marked-off places--what might be called safety zones (everybody knows of them), even in New York. There are usually white globes in front of them, and a short name written in long plain slanting white letters across a huge piece of glass. If anybody wants to see just what democracy is like in business all he has to do is to go into the nearest Childs restaurant, order some griddle-cakes, sit down and eat and think. All he really needs to do is to study the menu, but of course a menu is more thoroughly studied by eating some of it. One soon finds that a menu may be a little modest every-day magna charta of democracy or it may not. What a menu has long been for in the typical restaurant is to find a way of browbeating and bewildering a customer into spending more money for his luncheon than he intends to when he comes in. Rows of grieved and vaguely disturbed people can be seen in restaurants every day--being mowed down by menus. In a Childs restaurant business success is based on turning the whole idea of a menu around, and instead of the customer's coming in and studying the menu, the menu studies him. The consumer in a Childs restaurant is there to economize and the restaurant is there to help him do it, the whole menu being constructed by experts in foods for the express purpose of telling the customer more than he knows about his food and his money, persuading him and practically tricking him into spending less money on his luncheon than he intends to. A business may be said to be a big vital and winning business in any line in proportion as one sees the consumers in it--practically running it--running it in spirit. A democratic business is one which is being run as the consumers would run it if they knew how. A business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as one sees experts in it expressing crowds. One sees great crowds going to and fro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes like geniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired and inspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course--like tackling the high cost of living. What the Air Line League is for is to make the consumers of America--the all-class class, class-conscious--is to organize the consumers of America locally and nationally so that the comparative coöperation of crowds and geniuses and experts as in Childs' restaurants, can be assured in all lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the label of modern successful business life. The Air Line League definition of democracy would be this: A democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert attention of the men who make them. The triumph of America and of the other democracies during the war has been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait on them while they whip the Germans. What the Air Line League proposes to do (Further details later) is to arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of the Germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to keep this up. Is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our experts drop away--permanently drop away from waiting on crowds--are really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting on themselves in just the way the Germans said they would? What the Air Line League will stand for will be that experts and crowds can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war. Why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping the Germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves? XVI THE TOWN PENDULUM The Air Line League in its local, national and international branches will act as a Listening Machine. A Listening Machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward. Worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. When the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand. There are people in every town and in every local branch of the League who have what I like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. People in motion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass. People have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. When a man with a pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds of people--crowds of employers and crowds of workmen--swinging from one extreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comes up, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each other man's mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should go twice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end. In other words, The National Air Line League will act to bring extremes together--twice through the middle to once at each end--and local clubs will act as attention-swinging machines--as attention-forcing machines between classes. I might give an illustration: The National League in its central office in New York gets a report from the local branch in the town where Smith safety razors are made that the Smith Works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. The Central Office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with Smith blades every morning that the workmen and managers of the Smith factories, who are working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day in fighting with each other as to how Smith blades should be made for the public, and six hours a day in making the blades. The consumer is told by the League that he is paying for nine hours' work a day on his blades and only getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the Smith factories could be got to listen to each other and to work together the blades could be had for three cents less apiece. The League will then proceed through its local branch in the Smith town to arrest the attention of the Smith workmen and the Smith employers. It will suggest that they get each other's point of view and sit down very earnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everything the other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting together and being efficient and knowing how to make Smith blades. If necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employers at the Smith Works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of Smith blades throughout the country will shave themselves with their fathers' razors for three weeks. If the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed. A strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is undemocratic and unfair. A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair. In a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundred million people for the hundred million people is democracy. I employ this rather threatening illustration of the possible action of the League in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracy when experts and crowds act together--the fact that democracy can really be made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate and practical in dealing with autocratic classes, as autocracy can. But only two or three per cent of what the League in its local and national branches would really do would be like the illustration I have used. The power the League would have to do things like this would make doing them unnecessary. The regular work of the League would largely consist in accepting invitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for the purpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, or studies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to different types of factories. The way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth which organizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor which organizes to hold up the consumers, is for the consumers to organize. XVII THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE People are so much more apt to bear in mind in proportion, the power of an organization to be ugly, than they are its power not to need to be ugly--to get what it wants with people by combining with them instead of fighting them, that perhaps it might be well to dwell a moment on the fact that the power of the consumers of the country as organized in the Air Line League, to make it uncomfortable for predatory labor or predatory capital, will never be abused. If what an organization is for, is to put the soul and body of a people together it is compelled as a matter of course, to get its own way with the same quietness, dignity and power it is telling other people to. The first business of the Air Line League is going to be, to be believed in by everybody. The way to be believed in by everybody is for the League to do itself the thing that it talks about doing. If in this way the League soon gets itself believed in by everybody, the first thing people will notice about the Air Line League will soon be that it is an organization that can lick anybody in sight with its little finger. The next thing people will notice is that it never gets so low that it has to do it. The power of labor unions and employers' associations has frequently been abused because they have many of them organized their power for the express purpose of abusing it. It is highly unlikely that people will need to be afraid of the power of the Air Line League. An organization which exists for the express purpose of driving out of business people who get what they want by holdups, the entire activities of which are devoted to proving to people how much more holding out a hand gets for people in business than sticking out a fist, soon gets its fist trusted. If the Air Line League abuses its power it will commit suicide so fast that people will feel suddenly safe. * * * * * If I were writing a platform for the Air Line League, it might be put perhaps for all practical purposes in one sentence. Subject--War. Object--Stopping it. Predicate--What we believe about war. Verb--What we propose to do about what we believe about war. Adverb--How we propose to do it. Period--Peace. The main trouble with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column of belief. The spinal column of belief in the Air Line League--the gist of our platform--is this one sentence: PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET OTHER'S ATTENTION. Everything we believe and propose to do follows from this. The way to stop war is to advertise, to provide and set up in full sight and in working order before people who are trying to get what they want by war, a substitute for war which gets what they want for them quicker and better. The way to keep people who fight from fighting is to stand over them, advertise to them and dramatize to them how much more people can get by listening to each other. Then compel them to listen. We do not believe in fighting on the one hand nor in an anæmic and temporary thing like arbitration on the other. All that men really do in arbitration is to hire their listening done for them by other people. Listening which men were created to do themselves, which is done for them by others, only lasts a minute. The three plain spiritual brutal facts that capital and labor have to reckon with and conform to in dealing with human nature to-day are these: Disputes can not be fought out--not even by the people themselves. Disputes can not be arbitrated out by other people for them. All other people are for in a fight is to compel the fighters to listen to each other. Doing anything less than compelling the fighters to listen to each other, is visionary, cowardly, temporary and impracticable. The moment people stop fighting, begin listening to each other and begin feeling listened to, nobody can hire them to organize to fight each other. They organize to listen to each other. What the Air Line League is for in every nation, in every city, town and village where a branch is set up, is to organize people to listen to each other. I do not think any one is going to feel obliged to feel afraid of the power of a League, that puts daily before its own face, before everybody's face--before every letter it writes, and before everything it does, across its letter-head, this chapter in nine words. PEOPLE FIGHT BECAUSE THEY CANNOT GET EACH OTHER'S ATTENTION. XVIII HOW THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE WILL WORK Nine people out of ten who do wrong in business, do it because they feel that if they do not do the wrong to some one else, some one else will do the wrong to them. In the last analysis, some way of bringing about conscription for universal service in business is the only way in which we can be assured that the criminals and exploiters in any particular line of industry will not, at least temporarily, control and ruin the business. What the Air Line League would do practically would be to organize American business-men into a kind of "I Won't If You Won't" Club. A very large majority of men daily see that certain things ought not to be done. It is not right-mindedness in people that is needed so much as the organization of the right-mindedness so that those who are wrong can be crowded out. My idea of the general policy of the Air Line League would be to bring the public to coöperate with the best men in each industry in such a way as to drive the worst ones out. Probably from a publicity point of view the best way to do would be for the League to pick out the nine best factories in the country in which the laborers have a working understanding and a practical listening arrangement with their employers, and help the laborers in these nine factories advertise to other laborers in the country, at specific times and places, and to capital throughout the country, how they like it. One factory in ten, if necessary, could be selected for national discipline. A notorious factory could be picked out in which the laborers had the worst listening arrangement, and in which both the employers and employees were imposing upon each other to their own detriment and the detriment of their customers the most; and could be publicly disciplined by the National League acting through its local clubs everywhere. Cooperating with nine factories and disciplining one would be my idea of the best way to get results. All that would need to be done would be to make a list of all the industries in the country and keep the buyers of the country informed about them through the local Clubs. Industrial democracy is coming in this country one industry at a time. Each industry is going to work out its own salvation by emancipating and freeing the hands of the men who can run it best in the interests of the public--that is, run it with the lowest prices to the public, the highest prices to the wage earners, and a surplus for improvements, inventions and experiments in rendering its product of more service to all. I am not in favor of having capitalists try to convince labor as a class, nor having labor try to convince capital as a class. The skilled labor which has been convinced by capital should convince the others through the services of twenty thousand local Clubs, and skilled capital which has succeeded in being believed in by its labor will do the same in convincing other capital. XIX MAKING A RIGHT START It will be seen that the idea I have in mind might be imagined as a kind of civic federation club, a super-consumers' league, and a super-advertising club rolled into one. Rolling these three ideas into one is a temperament, and the men who are full of the vision of what can be done with them rolled into one, and of what is the matter with them if they are not rolled into one, must be the controlling powers in the new organization. The Civic Federation has been a safe plodding vague institution because it has not had a vigorous vision of itself, and has not been conducted by men who have a personal genius for conceiving and carrying out coöperation between capital and labor. It has been weak, theoretical, and full of generalization because it has not had the driving force that such a man as Schwab--some Schwab in publicity instead of steel--could have given it. The Consumers' League has been a useful, suggestive institution, and has done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness that puts things through. The new organizations--as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertising club--will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a national organized drive or vision of making men see together and act together, until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in every man's store, and the daily work of every man's life. Programs which have merely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at and generalized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated, melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consuming passion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. The selection and articulation of these men in all communities is all that is necessary. Everything is waiting and ready. First we will get the men together who have the fire. Then we will put fire under the boilers of the nation and turn the drive-wheels of a world. XX UP TO THE PEOPLE There are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in the way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of the country. 1. The consumer class is practically everybody. 2. The consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified with both capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its line of least resistance is to act fairly. 3. The interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. The consumer class as a class will want to pay extra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make things for it as possible. The consumer always pays for all quarrels, and anything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run can not but be good for the consumer in the long run. 4. In the last analysis, the consumers in any given industry, if duly organized as capital and labor are now, will not only have the disposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are making something that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have the fight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resort to choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturally and cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business of making goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in the business of making civil war. The nationally organized consumers will naturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off for fighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people to pay for. This national advertising campaign will be operated through national headquarters, coöperating with local branches organized in all manufacturing towns and cities. The national headquarters will act as a clearing house for the materials, facts, illustrations and demonstrations which the local centers collect and distribute and apply, proving that democracy works. Everything turns, in getting a thing done to-day, on seeing to it that the people who take it up are the people who can best get the attention of others. The consumer class cannot fail because they are the best people in the country to compel everybody to listen. The consumers are the best people to get everybody to listen because they are the best listeners. The consumers are the best people to start anything in America and keep it going because everybody in America cares what the consumers think, wants to be on good terms with them, and to please them, wants to be heard by them and wants to hear what they say. XXI THE WAY FOR A NATION TO SPEAK UP The Air Line League is not visionary. The people of this country have expressed an idea. They can do it again. Not long after the American part in the war was under way our Government had the idea--which it had not had at all when it began--that if America was going to do her part in defeating the Germans, or if we were to come anywhere near defeating the Germans, it would only be possible through an unexpected degree of self-sacrifice on the part of our people all day, every day until the war was over. Our people did not believe this idea. How could our Government get through to each man in America that winning the war depended on him? Get through to each woman and each child that something must be given up by each of us to defeat the Germans? The Government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the country needed them--every man of them--but it wanted also to inspire the people and to let the people see their power themselves. They wanted to teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of America could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the Germans. I fell asleep in Maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the Grand Central Station. I came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike Sunday we had during the war. A single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which I could have had for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me. I mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about human nature. I went over and stood and looked up Madison Avenue and looked down Madison Avenue. I had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and I found myself upon what seemed to me the loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place I had ever seen upon the earth--a corner of Madison Avenue. It seemed like a kind of vision to stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. I looked up at the sign on the corner. It really was Madison Avenue. It was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three thousand miles. It was as if a hundred million people had met me at the corner and told me--one look, one silence: "Here is this street we offer up that the will of God should go by. We are going to defeat the Germans with the silence on this street." I stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the invisible--a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were reaching, while I looked, across the country. I saw my people hushing a thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of Chicago, of San Francisco and New York like the aisles of churches. There was no need of church bells the first gasolineless Sunday, reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly--the way they do--that God was on the earth. One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the first gasolineless Sunday--five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying for a hundred million people, "God still reigneth." And twenty million little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had happened! I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into the long, white silent prayer of my people--and prayed with a hundred million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God. We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four full page ads in a thousand papers could do. Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people--in advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into prayers for a world--Mr. Garfield had few equals. To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country. To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight. Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people look out of their windows on streets--thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the Germans! We learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in America, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping Germany--was to interrupt people's personal daily habits. The way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it. The way for the American people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day. The moral from America's first gasless Sunday for the American people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. I whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the Air Line League. Our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to speak to them. Let a hundred million people do something to the people who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder what the hundred million people think. The true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it. To get an idea over to the Germans do something to them that will make them come over to us--come all the way over to us and extract it. The same principle is going to be applied next by the Public Group in industry. We will do something that will make them--capital and labor--say: "What do you mean?" Then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and find out. BOOK II WHAT EACH MAN EXPECTS OF HIMSELF G. S. L. TO HIMSELF I G. S. L. TO HIMSELF The most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are the things he feels he must say particularly to himself. In what I have to say about this nation I have stripped down to myself. Of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time. But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what they ought to do. A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to. I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody right. During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself. I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything happens to my mind or to my pocket book--in a railway station, in a trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom--wherever I am, I put it down--put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me. As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from this book to myself. On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has been written to express certain things a hundred million people want during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the hundred million people. I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I really believe it would be--at least in the main gist and spirit of it, like mine. Nearly every man in the hundred million people--in what we call helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready, except in his own strike, to write a book like this. I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can prove it and do something that will prove it. And the two great political parties in their coming conventions--one or both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with people. And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me. I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world. It is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a prayer or a cry. II IF I WERE A NATION Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look. The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is. Why should I propose, if I were a nation--just because I am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table--by a really simple thing like there being so many of me? I am human--a plain fellow human being--and if the United States would act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act, when it is really put up to him--forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple. All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it. Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to one human being being human--boil it down to a baby even--and what it would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on being human and close to essentials. And that is all there is to it. The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on Committees. * * * * * The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there. The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they would run the factory themselves. A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to ask him to come back to his desk. He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that a committee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away through jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back. The thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back. The crowds laughed. But the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy--had some imagination about each other and went to work. If I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why bother with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russian way to act an idea all out in order to see it?" In America we propose to come through to this same idea by being human, by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other's imaginations. The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern industrial life. These are the Mahogany Desk and the Cog. III WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the next row with his employee. The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing alongside him in the next row. To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what he does at his desk. A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious to a laboring man. In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row. His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he is and see the perspiration on his brow. The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course, but how can he make it look so? In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to workmen the way they work. Very soon now, everywhere--much harder than hoeing in the next row--with the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks hoeing their workmen's imaginations. The other main point in the book the hundred million people would write if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devote the second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttons on them directing machines, but to Cogs. The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and will have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a Cog feels about being a Cog. If a Cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watch the drivewheel and pistons--watch the smoke coming out of the smokestack and the water scooping up from between the rails--watch the three hundred faces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world booming by, and if the Cog could then say, "I belong with all this and I am helping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have all this!" And if the Cog could then slip back and go on just being a cog,--the cog would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be. He would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be in a democracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine. What is more, if a Cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out for some little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as a Cog one third easier and happier and three times as efficient. A man is created to be the kind of Cog that works best when it is allowed to do its work in this way. God created him when He drove in one rivet to feel the whole of the ship. It is feeling the whole of the ship that makes being a Cog worth while. The great work of the American people in the next four years is to work out for American industry the fate of the Cog in it. The fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing a Cog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its daily work--something that the rest of the Cog--the whole man in the Cog can have, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on his daily work. This is the second of the two main points the hundred million people would make in their book if they had time. These two main points--getting labor to see how a mahogany desk sweats--getting the mahogany desk to put itself in the place of a Cog, know how a Cog feels and what makes a Cog work--are points which are going to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are taken up in the right spirit and with a method--a practical human working method which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it will be impossible for people not to respond to it. I am not undertaking in this part of my book to make an inquiry as to what the right spirit is, or what the right method is that a hundred million people ought to adopt. I am a somewhat puzzled and determined person and I am instituting out loud a searching inquiry as to what I am going to do myself and what the principles and methods are that I should be governed by in doing my personal part, and conducting my own mind and judgment toward the movements and the men about me. To avoid generalizing, I might as well give my idea the way it came to me--one man's idea of how one man feels he wants to act when being lied to. I do not say in so many words, I _was_ lied to. I do not know. A great many people every day find themselves in situations where they do not know. The question I am asking of myself is, how can a man or a public take a fair human and constructive attitude when one does not know and cannot know for the time being, all that it is to the point to know? A stupendous amount of red-flagism, unrest and expensive unreasonableness would be swept away in this country if we all had in mind to use for ourselves when called for the following rules for being lied to. (Not that I am going to lumber people's minds up by numbering them as rules out loud. They are all here--in what follows--the spirit of them, and people can make their own rules for themselves as they go along.) IV RULES FOR BEING LIED TO (Charles Schwab or Anybody) ---- dropped in, in the rain the other night, and sat by my fireplace and said: "Charles Schwab is the Prince of Liars. He says one thing about labor and does another." He went on to say things he said other people said. There are two courses of action to take about Charles Schwab's being the Prince of Liars. One way is to expose what he says. The other way is to help him make what he says true. I would rather do what I can to help Charles Schwab practice what he preaches than to stop his preaching. Everything turns for the American people to-day on being constructive, on dealing with facts as they are, on using the men we have, and on getting the most out of the men we have. To get the most out of Charles Schwab throw around him expectation and malediction and then let him take his choice. Charles Schwab in saying what he says about the new spirit in which capital has got to deal with labor is rendering a great, unexpected, sensational and indispensable service to labor and to capital. It is a pity to throw this public confession of capital to labor, and in behalf of labor away. It would be a still greater pity to see labor itself throwing it away. If I could let myself be cooped up as a writer in any one class in this country to-day, and if it were my special business to take sides with labor, the thing I would try to do first with Charles Schwab, instead of undermining what he says and making what he says mean nothing--would be to coöperate with him--back him up--back him up with the public--back him up with the stockholders and the people in his mills, until he makes what he says mean three times as much. Then I would see to it if I could, that he says four times as much. I would try, if I could, to keep Charles Schwab steadily at it, claiming more and more for labor. Then catching up more and more to Charles Schwab, doing more and more, and compelling his partners to do more and more of what he says. Charles Schwab has fifty or a hundred thousand or so partners, of course--stockholders he has to educate. They have to be educated in public. He is not insincere because he has not educated them all in a minute. V GETTING ONE MAN RIGHT There are certain facts which make me believe in Schwab as an asset for the nation and for labor and capital both, that must not be thrown away. There are all manner of facts about Schwab and his mills which I do not yet know which I could look up and use, but the most valuable facts to use and use first, are facts anybody can get and get without looking up, by just sitting down and thinking. Getting one man right and being fair to one man is the way to begin to be fair to a nation. If Charles Schwab is what ---- says he is, if Charles Schwab is doing or winking while it is being done at the thing ---- says he is--he is an incredibly under-witted man--stupid about the public, about labor and about capital--and, what is the most reckless of all--stupid in behalf of himself. It is rather a hard nut to crack--Charles Schwab's being stupid. I cannot understand why people--why a man like ---- would apparently rather believe that Charles Schwab is stupid than to believe that there must be some other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard said about him. If what ---- says is true about Mr. Schwab, he is not only a stupid man but a ruined man. In the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothing will be able to keep Charles Schwab from to-morrow on, from being a stupendous tragedy as long as he lives, and a by-word after he is dead. The alternatives are: The assertions about Mr. Schwab's real attitude toward labor are not true. If true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for which all intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would be glad to allow. If true they are due to delegated authority. If a large organization does not hand over authority it is inefficient. If it does not make experiments with men and methods it is inefficient. If it does not make a certain proportion of mistakes in its experiments with men and methods its experiments are fake experiments. People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do things. VI GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean--what they are like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like. The quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. The quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature. These personalities to unlock a nation with--to make a hundred million men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like Charles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them. Intensive publicity extensively applied. Then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred million. Make true beliefs about picked out men--typical men we have thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives. If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men--if they can get fifty sample men right--they will then be able to use these fifty men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock team work with, with all the others. People will have something to work from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with employers and with workmen around them. Then we will have team work and civilization--we will have a democracy the Germans would like to be asked to belong to. VII ENGINEERS IN FOLKS The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The other facts than the facts about people--about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people. The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one another. We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off on their facts about one another. One of the first things business men are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by experts--by the general recognition and employment of experts in human nature--of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to one another. If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they really are, our economics in America will be as simple as a primer, before night. VIII THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R. January 19, 1920. Dined at the ----'s last night. Judge ---- was there. Two other lawyers. We sat after dinner and talked very late. Three lawyers are too many for a dinner. I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day. Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out being a lawyer backwards. The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them. My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started--a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards. (I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of--because everybody would see--a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.) Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous ad.--their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like--of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the United States Senate. It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards--two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights. You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you. My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it is worth--not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants. If I were hiring a man to help me get what I want out of other people and if I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the more practical thing for me to do. If I could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would be an expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun of myself, so that I could get myself into fairly good shape for other people to understand, it would be still more practical. I would soon find myself after the first few séances with the man I was hiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me--I would soon find myself having things done to me that would be so plain, so pointed, so sensible, so scientific and matter of fact and thorough that I would be able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man I met,--cut down to the quick and get what I wanted on any subject I took up, because nobody could fool me, because I couldn't even be fooled by myself. I do not know how long it is going to take but I do know that if the world is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who--either by doing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, have reformed themselves. My own personal observation is, so far, that when I set out to see things against myself I seem to need somehow, a great deal of assistance. In such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going to my friends, to people one goes out to dine with, I feel there ought to be some regular professional person one could go to, some more noble refined sort of spiritual hired man--make an appointment by telephone, go down to a room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plain matter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shape for one's fellow human beings to get on with. Then one could go out into the midst of the people and keel over a world. After one had hired some one to be a lawyer backwards to one and got used to it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let them put in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybody right and left. One would soon get so that one could learn something from everybody. One would take points even from relatives. The main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come at the start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing the truth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation. No amateur or friend could get anybody started. The only way to begin is to have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a long string of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business by seeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker and oftener than other people do. You hear of some especially good man who is being a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. You observe his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. Then you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth. * * * * * The trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they tell it, nobody pays for it. Most people neither take the truth nor anything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, the more they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it by wanting to pay for it. This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a regular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for going down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people in one's work. The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of himself and present him a world with the truth. This idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense. People should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an operation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order to have any one willing to let him live? We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that are done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal and intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open and operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men--hundreds of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be operated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten of the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated on. IX GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years is going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they really are. If I were writing a book for the next president to run for president on, one of the first things I would put into it would be a definite statement of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy they proposed to adopt to keep Labor and Capital from being off on their facts about each other. There are two policies to choose from. First Policy: Have Capital tell Labor what is the matter with Labor, and have Labor tell Capital what is the matter with Capital. (Results: Strikes heaped on lockouts and lockouts heaped on strikes.) Second Policy: Turn the whole truth-telling policy around. The way to make a truth count is to get the utmost possible attention to it. The way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have people one does not expect it from telling it. The way to advertise the sins of Capital is to have Capital tell them. Employers and capitalists can attract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are the matter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. And they not only can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while they are telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to change them. They can tell facts against themselves with one hand and change them with the other. Or they can begin changing them--begin getting labor to help them change them. If I had to save the world in a week or rather get assurance in a week that it could be saved, I would get all the people in it to agree for a year to read each other's papers. Have every man read two papers. We would start up for America the national Parallel Column Habit. Each man by himself daily putting his own little world and other people's world alongside until they got used to it, and then together. There is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for this nation. It is not a matter to argue about. It is a mere plain matter of fact in ordinary every day psychology. The veriest tyro in human engineering can see it,--that the way to get a truth noticed about Capital or Labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believed and acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it. Judge Gary could say some of the things Mr. Gompers is saying a great deal better than Mr. Gompers could. There is one thing I am going to do when I put this up to the people. I am not going to let them think I am putting it up to them as a Christian. The way to introduce the idea is to speak as a plain practical engineer in folks and in the way human nature works. I don't know as I would mind people having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if they liked, but I would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it as simple, plain, hard-headed publicity. The most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groups of people in America getting their facts right and getting them quick and dealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go around in America from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just got them--people the truths look prominent on. X THE FOOL KILLERS The gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequate universally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as a matter of course, for people's not being fooled about themselves. If people do not fool themselves nobody else can fool them. And they do not go around fooling others. The next thing employers and employees who are being fooled by themselves and who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is that their competitors in their own industry--the employers and employees in their own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are not taking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and better goods than they can. Things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks when people on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get together and look at the facts over each other's shoulders. All that is necessary is to get the thing started--looking at the facts over each other's shoulders. People who do not want to start to look at facts in this way should call in a specialist until they do. Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human nature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unless they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to. The world is not being run from day to day by the truth. It is run by what people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. extremists believe is the truth, which constitutes the important fact--the fact which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truth about Judge Gary's attitude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don't believe it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. The fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about themselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe what they want to about anybody. To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have obviously got to make provision for in modern American life, is practically a new profession--regular professional persons everywhere in all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and others of believing what they want to about themselves. XI THE WHISPERERS A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves. A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient type are whispering around to one another against themselves. One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up. But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout. The first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are whispering,--the whisperers on the other side--they will stop shouting to listen. The whole industrial situation narrows down to this,--might be put into two words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "Swap Whispers!" The tumult and the shouting die. It is with the whisperers, we will save the world. XII MR. DOOLEY, JUDGE GARY AND MR. GOMPERS The proposal that we have a new profession--a group of specialists to go to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost tragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in this way. In strained situations between people--situations in which one sees people getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed about themselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one--some one who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless laugh. To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or not, would be practical. Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola. And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God. I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time--just as Mr. Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home--stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room--if Mr. Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's Conference might have been saved. The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from the point of view of God or of common people, many of the men in it,--most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped. The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp--a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves. When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves. Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself. With Capital not yet grown up--not yet really capable (as the really mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative use of criticism,--incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a national dramatization,--a rather loud and theatrical acting out before an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty years, had made us suspect they were! For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation--called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word. There are three courses we can take in the Public Group now. We can try to discipline Capital and Labor into producing together by passing laws and heaping up embarrassments and penalties. We can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking them on to one another and letting them discipline one another. We can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keep quiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation and naturalness and deal with Capital and Labor as Lincoln would, by getting laughing and listening started. Then let them laugh at themselves. America should arrange to have Judge Gary, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Gompers get together on a desert island and face things out. A great deal of capital in this country--especially the best of it, is already seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has not wanted to believe. It is already seeing that it cannot carry off with Labor or with the Public any longer the idea of looking pure and noble, standing before people in a kind of eternal moral-Prince-Albert coat, one's hand in one's bosom, and with the same old pompous-looking face, without looking ridiculous. It is seeing that it would rather laugh at itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and economic, smile at its airs with Labor and the public, and lay them aside. If Capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, Labor will. If Labor does it, Capital will. Whichever side does it first, and does it best,--does it in the most human, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million people handing over to it the power and the leadership of the country. To whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the most fearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, will come the honor of the first victory. The first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is its victory over itself. People in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anything they want. XIII FOOLING ONESELF IN POLITICS The same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business in this country from now on--the pushing forward--the victory over all others in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves is going to be seen happening ten times over in politics. The leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanket political secret that covers all the other secrets of the coming conventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's next four years in The White House, is the thing that is going to be done by the people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled about themselves. One has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it. Any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at the beginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being a lawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyers backwards to ourselves, I am putting forward just a gay pleasant thoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue on which the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really begins to think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particular politicians. Everybody can pick out his own of course, but I am inclined to believe just at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nation knew of who was being a lawyer backwards--say in New York or London--a man who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up to fight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that most people in this country would like to take up a national collection for, have sent to him and done over at once, no matter what it cost, would be Henry Cabot Lodge. For six long weary months now, the main and international fact America and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called Henry Cabot Lodge is being fooled by himself. Ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,--their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in Washington can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips Henry Cabot Lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make Woodrow Wilson ridiculous, to set Woodrow Wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the World. But Henry Cabot Lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about Henry Cabot Lodge. He does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of Wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions Wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he--Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit Woodrow Wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it--every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration--into a great national stained-glass window for the Monroe Doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him--around Henry Cabot Lodge in the Window, like Saint George with the dragon, blessing him for saving Columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling League of Nations! It is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived. It would be of no use to argue--not even for a hundred million people to argue with Henry Cabot Lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea about the subject, but about Henry Cabot Lodge's idea of himself. So it came to pass--a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man magnificently obsessed--a man holding himself ready any minute of any day in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of Wilson to the precipice of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off.... Who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago--who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this? My own feeling is that the best possible use of Henry Cabot Lodge at the present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the psycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from now on, in the men they choose to get them. The ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are matched on every side in the world of politics. The personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow to be placed over them--the men they give power and command to, is the quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in people. What we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering and not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds of others. We are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. The man we are going to look past everybody for and pick to be a President or a Senator after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own party or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk line of the interests of all of us. XIV SWEARING OFF FROM ONESELF IN TIME Before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is established, and before very many offices have really been opened up where one can go in and have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having it poured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find it necessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, do any little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home. We nearly all of us have it in us--we the hundred million people--to be like Henry Cabot Lodge, on a less national scale, any minute. I say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while I write them down about Henry Cabot Lodge, that beautiful thought John Bunyan had, "Except for the grace of God" a wife, five friends and a sense of humor, there goes Gerald Stanley Lee! I have made myself say this over practically every day while writing this article (I have had to write it), and when I was in the same town Henry Cabot Lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the Senate, so pure and high and from the Back Bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dream about himself, I got taken up every time--I do not deny it--on the same monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then I would stand there (He is my own Senator) with his pass for The Senate in my pocket ... I would stand and watch him,--watch him walking through the lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought John Bunyan had about the murderer, "Except for the grace of God there goes etc., etc." Everybody fill in for himself! The essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature is that all the people who have any are very much alike. The best we can do about it--most of us--is to recognize the fact that in spite of the thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular arrangements, perhaps,--when something in us starts us up into being Lodges,--for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves in time. Here is Charles Evans Hughes for instance, who from the day he was born hates a Socialist from afar off,--a man who never had in his younger days perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing Charles Evans Hughes does before anybody can say Jack Robinson, the very first minute he reads in his paper that the New York Assembly has refused to give their seats to five Socialist members because they are Socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act of sympathy and protest on behalf of American Socialists from the last man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the narrow partisans of the Assembly itching with superiority, sweating with propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great Chamber in Albany, should take the Socialist members they had waved out of the room simply for belonging to the Socialist party, and conduct them back to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved individually unfit) of citizens of the United States and let them sit there as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people, who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselves enough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in Albany and everywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom they do not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth. Mr. Hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime to discourage Socialism as Henry Cabot Lodge is to discourage Woodrow Wilson, but the reason that the American people have been glad to have Charles Evans Hughes as Justice of the Supreme Court, the reason that they came within three inches of making him President of the United States is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate, conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not being deceived by Charles Evans Hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, for fighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sitting sternly on the Bench of the Supreme Court, against himself. Of course I am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior I and a hundred million other people are to Henry Cabot Lodge and to the way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being internationally fooled about himself. The special point I seek to make is that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out into millions of Lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our new national chance of our power as a people just now--just before the two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to The White House,--from whatever walk of life he comes,--a man who will have himself magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, or put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul--a man who will be the President of all the people everywhere all the time. When the members of The Bar Association of the City of New York who backed Mr. Hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who voted to back Mr. Hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally exposed to being fooled about themselves. Mr. Hughes and his followers were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes. In the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four years to justify democracy--to justify the power of the human spirit to be free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men of differing classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do it,--all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are, with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us in our sins. XV TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "An Article that Expected to Appear in the _Saturday Evening Post_." When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to the _Post_, and too late to change. The reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as I do) that he is getting the next eleven chapters for nothing--that they have not been paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the _Saturday Evening Post_ would approve or believe what I believe, or feel hurt if other people believe it. * * * * * The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself. It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret of increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, I say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having or exercising this power of self-criticism? If the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ were to come to me in a body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything, they--the readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ can do, and do now to acquire a technique--a kind of general amateur technique for not being fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at all, I have a faint hopeful idea--I feel it at this moment floating about my head--a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing off. I cannot believe that only this far--in a few pages or so about it, I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves, the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being fooled by himself--some one man all our people have a perfect passion,--almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make my idea alluring with him. Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States. It is true that other readers of the _Saturday Evening Post_ besides Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr. Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office--everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled. I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism. 1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself. 2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him. 3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration. XVI THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from Philadelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down--if all the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on platforms--what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions--if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope--what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do to Albert Sidney Burleson? The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington by ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel post to Austin, Texas, before night. I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker than if he were sent like a mere letter. Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can produce. Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to believe and who keeps fooled about himself. An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was placed by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he would save their money for the people instead of running their Post Office for them. This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception of what he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred million people could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suit himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being suited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left over that they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it. Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception of Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in thinking what other people's conceptions of him are. I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have it, please, deliver our letters for us. If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the compositor's hands on Thursday morning--should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose I would do? Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another column on Mr. Burleson. But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of the _Post_ are both going to get out of that extra column. I am going to do what I have done over and over before. Instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery, I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye. Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G. S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to be, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert Sidney Burleson will be over. Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr. Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson has about himself--four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet high all across the top. NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS. Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles of sunsets across the land. But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing for me. XVII THE MAN FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND POST OFFICES FAILED ON There is one thing I find when I am writing in a national magazine, trying to express myself on an idea I would like to believe but do not want to be fooled about, to four or five million people. I can not help feeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the very least anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousand who are being very much less fooled about me and about my idea than I am. Every day as I sit down to write one more chapter I try to catch up to them. Of course anybody can see I am not equal to it, but it does give one a chance, and it gives the book a chance before I am through, to have some sense in it. I cannot help thinking what Albert Sidney Burleson, who has a hundred million people to choose from, who has millions of people who are less fooled about him than he is, to catch up to every day, after all these seven long years they have put on him, ought to amount to. And what his Post Office ought to amount to. Of course we are all human and know how it is, in a way. We know that the first thought that would come to Mr. Burleson as to any man when he finds he is being criticized--that people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices are criticizing him and acting with him as if he were fooled about himself, is the automatic thought of self-defense. The second thought, which is what one would hope for from a General, even a Postmaster General, is that one resents it in oneself, that in an important opening for a man like being called foolish, one stops all one's thinking-works, and slumps ingloriously, automatically and without a quaver into self-defense. One would think a man who could get to be a Postmaster General would have the presence of mind when he says "Ouch!" to a nation that steps on his toes, to fix his face quick, smile and say, "Thank you! Thank you! I will see what there is in this!" Why should a man when God is blessing him as he does Mr. Burleson, even out of the mouths of his enemies, butt in in the way he does and interrupt truths with enough juice in them to make one Burleson, even one Burleson into twenty great men before a nation's eyes? A whole Cabinet--at least a whole Democratic Cabinet--could have been made time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsin great men are made out of, this country has wasted on Burleson in the past seven years. XVIII CAUSES OF BEING FOOLED ABOUT ONESELF I would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch on the causes and see how they can be removed. There seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation of psychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled about himself and needs to change his mind about himself. He is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things as they look to one kind or group of people--sees things in spotlights of personality, of place or time--all the rest black. Or he suffers from what one might call Lost-Mindedness--is always getting lost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. He either loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation the end, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means. The Habit of Flat-Thinking--of not thinking things out in four dimensions. The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for instance, it would be evaporated thinking. The Habit of Not Having any Habits--leaving out standardized elements in things and not being machine-minded enough. Automatism, or Machine-Mindedness. These six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end--in their final cause, I suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack of conscious control of the mind. XIX LOCO-MINDEDNESS Loco-mindedness in a Post Office consists in Mr. Burleson's running the Post Office for one kind of people--the kind of people he has noticed. There are supposed to be various kinds of people who use a Post Office. There are the people who write hundreds of letters a day--letters that are being waited for accurately and by a particular mail--like telegrams. There are people who sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, stick out their tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away and sweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks that they have put off six months. I have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running a Post Office exclusively for them as Mr. Burleson does, is a mistake. Even if they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mail one-tenth of one per cent of the letters. They may not care whether or not their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to in our Post Office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams in their first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt if they did. But millions of people in business who write scores or hundreds of letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a Post Office that is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, are hurt. In Northampton, Massachusetts, the letter from New York one used to receive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for a letter three hundred miles away--a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up to it, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile on after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon. I do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running a Post Office the way some women would run--or rather used to run a parlor store--with a bell on the door, there is something to be said for Mr. Burleson's philosophy. Nor do I deny that a store can be run and run successfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can save on each purchase. But the point is that if I go into a store in Northampton and cannot get the things I want there I go into some other store. I cannot go out from our Post Office in Northampton and go over and get what I want at some other Post Office a little further down the street. When I and people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices, say Aouch! Mr. Burleson says Pooh! Business correspondence between Washington and New York which used to be a twenty-four hour affair is now half a week. Letters thousands of men in New York used to receive in their offices in the early morning before interviews began and when they had time to read letters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are not received and placed before them for their answers until the late morning or early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even read them. So one's letters wait over a day--a night and a day, or until one gets back from Chicago. Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in America and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents? Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public? Who asked him to? It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars' worth of one's time. It is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car Post Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millions of people would make more money by not having their Post Office save money for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people's money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not. The first cause of Mr. Burleson's being fooled about himself is that he is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the Post Office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of America. His mind is jet black about all the rest. Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business into the ground by noticing only one kind of people. XX FLAT-THINKING THINKING IN ME-FLAT What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do their thinking in four dimensions. The thickness is what I think. The breadth is what other people think. The length is what God thinks. Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I think other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put them together as well as I can, the result is--who I am and what I amount to. Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to God in the "I think" thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think" breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to God at all. The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other people think and skips right past them straight to God. Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate business idea--its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped--if Mr. Burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand Post Offices think. There have been days--with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post Office like this: [Illustration: |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| |-----| |-----| U.S. ME The P.O. People] XXI LOST-MINDEDNESS OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means. To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things together. I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it. It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means. Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country--like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people. As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents. In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. The country pays for it for him. America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers. The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together--with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget. Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like the _Literary Digest_ be fined for it? Why fine the readers of the _Review of Reviews_ or _Collier's_ or _Scribner's_ for living in one place rather than another? I like to think of it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the _Youth's Companion_. Every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it. A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul--what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell--that his soul has got to live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on. As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation. There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the nation--some place where three million people act as one. It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it. And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought, holds a meeting once a week together like the _Saturday Evening Post_, like _Collier's_--dismisses two or three million people from everywhere who get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go home and read the _Hampshire County Gazette_. It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it--to lose the end in the means, I have to mention it--not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but in behalf of all of us. XXII I had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique in self-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand for a bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing with Mr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democrat for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called a nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us, I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use of Mr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's a Democrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds of thousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like any longer. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personal fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he constitutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of the sins of all of us. We are all concerned. We all want to know. It is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the reason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people so through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, and night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself. But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves, when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do? XXIII SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see them in other people. I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may have moments of being like me in this. Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a rather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing how unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in ourselves. Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article, but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase them back to their own homes from the Post Office. There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled about ourselves. And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance, when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete exhibit of what is the matter with American business. I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of men who have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three thousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Offices could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to their offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business to produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tell them anything--will just sit there all glazed over with complacency cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful shining porcelain-lined bathtubs. * * * * * It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling these men--if some warning could be given to us not to bother with them--if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up so that one could tell them at sight--by their heads looking the way they are--by their being bald--by their having brilliantly non-porous heads--just nice perfectly plain shiny knobs of not-thinking. One could tell them across a room. But the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, I know, the mind the most brilliantly open--which fairly glistens inside with eagerness, glistens outside, too. The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous mind, is to try gently--changing it, and see what happens. XXIV MACHINE-MINDEDNESS The various forms I have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end--one cause which we have to recognize and avoid--automatism, the lack of conscious control of the mind--letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's head. The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled about themselves, is machine-mindedness. A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how perfect he is. Everybody knows how it is. XXV NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful in business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who make people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and even babies--have all been brought to pass by convincing other human beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to themselves. I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything you do to most people that makes them different, improves them. But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people more and more and better--things they want already. The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask them to do. On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economic crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in business are especially called for--a time when practically millions of people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, I have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them awkward, can do to get them and to make them work. BOOK III TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY I BIG IN LITTLE A nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting a world to want it to get--its own way. I am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way and deserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because being human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same stuff--out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people's, I have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if I cut down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, will probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody. I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, a technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature as it were--a technique for getting and deserving to get one's own way. I pick out one man, to try out the principle on, because it is safer and fairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked to risk, on one man first. Because I happen to know him better than I know anybody else, and because my experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, I have picked out myself. When the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know him will believe it and try it. Then we will try it on one hundred men one after the other. Then as I have been working it out in this book, try it on the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundred million people. Then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled by ourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, we would have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselves felt in political conventions, making themselves felt in The White House and even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue by the great I AM, or I CAN'T, or I WON'T tucked under the come of all of us--called The United States Senate. II CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF BRAIN TRACKS My experience is that the first thing for me to attend to and know, in getting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discover and open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my main dependence on their old ones. Getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation--the brain track situation in one's own mind at a particular time, and in other people's, as it really is. In other words, the way to get one's way with people is to know and extend one's consciousness down deeper into one's subconsciousness in one's own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawing on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, one soon makes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the minds of others. I do not precisely know this, of course, because I have never practiced having my own way with other people as much as I would like, but my theory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, in speaking for all of us to believe this: The way for a man to do who wants to get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepen his consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly in soul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himself than others. Then he gets his way with others because everybody wants him to, almost without knowing it or anybody's else knowing it. A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. The indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new brain tracks and old ones together--is the secret of getting one's way for all of us, whether with Nature or with one another. Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other people and with ourselves. This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most of us--what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what people can do to get them. III WHAT IS CALLED THINKING The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common, is that nobody wants them. The way people really act--even the best of us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is as if they had no place to put them. The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us. In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago. The first fact is this: Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of ears--one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves and really do their living with. I first came on them--on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be happening to my audiences--what they seemed to be doing to themselves, but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me. I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them--on outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant. As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age. The trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. In any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to mixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do anything else. I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would not be any worse--the psychological clang of it--than what they do do. It would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall. What is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still more true of words in books. If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding what I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think, when they think, when they think they think. (For every time I say "they" in the last paragraph will the reader kindly read "we.") If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and sidling lines--printed for people the way they are going to read it, if the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passages or could take nice little airy swoops or flights--if every line on a page could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through people's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so. If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could be more responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson's mind does when he reads it--that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the type what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls--even Mr. Burleson himself would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my book, he was really carrying away from it. If in Mr. Burleson's own personal copy of this book, I were to have this next chapter about him that is going to follow soon--especially the sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically not read at all--printed in invisible ink and there were just those long pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to get them--so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would probably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for in ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not. IV LIVING DOWN CELLAR IN ONE'S OWN MIND What I saw a little three-year-old girl the other day doing with her dolly--dragging its flaxen-haired head around on the floor and holding on to it dreamily by the leg, is what the average man's body can be seen almost any day, doing to his mind. One feels almost as if one ought to hush it up at first until a few million more men have made similar practical observations in the psychology and physiology of modern life when one comes to see what our civilization is bringing us to--what it really is that almost any man one knows, including the man of marked education--take him off his guard almost any minute--is letting his body do to his mind. A very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has no origination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using his body. With the average man one meets, his body wags his brain when he talks, as a dog wags his tail. The tongue sends its roots not into the brain but into the stomach. (Probably this is why Saint Paul speaks of it so sadly and respectfully as a mighty member--because of its roots.) The main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in being original or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries to bully him when he tries it. The body has certain tracks it has got used to in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and then tumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose--all this blessed meat we carry around on us, to let us think any more than can be helped. I saw some wooden flowers in a florist's window on The Avenue the other day--four or five big blossoms six inches across--real flowers that had been taken from the edge of a volcano in South America--real flowers that had chemically turned to wood--(probably from having gas administered to them by the volcano!)--and I stood there and looked at them thinking how curious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead of going out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in that way. Then I turned and walked down the street, watching the souls and bodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them as one looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and I could not help seeing, of course, no one can--what their bodies--thousands of them--were apparently doing to their souls. After all the wooden flowers were not really much queerer for flowers than the people--many of them--were for people. From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch what they are letting their bodies do to them. Left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete mixer for pouring one's soul in with some Portland Cement and making one's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them in one--just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep things moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifying spiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one's spiritual experiences on to reels and nerves that keep going on forever. There is ground for belief (and this is what I am trying to have a plan to meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talking with people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds so unsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. What we really need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a kidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certain type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is not really listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him. The soul--the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind, claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. Then he automatically defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more can be said. What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his machine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and automatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him to listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want to let him hear. Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years--say for twenty or thirty years--the inevitable happens and one soon sees why it is that the majority of people--even very attractive people one goes around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of being fond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They go about--even the most elegant of them--thinking with their stomachs. Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were fresh from heaven--as if they had just been caught passing from the music of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below. V BEING HELPED UP THE CELLAR STAIRS Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people. We realize--whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs. The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it--the question of how other people--a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation--these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it. The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds and re-routing and recoördinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in London, for people in the way of reëducating and recoördinating their bodies. I took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading an article about it by Professor James Harvey Robinson in the _Atlantic_, Mr. Alexander's quite extraordinary book, which after starting off with an introduction by Professor John Dewey, of Columbia, leads one into a new world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world. I am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledge of that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a human being, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control of it and of the helpless civilization in which it still is trying to live, are going to be found before many years to be in the brain and the hand of Mathias Alexander. It is hard to keep from writing a book about him when one thinks of him, but as I cannot write a book about him in the middle of this one, I am going to touch for a moment on the principle Alexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, and then try to apply the same principles to breaking through new brain tracks for a nation. What Mr. Alexander does with people I have already hinted at in what I have said about our having a new profession in America--the profession of being a lawyer backward. Of course Mr. Alexander could not say of himself that he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he does practically the same thing in his field that a lawyer backward would do. He makes it his business to change people's minds for them instead of petting their minds and he does the precise thing I have in mine except that he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics--to a single first relation in which a man's mind needs to be changed--the relation of a man's mind to his body. If a man's mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed about many other things in which it is wrong. The first thing a man's mind should be changed about usually is his body. This is the principle upon which Mathias Alexander in the very extraordinary work he is doing in London, proceeds. When you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials or shown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can get no matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at the appointed time in Alexander's office, or studio, or laboratory, or operating room--whatever the name may be you will feel like calling it by, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. Then he takes you in his hands--his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins--quite literally begins reshaping you like Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably. Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you--just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, X-rays down through you with a look--through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet. Then he lays hands on you once more and works and you feel him working slowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to you softly not to help him, not to butt in soul and body on what he is doing to them with your preconceived ideas--ideas he is trying to cure you of, of what you think you think when you are thinking with what you suppose is your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose is your body. In other words, he gives you most strenuously to understand that the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mind or what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. As it is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with your mind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting on together, Alexander's first lessons with you you find are largely occupied in getting your mind--your terrible and beautiful mind which does such queer things to you, to back away. What he really wants of you is to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain new psycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if you insist on slipping yours in each time instead. So he keeps working on you, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as much like putty--a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. Then when you have removed all obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind--and will stop preventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely new position and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standing and walking, you have never dreamed you could have before. This goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk out of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like somebody else--like somebody else that has been lent to you to be--somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life. Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before--even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you. It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a putting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness--as they should be, in that he is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself. I have been reading over this chapter and all I can say to my readers is, as a substitute for leaving it out, that I hope it sounds to them like a fairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapter in a book--I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are. The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracks and what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts can be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits. VI REFLECTIONS ON THE STAIRS It is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or southwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the northeast corner toothache is over. (These figures or rather points of the compass may not be literally right, but the fact that they point to is.) Nearly every man has had things happen to him not very different from this. You have a bad lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that you are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, calls your attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the other side of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there and your right knee will get well. What seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and more subtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either all or part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageable illusions about things with which we are supposed to be--if anybody is--the most intimately acquainted. One keeps hearing every few days almost, lately, of how people's inner organs are not doing what they think they are, of how very often--even the most important of them have been mislaid--a colon for instance being allowed to do its work three inches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner of other mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanical inconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when they move about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightest idea. The sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it is happening and how and why are full--in many people of glaring and not infrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones. All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes--all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he is off on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, because the first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have been assigned to him to know about personally and attend to personally he is letting himself be fooled with every day. A man who is being fooled near by, regularly all the time, fooled from the sole of his poor tired feet to the poor helpless nib at the top of him which he calls his head, is naturally hard to argue with about the immortality of the soul, or the League of Nations. Reforms and reformers which overlook these facts must not be surprised if they seem to some of us a little superficial. Of course the moral of all this is--as regards changing society or persuading and convincing persons, get down to first principles. Stop flourishing around with fine and noble philosophies and phrases on the surface of men's souls. See that their souls and their bodies are both intricately divinely stupendously blended together and get at them both together. If you are arguing with a man and do not make much headway, stop arguing with him. Cut out his tonsils. Or it may be something else. Or send him to Alexander and have his back ironed out, if necessary so that his tonsils will work as they are. Then argue with him afterwards and quote Shakespeare and the Bible to him, stroke his soul and see how it works. VII HELPING OTHER PEOPLE UP THE CELLAR STAIRS It is getting almost dangerous to talk to me. I lay violent hands on people, when they disagree with me and send them to Alexander. Everybody, anybody, my wife, my pastor, every now and then an editor, whole shoals of publishers.... I think what it would be like for us all, to ship The United States Senate in a body to him. On every side it keeps coming to me that the short, quick and thorough way for me to install my idea, to get my idea started and to install my idea of new brain tracks, new ways for this nation to get its way and deserve its way, is to have people the minute they don't agree with me, alexandered, at once. Here is this book for instance. The proper course for me to take to get a man to accept the new brain track in it, is to send him a copy of the book to say yes or no to. Then if he does not agree with me and I am tempted to argue with him, I will drop the matter with him at once, send him to Alexander, have Alexander set him in a chair, tap him on the back, poke him thoughtfully, psycho-mechanically in the ribs, unlimber his mind from his body, untangle him psycho-physically, put him in shape so that he can think free, listen without obsessions and mental automatism--that is, get him so that he can set his mind on a subject instead of setting his stomach on it, and then I will ask him to read my book again. In the meantime, of course, I should be going to Alexander and rewriting the book. By the time the gentleman was cured I would have a cured book to send him, we would both be in a position to believe what we don't want to believe, to listen to each other indefinitely and we would be in a position to do team work together at once and take steps to install new brain tracks for nations immediately. This brings me to the two horns of my dilemma. In installing new brain tracks for nations it is not practicable for me to take up people who disagree with me--say a hundred million people or so and ship them to Alexander in London and have them done over by Alexander. What is the best possible substitute arrangement that can be made for having a whole nation put into perfect psycho-mechanical shape by Alexander so that it will take the first new brain tracks kindly? The principles for giving people new brain tracks toward their own bodies which Mr. Alexander has so successfully demonstrated, are the same principles which I have been trying for a long time to express and apply to ideas and to all phases of the personal and the national life. Where I have been studying for years as an artist, the art of changing my own mind and other people's about ideas, of working out new spiritual experiences for myself and other people, Alexander in his workroom in London has been engaged in changing people's minds toward their bodies, in giving men new brain tracks toward their own bodies. It is obvious that these principles--Alexander's principles for installing new physical experiences and mine for installing new spiritual ones, must be if they are fundamental or are worth anything, the same. My own feeling is that if anybody can go to Alexander and can be done over by Alexander personally in London that is the best thing to do. But it is inconvenient for a hundred million people to crowd into Alexander's office in London, and it is comparatively convenient and roomy for a hundred million people if they want to, to crowd into a book. Before giving the principles, I would like to state the question--What are the steps we all can use--those of us who are not Alexander--to install new brain tracks in this nation? The principles upon which, as it seems to me, new brain tracks for this nation should be installed and which I would like to deal with are these: First. Get people first to recognize with regard to new brain tracks, the fact that they do not want them. Second. Get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem to be able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, the things they want. People go to Alexander and ask him for new brain tracks. Something corresponding to this has to be got from people before offering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book. Third. Pick out the people next to the people the proposed new brain tracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people best calculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosen up ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that something can be put in. The fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts against ourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let us have them. VIII HELPING A NATION UP THE CELLAR STAIRS The Air Line League is a national organization of millions of American men and women belonging to all classes and all social and industrial groups, who become members of the League for the express purpose of asking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrial relations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by their subconscious and automatic selves. Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another. The best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them. The people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way. The best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without any one's saying anything about it. This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By the act of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a class, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts--facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves. Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves? IX TECHNIQUE FOR LABOR IN GETTING ITS WAY The best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on--the people from whom nobody expects it. In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need to read. My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of Harold Bell Wright's novels. But if I heard to-morrow morning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright's last novel, I would read it before I went to bed. Or Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers. Any common experience which I heard in the last few weeks Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers had had, a novel by Harold Bell Wright or anything--I would look into, a whole nation would look into it--the moment they heard of it--at once. The first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for America is to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off. Even an idea nobody would care about one way or the other becomes suddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we would not think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us to believe it. Suppose for instance that next Fourth of July (I pick out this day for what I want to have happen because I have so longed for years to have something strong and sincere said or done on it that would really celebrate it)--suppose for instance that next Fourth of July, beginning early in the morning all the Labor leaders of America from Maine to California, acting as one man broke away--just took one day off, from doing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them--suppose they proceeded to do something that would attract attention--something that would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies--just for twenty-four hours? Suppose just for one day all the Labor leaders instead of going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bad employers and how bad employers are in this country would devote the Fourth of July to advertising a few good ones? Then suppose they follow it up--that Labor do something with initiative in it--the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, something unexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something that would make a nation look and that a hundred million people would never forget? What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this country, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new national crusade for four weeks--if the fifty best laborers in the Endicott Johnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go in a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation of telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, an agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like and how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven by sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and their Bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of facts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of themselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them. All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation in America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that either of them--either capital or labor--is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides themselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborers about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move together to show it. This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scale like the Red Cross to arrange for and do. The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the fellow human being--employer or employee. The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America in shame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange a national advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were in this country soon, of team work in industry and of how--to anybody who knows the facts--it carries everything before it. The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen from all over the country who stand up for employers. Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into competence. The best substitute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other's shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows. X TECHNIQUE FOR CAPITAL IN GETTING ITS WAY I should hate to see Capital, in the form of a National Manufacturers' Association, realizing the desperateness of the labor situation and that something has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinking off privately and confessing its sins to God. I would rather see a confession of the sins of Capital toward Labor for the last forty years and of its sins to-day made by Capital in person to Labor. God will get it anyway--the confession--and it will mean ten times as much to Him and to everybody if He overhears it being given to Labor. Of course Labor has been doing of late wrong things that it is highly desirable should be confessed and naturally Capital thinks that a good way to open the exercises would be with a confession from Labor to Capital to the effect that Labor admits that Labor like the Trusts before it had had moments or seizures in which it has held up the country, broken its word, betrayed the people and acted the part the people hate to believe of it--of the bully and the liar. Not only the Capital Group but the Public Group feel that a confession from Labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to be desired. But the practical question that faces us is--supposing that what is wanted next by all, is a confession from Labor, what is the practical way from now on, to get Labor to confess? Some supposing might be done a minute. Suppose I have a very quick temper and five sons and suppose the oldest one has my temper and is making it catching to the other sons, what would any ordinary observer say is the practical course for the poor wicked old father to take with the boy's temper of which he has made the boy a present? My feeling is when my boy loses his temper with me at dinner for instance in the presence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a Bible feebly out at him and saying to him, "He that keepeth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city," would be rude. The way for me to give him good advice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while he is losing his, and keep mine. If Capital wants to get its way with Labor--and thinks that the way to begin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that has happened, is with a vast national spectacle of Labor confessing its sins, the most practical thing to do is for Capital to give Labor an illustration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works. The capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconscious or automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable of confiding to each other behind locked doors that the one single place, extreme labor to-day has got its autocracy from, is from them. Labor is merely doing now with the scarcity of labor, the one specific thing that Capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years with the scarcity of money and jobs. It seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for Capital to try to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking off and confessing its sins to God. Labor will slink off and confess its sins to God, too. That will be the end of it. It may be excellent as far as it goes, but in the present desperate crisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of society and the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must be admitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our all going out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessing our sins to God, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our all standing up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in the eye and confessing our sins to one another. I am not saying this because I am a moral person. I am not whining at thirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please to them and telling them that this is what they ought to do. I am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in human nature and in what works with human nature and saying that when capitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their facts about themselves and about other people, when they propose to be practical and serious, and really get their way with other people they are going to begin by being imperfect, by talking and acting with labor, like fellow-imperfect human beings. In the new business world that began the other day--the day of our last shot at the Germans, the only way a man is going to long get his way is to be more human than other people, have a genius for being human in business, for being human quick and human to the point where others have talent. XI PHILANDERING AND ALEXANDERING By philandering I mean fooling oneself with self-love. By Alexandering I mean going to one's Alexander whoever he or she or it is, some one person--or some one thing, which either by natural gift or by natural position is qualified to help one to be extremely disagreeable to oneself--and ask to be done over--now one subject and now another. Nearly all men admit--or at least they like to say when they are properly approached, or when they make the approach themselves, that they make mistakes and that they are poor miserable sinners. Everybody is. They rather revel in it, some of them, in being in a nice safe way, miserable sinners. The trouble comes in ever going into the particulars with them, in finding any particular time and place one can edge in in which they are not perfect. This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and illustrates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and other people's for new brain tracks--another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way. There are various Alexandering stages in the technique of not being fooled by oneself. Self-criticism. Asking others to help--one's nearest Alexander. Self-confession to oneself. Self-discipline. Asking others to help. The way to keep from philandering with one's own self-love or with one's own group or party--is to look over the entire field--the way one would on other subjects than being fooled by one's own side, strip down to the bare facts about oneself and facts about others for one's vision of action and fit them together and act. In getting one's way quickly, thoroughly, personally--_i.e._, so that other people will feel one deserves it and will practically hand it over to one, and want one to have it, the best technique seems to be not only to utilize self-criticism or self-confession, as a part of getting one's way, but self-confession screwed up a little tighter--screwed up into self-confession to others. I need not say that I am not throwing this idea out right and left to employers with any hopeful notion that it will be generally acted on offhand. It is merely thrown out for employers who want to get their way with their employees--get team work and increased production out of their employees before their rivals do. It is only for employers who want their own way a great deal--men who are in the habit of feeling masterful and self-masterful in getting their own way--who are shrewd enough, sincere enough to take a short-cut to it, and get it quick. XII THE FACTORY THAT LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT There is a man at the head of a factory not a thousand miles away, I wish thirty thousand banks and a hundred million people knew, as I know him--and as God and his workmen know him. Some thirty years ago his father, who was the President of the firm, failed in health, lost his mind slowly and failed in business. The factory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the big house to a little one--one in a row of a mile of little ones down a side street, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit the business stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walked back and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the street he lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought up to own. In not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earned and took the right to be the President of the business he had expected to have presented to him. Eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. His strikes seemed uglier than other people's and singularly hopeless--always with something in them--a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying in vain to make out. One day when the worst strike of all was just on--or scheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk about five o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past his windows, he called in Jim--into his office. Jim was a foreman--his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteen years old. He had lived in the house next door to Jim's and every morning for years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tin dinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earth and of what they were going to do when they were men. The President had some rather wild and supercilious conversation with Jim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in Jim's dismissing the President from the interview and slamming himself out of the door, only to open it again and stick his head in and say, "The trouble with you, Al, is you've forgotten you ever carried a dinner pail." The President lay awake that night, came to the works the next morning, called the four hundred men together, asked the other officers to stay away, shut himself up in the room with the four hundred men and told them with a deep feeling, no man present could even mistake or ever forget, what Jim had said to him about himself--that he had forgotten how he felt when he carried a dinner pail, told them that he had lain awake all night thinking that Jim was right, that he wanted to know all the things he had forgotten, that they would be of more use to him and perhaps more use than anything in the world and that if they would be so good as to tell him what the things were that he had forgotten--so good as to get up in that room where they were all alone together and tell him what was the matter with him, he would never forget it as long as he lived. He wanted to see what he could do in the factory from now on to get back all that sixteen-year-old boy with the dinner pail knew, have the use of it in the factory every day from now on to earn and to keep the confidence the sixteen-year-old boy had, and run the factory with it. Jim got up and made a few more remarks without any door-slamming. Fifteen or twenty more men followed with details. This was the first meeting that pulled the factory together. In those that followed the President and the men together got at the facts together and worked out the spirit and principles and applied them to details. The meetings were held on company time--at first every few days, then every week, and now quite frequently when some new special application comes up. Nine out of ten of the difficulties disappeared when the new spirit of team work and mutual candor was established and everybody saw how it worked. No one could conceive now of getting a strike in edgewise to the factory that listened to Jim. I am not unaccustomed to going about factories with Presidents and it is often a rather stilted and lonely performance. But when I first went through this factory with the President that listened to Jim, stood by benches, talked with him and his men together, felt and saw the unconscious natural and human way conversations were conducted between them, saw ten dollars a day and a hundred dollars a day talking and laughing together and believing and working together, it did not leave very much doubt in my mind as to what the essential qualities are that business men to-day--employers and workingmen--are going to have and have to have to make them successful in producing goods, in leading their rivals in business and in getting their way with one another. Naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, I would like to see Capital take what is supposed to be its initiative--be the side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own class, which it thinks Labor ought to. Whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-discipline and the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itself first, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and gratitude and partiality and enthusiasm of the American people for a hundred years. * * * * * The first thing for a man to do to get his way with another man--install a new brain track with him that they can use together, is to surprise the man by picking out for him and doing to him the one thing that he knows that you of all others would be the last man to do. It looks as if the second thing to do is to surprise the man into doing something himself that he knew that he himself anyway of all people in the world, is the last man to do. First you surprise him with you. Then with himself. After this of course with new people to do things, both on the premises, the habit soon sets in of starting with people all manner of things that everybody knew--who knew anything--knew the people could not do. This is what the President of the factory not a thousand miles away accomplished all in twenty-four hours by not being fooled about himself. He took a short cut to getting what he wanted to get with his employees, which if ten thousand other employers could hear of and could take to-morrow would make several million American wage earners feel they were in a new world before night. * * * * * The thing that seemed to me the most significant and that I liked best about the President of the Company who listened to Jim, was the discovery I made in a few minutes, when I met him, that unlike Henry Ford, whom I met for the first time the same week, he was not a genius. He was a man with a hundred thousand duplicates in America. Any one of a hundred thousand men we all know in this country would do what he did if he happened on it, if just the right Jim, just the right moment, stuck his head in the door. Here's to Jim, of course. But after all not so much credit to Jim. There are more of us probably who could have stuck our heads in the door. The greater credit should go to the lying awake in the night, to the man who was practical enough to be inspired by a chance to quit and quit sharply in his own business, being fooled by himself and who got four hundred men to help. Incidentally of course though he did not think of it, and they did not think of it, the four hundred men all in the same tight place he was in of course, of trying not to be fooled about themselves, asked him to help them. Of course with both sides in a factory in this way pursuing the other side and asking it to help it not to be fooled, everything everybody says counts. There is less waste in truth in a factory. Truth that is asked for and thirsted for, is drunk up. The refreshment of it, the efficiency of it which the people get, goes on the job at once. XIII LISTENING TO JIM (A Note on Collective Bargaining) I would like to say to begin with that I believe in national collective bargaining as it is going to be in the near future--collective bargaining executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such spirit as shall be determined by the facts--the practical engineering facts in human nature and the way human nature works. I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about human nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner of powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it. A book entitled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man who had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,--a man whose ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. A symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands would really count more. Most candid people would admit this as a principle. The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in National Associations of Employers and national associations of workingmen in labor unions. Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very superficial decisions. Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong about half the time. The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other people have it. When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when I am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937 is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied 2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word. Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by it a good many years. It is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do I suppose, at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,--especially in the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to let ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer. The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin, dealing at particular times and in particular places with particular human beings. In the factory that listened to Jim, no order from a national Collective Bargaining Works could have begun to meet the situation as well as Jim did and the factory did. If Jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from Indianapolis, or if the President of the Company had had a telegram giving him national instructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to? I believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, in certain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. But the causes of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealt with where the persons are. The more personal things to be done are, the more personally they have to be attended to. If the women of America were to organize a Childbirth Labor Union, say next Christmas--and if from next Christmas on, all the personal relations of men and women and husbands and wives--the stipulations and conditions on which women would and would not bear children were regulated by national rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders from Indianapolis, Indiana, it would be about as superficial a way to determine the well-being of the sexes, as foolish and visionary a way for the female class to attempt to reform and regulate the class that has been fenced off by The Creator as the male class, as the present attempt of the labor class to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personal relation of individual employers and individual workmen and substitute for it collective bargaining from Indianapolis. There is one thing about women. It would never have occurred to the women of this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing a thing nationally that they could not even do at home. For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance and from outside. The whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead, mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long going to be willing to put up with it. As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,--as the more individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the more individual and personal--that is to say, the more alive it is. All live men with any gusto or headway in them, or passion for work, all employers and employees with any headway or passion for getting together in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in the sexual relation and for the same reasons. If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America get together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America get together in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a father or mother, would go? Only anæmic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the conditions of their lives together. And in twenty years only anæmic employers and anæmic employees and workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of determining and of making effective what was right. XIV THE NEW COMPANY I met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the front of it--half a street away, American Experience Co. I wanted to get in. Of course it turned out to be as it got nearer, The American Express Co., but I couldn't help thinking what it would mean if we had an equally well-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes--boxes people have got out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people are mixed up with. (Fixes were called boxes when I was a boy. We used to speak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box.) The Air Line League proposes to be The American Experience Company--a big national concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, so that unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them without having to take their time and everybody else's time around them to go through them all over again alone and just for themselves. Of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who will miss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing it all over again in their own home factory for themselves. But there are many million people with sense in this country--people as good at making sense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, and the Air Line League proposes that to these people who have the sense, when they want them, when they order them, experiences shall be shipped. And when they get orders--they can ship theirs. If some of the experience the Labor unions in England have had and got over having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and taken over by the Americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the Air Line League or American Experience Company, if it were existing this minute, could bring home to people what they want to know about what works and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them--at once. Experiences--or date of experiences shipped from England would not only make a short-cut for America in increasing production in this country, lowering the cost of living, but would give America a chance in the same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and to turn the fate of a world. What the Air Line League proposes to do is to act--particularly through the Look-Up Club--as the American Shipping Experience Company. XV THE FIFTY-CENT DOLLAR This book is itself--so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of the Look-Up Club. The thing the book--between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper--a kind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of The Air Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in ten thousand cities--capital, labor and the consumer listening to each other--reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting out together the great daily common interest of all of us. The Look-Up Club, acting as it does for the three social groups that make up The Air Line League and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates primarily as a Publicity or Listening organization. I might illustrate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and how it would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particular idea--an idea on which people must really be got together in America before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all. Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up every morning saying:-- "The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are going to have our turn now. Nobody can stop us." Result: Under-production and the Fifty-Cent Dollar. The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the American employer is working for something besides money--that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job--the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together. I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports--men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like. If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face of Labor toward Capital--the face of this country toward the world and toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week. Suppose I propose to take one of these men and write about him until everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would be the first thing I would come upon? The first thing I would come upon would be a convention. It is one of the automatic ideas or conventions of business men--not to believe in themselves. XVI THE BUSINESS MAN, THE PROFESSIONAL MAN, AND THE ARTIST Why is it that if a professional man or an artist does or says a certain thing--people believe him and that if a business man does or says precisely the same thing--most business men are suspicious? When I say in the first sentence of an article on the front page of the _Saturday Evening Post_--as I did awhile ago--"I would pay people to read what I am saying on this page,"--everybody believes me. As people read on in one of my articles in the _Post_, they cannot be kept from seeing how egregiously I am enjoying my work. Anybody can see it--that I would pay up to the limit all the money I can get hold of--my own, or anybody's--to get other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as I do. Nobody seems inclined to deny that if I could afford to--or, if I had to--I would pay ten cents a word to practically any man, to get him to read what I write. Precisely the way I feel about an article in the _Saturday Evening Post_ so fortunate as to be by me--or, about a book written by g.s.l., a man I know very well--W. J. ---- feels about a house or about a bank created by W. J. ----. But if W. J., a designer--contractor--a builder--pretends he enjoys his creative work in building as much as I enjoy writing--if W. J., a business man, were to go around telling people or revealing to people that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handing back to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profits when he gets through (which is what he practically does over and over again) there are very few business men who would not say at first sight that W. J. is a man who ought to be watched. And he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people have to be watched for. W. J. in designing and constructing a house, or a bank for a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit for himself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profit for himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-half per cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. Changes and afterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable. W. J. wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for his customers' afterthought. The three things that interest W. J. in business are: his work on a perfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on making enough money to keep people from bothering his work. A perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comes out costing less than he said it would cost--possibly a check on his client's dinner plate the first night he dines in it. A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to--who cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending everybody to W. J. he can think of. The tendency of mean typical business men--even men who do this themselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me. This is what is the matter with the country--the conventional automatic assumption that millions of men--even men who are not in business merely to make money themselves--make in general, that we must arrange to run a civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are merely working for money. If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of all of us--we would be a new nation in a week. In a year we would increase production fifty per cent. This has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has come in. Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. as all people who know him know, has made a very great business success of running his business on this principle, of making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at once than merely making money--running a business like any other big profession, one of the first things I think of doing is to write something that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, the first fact I come on is that many business men do not approve of believing in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being a profession, any more than they can help. XVII THE NEWS-MAN I have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed, self-paid employee of the American people, upon what seems to me a very astonishing and revolutionary fact. I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two principles. 1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns in the next few years--or even months, on news--on getting certain people to know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain things will happen. 2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a generalization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusive one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular. Here is the fact I have come on in acting on these principles. When I find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if I make everybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this. A generalized--that is--a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized or dramatized idea--an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up. I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself a fact. Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now to advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make a new nation for a hundred people to know? Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity--instead of getting off ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist on making ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly in ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching? Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a man who dramatizes--makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of increased production or superproducing, seems to the point--suppose I begin with W. J.? What does anyone suppose would happen? XVIII W. J. If W. J. were dead, or were to die to-morrow, it would be convenient. In bearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful and practical of W. J. to die. If W. J.'s worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth story of the Equitable Building to-morrow morning all I would have to do would be to write an article about him in some national weekly, _Saturday Evening Post_ or _Collier's_, which would be read by four million people. But the _Saturday Evening Post_ or _Collier's_ has no use for W. J. until he is dead. It would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair to the business men who are paying ten thousand dollars a page to be advertised in it, for the _Saturday Evening Post_ to let any other man--any man who is not dead yet, be advertised in it. This is the reason for the Look-Up Club, a national body--the gathering together of one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise W. J. to--who will then turn--the hundred thousand men of vision--and advertise him to everybody. Then other men, strategic men like W. J.--men who are dramatizing other strategic ideas will be selected to follow W. J. for the one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise to a hundred million people. By writing a book and having my publisher distribute through the bookstores a book, I would reach, at best, only one hundred thousand people, and I am proposing to reach a hundred million people--to organize a hundred thousand salesmen scattered in five thousand cities and reach with my book, the hearts and minds, the daily eight-hour-a-day working lives of a hundred million people. This is what the Look-Up Club is for. It is an organized flying wedge of one hundred thousand salesmen who have picked each other out for driving into the attention of a nation, national ideas. The fate of America and the fate of the world at the present moment turns upon free advertising written by men who could not be hired to do it--in books distributed by a hundred thousand men who could not be hired to distribute them. We are setting to work a national committee of a hundred thousand men, to unearth in America, advertise, make the common property of everybody the men who dramatize, who make neighborly and matter-of-fact the beliefs a great people will perish if they do not believe. XIX THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP We are drawing in the next few months in America the plans and specifications for a great nation and a new world. We want a Committee of a Hundred Thousand. We are proposing to gather a Look-Up Committee of a hundred thousand men of constructive imagination in business and other callings, in ten thousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people, plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like--a picture of what a hundred million people want. The situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracks for a hundred million people. It will not seem to many people, too much to say that the quick way to do this, is to form a Club--a Committee in this country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these new brain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million. The Look-Up Club is a Publicity and Educational Organization for the purpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as a clearing house of the vision of the people--gathering, coördinating, pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their order of what the American people believe. The first subject we act in our Publicity Organization as our Listening Conspiracy--our Coöperative news-service to our members--is the subject of how coöperation between capital and labor works. Our first news-service will be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stop strikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and substitute coöperation as a means of getting things in American life. Every man who is nominated to membership in the Look-Up Club naturally asks four questions. 1. How can I belong? 2. What does it cost? 3. What do I undertake to do for the Club? 4. What do I get--what does the Club do for me? The idea is for each man who is deeply interested, to pick out, to nominate any fifty men--I put down for instance on my list Franklin P. Lane--among forty-nine others, ask Mr. Lane who the men are he knows in this nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twenty years, who are characterized either by having creative imagination themselves or by marked power to coöperate with men who have it. After Mr. Lane had given me his fifty, I would ask each of Mr. Lane's fifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we had covered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other from Maine to California the men of creative imagination in America. Other members will of course be nominated by members of the Air Line League in their respective communities and everybody who is invited to nominate for the Look-Up section of the Air Line League will be asked to nominate in three lists--(1) those he thinks of as representing invention in the nation at large, (2) those he knows or deals with in his own business or line of activity--all over the country, who have creative imagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and (3) those he knows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like to see in the Look-Up Club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision in the nation representing his own community. The cost is to be determined by the Club, but is planned as a small nominal sum--nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conducting the activities of the Club. What a man gets by joining the Club is the association with two or three thousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be in the Club headquarters in a skyscraper hotel of its own, when he comes to New York and the advantage of common action and common looking at the same things at the same time with the other members of the Club, through the activities of the Club by mail. The Look-Up Club Bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news of critical importance and timeliness to all members--news not generally known or not available in the same concentrated form in the daily press, will be sent to all members for their own use and for distribution to others at critical times and places and with strategic persons--labor unions and employers and public men. What the Look-Up Club does for a man is to give him the benefit of a friendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, to get the news and to pass on the news that counts and to do it all at the same time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs. If the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a little lonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us by agreement the same week in the year, we will do the thing we see. Anything we see will have to happen. The only reason the thing we see does not happen now, is that we make no arrangements to see it together. Seen together, news that looks like a rainbow acts like a pile driver. A man becomes a hundred thousand times himself. In the Look-Up Club what a man gets for his own use, is hundred thousand man-power news. What does a man when he joins the Look-Up Club, undertake to do? Send in news when he knows some, and use news when he gets it. I do not undertake to say just what each member of the Look-Up Club will undertake to do with news when he receives it. When a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and his nation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts about it--about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the people around him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to the Club, but under the head of the things the Club will tempt him to do and that he cannot be kept from doing. If a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life all get the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they get it, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know and everybody else will know what the Look-Up Club is for. We will be carrying out in the Look-Up Club what might be called a selective draft of vision. We will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of the people. XX PROPAGANDY PEOPLE I am weary and sad about the word propaganda. I am weary of being propaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regards propagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it is publicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, I am sad at heart. There is a prayer some one prayed once one tired New Year's Eve, which appeals to me. "Forgive me my Christmases as I forgive them that have Christmased against me." I could pray the same model outline for a prayer. But for Christmasing, substitute propagandy-izing. The word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way I feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believe about reformers--about people who are trying to get other people's attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now is that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's attention and try to get their own, would do more good. The advertising in which I believe is the advertising that is asked for. I believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and to give particulars. More good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertising idea around and working it wrong end to as we do now. For instance at this present moment I want to know everything about myself and against myself, my enemies know. I do not see why I should put up with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against me that if I knew would be the making of me. What I want to do is to find a way--make arrangements if I can, to get them to tell me--tell me politely--if they can, but tell me. If every person, or party, or group in America to-day would do this, Capital, Labor, bankers, socialists, Republicans and Democrats, America would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great one. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately. They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true. It is a platitude. A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth. What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to act on this truth. Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and the Put-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not for asserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking advertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to be advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National Vacuum Cleaner for Truth. XXI THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled. They are not organized to get what they want. We should organize the Consumers of Publicity, make it possible for the people of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they want. We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing Skilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions. The difficulties of attaining a power of national listening together--through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having an organization the members of which join it as they will join the Air Line League for the express purpose not of advertising--but of being advertised to. The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the present crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as I would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them. It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to. I say again--if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude--a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it--the most effective advertising is advertising that is asked for. BOOK IV THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY WITH OTHER NATIONS I FOURTH OF JULY ALL THE YEAR ROUND It would be very convenient for the other nations in the world to-day if America--being the biggest, the freshest and the most powerful after the war and having the other nations for the time being most dependent on it, could be the one that they felt most deserved to lead them and have its way with them. It is almost the personal necessity of forty other nations to-day that America should be a success, that America instead of instantly disappointing the other nations, should instantly prove itself worthy of the leadership they would like to place in her hands. "America's success is the world's success," people keep saying. This has a prettified and pleasant sound--in speaking of a great, or rather of a big, nation. But what of it? What is the fact? What do we wish we could believe is the fact? What is there--either in our own interests or the interests of others that can really be done and done now about the fact--if it is a fact--by any real person or body of persons in America? As a practical and not a Fourth of July institution,--or rather as an institution for celebrating the Fourth of July all the year round, the Air Line League looks upon direct action to be taken by the American people to meet the world's particular situation at this time, as follows: If America is to get its way--the way, as we like to think, of democracy and freedom, with other nations, there are certain things about us the other nations want to know. The other nations want to know that America has a technique for getting its way with itself. The nation that has the most self-control will be the nation that as a matter of course and of common safety will be asked in the crisis, by the other nations, to take the lead in controlling order, in controlling or insuring the self-control of others. The other nations want to know--if they are going to let us have our way with them--put over what we like to call our superior democratic open way upon them, that we have a vision--a vision of human nature and of modern life which is better, clearer, more practical and timely than their vision. The other nations want to know,--if we are to have our way, that we not only have a vision of what our way is--a national vision, but a technique for expressing and embodying that national vision. To deserve our way with them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which is historic--the facts of which--specifications, dates, names and places, can be placed in their hands. The other nations if they are going to let us have our way with them, will want to know by observation that America has not only a vision and a technique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to be wrong (as during the war) America has a technique for being born again. II THE VISION AND THE BODY I have dwelt already on what a body for the people would be like and how it would work. I would now like to touch on two facts--the fact that there is a particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the American people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be had. The success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations--on its getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be expressed. The technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth. This fact is not supposed to be open to argument. It is a biological fact--the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. Everybody knows, or thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and there at a time for a short time, in America--inventors, great statesmen, children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it. Everything about America that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire. The first thing this nation has to do to have a body is to get its own attention. The reason that the people of America in the Red Cross achieved a body, is that some one had a body for--the vision that if all the different kinds of people we had in America who had never dreamed of doing a thing together before, could be got together to do one thing together now the world war could be won. This spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the Red Cross, was not only the thing that started the Red Cross, but it was the daily momentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that made it go. The leaders of the Red Cross--Mr. Davison and the men he gathered about him had a vision of what could be done which other people did not dare to have. The secret of the Red Cross was that it was a vision-machine, a machine for multiplying one man's vision a millionfold, working out in the sight of the people three thousand miles a vision greater than the people would have thought they could have. This vision which the Red Cross had, which it advertised to people and made other people have, is what the people liked about it. The people threw down their jewels for it--for something to believe about themselves and do with themselves greater than they had believed before. They threw down their creeds for it. They threw down their class prejudices for it--a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all classes and all creeds of people could live and dream and work together every day. No more matter of fact conclusive demonstration of the implacable splendid brutal power of vision, of the power of vision to precipitate across three thousand miles a body for the souls and the prayers of a people, could be imagined than the Red Cross during its great days in the war. The Red Cross became capable of doing what it did because it touched the imagination of the average humdrum man rich or poor and made him think of somebody besides himself. The Red Cross did this by what was practically an advertising campaign, the advertising of different sets of people, to all of the others. The result was what looked and felt like a miracle--a kind of apocalypse of people who have outdone themselves. Naturally the people liked it. And naturally people who have watched themselves and one another outdoing themselves, can do anything. My own experience is that when I set out to find the real truth about people whether it pets me in my feeling about them or not, people turn out to be incredibly alike. They are all more full of good than they seem to want me to believe. The only difference is that some of them are more successful in keeping me from believing in them than others. I have taken some satisfaction in seeing in the Red Cross, a nation backing me up in this experience with human nature in America. III THE CALL OF A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE The nearest the American people have come to getting their way in other nations--to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve to do it--is in the Red Cross, and in our Food Distribution. In both of these organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others to what we could do for them--and with them--by getting our own attention first and by making our own sacrifice at home first. We were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shown self-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway in emergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a vision for others and gave a body to their vision at home. I have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women in the American Red Cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, living every day with a national international vision suffusing their minds and hearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared as the people that they really were and that they seemed to be, from sight. I have never understood it, how twenty million men and women out of that one common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost in an hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snapped back into the little life. I do not know as I would have minded them--three thousand miles of them going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but I have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them daily together. The necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested in living--the necessity of the actual personal things we all are daily trying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so much more vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high and exhilarating motive and to a noble common desire than the rather rudimentary showy stupid necessity the Germans thrust upon us could ever dream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which the leaders of the Red Cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere war with Germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of forty nations with themselves, at the very moment when with one touch of a button the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead of the old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them, snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people--clapped them back into their ten thousand cities into the common life. The magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lighting up the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! Who would have believed it or who can forgive it?... The Red Cross--the redeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of a whole world--not meeting the emergency of a whole world--the whole world yesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossal complicated, innumerable, hemming and hawing, stuttering Peace! What people used to think wealth was, what they used to think might was, the power of attracting the whole attention of millions of people is. In the Red Cross a hundred million people--American people, had looked at the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same thing in a thousand ways with their hands. In the Red Cross the feet of a hundred million people became as the feet of one man. The Red Cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused the attention of forty nations. It had in its hands the trigger of a ninety mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a pocket pistol instead. Because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of the north of France, it reduced to a peace basis. At the very moment when it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it, at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to any problem with it, it let the forty nations go. If I could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one man--a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his opera glass, if I were sitting next to him I would suggest his turning the screw to the right slowly. I would say, "Do you see better or worse as you turn it to the right?" If I found he saw worse I would tell him to turn it to the left and then I would leave him to try between the two until he found it. The day after the armistice, this was the chance the Red Cross had. It had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national blank look. Naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out. It was a Focus--a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made America a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. A hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up--asking for it as one man. To one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known--this spectacle of the way the Red Cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go. The idea of the Air Line League is that it shall take up where it stopped, the Red Cross vision--the Red Cross spirit. The idea of the Air Line League as a matter of fact was first invented as a future for the Red Cross. The Red Cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body for the people, I have in mind, should be started as a New Division for the Red Cross. But I soon discovered that what I wanted from the Red Cross for my purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people--the rank and file of the people in the Red Cross who had made themselves the soul of it and who would make the soul of anything--particularly the men and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to cool a little--had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set before the people of America, which if duly recognized and duly stated by the leaders of the Red Cross would have swept over all of us--would have kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active labor in the Red Cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere stress of merely beating Germans, there had been one before. IV THE CALL OF A WORLD The difference between a first class nation and a second class nation might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession. Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill. Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers--to keep them from walking too soon. The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth. The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs. The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division, it would occupy itself with germs--with the germs of six inch guns, with the germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war. The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and the germs of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with himself. It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I am likely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to say that charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understands himself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the world will fall into his hands. The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war between capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and of engineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done it at home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war between Ivy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to Ivy Lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him. Then I would pick out in myself things that Ivy Lee does not like to have me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them I will not want to do. Up to Ivy to do the same to me. This is a science. It is not merely a vision or a religion. Removing the cause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study and self-study, but it is approximately exact. It is also a fascinating and contagious science. We master the embryology of war between persons--the embryology of war between classes, and then between nations. The principles which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one of these problems will prove to be the principles of the others. If people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, I would change the figure. We are proposing to follow up at once, the Red Cross, which was run as a fire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the Air Line League which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires between nations get started. Edward A. Filene of Boston in trying to have a successful department store found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in the street cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a will getting new rapid transit for Boston. He found he could not get rapid transit for Boston without helping to get a new government and that he could not get a new government without helping to get a new Boston. He then found he could not help get a new Boston without getting new trade and industrial conditions in Boston and that he could not help get new ideals working in trade and industry in Boston without helping in the ideals of a nation. He then found he could not get a new nation without trying to help make several new nations. Then came the International Chamber of Commerce. Something like this seems to happen to nearly every man I know who really accomplishes anything. Or any nation. Frederick Van Eeden of Holland began life as a painter with marked success but being a lively and interested man he could not help wondering why people were not getting out of paintings in Holland--his own and other people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became a critic. He found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought to enjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not more people get more out of the best poetry? He then wrote one or two novels of high quality which Holland was proud of and which were read in several languages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character as much as they did the poorer ones? He decided that it was because people were physically underorganized and not whole in body and mind--like the Greeks, and became a physician. He thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soon found that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people's not having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finer things and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what was the matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits of thought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the first psycho-therapeutic hospital in Holland. He then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he was still superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of the social and industrial conditions, ideals and institutions under which they were conceived and born, and had to live. He then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had charge of bread for the poor during the great bread riots in Amsterdam and is now engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrial and civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to express and fulfill their real selves in the world. Any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and express itself and be a first class nation will sooner or later find that it has to go on from one individual personal interest to another until it finds it is doing practically what Frederick Van Eeden did. The only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to help everybody else to. The Red Cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and international arrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the relief of disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day, instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust all classes had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of forty nations, of society's best and noblest need, to keep society from causing the disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fell behind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world. The aches and pains of society with which since the war, the Red Cross so politely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and without hurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by the things we daily do to each other to make the money. The vision of the common people in America recognizes this and recognized it instantly at the end of the war. The hearts of the men and women of America to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not to instantly lose interest in a Red Cross which asks them to help run it as a beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to one another instead of as a machine to help them not to do them. V MISSOURI The best service America can render other nations to-day is be herself--fulfill and make the most of herself. Senator Reed of Missouri would probably agree with me in this. Where I differ with Senator Reed is in what America should propose to do to make the most of herself. Senator Reed of Missouri judging from reports of his speeches in the Senate wants America in the present distraction of nations to stop thinking of the others, wizen up and be safe. It seems to me that if America were to cut herself off from the rest of the world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking of herself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. She would just be like Senator Reed of Missouri. Nothing could be less safe for America just now than to be like Senator Reed of Missouri. Senator Reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. In the Senate of fifty states, Reed says "I'm from Missouri." In the congress of nations, Reed says "America über Alles." "The world for America." "America for Missouri." "Missouri for Me!" For America just at the present moment in the world it has got to belong to, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and in everybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept from doing--is like a man's shutting himself up in his own stateroom and being interested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. It seems more sensible for America--even from the point of view of looking out for herself--not to go down with Senator Reed and moon around in his stateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and in the engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps. Patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation by itself or that makes a nation just live with its own life preserver on, to preserve its own life preserver, can end either for Senator Reed or for America in but one way. It's going to end in a plunge of the ship. It is going to end in Senator Reed's running out, and running up to the deck the last minute. I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of Senator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neck and then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it may have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a practical or business-like example for his country. I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to present the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air Line League. The Germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it) that democracy cannot be made to work. They sneered at us during the war and said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not make democracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, and they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in industry and keep up with Germans in peace. Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrial democracy, about democracy's not being a real, sincere, every day thing, a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and a good many people in America--extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans. If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for America to pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America is living in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing ahead for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before they murder ours. Everything must be geared and geared at once to the Germans' being right. Or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to challenging the Germans--to telling them that they are as fooled about what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it could do in war. The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody else to believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy in industry whip German militarism in industry out of sight in our own labor unions and in our own factories. Then we will whip German militarism in industry out of the markets of the world. If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world--a world we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism in industry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is to whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work? What is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money and men? The fear of the United States Senate. The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senate and other governments not to be afraid of war. The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop this fear. The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day every day are making peace work between classes, better than war does. Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America and the world of having any business. It is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves, that I am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into one mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three classes together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. The Air Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes. The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial democracy--in proving to people by advertising it to them and by dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works. It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced against their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team work because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-class nation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years with being second-class human beings. They have a ruling majority of second-class human beings in Germany because they have the most complete and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for making second-class human beings out of practically anybody--arrangements for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do as a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making them want to do it. Taking the line of least resistance--the mechanical course in dealing with human nature, makes America's being a second-class nation a matter of course. What we have always been hoping for in America is that in due time we are going to be a first-class nation--a nation crowded with men and women who, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were first class when they came, have been made first class by the way that all day every day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of us when they come to us, and by the way they treat one another. VI A VICTORY LOAN ADVERTISEMENT May 10, 1919 THE BOY WHO STUCK HIS FOOT IN A small boy the other day walked up to one of those splendid marble pillars before the The Victory Arch and stuck his foot in. I went over and stooped down and felt of the crust. It was about an inch and a half thick. Then I stood in the middle of The Avenue, all New York boiling and swirling round me and looked up at The Arch of Victory--massive, majestic white and heavenly and soaring against the sky, and my heart ached! Something made me feel suddenly close to the small boy. What he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid Victory Arch he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted to--how deep the glory had struck in. I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory over the Germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and eighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broad daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their bills! ... eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devote ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years. I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americans though in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to poke through to the truth. We want something more than a theater property Victory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real one! We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest--to take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead. We make this week a wager to the world,--a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words--that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations--into the eternal underpinning of a world. In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch, all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake, with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through! We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no small boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in! * * * * * When I corrected the proof of this advertisement--it was the last advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York--it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has melted away into roar. But the truth I have spoken has not melted away. What The Air Line League is for in its national and international organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to answer the boy who stuck his foot in. BOOK V THE TECHNIQUE OF A NATION'S BEING BORN AGAIN I RECONSTRUCTION I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero--that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the People. I have proceeded upon two premises. A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost trying to have a family. A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing what to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family. Some of my readers will remember a diagram in "Crowds" in which I divided people off roughly into Inventors Artists Hewers or or See-ers Engineers Those who work Men who invent Men who invent out and finish things to do. ways and means what the see-ers and make it possible and engineers to do them. have begun. I have based what I have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy or rather this biology of a nation's human nature. In the next few pages I am dealing not with the reconstruction but with the reconception of a nation. Reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on a boundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like the American people. In the crisis that confronts America to-day not only the most easy, but the most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a great nation is to fall in love. I am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts--that is: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to an understanding and get together. I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done by the people--that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great hour in history, a great people may be born again. II NATIONAL BIOLOGY A man in being born the first time is the invention of others. Being born again is the finding of oneself, oneself,--the spiritual invention of one's own life. Being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time. All one has to do to see this, is to look about and see the people who have done it. When one is being born the first time one does not even know it. One is not especially intelligent the first time and could not really help it. And nobody else could help it. When one is being born again it takes all one can know and all one can know and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody around can do, to help one do it. In 1776 when America was being born first, America did not have the slightest idea of what was happening. It has taken one hundred and forty-four birthdays to guess. A nation is born the first time with its eyes shut. But in this terrible 1920 when America is being born again, she can only manage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobing herself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion, self-discovery, self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, naked before God, reading the hearts of forty nations, a thousand years and the unborn, and knowing herself,--slipping off her old self and putting on her new self. III THE AIR LINE LEAGUE The first thing a spirit in this world usually does to find a body is to select a father and mother. The American people if it is to be embodied and have the satisfaction and power of making itself felt and expressing itself, can only do so by following the law of life. A hundred million people can only get connected with a body, acquire a presence--find itself as a whole, the way each one of the hundred million people did alone. In a nation's being born again three types of mind are necessarily involved. The minds in America that create or project, the inventors. The minds that bring up. The minds that conceive and bring to the birth. These three classes of spiritual forces are concerned in America in making the people stop being a ghost, in making their American people as an idea, physically fit. The first thing to be arranged for America to make the people quit being a ghost in The White House, is to form into three bodies or organizations, these three, groups of men--make these three groups of men class-conscious, self-conscious, conscious of their own power and purpose in America--and have everybody in America conscious of them. I propose three organizations to stand for these three life-forces, three organizations which will act--each of which will act with the other two and will follow out for a nation, as individuals do for individuals, the law of life--of producing and reproducing the national life. The minds that are creative will discover and project a national idea for the people--the inventors, will act as one group. The minds that conceive and bring the idea to the birth, that bring the idea to pass, called engineers, will act as another, and the minds that teach, bring up, draw out and apply the idea and relate the idea to life--will act as another. I propose a club of fifty thousand creative men be selected and act together--that a nation may be conceived. I propose that fifty thousand engineers or how-men, men who think out ways and means, be selected and act together, that the nation that is conceived may be born. These two Clubs will have their national headquarters together in a skyscraper hotel of their own in New York and will act together--in bringing an idea for the people into the world. The third Club--twenty or thirty million people, on the scale of the Red Cross--in ten thousand cities, will apply and educate the idea, bring it up and put it through. * * * * * What one's soul is for, I suppose, is that one can use it when one likes, to contemplate and to enjoy an Idea. What one has a body for with reference to an idea is to take it up, try it out and put it through. The Air Line League proposes to coördinate these three functions and operate as a three in one club. The idea would be to call the first of the clubs, the club of inventors, the Look-Up Club. The second, a club of how-men and engineers, the Try-Out Club, and the third--the operating club of the vast body of the people taking direct action and putting the thing through locally and nationally would be called The Put-Through Clan. The Air Line League through these three clubs will undertake to help the people to stop being an abstraction, to swear off from being a Ghost in their own house. The great working majority of the American people--of the men and the women who made the Red Cross so effective during the war, which came to the rescue of the people of the nation with the people of other nations, will come to the rescue now, during the war the people are having and that the classes of people are having with one another. IV THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP § 1. _For Instance._ Such a crisis as this nation has now, Springfield, Massachusetts, had once. Springfield a few years ago, all in a few weeks, threw up the chance of being Detroit because two or three automobile men who belonged in Springfield and wanted to make Springfield as prosperous as Detroit, were practically told to go out to Detroit and find the men who would have the imagination to lend them the money--to make Springfield into a Detroit. Naturally when they found bankers with imagination in Detroit they stayed there. What happened to Springfield is what is going to happen to America if we do not make immediate national arrangements for getting men who have imagination in business in this country, men who can invent manpower, to know each other and act together. The twenty-five hundred dollars Frank Cousins of Detroit recognized Henry Ford with, a few years ago, he gave back the other day to Henry Ford for twenty-nine million dollars. People say as if that was all there was to it, that the fate of this nation to-day turns on our national manpower. But what does our national man-power turn on? It turns on people's knowing and knowing in the nick of time, a man when they see one. Man-power in a democracy like ours turns on having inventors, bankers and crowds act together. Sometimes banks hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with inventors or men of practical imagination. This is called conservatism. Sometimes it is the crowds and laborers who hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with leaders or men of imagination. But the fate of all classes turns upon our having men of creative imagination believed in by men who furnish money, and believed in by men who furnish labor. The idea of the Look-Up Club is that men of creative imagination shall be got together, shall be made class-conscious, shall feel and use their power themselves and put it where other people can use it. How much time and how many years of producing-power would it have saved America if Alexander Graham Bell had known or could have had ready to appeal to, America's first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in Boston, trying to supply people with imagination enough to see money in telephones? If William G. McAdoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a really great conception of the greater New York, and was fighting to get people in New York to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization of one hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large to appeal to--one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put a premium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of a penalty on it, how much time would it have saved New York and saved McAdoo? How much time would a national Club like this save this nation to-day and from now on in its race with the Germans? Why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as much time running around and asking permission of people who had none, as McAdoo had to? * * * * * If a hundred thousand silver dollars--just ordinary silver dollars--were put together in a row in New York on a sidewalk, everybody going by would have imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollars and what could be done with them. But put one hundred thousand picked men--or men of exceptional power together in a row in New York--and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings? I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars. This is one of the first things the Look-Up Club is for, to get people to be inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way that they are by a hundred thousand dollars put together. * * * * * I went out last night and walked up the Great White Way and looked at the little flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faith in these hundred thousand men--the site of the new hotel--the little sleeping shelf in the roar of New York for the hundred thousand men to have on Broadway. I stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waiting to be torn down for us, and ---- told me that the seventeen parcels of land in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get them to make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only a million and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, while they were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. And now that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all these foolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the land instead of being worth one million and a half dollars, was appraised by ---- the other day as worth four and a half million dollars. The same is true of the hundred thousand men of practical imagination scattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nation alone. The same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that has happened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estate in New York. What can I manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to Chicago to-morrow morning? All I could do alone would be to walk. As it is, I stand in line a minute at a window in the Grand Central Station, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men and with a slip of paper I move to Chicago while I go to sleep. This power for each man of a hundred thousand men is what I am offering in this little book to the nine hundred and ninety thousand others. What will we do, what ideas will we carry out? Get one hundred thousand picked men together and what can they not do, what ideas can they not carry out? What is hard, what is priceless, is getting the men and getting the men together. Everybody who has ever done anything knows this. What we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keep creating the values. The men who have created already the values of five thousand cities, shall now create values for a nation. I am not writing to people--to the hundred thousand men who are going to be nominated to the Look-Up Club--to ask them whether they think this idea of mine--of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of this country in a Club, is going through or not. I am writing them and asking them if--if it is going through--they want to belong to it. Very few men can speak with authority--even if they would, as to what the other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possibly do or not do with my idea in this book. But any man can speak with authority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to how he feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to count one to bring the idea to pass. I speak up for myself in this book. Anybody can see it. If every man will confine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend to himself at the end of this book and say what he wants--we will all get what we want. The proposition looks rather big, mathematically, but looked at humanly, it is a simple straight human-nature question. All I really ask of each man who is nominated is, "If the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business are being selected and brought together out of all the other business men in America, do you want to be one of them? Who are the ten, twenty or fifty men of practical vision in business--especially young men, you think ought not to be left out?" It is all an illusion about numbers and sizes of things. The way to be national is to be personal, for each man to take sides with the best in himself. Suddenly across a nation we look in a hundred thousand faces. § 2. _Why the Look-Up Club Looks Up._ The Constitution does not provide for an Imagination Department for the United States Government. It has judicial, executive and legislative departments, but a department made up of men of vision to create, conceive and reconceive, go deeper and see further than law and restraints can go, does not exist in our Government. We have a Judicial Department to decide on whether what is born has a right to live--a Legislative Department to pass rules under on how it shall be obliged to live--and an Executive Department to make it mind--but the department to create and to conceive for the people is lacking. Government at best is practically a dear uncle or dear maiden-aunt institution. Government as a physical expression is without functions of reproduction. Government--contrary to the theory of the Germans--from the point of view of sheer power in projecting and determining the nature and well-being of men--the fate of men and the world--is superficial, is a staid, standardized, unoriginal affair--devoted to ready-made ideas like the Red Cross during the war. This is what is the matter with a Government's posing in this or any other nation as a live body for the people. The spontaneous uprising of business men during the war--the spectacle of the dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, the breaking in of the National Council of Defense--the spontaneous combustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit like the Red Cross--all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of the superior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new brain tracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individual persons who have them, who make them catching to other individual persons, and who then give body to them across the nation. Its whole nature and action of a Government tend to make Government and most of the people in it mechanical. In the nature of things and especially in the nature of human nature, this nation--if its new ideas and its new brain tracks are to come to anything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparatively free origin and organization of their own. Hence the Look-Up Club coöperating with the Try-Out Club to act as an informal Imagination Department for the United States. V THE TRY-OUT CLUB TRIES OUT § 1. _I_ + _You_ = _We._ If Darius the Great had put the eunuchs of his court in charge as Special Commissioners for controlling the social evil in Babylon, they would have made very sad work of what they had to do because they would not have understood what it was all about. They would not have had the insight necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and go ahead. What makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, the penetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives--his vision of what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledge his unselfishness gives--his imagination about what he wants for others, and pours the two visions together. The law of business is the law of biology--action--reaction--interaction. I + You = We. It is getting to be reckless for the people in other nations to sit around and gossip about how bad it is for the Germans to be so selfish. It is reckless for capital to gossip about how selfish labor is--and for labor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a labor union. There are far worse things than selfishness in people. Being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to get at, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others. * * * * * This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When I was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off with me--a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and then suddenly saw I might want it too and passed it to me. He summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is, the whole question between the Germans and the other peoples of the earth. With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a world. His selfishness, his own personal accumulated experience with an egg, made him see that he wanted salt in it. His unselfishness made him see that I must be sitting there wanting salt in an egg as much as he did. So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the salt together. Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I was wishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying to express in it. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what I call civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization at all. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven. Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the world. The appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such a rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them, no one can compete with them. A righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person--is a selfish person and an unselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion in which he chooses to mix himself. Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together. People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are in theirs--capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. The fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them what they want. It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can be a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist--if he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of God and the love of one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give something to and leave alone. This is what I call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship. I put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers in the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act. The way for America to meet the German militaristic and competitive idea of business and of the business executive--the idea that brought on the war, is for America and the rest of the world to put forward something and put forward something quick, as a substitute for it, sell to themselves, sell to one another and to the Germans before it is too late, a substitute for it. The American engineers of business or great executives--the how-men and inventors of how to bring things to pass, must put forward the pursuit of mutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interests generously and finely conceived, the selfishness and unselfishness mixed, as this substitute. § 2. _The Engineer At Work._ The crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor. I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching--who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn. The fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paid money--the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approached as a fellow human being and has to be persuaded--and given something human and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. It lets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be a civilization. * * * * * If men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood or steel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage big business than the typical big business men of the phase of American industry now coming to an end. But of course in the crisis business is facing now, which turns on the putting forward of men who understand and can play masterfully upon the motives, temptations and powers of ordinary human nature the typical man we know at the Mahogany Desk, who has a machine imagination, who sees men as dots and dreams between piles of dollars and rows of machines, is a singularly helpless person and can only hold his own in his own business by giving way and putting forward in place of himself, men who are masters in human nature, experts and inventors in making men want to work. The difference between the business world that is passing out and the one that is coming in, is that the masters of the world who have been proud before, to be called the captains of industry, are going to think of themselves and want others to think of them as the fathers of industry. The man who orders can no longer order. People will only work and work hard for the man who fills them with new conceptions, who stirs the depths of their lives with desire and hope. The reason that reactionary capital is having trouble with labor, is that it is putting forward men who order instead of putting forward fathers and inventors. The reason that the I. W. W. and other labor organizations are having trouble with capital, is that their leaders are not inventors. They are tired conventional men governed by automatic preconceptions, merely doing over again more loudly and meanly against society, the things that capital has already tried and has had to give up because it could not make them work. Only inventors--executives who invent and fertilize opportunity for others--men who invent ways of making men see values--men who create values and who present people with values they want to work out, are going to get anything--either money or work, from now on, out of anybody. § 3. _The Engineer and the Game._ The time has gone by when a man can say any longer he is not in business for the fun of it. He finds he cannot long compete with the men about him who are, with engineers and others who are in business for the great game of producing results, of doing difficult things, of testing their knowledge, their skill and their strength. Making men want to work has come to be the secret of success in modern business and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing in his own passion for work which he can make catching to others, can only get second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. A factory in which the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with a factory fitted up with picked men proud of their work. It is not going to be necessary to scold people into not being selfish, or whine people into loving their work. A man who is so thin-blooded that the one way he can get work out of himself is to make money--the man who grows rich by ordering, by gobbling, and by hiring gobblers and plodders, cannot function under the new conditions. The guarantee that we are going to have a civilization now, that business with joy in it and personal initiative and motive in the work itself, is going to take possession of the markets of the world is based on the fact that labor has to have its imagination touched in order to work efficiently, and an entirely new level and new type of man--the man who can touch men's imaginations, is being put forward in business to do it. The Engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect upon institutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he is known to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependent on him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cab has on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman. A business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and the technique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the red flag look stranger, feel stranger and lonelier every day. § 4. _The American Business Sport._ If any man ever again in this world finds like Methuselah, the secret of eternal youth, the secret will be found to consist in being, I suspect, what the best American business man already is--what I would call a fine all-round religious sport. Sport has certain well-known disadvantages. So has religion. The man who once grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really big engineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all the advantages of sport and religion both. To have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find. The typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what he does as a sport. That is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into his business. His business becomes the continual lark of making his religion work. He dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in God, his belief that human nature is not crazy and that God has not been outwitted in allowing so much of it to exist. It has looked especially reckless during the last four years for God to let human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. Now is the time of all others, and Germany is now the country of all others, to show with a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature really is, and how being human (especially being human in a thing which everybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) really works. There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, and dramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world. People shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. They shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people--to make them peaceful.... * * * * * The only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top are the men who are in a position to hire men who do not work for wages. Making men want to work is the secret of the engineer in production. The secret of modern industry is the secret of the man who loves his work. To the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, the prize goes now in competition with Gobblers and Plodders. The Engineer or Winner instead of the Compeller of Men is going to draw out new kinds and new sizes of laboring men in industry at every point. The Engineer we count on in the Try-Out Club is the man who superimposes upon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfish enough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of the gentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport--the motive of doing a thing for its own sake, and because one likes it. The expression "I am not in business for the fun of it" is going by. What we are going to do with the mere half-alive profit-plodders--the mere wage gobblers, is not to improve them by making moral eyes at them, or discipline them by putting down lids of laws over them or by firing taxes at them. We are going to discipline men like these by driving them into the back streets of business, as anæmic, second-rate and inefficient men in bringing things to pass. A man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business is so thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himself for is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rate workers to work for him, _i.e._, he will be able to get only plodders who merely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people have to--by paying higher wages than they can earn. In other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personal initiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to drive uncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of the world. The men who are expressing through the hearts of the people their best, more lasting and more powerful selves, in business, who are gathering around them other people who are doing it, the men who try out their best selves in business--who invent ways as executives to make their best selves work for them and for others, are having to-day before our eyes, the world placed in their hands. Men who represent vital forces like these, are as solid, unconquerable in human life as the force of gravity, the multiplication table they are. They find themselves dominating like radium, penetrating like fresh air, drawing all things to them like the sky, the stars, like spring, like the love of women and of children and the love of Christ. The idea of having imagination about a customer and studying a customer as a means of winning his trade, his personal enthusiasm and confidence, is not considered sentimental. Having imagination about one's employees so that they will work in the same spirit as the other partners, is no longer considered sentimental except by the type of employer now being driven to the wall because he has no technique for making anybody want to work for him. As things go to-day it is the leader in industry who is trying to keep up a fine comfortable feeling of being a captain of industry--the man who feels he owns everything and owns everybody in sight, who is visionary and sentimental, who is the Don Quixote of business now. The employer who feels superior to individuals, who looks at men as dots and dreams--and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get on with him as if he were not there--the employer who is an absentee in soul and body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leaves them like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving away for him until they are stopped--the employer who during the first stupid stages of our new machine-industry, has been allowed to be prominent for a time, now stands exposed as too wooden and incompetent to conduct the intimately personal, difficult and human institution a factory has got to be if it succeeds (in a country with men like ours) in producing goods. From now on the big man in business is the man who gets work out of people that money cannot buy. The man who cannot get the work that money cannot buy in a few years now, is not going to stand the ghost of a chance. People will not believe you if you tell them what the world was like when he did. * * * * * Mastering others so that they have to do what one says is superficial, merely a momentarily successful-looking way a man has of being a failure. This master has been tried. He has failed. He is the half-inventor of Bolshevism. The real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them master themselves. The masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, is the man who makes the people want him to have what he wants--makes them keep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day. The wholesale national and international criticism the Red Cross workers made in the latter months of the Red Cross activities, of the touch-the-button and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the business men who controlled the activities at home and abroad--of the millions of workers in the Red Cross, has been itself a kind of national education in what certain types of American business men placed in power fell inadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on the employer and employee plan. But these men and their whole idea are going by. We are getting down to the quick, to the personal and the human, to the sense all good workers have of listening and being listened to and of not being overridden. Big business after this is going to be big in proportion as it makes people feel--employees and customers both, that they are listened to, that they are being dealt with as individual human beings and not as fractions of individuals, or as part of some big vague bloodless lump of humanity. Studying one's customers so as to make them want to trade with one is here to stay. To speak of studying with the best expert skill in the country one's employees so as to make them want to work, as humanity, is not quite bright. It is not humanity. It is business. Making people trade with one instead of making them want to trade with one is recognized as second-rate business. So is making people work for one instead of making them want to work. The business man who depends for his business, on customers, or on workers who want to get away and are going to the first minute they can, naturally goes under first. VI THE PUT-THROUGH CLAN PUTS THROUGH § 1. _What._ We are a people who think in action. Our way of making other nations think and of thinking ourselves is to do things. The people who swept into and took over the Red Cross, who dramatized the American people in the war abroad--are the people who are going to make war at home impossible. The big spiritual or material fact about the Red Cross is that it has been a dramatic organization, that for four years it has been an organization for acting out the feelings, desires, wills and beliefs of a great people toward men who were fighting for liberty. The Red Cross has been a great emotional epic play, an expression in action, of the heart and brain of a mighty nation. Emotions by great peoples have been spectacular before, and they have been sentimental and they have been occupied with enjoying themselves. But in the Red Cross twenty million people have been as inspired as Saint Francis and as practical as a Steel Trust in the same breath. The vision of the future of the Put-Through Clan that lies ahead is that it shall keep on dramatizing these qualities in the American character at home, selecting things to do which shall dramatize our people to one another, to themselves and to the people of other nations. * * * * * The way to make democracy work is for the people to use their brains, their spirit and their imagination to do team-work with the inventors and engineers who help express their democracy for them. The platform of the Put-Through Clan is the right of all to be waited on. Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled capital. Skilled capital has a right to skilled labor in return. The new and stupendous force in modern life from now on is to be the skilled consumer--the organization of the consumer-group to coöperate with skilled capital and skilled labor, to make it impossible as it is now, for unskilled capital, capital which has not the skill to win the public, or to win its own labor, and for unskilled labor, labor which cannot earn its money and takes it whether it earns it or not, to compel the consumer by force and by holdups to buy goods they do not want at prices they are not worth from men with whom they do not want to deal. The skilled consumer will organize his skill and deal with the people he wants. All the people of this country--the consumers (the real employers of all employers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through a hundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employers and workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyers and consumers of America instead of taking what is poked out at them because they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital and labor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return and will let employers and workmen return, to the status of human beings. § 2. _How._ The test of a man's truth is his technique. What Mathias Alexander believes about conscious control and making self-discipline work is true because he does not have to say it. He dramatizes it. Alexander is right in his fundamental idea of giving conscious control to people through new brain tracks toward their bodies because they get up and walk away from him when they have been with him, with their new brain tracks on. New habits--new psycho-physical habits, like Culebra cuts are put right through them. The man who conceives or invents may be wrong, the man who experiments or tries out, may need to be watched, but the man who puts through is inviolable. The program, the spirit and the function of the Put-Through Clan in a town, is to embody truth so baldly and with such a shameless plainness that no matter how hard they try, people cannot tug away from it. * * * * * There are three courses we might take in the Put-Through Clan in dealing with our town. (1) We can stand for disciplining capital and labor into shape by passing laws and heaping up penalties. (2) We can let them see how much better they can make things by sicking them on to each other and having them discipline each other. (3) We can make fun of both of them until they make fun of themselves and each class begins disciplining itself. Then general self-discipline will set in. We propose to indulge--each group of us in the Put-Through Clan--the labor group in the town, the employer group and the public group, in self-disciplining ourselves, until the thing is made catching out of sheer shame and decency in others. § 3. _Psycho-Analysis._ The scientific basis for psycho-analysis for a town, or for a labor union, or for a Republican or Democratic Party, is found in the facts that have been stated by Mathias Alexander in his book and demonstrated by his work. Professor John Dewey in his introduction to Mr. Alexander's book speaks of what Mr. Alexander stands for, as Completed Psycho-analysis. As Alexander's technique for pulling one particular man, soul and body, together, is precisely the technique I have in mind for pulling a nation together, I want to dwell on it a moment longer before applying it to the Put-Through Clan. The first thing a man is always fooled about is his own body and in everything else he is fooled about, he just branches out from that. The Put-Through Clan proceeds upon the idea that this is as true of his political or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is of his first one. Reform must be self-reform first. If it is true that the majority of ideas and decisions most people think they make with their minds are really made for them and handed up to them by their bodies--if it is true that what people quite commonly use their minds for is to keep up appearances, to give rational-looking excuses and reasons for their wanting what their stomachs and livers and nerves make them want, the way to persuade people nowadays is to do what Christ did--get their minds out from under the domination of their bodies. If it is true that when a man goes to his dentist with a toothache, he finds he does not know which side of his mouth it is on, it is likely to be still more true of all the rest of his ideas about himself--his ideas about his ideas. If everything about us, about most of us is more or less like this, as Alexander says--wires or nerves all twisted, sensory impressions upside down, half of what is inside our bodies mislaid half the time, the way to change people's minds is to change them toward the bodies they are with and that they are nearest to, first. Then we can branch out and educate others--even educate ourselves. Millions of grown people, in religion, business and politics to-day in America can be seen thinking automatically of the world about them in the terms of themselves, in the terms of their own souls sadly mixed up with their own bodies. We all know such people. The world is just an extension, a kind of annex or wing, built out from themselves full of reflections from their own livers, and fitted up throughout with air castles, dungeons, twilights, sunrises, after-glows, from their own precious interior decorations and bowels and mercies. The basic fact about human nature the Put-Through Clan acts on is the simplest thing in the world. We are always having moments of seeing it. We all see how true it is in babies we have personally known. We recognize it without a qualm in a baby, that his emotions and reflections about life, about Time and Eternity, and about things in general are just reflections of a milk bottle he has just had, or of a milk bottle he has not just had and wants to know why. I have often tried to translate a baby's cry in his crib, into English. As near as I can come to it, it is "I don't think my mother knows WHO I AM!" What a baby is really doing is disciplining other people. Not so very different after all from Senator Lodge pivoting as he has for six months a whole world on himself and on his having his own little way with it, disciplining the rest of the Senate, forty nations and a President, and everybody in sight--except himself. If a patient nation could put him in a crib, everybody would understand. Many people apparently are deceived by his beard, or by his degree at Harvard, or other clothes. But it is the same thing. What is really happening to him--to Senator Lodge is really a kind of spiritual neuritis. He is cramped, or as the vulgar more perspicuously and therefore more fittingly and elegantly put it, his mind is stuck on himself. He is imbedded in his own mereness and now as anybody can see there is nothing that can be done by anybody with anything, not with a whole world for a crowbar, to pry Lodge off himself. Most of us know other people like this. Most of us have moments and subjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to be pried off. The same is true, of course, of a political body like the Republican or Democratic Party, or of a labor union. The best that most of us--whole towns of us--can do is to get up as we propose for a whole town to do in the Put-Through Clan on the same platform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great general platform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably this blessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less by ourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us--especially our own personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. The only difference between people who are put into insane asylums and those of us who are still allowed from day to day a little longer to stay out, is that we can manage, if we try, some of us, to be more limber about calling ourselves fools in time. For all practical purposes in this world, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keeping themselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane. What happens to people--to most people when they are grown up is that they stop being simple and honest like a baby. But they all have practically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable. They are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their own interior decorations. What they think, what they feel, what they do in the little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceiling of the world. The joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of their non-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that they can still know and share and can still take over and have the use of in addition to the mere self they already have, they hold off from. This is where the baby has the advantage of them. § 4. _Psycho-Analysis for a Town._ When a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an institution--as a kind of church--of course it makes him very unhappy to believe he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to an end, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for getting what he wants or what a world wants--the minute a man thinks of himself as a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener to truth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or held differently, will suddenly work--changing himself toward himself, and believing what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention or discovery, a creative pleasure. In saying that the main thing the Put-Through Clan is for in a town, is to act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as a means of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state--as a means of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, I am merely saying that the act of self-invention--the act of recreation once entered into as a habit is so refreshing and so extraordinary in itself, and so practical in its results, that when people once see how it really works--when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started in self-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-analysis and in taking advantage of opposite ideas--there is going to be an epidemic in this country, a flu of truth. A whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-analysis finds it less embarrassing and not more embarrassing than one man does. When it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group to see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before. And it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves. Three per cent of the conveniences--the public X-ray machines for keeping people from being fooled about themselves will be enough. The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying it modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do. It is a mere phonograph-record to say that nobody likes self-discipline. What people do not like, is trying it, or getting started. There is a sense in which it is possible for a town like Northampton--twenty-five thousand people, to have--if it once gets started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It is easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would be easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it. Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry for him? No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or Wilbur Wright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective like Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the way he steals a march on himself. The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks back into the windows he has looked out of all his life. People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does this and of thinking he is being noble and doing right. It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. I am offering self-discipline because it works. People who get so low in their minds and who so little see how self-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel noble and beautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. They must be leaving most of theirs out.... The psychology of self-discipline is the psychology of the inventor. The inventor is the man who lives in the daily habit of criticising his own mind, and disciplining himself. The source of his creative and original power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities in himself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breaking through to new ones. The spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor upon modern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human nature and his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit of disciplining himself. In every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, people have had the time of their lives. The great days of history have been the eras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. Self-discipline and self-discovery go together. There is a greater return on the investment in being born again, in getting what one wants, than in anything else in the world. If one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. It explains and clears up one's enemies and clears one's own life for action. § 5. _To-morrow._ I am not writing a beautiful wistful work on how I wish human nature would work or hope it is going to work, in America. I am recording a grim, matter-of-fact, irresistible, implacable law in the biology of progress. I am not nagging, teasing or apologizing. I am not saying what I say as religion or as the Lord said unto Moses, or even "as it seems to me." I am not dealing in what I want to have happen. I am dealing in truth as a force and not as a property. I am foretelling what has got to happen. People who do not believe it will have to get out of the way of it. The conscious control of capital, the conscious control of labor, the conscious control of the public group--the arrival and the victory of the men who get their way by self-control and who are invited by all to have control of others because they have control of themselves, is a law of nature. I am not preaching or teasing. I am not asking people's permission in this book for certain events. This book is not an attempt to answer the question, "What is day after to-morrow's news?" It is put forth as a prospectus of what has got to happen. The truth is taking hold of us and is seizing us all. It is for us to say. This book is a scenario of a play for a hundred million people to put on the stage, and for five hundred million people to act. § 6. _Who._ People will be unfair to themselves and unfair to me and will cheat a nation if any attempt should ever be made to take this book as a program--a program for anybody--and not a spirit. The spirit is the program, and the people who naturally gather around the spirit and who secrete it will have to be the ones to embody and give it in the Put-Through Clan, its local and its national expression. Picked persons, picked out by all for their known temperament and gift for team-work--that is for their put-through spirit or spirit of thoroughness in getting the victory over themselves and combining themselves with others, will need to be the dominating people. The essence of the Clan is that it is to be vivified and penetrated throughout with personality, and with respect for personality. This means automatically that the Put-Through Clan is not going to be dominated by people who will make it a moral-advice, do-you-good, hand-you-down-welfare institution. The essential point in its program is self-discipline and any discipline there may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be a by-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves. In the operation of the Clan there are certain persons and types of persons to whom the Clan is always going to be distinctly partial. It is never going to treat people alike. People are not--for the time being--alike and are going to be treated as they are. Democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated with discrimination--as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feel that what they are, makes a difference in what they get. It is obvious that to begin with that the Put-Through Clan, composed as it is to be of the leading people in all groups--the people whose time has a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have a regular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time brings the greatest return. This means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists in industry in getting what they want through the Put-Through Clan, will have to stand further down the queue than others. I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative--possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Any scintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I take but I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can use it, if I take him I will find him cumbersome. Life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions. People who do not listen--extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day's work. It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way. If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen--to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others--people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous. People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurry with. Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings. * * * * * On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the Put-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people--to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited. The people who give the most return on the investment--the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response--in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first. I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited. I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want. Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms. Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people--who do not want to think. I am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for being tired. I am pointing out a fact to be acted on. Tired people always want the same thing. They want a thing to stay as it is--or they want it to stay just as it is--upside down. The same inefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness--merely another set of people running the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meanness work. This is where the Put-Through Clan of the Air Line League comes in. The Put-Through Clan will throw the local and national influence of twenty million consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital and labor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scared fighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are now being troubled. The real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capital and labor, but between spirited capital and labor that want to work, create and construct, on the one hand, and unspirited capital and labor, working as little and thinking as little as they can, on the other. The majority of revolutionaries are people who without taking any trouble to study or understand anything, or to change anything, just turn it thoughtlessly upside down--substitute their inefficiency for the other man's. Extreme revolutionaries generally talk about freedom, but until they can get us to believe they are going to allow freedom to others, the world is not going to let them--of all people, have any. The bottom fact about revolutionary labor like revolutionary capital is that it is tired. Revolutionary labor is not spirited. It is as soggy-minded, thoughtless and automatic to be a revolutionist to-day as it is to be a Louis XVI. It takes originality to construct and to change things and change the hearts and minds of people and the spirit of a nation. Anybody can be a revolutionist or a reactionary. All one has to do is to stop thinking and sag, or stop thinking and slash. * * * * * The mills of the gods grind slowly because they grind fine. The main difference between men and the gods is that when men do things on a large scale they are apt to slur things over and be mechanical, do things in huge empty swoops--pass over details and particular persons, and the gods when they do things on a large scale pay more attention to details, to microbes and to particular persons than ever. * * * * * In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line League as probably weighty and conclusive. Those classes of employers and employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about national labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. The Put-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the demands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slur over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are further away. § 7. _The Town Fireplace._ The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people--that people see things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings. Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country. Ten differing men can get together and agree. Ten differing crowds of men--of the same men, will get together and fight. Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into a fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes. If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together around a fireplace and listen to the others--if each crowd of a hundred thousand could feel listened to absolutely--listened to by the other four hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world in the morning. As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone--holds a vast lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights. Of course there are the crowds on paper, too. Ink-mobs roam the streets. Crowds do not get on as individual persons do, because individual crowds cannot get physically and humanly together. It has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who come into definite personal contact with employers grow quite generally conservative and that the best conservative leaders become what would have once seemed to them radical when they really learn how to lead. Why is it that when they begin to learn as leaders how things really are, they are so often impeached by the crowds they represent--by capital and labor? The moment there are conveniences for crowds--for the rank and file of crowds to catch up to their leaders, to see things whole, too--the moment we have the machinery for crowds being able to have the spiritual and personal experiences their leaders have with the other side, crowds will stop dismissing their leaders--the moment they see both sides, and get practical, too. The purpose of the local chapter of the Put-Through Clan, is to find a means in each town of getting all crowds and groups together regularly as one group revealing themselves, listening and being listened to, and confiding themselves to team-thinking and to doing team-work together. The Put-Through Clan headquarters in a town will be the Town Fireplace for Crowds. It will be the warmest, liveliest, manliest, most genial resort in town--where all the live men and real men who seek real contacts and care about men who do, will get together. The refreshing and emancipating experience many men had in army camps will be carried on and become a daily force in the daily life of every town in America. § 8. _The Sign on the World._ I looked up yesterday and saw a sign on a church in New York. I like it better every time I go by. THIS CHURCH IS OPEN ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR PRAYER, MEDITATION AND BUSINESS. I have been wondering just who the man is who had the horse-sense and piety to take up the secret of business and the grip of religion both, telegraph them into ten words like this, and make a stone church say them at people a thousand a minute, on the busiest part of the busiest street in New York. Whoever the man is, he stands for the business men we want for the Put-Through Clan first. One of the first things the Put-Through Clan is going to dramatize is this sign on the Marble Collegiate Church. The men in America in the next twenty years who are going to carry everything before them in business, drive everybody and everything out of their way, take possession of the great streets and the great factories in the name of God and the people, are the men who practice daily the spirit of this sign, the men in business who refuse to go tumtytumming along in a kind of thoughtless inertia of motion, doing what everybody's doing in business--the men who turn one side (by whatever name they call it) to pray, to snuggle up to God and think. Men who have success before them in business are the men who have the most imagination in business. Imagination with most of us consists in taking time to see things before other people do, in connecting up what we do with its larger, deeper, more permanent relations, relating what we do to ourselves, to others, to our time and generation, to the things we have done before and to the things that must be done next. "Prayer, Meditation and Business." It is wonderful how these words, when one comes on a man who does not say anything about it and puts them together, tone each other up. The first thing the Put-Through Clan is going to do in a town in this present tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known to everybody across a continent the men in business who stand by these words--who mix them so people cannot tell them apart. BOOK VI WHAT THE PEOPLE EXPECT OF THE PRESIDENT I THE BIG BROTHER OF THE PEOPLE If I were writing a book to be used during a Presidential campaign, used as a handbook of the beliefs of the people--a book in the next few weeks for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their conventions with, the first belief I would put down for the new President to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger, better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and social life seem willing to let him express. We are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over this country--in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look. This belief is the first belief--the first practical working belief the next President of this country should have about the people. Putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief about human nature in America, is going to be the way to get a President for our next President who shall release the spirit of the nation, and reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of America are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a people as the spent and weary peoples of Europe have hoped we were. The trouble with America in her own eyes and the eyes of the world to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are. The first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in America, which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they ought to be good--the goodness in each man which in our present system he bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to the man himself. No man with things as they are now going, can feel quite safe just now with his own private goodness. He has to run to the labor unions or the Manufacturers' Association to make sure he has a right to be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. No man feels he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now, and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be. The mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in America, are not mean things it is our nature to do. We have let our machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads. Our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers and workmen to one another, caricature us. All one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working together to make a dollar worth fifty cents. The reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owes it to himself and to his class to furnish as little work for a dollar as he dares and take a dollar for fifty cents' worth of work. Each man sees this several times a day, but he belongs to a vast machine for getting something for nothing. Every man knows in his heart that the cure for everybody's trying to get something for nothing is everybody's at once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. Then the American dollar will quit being worth fifty cents. Why doesn't he do it? Because the machinery he belongs with and that everybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothing machines. Both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor are geared for backing in producing and not for going forward. All that has to be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have what we want. People on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion that the way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybody to produce more and to charge less for what he produces. But labor will not do this if capital does not do it. Capital will not do this if labor does not do it. It cannot be done by one man getting up all alone and saying he will get on with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about him getting on with twice as much. The only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines for mutual frank expression, confession and coöperation--mutual confession and coöperation by the men in each industry saying, "I will if you will," until we cover the nation. This is one of the first things anti-Bolshevik capital and anti-Bolshevik labor are going to stand for--the organizing and advertising in their own industry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing among men who produce. The men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages in flour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by too high wages in cotton mills, "We will make cheaper cotton for you, if you will make cheaper flour for us." It is not a matter of meanness in American human nature we are dealing with, it is a matter of agreement between men--hundreds and thousands and millions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who are trying to slink out of it. The thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreement probably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, without organizing a national "I will if you will" between capital and labor. The men who produce with their minds will say to those who work with their hands, "We will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that you pay for goods, if you will agree to take less wages and produce more." Capital will say to labor, "If you will produce ten per cent more, we will scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. For every sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twice the sacrifice." Having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men who work with their hands have to think things out, many employers are going to feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they do not do twice as much of themselves. They will have machinery for being confidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it. Instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "I won't if you won't" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand picked capitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will set going everywhere a huge public voluntary national "I WILL IF YOU WILL." Instead of proceeding from now on to assume that we are a mean people in America, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine together that will express our better natures as well as our present one does our worst ones. There is one thing we propose to stand out for and that we do not intend to be wheedled out of, in our next two political conventions and during our next President's next four years, and that is that our two great machines in this country, our industrial one and our political one, shall be taken out of the hands of men who are fooled about themselves and who will not listen to others. We do not believe that there is anything essentially the matter with what is called our capitalistic system or our labor union system except men--the men who think they belong in the front ranks of capital and the front ranks of labor. The scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politics and business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying to make a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country like ours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the people in it could really do to express themselves to one another and to the world, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdups and party threats--shall be turned out of office by the people and huddled away out of sight. In our industrial and political expressing and acting machines on every hand we give notice we are going to pick men out, men who shall make our machines express us, our freedom, our justice, our steadiness of heart, and our belief in America, in ourselves, in one another, or our desire to listen to those who disagree with us, our human sporting instinct about our party and ourselves, and the victory of the people, the common sense and good will of common human nature in America and the world. To the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are still mooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinking themselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselves as the captains or military leaders of industry--to the labor union Dukes and Dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them--the hundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice. * * * * * I would like if I could to publish this book with blank pages for a few million signatures--and a place for the new President or proposed President to sign, too. The Presidential candidate we want, would have it in him to put his name down with the rest--with something like this, perhaps--"I do not say I could sign every paragraph in this book, but the general idea and program of organizing and giving body to the will of the people as expressed in this book--the spirit and direction of it and in the main the technique for getting it, I sign for." I believe that the American people when they know in reality, as they do know at heart, what I am believing in this book, would be inclined in looking up their candidate for President to pick out a President who would have written this book--the gist of it--if he had had time. At all events here it is--this program or handbook of the beliefs for a people. I put it forth as being more concrete than political party platforms are--and as a practical and plain way for a nation to look over a President, find him out, and follow him up. II THE MAN WHO CARRIES THE BUNCH OF KEYS FOR THE NATION The crowds have to be unlocked to each other. The temperament of our President for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other. At present it looks as if our President for the next four years would be perhaps the loneliest President America ever had. When our next President, when he gets into the White House, looks at our people and hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times of being lonely with the people. The people are lonely with one another. Anybody can go out into the street anywhere in America to-night and be lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. Any man can take any crowded street and see for himself. He can pass miles of men who in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how to defend America and they have another. If one were to take any ten blocks of Broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not Americans, wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country--partitioning each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts, bullies, braggarts and Bolshevists and pacifists--and while they might keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers, that whole section of Broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks. One would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people--every man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of America from his idea of America. If the President were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear the people, he would feel lonely with them. The only way not to feel lonely on ten blocks of Broadway just now would be to put up signs and labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off as they go along, into separate audiences. The League of Nations or the American Federation of Labor would sort out a thousand people on Broadway and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the I. W. W. could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "You are not America. We only are America!" This makes the President lonely. We elected him a few months ago to be President of all of us. It is slow work being President, being a good mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen to each other. The way the President is going to meet this issue and insist until we all thank him for it--on being President of all of us, is with his temperament. III THE PRESIDENT'S TEMPERAMENT If I were writing a book for the next President to run for President on--a thing I have guilty moments of hoping I am doing--the first thing I would arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platforms for him to run on--one platform on what he believes and the other platform--the way he believes it and gets other people to believe it. The way the next President we pick out, does his believing, the way he keeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled about his party and about himself, the clean-cutness and honesty of his mind, the tone, the ring in which he believes in himself and gets other people to believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his getting for this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most important thing about him. The most important part of the next President's platform is going to be, in the eyes of the people, his character, his temperament, the way his personal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives what he believes. The American people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians or philosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep about people. When Henry Cabot Lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of history he wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is being fooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer to him, may feel Mr. Lodge is too deep for them, but the moment they see Mr. Lodge being fooled about himself, they find Mr. Lodge easy. In a trait in human nature like this, with which they are familiar every day, a hundred million people--without trying, are deep. If a hundred million people could sit down and write a book--a book or open letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague, whoofy Nobodies we call our Political Parties, and tell them in so many words the kind of President the people want and understand--the kind of President the people would sweep in unspeakably into the White House when they saw him, no matter what any politician said, I am inclined to believe it would be found--when the book by the hundred million people was out, that our people feel on the whole that we could not have anything better in our country for our next President than a man who would be a lawyer backwards. What the platform of personality we want our next President to have amounts to, is this--Know everything a lawyer knows. Have everything a lawyer has--and just turn it around and use it the other way and be another kind of man about it. The fate of America and the fate of the world may be said to be turning to-day on the degree during the next four years, during the next President's administration, the American people and all groups of the people, stop believing weakly what they want to believe and face the facts about themselves. In order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough to eat, millions of American men and women of all groups and classes of the people have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changing their minds about themselves. Everything we are hoping to do turns upon our recognizing as a people, standing out from the rest and pushing forward to lead us, men who know more than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their own minds open and can therefore open ours. Instead of having for the next President of this country a man who braces people, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives the old beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes them believe them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a President who is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, who has the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humanness to look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides who have dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man who makes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they even think of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real in politics. I mean by a man's being real in politics, being a politician backwards, keeping open to facts acting and preferring to act as children and strong men act, with the deepness and directness of the child. The hundred million people in the book they would write if they had time, put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the White House, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him. The political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak. They would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the White House to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this country as clean as a whistle. IV THE PRESIDENT'S RELIGION I have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to the old monks of the Middle Ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and lived in monasteries alone with God. If I felt just as they felt about being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live the most deeply, intricately religious life I could think of I would refuse to look like a saint and be President of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and would pick out the most difficult business with the most difficult class of men to compete with in the United States. Then I would go into it, put all my money and all my religion together into it. The principles and standards that actually obtain in competition constitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. One might say coöperation of course, but what makes coöperation powerful and what selects the people who shall lead coöperation--what gives it character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him to find a way to do or not to do certain things--when he competes. Competition--the way a man threads his way through the men who compete with him--would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of spiritual values--the real monastery of modern life. All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially, or clap them into jail. There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them. As for the rest of us, competition--fair, manly, sporting competition, keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge of ourselves and others that make coöperation a noble as well as practical course of procedure. The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the state--to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business. If I were the rich young man in the New Testament I would not have sold all my goods to feed the poor--as that particular person (being what he was) was advised to. I would hold on to my money--and found a religious order with it. I would make a whip of cords of my money and my brains woven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers, the moral and business idiots out of the Temple. I would do it not by being a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having more imagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage of human motive power in business than they can use, by having more brains about human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public to be religious, _i.e._, my power as a sheer matter of business, to make the public prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in business until it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble and shortsighted, theirs. This is not the kind of thing that I happen to have the natural technique or gift to do--to found a live deep natural religious order like this, but there are thousands of men I know and that other men know in America, who have the natural typical American technique for putting their higher gifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who can only use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go with these men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched out before our eyes. The way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is to lead in the business world to-day in establishing principles of competition, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the common sense, the will, the glory and the religion of the people. The way to be a President, the next four years, is to use the White House and all the resources of the Government to coöperate with and back up this type of American business man. V THE RED FLAG AND THE WHITE HOUSE The first qualification the next President should run for the Presidency on is his vision or program for the nation with regard to backing up men in American life--democracy and the Red Flag. The first thing a President should see about the Red Flag is that the Red Flag is up to the people and not up to the White House--up to the people in five hundred thousand factories and offices and stores, up to the people on both sides of a hundred thousand counters, up to everybody who buys a paper of pins or a pound of cheese while they are buying it, up to everybody who buys a house or a watch or a cake of soap, a safety razor or a railroad, up to everybody while he is producing, while he is buying and selling, up to everybody individually and collectively to see that in every ten cents they spend in this country and every ten minutes they work in this country, the Red Flag--the civil war flag, is stamped on. Only the people can head off the Red Flag--all of the people working on it on their daily job all of the time. The more our President believes that the work of dealing with the Red Flag in this country is up to the people the more he gets the people to believe it, puts the work off on the people, the better the work will be done, the further the Red Flag will be from getting hold of the country and the longer the President will be in the White House. We call our President our Chief Executive. What we put him in the White House and make him our chief executive for is that he shall have imagination about a hundred million people besides himself, that he shall have imagination about what the people can do and imagination about getting them to do it. An executive is a man whose work is making other people work. We call the place in which we have our President live the Executive Mansion. The best man to elect to live in it is the man who can make a hundred million people work. THE END 
27518	----	file was produced from images produced by Core Historical Literature in Agriculture (CHLA), Cornell University) CHANGE IN THE VILLAGE BY GEORGE BOURNE NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 1912 _Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons, Ltd., Guildford, England_ TO MY SISTERS CONTENTS I PAGE I. THE VILLAGE 3 II THE PRESENT TIME II. SELF-RELIANCE 21 III. MAN AND WIFE 38 IV. MANIFOLD TROUBLES 50 V. DRINK 65 VI. WAYS AND MEANS 79 VII. GOOD TEMPER 97 III THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES VIII. THE PEASANT SYSTEM 115 IX. THE NEW THRIFT 127 X. COMPETITION 143 XI. HUMILIATION 151 XII. THE HUMILIATED 167 XIII. NOTICE TO QUIT 180 IV THE RESULTING NEEDS XIV. THE INITIAL DEFECT 193 XV. THE OPPORTUNITY 200 XVI. THE OBSTACLES 217 XVII. THE WOMEN'S NEED 229 XVIII. THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING 244 XIX. EMOTIONAL STARVATION 260 XX. THE CHILDREN'S NEED 272 V XXI. THE FORWARD MOVEMENT 289 I THE VILLAGE I THE VILLAGE If one were to be very strict, I suppose it would be wrong to give the name of "village" to the parish dealt with in these chapters, because your true village should have a sort of corporate history of its own, and this one can boast nothing of the kind. It clusters round no central green; no squire ever lived in it; until some thirty years ago it was without a resident parson; its church is not half a century old. Nor are there here, in the shape of patriarchal fields, or shady lanes, or venerable homesteads, any of those features that testify to the immemorial antiquity of real villages as the homes of men; and this for a very simple reason. In the days when real villages were growing, our valley could not have supported a quite self-contained community: it was, in fact, nothing but a part of the wide rolling heath-country--the "common," or "waste," belonging to the town which lies northwards, in a more fertile valley of its own. Here, there was no fertility. Deep down in the hollow a stream, which runs dry every summer, had prepared a strip of soil just worth reclaiming as coarse meadow or tillage; but the strip was narrow--a man might throw a stone across it at some points--and on either side the heath and gorse and fern held their own on the dry sand. Such a place afforded no room for an English village of the true manorial kind; and I surmise that it lay all but uninhabited until perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time a few "squatters" from neighbouring parishes had probably settled here, to make what living they might beside the stream-bed. At no time, therefore, did the people form a group of genuinely agricultural rustics. Up to a period within living memory, they were an almost independent folk, leading a sort of "crofter," or (as I have preferred to call it) a "peasant" life; while to-day the majority of the men, no longer independent, go out to work as railway navvies, builders' labourers, drivers of vans and carts in the town; or are more casually employed at digging gravel, or road-mending, or harvesting and hay-making, or attending people's gardens, or laying sewers, or in fact at any job they can find. At a low estimate nine out of every ten of them get their living outside the parish boundaries; and this fact by itself would rob the place of its title to be thought a village, in the strict sense. In appearance, too, it is abnormal. As you look down upon the valley from its high sides, hardly anywhere are there to be seen three cottages in a row, but all about the steep slopes the little mean dwelling-places are scattered in disorder. So it extends east and west for perhaps a mile and a half--a surprisingly populous hollow now, wanting in restfulness to the eyes and much disfigured by shabby detail, as it winds away into homelier and softer country at either end. The high-road out of the town, stretching away for Hindhead and the South Coast, comes slanting down athwart the valley, cutting it into "Upper" and "Lower" halves or ends; and just in the bottom, where there is a bridge over the stream, the appearances might deceive a stranger into thinking that he had come to the nucleus of an old village, since a dilapidated farmstead and a number of cottages line the sides of the road at that point. The appearances, however, are deceptive. I doubt if the cottages are more than a century old; and even if any of them have a greater antiquity, still it is not as the last relics of an earlier village that they are to be regarded. On the contrary, they indicate the beginnings of the present village. Before them, their place was unoccupied, and they do but commemorate the first of that series of changes by which the valley has been turned from a desolate wrinkle in the heaths into the anomalous suburb it has become to-day. Of the period and manner of that first change I have already given a hint, attributing it indefinitely to a slow immigration of squatters somewhere in the eighteenth century. Neither the manner of it, however, nor the period is material here. Let it suffice that, a hundred years ago or so, the valley had become inhabited by people living in the "peasant" way presently to be described more fully. The subject of this book begins with the next change, which by and by overtook these same people, and dates from the enclosure of the common, no longer ago than 1861. The enclosure was effected in the usual fashion: a few adjacent landowners obtained the lion's share, while the cottagers came in for small allotments. These allotments, of little use to their owners, and in many cases soon sold for a few pounds apiece, became the sites of the first few cottages for a newer population, who slowly drifted in and settled down, as far as might be, to the habits and outlook of their predecessors. This second period continued until about 1900. And now, during the last ten years, a yet greater change has been going on. The valley has been "discovered" as a "residential centre." A water-company gave the signal for development. No sooner was a good water-supply available than speculating architects and builders began to buy up vacant plots of land, or even cottages--it mattered little which--and what never was strictly speaking a village is at last ceasing even to think itself one. The population of some five hundred twenty years ago has increased to over two thousand; the final shabby patches of the old heath are disappearing; on all hands glimpses of new building and raw new roads defy you to persuade yourself that you are in a country place. In fact, the place is a suburb of the town in the next valley, and the once quiet high-road is noisy with the motor-cars of the richer residents and all the town traffic that waits upon the less wealthy. But although in the exactest sense the parish was never a village, its inhabitants, as lately as twenty years ago (when I came to live here) had after all a great many of the old English country characteristics. Dependent on the town for their living the most of them may have been by that time; yet they had derived their outlook and their habits from the earlier half-squatting, half-yeoman people; so that I found myself amongst neighbours rustic enough to justify me in speaking of them as villagers. I have come across their like elsewhere, and I am not deceived. They had the country touch. They were a survival of the England that is dying out now; and I grieve that I did not realize it sooner. As it was, some years had passed by, and the movement by which I find myself living to-day in a "residential centre" was already faintly stirring before I began to discern properly that the earlier circumstances would repay closer attention. They were not all agreeable circumstances; some of them, indeed, were so much the reverse of agreeable that I hardly see now how I could ever have found them even tolerable. The want of proper sanitation, for instance; the ever-recurring scarcity of water; the plentiful signs of squalid and disordered living--how unpleasant they all must have been! On the other hand, some of the circumstances were so acceptable that, to recover them, I could at times almost be willing to go back and endure the others. It were worth something to renew the old lost sense of quiet; worth something to be on such genial terms with one's neighbours; worth very much to become acquainted again at first hand with the customs and modes of thought that prevailed in those days. Here at my door people were living, in many respects, by primitive codes which have now all but disappeared from England, and things must have been frequently happening such as, henceforth, will necessitate journeys into other countries if one would see them. I remember yet how subtly the intimations of a primitive mode of living used to reach me before I had learnt to appreciate their meaning. Unawares an impression of antiquity would come stealing over the senses, on a November evening, say, when the blue wood-smoke mounted from a cottage chimney and went drifting slowly down the valley in level layers; or on still summer afternoons, when there came up from the hollow the sounds of hay-making--the scythe shearing through the grass, the clatter of the whetstone, the occasional country voices. The dialect, and the odd ideas expressed in it, worked their elusive magic over and over again. To hear a man commend the weather, rolling out his "Nice moarnin'" with the fat Surrey "R," or to be wished "Good-day, sir," in the high twanging voice of some cottage-woman or other, was to be reminded in one's senses, without thinking about it at all, that one was amongst people not of the town, and hardly of one's own era. The queer things, too, which one happened to hear of, the simple ideas which seemed so much at home in the valley, though they would have been so much to be deprecated in the town, all contributed to produce the same old-world impression. Where the moon's changes were discussed so solemnly, and people numbered the "mistis in March" in expectation of corresponding "frostis in May"; where, if a pig fell sick, public opinion counselled killing it betimes, lest it should die and be considered unfit for food; where the most time-honoured saying was counted the best wit, so that you raised a friendly smile by murmuring "Good for young ducks" when it rained; where the names of famous sorts of potatoes--red-nosed kidneys, _magnum bonums_, and so on--were better known than the names of politicians or of newspapers; where spades and reap-hooks of well-proved quality were treasured as friends by their owners and coveted by other connoisseurs--it was impossible that one should not be frequently visited by the feeling of something very old-fashioned in the human life surrounding one. More pointed in their suggestion of a rustic tradition were the various customs and pursuits proper to given seasons. The customs, it is true, were preserved only by the children; but they had their acceptable effect. It might have been foolish and out-of-date, yet it was undeniably pleasant to know on May Day that the youngsters were making holiday from school, and to have them come to the door with their morning faces, bringing their buttercup garlands and droning out the appropriate folk ditty. At Christmastime, too, it was pleasant when they came singing carols after dark. This, indeed, they still do; but either I am harder to please or the performance has actually degenerated, for I can no longer discover in it the simple childish spirit that made it gratifying years ago. Meanwhile, quite apart from such celebrations, the times and seasons observed by the people in following their work gave a flavour of folk manners which dignified the life of the parish, by associating it with the doings of the countryside for many generations. In August, though one did not see, one heard about, the gangs of men trudging off at night for the Sussex harvest. In September the days went very silently in the valley, because the cottages were shut up and the people were all away at the hop-picking; and then, in the gathering dusk, one heard the buzz and rumour of manifold homecomings--tired children squalling, women talking and perhaps scolding, as the little chattering groups came near and passed out of earshot to their several cottages; while, down the hollows, hovering in the crisp night air, drifted a most appetizing smell of herrings being fried for a late meal. Earlier in the year there was hay-making in the valley itself. All the warm night was sometimes fragrant with the scent of the cut grass; and about this season, too, the pungent odour of shallots lying out in the gardens to ripen off would come in soft whiffs across the hedges. Always, at all times, the people were glad to gossip about their gardens, bringing vividly into one's thoughts the homely importance of the month, nay, the very week, that was passing. Now, around Good Friday, the talk would be of potato-planting; and again, in proper order, one heard of peas and runner-beans, and so through the summer fruits and plants, to the ripening of plums and apples, and the lifting of potatoes and carrots and parsnips. In all these ways the parish, if not a true village, seemed quite a country place twenty years ago, and its people were country people. Yet there was another side to the picture. The charm of it was a generalized one--I think an impersonal one; for with the thought of individual persons who might illustrate it there comes too often into my memory a touch of sordidness, if not in one connection then in another; so that I suspect myself, not for the first time, of sentimentality. Was the social atmosphere after all anything but a creation of my own dreams? Was the village life really idyllic? Not for a moment can I pretend that it was. Patience and industry dignified it; a certain rough jollity, a large amount of good temper and natural kindness, kept it from being foul; but of the namby-pamby or soft-headed sentiment which many writers have persuaded us to attribute to old-English cottage life I think I have not in twenty years met with a single trace. In fact, there are no people so likely to make ridicule of that sort of thing as my labouring-class neighbours have always been. They do not, like the middle classes, enjoy it. It is a commodity for which they have no use, as may appear in the following pages. To say this, however, is to say too little. I do not mean that the prevailing temper in the village was sordid, bitter, cruel, like that, say, of the Norman peasantry in De Maupassant's short stories. In by far the greater majority the people have usually seemed to me at the worst a little suspicious, a little callous, a little undemonstrative, and at the best generous and happy-go-lucky to a fault. Nevertheless, tales as repulsive as any that the French writer has told of his country-people could have been collected here by anyone with a taste for that sort of thing. Circumstantial narratives have reached me of savage, or, say, brutish, doings: of sons ill-treating their mothers, and husbands their wives of fights, and cruelties, and sometimes--not often--of infamous vice. The likelihood of these tales, which there was no reason to doubt, was strengthened by what I saw and heard for myself. Drunkenness corrupted and disgraced the village life, so that good men went wrong and their families suffered miserably. I have helped more than one drunkard home at night, and seen a wretched woman or a frightened child come to the door to receive him. Even in the seclusion of my own garden I could not escape the evidences of mischief going on. For sounds echo up and down the valley as clearly as across the water of a lake; and sometimes a quiet evening would grow suddenly horrid with distracted noises of family quarrel in some distant cottage, when women shrilled and clamoured and men cursed, and all the dogs in the parish fell a-barking furiously. Even in bed one could not be secure. Once or twice some wild cry in the night--a woman's scream, a man's volley of oaths--has drawn me hurrying to my window in dread that outrage was afoot; and often the sounds of obscene singing from the road, where men were blundering homewards late from the public-houses in the town, have startled me out of my first sleep. Then, besides the distresses brought upon the people by their own folly, there were others thrust upon them by their economic condition. Of poverty, with its attendant sicknesses and neglects, there has never been any end to the tales, while the desolations due to accidents in the day's work, on the railway, or with horses, or upon scaffoldings of buildings, or in collapsing gravel-quarries, have become almost a commonplace. In short, there is no room for sentimentality about the village life. Could its annals be written they would make no idyll; they would be too much stained by tragedy and vice and misery. Yet the knowledge of all this--and it was not possible to live here long without such knowledge--left the other impressions I have spoken of quite unimpaired. Disorders were the exception, after all. As a general rule the village character was genial, steadfast, self-respecting; one could not but recognize in it a great fund of strength, a great stability; nor could one help feeling that its main features--the limitations and the grimness, as well as the surprising virtues--were somehow closely related to that pleasant order of things suggested by the hay-making sounds, by the smell of the wood-smoke, by the children's May-day garlands. And, in fact, the relationship was essential. The temper and manners of the older people turned out to have been actually moulded by conditions of a true village kind, so that the same folk-quality that sounded in the little garland song reappeared more sternly in my neighbours' attitude towards their fate. Into this valley, it is true, much had never come that had flourished and been forgotten in English villages elsewhere. At no time had there been any of the more graceful folk arts here; at no time any comely social life, such as one reads of in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_ or Gray's _Elegy_; but, as I gradually learnt, the impoverished labouring people I talked to had been, in many cases, born in the more prosperous conditions of a self-supporting peasantry. Bit by bit the truth come home to me, in the course of unconcerned gossip, when my informants had no idea of the significance of those stray scraps of information which they let fall. I was not alive to it myself for a long time. But when I had heard of the village cows, which used to be turned out to graze on the heaths, and had been told how fir-timber fit for cottage roof-joists could be cut on the common, as well as heath good enough for thatching and turf excellent for firing; and when to this was added the talk of bread-ovens at half the old cottages, and of little corn-crops in the gardens, and of brewing and wine-making and bee-keeping; I understood at last that my elderly neighbours had seen with their own eyes what I should never see--namely, the old rustic economy of the English peasantry. In that light all sorts of things showed a new meaning. I looked with rather changed sentiments, for example, upon the noisome pigsties--for were they not a survival of a venerable thrift? I viewed the old tools--hoes and spades and scythes and fag-hooks--with quickened interest; and I speculated with more intelligence upon those aged people of the parish whose curious habits were described to me with so much respect. But of all the details that now gained significance, most to be noted were the hints of the comparative prosperity of that earlier time. For now some old woman, half starving on her parish pay, would indicate this or that little cottage, and remark that her grandfather had built it for her mother to go into when she married. Or now, a decrepit man would explain that in such and such a puzzling nook in the hillside had once stood his father's cow-stall. Here, at the edge of the arable strip, a building divided into two poor cottages proved to have been originally somebody's little hop-kiln; there, on a warm slope given over to the pleasure-garden of some "resident" like myself, a former villager used to grow enough wheat to keep him in flour half the winter; and there again, down a narrow by-way gone ruinous from long neglect, Master So-and-so, whose children to-day go in fear of the workhouse, was wont to drive his little waggon and pair of horses. Particulars like these, pointing to a lost state of well-being, accounted very well for the attraction which, in spite of individual faults, I had felt towards the village folk in general. The people stood for something more than merely themselves. In their odd ways and talk and character I was affected, albeit unawares, by a robust tradition of the English countryside, surviving here when the circumstances which would have explained it had already largely disappeared. After too many years of undiscernment that truth was apparent to me. And even so, it was but a gradual enlightenment; even now it is unlikely that I appreciate the facts in their deepest significance. For the "robust" tradition, as I have just called it, was something more than simply robust. It was older, by far, than this anomalous village. Imported into the valley--if my surmise is correct--by squatters two centuries ago, it was already old even then; it already had centuries of experience behind it; and though it very likely had lost much in that removal, still it was a genuine off-shoot of the home-made or "folk" civilization of the South of England. No wonder that its survivals had struck me as venerable and pleasant, when there was so much vigorous English life behind them, derived perhaps from so many fair English counties. The perception came to me only just in time, for to-day the opportunities of further observation occur but rarely. The old life is being swiftly obliterated. The valley is passing out of the hands of its former inhabitants. They are being crowded into corners, and are becoming as aliens in their own home; they are receding before newcomers with new ideas, and, greatest change of all, they are yielding to the dominion of new ideas themselves. At present, therefore, the cottagers are a most heterogeneous population, presenting all sorts of baffling problems to those who have to deal with them, as the schoolmaster and the sanitary officer and others find. In no two families--hardly in two members of the same family--do the old traditions survive in equal degree. A lath-and-plaster partition may separate people who are half a century asunder in civilization, and on the same bench at school may be found side by side two children who come from homes, the one worthy of King George III.'s time, the other not unworthy of King George V.'s. But the changes which will remove the greatest of these discrepancies are proceeding very fast; in another ten years' time there will be not much left of the traditional life whose crumbling away I have been witnessing during the twenty years that are gone. Some grounds of hope--great hope, too--which begin at last to appear, and are treated of in the final chapter of this book, save the tale of Change in the Village from being quite a tragedy, yet still it is a melancholy tale. I have dealt with it in the two sections called respectively "The Altered Circumstances" and "The Resulting Needs." The earlier chapters, which immediately follow this one under the heading "The Present Time," are merely descriptive of the people and their conditions as I know them now, and aim at nothing more than to pave the way for a clearer understanding of the main subject. II THE PRESENT TIME II SELF-RELIANCE There is a chapter in Dickens's _Hard Times_ which tells how it was discovered that somebody had fallen down a disused mine-shaft, and how the rescue was valiantly effected by a few men who had to be awakened for that end from their drunken Sunday afternoon sleep. Sobered by the dangers they foresaw, these men ran to the pit-mouth, pushed straight to the centre of the crowd there, and fell to work quietly with their ropes and winches. As you read, you seem to see them, spitting on their great hands while they knot the ropes, listening attentively to the doctor as to an equal, and speaking in undertones to one another, but regardless of the remarks of the bystanders. The best man amongst them, says Dickens--and you know it to be true: Dickens could have told you the men's names and life-history had he chosen--the best man amongst them was the greatest drunkard of the lot; and when his heroic work was done, nobody seems to have taken any farther notice of him. These were Northcountrymen; but there was a quality about them of which I have often been reminded, in watching or hearing tell of the men in this Surrey village. It is the thing that most impresses all who come into any sympathetic contact with my neighbours their readiness to make a start at the dangerous or disagreeable task when others would be still talking, and their apparent expectation that they will succeed. In this spirit they occasionally do things quite as well worthy of mention as the incident described by Dickens. I remember looking on myself at just such another piece of work, in the town a mile away from here, one winter day. The sluggish "river," as we call it, which flows amongst meadows on the south of the town, is usually fordable beside one of the bridges, and men with horses and carts as often as not drive through the ford, instead of going over the bridge. But on the day I am recalling floods had so swollen the stream that a horse and cart were swept down under the narrow bridge, and had got jammed there, the driver having escaped over the iron railings of the bridge as the cart went under. I don't know what became of him then--he was but a lad, I was told. When I came on the scene, a number of people were on the bridge, while many more were down on the river banks, whence they could see the horse and cart under the arch. A few were bawling out unheeded advice as to what should be done; in fact, a heated altercation had arisen between the two loudest--a chimney-sweep and a medical man--whose theories disagreed; but it was plain to everybody that it would be a risky thing to venture under the bridge into that swirling stream. For ten minutes or more, while the horse remained invisible to us on the bridge, and likely to drown, the dispute snapped angrily from bank to bank, punctuated occasionally by excited cries, such as "He's gettin' lower!" "He's sinkin' down!" Then, unobserved, a bricklayer's labourer came running with a rope, which he hurriedly made into a noose and tightened under his armpits. None of the shouters, by the way, had suggested such a plan. The man was helped over the railings and swiftly lowered--Heaven knows who took a hand at that--and so he disappeared for five minutes. Then a shout: the horse came into view, staggering downstream with harness cut, and scrambled up into the meadow; and the man, drenched and deadly white, and too benumbed to help himself, was hauled up on to the bridge, and carried to the nearest inn. I never heard his name--people of his sort, as Dickens knew, are generally anonymous--but he was one of the labourers of the locality, and only last winter I saw him shivering at the street corners amongst other out-o'-works. Behaviour like this is so characteristic of labouring men that we others expect it of them as if it were especially their duty. Again and again I have noticed it. If a horse falls in the street, ten chances to one it is some obscure labouring fellow who gets him up again. Whether there is danger or no, in emergencies which demand readiness and disregard of comfort, the common unskilled labourer is always to the fore. One summer night I had strolled out to the top of the road here which slants down, over-arched by tall trees, past the Vicarage. At some distance down, where there should have been such a depth of darkness under the trees, I was surprised to see a little core of light, where five or six people stood around a bright lamp, which one of them was holding. The scene looked so theatrical, glowing under the trees with the summer night all round it, that, of course, I had to go down the hill and investigate it. The group I joined was, it turned out, watching a bicyclist who lay unconscious in somebody's arms, while a doctor fingered at a streaming wound in the man's forehead, and washed it, and finally stitched it up. The bicycle--its front wheel buckled by collision with the Vicarage gatepost--stood against the gate, and two or three cushions lay in the hedge; for the Vicar had come out to the man's assistance, and had sent for the doctor, and it was the Vicar himself, old and grey, but steady, who now held his library lamp for the doctor's use. The rest of us stood looking on, one of us at least feeling rather sick at the sight, and all of us as useless as the night-moths which came out from the trees and fluttered round the lamp. At last, when all was done, and the injured man could be moved, there rose up a hitherto unnoticed fellow who had been supporting him, and I recognized one of our village labourers. He looked faint, and tottered to a chair which the Vicar had ready, and gulped at some brandy, for he, too, had been overcome by sight of the surgery. But it was to him that the task of sitting in the dusty road and being smeared with blood had fallen. And this quiet acceptance of the situation, recognizing that he if anyone must suffer, and take the hard place which soils the clothes and shocks the feelings, gives the clue to the average labourer's temper. It is really very curious to think of. Rarely can a labourer afford the luxury of a "change." Wet through though his clothes may be, or blood-stained, or smothered with mud or dust, he must wear them until he goes to bed, and must put them on again as he finds them in the morning; but this does not excuse him in our eyes from taking the disagreeable place. Still less does it excuse him in his own eyes. If you offer to help, men of this kind will probably dissuade you. "It'll make yer clothes all dirty," they say; "you'll get in such a mess." So they assume the burden, sometimes surly and swearing, oftener with a good-tempered jest. To anything with a touch of humour in it they will leap forward like schoolboys. I am reminded of a funny incident one frosty morning, when patches of the highway were slippery as glass. Preceding me along the road was a horse and cart, driven by a boy who stood upright in the cart, and seemed not to notice how the horse's hoofs were skidding; and some distance ahead three railway navvies were approaching, just off their night's work, and carrying their picks and shovels. I had left the cart behind, and was near these three, when suddenly they burst into a laugh, exclaiming to one another, "Look at that old 'oss!" I turned. There sat the horse on his tail between the shafts, pawing with his forefeet at the road, but unable to get a grip at its slippery surface. It was impossible not to smile; he had such an absurd look. The navvies, however, did more than smile. They broke into a run; they saw immediately what to do. In thirty seconds they were shovelling earth out from the hedgerow under the horse's feet, and in two minutes more he had scrambled up, unhurt. In such behaviour, I say, we have a clue to the labouring-man's temper. The courage, the carelessness of discomfort, the swiftness to see what should be done, and to do it, are not inspired by any tradition of chivalry, any consciously elaborated cult. It is habitual with these men to be ready, and those fine actions which win our admiration are but chance disclosures in public of a self-reliance constantly practised by the people amongst themselves--by the women quite as much as by the men--under stress of necessity, one would say at first sight. Take another example of the same willing efficiency applied in rather a different way. In a cottage near to where I am writing a young labourer died last summer--a young unmarried man, whose mother was living with him, and had long depended on his support. Eighteen months earlier he had been disabled for a week or two by the kick of a horse, and a heart-disease of long standing was so aggravated by the accident that he was never again able to do much work. There came months of unemployment, and as a consequence he was in extreme poverty when he died. His mother was already reduced to parish relief; it was only by the help of his two sisters--young women out at service, who managed to pay for a coffin for him--that a pauper's funeral was avoided. A labourer's wife, the mother of four or five young children, took upon herself the duty of washing and laying out the corpse, but there remained still the funeral to be managed. An undertaker to conduct it could not be engaged; there was no money to pay him. Then, however, neighbours took the matter up, not as an unwonted thing, I may say--it is usual with them to help bury a "mate"--only, as a rule, there is the undertaker too. In this case they did without him--six poor men losing half a day's work, and giving their services. The coffin was too big to be carried down the crooked staircase; too big also to be got out of the bedroom window until the window-sashes had been taken out. But these men managed it all, borrowing tools and a couple of ladders and some ropes; and then, in the black clothes which they keep for such occasions, they carried the coffin to the churchyard. That same evening two of them went to work at cleaning out a cess-pit, two others spent the evening in their gardens, another had cows to milk, and the sixth, being out of work and restless, had no occupation to go home to so far as I know. Of course this, too, was a piece of voluntary service, resembling in that respect those more striking examples of self-reliance which are brought out by sudden emergencies. But it points, more directly than they do, to the sphere in which that virtue is practised until it becomes a habit. For if you follow the clue on, it leads very quickly to the scene where self-reliance is so to speak at home, where it seems the natural product of the people's circumstances--the scene, namely, of their daily work. For there, not only in the employment by which the men earn their wages, but in the household and garden work of the women as well as the men, there is nothing to support them save their own readiness, their own personal force. It sounds a truism, but it is worth attention. Unlike the rest of us, labouring people are unable to shirk any of life's discomforts by "getting a man" or "a woman," as we say, to do the disagreeable or risky jobs which continually need to be done. If a cottager in this village wants his chimney swept, or his pigstye cleaned out, or his firewood chopped, the only "man" he can get to do it for him is himself. Similarly with his wife. She may not call in "a woman" to scrub her floor, or to wash and mend, or to skin a rabbit for dinner, or to make up the fire for cooking it. It is necessary for her to be ready to turn from one task to another without squeamishness, and without pausing to think how she shall do it. In short, she and her husband alike must practise, in their daily doings, a sort of intrepidity which grows customary with them; and this habit is the parent of much of that fine conduct which they exhibit so carelessly in moments of emergency. Until this fact is appreciated there is no such thing as understanding the people's disposition. It is the principal gateway that lets you in to their character. Nevertheless the subject needs no further illustration here. Anyone personally acquainted with the villagers knows how their life is one continuous act of unconscious self-reliance, and those who have not seen it for themselves will surely discover plentiful evidences of it in the following pages, if they read between the lines. But I must digress to remark upon one aspect of the matter. In view of the subject of this book--namely, the transition from an old social order to present times--it should be considered whether the handiness of the villagers is after all quite so natural a thing as is commonly supposed. For a long time I took it for granted. The people's accomplishments were rough, I admit, and not knowing how much "knack" or experience was involved in the dozens of odd jobs that they did, I assumed that they did them by the light of Nature. Yet if we reflect how little we learn from Nature, and how helpless people grow after two or three generations of life in slums, or in libraries and drawing-rooms, it would seem probable that there is more than appears on the surface in the labourer's versatility of usefulness. After all, who would know by the light of Nature how to go about sweeping a chimney, as they used to do it here, with rope and furzebush dragged down? or how to scour out a watertank effectively? or where to begin upon cleaning a pigstye? Easy though it looks, the closer you get down to this kind of work as the cottager does it the more surprisedly do you discover that he recognizes right and wrong methods of doing it; and my own belief is that the necessity which compels the people to be their own servants would not make them so adaptable as they are, were there not, at the back of them, a time-honoured tradition teaching them how to go on. Returning from this digression, and speaking, too, rather of a period from ten to twenty years ago than of the present time, it would be foolish to pretend that the people's good qualities were unattended by defects. The men had a very rough exterior, so rough that I have known them to inspire timidity in the respectable who met them on the road, and especially at night, when, truth to tell, those of them who were out were not always too sober. After you got to know them, so as to understand the shut of their mouths and the look of their eyes--usually very steadfast and quiet--you knew that there was rarely any harm in them; but I admit that their aspect was unpromising enough at first sight. A stranger might have been forgiven for thinking them coarse, ignorant, stupid, beery, unclean. And yet there was excuse for much of it, while much more of it was sheer ill-fortune, and needed no excuse. Though many of the men were physically powerful, few of them could boast of any physical comeliness. Their strength had been bought dear, at the cost of heavy labour begun too early in life, so that before middle-age they were bent in the back, or gone wrong at the knees, and their walk (some of them walked miles every day to their work) was a long shambling stride, fast enough, but badly wanting in suggestiveness of personal pride. Seeing them casually in their heavy and uncleanly clothes, no one would have dreamed of the great qualities in them--the kindliness and courage and humour, the readiness to help, the self-control, the patience. It was all there, but they took no pains to look the part; they did not show off. In fact, their tendency was rather in the contrary direction. They cared too little what was thought of them to be at the pains of shocking one's delicacy intentionally; but they were by no means displeased to be thought "rough." It made them laugh; it was a tribute to their stout-heartedness. Nor was there anything necessarily braggart in this attitude of theirs. As they realized that work would not be readily offered to a man who might quail before its unpleasantness, so it was a matter of bread-and-cheese to them to cultivate "roughness." I need not, indeed, be writing in the past tense here. It is still bad policy for a workman to be nice in his feelings, and several times I have had men excuse themselves for a weakness which they knew me to share, but which they seemed to think needed apology when they, too, exhibited it. Only a few weeks ago a neighbour's cat, affected with mange, was haunting my garden, and had become a nuisance. Upon my asking the owner--a labourer who had worked up to be something of a bricklayer--to get rid of it, he said he would get a certain old-fashioned neighbour to kill it, and then he plunged into sheepish explanations why he would rather not do the deed himself. "Anybody else's cat," he urged, "he wouldn't mind so much," but he had a touch of softness towards his own. It was plain that in reality he was a man of tender feelings, yet it was no less plain that he was unwilling to be thought too tender. The curious thing was that neither of us considered for a moment the possibility of any reluctance staying the hand of the older neighbour. Him we both knew fairly well as a man of that earlier period with which I am concerned just now. At that period the village in general had a lofty contempt for the "meek-hearted" man capable of flinching. An employer might have qualms, though the men thought no better of him for that possession, but amongst themselves flinching was not much other than a vice. In fact, they dared not be delicate. Hence through all their demeanour they displayed a hardness which in some cases went far below the surface, and approached real brutality. Leaving out the brutality, the women were not very different from the men. It might have been supposed that their domestic work--the cooking and cleaning and sewing from which middle-class women seem often to derive so comely a manner--would have done something to soften these cottage women. But it rarely worked out so. The women shared the men's carelessness and roughness. That tenderness which an emergency discovered in them was hidden in everyday life under manners indicative of an unfeigned contempt for what was gentle, what was soft. And this, too, was reasonable. In theory, perhaps, the women should have been refined by their housekeeping work; in practice that work necessitated their being very tough. Cook, scullery-maid, bed-maker, charwoman, laundress, children's nurse--it fell to every mother of a family to play all the parts in turn every day, and if that were all, there was opportunity enough for her to excel. But the conveniences which make such work tolerable in other households were not to be found in the cottage. Everything had to be done practically in one room--which was sometimes a sleeping-room too, or say in one room and a wash-house. The preparation and serving of meals, the airing of clothes and the ironing of them, the washing of the children, the mending and making--how could a woman do any of it with comfort in the cramped apartment, into which, moreover, a tired and dirty man came home in the evening to eat and wash and rest, or if not to rest, then to potter in and out from garden or pig-stye, "treading in dirt" as he came? Then, too, many cottages had not so much as a sink where work with water could be done; many had no water save in wet weather; there was not one cottage in which it could be drawn from a tap, but it all had to be fetched from well or tank. And in the husband's absence at work, it was the woman's duty--one more added to so many others--to bring water indoors. In times of drought water had often to be carried long distances in pails, and it may be imagined how the housework would go in such circumstances. For my part I have never wondered at roughness or squalor in the village since that parching summer when I learnt that in one cottage at least the people were saving up the cooking water of one day to be used over again on the day following. Where such things can happen the domestic arts are simplified to nothing, and it would be madness in women to cultivate refinement or niceness. And my neighbours appeared not to wish to cultivate them. It may be added that many of the women--the numbers are diminishing rapidly--were field-workers who had never been brought up to much domesticity. Far beyond the valley they had to go to earn money at hop-tying, haymaking, harvesting, potato-picking, swede-trimming, and at such work they came immediately, just as the men did, under conditions which made it a vice to flinch. As a rule they would leave work in the afternoon in time to get home and cook a meal in readiness for their husbands later, and at that hour one saw them on the roads trudging along, under the burden of coats, dinner-baskets, tools, and so on, very dishevelled--for at field-work there is no such thing as care for the toilet--but often chatting not unhappily. On the roads, too, women were, and still are, frequently noticeable, bringing home on their backs faggots of dead wood, or sacks of fir-cones, picked up in the fir-woods a mile away or more. Prodigious and unwieldy loads these were. I have often met women bent nearly double under them, toiling painfully along, with hats or bonnets pushed awry and skirts draggling. Occasionally tiny urchins, too small to be left at home alone, would be clinging to their mothers' frocks. In the scanty leisure that the women might enjoy--say now and then of an afternoon--there were not many circumstances to counteract the hardness contracted at their work. These off times were opportunities for social intercourse between them. They did not leave home, however, and go out "paying calls." Unless on Sunday evenings visiting one another's cottages was not desirable. But there were other resources. I have mentioned how sounds will travel across the valley, and I have known women come to their cottage doors high up on this side to carry on a shouting conversation with neighbours opposite, four hundred yards away. You see, they were under no constraint of propriety in its accepted forms, nor did they care greatly who heard what they had to say. I have sometimes wished that they did care. But, of course, the more comfortable way of intercourse was to talk across the quickset hedge between two gardens. Sometimes one would hear--all an afternoon it seemed--the long drone of one of these confabulations going on in unbroken flow, with little variation of cadence, save for a moaning rise and fall, like the wind through a keyhole. I have a suspicion that the shortcomings of neighbours often made the staple of such conversations, but that is only a surmise. I remember the strange conclusion of one of them which reached my ears. For, as the women reluctantly parted, they raised their voices, and one said piously, "Wal, they'll git paid for 't, one o' these days. Gawd A'mighty's above the Devil"; to which the other, with loud conviction: "Yes, and always will be, thank Gawd!" This ended the talk. But the last speaker, turning round, saw her two-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change from satisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck, you dirty little devil," she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud of her children, and disliking to see them untidy. III MAN AND WIFE For general social intercourse the labouring people do not meet at one another's cottages, going out by invitation, or dropping in to tea in the casual way of friendship; they have to be content with "passing the time of day" when they come together by chance. Thus two families may mingle happily as they stroll homewards after the Saturday night's shopping in the town, or on a fine Sunday evening they may make up little parties to go and inspect one another's gardens. Until recently--so recently that the slight change may be ignored at least for the present--the prevailing note of this so restricted intercourse was a sort of _bonhomie_, or good temper and good sense. With this for a guide, the people had no need of the etiquette called "good manners," but were at liberty to behave as they liked, and talk as they liked, within the bounds of neighbourliness and civility. This has always been one of the most conspicuous things about the people--this independence of conventions. In few other grades of society could men and women dare to be so outspoken together, so much at ease, as these villagers still often are. Their talk grows Chaucerian at times. Merrily, or seriously, as the case may be, subjects are spoken of which are never alluded to between men and women who respect our ordinary conventions. Let it be admitted--if anybody wishes to feel superior--that the women must be wanting in "delicacy" to countenance such things. There are other aspects of the matter which are better worth considering. Approaching it, for instance, from an opposite point of view, one perceives that the average country labourer can talk with less restraint because he has really less to conceal than many men who look down upon him. He may use coarse words, but his thoughts are wont to be cleanly, so that there is no suspicion of foulness behind his conversation, rank though it sound. A woman consequently may hear what he says, and not be offended by suggestion of something left unsaid. On these terms the jolly tale is a jolly tale, and ends at that. It does not linger to corrupt the mind with an unsavoury after-flavour. But more than this is indicated by the want of conventional manners in the village. The main fact is that the two sexes, each engaged daily upon essential duties, stand on a surprising equality the one to the other. And where the men are so well aware of the women's experienced outlook, and the women so well aware of the men's, the affectation of ignorance might almost be construed as a form of immodesty, or at any rate as an imprudence. It would, indeed, be too absurd to pretend that these wives and mothers, who have to face every trial of life and death for themselves, do not know the things which obviously they cannot help knowing; too absurd to treat them as though they were all innocence, and timidity, and daintiness. No labouring man would esteem a woman for delicacy of that kind, and the women certainly would not like to be esteemed for it. Hence the sexes habitually meet on almost level terms. And the absence of convention extends to a neglect--nay, to a dislike--of ordinary graceful courtesies between them. So far as I have seen they observe no ceremonial. The men are considerate to spare women the more exhausting or arduous kinds of work; but they will let a woman open the door for herself, and will be careless when they are together who stands or who sits, or which of them walks on the inside of the path, or goes first into a gateway. And the women look for nothing different. They expect to be treated as equals. If a cottage woman found that a cottage man was raising his hat to her, she would be aflame with indignation, and would let him know very plainly indeed that she was not that sort of fine lady. In general, the relations between the sexes are too matter-of-fact to permit of any refinement of feeling about them, and it is not surprising that illegitimacy has been very common in the village. But once a man and a woman are married, they settle down into a sober pair of comrades, and instead of the looseness which might be looked for there is on the whole a remarkable fidelity between the married couples. I have no distinct memory of having heard during twenty years of any certain case of intrigue or conjugal misbehaviour amongst the cottage folk. The people seem to leave that sort of thing to the employing classes. It scandalizes them to hear of it. They despise it. Oddly enough, this may be partly due to the want of a feminine ideal, such as is developed by help of our middle-class arts and recognized in our conventions. True, the business of making both ends meet provides the labourer and his wife with enough to think about, especially when the children begin to come. Then, too, they have no luxuries to pamper their flesh, no lazy hours in which to grow wanton. The severity of the man's daily labour keeps him quiet; the woman, drudge that she is, soon loses the surface charm that would excite admirers. But when all this is said, it remains probable that a lowliness in their ideal preserves the villagers from temptation. They do not put woman on a pedestal to be worshipped; they are unacquainted with the finer, more sensitive, more high-strung possibilities of her nature. People who have been affected by long traditions of chivalry, or by the rich influences of art, are in another case; but here amongst the labouring folk a woman is not seen through the medium of any cherished theories; she is merely an individual woman, a man's comrade and helper, and the mother of his family. It is a fine thing, though, about the unions effected on these unromantic terms, that they usually last long, the man and wife growing more affectionate, more tender, more trustful, as they advance in years. Of course, the marriages are not invariably comfortable or even tolerable. One hears sometimes of men callously disappearing--deserting their wives for a period, and going off, as if for peace, to distant parts wherever there is work to be picked up. One man, I remember, was reported to have said, when he ultimately reappeared, that he had gone away because "he thought it would do his wife good." Another, who had openly quarrelled with his wife and departed, was discovered months afterwards working in a Sussex harvest-field. He came back by-and-by, and now for years the couple have been living together, not without occasional brawls, it's true, but in the main good comrades, certainly helpful to one another, and very fond of their two or three children. A bad case was that of a bullying railway navvy, who, having knocked his wife about and upset his old father, went off ostensibly to work. In reality he made his way by train to a town some ten miles distant, and from there, in a drunken frolic, sent a telegram home to his wife announcing that he was dead. He had given no particulars: a long search for him followed, and he was found some days later in a public-house of that town vaingloriously drinking. I remember that Bettesworth, who told me this tale, was full of indignation. "Shouldn't you think he could be punished for that?" he asked. "There, if I had my way he should have twelve months reg'lar _hard labour_, and see if that wouldn't dummer a little sense into 'n." There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman in the case," to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appears to have been simply a piece of freakish brutality. When disagreements occur, it is likely that the men are oftener to blame than their wives. Too often I have seen some woman or other of the village getting her drunken and abusive husband home, and never once have I seen it the other way about. Nevertheless, in some luckless households the faults are on the woman's side, and it is the man who has the heartache. I knew one man--a most steady and industrious fellow, in constant work which kept him from home all day--whose wife became a sort of parasite on him in the interest of her own thriftless relatives. In his absence her brothers and sisters were at his table eating at his expense; food and coals bought with his earnings found their way to her mother's cottage; in short, he had "married the family," as they say. He knew it, too. In its trumpery way the affair was an open scandal, and the neighbours dearly wished to see him put a stop to it. Yet, though he would have had public opinion to support him in taking strong measures, his own good nature deterred him from doing so. Probably, too, his own course was the happier one. Thrive he never could, and gloomy enough and dispirited enough he used to look at times; yet to see him with his children on Sundays--two or three squalid, laughing urchins--was to see a very acceptable sight. Returning to the main point, if anyone has a taste for ugly behaviour, and thinks nothing "real" but what is uncomfortable too, he may find plenty of subjects for study in the married life of this parish; but he will be ridiculously mistaken if he supposes the ugliness to be normal. A kind of dogged comradeship--I can find no better word for it--is what commonly unites the labouring man and his wife; they are partners and equals running their impecunious affairs by mutual help. I was lately able to observe a man and woman after a removal settling down into their new quarters. It was the most ordinary, matter-of-fact affair in the world. The man, uncouth and strong, like a big dog or an amiable big boy, moved about willingly under his wife's direction, doing the various jobs that required strength. One evening, in rain, his wife stood watching while he chopped away the wet summer grass that had grown tall under the garden hedge; then she pointed out four or five spots against the hedge, where he proceeded to put in wooden posts. Early the next morning there was a clothes-line between the posts, and the household washing was hanging from it. Nothing could have been more commonplace than the whole incident, but the commonness was the beauty of it. And it was done somehow in a way that warmed one to a feeling of great liking for those two people. Very often it seems to be the woman who supplies the brains, and does the scheming, for the partnership. When old Bettesworth was on his last legs, as many as half a dozen different men applied to me for his job, of whom one, I very well remember, apologized for troubling me, but said his "missus" told him to come. Poor chap! it was his idea of courtesy to offer an apology, and it was the Old Adam in him that laid the blame on his wife, for really he desired very much to escape from his arduous night-work on the railway. At the same time there is not the least doubt that what he said was true; that he and his wife had talked the matter over, and that, when he proved timid of interviewing me, she forced him to come. Again, two or three winters ago, a man despairing of work in England got in touch with some agency to assist him in emigrating to Canada. It was his wife then who went round the parish trying to raise the few extra pounds that he was to contribute. That was a case to fill comfortable people with uncomfortable shame. The woman, not more than five-and-twenty, would have been strikingly handsome if she had ever in her life had a fair chance; but as it was she looked half-starved, and she had a cough which made it doubtful if she would ever live to follow her husband to Canada. Still, she was playing her part as the man's comrade. As soon as he could save enough money he was to send for her and her baby, she said; in the meantime she would have to earn her own living by going out to day-work. During the South African War there was many a woman in the village keeping things together at home while the men were at the front. They had to work and earn money just as they do when their men are beaten down at home. There was one woman who received from her husband a copy of verses composed by him and his companions during their occupation of a block-house on the veldt. Very proud of him, she took the verses to a printer, had them printed--just one single copy--and then had the printed copy framed to hang on the bedroom wall in her cottage. Her husband showed it to me there one day, mightily pleased with it and her. Probably the people behind the counters at the provision shops in the town could tell many interesting things about the relations between married people of this class, for it is quite the common thing in the villages for a man and wife to lock up their cottage on a Saturday evening, and go off with the children to do the week's shopping together. On a nice night the town becomes thronged with them, and so do the shops, outside which, now and then, a passer-by may notice little consultations going on, and husband or wife--sometimes one, sometimes the other--handing over precious money to the other to be spent. And if it is rather painful to see the faces grow so strained and anxious over such trifling sums, on the other hand the signs of mutual confidence and support are comforting. Besides, anxiety is not the commonest note. The majority of the people make a little weekly festivity of this Saturday night's outing; they meet their friends in the street, have a chat, wind up with a visit to the public-house, and so homewards at any time between seven and ten o'clock, trooping up the hill happily enough as a rule. Now and then one comes across solitary couples making one another miserable. Thus one night I heard a woman's voice in the dark, very tired and faint, say, "It's a long hill!" to which the surly tones of a man replied: "'Ten't no longer than 'twas, is it?" Brutishness like this, however, is quite the exception. As a sample of what is normal, take the following scraps of talk overheard one summer night some years ago. The people were late that night, and indeed, it was pleasant to be out. Not as yet were there any of those street lamps along the road which now make all nights alike dingy; but one felt as if walking into the unspoiled country. For though it was after ten, and the sky overcast, still one could see very clearly the glimmering road and the hedgerows in the soft midsummer twilight. Enjoying this tranquillity, I passed by a man and woman with two children, and heard the man say invitingly: "Shall I carry the basket?" The wife answered: "'E en't 'eavy, Bill, thanks.... Only I got this 'ere little Rosy to git along." Her voice sounded gentle and cheerful, and I tried to hear more, checking my pace. But the children were walking too slowly. I was getting out of earshot, missing the drift of the peaceful-sounding chatter, when presently the woman, as if turning to the other child, said more loudly: "Come along, Sonny!" The man added: "Hullo, old man! Come along! You'll be left behind!" The children began prattling; their father and mother laughed; but I was leaving them farther and farther behind. Then, however, some other homeward-goer overtook the little family. For the talk grew suddenly louder, the woman beginning cheerily: "Hullo, Mr. Weatherall! 'Ow's your poor wife?... I didn't see as 'twas you, 'till this here little Rosy said...." What Rosy had said I failed to catch. I missed also what followed, leading up to the woman's endearing remark: "This 'ere little Rosy, she's a reg'lar gal for cherries!" The neighbour seemed to say something; then the husband; then the neighbour again. And at that there came a burst of laughter, loudest from the woman, and Mr. Weatherall asked: "Didn't you never hear that afore?" The woman, laughing still, was emphatic: "No; I'll take my oath as I never knowed that." "Well, you knows it now, don't ye?" "I ain't sure yet. I ain't had time to consider." After that the subject changed. I heard the woman say: "I've had six gals an' only one boy--one out o' seven. Alice is out courtin'"; and then they seemed to get on to the question of ways and means. The last words that reached me were "Fivepence ... tuppence-ha'penny;" but still, when I could no longer catch any details at all, the voices continued to sound pleasantly good-tempered. IV MANIFOLD TROUBLES Besides the unrelieved hardness of daily life--the need, which never lifts from them, of making shift and doing all things for themselves--there has always been another influence at work upon my neighbours, leaving its indelible mark on them. Almost from infancy onwards, in a most personal and intimate way, they are familiar with harrowing experiences of calamity such as people who employ them are largely able to escape. The little children are not exempt. There being no nursemaids to take care of the children while fathers and mothers are busy, the tiniest are often entrusted to the perilous charge of others not quite so tiny, and occasionally they come to grief. Then too often the older children, who are themselves more secure for a few years, are eyewitnesses of occurrences such as more fortunate boys and girls are hardly allowed even to hear of. Nor is it only with the gory or horrible disaster that the people thus become too early acquainted. The nauseating details of sickness are better known and more openly discussed in the cottage than in comfortable middle-class homes. For it is all such a crowded business--that of living in these cramped dwellings. Besides, the injured and the sick, absorbed in the interest of their ailments, are amiably willing to give others an opportunity of sharing it. The disorder or the disablement is thus almost a family possession. An elderly man, who had offered to show me a terrible ulcer on his leg, smiled at my squeamishness, as if he pitied me, when I declined the privilege. "Why, the little un," he said, pointing to a four-year-old girl on the floor, "the little un rolls the bandage for me every evening, because I dresses'n here before the fire." That is the way in the labourer's cottage. Even where privacy is attempted for the sufferer's sake there is no refuge for the family from the evidence of suffering. The young people in one room may hardly avoid knowing and hearing where a man is dying, or a woman giving birth to a child, just the other side of a latched deal door. In this connection it should be remembered how much more than their share of the afflictions of the community falls to the labouring people. The men's work naturally takes them where accidents happen, where disease is contracted. And then, from ignorance or the want of conveniences, from the need to continue wage-earning as long as endurance will hold out, and also from the sheer carelessness which is a part of their necessary habit, both the men and the women not seldom allow themselves to fall into sickness which a little self-indulgence, if only they dared yield to it, would enable them to avoid. I should not know how to begin counting the numbers I have personally known enfeebled for life in this way. Things are better now than they were twenty years ago; there are many more opportunities than there used to be of obtaining rest or nursing, but still the evil is widespread. Without going out of my way at all, during the last fortnight I have heard of--have almost stumbled across--three cases of the sort. The first was that of a woman who had been taking in washing during her husband's long illness. Meeting the man, who was beginning to creep about again, I happened to ask how his wife was; and he said that she was just able to keep going, but hardly knew how to stand because of varicose veins in both legs. The second case, too, was a woman's. She met me on the road, and on the off chance asked if I could give her a letter of admission to the County Hospital, and so save her the pain of going down to the Vicarage to beg for a letter there. What was the matter? "I give birth to twins five months ago," she said, "and since then dropsy have set in. I gets heavier every day. The doctor wants me to go to the hospital, and I was goin' to the Vicar to ask for a letter, but I dreads comin' back up that hill." As it was she had already walked half a mile. In the third case a man's indifference to his own suffering was to blame for the plight in which he found himself. Driving a van, he had barked his shin against the iron step on the front of the van. Just as the skin had begun to heal over he knocked it again, severely, in exactly the same way, and he described to me the immense size of the aggravated wound. But, as he said, he had supposed it would get well, and, beyond tying his leg up with a rag, he took no further trouble about it, until it grew so bad that he was obliged to see a doctor. His account of the interview went in this way: "'How long since you done this?' the doctor says. 'A month,' I says. 'Then you must be a damn fool not to 'ave come to me afore,' the doctor says." The man, indeed, looked just as likely as not to be laid up for six months, if not permanently crippled, as a result of his carelessness. Yet, common as such cases are now, they were commoner when I first knew the village--when there was no cottage hospital, no proper accommodation at the workhouse infirmary, no parish nurse, and when the parish contained few people of means to help those who were in distress. I remember once looking round in that early period, and noting how there was hardly a cottage to be seen which had not, to my own knowledge, been recently visited by trouble of some sort or another. True, the troubles were not all of them of a kind that could be avoided by any precaution, for some of them arose from the death of old people. Yet in a little cottage held on a weekly tenancy death often involves the survivors of the family in more disturbance, more privation too, than it does elsewhere. Putting these cases aside, however, I could still see where, within two hundred yards of me, there had been four other deaths--one being that of an infant, and one that of a woman in child-birth. In the other two cases the victims were strong men--one, a railway worker, who was killed on the line; the other a carter, who died of injuries received in an accident with his horse. The list of lesser misfortunes included the illness of a man who broke down while at work, with hæmorrhage of the stomach, and the bad case of a bricklayer's labourer, who lay for days raving from the effects of a sunstroke. In pre-Christian times it might have been argued that the gods were offended with the people, so thickly did disasters fall upon them, but my neighbours seemed unaware of anything abnormal in the circumstances. By lifelong experience they had learned to take calamity almost as a matter of course. For, as I said, the experience begins early. The children, the young girls, have their share of it. During those earlier years I am recalling, a little girl of the village, who was just beginning domestic service in my household, was, within the space of six months, personally concerned in two accidents to little children. She came from one of half-a-dozen families whose cottages, for a wonder in this village, stood in a row; and amongst scraps of her talk which were repeated to me I heard how her little brother--only five years old, but strong at throwing stones--threw at a girl playmate and knocked out one of her eyes. That happened in the springtime. In the autumn of the same year a mishap, if possible more shocking at the moment, befell another child in that row of cottages. A man there one evening was trimming a low hedge. His tool was a fag-hook--well sharpened, for he was one of the ablest men in the village. And near by where he worked his children were at play, the youngest of them being between three and four years old. As he reached over the hedge, to chop downwards at the farther side, this little one suddenly came running dangerously near. "Take care, ducky!" he cried. "Don't come so close, 'r else perhaps father'll cut ye." He gave three more strokes, and again the child ran in. The hook fell, right across the neck. I had these particulars from a neighbour. "If 't had bin another half inch round, the doctor said, 'twould have bin instant death.... The man was covered with blood, and all the ground, too. I was at work when I heared of it, but I couldn't go on after that, it upset me so.... And all this mornin' I can't get it out o' my mind. There's a shiver all up that row. They be all talkin' of it. The poor little thing en't dead this mornin', and that's all's you can say. They bin up all night. Ne'er a one of 'em didn't go to bed." So far the neighbour. Later the little maidservant, who had gone home that evening, told me: "We was passin' by at the time--me and my older sister.... She run in and wrapped a towel round its neck." "Where, then, was the mother?" "She was with its father. He'd fainted. So we went in. We thought p'raps we could run for the doctor. But she went herself, jest as she was," carrying the child down to the town. As for the girl's sister, who had behaved with some aplomb, "It made her feel rather bad afterwards. She felt sick. All the floor was covered with blood." The little maidservant had a curious look, half horror, half importance, as she said this. She herself was not more than fifteen at the time. But sickness is commoner by far than accident, and owing to the necessity the cottagers are under of doing everything for themselves they often get into dire straits. Of some of the things that go on one cannot hear with equanimity. The people are English; bone of our bone. But we shut our eyes. I have heard of well-to-do folk in the parish who, giving of their abundance to foreign missions, deny that there is distress here at home. The most charitable explanation of that falsehood is to suppose that across their secluded gardens and into their luxurious rooms, or even to their back-doors, an average English cottager is too proud to go. Yet it is hard to understand how all signs of what is so constantly happening can be shut out. For myself, I have never gone out of my way to look for what I see. I have never invited confidences. The facts that come to my knowledge seem to be merely the commonplaces of the village life. If examples of the people's troubles were wanted, they could be provided almost endlessly, and in almost endless diversity. But there is one feature that never varies. Year after year it is still the same tale; all the extra toil, all the discomfort, or horror, or difficulty, of dealing with sickness falls immediately on the persons of the family where the sickness occurs; and it sets its cruel mark upon them, so that the signs can be seen as one goes about, in the faces of people one does not know. And the women suffer most. One winter evening a woman came to my door to see if she could borrow a bed-rest. Her sister, she said, had been ill with pleurisy and bronchitis for a week or more, and for the last two days had been spitting a great deal of blood. The woman looked very poor; she might have been judged needlessly shabby. A needle and thread would so soon have remedied sundry defects in her jacket, which was gaping open at the seams. But her face suggested that there were excuses for her. I have never forgotten her face, as it showed that evening, although I have since seen it looking happier. It was dull of colour--the face of an overworked and over-burdened soul; and it had a sullen expression of helplessness and resentment. The eyes were weary and pale--I fancied that trouble had faded the colour out of them. But with all this I got an impression of something dogged and unbeaten in the woman's temper. She went away with the bed-rest, apologizing for coming to borrow it. "'Tis so bad"--those were her words--"'tis so bad to see 'em layin' there like that, sufferin' so much pain." I had never seen her before--for it was years ago; and, knowing no better then, I supposed her to be between forty and fifty years old. In reality, she can hardly have been thirty. It was the stress of personal service that had marred her so young. Did her jacket need mending? As I have since learnt, at that period the youngest of her family was unborn, and the oldest cannot have been more than eight or nine. Besides nursing her sister, therefore, she had several children to wait upon, as well as her husband--a man often ailing in health. For all I know she was even then, as certainly she has been since, obliged to go out working for money, so as to keep the family going; and, seeing that she was a mother, it is probable that she herself had already known the extremity of hardship. Because, as scarcely needs saying, the principle of self-help is strained to the uttermost at time of child-birth. Then, the other members of the family have to shift for themselves as best they can, with what little aid neighbours can find time to give; and where there are young children in the cottage, it is much if they are sufficiently fed and washed. But it is the situation of the mother herself that most needs to be considered. Let me give an illustration of how she fares. Several years ago there was a birth in a cottage very near to me. Only a few hours before it happened the woman had walked into the town to do her shopping for herself and carry home her purchases. As soon as the birth was known, a younger sister, out at service, got a week's holiday, so that she might be at hand to help, though there was no spare room in the cottage where she could sleep. During that week, also, the parish nurse came in daily, until more urgent cases occupied all her time. After that the young mother was left to her own resources. According to someone I know, who looked in from time to time, she lay in bed with her new-born baby, utterly alone in the cottage, her husband being away at work all day for twelve hours, while the elder children were at school. She made no complaint, however, of being lonely; she thought the solitude good for her. But she was worried by thinking of the fire in the next room--the living-room, which had the only fireplace in the house, there being none in her bedroom--lest it should set fire to the cottage while she lay helpless. It seems that the hearth was so narrow and the grate so high that coals were a little apt to fall out on to the floor. Once, she said, there had almost been "a flare-up." It was when she was still getting about, and she had gone no farther away than into her garden to feed the fowls; but in that interval a coal fell beyond the fender, and she, returning, found the place full of smoke and the old hearthrug afire. The dread that this might happen again distressed her now as she lay alone, unable to move. I could furnish more pitiful tales than this, if need were--tales of women in child-bed tormented with anxiety because their husbands are out of work, and there is no money in the cottage, and no prospect of any; or harassed by the distress of little children who miss the help which the mother cannot give, and so on. But this case illustrates the normal situation. Here there was no actual destitution, nor any fear of it, and the other children were being cared for. The husband was earning a pound a week at constant work, and the circumstances of the family were on the whole quite prosperous. But one of the conditions of prosperity was that the father of the family should be away all day, leaving the mother and infant unattended. From whatever sickness the woman suffers, there is always the same piteous story to be told--she is destitute of help. The household drudge herself, she has no drudges to wait upon her. The other day I was told of a woman suffering from pleurisy. Her husband had left home at six o'clock for his work; a neighbour-woman came in to put on a poultice and make things comfortable; then she, too, had to go to her work. In the afternoon a visitor, looking in by chance, found that the sick woman had been alone for five hours; she was parched with thirst, and her poultice had gone cold. For yet one more example. I mentioned just now a man who was killed on the railway. His widow, quite a young woman then, reared her three or four children, earning some eight or nine shillings a week at charing or washing for people in the town; and still she keeps herself, pluckily industrious. There is one son living with her--an errand-boy--and there are two daughters both in service at a large new house in the village. During last spring the woman had influenza, and had to take to her bed, her girls being permitted to take turns in coming home to care for her. Just as she, fortunately, began to recover, this permission was withdrawn: both girls were wanted in "their place," because a young lady there had taken influenza. So they had to forsake their mother. But by-and-by one of these girls took the infection. Her "place," then, was thought to be--at home. She was sent back promptly to her mother, and it was not long before the mother herself broke down again, not being yet strong enough to do sick-nursing in addition to her daily work. It must be borne in mind that these acute and definite troubles spring up from the surface of an ill-defined but chronic anxiety, from which very few of the cottagers are free for any length of time. For though there is not much extreme destitution, a large number of the villagers live always on the brink of it; they have the fear of it always in sight. In a later chapter I shall give some particulars as to their ways and means; in this, I only wish it to be remembered that the question of ways and means is a life-and-death one for the labourer and his wife, and leaves them little peace and little hope of it. During the trade depression which culminated in 1908-09 I was frequently made aware of the disquiet of their minds by the scraps of talk which reached me as I passed along the road, and were not meant for my hearing. From women who were comparing notes with one another, this was the sort of thing one would hear: "'En't had nothin' to do this six weeks; and don't sim no likelihoods of it." "I s'pose we shall get through, somehow." "I'm sure I dunno what 'tis a-comin' to." "'Tis bad 'nough now, in the summer; what it'll be like in the winter, Gawd only knows." Again and again I heard talk like this. And all this was only an accentuation or a slight increase in volume of a note of apprehension which in better times still runs less audibly as a kind of undertone to the people's thought. I had stopped one day to say good-morning to an old widow-woman outside her cottage. She was the mother of that young man whose funeral was mentioned two chapters back; but this was before his death, and while, in fact, he was still doing a little occasional work. She spoke cheerfully, smiled even, until some chance word of mine (I have forgotten what it was) went through the armour of her fortitude, and she began to cry. Then she told me of the position she was in, and the hopelessness of it, and her determination to hold out. Some charitable lady had called upon her. "Mrs. Curtis," the lady had said, "if ever you are ill, I hope you'll be sure and send to _me_." And Mrs. Curtis had replied: "Well, ma'am, if ever I sends, you may be sure I _am_ ill." "But," she added, "they don't understand. 'Tis when you're on yer feet that help's wanted--not wait till 'tis too late." With regard to her present circumstances--she "didn't mind saying it to me--sometimes she didn't hardly know how they was goin' on," for she hadn't a penny except what her son could earn. And "people seemed to think it didn't matter for a single chap to be out o' work. They didn't think he might have a mother to keep, or, if he was in lodgin's, he couldn't live there for nothin'.... Sometimes we seems to be gettin' on a little, and then you has bad luck, and there you are again where you was before. It's like gettin' part way up a hill and fallin' down to the bottom again, and you got it all to begin over again." I said something--some platitude--turning to go away. Then she managed to smile--a shining-eyed smile--saying: "Well, 'tis only for life. If 'twas for longer than that I don't know if we should hardly be able to bear it." This was but one old woman. Yet, if you have an ear for a folk-saying, you will recognize one there in that "only for life" of hers. Be sure that a by-word so compact as that was not one old woman's invention. To acquire such brevity and smoothness, it must have been wandering about the parish for years; and when it reached me at last it had been polished by the despair of hundreds of other people, as a coin is polished by passing through hundreds of hands. V DRINK It will be understood, from what was said on the subject in the first chapter, that the village population has its rough element, and that drunkenness, or at any rate excessive drinking, is very common. It is true that there are very few habitual drunkards in the parish--there are not even many men, perhaps, who frequently take too much; but, on the other hand, the majority are beer-drinkers, and every now and then one or another of them, normally sober, oversteps the limit. Thus, possibly every other family has had its passing experience of what drunkenness means in the temporary lapse of father, or son, or brother. A rainy Bank Holiday invariably leads to much mischief in this way, and so does a sudden coming of hot weather in the summer. The men have too much to do to spare time for the public-house in the ordinary weekdays, but on Saturday and Sunday nights, when the strain is relaxed, they are apt to give way too far. The evils of drunkenness, however, are well enough known, and I do not propose to dwell on that side of the matter. But there is another aspect of it which must be considered, if only because it is so thoroughly characteristic of the old village outlook. Incidentally, this other aspect may be worth a little attention from temperance reformers. For the truth is that the average villager's attitude towards drink and temperance is not that of an unrepentant or rebellious sinner; rather, it is the attitude of a man who has sound reasons for adhering to his own point of view. If he grows restive under the admonitions of the pharisaical, if he meets them defiantly, or if he merely laughs, as often as not it is because he feels that his mentors do not understand the situation so well as he does. How should they, who see it wholly from the outside--they who never go near the public-house; they who have no experience either of poverty or of hard work--how should they, who speak from prejudice, be entitled to dictate to him, who has knowledge? He resents the interference, considers it insulting, and goes his own way, supported by a village opinion which is entirely on his side, and certainly has its claims to respect. It is this village opinion which I wish to examine now. In the eyes of the older villagers or of the more old-fashioned ones mere occasional drunkenness is a very venial fault. The people make a distinction between the habitual drunkard and him who occasionally drinks too much, and they are without compassion for the former. He is a "low blackguard"; they look reproachfully if you talk of trying to help him by giving him a job of work, or at any rate they pity your wasted efforts. But for the occasional defaulter they have a friendly feeling, unless, of course, he turns savage in his cups. As long as he is cheerful he is rather a figure of fun to them than anything, or he is an object of wondering interest. On a certain August Bank Holiday I saw one of our villagers staggering up the hill--a middle-aged man, far gone in drink, so that all the road was none too wide for him. Other wayfarers accompanied and observed him with a philosophically detached air, and between whiles a woman grabbed at his coat between the shoulders, trying to steady him. But by and by, lurching free, he wobbled across the road to within an inch of a perambulator with two children which another man was pushing. The drunken man leant over it, poised like an impending fate, and so hung for a few seconds before he staggered away, and it might be supposed that at least the man with the perambulator would be indignant. But not he. He merely remarked wonderingly: "You wouldn't ha' thought it possible he could ha' done it, would ye?" The other wayfarers laughed lightly, amongst them a young married woman with a refined face. While the comic side of a man in drink makes its strong appeal to the village folk, they are ready to see excuses for him, too. Anybody, they argue, is liable to be overtaken before he knows, and where is the great disgrace in an accident that may befall themselves, or me, or you? There is at least no superiority in their outlook, no pharisaism. Listen, for proof of it, to a talk of Bettesworth's about a neighbour who had been working with the "ballast-train" on the railway all night. "You," he began--and this first word showed how innocent he was of shame in his own attitude, since he supposed that I must share his amusement--"you'd ha' laughed if you'd ha' sin Isaac yest'day. He was got fair boozed; an' comin' up the gully, thinkin' he was goin' straight for 'ome, he run his head right into they bushes down by ol' Dame Smith's. Then he got up the slope about a dozen yards, an' begun to go back'ards 'till he come to Dame Smith's wall, and that turn'd 'n, and he begun to go back'ards again down the gully. I did laugh. He bin at work all night on the ballast-train, an' come back reg'lar fagged out, an' hadn't had no vittles--an' a feller _wants_ something--and then the fust glass he has do's for 'n. He bin workin' every night for a week, an' Sundays, too. And Alice" ("Alice" is Isaac's wife) "is away hop-tyin' all day, so, of course, Isaac didn't care 'bout goin' 'ome to lop about there by hisself.... I've seed a many go like that. They works all night, an' gets reg'lar fagged out, an' then the fust drop does 'em. When Alice come 'ome, she looked at least to find the kettle boilin'. 'Stead o' that, she couldn't git in. At least, she had to fetch the key from where she put 'n when she went away in the mornin'. I laughed at her when I went down 'ome. 'Where is he now?' I says. 'Ah, you may laugh,' she says, 'but I got to rouse 'n up about ten o'clock an' git 'n a cup o' tea. He got to be at work again at eleven.' That's how they do's. Begins about ten or eleven o'clock, and don't leave off again afore six or seven, or p'raps nine or ten, next mornin'. Makes days an' quarters for three an' ninepence. I've knowed a many like that come 'ome an' git boozed fust glass, like old Isaac. I did laugh, though, and so did Dame Smith when she was a-tellin' of me." Inheriting from their forefathers such an unimaginative point of view, most of the cottage folk have been, until quite lately, far from regarding the public-house as a public nuisance. It had a distinct value in their scheme of living. That fact was demonstrated plainly in an outburst of popular feeling some years ago. The licensing magistrates of the neighbourhood had taken the extreme, and at that time unprecedented, course of refusing to renew the licenses of several houses in the town. But while the example they had thus set was winning them applause all up and down England, they were the objects, in this and the adjacent villages, of all sorts of vituperation on account of what the cottagers considered a wanton insult to their class. It must be admitted that the action of the justices had some appearance of being directed against the poor. Nobody could deny, for instance, that the houses frequented by middle-class clients, and responsible for a good deal of middle-class drinking, were all passed over, and that those singled out for extinction served only the humblest and least influential. My neighbours entertained no doubts upon the matter. They were not personally concerned--at any rate, the public-houses in this village were left open for them to go to--but the appearance of favouritism offended them. They were as sure as if it had been officially proclaimed that the intention was to impose respectability upon them against their will; their pleasures were to be curtailed to please fanatics who understood nothing and cared less about the circumstances of cottage folk. So, during some weeks the angry talk went round the village; it was not difficult to know what the people were thinking. They picked to pieces the character of the individual magistrates, planning ineffective revenge. "That old So-and-So" (Chairman of the Urban Council)--"they'd bin to his shop all their lives, but he'd find he'd took his last shillin' from 'em now! And that What's-his-Name--the workin' classes had voted for 'n at last County Council election, and this was how he served 'em! He needn't trouble to put up again, when his turn was up!" Then they commiserated the suffering publicans. "Look at poor old Mrs. ----, what kept the house down Which Street--always a most well-conducted house. Nobody couldn't find no fault with it, and 'twas her livin'! Why should she have her livin' took away like that, poor old gal?... They sims to think nobody en't right 'xcep' jest theirselves--as if we poor people could live an' go on same as they do. They can 'ave their drink at 'ome, and their music, but where be we to go to if they shuts up the 'ouses?" Such were the remarks I heard over and over again. It seemed to the poor that there were to be no more cakes and ale, because Malvolio was virtuous, or because their own manners were not refined enough. In the light of subsequent political events I am prepared to believe that some of this popular indignation was engineered from the public-houses. But I do not think it required much engineering. It sounded spontaneous at the time, and considering how the villagers are placed, their resentment was not unnatural. As I have said, the public-house has its value in their scheme of living. They have no means of enjoying themselves at home, no room in their cottages for entertaining friends, and they may well ask what they are to do if the public-houses are closed to them. One thing, at least, is sure. If the ordinary village inn were nothing but the foul drink-shop which its enemies allege, if all that it provided was an irresistible temptation to depravity, the majority of the people who resort to it now would very soon leave it alone. And the same is true of the little lowly places in the town. In the third chapter I mentioned how the village women, with their men-folk and their children, too--until the recent Act of Parliament shut the children out--would make a Saturday-night call at some public-house before going home from the weekly shopping expedition. But these are the reverse of bad women. They are honest and self-respecting mothers of families; women obviously innocent of anything approaching intemperance. I have seen them chatting outside a public-house door, and then smilingly pushing it open and going in, as happily unconscious of evil as if they were going to a mothers' meeting. They see no harm in it. They are away from home, they have far to go, and they want refreshment. But it is perfectly certain that most of them would rather drop than enter such places--for they are not afraid of fatigue--if there were risk of anything really wrong within. The labouring-class woman, as already explained, takes no hurt from a frank style of talk. She is not squeamish, but she has a very strong sense of her own honour; and if you remember how keen is the village appetite for scandal, you will perceive that there can be no fear of scandal attaching to her because of a visit to a public-house, or she would not go there. It should be noted, as evidence of a strict public opinion regulating the custom, that these same women seldom enter the public-houses in the village, and never any others save on this one occasion. They require the justification of their weekly outing, when supper is delayed, and the burden of living can be forgotten amongst friends for an hour. At other times they would consider the indulgence disgraceful; and though they enjoy it just at these times, I do not remember that I have ever seen one of them showing the least sign of having carried her enjoyment too far. The men certainly are governed by no such severe public opinion, but are free to "get a drink" at any time without being thought the worse of by their neighbours; yet they, too, for the most part, are of good and sober character enough to prove that the village public-house cannot be so utterly given up to evil as might be supposed from the horrified talk of refined people. Not many men in this parish would tolerate a place in which they could do nothing but get drunk. It is for something else that they go to the Fox or the Happy Home. The drinking is but a pleasant incident. They despise the fellow who merely goes in to have his unsociable glass and be off again, as heartily as they dislike the habitual soaker who brings their entertainment into disfavour; and they themselves keep a rough sort of order--or they increase disorder in trying to quell it--rather than that the landlord should interfere. That loud harsh talk which one hears as one passes the public-house of an evening is not what the hyper-sensitive suppose. It does not betoken drunkenness so much as uncouth manners--the manners of neglected men who spend their lives at severe physical labour, and want a little relaxation in the evening. So far as I have seen, the usual conversation in the taproom of a country public-house is a lazy and innocent interchange of remarks, which wander aimlessly from one subject to another, because nobody wants to bother his head with thinking; or else it is a vehement discussion, in which dogmatic assertion does duty for argument and loudness for force. In either case it rests and stimulates the tired men, while the drink refreshes their throats, and it has no more necessary impropriety than the drawing-room talk of the well-to-do. In this intercourse men who do not read the papers get an inkling of the news of the day, those who have no books come into contact with other minds, opinions are aired, the human craving for fun gets a little exercise; and for topics of talk, instead of those which occupy moneyed people, who know about the theatre or the Church, or foreign travel, or golf, or the state of the poor, or the depreciation of Consols, the labourers have their gardens, and the harvest, and the horses they drive. They talk about their employers, and their work, and their wages; they dispute about county cricket or exchange notes about blight, or new buildings, or the latest public sensation; and all this in endless detail, endlessly interesting to them. So, utterly unaided by arts or any contrivances for amusement, they make entertainment for themselves. That they must make it in kindly temper, too, is obvious; for who would take part in it to be usually annoyed? And it may well be conceived that in an existence so empty of other pleasures, the pleasures to be derived from company are held precious. The scheme of living would be very desolate without that consolation, would grow very illiberal and sombre. But the public-houses at least do something to prevent this, and in clinging to them the villagers have clung to something which they need and cannot get elsewhere. It is idle to pretend that the "Institute" which was started a few years ago provides a satisfactory alternative. Controlled by people of another class, whose "respectability" is irksome, and open only to members and never to women, the Institute does not lend itself to the easy intercourse which tired men enjoy at the public-house. Its billiard-table is not for their heavy hands, used to the pick-axe and shovel; its card games interrupt their talk; its newspapers remind them that they cannot read very well, and suggest a mode of life which they are unable to share. These reasons, I believe, prevail to keep the labouring men from patronizing the Institute more even than does its strictly teetotal policy. Or perhaps I should say, rather, that while they dislike going without their beer, they object more strongly still to the principle on which it is forbidden in the Institute. For that principle is nothing more or less than a tacit arraignment of their own point of view. It imputes evil propensities to them; it directly challenges the truth of an idea which not only have they never doubted, but which their own experience seems to them to confirm. The day-labourer really knows nothing to take the place of beer. A man who has been shovelling in a gravel-pit, or carrying bricks up a ladder, or hoeing in the fields, or carting coal, for ten hours in the day, and has, perhaps, walked six or seven miles to do it, acquires a form of thirst which no other drink he can buy will touch so coolly. Of alternatives, milk fails utterly; "minerals" are worse than unsatisfactory; tea, to serve the purpose at all, must be taken very hot, and then it produces uncomfortable sweat, besides involving the expense of a fire for its preparation. There remains cold water. But cold water in copious draughts has its drawbacks, even if it can be obtained, and that is assuming too much. In this parish, at any rate, good water was, until quite lately, a scarce commodity, and nobody cared to drink the stagnant stuff out of the tanks or water-butts which supplied most of the cottages. In short, prudence itself has seemed to recommend beer as the one drink for tired men. In their view it is the safest, and the most easily obtained, and, when obtained, it affords the most refreshment. Thus much their own experience has taught the villagers. And they have the tradition of long generations to support them in their taste. As far back as they can remember, the strongest and ablest men, whose virtues they still recall and admire, renewed their strength with beer daily. Not labourers alone, but farmers and other employers too, whose health and prosperity were a sufficient justification of their habits, were wont to begin their morning with a glass of beer, which they took, not as a stimulant, but as a food; and the belief in it as a food was so convinced that a man denied his beer by doctor's orders was hardly to be persuaded that he was not being starved of due nourishment. Such was the esteem in which beer was held twenty years ago, nor has the belief been uprooted yet. Indeed, an opinion so sanctioned to a man, by the approval of his own father and grandfather and all the worthies he can remember, does not immediately become false to him just because it is condemned by strangers who do not know him, and who, with all their temperance, seem to him a delicate and feeble folk. He prefers his own standard of good and evil, and in sitting down to his glass he has no doubt that he is following a sensible old fashion, modestly trying to be, not a fine gentleman, but a sturdy Englishman. On much the same principle the public-house as a place of resort is justified to the villager. I have already shown how it serves him for entertainment instead of newspaper, or book, or theatre; and here, again, he has a long-standing country tradition to support him. In spite of reformers on the one hand, and on the other hand that tendency of "the trade," which is spoiling the public-house as a place of comfortable rest by frowning upon customers who stay too long and drink too little--in spite of these discouragements, the villagers still cannot believe that what was good enough for their fathers is not good enough for themselves. It might not be equally good if they wished to be "superior persons," but for the modest needs of people like themselves they think it should serve. So they go to the public-house just as their fathers did, content to miss the approval of the cultured, so long as they can do as well as those worthies. Of course, if they ever analyzed their impressions, they must often go home discerning that they had been disappointed; that the company had been dull and the comfort small; that they had got less conviviality than they wanted, and more of the drink that should have been only its excuse; but as they are never introspective, so the disappointment goes unnoticed, and leads to no disillusionment. VI WAYS AND MEANS Before going farther I must try to give some account of the ways and means of the villagers, although, obviously, in a population so heterogeneous, nothing short of a scientific survey on the lines pursued by Sir Charles Booth or Mr. Rowntree could be of much value in this direction. The observations to be offered here pretend to no such authority. They have been collected at random, and subjected to no tests, and they refer almost exclusively to the "unskilled" labouring people. During twenty years there have not been many fluctuations in the price of a day's labour in the parish, but probably on the whole there has been a slight increase. The increase, however, is very uncertain. While the South African War was in progress, and afterwards when Bordon Camp was building, eight miles away, labour did indeed seem to profit. But then came the inevitable trade depression, work grew scarce, and by the summer of 1909 wages had dropped to something less than they had been before the war. I heard, for instance, of a man--one of the most capable in the district--who was glad that summer to go haymaking at half a crown a day. And yet two or three years earlier he had certainly been earning from fourpence halfpenny to fivepence an hour, or, say, from three and sixpence to four shillings for a day's work. In 1909 the low-water mark was reached; the following spring saw a slight revival, and at present the average may be put at three shillings. For this sum a fairly good man can be got to do an ordinary day's work of nine hours in the vegetable-garden or at any odd job. The builders' labourers are rather better paid--if their employment were not so intermittent--with an average of from fourpence halfpenny to fivepence an hour. Carters, too, and vanmen employed by coal-merchants, builders, and other tradesmen in the town, are comparatively well off with constant work at eighteen or twenty shillings a week. The men in the gravel-pits--but that industry is rapidly declining as one after another the pits are worked out--can earn perhaps five shillings a day if at piece-work, or about three and sixpence on ordinary terms. From this sum a deduction must be made for tools, which the men provide and keep in repair themselves. It is rather a heavy item. The picks frequently need repointing, and a blacksmith can hardly do this for less than twopence the point. The gravel-work, too, is very irregular. In snow or heavy rain it has to stop, and in frost it is difficult. More than once during the winter of 1908-09, it being a time of great distress, gravel-pit workers came to me with some of those worked flints--the big paleoliths of the river-gravel--which they had found and saved up, but now desired to sell, in order to raise money for pointing their pickaxes. I have wondered sometimes if the savages who shaped those flints had ever looked out upon life so anxiously as these neighbours of mine, whose iron tools were so strangely receiving this prehistoric help. At one time upwards of forty men in the parish had more or loss constant work on one of the "ballast-trains" which the South-Western Railway kept on the line for repairing the permanent way. The work, usually done at night and on Sundays, brought them in from eighteen to twenty-four shillings a week, according to the hours they made. I do not know how many of our men are employed on the railway now, but they are certainly fewer. Some years ago--it was when the great trade depression had already hit the parish badly, and dozens of men were out of work here--the railway-company suddenly stopped this train, and consternation spread through the village at the prospect of forty more being added to the numbers of its unemployed. Reviewing the figures, and making allowance for short time due to bad weather, public holidays, sickness, and so on, it may be estimated that even when trade is good the average weekly wage earned by one of the village men at his recognized work is something under seventeen shillings. This, however, does not constitute quite the whole income of the family. In most cases the man's wages are supplemented by small and uncertain sums derived from the work of women and children, and from odd jobs done in the evenings, and from extra earnings in particular seasons. Field-work still employs a few women, although every year their numbers decrease. It is miserably paid at a shilling a day, or in some cases on piece-work terms which hardly work out at a higher figure. Piecework, for instance, was customary in the hop-gardens (now rapidly disappearing), where the women cut the bines and "tied" or "trained" the hops at so much per acre, providing their own rushes for the tying. At haymaking and at harvesting there is work for women; and again in the hop-gardens, when the picking is over, women are useful at clearing up the bines. They can earn money, too, at trimming swedes, picking up newly-dug potatoes, and so on; but when all is said, there are not many of them who can find work to do in the fields all the year round. At the best, bad weather often interrupts them, and the stress and hardships of the work, not to mention other drawbacks, make the small earnings from it a doubtful blessing. A considerable number of women formerly eked out the family income by taking in washing for people in the town. Several properly equipped laundries have of late years greatly reduced this employment, but it still occupies a few. The difficulties of carrying it on are considerable, apart from the discomforts of it in a small cottage. Unless a woman has a donkey and cart, it is hard for her to get the washing from her customers' homes and carry it back again. Of the amount that can be earned at the work by a married woman, with husband and children to do for, I have no knowledge. Charwomen, more in demand than ever as the residential character of the place grows more pronounced, earn latterly as much as two shillings a day, besides at least one substantial meal. The meal is a consideration, and obviously good for the women. In bad times, when the men and even the children go rather hungry, it often happens that the mother of the family is able to keep her strength up, thanks to the tolerable food she gets three or four days a week in the houses where she goes scrubbing and cleaning. A few women--so few that they really need not be mentioned--earn a little at needlework, two or three of them having a small dressmaking connection amongst their cottage neighbours and with servant-girls. It will be realized that the prices which such clients can afford to pay are pitifully small. In one or other of these ways most of the labouring class women do something to add to the earnings of their husbands, so that in prosperous times the family income may approach twenty-four shillings a week. Yet the average must be below that sum. The woman's work is very irregular, and just when her few shillings would be most useful--namely, when she has a baby or little children to care for--of course her employment stops. If not, it is unprofitable in the end; for, involving as it does some neglect of the children, as well as of the woman's own health, it leads to sickness and expenses which may impoverish the whole family for years. With regard to the minor sources of income, I have often wondered at the eagerness of the average labourer to earn an odd shilling, and at the amount of work he will do for it, after his proper day's work is over. I know several men who frequently add two or three shillings to their week's money in this way. To give an instance of how they go on, one evening recently I was unexpectedly wanting to send a heavy parcel into the town. Going out to seek somebody who would take it, I chanced upon a man--very well known to me--who was at work just within the hedge of a villa garden, where he was erecting on a pole a notice-board announcing a "sale of work" shortly to be held. He had obviously nearly done, so I proposed my errand to him. Yes; he would go as soon as he had finished what he was doing. Then, perceiving that he looked tired, I commented on the fact. He smiled. "I bin mowin' all day over there at ...," and he mentioned a farm two or three miles distant. Still, he could go with my parcel. This was at about seven o'clock in the evening, and would mean a two-mile walk for him. The very next evening, when it was raining, I saw him in the churchyard digging a grave. "Haven't been mowing to-day, have you?" "Yes," he said cheerily. Mowing is, perhaps, the most fatiguing work a man can do, but fatigue was nothing to this man where a few shillings could be earned. His ordinary wages, I believe, are eighteen shillings a week, but during last winter he was out of work for six or eight weeks. I have known this man, and others also, to make now and then quite a little harvest, amounting to several pounds, at the unsavoury work of cleaning out cess-pits. One man, indeed--a farm-labourer by day--had for a time a sort of trade connection in the parish for this employment, and would add the labour of two or three nights a week to that of his days; but, of course, he could not keep it up for long. It is highly-paid work, as it ought to be; but the ten shillings or so that a man may earn at it four or five times a year come rather as a welcome windfall than as a part of income upon which he can rely. The seasonal employments are disappearing from the neighbourhood, as agriculture gives place to the residential interests. Hop-picking used to be the most notable of them, and even now, spite of the much-diminished acreage under hops, it is found necessary at the schools to defer the long holiday until September, because it would be impossible to get the children to school while the hops are being picked. For all the family goes into the gardens--all, that is to say, who have no constant work. The season now lasts some three weeks, during which a family may earn anything from two to four pounds. At this season a few of the more experienced and trustworthy men--my friend who mows, and digs graves, and runs errands is one of them--do better in the hop-kilns at "drying" than in the gardens. Theirs is an anxious, a responsible, and almost a sleepless duty. The pay for it, when I last heard, was two guineas a week, and--pleasant survival from an older mode of employment--the prudent hop-grower gives his dryers a pound at Christmas as a sort of retaining-fee. It is to be observed that failure of the crop is too frequent an occurrence. In years when there are no hops, the people feel the want of their extra money all the following winter. Another custom, as it is all but extinct, needs only a passing mention now. No longer do large gangs of our labourers--with some of their womenfolk, perhaps--troop off "down into Sussex" for the August harvesting there, and for the hoeing that follows it; and no longer is the village enriched by the gold they used to bring back. When July is ending, perhaps two or three men, whether enticed by some dream of old harvesting joys in sight of the sea, or driven by want at home, may stray off for a few weeks; but I do not hear that their adventure is ever so prosperous nowadays as to induce others to follow suit. Where the income of a family from the united efforts of the father and mother is still so small, every shilling that can be added to it is precious, and, consequently, the children have to begin earning as early as they may. Hence there is not much lingering at school, after the minimum age for leaving has been reached. Nay, some little boys, and here and there a little girl, will make from a shilling to half a crown a week at carrying out milk or newspapers before morning school begins, so that they go to their lessons with the first freshness taken off them by three or four miles of burdened walking. In view of the wear and tear of shoe-leather, even those parents who countenance the practice are doubtful of its economy. Still, a few of them encourage it; and though, if spread out amongst the families, these pitiful little earnings could hardly make a perceptible difference to the average income. I mention them here in order to leave no source of income unnoticed. When school-days are over, the family begins to benefit from the children's work. At fourteen years old, few of the boys are put to trades, but most of them get something to do in the town, where there is a great demand for errand-boys. Their wages start at about four shillings a week, increasing in a few years to as much as seven or eight. Then, at seventeen years old or so, the untrained youths begin to compete in the labour market with the men, taking too early, and at too small wages, to the driving of carts or even to work in the gravel-pits. The amount of help that these fellows then contribute towards the family expenses out of their twelve or fourteen shillings a week depends upon the parents, but it is something if they merely keep themselves; and I believe, though I do not certainly know, that it is customary for them to pay a few shillings for their lodging at least. For girls leaving school there is no difficulty in finding, as they say, "a little place" for a start in domestic service; for even the cheaper villas which have sprung up around the town generally need their cheap drudges. Hence, at an earlier age than the boys, the girls are taken off their parents' hands and become self-supporting. True, it is long before they can earn much more in money than suffices for their own needs in clothes and boots--they cannot send many shillings home to their mothers; but no doubt a family may be found here and there enriched to the extent of a pound or two a year by the labour of the girls. Putting the various items together, it might seem that in favourable circumstances there would be some twenty-three or twenty-four shillings a week for a family to live on all the year round. But it must be remembered, first, that the circumstances seldom remain favourable for many months together; and, second, that the greater number of families have to do without those small supplementary sums provided by the work of children, or by odd jobs, or by the good wages of hop-drying, and so forth. Nor is this the only deduction to be made. As I have already explained, in the cases where money is most needed--namely, where there is a family of little children--the mother cannot go out to work, and the income is reduced to the bare amount earned by the father alone. And these cases are very plentiful, while, on the contrary, those in which the best conditions prevail are very scarce. Taking the village all through, and balancing bad times against good ones, I question if the income of the labouring class families averages twenty shillings a week; indeed, I should be greatly surprised to learn that it amounted to so much. In very many instances eighteen shillings or even less would be the more correct estimate. One other item remains to be recognized, although its value is too variable to be computed with any exactness in money and added to the sum of an average week's income. What is the worth to a labourer of the crops he grows in his garden? It depends, obviously, on the man's skill, and the size of the garden, and the clemency of the seasons--matters, all of them, in which any attempt at generalization must be received with suspicion. All that can be said with certainty is that most of the cottages in the valley have gardens, and that most of the cottagers are diligent to cultivate them. But when the circumstances are considered, it will be plain that the value of the produce must not be put very high. The amount of ground that can be worked in the spring and summer evenings is, after all, not much; it is but little manure that can be bought out of a total money-income of eighteen shillings a week; and even good seed is, for the same reason, seldom obtained. The return for the labour expended, therefore, is seldom equal to what it should be, and we may surmise that he is a fortunate man, or an unusually industrious one, who can make his gardening worth more than two shillings a week to him in food. There must be many cottages in the valley where the yield of the garden is scarcely half that value. To complete the picture of the people's ways and means, it ought next to be shown how the money income is spent by an average family. To do that, however, would be beyond my power, even if it were possible to determine what an "average family" is. I know, of course, that rent takes from three and sixpence a week for the poorest hovels to six shillings for the newer tenements on the outskirts of the parish; in other words, that from a quarter to a third of the labourer's whole income goes back immediately into the pockets of the employing classes for shelter alone. I know also that payments into benefit societies drain away another eightpence to a shilling a week. I realize that very often the weekly bread bill runs away with nearly half the money that is left, and so I can reckon that tea and groceries, boots and clothes, firing and light, have somehow to be obtained at a cost of no more than seven or eight shillings weekly. But these calculations fail to satisfy me. They leave unsolved the problem of those last seven or eight shillings, on the expenditure of which turns the really vital question which an inquiry like this ought to settle. How do the people make both ends meet? Are the seven shillings as a rule enough for so many purposes? or almost, but not quite enough? or nothing like enough? After all, I do not know. Information breaks down just at this point where information is most to be desired. There is no doubt at all, however, as to the strain and stress of the general struggle to live in the valley, the sheer wear and tear of temper and spirits involved in the daily grappling with that problem. Everywhere one comes across symptoms of it--partial evidences--but the most complete exposition that I have had was given, some years ago now, by a woman who had no intention of complaining. She came to me with a message from a neighbour who was ill, but, in explanation of her part in helping him, she began to speak of her own affairs. With some of these affairs I was already acquainted. Thus I knew her to be the mother of an exceptionally large family, so that her case could not be quite typical. But I also knew that her husband had been in constant work for many years, so that, in her case, there had been no period when the income at her disposal ceased altogether, as in the case of so many other women otherwise less handicapped than she. I was aware, too, that she herself helped out the family earnings by taking in washing. To these items of vague knowledge she added a few particulars. As to income, I learnt that her husband--a labourer on a farm some three miles away--earned fifteen shillings a week during the winter, and rather more in the summer months, when he was allowed to do "piece-work." The piece-work had the further advantage of permitting him to begin so early in the day--four o'clock was his time in summer--that he usually got home again by four in the afternoon, and was able to do better than most men with his garden. Amongst other things, he raised flowers for sale. He was wont to send to a well-known nursery in Norfolk for his seeds--china-asters and stocks were his speciality--and he reared his plants under a little glass "light" which he had made for himself out of a few old window-sashes. His pains with these flowers were unsparing. Neighbours laughed at him (so his wife assured me, with some pride) because he went to the plants down on his hands and knees, smoking each one with tobacco to clear it from green aphis. He also raised fifty or sixty sticks of celery every year, which sold for threepence apiece. Meanwhile he by no means neglected his main business as a cottage-gardener--namely, the growing of food-crops for home use. By renting for five shillings a year an extra plot of ground near his cottage, he was able to keep his large family supplied with potatoes for quite half the year. It was much to do. They wanted nearly a bushel of potatoes a week, the wife said; and if that was so, the man was adding, in the shape of potatoes at half a crown a bushel, the value of more than three pounds a year to his income. No doubt he grew other vegetables too--parsnips, carrots, turnips, and some green-stuff--but these were not mentioned. A little further help was at last coming from the family, the eldest daughter having begun to pay half the rent out of her earnings as a servant-girl. Help certainly must have been welcome. There were two other girls in service, and therefore off their parents' hands; but six children--the youngest only a few months old--were still at home, dependent on what their father and mother could earn. Of these, the eldest was a boy near thirteen. "I shall be glad when he's schoolin's over," the mother said; and she had applied for a "labour certificate" which would allow him to finish school as a "half-timer," and to go out and earn a little money. Since their marriage, twenty-three years earlier, the couple had occupied always the came cottage, at a rental of three shillings a week. After the first twenty years--the property then changing owners--the first few repairs in all that long period had been undertaken. That is to say, the outside woodwork was painted; a promise was given to do up the interior; the company's water was laid on; and--the rent was raised to three-and-sixpence. The woman thought this a hardship; but she said that her husband, looking at the bright side of things, rejoiced to think that now the water from the old tank, hitherto so precious for household uses, might be spared for his flowers. After the rent was paid--with the daughter's help--there were about fourteen shillings left. But the man was an "Oddfellow," and his subscription was nine shillings a quarter, or eightpence halfpenny a week. In prudence, that amount should perhaps have been put by every week, but apparently prudence often had to give way to pressing needs. "When the club money's due, that's when we finds it wust," the woman remarked. "Sometimes I've said to 'n, 'I dunno how we be goin' to git through the week.' 'Oh,' he says, 'don't you worry. We shall get to the end of 'n somehow.'" But she did not explain, nor is it easy to conceive, how it was done. For observe, the weekly bushel of potatoes did not feed the family, even for half the year. "A gallon of potatoes a day, that's what it is," she had said; and then she had enumerated other items. "A gallon of bread a day," was needed too, besides a gallon of flour once a week "for puddings." In other words, bread and flour cost upwards of six shillings weekly. Seeing that this left but eight shillings for eight people, it is small wonder that the club-money was rarely put by, and great wonder how the family managed at all when the club-money was wanted in a lump. It must have been that they went short that week. For instance, they would do without puddings, and so save on flour and firing; and the man would forego his tobacco--he had never any time to visit the public-house, so that there was nothing to be saved in that direction. Yet assuming all this, and assuming that the eldest daughter advanced a few extra shillings, still the situation remains baffling. On what could they save, out of eight shillings? Probably one or other of the children, or may be the mother herself, would make an old pair of boots serve just one more week, until there was money in hand again; and that would go far to tide the family over. Yet the next week would then have to be a pinched one; for, said the woman, "boots is the wust of all. It wants a new pair for one or t'other of us purty near every week." So far this woman's testimony. It is corroborated by what other cottagers have told me. A man said, looking fondly at his children: "I has to buy a new pair o' shoes for one or other of us every week. Or if I misses one week, then next week I wants two pair." Others, again, have told of spending five to six shillings a week on bread. But of the less essential items one never hears. Even of clothes there is rarely any talk, and of coal not often; nor yet often of meat, or groceries. I do not suggest that meat and groceries are foresworn, but it would appear that they come second in the household expenses. They are luxuries, only to be obtained if and when more necessary things have been provided. With regard to firing--a little coal is made to go a long way in the labourer's cottage; and with regard to clothes--it is doubtful if anything new is bought, in many families, from year's end to year's end. At "rummage sales," for a few pence, the women are now able to pick up surprising bargains in cast-off garments, which they adapt as best they can for their own or their children's wear. Economies like this, however, still hardly suffice to explain how the scanty resources are really spread out. Apart from a few cases of palpable destitution, it is not obvious that any families in the village suffer actual want; and seeing that inquiries in the school in recent winters have failed to discover more than two or three sets of children manifestly wanting food, one is led to conclude that acute poverty is of rare occurrence here. On the other hand, all the calculations suggest that a majority perhaps of the labouring folk endure a less intense but chronic poverty, in which, at some point or other every day, the provision for bare physical needs falls a little short. VII GOOD TEMPER In view of their unpromising circumstances the people as a rule are surprisingly cheerful. It is true there are never any signs in the valley of that almost festive temper, that glad relish of life, which, if we may believe the poets, used to characterize the English village of old times. Tested by that standard of happiness, it is a low-spirited, mirthless, and all but silent population that we have here now. Of public and exuberant enjoyment there is nothing whatever. And yet, subdued though they may be, the cottagers usually manage to keep in tolerable spirits. A woman made me smile the other day. I had seen her husband a week earlier, and found him rheumatic and despondent; but when I inquired how he did, she conceded, with a laugh: "Yes, he had a bit o' rheumatism, but he's better now. He 'ad the 'ump then, too." I inferred that she regarded his dejection as quite an unnecessary thing; and this certainly is the customary attitude. The people are slow to admit that they are unhappy. At a "Penny Readings" an entertainer caused some displeasure by a quite innocent joke in this connection. Coming through the village, he noticed the sign of one of the public-houses--The Happy Home--and invented a conundrum which he put from the platform: "Why was this a very miserable village?" But the answer, "Because it has only one Happy Home in it," gave considerable offence. For we are not used to these subtleties of language, and the point was missed, a good many folk protesting that we have "a _lot_ o' happy homes" here. That they should be so touchy about it is perhaps suggestive--pitifully suggestive--of a suspicion in them that their happiness is open to question. None the less, the general impression conveyed by the people's manners is that of a quiet and rather cheery humour, far indeed from gaiety, but farther still from wretchedness. And in matters like this one's senses are not deceived. I know that my neighbours have abundant excuses for being down-hearted; and, as described in an earlier chapter, I sometimes overhear their complainings; but more often than not the evidence of voice-tones and stray words is reassuring rather than dispiriting. Notice, for instance, the women who have done their shopping in the town early in the morning, and are coming home for a day's work. They are out of breath, and bothered with their armfuls of purchases; but nine times out of ten their faces look hopeful; there is no sound of grievance or of worry in their talk; their smiling "Good-morning" to you proves somehow that it is not a bad morning with them. One day a woman going to the town a little late met another already returning, loaded up with goods. "'Ullo, Mrs. Fry," she laughed, "you be 'bliged to be fust, then?" "Yes; but I en't bought it _all_, I thought you'd be comm', so I left some for you." "That's right of ye. En't it a _nice mornin'_?" "Jest what we wants! My old man was up an' in he's garden...." The words grow indistinguishable as you get farther away; you don't hear what the "old man" was doing so early, but the country voices sound for a long time, comfortably tuned to the pleasantness of the day. This sort of thing is so common that I seldom notice it, unless it is varied in some way that attracts attention. For instance, I could not help listening to a woman who was pushing her baby in a perambulator down the hill. The baby sat facing her, as bland as a little image of Buddha, and as unresponsive, but she was chaffing it. "Well, you _be_ a funny little gal, _ben't_ ye? Why, you be goin' back'ards into the town! Whoever heared tell o' such a thing--goin' to the town _back_'ards. You _be_ a funny little gal!" To me it was a funny little procession, with a touch of the pathetic hidden away in it somewhere; but it bore convincing witness to happiness in at least one home in our valley. It is not so easy to discover, or rather to point out, the corresponding evidence in the demeanour of the men, although when one knows them one is aware that their attitude towards life is quite as courageous as the women's, if not quite so playful. I confess that I rarely see them until they have put a day's work behind them; and they may be more lightsome when they start in the morning, at five o'clock or soon after it. Be that as it may, in the evenings I find them taciturn, nonchalant rather than cheerful, not much disposed to be sprightly. Long-striding and ungainly, they walk home; between six o'clock and seven you may be sure of seeing some of them coming up the hill from the town, alone or by twos and threes. They speak but little; they look tired and stern; very often there is nothing but a twinkle in their eyes to prove to you that they are not morose. But in fact they are still taking life seriously; their thoughts, and hopes too, are bent on the further work they mean to do when they shall have had their tea. For the more old-fashioned men allow themselves but little rest, and in many a cottage garden of an evening you may see the father of the family soberly at work, and liking it too. If his wife is able to come and look on and chatter to him, or if he can hear her laughing with a friend in the next garden, so much the better; but he does not stop work. Impelled, as I shall show later, by other reasons besides those of economy, many of the men make prodigiously long days of it, at least during the summer months. I have known them to leave home at five or even four in the morning, walk five or six miles, do a day's work, walk back in the evening so as to reach home at six or seven o'clock, and then, after a meal, go on again in their gardens until eight or nine. They seem to be under some spiritual need to keep going; their conscience enslaves them. So they grow thin and gaunt in body, grave and very quiet in their spirits. But sullen they very rarely are. With rheumatism and "the 'ump" combined a man will sometimes grow exasperated and be heard to speak irritably, but usually it is a very amiable "Good-evening" that greets you from across the hedge where one of these men is silently digging or hoeing. The nature of their work, shall I say, tends to bring them to quietness of soul? I hesitate to say it, because, though work upon the ground with spade or hoe has such a soothing influence upon the amateur, there is a difference between doing it for pleasure during a spare hour and doing it as a duty after a twelve hours' day, and without any prospect of holiday as long as one lives. Nevertheless it is plain to be seen that, albeit their long days too often reduce them to a state of apathy, these quiet and patient men experience no less often a compensating delight in the friendly feeling of the tool responding to their skill, and in the fine freshness of the soil as they work it, and in the solace, so varied and so unfailingly fresh, of the open air. Thus much at least I have seen in their looks, and have heard in their speech. On a certain June evening when it had set in wet, five large-limbed men, just off their work on the railway, came striding past me up the hill. They had sacks over their shoulders; their clothes and boots, from working in gravel all day, were of the same yellowish-brown colour as the sacks; they were getting decidedly wet; but they looked enviably easy-going and unconcerned. As they went by me one after another, one sleepy-eyed man, comfortably smoking his pipe, vouchsafed no word or glance. But the others, with friendly sidelong glance at me, all spoke; and their placid voices were full of rich contentment. "Good-night"; "Nice _rain_"; "G'd-evenin'"; and, last of all, "_This_'ll make the young taters grow!" The man who said this looked all alert, as if the blood were dancing in him with enjoyment of the rain; his eyes were beaming with pleasure. So the five passed up the hill homewards, to have some supper, and then, perhaps, watch and listen to the rain on their gardens until it was time to go to bed. I ought to mention, though I may hardly illustrate, one faculty which is a great support to many of the men--I mean the masculine gift of "humour." Not playful-witted like the women, nor yet apt, like the women, to refresh their spirits in the indulgence of sentiment and emotion, but rather stolid and inclined to dim brooding thought, they are able to see the laughable side of their own misadventures and discomforts; and thanks to this they keep a sense of proportion, as though perceiving that if their labour accomplishes its end, it does not really matter that they get tired, or dirty, or wet through in doing it. This is a social gift, of small avail to the men working alone in their gardens; but it serves them well during the day's work with their mates, or when two or three of them together tackle some job of their own, such as cleaning out a well, or putting up a fowl-house. Then, if somebody gets splashed, or knocks his knuckles, and softly swears, his wrath turns to a grin as the little dry chuckle or the sly remark from the others reminds him that his feelings are understood. It is well worth while to be present at these times. I laugh now to think of some of them that I have enjoyed; but I will not risk almost certain failure in trying to describe them, for their flavour depends on minute details into which I have no space to enter. But whatever alleviations there may be to their troubles, the people's geniality is still noteworthy. In circumstances that contrast so pitifully with those of the employing classes, it would seem natural if they were full of bitterness and envy; yet that is by no means the case. Being born to poverty and the labouring life, they accept the position as if it were entirely natural. Of course it has its drawbacks; but they suppose that it takes all sorts to make a world, and since they are of the labouring sort they must make the best of it. With this simple philosophy they have contrived hitherto to meet their troubles calmly, not blaming other people for them, unless in individual cases, and hardly dreaming of translating them into social injustice. They have no sense of oppression to poison their lives. The truth which economists begin to recognize, that where there are wealthy and idle classes there must as an inevitable result be classes who are impoverished and overworked, has not found its way into the villager's head. So, supported by an instinctive fatalism, the people have taken their plight for granted, without harbouring resentment against the more fortunate. It may be added that most of them are convinced believers in those fallacies which cluster around the phrase "making work." It were strange if they were not. The labourer lives by being employed at work; and, knowing his employer personally--this or that farmer or tradesman or villa-resident--he sees the work he lives by actually being "made." Only very rarely does it occur to him that when he goes to the shop he, too, makes work. In bad times, perhaps, he gets an inkling of it; and then, when wages are scarce, and the public-house landlord grumbles, old-fashioned villagers will say, "Ah, they misses the poor man, ye see!" But the idea is too abstract to be followed to its logical conclusion. The people do not see the multitudes at work for them in other counties, making their boots and ready-made clothes, getting their coal, importing their cheap provisions; but they do see, and know by name, the well-to-do of the neighbourhood, who have new houses built and new gardens laid out; and they naturally enough infer that labour would perish if there were no well-to-do people to be supplied. Against the rich man, therefore, the labourers have no sort of animosity. If he will spend money freely, the richer he is the better. Throughout the south of England this is the common attitude. I remember, not long ago, on a holiday, coming to a village which looked rarely prosperous for its county, owing, I was told, to the fact that the county lunatic asylum near by caused money to be spent there. In the next village, which was in a deplorable state, and had no asylum, the people were looking enviously towards this one, and wishing that at least their absentee landlords would come and hunt the neighbourhood, though it appeared that one of these gentlemen was a Bishop. But the labouring folk were not exacting as to the sort of person--lunatics, fox-hunters, Bishops--anybody would be welcome who would spend riches in a way to "make work." And so here. This village looks up to those who control wealth as if they were the sources of it; and if there is a little dislike of some of them personally, there has so far appeared but little bitterness of feeling against them as a class. I do not say that there has never been any grumbling. One day, years ago, an old friend of mine broke out, in his most contemptuous manner, "What d'ye think Master Dash Blank bin up to now?" He named the owner of a large estate near the town. "Bin an' promised all his men a blanket an' a quarter of a ton o' coal at Christmas. A _blanket_, and a _quarter of a ton o' coal_! Pity as somebody hadn't shoved a brick down his throat, when he _had_ got 'n open, so's to _keep_ 'n open!" The sentiment sounds envious, but in fact it was scornful. It was directed, not against the great man's riches, but against the well-known meanness he displayed anew in his contemptible gifts. A faint trace of traditional class animosity sounds in one or two customary phrases of the village, for instance in the saying that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. Yet this has become such a by-word as to be usually stated with a smile; for is it not an old acquaintance amongst opinions? The older people even have a humorous development of it. According to their improved version, there are not two only, but three kinds of law: one kind for the rich, one for the poor, and one "the law that nobody can't make." What is this last? Why, the law "to make a feller pay what en't got nothink." By such witticisms the edge of bitterness is turned; the sting is taken out of that sense of inequality which, as the labourer probably knows, would poison his present comfort and lead him into dangerous courses if he let it rankle. With one exception, the angriest recognition of class differences which I have come across amongst the villagers was when I passed two women on their way home from the town, where, I surmised, they, or some friend of theirs, had just been fined at the County Court or the Petty Sessions. "Ah!" one was saying, with spiteful emphasis, "_there'll_ come a great day for they to have _their_ Judge, same as we _poor_ people." Yet even there, if the emotion was newly-kindled, the sentiment was too antiquated to mean much. For it is a very ancient idea--that of getting even with one's enemies in the next world instead of in this. So long as the poor can console themselves by leaving it to Providence to avenge them at the Day of Judgment, it cannot be said that there is any virulent class-feeling amongst them. The most that you can make of it is that they occasionally feel spiteful. It happened, in this case, to be against rich people that those two women felt their momentary grudge; but it was hardly felt against the rich as a class; and if the same kind of offence had come from some neighbour, they would have said much the same kind of thing. In the family disputes which occur now and then over the inheritance of a few pounds' worth of property, the losers put on a very disinterested and superior look, and say piously of the gainers: "Ah, they'll never prosper! They _can't_ prosper!" The exceptional case alluded to above was certainly startling. I was talking to an old man whom I had long known: a little wrinkled old man, deservedly esteemed for his integrity and industry, full of experience as well as of old-world notions sometimes a little "grumpy," a little caustic in his manner of talking, but on the whole quite kindly and tolerant in his disposition. You could often watch in his face the habitual practice of patience, as, with a wry smile and a contemptuous remark, he dismissed some disagreeable topic or other from his thoughts. He had come down in the world. His father's cottage, already mortgaged when he inherited it, had been sold over his head after the death of the mortgagee, so that thenceforth he was on no better footing than any other of the labourers. Gradually, as the demand failed for his old-fashioned forms of skill--thatching, mowing, and so on--his position became more and more precarious; yet he remained good-tempered, in his queer acid way, until he was past seventy years old. That evening, when he startled me, he had been telling of his day's work as a road-mender, and he was mightily philosophical over the prospect of having to give up even that last form of regular employment, because of the exposure and the miles of walking which it entailed. Nobody could have thought him a vindictive or even a discontented man so far. By chance, however, something was said about the uncultivated land in the neighbourhood, covered as it is with fir-woods now; and at that he suddenly fired up. Pointing to the woods, which could be seen beyond the valley, he said spitefully, while his eyes blazed: "I can remember when all that was open common, and you could go where you mind to. Now 'tis all fenced in, and if you looks over the fence they'll lock ye up. And they en't got no more _right_ to it, Mr. Bourne, than you and me have! I should _like_ to see they woods all go up in flames!" That was years ago. The woods are flourishing; the old man is past doing any mischief; but I remember his indignation. And it was the sole case I have met with in the parish, of animosity harboured not so much against persons as against the existing position of things. This one man was alive to the injustice of a social arrangement; and in that respect he differed from the rest of my neighbours, unless I am much deceived in them. Of course there may be more of envious feeling abroad in the village than I know about. It is the sort of thing that would keep itself secret; and perhaps this old man's contemporaries, who shared his recollections, silently shared his bitterness too. But if so, I do not believe that they have passed the feeling on to their children. The impression is strong in me that the people have never learnt to look upon the distribution of property, which has left them so impoverished, as anything other than an inevitable dispensation of Providence. If they thought otherwise, at any rate if the contrary view were at all prevalent amongst them, they must be most gifted hypocrites, to go about with the good temper in their eyes and the cheerfulness in their voices that I have been describing. To what should it be attributed--this power of facing poverty with contentment? To some extent doubtless it rests on Christian teaching, although perhaps not much on the Christian teaching of the present day. Present-day religion, indeed, must often seem to the cottagers a tiresome hobby reserved to the well-to-do; but from distant generations there seems to have come down, in many a cottage family, a rather lofty religious sentiment which fosters honesty, patience, resignation, courage. Much of the gravity, much of the tranquillity of soul of the more sedate villagers must be ascribed to this traditional influence, whose effects are attractive enough, in the character and outlook of many an old cottage man and woman. Yet there is much more in the village temper than can be accounted for by this cause alone. In most of the people the cheerfulness does not suggest pious resignation, in the hope of the next world; it looks like a grim and lusty determination to make the best of this world. It is contemptuous, or laughing. As I have shown, it has a tendency to be beery. It occasionally breaks out into disorder. In fact, if the folk were not habitually overworked they would be boisterous, jolly. Of course it may all proceed from the strong English nature in them; and in that case we need seek no other explanation of it. Yet if one influence, namely, a traditional Christianity, is to be credited--as it certainly should be--with an effect upon the village character in one direction, then probably, behind this other effect in another direction, some other influence is at work. And for my part I make no doubt of it. The cheerfulness of the cottagers rests largely upon a survival of the outlook and habits of the peasant days before the common was enclosed. It is not a negative quality. My neighbours are not merely patient and loftily resigned to distress; they are still groping, dimly, for an enjoyment of life which they have not yet realized to be unattainable. They maintain the peasant spirits. Observe, I do not suggest that they are intentionally old-fashioned. I do not believe them to be sympathetic at all to those self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are now being recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropists. They make no æsthetic choice. They do not deliberate which of the ancestral customs it would be "nice" for them to follow; but, other things being equal, they incline to go on in the way that has been usual in their families. It is a tendency that sways them, not a thought-out scheme of the way to live. Now and again, perhaps, some memory may strengthen the tendency, as they are reminded of this or that fine old personality worthy of imitation, or as some circumstance of childhood is recalled, which it would be pleasant to restore; but in the main the force which bears them on is a traditional outlook, fifty times more potent than definite but transient memories. This it is that has to be recognized in my neighbours. Down in their valley, until the "residents" began to flock in, the old style of thinking lingered on; in the little cottages the people, from earliest infancy, were accustomed to hear all things--persons and manners, houses and gardens, and the day's work--appraised by an ancient standard of the countryside; and consequently it happens that this evening while I am writing, out there on the slopes of the valley the men and women, and the very children whose voices I can just hear, are living by an outlook in which the values are different from those of easy-going people, and in which, especially, hardships have never been met by peevishness, but have been beaten by good-humour. III THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES VIII THE PEASANT SYSTEM The persistence into the twentieth century--the scarcely realized persistence--not so much of any definite ideas, as of a general temper more proper to the eighteenth century, accounts for all sorts of anomalies in the village, and explains not only why other people do not understand the position of its inhabitants to-day, but why they themselves largely fail to understand it. They are not fully aware of being behind the times, and probably in many respects they no longer are so; only there is that queer mental attitude giving its bias to their view of life. Although very feebly now, still the momentum derived from a forgotten cult carries them on. But, having noticed the persistence of the peasant traditions, we have next to notice how inadequate they are to present needs. Our subject swings round here. Inasmuch as the peasant outlook lingers on in the valley, it explains many of those peculiarities I have described in earlier chapters; but, inasmuch as it is a decayed and all but useless outlook, we shall see in its decay the significance of those changes in the village which have now to be traced out. The little that is left from the old days has an antiquarian or a gossipy sort of interest; but the lack of the great deal that has gone gives rise to some most serious problems. For, as I hinted at the outset, the "peasant" tradition in its vigour amounted to nothing less than a form of civilization--the home-made civilization of the rural English. To the exigent problems of life it furnished solutions of its own--different solutions, certainly, from those which modern civilization gives, but yet serviceable enough. People could find in it not only a method of getting a living, but also an encouragement and a help to live well. Besides employment there was an intense interest for them in the country customs. There was scope for modest ambition too. Best of all, those customs provided a rough guidance as to conduct--an unwritten code to which, though we forget it, England owes much. It seems singular to think of now; but the very labourer might reasonably hope for some satisfaction in life, nor trouble about "raising" himself into some other class, so long as he could live on peasant lines. And it is in the virtual disappearance of this civilization that the main change in the village consists. Other changes are comparatively immaterial. The valley might have been invaded by the leisured classes; its old appearance might have been altered; all sorts of new-fangled things might have been introduced into it; and still under the surface it would have retained the essential village characteristics, had but the peasant tradition been preserved in its integrity amongst the lowlier people; but with that dying, the village, too, dies where it stands. And that is what has been happening here. A faint influence from out of the past still has its feeble effect; but, in this corner of England at least, what we used to think of as the rural English are, as it were, vanishing away--vanishing as in a slow transformation, not by death or emigration, not even by essential change of personnel, but by becoming somehow different in their outlook and habits. The old families continue in their old home; but they begin to be a new people. It was of the essence of the old system that those living under it subsisted in the main upon what their own industry could produce out of the soil and materials of their own countryside. A few things, certainly, they might get from other neighbourhoods, such as iron for making their tools, and salt for curing their bacon; and some small interchange of commodities there was, accordingly, say between the various districts that yielded cheese, and wool, and hops, and charcoal; but as a general thing the parish where the peasant people lived was the source of the materials they used, and their well-being depended on their knowledge of its resources. Amongst themselves they would number a few special craftsmen--a smith, a carpenter or wheelwright, a shoemaker, a pair of sawyers, and so on; yet the trades of these specialists were only ancillary to the general handiness of the people, who with their own hands raised and harvested their crops, made their clothes, did much of the building of their homes, attended to their cattle, thatched their ricks, cut their firing, made their bread and wine or cider, pruned their fruit-trees and vines, looked after their bees, all for themselves. And some at least, and perhaps the most, of these economies were open to the poorest labourer. Though he owned no land, yet as the tenant, and probably the permanent tenant, of a cottage and garden he had the chance to occupy himself in many a craft that tended to his own comfort. A careful man and wife needed not to despair of becoming rich in the possession of a cow or a pig or two, and of good clothes and household utensils; and they might well expect to see their children grow up strong and prosperous in the peasant way. Thus the claim that I have made for the peasant tradition--namely, that it permitted a man to hope for well-being without seeking to escape from his own class into some other--is justified, partially at least. I admit that the ambition was a modest one, but there were circumstances attending it to make it a truly comforting one too. Look once more at the conditions. The small owners of the parish might occupy more land than the labourers, and have the command of horses and waggons, and ploughs and barns, and so on; but they ate the same sort of food and wore the same sort of clothes as the poorer folk, and they thought the same thoughts too, and talked in the same dialect, so that the labourer working for them was not oppressed by any sense of personal inferiority. He might even excel in some directions, and be valued for his excellence. Hence, if his ambition was small, the need for it was not very great. And then, this life of manifold industry was interesting to live. It is impossible to doubt it. Not one of the pursuits I have mentioned failed to make its pleasant demand on the labourer for skill and knowledge; so that after his day's wage-earning he turned to his wine-making or the management of his pigs with the zest that men put into their hobbies. Amateurs the people were of their homely crafts--very clever amateurs, too, some of them. I think it likely, also, that normally even wage-earning labour went as it were to a peaceful tune. In the elaborate tile-work of old cottage roofs, in the decorated ironwork of decrepit farm-waggons, in the carefully fashioned field-gates--to name but a few relics of the sort--many a village of Surrey and Hampshire and Sussex has ample proofs that at least the artisans of old time went about their work placidly, unhurriedly, taking time to make their products comely. And probably the same peaceful conditions extended to the labouring folk. Of course, their ploughing and harvesting have left no traces; but there is much suggestiveness in some little things one may note, such as the friendly behaviour of carter-men to their horses, and the accomplished finish given to the thatch of ricks, and the endearing names which people in out-of-the-way places still bestow upon their cows. Quietly, but convincingly, such things tell their tale of tranquillity, for they cannot have originated amongst a people habitually unhappy and harassed. But whether the day's work went comfortably or no, certainly the people's own home-work--to turn to that again--must often have been agreeable, and sometimes delightful. The cottage crafts were not all strictly useful; some had simple æsthetic ends. If you doubt it, look merely at the clipped hedges of box and yew in the older gardens; they are the result of long and loving care, but they serve no particular end, save to please the eye. So, too, in general, if you think that the folk of old were inappreciative of beauty, you have but to listen to their names of flowers--sweet-william, hearts-ease, marigold, meadow-sweet, night-shade--for proof that English peasant-life had its graceful side. Still, their useful work must, after all, have been the mainstay of the villagers; and how thoroughly their spirits were immersed in it I suppose few living people will ever be able to realize. For my part, I dare not pretend to comprehend it; only at times I can vaguely feel what the peasant's attitude must have been. All the things of the countryside had an intimate bearing upon his own fate; he was not there to admire them, but to live by them--or, say, to wrest his living from them by familiar knowledge of their properties. From long experience--experience older than his own, and traditional amongst his people--he knew the soil of the fields and its variations almost foot by foot; he understood the springs and streams; hedgerow and ditch explained themselves to him; the coppices and woods, the water-meadows and the windy heaths, the local chalk and clay and stone, all had a place in his regard--reminded him of the crafts of his people, spoke to him of the economies of his own cottage life; so that the turfs or the faggots or the timber he handled when at home called his fancy, while he was handling them, to the landscape they came from. Of the intimacy of this knowledge, in minute details, it is impossible to give an idea. I am assured of its existence because I have come across surviving examples of it, but I may not begin to describe it. One may, however, imagine dimly what the cumulative effect of it must have been on the peasant's outlook; how attached he must have grown--I mean how closely linked--to his own countryside. He did not merely "reside" in it; he was part of it, and it was part of him. He fitted into it as one of its native denizens, like the hedgehogs and the thrushes. All that happened to it mattered to him. He learnt to look with reverence upon its main features, and would not willingly interfere with their disposition. But I lose the best point in talking of the individual peasant; these things should rather be said of the tribe--the little group of folk--of which he was a member. As they, in their successive generations, were the denizens of their little patch of England--its human fauna--so it was with traditional feelings derived from their continuance in the land that the individual peasant man or woman looked at the fields and the woods. Out of all these circumstances--the pride of skill in handicrafts, the detailed understanding of the soil and its materials, the general effect of the well-known landscape, and the faint sense of something venerable in its associations--out of all this there proceeded an influence which acted upon the village people as an unperceived guide to their conduct, so that they observed the seasons proper for their varied pursuits almost as if they were going through some ritual. Thus, for instance, in this parish, when, on an auspicious evening of spring, a man and wife went out far across the common to get rushes for the wife's hop-tying, of course it was a consideration of thrift that sent them off; but an idea of doing the right piece of country routine at the right time gave value to the little expedition. The moment, the evening, became enriched by suggestion of the seasons into which it fitted, and by memories of years gone by. Similarly in managing the garden crops: to be too late, to neglect the well-known signs which hinted at what should be done, was more than bad economy; it was dereliction of peasant duty. And thus the succession of recurring tasks, each one of which seemed to the villager almost characteristic of his own people in their native home, kept constantly alive a feeling that satisfied him and a usage that helped him. The feeling was that he belonged to a set of people rather apart from the rest of the world--a people necessarily different from others in their manners, and perhaps poorer and ruder than most, but yet fully entitled to respect and consideration. The usage was just the whole series or body of customs to which his own people conformed; or, more exactly, the accepted idea in the village of what ought to be done in any contingency, and of the proper way to do it. In short, it was that unwritten code I spoke of just now--a sort of _savoir vivre_--which became part of the rural labourer's outlook, and instructed him through his days and years. It was hardly reduced to thoughts in his consciousness, but it always swayed him. And it was consistent with--nay, it implied--many strong virtues: toughness to endure long labour, handiness, frugality, habits of early rising. It was consistent too--that must be admitted--with considerable hardness and "coarseness" of feeling; a man might be avaricious, loose, dirty, quarrelsome, and not offend much against the essential peasant code. Nor was its influence very good upon his intellectual development, as I shall show later on. Yet whatever its defects, it had those qualities which I have tried to outline; and where it really flourished it ultimately led to gracefulness of living and love of what is comely and kindly. You can detect as much still, in the flavour of many a mellow folk-saying, not to mention folk-song; you may divine it yet in all kinds of little popular traits, if once you know what to look for. In this particular valley, where the barren soil challenged the people to a severer struggle for bare subsistence, the tradition could not put forth its fairer, its gentler, features; nevertheless the backbone of the village life was of the genuine peasant order. The cottagers had to "rough it," to dispense with softness, to put up with ugliness; but by their own skill and knowledge they forced the main part of their living out of the soil and materials of their own neighbourhood. And in doing this they won at least the rougher consolations which that mode of life had to offer. Their local knowledge was intensely interesting to them; they took pride in their skill and hardihood; they felt that they belonged to a set of people not inferior to others, albeit perhaps poorer and ruder; and all the customs which their situation required them to follow sustained their belief in the ancestral notions of good and evil. In other words, they had a civilization to support them--a poor thing, perhaps, a poor kind of civilization, but their own, and entirely within the reach of them all. I have no hesitation in affirming all this; because, though I never saw the system in its completeness, I came here soon enough to find a few old people still partially living by it. These old people, fortunate in the possession of their own cottages and a little land, were keepers of pigs and donkeys, and even a few cows. They kept bees, too; they made wine; they often paid in kind for any services that neighbours did for them; and with the food they could grow, and the firing they could still obtain from the woods and heath, their living was half provided for. The one of them I knew best was not the most typical. Shrewd old man that he was, he had adapted himself so far as suited him to a more commercial economy, and had grown suspicious and avaricious; yet if he could have been translated suddenly back into the eighteenth century, he would scarce have needed to change any of his habits, or even his clothes. He wore an old-fashioned "smock frock," doubtless home-made; and in this he pottered about all day--pottered, at least, in his old age, when I knew him--not very spruce as to personal cleanliness, smelling of his cow-stall, saving money, wanting no holiday, independent of books and newspapers, indifferent to anything that happened farther off than the neighbouring town, liking his pipe and glass of beer, and never knowing what it was to feel dull. I speak of him because I knew him personally; but there were others of whom I used to hear, though I never became acquainted with them, who seem to have been hardly at all tainted with the commercial spirit, and were more in the position of labourers than this man, yet lived almost dignified lives of simple and self-supporting contentment. Of some of them the middle-aged people of to-day still talk, not without respect. But in writing of such folk I have most emphatically to use the past tense; for although a sort of afterglow from the old civilization still rests upon the village character, it is fast fading out, and it has not much resemblance to the genuine thing of half a century ago. The direct light has gone out of the people's life--the light, the meaning, the guidance. They have no longer a civilization, but only some derelict habits left from that which has gone. And it is no wonder if some of those habits seem now stupid, ignorant, objectionable; for the fitness has departed from them, and left them naked. They were acquired under a different set of circumstances--a set of circumstances whose disappearance dates from, and was caused by, the enclosure of the common. IX THE NEW THRIFT One usually thinks of the enclosure of a common as a procedure which takes effect immediately, in striking and memorable change; yet the event in this village seems to have made no lasting impression on people's minds. The older folk talk about things that happened "before the common was enclosed" much as they might say "before the flood," and occasionally they discuss the history of some allotment or other made under the award; but one hears little from them to suggest that the fateful ordinance seemed to them a fateful one at the time. It may be that the stoical village temper is in part accountable for this indifference. As the arrangement was presumably made over the heads of the people, they doubtless took it in a fatalistic way as a thing that could not be helped and had better be dismissed from their thoughts. Were this all, however, I think that I should have heard more of the matter. Had sudden distress fallen upon the valley, had families been speedily and obviously ruined by the enclosure, some mention of the fact would surely have reached me. But the truth appears to be that nothing very definite or striking ensued, to be remembered. The change was hardly understood, or, at any rate, its importance was not appreciated, by the people concerned. Perhaps, indeed, its calamitous nature was veiled at first behind some small temporary advantages which sprang from it. True, I question if the benefits experienced here were equal to those which are said to have been realized in similar circumstances elsewhere. In other parishes, where the farmers have been impoverished and the labourers out of work, the latter, at the enclosure of a common, have sometimes found welcome employment in digging out or fencing in the boundaries of the new allotments, and in breaking up the fresh ground. So the landowners say. But here, where there were few men wanting constant labour, the opportunity of work to do was hardly called for, and the making of boundaries was in many cases neglected. In that one way, therefore, not many can have derived any profit from the enclosure. On the other hand, an advantage was really felt, I think, in the opening that arose for building cottages on the newly-acquired freeholds. Quite a number of cottages seem to date from that period; and I infer that the opportunity was seized by various men who wished to provide new house-room for themselves, or for a married son or daughter. They could still go to work almost on the old lines. Perhaps the recognized price--seventy pounds, it is said to have been, for building a cottage of three rooms--would have to be exceeded a little, when timbers for floor and roof could no longer be had for the cutting out of fir-trees on the common; and yet there, after all, were the trees, inexpensive to buy; and there was the peasant tradition, still unimpaired, to encourage and commend such enterprise. There is really little need, however, for these explanations of the people's unconcern at the disaster which had, in fact, befallen them. The passing of the common seemed unimportant at the time, not so much because a few short-lived advantages concealed its meaning as because the real disadvantages were slow to appear. At first the enclosure was rather a nominal event than an actual one. It had been made in theory; in practice it was deferred. I have just said that in many cases the boundaries were left unmarked; I may add now that to this day they have not quite all been defined, although the few spots which remain unfenced are not worthy of notice. They are to be found only in places where building is impossible; elsewhere all is now closed in. For it is the recent building boom that has at last caused the enclosure to take its full effect. Before that began, not more than ten or twelve years ago, there were abundant patches of heath still left open; and on many a spot where nowadays the well-to-do have their tennis or their afternoon tea, of old I have seen donkeys peacefully grazing. The donkeys have had to go, their room being wanted, and not many cottagers can keep a donkey now; but kept they were, and in considerable numbers, until these late years, in spite of the enclosure. But if the end could be deferred so long, one may judge how slowly the change began--slowly and inconspicuously, so that those who saw the beginning could almost ignore it. Even the cows--once as numerous as the donkeys--were not given up quite immediately, though in a few years they were all gone, I am told. But long after them, heath for thatching and firing might still be cut in waste places; fern continued until six or seven years ago to yield litter for pig-sties; and since these things still seemed to go on almost as well after the enclosure as before it, how should the people have imagined that their ancient mode of life had been cut off at the roots, and that it had really begun to die where it stood, under their undiscerning eyes? Nevertheless, that was the effect. To the enclosure of the common more than to any other cause may be traced all the changes that have subsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystone out of an arch. The keystone is not the arch; but, once it is gone, all sorts of forces, previously resisted, begin to operate towards ruin, and gradually the whole structure crumbles down. This fairly illustrates what has happened to the village, in consequence of the loss of the common. The direct results have been perhaps the least important in themselves; but indirectly the enclosure mattered, because it left the people helpless against influences which have sapped away their interests, robbed them of security and peace, rendered their knowledge and skill of small value, and seriously affected their personal pride and their character. Observe it well. The enclosure itself, I say, was not actually the cause of all this; but it was the opening, so to speak, through which all this was let in. The other causes which have been at work could hardly have operated as they have done if the village life had not been weakened by the changes directly due to the loss of the common. They consisted--those changes--in a radical alteration of the domestic economy of the cottagers. Not suddenly, but none the less inevitably, the old thrift--the peasant thrift--which the people understood thoroughly had to be abandoned in favour of a modern thrift--commercial thrift--which they understood but vaguely. That was the essential effect of the enclosure, the central change directly caused by it; and it struck at the very heart of the peasant system. For note what it involved. By the peasant system, as I have already explained, people derived the necessaries of life from the materials and soil of their own countryside. Now, so long as they had the common, the inhabitants of the valley were in a large degree able to conform to this system, the common being, as it were, a supplement to the cottage gardens, and furnishing means of extending the scope of the little home industries. It encouraged the poorest labourer to practise, for instance, all those time-honoured crafts which Cobbett, in his little book on Cottage Economy, had advocated as the one hope for labourers. The cow-keeping, the bread-making, the fattening of pigs and curing of bacon, were actually carried on here thirty years after Cobbett's time, besides other things not mentioned by him, such as turf-cutting on the heath and wheat-growing in the gardens. But it was the common that made all this possible. It was only by the spacious "turn-out" which it afforded that the people were enabled to keep cows and get milk and butter; it was only with the turf-firing cut on the common that they could smoke their bacon, hanging it in the wide chimneys over those old open hearths where none but such fuel could be used; and, again, it was only because they could get furze from the common to heat their bread ovens that it was worth their while to grow a little wheat at home, and have it ground into flour for making bread. With the common, however, they could, and did, achieve all this. I am not dealing in supposition. I have mentioned nothing here that I have not learnt from men who remember the system still flourishing--men who in their boyhood took part in it, and can tell how the turfs were harvested, and how the pig-litter was got home and stacked in ricks; men who, if you lead them on, will talk of the cows they themselves watched over on the heath--two from this cottage, three from that one yonder, one more from Master Hack's, another couple from Trusler's, until they have numbered a score, perhaps, and have named a dozen old village names. It all actually happened. The whole system was "in full swing" here, within living memory. But the very heart of it was the open common. Accordingly, when the enclosure began to be a fact, when the cottager was left with nothing to depend upon save his garden alone, as a peasant he was a broken man--a peasant shut out from his countryside and cut off from his resources. True, he might still grow vegetables, and keep a pig or two, and provide himself with pork; but there was little else that he could do in the old way. It was out of the question to obtain most of his supplies by his own handiwork: they had to be procured, ready-made, from some other source. That source, I need hardly say, was a shop. So the once self-supporting cottager turned into a spender of money at the baker's, the coal-merchant's, the provision-dealer's; and, of course, needing to spend money, he needed first to get it. The change was momentous, as events have sufficiently proved. In the matter of earning, to be sure, the difference has appeared rather in the attitude of the people than in the actual method of going about to get money. To a greater or less extent, most of them were already wage-earners, though not regularly. If a few had been wont to furnish themselves with money in true peasant fashion--that is to say, by selling their goods, their butter, or milk, or pig-meat, instead of their labour--still, the majority had wanted for their own use whatever they could produce in this way, and had been obliged to sell their labour itself, when they required money. Wage-earning, therefore, was no new thing in the village; only, the need to earn became more insistent, when so many more things than before had to be bought with the wages. Consequently, it had to be approached in a more businesslike, a more commercial, spirit. Unemployment, hitherto not much worse than a regrettable inconvenience, became a calamity. Every hour's work acquired a market value. The sense of taking part in time-honoured duties of the countryside disappeared before the idea--so very important now--of getting shillings with which to go to a shop; while even the home industries which were still practicable began to be valued in terms of money, so that a man was tempted to neglect his own gardening if he could sell his labour in somebody else's garden. Thus undermined, the peasant outlook gave way, perforce, to that of the modern labourer, and the old attachment to the countryside was weakened. In all this change of attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of the enclosure of the common which were spoken of above. If the villagers became more mercenary, it was not because the fencing in of the heaths immediately caused them to become so, but because it left them helpless to resist becoming so--left them a prey to considerations whose weight they had previously not so much felt. After all, the new order of things did but intensify the need of wage-earning; it made no difference in the procedure of it. But in regard to spending the case was otherwise. Under the old régime, although probably a small regular expenditure of money had been usual, yet in the main the peasant's expenditure was not regular, but intermittent. Getting so much food and firing by his own labour, he might go for weeks without needing more than a few shillings to make up occasional deficiencies. His purse was subject to no such constant drain as that for which the modern labourer has to provide. In short, the regular expenses were small, the occasional ones not crushing. But to-day, when the people can no longer produce for themselves, the proportion has changed. It has swung round so completely that nearly all the expenses have become regular, while those of the other sort have wellnigh disappeared. Every week money has to be found, and not only, as of old, for rent, and boots, and for some bread and flour, but also for butter or margarine, sugar, tea, bacon or foreign meat if possible, lard, jam, and--in the winter, at least--coal. Even water is an item of weekly expense; for where the company's water is laid on to a cottage, there is sixpence a week or so added to the rent. The only important thing which is still not bought regularly is clothing. The people get their clothes when they can, and when they positively must. As a result, the former thrift of the village has been entirely subverted. For earning and spending are not the whole of economy. There is saving to be considered; and, in consequence of the turn-over of expenses from the occasional to the regular group, the cottagers have been obliged to resort to methods of saving specially adapted to the changed conditions. The point is of extreme importance. Under the old style, a man's chief savings were in the shape of commodities ready for use, or growing into use. They were, too, a genuine capital, inasmuch as they supported him while he replaced and increased them. The flitches of bacon, the little stores of flour and home-made wine, the stack of firing, the small rick of fern or grass, were his savings-bank, which, while he drew from it daily, he replenished betimes as he planted his garden, and brought home heath and turf from the common, and minded his pigs and his cow, and put by odd shillings for occasional need. Notice that putting-by of shillings. It was not the whole, it was only the completion, of the peasant's thrift. At a pinch he could even do without the money, paying for what he wanted with a sack of potatoes, or a day's work with his donkey-cart; but a little money put by was a convenience. When it was wanted, it was wanted in lump sums--ten shillings now, say, for a little pig; and then fifteen shillings or so in six weeks' time for mending the donkey-cart, and so on; and, thanks to the real savings in the shape of food and firing ready for use, the shillings, however come by, could be hoarded up. But under the new thrift they cannot be so hoarded up; nor, fortunately, are the little lump sums so necessary as before. The real savings now, the real stores of useful capital, are no longer in the cottager's home. They are in shops. What the modern labourer chiefly requires, therefore, is not a little hoard of money lying by, but a regular supply of money, a constant stream of it, flowing in, to enable him to go to the shops regularly. In a word, he wants an income--a steady income of shillings. And since his earnings are not steady--since his income may cease any day, and continue in abeyance for weeks at a time, during which the shops will be closed against him, his chief economy is directed upon the object of insuring his weekly income. Most miserably for him, he has never been able to insure it against all reverses. Against trade depression, which throws him out of work and dries up the stream of money that should come flowing in, he has no protection. He has none if his employer should go bankrupt, or leave the neighbourhood, and dismiss him; none against the competition of machinery. Still, the labourers do as much as they can. Sickness, at least, does not find them unprepared. To cover loss of wages during sickness, they pay into a benefit society. The more careful, indeed, pay into two--the Oddfellows or the Foresters, or some such society--and a local "slate-club." I have known men out of work living on tea and bread, and not much of that, so that they may keep up their club payments, and be sure of an income if they should fall sick; and I have known men so circumstanced immediately feel the advantage if sickness should actually fall upon them. This is the new thrift, which has replaced that of the peasant. I do not say that there is no other saving--that no little sums are hoarded up; for, in fact, I could name one or two men who, after illness protracted to the stage when sick-pay from the club is reduced, have still fought off destitution with the small savings from better times. In most cases, however, no hoarding is possible. The club takes all the spare money; and the club alone stands between the labourer and destitution. And let this be clearly understood. At first it looks as if the member of a club had money invested in his society--money there, instead of perishable goods at home. Yet, in fact, that is not the case. His payments into the club funds are no investment. They bring him no profit; they are not a useful capital that can be renewed with interest. At the Christmas "share-out" he does get back a part of the twenty-six shillings contributed to the slate-club during the year; but the two pounds a year paid to the benefit society are his no longer; they cannot be "realized"; they are gone beyond reclaiming. Though he be out of work and his family starving, he cannot touch the money; to derive any advantage from it he himself must first fall ill. That is what the modern thrift means to the labourer. It does nothing to further--on the contrary, it retards--his prosperity; but it helps him in a particular kind of adversity. It drains his personal wealth away, and leaves him destitute of his capital; it robs his wife and children of his savings; but in return it makes him one of a brotherhood which guarantees to him a minimum income for a short time, if he should be out of health. An oldish man, who had been telling me one evening how they used to live in his boyhood, looked pensively across the valley when he had done, and so stood for a minute or two, as if trying to recover his impressions of that lost time. At last, with appearance of an effort to speak patiently, "Ah," he said, "they tells me times are better now, but I can't see it;" and it was plain enough that he thought our present times the worse. So far as this valley is concerned I incline to agree with him, although in general it is a debatable question. On the one hand, it may be that the things a labourer can buy at a shop for fifteen shillings a week are more in quantity and variety, if not better in quality, than those which his forefathers could produce by their own industry; and to that extent the advantage is with the present times. But, on the other hand, the fifteen shillings are not every week forthcoming; and whereas the old-time cottager out of work could generally find something profitable to do for himself, the modern man, having once got his garden into order, stands unprofitably idle. Perhaps the worst is that, owing to the lowness of their wages, the people have never been able to give the new thrift a fair trial. After all, they miss the lump sums laid by against need. If their earnings would ever overtake their expenses and give a little margin, they might do better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth, they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me about twenty-six shillings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again as that, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So, too, the boots he can get for four or five shillings a pair are the dearest of all boots. They wear out in a couple of months or so, and another pair must be bought almost before another four or five shillings can be spared. In its smaller degree, a still more absurd difficulty handicaps the people in dealing with their own fruit-crops. To make raspberry or gooseberry jam should be, you would think, an economy delightful to the cottage women, if only as a piece of old-fashioned thrift; yet they rarely do it. If they had the necessary utensils, still the weekly money at their disposal will not run to the purchase of extra firing and sugar. It is all too little for everyday purposes, and they are glad to eke it out by selling their fruit for middle-class women to preserve, though in the end they have to buy for their own families an inferior quality of jam at a far higher price. Wherever you follow it up, you will find the modern thrift not quite successful in the cottages. It is not elastic enough; or, rather, the people's means are not elastic enough, and will not stretch to its demands. There is well-being in it--variety of food, for instance, and comfort of clothing--as soon as both ends can be made to meet and to lap over a little; but it strains the small incomes continually to the breaking-point, so that every other consideration has to give way under it to a pitiful calculation of pence. For the sake of pence the people who keep fowls sell the eggs, and feed their children on bread and margarine; and, on the same principle, they do not even seek to produce other things which are well within their power to produce, but are too luxurious for their means. "'Twouldn't be no use for me to grow strawberries," a man explained; "my children'd have 'em." It sounded a strange reason, for to what better use could strawberries be put? But it shows how tightly the people are bound down by their commercial conditions. In order to make the Saturday's shopping easier, they must weigh the shillings and pence value of everything they possess and everything they attempt to do. These considerations, however, though showing that present times are not good, do not prove that they are worse than past times. It may be that there was poverty in the valley before the enclosure of the common quite as severe as there is now; and, so far as concerns mere economics, that event did but change the mode of the struggle for existence, without greatly affecting its intensity. People are poor in a different way now, that is all. Hence, in its more direct results, the loss of the common has not mattered much, and it might be forgotten if those results were the only ones. But they are not the only ones. The results have spread from the economic centre outwards until the whole life of the people has been affected, new influences coming into play which previously were but little felt. So searching, indeed, has the change been, and so revolutionary, that anything like a full account of it would be out of the question. The chapters that follow, therefore, do not pretend to deal with it at all exhaustively; at most they will but draw attention to a few of its more striking aspects. X COMPETITION When the half-peasant men of the valley began to enter the labour market as avowed wage-earners, a set of conditions confronted them which we are apt to think of as established by a law of Nature, but which, in fact, may be almost unknown in a peasant community. For the first time the importance of a "demand for labour" came home to them. I do not say that it was wholly a new thing; but to the older villagers it had not been, as it is now to their descendants, the dominating factor in their struggle for life. On the contrary, in proportion as their labour was bestowed immediately on productive work for their own uses, the question whether there was a demand for labour elsewhere did not arise. The common was indifferent; it wanted none of them. It neither asked them to avail themselves of its resources, nor paid them money for doing so, nor refused employment to one because another was already engaged there. But to-day, instead of going for a livelihood to the impartial heath, the people must wait for others to set them to work. The demand which they supply is their own no longer, and no longer, therefore, is their living in their own hands. Of all the old families in the village, I think there are only two left now who have not drifted wholly into this dependent state; but I know numbers of labourers, often out of work, whose grandfathers were half independent of employers. In theory, no doubt the advantage ought to be with the present times. Under the new system a far larger population is able to live in the parish than could possibly have been supported here under the old; for now, in place of the scanty products of the little valley and the heaths, the stores of the whole world may be drawn upon by the inhabitants in return for the wages they earn. Only there is the awkward condition that they must earn wages. Those limitless stores cannot be approached by the labourer until he is invited--until there is "a demand" for his labour. Property owners, or capitalists, standing between him and the world's capital, are able to pick and choose between him and his neighbours as the common never did, and to decide which of them shall work and have some of the supplies. And as a consequence of this picking and choosing, competition amongst the labourers seeking to be employed has become the accepted condition of getting a living in the village, and it is to a great extent a new condition. Previously there was little room for anything of the kind. The old thrift lent itself to co-operation rather. I admit that I have never heard of any system being brought into the activities of this valley, such as I witnessed lately in another part of England, where the small farmers, supplying an external market, and having no hired labour, were helping one another to get their corn harvested, all being solicitous for their neighbours' welfare, and giving, not selling, their labour. Here the conditions hardly required such wholesale co-operation as that; but in lesser matters both kindliness and economy would counsel the people to be mutually helpful, and there is no reason to doubt that the counsel was taken. Those who had donkey-carts would willingly bring home turfs for those who had none, in return for help with their own turf-cutting. The bread-ovens, I know, were at the disposal of others besides the owners. At pig-killing, at thatching, at clearing out wells (where, in fact, I have seen the thing going on), the people would put themselves at one another's service. They still do so in cases where there is no question of earning money for a living. And if the spirit of friendly co-operation is alive now, when it can so rarely be put in practice, one may readily suppose that it was fairly vigorous fifty years ago. But no spirit of co-operation may now prompt one wage-earner to ask, or another to proffer, assistance in working for wages. As well might one shopkeeper propose to wait on another's customers for him. Employers would not have it; still less would those who are employed. A man may be fainting at his job, but none dare help him. He would resent, he would fear, the proposal. The job is, as it were, his property; as long as he can stand and see he must hold it against all comers, because in losing hold he loses his claim upon the world's supplies of the necessaries of life. In spite of all the latent good-will, therefore, and in spite of the fact that the cottagers are all on the same social level, intimacies do not thrive amongst them. If there was formerly any parochial sentiment in the village, any sense of community of interest, it has all been broken up by the exigencies of competitive wage-earning, and each family stands by itself, aloof from all the others. The interests clash. Men who might be helpful friends in other circumstances are in the position of rival tradesmen competing for the patronage of customers. Not now may their labour be a bond of friendship between them; it is a commodity with a market value, to be sold in the market. Hence, just as in trade, every man for himself is the rule with the villagers; just as in trade, the misfortune of one is the opportunity of another. All the maxims of competitive commerce apply fully to the vendor of his own labour. There must be "no friendship in business"; the weakest must go to the wall. Each man is an individualist fighting for his own hand; and to give as little as he can for as much as he can get is good policy for him, with precisely the same limitations as those that govern the trading of the retail merchant, tormented with the conflicting necessities of overcharging and underselling. It follows that the villagers are a prey to jealousy and suspicion--not, perhaps, when they meet at the public-house or on the road, but in the presence of employers, when any question of employment arises. At such times one would think that labouring men have no critics so unkindly as their own neighbours and equals. It is true those who are in constant work are commended; but if you ask about a man who is "on the market" and open for any work that may be going, his rivals are unlikely to answer generously. "So-and-So?... H'm!... He do's his best; but he don't seem to get _through_, somehow." "Old Who-is-it? Asked _he_ to come and help me, have ye? Well, you'll judge for yourself; but I don't hardly fancy he'll suit." Or, again: "Well, we all knows how 'tis with What's-his-name. I don't say but what he keeps on work right enough; but he'll have to jump about smarter 'n what I've ever knowed 'n, if he's to work 'long o' me." So, too often, and sometimes in crueller terms, I have heard efficient labourers speak of their neighbours. Certainly it is not all envy. An active man finds it penance to work with a slow one, and worse than penance; for his own reputation may suffer, if his own output of work should be diminished by the other's fault. That neighbour of mine engaged at hop-drying doubtless had good grounds for exasperation with the helper sent into the kiln, when he complained to the master: "Call that a _man_ you sent me? If that's what you calls a man, I'd sooner you let me send for my old woman! Blamed if she wouldn't do better than that feller!" Detraction like this, no doubt, is often justified; but when it becomes the rule, the only possible inference is that an instinctive jealousy prompts men to it, in instinctive self-preservation. Yet there are depths of dishonour--depths not unknown amongst employers--into which the village labourers will rarely condescend to plunge, acute though the temptation may be. Not once have I met with an instance of one man deliberately scheming to get another man's job away from him. A labourer unable to keep up with his work will do almost anything to avoid having a helper thrust upon him--he fears the introduction of a possible rival into his preserve. But this is not the same thing as pushing another man out; it has no resemblance to the behaviour of the hustling capitalist, who opens his big business with the definite intention of capturing trade away from little businesses. That is a course to which my impoverished neighbours will not stoop. The nearest thing to it which I have known was the case of those men mentioned in an earlier chapter, who applied for Bettesworth's work during his last illness. They came, however, believing the place to be vacant; and one and all, with a sincerity I never doubted, deprecated the idea of desiring to take it away from him. In fact, the application was distasteful to them. Nothing, I believe, would have prevailed upon them to make it, short of that hunger for constant employment which many of the men feel now, under their new competitive thrift. That they should have been scrupulous at all was to their credit. All their circumstances constrain the people to be selfish, secret about their hopes, swift to be first in the field where a chance occurs. And it is surprising how vigilant a lookout is kept, and how wide a district it covers. By what routes the news of new employment travels I do not know, but travel it does, fast and far. Men rise early and walk many miles to be before others at some place where they have heard of work to be had; and one gets the impression, sometimes, of a population silently but keenly watching to see what opportunity of well-being may suddenly fall to them, not in general, but individually. Do what they will to be neighbourly, competition for the privilege of earning wages separates them sooner or later. There were two men I knew who maintained a sort of comradeship in work during several years, so that one of them would not take a job unless there was room for the other, and if either was paid off, the other left with him. They were amongst the ablest labourers in the parish, used to working long hours at high pressure, and indifferent to what they did, provided that the pay was good. I heard of them from time to time--now at railway work, now at harvesting, now helping where a bridge was being built, and so on. It was the depression of the winter of 1908-09 that finally broke up their comradeship. During those miserable months even these two were unemployed, and went short of food at times; and now they are working separately--competing one against the other, in fact. XI HUMILIATION Still more than the relations of the villagers with their own kind their relations with other sorts of people have suffered change under the new thrift. To just that extent to which the early inhabitants of the valley were peasants, they formed, as it were, a separate group, careless of the outer world and its concerns. They could afford to ignore it, and to be ignored by it. To them, so well suited with their own outlook and customs, it was a matter of small importance, though all England should have other views than theirs, and other manners. And the outer world, on its side, was equally indifferent. It left the villagers to go their own queer way, and recognized--as it does in the case of other separate groups of folk, such as fishermen or costermongers--that what seemed singular in them was probably justified by the singularity of their circumstances. Nobody supposed that they were a wrong or a regrettable type who ought to be "done good to" or reformed. They belonged to their own set. They were English, of course; but they were outside the ordinary classifications of English society. Even towards those of them who went out of the valley to earn wages this was still the attitude. They went out as peasants, and were esteemed because they had the ability of peasants. In much the same way as country folk on the Continent take their country produce into town markets the men of this valley took, into the hop-grounds and fields of the neighbouring valley, or into its old-fashioned streets and stable yards, their toughness, their handiness, their intimate understanding of country crafts; and, returning home in the evening, they slipped back again into their natural peasant state, without any feeling of disharmony from the day's employment. There was no reason why it should be otherwise. Although, at work, they had come into contact with people unlike themselves in some ways, the contrast was not of such a kind that it disheartened or seemed to disgrace them. At the time of the enclosure of the common, a notable development, certainly, was beginning amongst the employing classes, but it had not then proceeded far. Of course the day of the yeoman farmer was almost done; and with it there had disappeared some of that equality which permitted wage-earning men to be on such easy terms with their masters as one hears old people describe. No longer, probably, would a farmer take a nickname from his men, or suffer them to call his daughters familiarly by their Christian names; and no longer did master and man live on quite the same quality of food, or dress in the same sort of clothes. Nevertheless the distinction between employers and employed--between the lower middle-class and the working-class--was not nearly so marked fifty years ago as it has since become. The farmers, for their part, were still veritable country folk, inheritors themselves of a set of rural traditions nearly akin to those of the peasant squatters in this valley. And even the townsmen, who were the only others who could give employment to these villagers, were extremely countrified in character. In their little sleepy old town--not half its present size, and the centre then of an agricultural and especially a hop-growing district--people were intimately interested in country things. No matter what a man's trade or profession--linen-draper, or saddler, or baker, or lawyer, or banker--he found it worth while to watch the harvests, and to know a great deal about cattle and sheep, and more than a great deal about hops. Some of the tradesmen were, in fact, growing wealthy as hop-planters; and one and all identified themselves with the outdoor industries of the neighbourhood. And though some grew rich, and changed their style of living, they did not change their mental equipment, but continued (as I myself remember) more "provincial" than many a farmer is nowadays. All their thoughts, all their ideas, could be quite well expressed in the West Surrey and Hampshire dialect, which the townspeople, like the village folk, continued to speak. Meanwhile, the work required by these employers ran, as yet, very much on antiquated lines. Perhaps it was that the use of machinery had received a setback, twenty years earlier, by the "Swing Riots," of which a few memories still survive; at any rate haymaking, harvesting, threshing--all the old tasks, indeed--were still done by hand; thatch had not gone out of use for barns and stables; nor, for house-roofs, had imported slates quite taken the place of locally made tiles. The truth is, the town, in its more complex way, had not itself passed far beyond the primitive stage of dependence on local resources and local skill. It is really surprising how few were the materials, or even the finished goods, imported into it at that time. Clothing stuffs and metals were the chief of them. Of course the grocers (not "provision merchants" then) did their small trade in sugar and coffee, and tea and spices; there was a tinware shop, an ironmonger's, a wine-merchant's; and all these necessarily were supplied from outside. But, on the other hand, no foreign meat or flour, or hay or straw or timber, found their way into the town, and comparatively few manufactured products from other parts of England. Carpenters still used the oak and ash and elm of the neighbourhood, sawn out for them by local sawyers: the wheelwright, because iron was costly, mounted his cartwheels on huge axles fashioned by himself out of the hardest beech; the smith, shoeing horses or putting tyres on wheels, first made the necessary nails for himself, hammering them out on his own anvil. So, too, with many other things. Boots, brushes, earthenware, butter and lard, candles, bricks--they were all of local make; cheese was brought back from Weyhill Fair in the waggons which had carried down the hops; in short, to an extent hard to realize, the town was independent of commerce as we know it now, and looked to the farms and forests and the claypits and coppices of the neighbourhood for its supplies. A leisurely yet steady traffic in rural produce therefore passed along its streets, because it was the life-centre, the heart, of its own countryside; and the village labourer, going in and out upon his town tasks, or even working all day in some secluded yard behind the street, still found a sort of homeliness in the materials he handled, and was in touch with the ideas and purposes of his employer. Owing to these same circumstances, the wage-earners of that day enjoyed what their descendants would consider a most blissful freedom from anxiety. On the one side, the demand for labour was fairly steady. It was the demand of a community not rapidly growing in numbers, nor yet subject to crazes and sudden changes of a fashion--a community patiently, nay, cheerfully, conservative in its ambitions, not given to rash speculation, but contented to go plodding on in its time-honoured and modest well-being. What the townsfolk wanted one year they wanted the next, and so onwards with but quiet progress. And as the demand for labour was thus steady, so on the other side was the supply of it. A dissatisfied employer could not advertise, then, in a London daily paper, and get scores of men applying to him for work at a day's notice; nor, indeed, would strangers have been able to do the work in many cases, so curiously was its character determined by local conditions. Besides, town opinion, still prejudiced by memories of the old Poor Law, would have viewed with extreme disfavour, had such an experiment ever been tried, the importation of men and families whose coming must surely result in pauperism for somebody, and in a consequent charge upon the rates. So, putting together the leading factors--namely, a steady demand for countrified labour, a steady supply of it, and an employing class full of country ideas--we get a rough idea of the conditions of wage-earning in the neighbourhood, when the folk of this valley, fenced out from their common, were forced to look to wage-earning as their sole means of living. That the conditions were ideal it would be foolish to suppose; but that, for villagers at least, they had certain advantages over present conditions is not to be denied. Especially we may note two unpleasing features of modern wage-earning which had not then made their appearance. In the first place, the work itself was interesting to do, was almost worth doing for its own sake, when it still called for much old-world skill and knowledge, and when the praises of the master were the praises of an expert who well knew what he was talking about. On these terms, it was no mean pleasure that the able labouring men had in their labour. They took a pride in it--as you may soon discern if you will listen to the older men talking. I have heard them boast, as of a triumph, of the fine flattering surprise of some master, when he had come to look at their day's work, and found it more forward, or better done, than he had dared to hope. The words he said are treasured up with delight, and repeated with enthusiasm, after many years. As for the other point, it has already been touched upon. Harsh the employers might be--more callous by far, I believe, than they are now; but in their general outlook they were not, as yet, so very far removed from the men who worked for them. Their ideas of good and bad were such as the peasant labourer from this valley could understand; and master and man were not greatly out of touch in the matter of civilization. It made a vast difference to the labourer's comfort. He might be hectored, bullied, cheated even, but he hardly felt himself degraded too. It was not a being out of another sphere that oppressed him; not one who despised him, not one whose motives were strange and mysterious. The cruellest oppression was inhuman rather than unhuman--the act, after all, only of a more powerful, not of a more dazzling, personage--so that it produced in him no humiliating sense of belonging to an inferior order of creation. And, of course, oppression was exceptional. Employers were obliged to get on comfortably with their work-people, by the conditions governing the supply of labour. I have in my mind several cases mentioned to me by people long ago dead, in which men for various faults (drunkenness in one instance, theft in another) were dismissed from their employment again and again, yet as often reinstated, because the master found it easier to put up with their faults than to do without their skill. It may be inferred, therefore, that ordinary men got along fairly well with their masters in the ordinary course. This state of things, however, has gradually passed away. As I shall show in another chapter, the labourer may now take but little interest and but little pride in his work; but the change in that direction is not more pronounced than is the change in the relations between the villagers and the employing classes. It is a cruel evil that the folk of the valley have suffered there. No longer are they a group whose peculiarities are respected while their qualities are esteemed. In their intercourse with the outer world they have become, as it were, degraded, humiliated; and when they go out of the valley to earn wages, it is to take the position of an inferior and almost servile race. The reason is that the employing class, as a whole, has moved on, leaving the labourers where they were, until now a great gulf divides them. Merely in relative wealth, if that were all, the difference has widened enormously. Seventy or eighty years ago, I have heard say, the shopkeeper in the town who had as much as a hundred pounds put by was thought a rich man. There are now many artisans there whose savings exceed that figure, while the property of the townsmen who employ labour is, of course, valued often in thousands. The labouring people alone remain without savings, as poor as their grandfathers when the common was first enclosed. But it is a question of civilization far more than of wealth that now divides the employing classes from the employed. The former have discarded much of their provincialism; they are astir with ambitions and ideas at which the old town would have stood aghast. In beliefs and in tastes they are a new people. They have new kinds of knowledge; almost one may say that they use their brains in new ways; and the result is that between them and the village labourer mutual understanding has broken down. How far the separation has gone is betrayed in the fact that the countrified speech, common to village and town fifty years ago, has become a subject of derision to the town-people, forgetful of their own ancestry. So, in field and street and shop, the two kinds of folk meet face to face, not with an outlook, and hardly with a speech, which both can appreciate, but like distinct races, the one dominant, the other subject. And, all but inevitably, the breach is daily widened by the conditions on which the new civilization of the employing class is based. For, with all its good features, it is rather a barbaric civilization, in this sense--that it is more a matter of fineness in possessions than in personal qualities. It cannot be maintained without a costly apparatus of dress and furniture, and of drudges to do the dirty work; and consequently it demands success in that competitive thrift which gives a good money-income. Without that the employers are nowhere. They are themselves driven very hard; they must make things pay; to secure the means of civilization for themselves, they must get them out of the labourer with his eighteen shillings a week. In vain, therefore, are they persuaded by their newest ideas to see in him an Englishman as good as themselves: they may assent to the principle, but in practice it is as imperative as ever to make him a profitable drudge. Accordingly, those relations of mutual approval which were not uncommon of old between master and man cannot now be maintained. If it is impossible for the village folk to understand the town folk, it is equally impossible for the town folk to understand the village folk. They cannot afford to understand. The peasant outlook is out of date--a cast-off thing; and for cleaving to it the labourer is despised. If he could be civilized, and yet be made to "pay," that is what would best suit the middle-classes; and that is really the impossible object at which they aim, when they try to "do him good." They want to make him more like themselves, and yet keep him in his place of dependence and humiliation. It must be said that amongst a section of the employers there is no desire to "do good" even on these terms. While the labouring people, on their side, betray little or no class feeling of hostility towards employers, the converse is not true, but jealousy, suspicion, some fear--the elements of bitter class-war, in fact--frequently mark the attitude of middle-class people towards the labouring class. It seems to be forgotten that the men are English. One hears them spoken of as an alien and objectionable race, worth nothing but to be made to work. The unemployment which began to beggar so many of my village neighbours after the South African War was actually welcomed by numerous employers in this district. "It will do the men good," people said to me; "it will teach them their place. They were getting too independent." The election of 1906, when the Conservative member for the division was unseated, brought out a large crop of similarly malevolent expressions. "Look at the class of people who have the vote," said a disgusted villa lady, with her nose in the air. "Only the low, ignorant people wear those colours," another lady assured her little boy, whose eyes preferred "those colours" to the favours in his own buttonhole. More pointed was the overheard remark of a well-to-do employer, irritated by the election crowds in the town: "As my wife says, it was bad enough before. The children of the lower classes used, as it was, to take the inside of the pavement, and we had to walk on the kerb. But now we shall be driven out into the road." I would not mention these things were it not for their significance to the village folk. By becoming wage-earners solely, the villagers have fallen into the disfavour of an influential section of the middle-classes, most of whom have no other desire than to keep them in a sufficient state of servility to be useful. How else is one to interpret that frequent middle-class outcry against education: "What are we going to do for servants?" or how else the grudging attitude taken up towards the few comforts that cottage people are able to enjoy? I listened lately to two men talking of "Tariff Reform"--one of them a commercial traveller, lofty in his patriotism. When mention was made of some old man's tale, that in his boyhood be rarely tasted meat, "unless a sheep died," the commercial traveller commented scornfully, "And now every working man in the kingdom thinks he must have meat twice a day"--as though such things ought not to be in the British Empire. The falsehood of the remark enhanced its significance. It was the sort of thing to say in hotel-bars, or in the offices of commerce--the sort of thing that goes down well with employers. It indicated that the animus of which I am speaking is almost a commonplace. In truth, I have heard it expressed dozens of times, in dozens of ways, yet always with the same implied suggestion, that the English labouring classes are a lower order of beings, who must be treated accordingly. And yet employers of this type, representing the wealth, perhaps, but by no means the culture, of modern civilization, are, in fact, nearer to the unlettered labourers in their outlook, and are therefore by far less embarrassing to them, than those of another and kindlier type which figures largely in this parish to-day. Those people for whom the enclosure of the common, as it has turned out, made room in the valley--I mean the well-to-do residents--employ local labour, not for profit at all, but to minister to their own pleasure, in their gardens and stables, and the majority of them would be genuinely glad to be helpful to their poorer neighbours. The presence of poverty reproaches them; their consciences are uneasy; or, better still, some kind of regard, some kind of respect, goes out from them towards the toilsome men and the over-burdened women whom, in fact, they have displaced. Yet compassion is not the same thing as understanding, and the cottagers know very well that even their best friends of this kind have neither the knowledge nor the taste to appreciate them in their own way. Sympathy for their troubles--yes, there is that; but sympathy with their enjoyments hardly any property-owner dreams of cultivating; and this is the more true the more the property-owner has been polished by his own civilization. A lady long resident here was quite surprised to hear from me, some months ago, that the cottagers are ardent gardeners. "Dear me!" she said; "I had no idea of it." And yet one of the ablest men of the parish had tended her own garden for years. Hence it is in their intercourse with these--the well-meaning and cultivated--that the villagers are most at a loss. In those embittered employers who merely seek to make money out of him the labourer does at least meet with some keen recognition of his usefulness; but with these others he is all at sea. Non-introspective, a connoisseur of garden crops and of pig-sties, and of saved-up seeds; cunning to understand the "set" of spade or hoe, and the temper of scythe and fag-hook; jealous of the encroachment of gravelled walk or evergreen hedge upon the useful soil; an expert in digging and dunging--he is very well aware that the praises of the villa-people employing him are ignorant praises. His best skill is, after all, overlooked. The cunning of his craft excites in them none of the sympathy of a fellow-expert, and is but poorly rewarded by their undiscriminating approval. At the same time, the things which these people require of him--the wanton things they ask him to do with the soil, levelling it to make lawns, wasting it upon shrubberies and drives, while they fence-in the heath patches and fence-out the public--prove to him more fully than any language can do that they put a different sort of value upon the countryside from its old value, and that they care not a straw for the mode of life that was his before they came here. All their ways are eloquent of condemnation of his tastes. And yet again, while his old skill fails to be understood, and his old outlook to be appreciated, he finds that the behaviour preferred in him is oftener than not a behaviour which his forefathers would have thought silly, to say the least--a finikin, fastidious behaviour, such as he would scorn to practise at home. Thus in all ways the employers most conscientiously humane are those who can least avoid, in their tastes and their whole manner of living, snubbing him and setting him down in an inferior place. They cannot help it, now that they have thrust themselves upon him as neighbours. The more they interest themselves in him, the more glaringly is the difference which separates themselves from him brought out. Whether, if the common had remained open, the villagers could still have held aloof, at this time of day, from the movements of the outer world is a question not worth discussion. The enclosure was brought to pass; the keystone was knocked out of the arch; and here are some of the indirect consequences. From a position in which the world's distinctions of class and caste were hardly noticed--a position which was, so to speak, an island of refuge, where self-respect could be preserved in preserving the old rough peasant ways--the valley folk have been forced into such relations with the world outside the valley as we have seen. They are no longer a separate set, unclassified, but a grade has been assigned to them in the classification of society at large, and it is wellnigh the lowest grade of all, for only the pauper and criminal classes are below them. In this sense, therefore, they are a "degraded" people, though by no fault of their own. Amongst "the masses" is where they are counted. Moreover, since they are now, as we have seen, competing against one another for the right to live, none of the concessions are made to them now that were of old made to the group of them, but they count, and are judged, individually, amongst the millions of the English proletariat. "Inferiority" has come into their lives; it is expected of them to treat almost everybody else as a superior person. But the cruellest indignity of all is that, although we regard them as inferiors, we still look to them to admire and live up to our standards; and they are to conform to our civilization, yet without the income it requires or the social recognition it should secure. And if they will not do this willingly, then shall they be coerced, or at least kept in order, by "temperance" and other "reforming" legislation, and by the police. XII THE HUMILIATED The effects of this "inferiority" which has been thrust upon the villagers are not exactly conspicuous in any particular direction. As it has been shown already, the people themselves seem almost unaware of any grievance in the matter, the change having come upon them too gradually for it to be sharply felt. They bear no malice against their employers. You would hardly learn, from anything that they consciously say or do, that in becoming so humiliated they have been hurt in their feelings, or have found it necessary to change their habits. Indeed, the positive alteration in their manners, by which I mean the adoption of new ways in place of old ones, has probably not amounted to a great deal. I admit that I have no means of estimating how much it does amount to. During fifty years, in which every cottager must now and then have become aware of constraint put upon him or her by the superior attitude of the employing class, it is quite possible that there have been innumerable small concessions and adaptations of manner, and that these have accumulated into a general change which would surprise us if it could be measured. But I incline to think that the effects of class-pressure have been chiefly negative; that, while employers have been adopting new modes of life, all that has happened to the labouring folk here in the valley is that this or that habit, found inexpedient at last, has been quietly dropped. A sort of reserve in the village temper, a want of gaiety, a subdued air--this, which one cannot help observing, is probably the shadow cast upon the people from the upraised middle-class. It looks suggestive, too. Yet, upon examining it, one fails to find in it any definite token that would show exactly how and where the village temper has been touched, or in what light "superior" persons are regarded in the cottages. The people appear enigmatic. They keep their own counsel. Whether they are bewildered or amused at the behaviour of employers, or alarmed or embittered by it, or actually indifferent to it, no sign escapes them when members of the employing class are by. In these circumstances, it is instructive to turn aside for a while from the grown-up people of the village, and to consider their children; because the children do not learn about the employing class by direct intercourse, but derive from their parents such ideas as they have of what is safe to do, and what is proper, where employing people are concerned. As soon as this truth is realized, a curious significance appears in some characteristic habits of the village school boys and girls. The boys, especially, deserve remark. That they are in general "rough," "uncivilized," I suppose might go without saying. It might also go without saying, were it not that the comparison turns out to be useful, that in animal spirits, physical courage, love of mischief and noise, they are at least a match for middle-class boys who go to the town grammar-school. I wish I could say that they have an equally good sense of "playing the game," an equally strong _esprit de corps_, and so on. Unfortunately, these traditions have hardly reached the village school as yet, and perhaps will not easily make their way there, amongst the children of parents whom the struggle for life compels to be so suspicious and jealous. The question is, however, beside the point now. Viewed without prejudice, the village boys must be thought quite as good material as any other English boys; you can see that there is the making of strong and brave men in them. With similar chances they would not be inferior in any respect to the sons of the middle classes. But under existing conditions the two sorts of boys develop some curious differences of habit. Where those from middle-class homes are self-possessed, those from the labourers' cottages are not merely shy, not merely uncouth and lubberly; they grow furtive, suspicious, timid as wild animals, on the watch for a chance to run. Audacious enough at bird's-nesting, sliding, tree-climbing, fighting, and impertinent enough towards people of their own kind, they quail before the first challenge of "superiority." All aplomb goes from them then. It is distressing to see how they look: with an expression of whimpering rebellion, as though the superior person had unhuman qualities, not to be reckoned on--as though there were danger in his presence. An incident of a few years ago, very trumpery in itself, displayed to me in the sharpest distinctness the contrast between the two orders of boys in this respect. In the hedge which parts my garden from the lane there is a nut-tree, too tempting to all boys when the nuts are ripe. At that season one hears whispered and exclamatory confabulations going on in the lane, and then large stones go crashing up into the tree, falling back sometimes within the hedge, where there is a bit of grass and a garden seat. Occasionally, playing the absurd part of irate property-owner, I have gone to the gate near by to drive off the offenders, but have opened it only in time to see a troop of urchins, alarmed by the click of the gate-latch, scurrying away like rabbits round the bend of the lane. One Sunday afternoon, however, when I looked out after a stone had fallen nearly on my head, it was to find two boys calmly waiting for me to approach them. Their school caps showed them to be two boys of the grammar-school. The interview went comically. Upon being told crossly that they were a nuisance, the boys apologized--an act which seemed to put me in the wrong. In my annoyance at that, I hinted ironically that, in fact, I was a benevolent person, quite willing to admit boys inside the hedge to pick up nuts, if nuts they really must have. Then I turned away. To my astonishment, they took me at my word, followed me into the garden, and calmly began to pick up nuts; while I withdrew, discomfited. I have since smiled to think of the affair; but I recall it now with more interest, for the sake of the contrast it affords between middle-class boys and labouring-class boys in exactly similar circumstances. Where the former behave confidently, because they feel safe, the latter are overtaken by panic, and run to cover. In this light another curious fact about the village boys gains in significance, supposing it to be indeed a fact. From the nature of the case, proof is not possible, but I have a strong impression that, excepting to go to the town, the boys of the village rarely, if ever, stray into neighbouring parishes, or more than a few hundred yards away from their parents' homes. One exception must be noted. In the lonely and silent fir-woods, which begin in the next valley and stretch away over ridge and dell for some miles from south-east to south-west, one sometimes comes upon a group of village children--little boys and girls together--filling sacks with fir-cones, and pushing an old perambulator to carry the load. But these are hardly voluntary expeditions; and the boys are always very small ones, while the girls are in charge. The bigger boys, of from ten to thirteen years old, do not go into the woods. They play in the roads and pathways, or on the corners of unused land, and as a rule within sight or call of home. I have never seen any of them, as I have occasionally seen middle-class boys from the town, rambling far afield in the outlying country, and my belief is that they would be considerably scared to find themselves in such unfamiliar scenes. Assuming that I am right, yet another contrast presents itself. It was in this very neighbourhood that William Cobbett, as a little boy, played off upon the huntsman that trick of revenge which he bragged about in after-life. For five or six miles across country, over various streams, through woods and heaths and ploughed upland fields, he made his way all alone, dragging his red herring, perfectly confident in himself, never at a loss to know where he was, but thoroughly familiar with the lie of the land most suitable for his game. Of course, not many boys are Cobbetts. Yet many of the village boys, even now, would be his match at other games. For here, on the shelving sand-banks beside the stream, I have seen them enjoying rough-and-tumble romps like those which the little Cobbett lived to think the best part of his education; and they do it with a recklessness which even he can scarce have surpassed. But in getting about the country they do not so much as begin to emulate him. Of course, it is true that now they have to spend their days in school; true, too, that the enclosures of land throughout the neighbourhood have made wandering less easy in our times; nevertheless, within a few miles there are woods and heath-lands in plenty for adventurous boys, as those of the middle-class are aware; yet those of the village never risk the adventure. I can but infer that they are afraid of something, and a moment's thought discloses what they fear. Just as in meddling with my nut-tree, so everywhere they are in danger of trouble with people of the propertied or employing kind; and behind these people stands the policeman, and behind the policeman that dim object of dread called "a summons." This it is that keeps the village children within the bounds familiar to them, where they know who is who, and what property belongs to which owner, and how far they may risk doing mischief, and round what corners they may scamper into safety. The caution they display is not unnecessary. Somehow, middle-class boys do not get into trouble with the law; but it happens not infrequently that a few little villagers are "pulled up" before a magistrate for trivial acts of mischief, and if the worst punishment inflicted upon them is a shilling fine and costs, which their parents pay, that is enough to make "a summons" a very dreadful thing to a little boy. Out of eighteen shillings a week, his father cannot afford "a shilling and costs" for a piece of mischief, as the little boy is but too likely to be shown. Children's memories are short, however, and it takes more than an occasional punishment of two or three to inspire in them all a timorousness so instinctive in character as that of these village boys. At the back of it there must be a more constant and pervasive influence. And, to come to the point at last, I think that the boys are swayed, unwittingly, by an attitude in the grown-up people with whom they live--an attitude of habitual wariness, not to say fear, in regard to everything connected with property and employers. This is what makes the timidity of the village urchins interesting. We may discern in it the expression of a feeling prevalent throughout the cottages--an unreasoned but convinced distrust of propertied folk, and a sense of being unprotected and helpless against their privileges and power. Here, accordingly, is one direction in which class distinction has seriously affected the villagers. It would be an exaggeration to say that they feel like outlaws; but they are vaguely aware of constraint imposed upon them by laws and prejudices which are none too friendly to people of their kind. One divines it in their treatment of the village policeman. There is probably no lonelier man in the parish than the constable. Of course he meets with civility, but his company is avoided. One hears him mentioned in those same accents of grudging caution which the villagers use in speaking of unfriendly property-owners, as though he belonged to that alien caste. The cottagers feel that they themselves are the people whom he is stationed in the valley to watch. They feel it; nor can it be denied that there is some excuse for the feeling. It is true that they far outnumber the employers, so that, other things being equal, from their more numerous ranks there would naturally come a larger number of offenders against the law. But other things are not equal. The proportion is not kept. Anyone who studies the police-court reports in the local papers will see that, apart from cases of technical offence, like riding a bicycle on the footpath, or keeping a dog without a licence, practically all the proceedings are taken in defence of the privileges and prejudices of the employing classes against the employed classes. Clearly the village idea is not wholly wrong. In theory, the policeman represents the general public; in practice, he stands for middle-class decorum and the rights of property; and what the people say is roughly true--there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor. But it is only roughly true, and one must get it a little more exact to appreciate the position in which the labouring-folk stand. I am not disposed to say anything here against the administration of the law by the justices, when offenders are brought before them; but in the choice or detection of offenders I must point out that a great deal of respect of persons is shown. Remember what that old man said, who would have liked to see the fir-woods go up in flames: "'Tis all fenced in, and now if you looks over the fence you be locked up for it." That was an exaggeration, of course--a sort of artistic licence, a piece of oratory; yet for him the assertion held more than a grain of truth. The case is that of the two sorts of boys over again. Where a middle-class man may take his Sunday walk securely, risking nothing worse than being civilly turned back by a game-keeper, these village men dare not go, unless they are prepared to answer a summons for "trespassing for an unlawful purpose," or "in search of game." Let it be admitted that the unlawful purpose is sometimes proved; at least, the trespassers are occasionally found to have rabbit-wires concealed about their persons. The remarkable thing, however, is that they should have been searched in order to make this discovery. The searching may be legal, for all that I know; yet I do not seem to see a middle-class man--a shopkeeper from the town, or any employer of labour--submitting to the process, as the cowed labouring man apparently does. It will be said that the middle-class man is in no fear of such an outrage, because he is not suspect. But that is conceding the greater part of what I wish to demonstrate. Rightly or wrongly, the labouring man is suspect. A distinction of caste is made against him. The law, which pretends to impartiality, sets him in a lower and less privileged place than his employers; and he knows it. In alleging that he might not look over a fence without being locked up for it my old acquaintance merely overstated a palpable truth. People of his rank--cottage people, labouring people--do, indeed, not dare to wander in country places anywhere off the public roads. Much more might be said on the same lines. Whether inevitably or no, at all events it happens that the march of respectability gives, to regulations which may be quite proper in themselves, a very strong appearance of being directed against the poorer working people. No doubt it is right enough that the brawling of the "drunk and disorderly" on the highroads should be checked; the public interest demands it; yet the impression conveyed is that the regulations are enforced more for the pleasure of property-owners than anybody else; that, in fact, middle-class respectability has, so to speak, made this law especially with a view to keeping the working classes in order. I am not urging that in this there is any substantial grievance; the offence is rarely committed by others than labourers, and by them too often. Yet it is well known that, while a labourer roystering along the road is pounced upon and locked up, an employer the worse for drink is shepherded home from his hotel by the police, and the affair hushed up. From circumstances like these--and they are very common--a suspicion is bred in cottage people that they are not in good odour with the authorities. The law rather tolerates than befriends them. They are not wanted, are not regarded as equal fellow-citizens with the well-to-do, but are expected to be quiet, or to keep out of sight. English people though they are, yet, if nobody will employ them so that they can pay rent for a cottage, they have no admitted rights in England--unless it be to go to the workhouse or to keep moving on upon the public road. In endless ways the sense of inequality is impressed upon them. I opened the local paper lately, and read of four of our young labourers accused of "card-playing." The game was "Banker," the policeman told the magistrates--as if gentlemen were likely to know what that meant!--and he had caught the fellows red-handed, in some as yet unfenced nook of the heath. That was how they were in fault. They should not have been playing where they could be seen, in the open air; they should have taken their objectionable game out of sight, into some private house, as the middle-classes do--and as, I suppose, the policeman himself must have done in his time, since he knew the game. Unfortunately for the labouring men, they have no private house available: there is no room for a card-party in their cottages; and thus they become subject to laws which, as they do not touch the property-owner, seem designed to catch especially them. For another example of the same insinuation of inequality, consider the local by-laws, which now forbid the keeping of pigs within a considerable distance of a dwelling-house. I will not say that the villager thinks the regulation a wrong one; at any rate he understands that it is excused in the interests of public health. But he also knows that it has been introduced since the arrival of middle-class people in the parish. They came, and his pigs had to go; so that in his eyes even the general public health looks like the health of rich residents rather than of poor ones. The people display little resentment; they accept their position with equanimity. Nevertheless it drives them in upon themselves. Observing the conditions, and yielding to them as to something inherent in the nature of things, they strive to keep out of the way of the superior classes. They are an aloof population, though not as their ancestors were. They are fenced out from the country; they cannot with security go into enclosed wood or coppice; they must keep to the public way, and there they must behave so as not to disturb the employing classes. Accordingly, all up and down the valley they restrict themselves more and more soberly to their gardens and cottages, dreading few things so much as a collision with those impersonal forces which seem always to side with property and against people like them. XIII NOTICE TO QUIT It might be thought that at least when they are at home the people would be untroubled; yet that is not the case. Influences from the new civilization reach them in their cottages, and the intrusion is but the more searching for being impersonal. It is borne in upon the senses in the shape of sights and sounds proclaiming across the valley that the village is an altered place, that the modern world is submerging it, that the old comfortable seclusion is gone. Even the obscurity of winter nights does not veil that truth; for where, but a few years ago, the quiet depths of darkness were but emphasized by a few glimmering cottage lights, there is now a more brilliant sparkling of lit-up villa windows, while northwards the sky has a dull glare from new road-lamps which line the ridge on its town side. As for the daytime, the labourer can hardly look from his door without seeing up or down the valley some sign or other telling of the invasion of a new people, unsympathetic to his order. He sees, and hears too. As he sweats at his gardening, the sounds of piano-playing come to him, or of the affected excitement of a tennis-party; or the braying of a motor-car informs him that the rich who are his masters are on the road. And though the man should go into his cottage and shut the door, these things must often have for him a sinister meaning which he cannot so easily shut out. There is a vague menace in them. They betoken to all the labouring people that their old home is no longer quite at their own disposal, but is at the mercy of a new class who would willingly see their departure. Perhaps the majority do not feel themselves personally threatened; nevertheless, the situation is disquieting for all. Before the property-owners came, and while still the population was homogeneous, a sort of continuity in the life of the valley impressed itself upon one's consciousness, giving a sense of security. Here amidst the heaths a laborious and frugal people, wise in their own fashion, had their home and supplied their own wants. Not one of them probably thought of the significance of it all, or understood how the village traditions were his inheritance; not one considered what it meant to him to belong to the little group of folk and be independent of the whims of strangers. Yet, for all that, there was comfort in the situation. To be so familiar as the people were with the peculiarities of the valley, to appreciate the usefulness of the wide heath-land, to value the weather, to comprehend at a glance the doings of the neighbours, and to have fellow-feeling with their motives and hopes and disappointments, was to be at home most intimately, most safely. But all this is a thing of the past. To-day, when the labourer looks around, much of what he sees in the new houses, roads, fences, and so on, has, indeed, been produced by his own handiwork, but it is a product in the enjoyment of which he has no share. It has nothing to do with him and his people; on the contrary, it announces the break-up of the traditional industries by which he lived, and the disintegration of the society of which he was a member. It follows that a certain suggestiveness which used to dignify the home pursuits of the village is wanting to them now. Instead of being a part of the general thrift of the valley--a not unworthy contribution to that which, in the sum, was all important to the village life--those little jobs which the labourer does at home, including his garden-work, have no relation now to anything save his private necessities, because now the dominant interests of the valley are those of a different sort of people who care nothing for such homely things. I shall be told that, after all, this is mere sentiment. But, then, half the comfort of life proceeds from those large vague sentiments which lift a man's private doings up from meanness into worthiness. No such enrichment, however--no dim sense of sharing in a prosperous and approved existence--can reward the labourer's industry in this place at the present time. The clever work which, in the village of his equals, would have made him conspicuous and respected, now stamps him as belonging to the least important and least considered section of the population. Still, I will waive this point. Assuming--though it is much to assume--that the cottagers have no sentiment in the matter, there are other circumstances in the change which cannot fail to disquiet them. I hinted just now that the "residential" people would not grieve if the labouring folk took their departure. Now, this is no figure of speech. Although it is likely that not one cottager in twenty has any real cause to fear removal, there has been enough disturbance of the old families to prove that nobody is quite safe. Thus, about two years ago, when some cottage property near to a new "residence" was bought up by the owner of the residence, it was commonly said that he had bought it in order to get rid of some of the tenants, whom he disliked for neighbours. Whether or not that was the real reason I do not know; but certain it is that two of the tenants were forthwith turned out--one of them after twenty-five years of occupancy. It was not the first case of the kind in the village, nor yet the last. At the present moment I know of three families who are likely ere long to have to quit. They live in a block of cottages just beyond the hedge of a substantial house--a block which, it must be owned, is rather an eyesore from there, but which might easily be turned into a decent villa, and is actually up for sale for that purpose. And the dwellers in the substantial house are fervently hoping that a buyer of the cottages will soon come forward. They have told me so themselves. "Of course," they say, "we shall be sorry for the poor people to be turned out, but we should like to have nicer neighbours, of our own sort." So in their own valley these English people are not safe from molestation. With scarce more care for them than would be shown by a foreign invader, gentility pursues its ungentle aims. No cottager can feel quite secure. A dim uncertainty haunts the village, with noticeable effect upon everybody's activities. For a sort of calculating prudence is begotten of it, which yet is not thrift. It dissuades the people from working for a distant future. It cuts off hope, benumbs the tastes, paralyzes the aspiration to beautify the home which may any day have to be abandoned. And in the long run this effect, from which all the people suffer more or less unconsciously, is more injurious than the actual misfortune of having to move, which, after all, falls upon the few only. Not that I would make light of that calamity. Men under its shadow lie awake o' nights, worrying about it. While I am writing here, in a cottage near at hand there is a man under notice to quit, who is going through all the pitiful experiences--wondering where in the world he shall take his wife and children, fearing lest it should have to be into some backyard in the town, dreading that in that case he will be too far away from his day's work and have to give it up, and scheming to save enough, from the cost of bread and boots, to pay for a van to move his furniture. It is not for any fault that he is to go. And indeed he is being well treated; for the owner, who wants to occupy the cottage himself, has waited months because the man cannot find another place. Nevertheless he will have to go. As a rule, a man under notice to quit is in the position of standing by and seeing his home, and his living, and the well-being of his family sacrificed to the whim of a superior whom he dares not oppose; and I do not dream of arguing that that is a tolerable position for any Englishman to be in. None the less, it is true that these acute troubles, which fall upon a few people here and there, and presently are left behind and forgotten, are of less serious import than the injury to the village at large, caused by the general sense of insecurity. The people's tastes are benumbed, I said: their aspirations to beautify their homes are paralyzed by the want of permanence in their condition. To make this quite plain, it would be only needful to look at the few cottages in the valley still inhabited by their owners, and to compare them with those let to weekly tenants. It seems to be no question of income that makes the difference between the two. In several cottages very well known to me, the owners are not earning more than fifteen shillings a week--or, including the value of the cottage, twenty shillings; yet the places, in their varied ways, all look comfortable and comely. Fruit-trees, or grape-vines, or roses, are trained to the walls. The boundary hedges are kept well trimmed; here and there survives a box border--product of many years of clipping--or even a yew-tree or two fancifully shaped out. Here and there, too, leading to the cottage door, is carefully preserved an example of those neat pavements of local stone once so characteristic of this countryside; and in all these things one sees what the average cottager would do if it were worth while--if he had the heart. Since none of these things, however, can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, without skill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such things decorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected, broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often suppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized, materialized, so sordid and ugly are their homes. Yet it is not for want of taste that they endure these conditions. Amidst the pitiful shabbiness which prevails may be found many little signs that the delight in comely things would go far if it dared. There is hardly a garden in the village, I think, which does not contain a corner or a strip given over unthriftily, not to useful vegetables, but to daffodils or carnations or dahlias, or to the plants of sweet scent and pleasant names, like rosemary and lavender, and balm, and mignonette. And not seldom a weekly tenant, desirous of beauty, goes farther, takes his chance of losing his pains; nails up against his doorway some makeshift structure of fir-poles to be a porch, sowing nasturtiums or sweet-peas to cover it with their short-lived beauty; or he marks out under his window some little trumpery border to serve instead of a box-hedge as safeguard to his flowers. One of those families whose removal was mentioned above--turned out in the summertime they were, with loss of garden crops--found refuge in a hovel which stood right against a public pathway. And, although it was an encroachment, within a week a twelve-inch strip of the pathway was dug up under the cottage eaves, and fenced in with a low fencing of sticks roughly nailed together. Within this narrow space were planted chrysanthemums rescued from the previous home; and when the fence gave way--as it did before the chrysanthemums flowered--big stones and brickbats were laid in its place. Considered as decoration, the result was a failure; it was the product of an hour's work in which despair and bitterness had all but killed the people's hope; but that it was done at all is almost enough to prove my point. For further illustration I may refer again to that other man mentioned above, who is now under notice to leave his cottage. Last year he was happy in tending four or five rose-trees which he had been allowed to bring home from the rubbish-heap of his employer's garden. I remember that when he showed them to me, gloating over them, he tried to excuse himself to me for neglecting his potatoes in their favour, and I did my best to encourage him and puff him up with pride. But it was of no use. This summer he is neglecting his roses, and is wondering if his potatoes will be ripe enough for digging before he is obliged to move. With such things going on, it is not wonderful that the people live shabbily, meanly, out at elbows. Tastes so handicapped as theirs make no headway, and, though not dying, sink into disuse. The average cottager learns to despise pleasantness and to concentrate upon usefulness. His chief pride now is in his food-crops, which, if not eaten, can be turned into money. Of course, these have their beauty--not undiscerned by the labourer--but they are not grown for that end, and the thriftier the man, the less time to the consideration of beauty will he give. It is, besides, an imprudence to make a cottage look comely, now that covetous eyes are upon the valley and the people's position there has grown insecure. Does it seem a slight thing? Whatever the practical importance of it, the extent of change involved in this hopeless attitude of the villagers towards their home-places must not be under-rated; for if it could be viewed in sharp perspective it would appear considerable enough. Let us note the transitions. First the straying squatters settled here, to cultivate chosen spots of the valley and reduce them to order. They were not wedded to the place; only if it gave them a chance of getting food and shelter were they likely to remain. Soon, however, that first uncertainty was forgotten. Their peasant customs fitted the environment; there was no danger of molestation; already to their children the valley began to feel like a permanent home. As years went on that feeling deepened, wrapped the people round in an unthought-of security, and permitted them, here and there, to go beyond the necessary peasant crafts and think of what was pleasant as well as necessary. Gardens were trimmed into beauty, grape-vines were grown for the sake of wine-making, and bees were kept for the sake of honey and mead. In the cottages decent furniture and implements began to accumulate; the women decorated their men's blouses with pretty smocking; the children were taught old-fashioned lore because it was old-fashioned and their inheritance; time-honoured customs of May-day and of Christmas were not ignored. So during a few generations the old country thrift and its simple civilization were kept alive, until the loss of the common made the old thrift no longer possible and introduced the new. Lastly, and within recent years, a new population has come, taking possession, with a new civilization which is by no means simple; and now once more a sense of unsettledness is upon the cottagers, although for the most part they remain here. It is, however, an unsettledness very unlike that of the earlier time. Instead of hope in it there is anxiety; instead of striking deeper root in the valley, the people's hold grows shallower. The agreeable peasant arts have faded out accordingly. The whole peasant mode of life is all but forgotten. To-day we have here not a distinct group of people living by customs which their singular circumstances justify, but numerous impoverished families living provisionally from hand to mouth, because of the possibility of further changes to be thrust upon them. While they wait they still work, yet without pleasantness in their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from being quite joyless. IV THE RESULTING NEEDS XIV THE INITIAL DEFECT Keeping pace with the alterations in their circumstances, a great mental and spiritual destitution has made its appearance amongst the labouring people. I say "has made its appearance" because it cannot be wholly attributed to the changes we have been discussing. Those changes have done their part, certainly. Obliterating the country crafts and cults, breaking down the old neighbourly feelings, turning what was an interesting economy into an anxious calculation of shillings and pence, and reducing a whole village of people from independence to a position bordering on servility, the introduction of a new system of thrift must bear the greater share of the blame for the present plight of the labourers. Nevertheless, their destitution--their mental and spiritual destitution--has its roots deeper down, and springs from a grave defect which was inherent in the peasant system. It is time to recognize that fact. In many ways the folk-civilization had served the cottagers excellently. They had grown up hardy and self-reliant under its influence; clever with their hands, shrewd with their heads, kindly and cheerful in their temper. But one can see now that all this had been bought very dear. To set against the good qualities that came to light there was a stifling of other qualities which were equally good, but had no chance of development at all under the peasant thrift. Especially on the side of mental activity was the people's natural power cramped. I do not mean that they were stupid; it would be an error of the first magnitude to suppose anything of the sort. But the concentration of their faculties on their rural doings left them childish and inefficient in the use of their brains for other purposes. Mention has been made of the "fatalism" which still prevails in the village outlook; but fatalism is too respectable a name for that mere absence of speculative thought which was characteristic of the peasant kind of people I have known. The interest of their daily pursuits kept their minds busy upon matters obvious to the senses, while attention to opinions and ideas was discouraged. For this reason the older men and women had seldom if ever indulged in fancies or day-dreams, or troubled about theories or first principles; and until lately I might have said the same of the younger ones too. As for watching themselves--watching and checking off the actions of their own intelligence--it was what they never did. A sentiment might arise in them and mellow all their temper, and they would not notice it. The inner meaning of things concerned them very little. Their conception of cause and effect, or of the constancy of nature, was rudimentary. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred," said an old bricklayer of the village, baffled by some error in his work--"ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll come right same as you sets it out, but not always." Puzzles were allowed to be puzzling, and left so; or the first explanation was accepted as final. The "mistis in March" sufficiently accounted for the "frostis in May." Mushrooms would only grow when the moon was "growing." Even with regard to personal troubles the people were still as unspeculative as ever. Were they poor, or ill? It merely happened so, and that settled it. Or were they in cheerful spirits? Why, so they were; and what more could be said? It was largely this simplicity of their mental processes that made the older people so companionable. They were unaccustomed to using certain powers of the brain which modern people use; nay, they were so unaware of that use as to be utterly unsuspicious of such a thing. To be as little psychological as possible, we may say that a modern man's thought goes on habitually at two main levels. On the surface are the subjects of the moment--that endless procession of things seen or heard or spoken of which make up the outer world; and here is where intercourse with the old type of villager was easy and agreeable. But below that surface the modern mind has a habit of interpreting these phenomena by general ideas or abstract principles, or referring them to imaginations all out of sight and unmentioned; and into this region of thought the peasant's attention hardly penetrated at all. Given a knowledge of the neighbourhood, therefore, it was easy to keep conversation going with a man of this kind. If you could find out the set of superficial or practical subjects in which he was interested, and chatter solely on that plane, all went well. But if you dipped underneath it amongst fancies or generalizations, difficulties arose. The old people had no experience there, and were out of their depth in a moment. And yet--I must repeat it--we should be entirely wrong to infer that they were naturally stupid, unless a man is to be called stupid because he does not cultivate every one of his inborn faculties. In that sense we all have our portion in stupidity, and the peasant was no worse than the rest of us. His particular deficiency was as I have described it, and may be fully explained by his mode of life. For in cow-stall or garden or cottage, or in the fields or on the heaths, the claim of the moment was all-absorbing; and as he hurried to thatch his rick before the rain came, or to get his turfs home by nightfall, the ideas which thronged about his doings crowded out ideas of any other sort. Or if, not hurrying, his mind went dreamy, it was still of peasant things that he dreamed. Of what he had been told when he was a child, or what he had seen for himself in after-life, his memory was full; and every stroke of reap-hook or thrust of spade had power to entice his intellect along the familiar grooves of thought--grooves which lie on the surface and are unconnected with any systematized channels of idea-work underneath. So the strong country life tyrannized over country brains, and, apart from the ideas suggested by that life, the peasant folk had few ideas. Their minds lacked freedom; there was no escape from the actual environment into a world either of imagination or of more scientific understanding. Nor did this matter a great deal, so long as the environment remained intact. In the absence of what we call "views"--those generalizations about destiny or goodness, or pleasure, or what not, by which we others grope our way through life--the steady peasant environment, so well known and containing so few surprises, was itself helpful, precisely because it was so well known. If a man would but give shrewd attention to his practical affairs, it was enough; a substitute for philosophy was already made for him, to save him the trouble of thinking things out for himself. His whole mental activity proceeded, unawares, upon a substratum of customary understanding, which belonged to the village in general, and did not require to be formulated, but was accepted as axiomatic by all. "Understanding" is the best word I can find for it. It differed from a philosophy or a belief, because it contained no abstract ideas; thinking or theorizing had no part in it; it was a sheer perception and recognition of the circumstances as they were. The people might dispute about details; but the general object to be striven for in life admitted of no disagreement. Without giving it a thought, they knew it. There lay the valley before them, with their little homesteads, their cattle, their gardens, the common; and connected with all these things a certain old-established series of industries was recognized, leading up to a well-known prosperity. That perception was their philosophy. The environment was understood through and through. And this common knowledge, existing apart from any individual in particular, served every individual instead of a set of private opinions of his own. To get away from it was impossible, for it was real knowledge; a man's practical thoughts had to harmonize with it; supported by it, he was saved the trouble of thinking things out in "systems"; and in fact it was a better guide to him than thought-out systems could have been, because generations of experience had fitted it so perfectly to the narrow environment of the valley. So long, therefore, as the environment remained unaltered, the truth that the people's minds held few ideas upon other subjects, and had developed no method of systematic thinking, was veiled. But it has become plain enough now that the old environment is gone. The new thrift has laid bare the nakedness of the land. It has found the villagers unequipped with any efficient mental habits appropriate to the altered conditions, and shown them to be at a loss for interesting ideas in other directions. They cannot see their way any longer. They have no aims; at any rate, no man is sure what his own aims ought to be, or has any confidence that his neighbours could enlighten him. Life has grown meaningless, stupid; an apathy reigns in the village--a dull waiting, with nothing in particular for which to wait. XV THE OPPORTUNITY Amongst so many drawbacks to the new thrift, one good thing that it has brought to the villagers, in the shape of a little leisure, gives us the means of seeing in more detail how destitute of interests their life has become. It must be owned that the leisure is very scanty. It is so obscured, too, by the people's habit of putting themselves to productive work in it that I have sometimes doubted if any benefit of the kind actually filtered down into their overburdened lives. Others, however, with a more business-like interest in the matter than mine, have recognized that a new thing has come into the country labourer's life, although they do not speak of it as "leisure." Mere wasted time is what it looks like to them. Thus, not long ago, an acquaintance who by no means shares my views of these matters was deploring to me the degenerate state, as he conceived it, of the labourers on certain farms in which he is interested, a few miles away from this valley. The men, he said, holding their cottages as one of the conditions of employment on the farms, had grown idle, and were neglecting the cottage gardens--were neglecting them so seriously that, in the interests of the estate, he had been obliged to complain to the farmers. Upon my asking for explanations of a disposition so unlike that of the labourers in this parish, many of whom are not content with their cottage gardens, but take more ground when they can get it, my friend said deliberately: "I think food is too cheap. With their fifteen shillings a week the men can buy all they want without working for it; and the result is that they waste their evenings and the gardens go to ruin." With this remarkable explanation I am glad to think that I have nothing to do here. The point is that, according to a business man with lifelong experience in rural matters, country labourers now have time at their disposal. Without further question we may accept it as true; the cheapening of produce has made it just possible for labouring men to live without occupying every available hour in productive work, and in this one respect they do profit a little by those innovations--the use of machinery, the division of labour, and the free importation of foreign goods--which have replaced the antiquated peasant economy. It is not necessary nowadays--not absolutely necessary--for the labourer, when his day's wage-earning is done, to fall to work again in the evening in order to produce commodities for his own use. Doubtless if he does so he is the better off; but if he fails to do so he may still live. While he has been earning money away from home during the day, other men he has never met, in countries he has never seen, have been providing for him the things that he will want at home in the evening; and if these things have not been actually brought to his door, they are waiting for him in shops, whence he may get them in exchange for the money he has earned. Some of them, too, are of a quality such as, with the utmost skill and industry, he never could have produced for himself. Modern artificial light provides an example. Those home-made rushlights eulogized by Gilbert White and by Cobbett may have been well enough in their way, but cheap lamps and cheap paraffin have given the villagers their winter evenings. At a cost of a few halfpence earned in the course of the day's work a cottage family may prolong their winter day as far into the night as they please; and that, without feeling that they are wasting their store of light, and without being under necessity of spending the rescued hours at any of those thrifty tasks which alone would have justified peasant folk in sitting up late. They have the evening to use at their pleasure. If it is said, as my friend interested in land seemed to suggest, that they do not know how to use it, I am not concerned to disagree. In fact, that is my own text. On an evening last winter, having occasion to ask a neighbour to do me a service, I knocked at his cottage door, and was invited in. The unshaded lamp on the table cast a hard, strong light on the appointments of the room, and in its glare the family--namely, the man, with his wife, his mother, and his sister--were sitting round the fire. On the table, which had no cloth, the remains of his hot tea-supper were not cleared away--the crust of a loaf, a piece of bacon-rind on a plate, and a teacup showed what it had been. But now he had finished, and was resting in his shirt-sleeves, nursing his baby. In fact, the evening's occupation had begun. The family, that is to say, had two or three hours to spend--for it was but little past seven o'clock--and nothing to do but to sit there and gossip. An innocent pastime that; I have no fault to find with it, excepting that it had the appearance of being very dull. The people looked comfortable, but there was no liveliness in them. No trace of vivacity in their faces gave the smallest reason to suppose that my coming had interrupted any enjoyment of the evening. A listless contentment in being at home together, with the day's work done and a fire to sit by, was what was suggested by the whole bearing of the family. Their leisure was of no use to them for recreation--for "making themselves anew," that is--or for giving play to faculties which had lain quiet during the day's work. At the time, however, I saw nothing significant in all this. It was just what other cottage interiors had revealed to me on other winter evenings. The surprising, the unexpected thing would have been to find the little spell of leisure being joyfully used. Shall we leave the matter there then? If we do, we shall overlook the one feature in the situation that most particularly deserves attention. For suppose that the cottagers in general do not know what to do with their leisure, yet we must not argue that therefore they do not prize it. Dull though they may seem in it, tedious though I believe they often find it, nevertheless there proceeds from it a subtle satisfaction, as at something gained, in the liberty to behave as they like, in the vague sense that for an hour or two no further effort is demanded of them. Yawning for bed, half sick of the evening, somewhere in the back of their consciousness they feel that this respite from labour, which they have won by the day's work, is a privilege not to be thrown away. It is more to them than a mere cessation from toil, a mere interval between more important hours; it is itself the most important part of the day--the part to which all the rest has led up. Nothing of the sort, I believe, was experienced in the village in earlier times. Leisure, and the problem of using it, are new things there. I do not mean that the older inhabitants of the valley never had any spare time. There were, doubtless, many hours when they "eased off," to smoke their pipes and drink their beer and be jolly; only, such hours were, so to speak, a by-product of living, not the usual and expected consummation of every day. Accepting them by no means unwillingly when they occurred, the folk still were wont normally to reduce them to a minimum, or at least to see that they did not occur too often; as if spare time, after all, was only a time of waiting until work could be conveniently resumed. So lightly was it valued that most villagers cut it short by the simple expedient of going to bed at six or seven o'clock. But then, in their peasant way, they enjoyed interesting days. The work they did, although it left their reasoning and imaginative powers undeveloped, called into play enough subtle knowledge and skill to make their whole day's industry gratifying. What should they want of leisure? They wanted rest, in which to recover strength for taking up again the interesting business of living; but they approached their daily life--their pig-keeping and bread-making, their mowing and thatching and turf-cutting and gardening, and the whole round of country tasks--almost in a welcoming spirit, matching themselves against its demands and proving their manhood by their success. But the modern labourer's employment, reduced as it is to so much greater monotony, and carried on for a master instead of for the man himself, is seldom to be approached in that spirit. The money-valuation of it is the prime consideration; it is a commercial affair; a clerk going to his office has as much reason as the labourer to welcome the morning's call to work. As in the clerk's case, so in the labourer's: the act or fruition of living is postponed during the hours in which the living is being earned; between the two processes a sharp line of division is drawn; and it is not until the clock strikes, and the leisure begins, that a man may remember that he is a man, and try to make a success of living. Hence the truth of what I say: the problem of using leisure is a new one in the village. Deprived, by the economic changes which have gone over them, of any keen enjoyment of life while at work, the labourers must make up for the deprivation when work is over, or not at all. Naturally enough, in the absence of any traditions to guide them, they fail. But self-respect forbids the old solution. To feed and go to bed would be to shirk the problem, not to solve it. So much turns upon a proper appreciation of these truths that it will be well to illustrate them from real life, contrasting the old against the new. Fortunately the means are available. Modernized people acquainted with leisure are in every cottage, while as for the others, the valley still contains a few elderly men whose lives are reminiscent of the earlier day. Accordingly I shall finish this chapter by giving an account of one of these latter, so that in the next chapter the different position of the present-day labourers may be more exactly understood. The man I have in mind--I will rename him Turner--belongs to one of the old families of the village, and inherited from his father a cottage and an acre or so of ground--probably mortgaged--together with a horse and cart, a donkey, a cow or two, a few pigs, and a fair stock of the usual rustic tools and implements. Unluckily for him, he inherited no traditions--there were none in his family--to teach him how to use these possessions for making a money profit; so that, trying to go on in the old way, as if the world were not changing all round him, he muddled away his chances, and by the time that he was fifty had no property left that was worth any creditor's notice. The loss, however, came too late to have much effect on his habits. And now that he is but the weekly tenant of a tiny cottage, and owns no more than a donkey and cart and a few rabbits and fowls, he is just the same sort of man that he used to be in prosperity--thriftless from our point of view, but from the peasant point of view thrifty enough, good-tempered too, generous to a fault, indifferent to discomforts, as a rule very hard-working, yet apparently quite unacquainted with fatigue. He gets his living now as a labourer; but, unlike his neighbours, he seems by no means careful to secure constant employment. The regularity of it would hardly suit his temper; he is too keenly desirous of being his own master. And his own master he manages to be, in a certain degree. From those who employ him he obtains some latitude of choice, not alone as to the hours of the day when he shall serve them, but even as to the days of the week. I have heard him protest: "Monday you says for me to come. Well, I dunno about _Monday_--if Tuesday'd suit ye as well? I wants to do so-and-so o' Monday, if 'tis fine. You see, there's Mr. S---- I bin so busy I en't bin anear him this week for fear _he_ should want me up _there_. I _knows_ his grass wants cuttin'. But I 'xpects I shall ha' to satisfy 'n Monday, or else p'raps he won't like it." Sometimes he takes a day for his own affairs, carting home hop-bine in his donkey-cart, or getting heath for some thatching job that has been offered to him. On these terms, while he finds plenty to do in working intermittently for four or five people in the parish, he preserves a freedom of action which probably no other labourer in the village enjoys. Few others could command it. But Turner's manner is so ingratiating that people have a personal liking for him, and it is certain that his strength and all-round handiness make of him an extremely useful man. Especially does his versatility commend him. Others in the village are as strong as he and as active and willing, but there are not now many others who can do such a number of different kinds of work as he can, with so much experienced readiness. Among his clients (for that is a more fitting word for them than "employers") there are two or three residents with villa gardens, and also two of those "small-holders" who, more fortunate than himself (though not more happy, I fancy), have managed to cling to the little properties which their fathers owned. Turner, therefore, comes in for a number of jobs extraordinarily diverse. Thus, during last summer I knew him to be tending two gardens, where his work ranged from lawn-cutting (sometimes with a scythe) to sowing seeds, taking care of the vegetable crops, and trimming hedges. But this occupied him only from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. In the margin outside these hours--starting at five or earlier and keeping on until dark--he was helping the two small-holders, one after the other, to make their hay and get the ricks built. Then the ricks required thatching, and Turner thatched them. In the meantime he was getting together a little rick of his own for his donkey's use, carrying home in bags the longer grass which he had mowed in the rough places of people's gardens or had chopped off in hedgerows near his home. A month later he was harvesting for the small-holders, and again there was rick-thatching for him to do. "That's seven I've done," he remarked to me, on the day when he finished the last one. "But didn't the rain stop you this morning?" I asked, for rain had begun heavily about nine o'clock. He laughed. "No.... We got'n covered in somehow. Had to sramble about, but he was thatched afore the rain come." Later still he was threshing some of this corn with a flail. I heard of it with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes," he said; "my old dad put me to it when I was seventeen, so I _had_ to learn." He seemed to think little of it. But to me threshing by hand was so obsolete and antiquated a thing as to be a novelty; nor yet to me only, for a friend to whom I mentioned the matter laughed, and asked if I had come across any knights in armour lately. One autumn, when he was doing some work for myself, he begged for a day or two away in order to take a job at turf-cutting. When he returned on the third or fourth day, he said: "Me and my nipper" (a lad of about sixteen years old) "cut sixteen hundred this time." Now, lawn-turfs are cut to a standard size, three feet by one, wherefore I remarked: "Why, that's nearly a mile you have cut." "Oh, is it?" he said. "But it didn't take long. Ye see, I had the nipper to go along with the edgin' tool in front of me, and 'twan't much trouble to get 'em up." He could not keep on for me regularly. The thought of Mr. S----'s work waiting to be done fidgeted him. "When I was up there last he was talkin' about fresh gravellin' all his paths. I said to'n, 'If I was you I should wait anyhow till the leaves is down--they'll make the new gravel so ontidy else.' So they would, sure. I keeps puttin' it off. But I shall ha' to go. I sold'n a little donkey in the summer, and he's hoofs'll want parin' again. I done 'em not so long ago...." So his work varies, week after week. From one job to another up and down the valley he goes, not listlessly and fatigued, but taking a sober interest in all he does. You can see in him very well how his forefathers went about their affairs, for he is plainly a man after their pattern. His day's work is his day's pleasure. It is changeful enough, and calls for skill enough, to make it enjoyable to him. Furthermore, things on either side of it--things he learnt to understand long ago--make their old appeal to his senses as he goes about, although his actual work is not concerned with them. In the early summer--he had come to mow a little grass plot for me--I found him full of a boyish delight in birds and birds'-nests. A pair of interesting birds had arrived; at any time in the day they could be seen swooping down from the branch of a certain apple-tree and back again to their starting-place without having touched the ground. "Flycatchers!" said Turner exultantly. "I shall ha' to look about. They got their nest somewhere near, you may be sure o' that! A little wisp o' grass somewhere in the clunch (fork) of a tree ..." (his glance wandered speculatively round in search of a likely place) "that's where they builds. Ah! look now! There he goes again! Right in the clunch you'll find their nest, and as many as ten young 'uns in'n.... Yes, I shall be bound to find where he is afore I done with it." The next day, hard by where he was at work, an exclamation of mine drew him to look at a half-fledged bird, still alive, lying at the foot of a nut-tree. "H'm: so 'tis. A young blackbird," he said pitifully. The next moment he had the bird in his hand. "Where can the nest be, then? Up in that nut? Well, to be sure! Wonders I hadn't seen that afore now. That's it though, 'pend upon it; right up in the clunch o' that bough." Before I could say a word he was half-way up amongst the branches, long-legged and struggling, to put the bird back into its nest. As he has always lived in the valley, he is full of memories of it, and especially early memories; recalling the comparative scantiness of its population when he was a boy, and the great extent of the common; and the warm banks where hedgehogs abounded--hedgehogs which his father used to kill and cook; and the wells of good water, so few and precious that each had its local name. For instance, "Butcher's Well" (so-called to this day, he says) "was where Jack Butcher used to live, what was shepherd for Mr. Warner up there at Manley Bridge." At eight years old he was sent out on to the common to mind cows; at ten he was thought big enough to be helpful to his father, at piece-work in the hop-grounds; and in due time he began to go "down into Sussex" with his father and others for the harvesting. His very first experience there was of a wet August, when the men could earn no money and were reduced to living on bread and apples; but other years have left him with happier memories of that annual outing. "Old Sussex!" he laughed once in appreciative reminiscence--"Old Sussex! Them old hills! I did use to have a appetite there! I could eat anything.... You could go to the top of a hill and look down one way and p'raps not see more'n four or five places (houses or farmsteads), and look t'other way and mebbe not be able to see e'er a one at all. Oh, a reg'lar wild, out-o'-th'-way place 'twas." On this farm, to which his gang went year after year, the farmer "didn't _pay_ very high--you couldn't expect'n to. But he used to treat us very well. Send out great puddin's for us two or three times a week, and cider, and bread-an'-cheese.... Nine rabbits old Fisher the roadman out here says 'twas, but I dunno 'bout that, but I _knows_ 'twas as many as seven, the farmer put into one puddin' for us. There was a rabbit for each man, be how 'twill. In a great yaller basin...." Turner held out his arms to illustrate a large circumference. In the time of his prosperity the main of his work was with his own horse and cart, so that I know him to have had considerable experience in that way; and I recollect, too, his being at plough in one of the slanting gardens of this valley, not with his horse--the ground was too steep for that--but with two donkeys harnessed to a small plough which he kept especially for such work. Truly it would be hard to "put him out," hard to find him at a loss, in anything connected with country industry. He spoilt some sea-kale for me once, admitting, however, before he began that he was not very familiar with its management; but that is the only matter of its kind in which I have proved him inefficient. To see him putting young cabbage-plants in rows is to realize what a fine thing it is to know the best way of going to work, even at such a simple-seeming task as that; and I would not undertake to count in how many such things he is proficient. One day he was telling me an anecdote of his taking honey from an old-fashioned straw beehive; another day the talk was of pruning fruit-trees. I had shown him an apple--the first one to be picked from a young tree--and he at once named it correctly as a "Blenheim Orange," recognizing it by its "eye," whereupon I asked a question or two, and, finally, if he understood pruning. There came his customary laugh, while his eyes twinkled, as if the question amused him, as if I might have known that he understood pruning. "Yes, I've done it many's a time. Grape vines, too." Who taught him? "Oh, 'twas my old uncle made me do that. He was laid up one time--'twas when I was eighteen year old--and he says to me: 'You'll ha' to do it. Now's your time to learn....' Of course he showed me _how_. So 'twas he as showed me how to thatch.... My father never knowed how to do thatchin', nor anythink else much. He was mostly hop-ground. He done a little mowin', of course." Equally of course, the father had reaped and harvested, and kept pigs and cows, and a few odd things besides; nevertheless, being chiefly a wage-earner, "he never knowed much," and it was to the uncle that the lad owed his best training. From talk of the uncle, and of the uncle's cows, of which he had charge for a time, he drifted off to mention a curious piece of old thrift connected with the common, and practised apparently for some time after the enclosure. There was a man he knew in those now remote days who fed his cows for a part of the year on furze, or "fuzz," as we call it here. Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose--a kind of chaff-cutting box--was described to me. The same man had a horse, which also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's own beer-brewing. To the lore derived from his uncle and others, Turner has added much by his own observation--not, of course, intentional observation scientifically verified, but that shrewd and practical folk-observation, if I may so call it, by which in the course of generations the rural English had already garnered such a store of mingled knowledge and error. So he knows, or thinks he knows, why certain late-bearing apple-trees have fruit only every other year, and what effect on the potato crop is caused by dressing our sandy soil with chalk or lime; so he watches the new mole-runs, or puzzles to make out what birds they can be that peck the ripening peas out of the pods, or estimates the yield of oats to the acre by counting the sheaves that he stacks, or examines the lawn to see what kinds of grass are thriving. About all such matters his talk is the talk of an experienced man habitually interested in his subject, and yet it is never obtrusive. The remarks fall from him casually; you feel, too, that while he is telling you something that he noticed yesterday or years ago his eyes are alert to seize any new detail that may seem worthy of attention. Details are always really his subject, for the generalizations he sometimes offers are built on the flimsiest foundation of but one or two observed facts. But I am not now concerned with the value of his observations for themselves; the point is that to him they are so interesting. He is a man who seems to enjoy his life with an undiminished zest from morning to night. It is doubtful if the working hours afford, to nine out of ten modern and even "educated" men, such a constant refreshment of acceptable incidents as Turner's hours bring to him. He is perhaps the best specimen of the old stock now left in the valley; but it must not be thought that he is singular. Others there are not very unlike him; and all that one hears of them goes to prove that the old cottage thrift, whatever its limitations may have been, did at least make the day's work interesting enough to a man, without his needing to care about leisure evenings. Turner, for his part, does not value them at all. In the winter he is often in bed before seven o'clock. XVI THE OBSTACLES Keeping this old-fashioned kind of life in mind as we turn again to the modern labourer's existence, we see at once where the change has come in, and why leisure, from being of small account, has become of so great importance. It is the amends due for a deprivation that has been suffered. Unlike the industry of a peasantry, commercial wage-earning cannot satisfy the cravings of a man's soul at the same time that it occupies his body, cannot exercise many of his faculties or appeal to many of his tastes; and therefore, if he would have any profit, any enjoyment, of his own human nature, he must contrive to get it in his leisure time. In illustration of this position, I will take the case--it is fairly typical--of the coal-carter mentioned in the last chapter. He is about twenty-five years old now; and his career so far, from the time when he left school, may be soon outlined. It is true, I cannot say what his first employment was; but it can be guessed; for there is no doubt that he began as an errand-boy, and that presently, growing bigger, he took a turn at driving a gravel-cart to and fro between the gravel-pits and the railway. Assuming this, I can go on to speak from my own knowledge. His growth and strength came early; I remember noticing him first as a powerful fellow, not more than seventeen or eighteen years old, but already doing a man's work as a gravel-digger. When that work slackened after two or three years, he got employment--not willingly, but because times were bad--at night-work with the "ballast-train" on the railway. Exhausting if not brutalizing labour, that is. At ten or eleven at night the gangs of men start off, travelling in open trucks to the part of the line they are to repair, and there they work throughout the night, on wind-swept embankment or in draughty cutting, taking all the weather that the nights bring up. This man endured it for some twelve months, until a neglected chill turned to bronchitis and pleurisy, and nearly ended his life. After that he had a long spell of unemployment, and was on the point of going back to the ballast-train as a last resource when, by good fortune, he got his present job. He has been a coal-carter for three or four years--a fact which testifies to his efficiency. By half-past six o'clock in the morning he has to be in the stables; then comes the day on the road, during which he will lift on his back, into the van and out of it, and perhaps will carry for long distances, nine or ten tons of coal--say, twenty hundredweight bags every hour; by half-past five or six in the evening he has put up his horse for the night; and so his day's work is over, excepting that he has about a mile to walk home. Of this employment, which, if the man is lucky, will continue until he is old and worn-out, we may admit that it is more useful by far--to the community--than the old village industries were wont to be. Concentrated upon one kind of effort, it perhaps doubles the productivity of a day's work. But just because it is so concentrated it cannot yield to the man himself any variety of delights such as men occupied in the old way were wont to enjoy. It demands from him but little skill; it neither requires him to possess a great fund of local information and useful lore, nor yet takes him where he could gather such a store for his own pleasure. The zest and fascination of living, with the senses alert, the tastes awake, and manifold sights and sounds appealing to his happy recognition--all these have to be forgotten until he gets home and is free for a little while. Then he may seek them if he can, using art or pastimes--what we call "civilization"--for that end. The two hours or so of leisure are his opportunity. But after a day like the coal-carter's, where is the man that could even begin to refresh himself with the arts, or even the games, of civilization? For all the active use he can make of them those spare hours of his do not deserve to be called leisure; they are the fagged end of the day. Slouching home to them, as it were from under ten tons of coal, he has no energy left for further effort. The community has had all his energy, all his power to enjoy civilization; and has paid him three shillings and sixpence for it. It is small wonder that he seems not to avail himself of the opportunity, prize it though he may. Yet there is still a possibility to be considered. Albeit any active use of leisure is out of the question, is he therefore debarred from a more tranquil enjoyment? He sits gossiping with his family, but why should the gossip be listless and yawning? Why should not he, to say nothing of his relations, enjoy the refreshment of talk enlivened by the play of pleasant and varied thoughts? As everyone knows, the actual topic of conversation is not what makes the charm; be what it may, it will still be agreeable, provided that it goes to an accompaniment of ideas too plentiful and swift to be expressed. Every allusion then extends the interest of it; reawakened memories add to its pleasure; if the minds engaged are fairly well furnished with ideas, either by experience or by education, the intercourse between them goes on in a sort of luminous medium which fills the whole being with contentment. Supposing, then, that by education, or previous experience, the coal-carter's mind has been thus well furnished, his scanty leisure may still compensate him for the long dull hours of his wage-earning, and the new thrift will after all have made amends for the deprivation of the old peasant enjoyments. But to suppose this is to suppose a most unlikely thing. Previous experience, at any rate, has done little for the man. The peasants themselves were better off. Compare his chances, once more, with those of a man like Turner. From earliest childhood, Turner's days and nights have been bountiful to him in many-coloured impressions. At the outset he saw and had part in those rural activities, changeful, accomplished, carried on by many forms of skill and directed by a vast amount of traditional wisdom, whereby the country people of England had for ages supported themselves in their quiet valleys. His brain still teems with recollections of all this industry. And then to those recollections must be added memories of the scenes in which the industry went on--the wide landscapes, the glowing cornfields, the meadows, woods, heaths; and likewise the details of barn and rick-yard, and stable and cow-stall, and numberless other corners into which his work has taken him. To anyone who understands them, those details are themselves like an interesting book, full of "idea" legible everywhere in the shapes which country craftsmanship gave to them; and Turner understands them through and through. Nor is this all. If not actual adventure and romance, still many of the factors of adventure and romance have accompanied him through his life; so that it is good even to think of all that he has seen. He has had experience (travelling down to Sussex) of the dead silence of country roads at midnight under the stars; has known the August sunrise, and the afternoon heat, and the chilly moonlight, high up on the South Downs; and the glint of the sunshine in apple-orchards at cider-making time; and the grey coming of the rain that urges a man to hurry with his thatching; and the thickening of the white winter fog across the heaths towards night-fall, when wayfarers might miss the track and wander all night unless they knew well what they were about. Of such stuff as this for the brain-life to feed upon there has been great abundance in Turner's career, but of such stuff what memories can the coal-carter have? Already in his earliest childhood the principal chances were gone. The common had been enclosed; no little boys were sent out to mind cows there all day, and incidentally to look for birds'-nests and acquaint themselves with the ways of the rabbits and hedgehogs and butterflies and birds of the heath. Fenced-in property, guarded by the Policeman and the Law, restricted the boy's games to the shabby waste-places of the valley, and to the footpaths and roads, where there was not much for a child to do or to see. At home, and in the homes of his companions, the new thrift was in vogue; he might not watch the homely cottage doings, and listen to traditional talk about them, and look up admiringly at able men and women engaged upon them, for the very good reason that no such things went on. Men slaving at their gardens he might see, and women weary at their washing and mending, amid scenes of little dignity and much poverty and makeshift untidiness; but that was all. The coherent and self-explanatory village life had given place to a half blind struggle of individuals against circumstances and economic processes which no child could possibly understand; and it was with the pitiful stock of ideas to be derived from these conditions that the coal-carter passed out of childhood, to enter upon the wage-earning career which I have already outlined. I need not spend much time in discussing that career as a source of ideas. From first to last, and with the coal-carting period thrown in, monotony rather than variety has been the characteristic of it. I do not say that it has been quite fruitless. There are impressions to be derived, and intense ones probably, from working all day against the "face" of a gravel-pit, with the broken edge of the field up above one's head for horizon; and from the skilled use of pick and shovel; and from the weight of the wheelbarrow full of gravel as one wheels it along a sagging plank. That is something to have experienced; as it is to have sweated at night in a railway-cutting along with other men under the eye of a ganger, and to have known starlight, or rain, or frost, or fog, or tempest meanwhile. It is something, even, to see the life of the roads year after year from the footboard of a coal-van, and to be in charge of a horse hour after hour; but I am talking now of ideas which might give buoyancy and zest to the gossip beside a man's fireside in the evening when he is tired; and I think it unnecessary to argue that, in regard to providing this kind of mental furniture, the coal-carter's experience of life cannot have done great things for him. It has been poverty-stricken just where the peasant life was so rich; it has left a great deficiency, which could only have been made good by an education intentionally given for that end. But it goes almost without saying that the man's "education" did very little to enrich his mind. The ideas and accomplishments he picked up at the elementary school between his fourth and fourteenth years were of course in themselves insufficient for the needs of a grown man, and it would be unfair to criticize his schooling from that standpoint. Its defect was that it failed to initiate him into the inner significance of information in general, and failed wholly to start him on the path of learning. It was sterile of results. It opened to him no view, no vista; set up in his brain no stir of activity such as could continue after he had left school; and this for the reason that those simple items of knowledge which it conveyed to him were too scrappy and too few to begin running together into any understanding of the larger aspects of life. A few rules of arithmetic, a little of the geography of the British Islands, a selection of anecdotes from the annals of the ancient Jews; no English history, no fairy-tales or romance, no inkling of the infinities of time and space, or of the riches of human thought; but merely a few "pieces" of poetry, and a few haphazard and detached observations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiar things--"the cat," "the cow," "the parsnip," "the rainbow," and so forth--this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind--a jumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. And what could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for that civilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place? When the boy left school his "education" had but barely begun. And hardly anything has happened since then to carry it farther, although once there seemed just a chance of something better. During two successive winters the lad, being then from sixteen to seventeen years old, went to a night-school, which was opened for twenty-six weeks in each "session," and for four hours in each week. But the hope proved fallacious. In those hundred and four hours a year--hours which came after a tiring day's work--his brain was fed upon "mensuration" and "the science of horticulture," the former on the chance that some day he might want to measure a wall for paper-hanging or do some other job of the sort, and the latter in case fate should have marked him out for a nursery-gardener, when it would be handy to know that germinating seeds begin by pushing down a root and pushing up a leaf or two. This gives a notion of the sort of idea the luckless fellow derived from the night-school. I do not think that the joinery-classes at present being held in the night-school had begun in his time; but supposing that he also learnt joinery, he might, now that he is a man, add thoughts of mortices and tenons and mitre-joints to his other thoughts about wall areas and germinating seeds. Of course, all these things--like Jewish history or English geography--are worth knowing; but again it is true, of these things no less than of the childish learning acquired at the day-school, that whatever their worth may be to the people concerned to know them, they were very unlikely to set up in this young man's brain any constructive idea-activity, any refreshing form of thought that would enrich his leisure now, or give zest to his conversation. They were odds and ends of knowledge; more comparable to the numberless odds and ends in which peasants were so rich than to the flowing and luminous idea-life of modern civilization. Adequate help having thus failed to reach the man from any source at any time of his life, it cannot be surprising if now the evening's opportunity finds him unprepared. He is between two civilizations, one of which has lapsed, while the other has not yet come his way. And what is true of him is true of the younger labouring men in general. In bread-and-cheese matters they are perhaps as well off as their forefathers in the village, but they are at a disadvantage in the matter of varied and successful vitality. The wage-earning thrift which has increased their usefulness as drudges has diminished their effectiveness as human beings; for it has failed to introduce into their homes those enlivening, those spirit-stirring influences which it denies to them when they are away from home doing their work. Hence a strange thing. The unemployed hours of the evening, which should be such a boon, are a time of blank and disconsolate tediousness, and when the longer days of the year come round many a man in the valley who ought to be glad of his spare time dodges the wearisome problem of what to do with it by putting himself to further work, until he can go to bed without feeling that he has been wasting his life. Yet that is really no solution of the problem. It means that the men are trying to be peasants again, because they can discover no art of living, no civilization, compatible with the new thrift. Of course it is true that they are handicapped by the lowness of the wages they receive. However much time one may have, it would be all but impossible to follow up modern civilization without any of its apparatus, in the shape of books and musical instruments, and the comfort of seclusion in a spare room; and none of these advantages can be bought out of an income of eighteen shillings a week. That is plainly the central difficulty--a difficulty which, unless it can be put right, condemns our commercial economy as wholly inadequate to the needs of labouring people. Supposing, however, that this defect could be suddenly remedied; supposing, that is, that by some miracle wages could be so adjusted as to put the labourer in command of the apparatus of civilization; still, he could not use the apparatus without a personal adjustment. He is impoverished, not in money only, but also in development of his natural faculties, since the old village civilization has ceased to help him. XVII THE WOMEN'S NEED If, while the common was still open, very few even of the men of the village troubled about regular employment, we may well believe that there were still fewer regular wage-earners amongst the women. I do not mean that wage-earning was a thing they never did. There was not a woman in the valley, perhaps, but had experience of it at hay-making and harvesting, while all would have been disappointed to miss the hop-picking. But these occasional employments had more resemblance to holidays and outings than they had to constant work for a living. As the new thrift gradually established itself, the younger women at least had to alter their ways. For observe what had happened. A number of men, once half-independent, but now wanting work constantly, had been forced into a market where extra labour was hardly required; and it needs no argument to prove that, under such conditions, they were not only unable to command high wages, but were often unemployed. Of necessity, therefore, the women were obliged to make up the week's income by their own earnings. The situation, in fact, was similar to that which had been produced in earlier times and in other parishes by the old Poor Law, when parish pay enabled men to work for less than a living wage; only now the deficiency was made up, not at the expense of employers and ratepayers, but at the expense of women and girls. But, though becoming wage-earners, the women missed the first advantage that wage-earners should enjoy--namely, leisure time. After all, the new thrift had but partially freed them from their old occupations. They might buy at a shop many things which their mothers had had to make; but there was no going to a shop to get the washing and scrubbing done, the beds made, the food cooked, the clothes mended. All this remained to the women as before. When they came home from the fields--at first it was principally by field-work that they earned wages--it was not to be at leisure, but to fall-to again on these domestic doings, just as if there had been no change, just as if they were peasant women still. And yet, though this work had not changed, there was henceforth a vast difference in its meaning to the women. To approach it in the true peasant or cottage woman's temper was impossible; nor in doing it might the labourer's wife enjoy half the satisfaction that had rewarded the fatigue of her mother and grandmother. Something dropped away from it that could not be replaced when the old conditions died out. To discover what the "something" was, one need not idealize those old conditions. It would be a mistake to suppose that the peasant economy, as practised in this valley, was nearly so good a thing for women as it was for the other sex; a mistake to think that their life was all honey, all simple sweetness and light, all an idyll of samplers and geraniums in cottage windows. On the contrary, I believe that very often it grew intensely ugly, and was as narrowing as it was ugly. The women saw nothing, and learnt nothing, of the outer world; and, in their own world, they saw and learnt much that was ill. All the brutalities connected with getting a living on peasant terms tended to coarsen them--the cruelties of men to one another, the horrors that had to be inflicted on animals, the miseries of disease suffered by ignorant human beings. Their perpetual attention to material cares tended to make them materialized and sordid; they grew callous; there was no room to cultivate delicacy of imagination. All this you must admit into the picture of the peasant woman's life, if you would try to see it fairly on the bad side as well as on the good side. Still, a good side there was, and that it was far oftener in evidence than the other I am well persuaded, when I remember the older village women who are dead now. They, so masculine in their outlook, yet so true-hearted and, now and then, so full of womanly tenderness and high feeling, could not have been the product of conditions that were often evil. And one merit in particular must be conceded to the old style of life. Say that the women's work was too incessant, and that some of it was distinctly ill to do; yet, taken as a whole, it was not uninteresting, and it was just that wholeness of it that made all the difference. The most tiresome duties--those domestic cares which were destined to become so irksome to women of a later day--were less tiresome because they were parts of a whole. Through them all shone the promise of happier hours to be won by their performance. For although in this rough valley women might not achieve the finer successes of cottage folk-life, where it led up into gracefulness and serenity, in a coarser fashion the essential spirit of pride in capable doing was certainly theirs. They could, and did, enjoy the satisfaction of proficiency, and win respect for it from their neighbours. If they were not neat, they were very handy; if there was no superlative finish about their work, there was soundness of quality, which they knew would be recognized as so much to their credit. Old gossip bears me out. Conceive the nimble and self-confident temper of those two cottage women--not in this village, I admit, but in the next one to it, and the thing was quite possible here--who always planned to do their washing on the same day, for the pleasure of seeing who had the most "pieces," and the best, to hang out on the clothes-lines. The story must be seventy years old, and I don't know who told it me; but it has always seemed to me very characteristic of the good side of cottage life, whether one thinks of the eager rivalry itself in the gardens, where the white clothes flapped, or of the long record implied in it of careful housewifery and quiet needlework. This spirit of joy in proficiency must have sweetened many of the cottage duties, and may well have run through them all. When a woman treated her friends to home-made wine at Christmas, she was exhibiting to them her own skill; when she cut up the loaf she had baked, or fried the bacon she had helped to cure, the good result was personal to herself; the very turf she piled on the fire had a homely satisfaction for her, because, cut as it was by her husband's own tools, and smelling of the neighbouring heath as it burnt, it was suggestive of the time-honoured economies of all the valley. In this way another comfort was added to that of her own more personal pleasure. For there was hardly a duty that the old-time village woman did, but was related closely to what the men were doing out of doors, and harmonized with the general industry of her people. She may be figured, almost, as the member of a tribe whose doings explained all her own doings, and to whose immemorial customs her scrubbing and washing belonged, not unworthily. Her conscience was in the work. From one thing to another she went, now busily at a pleasant task, now doggedly at a wearisome one, and she knew no leisure; but at every point she was supported by what we may call the traditional feeling of the valley--nay, of the whole countryside--commending her perhaps; at any rate, fully understanding her position. To be like her mother and her grandmother; to practise the time-honoured habits, and to practise them efficiently, was a sort of religious cult with her, in the same way as it is nowadays with women of a certain position not to be dowdy. The peasant-cottager's wife could never think of herself as a mere charwoman or washerwoman; she had no such ignoble career. She was Mrs. This, or Dame That, with a recognized place in the village; and all the village traditions were her possession. The arts of her people--the flower-gardening, the songs and old sayings and superstitions, the customs of Harvest-time and Christmas--were hers as much as anybody's; if the stress of work kept her from partaking in them, still she was not shut out from them by reason of any social inferiority. And so we come back to the point at issue. House-drudgery might fill the peasant woman's days and years, and yet there was more belonging to it. It was the core of a fruit: the skeleton of something that was full of warm life. A larger existence wrapped it in, and on the whole a kindlier one. In view of all this it is easy to see why the house-duties can no longer be approached in the old temper, or yield their former satisfaction while they are being done. The larger existence has been stripped away from them. They do not lead up to happier, more interesting, duties; they are not preparatory to pleasantness. The washing and scrubbing, the very cooking and needlework, are but so much trouble awaiting a woman when she gets up in the morning and when she comes home tired at night; they spoil the leisure that wage-earning should win, and they are undertaken, not with the idea of getting on to something productive, something that would make the cottage a more prosperous home, but solely to keep it from degenerating into an entirely offensive one. There is no hope surrounding these doings. Nor do they fail only because they have become dissociated from pleasanter work. Even the best of them are actually less interesting in themselves. Look, for instance, at cooking. That cheap and coarse food which women now buy because its coarseness makes it cheap is of a quality to discourage any cook; it is common to the village--the rough rations of the poor; and the trumpery crocks and tins, the bad coal, and worse fireplaces, do nothing to make the preparation of it more agreeable. With needlework it is the same story: commercial thrift has degraded that craft. She must be an enthusiast indeed who would expend any art of the needle upon the shabby second-hand garments, or the shoddy new ones, which have to content the labourer's wife. And if the family clothes are not good to make or to mend, neither are they good to wash, or worth displaying on the clothes-lines in the hope of exciting envy in neighbours. Not at first, but in due time, inefficiency was added to the other causes which tended to make housework unpalatable to the women, and of no use to them as an uplifting experience. The inefficiency could hardly be avoided. The mothers, employed in the fields, had but little chance of teaching their daughters; and these daughters, growing up, to marry and to follow field-work themselves, kept their cottages as best they could, by the light of nature. In not a few cases all sense of an art of well-doing in such matters was lost, and the home became a place to sleep in, to feed in; not a place in which to try to live well. Perhaps the lowest ebb was reached some fifteen or twenty years ago. By then that feeling of belonging intimately to the countryside and sharing its traditions had died out, and nothing had come to replace it. For all practical purposes there were no traditions, nor were there any true country-folk living a peculiar and satisfying life of their own. The women had become merely the "hands" or employées of farmers, struggling to make up money enough every week for a wretched shopping. With health, a joking humour, and the inevitable habit of self-reliance, they preserved a careless good-temper, and they had not much time to realize their own plight; but it was, for all that, a squalid life that many of them led, a neglected life. Only in a very few cottages did there linger any serviceable memory of better things. Of late years some recovery is discernible. Field-work, which fostered a blowsy carelessness, has declined, and at the same time the arrival of "residents" has greatly increased the demand for charwomen and washerwomen. The women, therefore, find it worth while to cultivate a certain tidiness in their persons, which extends to their homes. It is true I am told that their ideas of good housework are often rudimentary in the extreme; that the charwoman does not know when to change her scrubbing water; that the washerwoman is easily satisfied with quite dubious results; and I can well believe it. The state of the cottages is betrayed naïvely by the young girls who go from them into domestic service. "You don't seem to like things sticky," one of these girls observed to a mistress distressed by sticky door-handles one day and sticky table-knives the next day. That remark which Richard Jefferies heard a mother address to her daughter, "Gawd help the poor missus as gets hold o' _you_!" might very well be applied to many and many a child of fourteen in this valley, going out, all untrained, to her first "place"; but these things, indicating what has been and is, do not affect the truth that a slight recovery has occurred. It is an open question how much of the recovery is a revival of old ideas, called into play again by new forms of employment. Perhaps more of it is due to experience which the younger women now bring into the valley when they marry, after being in comfortable domestic service outside the valley. In other words, perhaps middle-class ideas of decent house-work are at last coming in, to fill the place left empty by the obsolete peasant ideas. May we, then, conclude that the women are now in a fair way to do well; that nothing has been lost which those middle-class ideas cannot make good? In my view the circumstances warrant no such conclusion. Consider what it is that has to be made good. It is something in the nature of a civilization. It is the larger existence which enwrapped the peasant woman's house-drudgery and made it worth while. A good domestic method is all very well, and the middle-class method is probably better than the old method; but alike in the peasant cottages, and now in middle-class homes, we may see in domestic work a nucleus only--the core of a fruit, the necessary framework of a more acceptable life. With the cottage women in the old days that work favoured such developments of ability and of character as permitted the women to look with complacency upon women bred in other ways. They experienced no humiliating contrasts. Their household drudgery put within their reach the full civilization of which it was an organic part. But who can affirm as much of their household drudgery to-day? Who can pretend that the best accomplishment of it on middle-class lines admits the cottage woman into the full advantages of middle-class civilization, and enables her to look without humiliation upon the accomplishments of well-to-do women? I know that villa ladies and district visitors cling to some such belief, but the notion is false, and may be dismissed without argument, until the ladies can show that they owe all their own refinement to the inspiring influences of the washing-tub, and the scrubbing-pail, and the kitchen-range. The truth is that middle-class domesticity, instead of setting cottage women on the road to middle-class culture of mind and body, has side-tracked them--has made of them charwomen and laundresses, so that other women may shirk these duties and be "cultured." Of course, their wage-earning and their home-work are not the only sources from which ideas that would explain and beautify life might be obtained by them. The other sources, however, are of no great value. At school, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough general information, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needlework and cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookish lessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectually most ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery and that sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture of thought and taste going on elsewhere in the house, but they are not admitted to it. Afterwards, marrying, and confronted with the problem of making both ends meet on eighteen shillings a week, they get experience indeed of many things, and, becoming mothers, they learn invaluable lessons; yet still the _savoir vivre_ that should make up for the old peasant cult, the happy outlook, the inspiring point of view, is not attained. Their best chance is in the ideas and knowledge they may pick up from their husbands, and if from them they do not learn anything of the best that has been thought and said in the world, they do not learn it. Of their husbands, in this connection, there will be something further to be said presently; in the meantime I may leave it to the reader to judge whether the cottage woman's needs, since the peasant system broke down, are being well met. But I must not leave it to be inferred that the women, thus stranded between two civilizations, are therefore degraded or brutalized. From repeated experience one knows that their sense of courtesy--of good manners as distinct from merely fashionable or cultured manners--is very keen: in kindness and good-will they have nothing to learn from anybody, and most of their "superiors" and would-be teachers might learn from them. Nor would I disparage their improved housekeeping, as though it had no significance. It may open no doorway for them into middle-class civilization, but I think it puts their spirits, as it were, on the watch for opportunities of personal development. I judge by their looks. An expression, not too often seen elsewhere, rests in the eyes of most of the cottage women--an expression neither self-complacent nor depressed, nor yet exactly docile, though it is near to that. The interpretation one would put upon it depends on the phrases one is wont to use. Thus some would say that the women appear to be reaching out towards "respectability" instead of the blowsy good-temper bred of field-work; others, more simply, but perhaps more truly, that they are desirous of being "good." But whatever epithet one gives it, there is the fine look: a look hardly of expectancy--it is not alert enough for that--but rather of patient quietness and self-possession, the innermost spirit being held instinctively unsullied, in that receptive state in which a religion, a brave ethic, would flourish if the seeds of such a thing could be sown there. A hopeful, a generous and stimulating outlook--that is what must be regained before the loss of the peasant outlook can be made good to them. They are in want of a view of life that would reinstate them in their own--yes, and in other people's--estimation; a view of social well-being, not of the village only, but of all England now, in which they can hold the position proper to women who are wives and mothers. And this, vague though it is, shows up some of the more pressing needs of the moment. Above all things the economic state of the cottage-women requires improvement. There must be some definite leisure for them, and they must be freed from the miserable struggle with imminent destitution, if they are to find the time and the mental tranquillity for viewing life largely. But leisure is not all. They need, further, an education to enable them to form an outlook fit for themselves; for nobody else can provide them with such an outlook. The middle-classes certainly are not qualified to be their teachers. It may be said at once that the attempts of working-women here and there to emulate women of the idle classes are of no use to themselves and reflect small credit on those they imitate. In this connection some very curious things--the product of leisure and no outlook--are to be seen in the village. That objectionable yet funny cult of "superiority," upon which the "resident" ladies of the valley spend so much emotion, if not much thought, has its disciples in the cottages; and now and then the prosperous wife or daughter of some artisan or other gives herself airs, and does not "know," or will not "mix with," the wives and daughters of mere labourers in the neighbouring cottages. Whether women of this aspiring type find their reward, or mere bitterness, in the patronage of still higher women who are intimate with the clergy is more than I can say. The aspiration has nothing to do with that "religion," that new ethic, which I have just claimed to be the thing ultimately needed, before the loss of the peasant system can be made up to the women. XVIII THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING Some light was thrown on the more specific needs of the village by an experiment in which I had a share from ten to thirteen years ago. The absence of any reasonable pastime for the younger people suggested it. At night one saw boys and young men loafing and shivering under the lamp outside the public-house doors, or in the glimmer that shone across the road from the windows of the one or two village shops. They had nothing to do there but to stand where they could just see one another and try to be witty at one another's expense, or at the expense of any passers-by--especially of women--who might be considered safe game: that was their only way of spending the evenings and at the same time enjoying a little human companionship. True, the County Council had lately instituted evening classes for "technical education" in the elementary schools; but these classes were of no very attractive nature, and at best they occupied only two evenings a week. As many as twenty or five-and-twenty youths, however, attended them, glad of the warmth and light, though bored by the instruction. They were mischievous and inattentive; they kept close watch on the clock, and as soon as half-past nine came they were up and off helter-skelter, as if the gloomy precincts of the shop or the public-house were, after all, less irksome than the night-school. There was no recreation whatever for the growing girls, none for the grown-up women; nothing but the public-house for the men, unless one excepts the two or three occasions during the winter when the more well-to-do residents chose to give an entertainment in the schoolroom, and admitted the poor into the cheaper seats. Everybody knows the nature of these functions. There were readings and recitations; young ladies sang drawing-room songs or played the violin; tableaux were displayed or a polite farce was performed; a complimentary speech wound up the entertainment; and then the performers withdrew again for several months into the aloofness of their residences, while the poor got through their winter evenings as best they could, in their mean cottages or under the lamp outside the public-house. It was in full view of these circumstances that an "Entertainment Club" was started, with the idea of inducing the cottage people to help themselves in the matter of recreation instead of waiting until it should please others to come and amuse them. I am astonished now to think how democratic the club contrived to be. In the fortnightly programmes which were arranged the performers were almost exclusively of the wage-earning sort, and offers of help from "superior people" were firmly declined. And for at least one, and, I think, two winters, the experiment was wildly successful--so successful that, to the best of my recollection, the "gentry" were crowded out, and gave no entertainments at all. But the enthusiasm could not last. During the third winter decay set in, and early in the fourth the club, although with funds in hand, ceased its activities, leaving the field open, as it has since remained, to the recognized exponents of leisured culture. The fact is, it died of their culture, or of a reflection of it. At the first nobody had cared a straw about artistic excellence. The homely or grotesque accomplishments of the village found their way surprisingly on to a public platform, and were not laughed to scorn; anyone who could sing a song or play a musical instrument--it mattered not what--was welcomed and applauded. But how could it go on? The people able to do anything at all were not many, and when their repertory of songs learnt by ear was exhausted, there was nothing new forthcoming. Gradually, therefore, the club began to depend on the few members with a smattering of middle-class attainments; and they, imitating the rich--asking for piano accompaniments to their singing, and so on--at the same time gave themselves airs of superiority to the crowd. And that was fatal. The less cultivated behaved in the manner usual to them where there is any unwarrantable condescension going--that is to say, they kept out of the way of it, until, finally, the performers and organizers had the club almost to themselves. From the outset the strong labouring men had contemptuously refused to have anything to do with what was often, I admit, a foolish and "gassy" affair; but their wives and sons and daughters had been very well pleased, until the taint of superiority drove them away. The club died when its democratic character was lost. Yet, though I was glad to have done with it, I have never regretted the experience. It is easy now to see the absurdity of my idea, but at that time I knew less than I do now of the labouring people's condition, and in furthering the movement I entertained a shadowy hope of finding amongst the illiterate villagers some fragment or other of primitive art. It is almost superfluous to say that nothing of the sort was found. My neighbours had no arts of their own. For any refreshment of that kind they were dependent on the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table, or on such cheap refuse as had come into the village from London music-halls or from the canteens at Aldershot. Street pianos in the neighbouring town supplied them with popular airs, which they reproduced--it may be judged with what amazing effect--on flute or accordion; but the repertory of songs was filled chiefly from the sources just mentioned. The young men--the shyest creatures in the country, and the most sensitive to ridicule--found safety in comic songs which, if produced badly, raised but the greater laugh. Only once or twice were these songs imprudently chosen; as a rule, they dealt with somebody's misfortunes or discomforts, in a humorous, practical-joking spirit, and so came nearer, probably, to the expression of a genuine village sentiment than anything else that was done. But for all that they were an imported product. Instead of an indigenous folk-art, with its roots in the traditional village life, I found nothing but worthless forms of modern art which left the people's taste quite unfed. Once, it is true, a hint came that, democratic though the club might be, it was possibly not democratic enough. A youth mentioned that at home one evening he and his family had sat round the table singing songs, out of song-books, I think. It suggested that there might still lurk in the neglected cottages a form of artistic enjoyment more crude than anything that had come to light, and perhaps more native to the village. But I have no belief that it was so. Before I could inquire further, this boy dropped out of the movement. When asked why he had not come to one entertainment, he said that he had been sent off late in the afternoon to take two horses miles away down the country--I forget where--and had been on the road most of the night. A few weeks afterwards, turning eighteen, he went to Aldershot and enlisted. So far as I remember, he was the only boy of the true labouring class who ever took any active part in the proceedings--he performed once in a farce. The other lads, although some were sons of labourers and grandsons of peasants, were of those who had been apprenticed to trades, and therefore knew a little more than mere labourers, though I do not say that they were more intelligent by nature. If, however, they were the pick of the village youth, the fact only makes the more impressive certain truths which forced themselves upon my notice at that time with regard to the needs of the village since the old peasant habits had vanished. There was no mistaking it: intercourse with these young men showed only too plainly how slow modern civilization had been to follow modern methods of industry and thrift. Understand, they were well-intentioned and enterprising fellows. They had begun to look beyond the bounds of this parish, and to seek for adaptations to the larger world. Moreover, they were learning trades--those very trades which have since been introduced into our elementary schools as a means of quickening the children's intellectual powers. But these youths somehow had not drawn enlightenment from their trades, being, in fact, handicapped all the time by the want of quite a different education. To put it rather brutally, they did not understand their own language--the standard English language in which modern thinking has to go on in this country. For several of the entertainments they came forward to perform farces. After the first diffidence had worn off, they took a keen delight in the preparations, working hard and cordially; they were singularly ready to be shown what to do, and to be criticized. "Knock-about" farce--the counterpart in drama of their comic songs--pleased them best, and they did well in it. But "Box and Cox" was almost beyond them, because they missed the meanings of the rather stilted dialogue. In helping to coach them in their parts I had the best of opportunities to know this. They produced a resemblance to the sound of the sentences, and were satisfied, though they missed the sense. Instead of saying that he "divested" himself of his clothing, Mr. Box--or was it Cox?--said that he "invested" himself, and no correction could cure him of saying that. When one of them came to describing the lady's desperate wooing of him, "to escape her importunities" is what he should have said; but what he did say was "to escape our opportunities"--an error which the audience, fortunately, failed to notice, for it slipped out again at the time of performance, after having been repeatedly put right at rehearsal. And this sort of thing happened all through the piece. Almost invariably the points which depended on a turn of phrase were lost. "I at once give you warning that I give you warning at once" became, "I at once give you warning. That is, I give you warning at once." Cox (or Box) reading the lawyer's letter, never made out the following passage: "I soon discovered her will, the following extract from which will, I am sure, give you satisfaction." It was plain that he thought the second word "will" meant the same as the first. As evidence of a lack of "book-learning" in the village, this might have been insufficient, had it stood alone. But it did not. The misbehaviour of the boys at the night-school has been mentioned. Being a member of the school managing committee, I went in to the school occasionally, and what I saw left me satisfied that a large part of the master's difficulty arose from the unfamiliarity of the scholars with their own language. That initial ignorance blocked the road to science even more completely than, in the Entertainment Club, it did to art. "The Science of Horticulture" was the subject of the lesson on one dismal evening, this being the likeliest of some half-dozen "practical sciences" prescribed for village choice by the educational authority at Whitehall. About twenty "students," ranging from sixteen to nineteen years old, were--no, not puzzling over it: they were "putting in time" as perfunctorily as they dared, making the lesson an excuse for being present together in a warmed and lighted room. When I went in it was near the close of the evening; new matter was being entered upon, apparently as an introduction to the next week's lesson. I stood and watched. The master called upon first one, then another, to read aloud a sentence or two out of the textbook with which each was provided; and one after another the boys stood up, shamefaced or dogged, to stumble through sentences which seemed to convey absolutely no meaning to them. If it had been only the hard words that floored them--such as "cotyledon" and "dicotyledon"--I should not have been surprised; but they blundered over the ordinary English, and had next to no sense of the meaning of punctuation. I admit that probably they were not trying to do their best; that they might have put on a little intentional clumsiness, in the instinctive hope of escaping derision by being thought waggish. But the pity of it was that they should need to protect themselves so. They had not the rudimentary accomplishment: that was the plain truth. They could not understand ordinary printed English. Of science, of course, they were learning nothing. They may have taken away from those lessons a few elementary scientific terms, and possibly they got hold of the idea of the existence of some mysterious knowledge that was not known in the village; but the advantage ended there. I doubt if a single member of the class had begun to use his brain in a scientific way, reasoning from cause to effect; I doubt if it dawned upon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to be acquired. They were trying--if they were trying anything at all--to pick up modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thing to be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only from watching this particular class then and on other occasions, but also from the following circumstance. At Christmastime in one of these winters a few of the boys of the night-school went round the village, mumming. They performed the same old piece that Mr. Hardy has described in "The Return of the Native"--the same old piece that, as a little child, I witnessed years ago in a real village; but it had degenerated lamentably. The boys said that they had learnt it from an elder brother of one of them, and had practised it in a shed; and at my request the leader consented to write out the piece, and in due time he brought me his copy. I have mislaid the thing, and write from memory; but I recall enough of it to affirm that he had never understood, or even cared to fix a meaning to, the words--or sounds, rather--which he and his companions had gabbled through as they prowled around the kitchen clashing their wooden swords. That St. George had become King William was natural enough; but what is to be said of changing the Turkish Knight into the Turkey Snipe? That was one of the "howlers" this youth perpetrated, amongst many others less striking, perhaps, but not less instructive. The whole thing showed plainly where the difficulty lay at the night-school. The breaking up of the traditional life of the village had failed to supply the boys either with the language or with the mental habits necessary for living successfully under the new conditions. Some of these boys were probably the sons of parents unable to read and write; none of them came from families where those accomplishments were habitually practised or much esteemed. The argument, thus illustrated by the state of the boys, extends in its application to practically the whole of the village. "Book-learning" had been very unimportant to the peasant with his traditional lore, but it would be hard to exaggerate the handicap against which the modern labourer strives, for want of it. Look once more at his position. In the new circumstance the man lives in an environment never dreamt of by the peasant. Economic influences affecting him most closely come, as it were, vibrating upon him from across the sea. Vast commercial and social movements, unfelt in the valley under the old system, are altering all its character; instead of being one of a group of villagers tolerably independent of the rest of the world, he is entangled in a network of economic forces as wide as the nation; and yet, to hold his own in this new environment, he has no new guidance. Parochial customs and the traditions of the village make up the chief part of his equipment. But for national intercourse parochial customs and traditions are almost worse than none at all--like a Babel of Tongues. National standards have to be set up. We cannot, for instance, deal in Winchester quarts and Cheshire acres, in long hundreds and baker's dozens; we have no use for weights and measures that vary from county to county, or for a token coinage that is only valid in one town or in one trade. But most of all, for making our modern arrangements a standard English language is so necessary that those who are unfamiliar with it can neither manage their own affairs efficiently nor take their proper share in the national life. And this is the situation of the labourer to-day. The weakness of it, moreover, is in almost daily evidence. One would have thought that at least in a man's own parish and his own private concerns illiteracy would be no disadvantage; yet, in fact, it hampers him on every side. Whether he would join a benefit society, or obtain poor-law relief, or insure the lives of his children, or bury his dead, or take up a small holding, he finds that he must follow a nationalized or standardized procedure, set forth in language which his forefathers never heard spoken and never learned to read. Even in the things that are really of the village the same conditions prevail. The slate-club is managed upon lines as businesslike as those of the national benefit society. The "Institute" has its secretary, and treasurer, and balance-sheet, and printed rules; the very cricket club is controlled by resolutions proposed and seconded at formal committee meetings, and duly entered in minute-books. But all this is a new thing in the village, and no guidance for it is to be found in the lingering peasant traditions. To this day, therefore, the majority of my neighbours, whose ability for the work they have been prepared to do proves them to be no fools, are, nevertheless, pitiably helpless in the management of their own affairs. Most disheartening it is, too, for those whose help they seek, to work with them. In the cricket-club committee, on which I served for a year or two, it was noticeable that the members, eager for proper arrangements to be made, often sat tongue-tied and glum, incapable of urging their views, so that only after the meeting had broken up and they had begun talking with one another did one learn that the resolutions which had been passed were not to their mind. Formalities puzzled them--seemed to strike them as futilities. And so in other matters besides cricket. A local builder--a man of blameless integrity--had a curious experience. Somewhat against his wishes, he was appointed treasurer of the village Lodge of Oddfellows; but when, inheriting a considerable sum of money, he began to buy land and build houses, nothing would persuade the illiterate members of the society that he was not speculating with their funds. Audited accounts had no meaning for them; possibly the fact that he was doing a service for no pay struck them as suspicious; at any rate they murmured so openly that he threw up his office. Whom they have got in his place, and whether they are suspicious of him too, I do not know. My point is that, while modern thrift obliges them to enter into these fellowships, they remain, for mere want of book-learning, unable to help themselves, and dependent on the aid of friends from the middle or employing classes. In other words, the greater number of the Englishmen in the village have to stand aside and see their own affairs controlled for them by outsiders. This is so wholly the case in some matters that nobody ever dreams of consulting the people who are chiefly concerned in them. In the education of their children, for one thing, they have no voice at all. It is administered in a standardized form by a committee of middle-class people appointed in the neighbouring town, who carry out provisions which originate from unapproachable permanent officials at Whitehall. The County Council may modify the programme a little; His Majesty's inspectors--strangers to the people, and ignorant of their needs--issue fiats in the form of advice to the school teachers; and meanwhile the parents of the children acquiesce, not always approving what is done, but accepting it as if it were a law of fate that all such things must be arranged over their heads by the classes who have book-learning. And this customary attitude of waiting for what the "educated" may do for them renders them apathetic where they might be, and where it is highly important that they should be, reliant upon their own initiative--I mean, in political action. The majority of the labourers in the village have extremely crude ideas of representative government. A candidate for Parliament is not, in their eyes, a servant whom they may appoint to give voice to their own wishes; he is a "gentleman" who, probably from motives of self-interest, comes to them as a sort of quack doctor, with occult remedies, which they may have if they will vote for him, and which might possibly do them good. Hence they hardly look upon the Government as an instrument at all under the control of people like themselves; they view it, rather, as a sort of benevolent tyranny, whose constitution is no concern of theirs. Commons or Lords, Liberals or Tories--what does it matter to the labourer which of them has the power, so long as one or other will cast an occasional look in his direction, and try to do something or other to help him? What they should do rests with the politicians: it is their part to suggest, the labourer's to acquiesce. Such are some of the more obvious disabilities from which the cottage people suffer, largely for want of book-learning. I think, however, that they are beginning to be aware of the disadvantage, for, though they say little about it, I have heard of several men getting their children to teach them, in the evening, the lessons learnt at school during the day. Certainly the old contempt for "book-learning" is dying out. And now and then one hears the most ingenuous confessions of incompetence to understand matters of admitted interest. An old woman, discussing "Tariff Reform," said: "We sort o' people can't understand it for ourselves. What we wants is for somebody to come and explain it to us. And then," she added, "we dunno whether we dares believe what they says." If you could hear one even of the better-taught labourers trying to read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate his difficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of a paragraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of the argument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, may easily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heard of the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor, and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausing circumspection which a parenthesis demands. XIX EMOTIONAL STARVATION Remembering the tales which get into the papers now and then of riot amongst the "high-spirited young gentlemen" at the Universities, I am a little unwilling to say more about the unruliness of our village youths, as though it were something peculiar to their rank of life. Yet it must not be quite passed over. To be sure, not all the village lads, any more than all undergraduates, are turbulent and mischievous; yet here, as at Oxford, there is a minority who apparently think it manly to be insubordinate and to give trouble, while here, just as there, the better sense of the majority is too feeble to make up a public opinion which the offenders would be afraid to defy. The disorder of the village lads was noticeable long ago at the night-school; for example, on an evening shortly after the "Khaki" election, when Mr. Brodrick (now Lord Midleton) had been re-elected for this division. On that evening a lecture on Norway, illustrated by lantern slides, could hardly be got through owing to the liveliness of a few lads, who amused all their comrades by letting off volleys of electioneering cries. I have forgotten who the lecturer was, but I remember well how the shouts of "Good old Brodrick!" often prevailed, so that one could not hear the man's voice. Since then there have been more striking examples of the same sort of vivacity. Not two winters ago the weekly meetings of a "boys' club," which aimed only to help the village lads pass an evening sensibly, had to be abandoned, owing to the impossible behaviour of the members. One week I heard that they had run amok amongst the furniture of the schoolroom where the meetings were held; on the next, they blew out the lamps, and locked one of the organizers into the room for an hour; and a week or two afterwards they piled window-curtains and door-mats on to the fire, and nearly got the building ablaze. In short, to judge from what was told me, there seems to have been little to distinguish them from frolicsome undergraduates, save their poverty-stricken clothes and their unaspirated speech. It is true they kept their excesses within doors, but then, they had no influential relatives to take their part against an interfering police force; and moreover, most of them came to the meetings a little subdued by ten hours or so of work at wage-earning. Still, their "high spirits" were in evidence, uncontrolled--just as elsewhere--by any high sentiment. The sense of personal responsibility for their actions, the power to understand that there is such a thing as "playing the game" even towards people in authority or towards the general public, seemed to be as foreign to them as if they had never had to soil their hands with hard work. Whatever may be the case with others, in the village lads a merely intellectual unpreparedness is doubtless partly accountable for this behaviour. The villagers having had no previous experience of action in groups, unless under compulsion like that of the railway-ganger or of the schoolmaster with his cane, it is strange now to the boys to find themselves at a school where there is no compulsion, but all is left to their voluntary effort. And stranger still is the club. A formal society, dependent wholly on the loyal co-operation of its members and yet enforcing no obvious discipline upon them, is a novelty in village life. The idea of it is an abstraction, and because the old-fashioned half-peasant people fifty years ago never needed to think about abstractions at all, it turns out now that no family habit of mind for grasping such ideas has come down from them to their grandsons. This mental inefficiency, however, is only a form--a definite form for once--of a more vague but more prevalent backwardness. The fact is that the old ideas of conduct in general are altogether too restricted for the new requirements, so that the village life suffers throughout from a sort of ethical starvation. I gladly admit that, for the day's work and its hardships, the surviving sentiments in favour of industry, patience, good-humour, and so on, still are strong; and I do not forget the admirable spirit of the cottage women in particular; yet it is true that for the wider experiences of modern life other sentiments or ideals, in addition to those of the peasants, need development, and that progress in them is behindhand in the village. What the misbehaviour of the village boys illustrates in one direction may be seen in other directions amongst the men and women and children. Like other people, the cottagers have their emotional susceptibilities, which, however, are either more robust than other people's or else more sluggish. At any rate it takes more than a little to disturb them. During last winter I heard of a man--certainly he was one of the older sort, good at many an obsolete rural craft--who had had chilblains burst on his fingers, and had sewn up the wounds himself with needle and cotton. There is no suspicion of inhumanity against him, yet it seemed to me that in fiercer times he would have made a willing torturer; and other little incidents--all of them recent ones too--came back to my mind when I heard of him. In one of these a servant-girl from the village was concerned--a quiet and timid girl she was said to be; yet, on her own initiative, and without consulting her mistress, she drowned a stray cat which was trying to get a footing in the household. Again, I myself heard and wondered at the happy prattle of two little girls--the children, they, of a most conscientious man and woman--as they told of the fun they had enjoyed, along with their father and mother, in watching a dog worry a hedgehog. And yet it is plain enough that the faculty for compassion and kindness is inborn in the villagers, so that their susceptibilities might just as well be keen as blunt. In their behaviour to their pets the gentle hands and the caressing voices betoken a great natural aptitude for tenderness. And not to their pets only. All one afternoon I heard, proceeding from a pig-stye, the voice of an elderly man who was watching an ailing sow there. "_Come_ on, ol' gal ... _come_ on, ol' gal," he said, over and over again in tireless repetition, as sympathetically as if he were talking to a child. Where the people fail in sensitiveness is from a want of imagination, as we say, though we should say, rather, a want of suppleness in their ideas. They can sympathize when their own dog or cat is suffering, because use has wakened up their powers in that direction; but they do not abstract the idea of suffering life and apply it to the tormented hedgehog, because their ideas have not been practised upon imagined or non-existent things in such a way as to become, as it were, a detached power of understanding, generally applicable. But is it to be wondered at if some unlovely features appear in the village character? Or is it not rather a circumstance to give one pause, that these commercially unsuccessful and socially neglected people, whose large families the self-satisfied eugenist views with such solemn misgivings, should be in the main so kindly, so generous, and sometimes so lofty in their sentiments as in fact they are? With like disadvantages, where are there any other people in the country who would do so bravely? If it is clear that they miss a rich development of their susceptibilities, a reason why is no less clear. I have just hinted at it. The ample explanation is in the fact that they have hardly any imaginary or non-existent subjects upon which to exercise emotional sensibility for its own sake, so that it may grow strong and fine by frequent practice; but they have to wait for some real thing to move them--some distressful occurrence in the valley itself, like that mentioned earlier in this book, when a man trimming a hedge all but killed his own child, and a thrill of horror shuddered through the cottages. Of matters like this the people talk with an excited fascination, there being so little else to stir them. Instead of the moving accident by flood or field, they have the squalid or merely agonizing accident. Sickness amongst friends or neighbours affords another topic upon which their emotion seeks exercise: they linger over the discussion of it, talking in moaning tones instinctively intended to stimulate feeling. Then there are police-court cases. Some man gets drunk, and is fined; or cannot pay his rent, and is turned out of his cottage; or misbehaves in such a way that he is sent to gaol. The talk of it threads its swift way about the village--goes into intimate details, too, relating how the culprit's wife "took on" when her man was sentenced; or how his children suffer; or perhaps how the magistrates bullied him, or how he insulted the prosecuting lawyer. It is natural that the people should be greedy readers (when they can read at all) of the sensational matter supplied by newspapers. Earthquakes, railway disasters, floods, hurricanes, excite them not really disagreeably. So, too, does it animate them to hear of prodigies and freaks of Nature, as when, a little while ago, the papers told of a man whose flesh turned "like marble," so that he could not bend his limbs for fear lest they should snap. Anything to wonder at will serve; anything about which they can exclaim. That feeling of the crowd when fireworks call forth the fervent "_O-oh!_" of admiration, is the village feeling which delights in portents of whatever kind. But nothing else is quite so effectual to that end as are crimes of violence, and especially murder. For, after all, it is the human element that counts; and these descendants of peasants, having no fictitious means of acquainting themselves with human passion and sentiment, such as novels and dramas supply in such abundance to other people, turn with all the more avidity to the unchosen and unprepared food furnished to their starving faculties by contemporary crime. There is, indeed, another side to their sensationalism which should be noticed. I was a little startled some years ago by a scrap of conversation between two women. The papers at that time were full of a murder which had been committed in a village neighbouring this, the young man accused of it being even then on his trial. It was in the evidence that he had visited his home quite an hour after the time when the deed must have been done, and these women were discussing that point, one of them saying: "I don't believe _my_ boy would ha' come 'ome that Sunday night if _he'd_ ha' done it." It was surprising to me to hear a respectable mother speculate as to how her own son would behave in such a case, or contemplate even the possibility of his being guilty of murder; and I thought it all too practical a way of considering the subject. But it revealed how appallingly real such things may be to people who, as I tried to show farther back, have reason to feel a little like an alien race under our middle-class law. Very often one may discern this personal or practical point of view in their sensationalism: they indulge it chiefly for the sake of excitement, but with a side glance at the bearing which the issue may have upon their own affairs. In a foul case which was dealt with under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, large numbers of our cottage women flocked to the town to hear the trial, attracted partly by the hope of sensation, of course, but also very largely actuated by a sentiment of revenge against the offender; for here the safety of their own young daughters was involved. Be this as it may, still it is true that the two sources I have mentioned--namely, the sensational news in the papers and the distresses and misdemeanours in the village itself--supply practically all that the average cottager gets to touch his sentiments and emotions into life; and it is plain enough that from neither of these sources, even when supplemented by a fine traditional family life, can a very desirable spiritual nourishment be obtained. "Real" enough the fare is, in all conscience; but, as usual with realities of that sort, it wants choiceness. It provides plenty of objects for compassion, for anxiety, for contempt, for ridicule even, but very little for emulation, for reverence. The sentiments of admiration and chivalry, the enthusiastic emotions, are hardly ever aroused in man or woman, boy or girl, in the village. Nothing occurs in the natural course to bring what is called "good form" into notice and make it attractive, and at the same time the means of bringing this about by art demand more money, more leisure and seclusion, more book-learning too, than the average labourer can obtain. In the middle-classes this is not the case. It is true that the middle-classes have little to boast of in this respect, but generous ideas of modesty and reverence, and of "playing the game," and of public duty, and of respect for womanhood, have at least a chance of spreading amongst boys and girls, in households where art and books are valued, and where other things are talked of than the sordid scandals of the valley and of the police-courts. The difference that the want of this help may make was brought forcibly home to me one day. I came upon a group of village boys at play in the road, just as one of them--a fellow about thirteen years old--conceived a bright idea for a new game. "Now I'll be a murderer!" he cried, waving his arms ferociously. There are other circumstances that tend to keep the standard of sentiment low. As the boys begin to work for money at so early an age, the money-value of conduct impresses itself strongly upon them, and they soon learn to think more of what they can get than of what they can do or are worth. And while they have lost all the steadying influence that used to flow from the old peasant crafts, they get none of the steadiness which would come from continuity of employment. The work they do as errand-boys calls neither for skill in which they might take pride nor for constancy to any one master; but it encourages them to be mannish and "knowing" long before their time. Of course the more generous sentiments are at a discount under such conditions. Then, too, there can be little doubt that the "superior" attitude of the employing classes has its injurious effect upon the village character. The youth who sees his father and mother and sisters treated as inferiors, and finds that he is treated so too, is led unconsciously to take a low view of what is due either to himself or to his friends. The sort of view he takes may be seen in his behaviour. The gangs of boys who troop and lounge about the roads on Sundays are generally being merely silly in the endeavour to be witty. They laugh loudly, yet not humorously and kindly (one very rarely hears really jolly laughter in the village), but in derision of one another or of the wayfarers--girls by preference. So far as one can overhear it, their fun is always of that contumacious character, and it must be deadly to any sentiment of modesty, or honour, or reverence. It requires but little penetration to see how these circumstances react upon the village girls. The frolicsome and giddy appear to enjoy themselves much as the boys do, but the position must be cruel to those of a serious tendency. To be treated with disrespect and be made the subjects of rough wit as they go about is only the more acute part of their difficulty. One may suppose that at home they find little appreciation of any high sentiments, but are driven, in self-defence, to be rather flippant, rather "worldly." The greater number of house mistresses, meanwhile, if one may judge from their own complacent conversation, behave in a way most unlikely to contribute to their servants' self-respect. It is hard to believe that any really high sentiment is to be learnt from women who, for all the world as if they were village louts, make light of a girl's feelings, and regard her love-affairs especially as a proper subject for ridicule or for suspicion. XX THE CHILDREN'S NEED As one of the managing committee of the village schools for a good many years, I have had considerable opportunity of watching the children collectively. The circumstances, perhaps, are not altogether favourable to the formation of trustworthy opinions. Seen in large numbers, and under discipline too, the children look too much alike; one misses the infinite variety of their personalities such as would appear in them at home. On the other hand, characteristics common to them all, which might pass unnoticed in individuals, become obvious enough when there are many children together. In the main the "stock" has always seemed to me good, and to some extent my impression is supported by the results of the medical inspection now undertaken at the schools by the County Council. Such defects as the doctor finds are generally of no deep-seated kind: bad teeth, faulty vision (often due, probably, to improper use of the eyes in school), scalp troubles, running ears, adenoids, and so on, are the commonest. Insufficient nutrition is occasionally reported. In fact the medical evidence tells, in a varied form, much the same tale that school managers have been able to read for themselves in the children's dilapidated boots and clothes, and their grimy hands and uncared-for hair, for it all indicates poverty at home, want of convenience for decent living, and ignorance as well as carelessness in the parents. All this we have known, but now we learn from the doctor that the evil effects of these causes do not stop at the clothes and skin, but go a little deeper. Yet probably they have not hurt the essential nature of the children. Congenital defects are rare; the doctor discovers even a high average of constitutional fitness, due, it may be, to severe "natural" selection weeding out the more delicate. It is certain that the village produces quite a fair proportion of really handsome children, besides those of several of the old families, who are wont to be of exceptional beauty. Unhappily, before the school-years are over, the fineness usually begins to disappear, being spoilt, I suspect, partly by the privations of the home-life and partly by another cause, of which I will speak by-and-by. I think, further--but it is only a vague impression, not worth much attention--that as regards physique the girls are as a rule more thriving and comely than the boys. The latter appear very apt to become knottled and hard, and there is a want of generosity in their growth, as though they received less care than the girls, and were more used to going hungry, and being cold and wet. But if my impression is right, there are two points to be noticed in further explanation of it. The first point relates to the early age at which the boys begin to be useful at work. It has been already told how soon they are set to earn a little money out of school-hours; but even before that stage is reached the little boys have to make themselves handy. On the Saturday holiday it is no uncommon thing to see a boy of eight or nine pushing up the hill a little truck loaded with coal or coke, which he has been sent to buy at the railway yard. Smaller ones still are sent to the shops, and not seldom they are really overloaded. Thus at an age when boys in better circumstances are hardly allowed out alone, these village children practise perforce a considerable self-reliance, and become acquainted with the fatigue of labour. Some little chaps, as they go about their duties--leading lesser brothers by the hand perhaps, or perhaps dealing very sternly with them, and making them "keep up" without help--have unawares the manner of responsible men. That is one point which may help to account for the apparent physical disparity between the boys and girls of the village. The other is a subject of remark amongst all who know the school-children. There is no doubt about it; whether the girls are comelier of growth than the boys or not, they are in behaviour so much more civilized that one might almost suppose them to come from different homes. To my mind this might be sufficiently explained by the fact that they are usually spared those burdensome errands and responsibilities which are thrust so soon upon their brothers; but the schoolmaster has another explanation, which probably contains some truth. His view is that at home the girls come chiefly under the influence of their mothers, whose experience of domestic service gives them an idea of manners, while the boys take pattern from their fathers, whose work encourages roughness. Whatever the cause, the fact remains: the boys may be physically as sound as the girls, but they certainly have less charm. It is not often delightful to see them. They do not stand up well; they walk in a slouching and narrow-chested way; and, though they are mischievous enough, there is strangely wanting in them an air of alertness, of vivacity, of delight in life. There is no doubt that their heavily-ironed and ill-fitting boots cause them to walk badly; yet it is only reasonable to suppose that this is but one amongst many difficulties, and that, in general, the conditions in which the boys live are unfavourable to a good physical growth. As regards intellectual power, in boys and girls too, the evidence--to be quite frank--does not bear out all that I wish to believe; for, in spite of appearances, I am not yet persuaded that these cottage children are by birth more dull of wit than town-bred children and those in better circumstances. It must be remembered that in this village, so near as it is to a town, there has been little of that migration to towns which is said to have depleted other villages of their cleverer people. A few lads go to sea, more than a few into the army; some of the girls marry outside, and are lost to the parish. But it would be easy to go through the valley and find, in cottage after cottage, the numerous descendants of old families that flourished here, and were certainly not deficient in natural brain-power, two generations ago, although it was not developed in them on modern lines. Nor need one go back two generations. To be acquainted with the fathers and mothers of the school-children is to know people whose minds are good enough by nature, and are only wanting in acquired power; and when, aware of this, one goes into the school and sees the children of these parents, some of them very graceful, with well-shaped heads and eyes that can sparkle and lips that can break into handsome, laughing curves, it is very hard to believe that the breed is dull. The stupidity is more likely due merely to imperfect nurture; at any rate, one should not accept an explanation of it that disparages the village capacity for intelligence until it is made clear that the state of the children cannot be explained in any other way. Leaving explanations aside, however, there is the fact, not to be gainsaid, that the children in general are slow of wit. One notes it in the infant school first, and especially in the very youngest classes. There, newly come from their mother's care, the small boys and girls from five to six years old have often a wonderfully vacant expression. There is little of that speculative dancing of the eyes, that evident appetite for perceptions and ideas, which you will find in well-to-do nurseries and playrooms. And whereas in the latter circumstances children will take up pencil or paintbrush confidently, as if born to master those tools, the village infant is hesitating, clumsy, feeble. Upon the removal of a child to the upper or "mixed" school, a certain increase of intelligence often seems to come at a bound. The circumstance is highly suggestive. The "infant" of seven is suddenly brought into contact with older scholars already familiarized with particular groups of ideas, and those ideas are speedily absorbed by the little ones, while the swifter methods of teaching also have their quickening effect, for a time. But after this jump has been made and lost sight of--that is to say amongst the older scholars, who do not again meet with such a marked change of environment--one is again aware of considerable mental density throughout the school. The children resemble their parents. They are quick enough to observe details, though not always the details with which the teacher is concerned, but they have very little power of dealing with the simplest abstractions. They are clumsy in putting two thoughts together for comparison; clumsy in following reasons, or in discussing underlying principles. In short, "thinking" is an art they hardly begin to practise. They can learn and apply a "rule of thumb," a folk-rule, so to speak--but there is no flow, nor anything truly consecutive, in the movement of their ideas. Elsewhere one may hear children of six or seven--little well-cared-for people--keep up a continual stream of intelligent and happy talk with their parents or nursemaids; but to the best of my belief this does not happen amongst the village children, at any age. Observations of them at play, in the cottage gardens or on the road, throw some light on their condition. It would appear that they are extremely ill-supplied with subjects to think about. In the exercise of imagination, other children fall naturally into habits of consecutive thought, or at any rate of consecutive fancy; but these of the labouring class have hardly any ideas which their young brains could play with, other than those derived from their own experience of real life in the valley, or those which they hear spoken of at home. Hence in their histrionic games of "pretending" it is but a very limited repertory of parts that they can take. Two or three times I have come upon a little group of them under a hedgerow or sun-warmed bank, playing at school; the teacher being delightfully severe, and the scholars delightfully naughty. And now and again there is a feeble attempt at playing soldiers. Very often, too, one may see boys, in string harness, happy in being very mettlesome horses. In one case a subtle variant of this game inspired two small urchins to what was, perhaps, as good an imaginative effort as I have met with in the village. The horse, instead of being frisky, was being slow, so that the driver had to swear at him. And most vindictive and raucous was the infant voice that I heard saying, "Git up, you blasted lazy cart-'orse!" Other animals are sometimes represented. With a realistic grunt, a little boy, beaming all over his face, said to his companion, "Now I'll be your pig." Another day it puzzled me to guess what a youngster was doing, as he capered furiously about the road, wearing his cap pushed back and two short sticks protruding from beneath it over his forehead; but presently I perceived that he was a "bullick" being driven to market. Excepting the case already mentioned, of the boy who proposed to "be a murderer," I do not recall witnessing any other forms of the game of "pretending" amongst the village children, unless in the play of little girls with their dolls. There was one very pretty child who used to prattle to me sometimes about her "baby," and how it had been "bad," that is to say, naughty, and put to bed; or had not had its breakfast. This little girl was an orphan who lived with her grandfather and a middle-aged aunt, and was much petted by them. She was almost alone too, amongst the village children of that period, in being the possessor of a doll, for no more than five or six years ago one rarely saw such a thing in the village. Christmas-trees have since done something to make up the deficiency. A month or two ago I saw a four-year-old girl--a friend of mine from a neighbour's cottage--solemnly walking down a by-lane alone, carrying a rag-doll half as big as herself. I stopped, and admired; but, in spite of her pride, she took a very matter-of-fact view of her toy. "It's head keeps comin' off," was all that she could be persuaded to say. "Matter-of-fact" is what the children are, for the most part. One autumn evening, after dark, titterings and little squeals of excitement sounded from a neighbour's garden, where a man, going to draw water from his well, and carrying a lantern, was accompanied by four or five children. In the security of his presence they were pretending to be afraid of "bogies." "If a bogie was to come," I heard, "I should get up that apple-tree, and then if he come up after me I should get down t'other side." An excited laugh was followed by the man's contemptuous remonstrance, "_Shut_ up!" which produced silence for a minute or two, until the party were returning to the cottage; when a very endearing voice called softly, "Bo-gie! Bo-gie! Come, bogie!" This instance of fancy in a cottage child stands, however, alone in my experience. I have never heard anything else like it in the village. The children romp and squabble and make much noise; they play, though rarely, at hide-and-seek; or else they gambol about aimlessly, or try to sing together, or troop off to look at the fowls or the rabbits. The bigger children are as a rule extremely kind to the lesser ones. A family of small brothers and sisters who lived near me some time ago were most pleasant to listen to for this reason. The smallest of them, a three-year-old boy commonly called "'Arry," was their pet. "Look, 'Arry; here's a _dear_ little flow-wer! A little 'arts-ease--look, 'Arry!" "'Ere, 'Arry, have a bite o' this nice apple!" They were certainly attractive children, though formidably grubby as to their faces. I heard them with their father, admiring a litter of young rabbits in the hutch. "O-oh, en't that a _dear_ little thing!" they exclaimed, again and again. Sunday was especially delightful to them because their father was at home then; and I liked to hear him playing with them. One particularly happy hour they had, in which he feigned to be angry and they to be defiant. They jumped about just out of his reach, jeering at him. "Old Father Smither!" they cried, as often as their peals of laughter would let them cry anything at all. But it struck me as very strange that their sing-song derision was not going to the right tune and rhythm; for there is a genuine folk-tune which I thought indissolubly wedded to this derisive formula. Beginning in a long drawl, it throws all the weight on the first and fourth syllables: "_Old_ Father _Smith_-er." But these children, apparently ignorant of it, had invented a rhythm of their own, in which the first syllable, "Old," was almost elided, and the weight was thrown on the next. I could not help wondering at the breach which this indicated with the ancient folk traditions. If it were necessary, plentiful other evidence could be produced of the children's great need for more subjects upon which to exercise their thoughts and fancies. For one example: some years ago a little maidservant from this village was found, when she went to her first "place" in the town, never to have seen a lamb, or a pond of water. This was an extreme case, perhaps; but it suggests how badly the children are handicapped. As recently as last year, when a circus was visiting the town, I asked two village boys on the road if they had seen the procession. They had not; nor had they ever in their lives seen a camel or an elephant; but one of them "thought he should know an elephant, by his trunk." He was probably eight years old; and it is worth noting that he must have owed his enlightenment to books or pictures seen at school; indeed, there is nothing of the sort to be learnt at home, where there are no books, and where the parents, themselves limited to so narrow a range of experience and therefore of ideas, are not apt to encourage inquisitiveness in their children. A man who lived near me a few years ago could often be heard, on Sundays and on summer evenings, chiding his little son for that fault. "Don't you keep on astin' so many questions," was his formula, which I must have heard dozens of times. One can sympathize: it would be so much easier to give the child a bun, or the cottage equivalent, and order him to eat it; but that does not satisfy the child's appetite for information. Probably the great difficulty is that the children's questions can hardly any longer turn upon those old-fashioned subjects which the parents understand, but upon new-fangled things. And, apart from all this, I suspect that in most of the cottages the old notion prevails that children should be kept in their place, and not encouraged to bother grown-up people with their trumpery affairs. From the contrast between the talk of the village youngsters and that of children who are better cared for, I inferred just now a want of "flow" in the thoughts of the former, as though the little scrappy ideas existed in their brains without much relationship to one another. Of course it is possible that the brain activity is far greater than one would surmise, and that it only seems sluggish because of the insufficiency of our village speech as a means of expression, for certainly the people's vocabulary is extremely limited, while they have no habit of talking in sentences of any complexity. Yet where a language has neither abundant names for ideas, nor flexible forms of construction to exhibit variations of thought, it is hard to believe that the brain-life itself is anything but cramped and stiff. And if the crude phrasing indicates poverty in the more definite kinds of ideas, I cannot help thinking that another feature of the children's talk betrays no less a poverty, in respect to those more vague ideas which relate to behaviour and to perception of other people's position and feelings. It was since beginning this chapter that I happened to be walking for some distance in front of four children--three girls and a boy--from a comfortable middle-class home. It was a Sunday morning, and they were chatting very quietly, so that their words did not reach me; but I found it very agreeable to hear the variety of cadence in their voices, with occasionally pauses, and then a resumption of easy talk, as if they had got a subject to consider in serious lights, and recognized each other's right to be heard and understood. Indeed, it bordered on priggishness, and perhaps over-stepped the border; but nevertheless it made me feel jealous for our village children, for in the conversation of village children one never hears that suggestion of a considerate mental attitude towards one another. The speech is without flexibility or modulation of tone; harsh, exclamatory, and screaming, or guttural and drawling. Rarely, if ever, does one derive from it an impression that the children are growing to regard one another's feelings, or one another's thoughts. A further point must be mentioned. I hinted that there might be an additional cause, besides physical privations, for the loss of the children's attractiveness in many cases even before they leave school. My belief is that, as they approach the age when ideas of a sensitive attitude towards life should begin to sway them, unconsciously moulding the still growing features into fineness, those ideas do not come their way. The boys of eight begin to look, at times, like little men; and the girls of eleven and upwards begin to show signs of acquaintance with struggling domestic economies; but neither boys nor girls discover, in the world into which they are growing up, any truly helpful ideas of what it is comely to be and to think. Lingering peasant notions of personal fitness and of integrity keep them from going viciously wrong, so that when they come to puberty their perplexed spirits are not quite without guidance; yet, after all, the peasant conditions are gone, and seeing that the new wage-earning conditions do not, of themselves, suggest worthy ideas of personal bearing, the children's faculties for that sort of thing soon cease to unfold, and with a gradual slackening of development the attractiveness disappears. The want is the more to be regretted in that, at a later time of life, when the women have been moulded by motherhood and the men by all the stress and responsibility of their position, such composure and strength often appear in them as to justify a suspicion that these uncared-for people are by nature amongst the very best of the English. V THE FORWARD MOVEMENT XXI THE FORWARD MOVEMENT The last twenty years having witnessed so much change in the village, it is interesting to speculate as to the farther changes that may be looked for in the years to come; indeed, it is more than merely interesting. Educational enthusiasts are busy; legislators have their eye on villages; throughout the leisured classes it is habitual to look upon "the poor" as a sort of raw material, to be remodelled according to leisured ideas of what is virtuous, or refined, or useful, or nice; and nobody seems to reflect that the poor may be steadily, albeit unconsciously, moving along a course of their own, in which they might be helped a little, or hindered a little, by outsiders, but from which they will not in the long run be turned aside. Yet such a movement, if it is really proceeding, will obviously stultify the most well-intentioned schemes that are not in accordance with it. And, if I am not greatly mistaken, it is under way. That seems to me an ill-grounded complacency which permits easy-going people to say lightly, "Of course we want a few reforms," as if, once those reforms were brought to pass, the labouring population would thereafter settle down and change no more. In one respect, no doubt, there is little more to be looked for. The changes so far observed have been thrust upon the people from outside--changes in their material or social environment, followed by mere negations on their part, in the abandonment of traditional outlooks and ambitions; and of course in that negative direction the movement must come to an end at last. But when there are no more old habits to be given up, there is still plenty of scope for acquiring new ones, and this is the possibility that has to be considered. What if, quietly and out of sight--so quietly and inconspicuously as to be unnoticed even by the people themselves--their English nature, dissatisfied with negations, should have instinctively set to work in a positive direction to discover a new outlook and new ambitions? What if the merely mechanical change should have become transmuted into a vital growth in the people's spirit--a growth which, having life in it, must needs go on spontaneously by a process of self-unfolding? If that should be the case, as I am persuaded that it is, then the era of change in the village is by no means over; on the contrary, it is more likely that the greatest changes are yet to come. As the signs which should herald their approach will be those of recovery from the mental and spiritual stagnation into which the village has been plunged, and as we may regard that stagnation as the starting-point from which any further advance will proceed, it is worth while to fix it in our minds by a similitude. What has most obviously happened to the village population resembles an eviction, when the inmates of a cottage have been turned out upon the road-side with their goods and chattels, and there they sit, watching the dismantling of their home, and aware only of being moved against their will. It is a genuine movement of them; yet it does not originate with them; and the first effect of it upon them is stagnation. Unable to go on in their old way, yet knowing no other way in which to go on, they merely wait disconsolate. The similitude really fits the case very well, in this village at least, and probably in many others. Of the means whereby the people have been thrust out from the peasant traditions in which they were at home I have discussed only the chief one--namely, the enclosure of the common. That was the cause which irresistibly compelled the villagers to quit their old life; but of course there were other causes, less conspicuous here than they have been elsewhere, yet operative here too. Free Trade, whilst it made the new thrift possible, at the same time effectually undermined many of the old modes of earning a living; and more destructive still has been the gradual adoption of machinery for rural work. We are shocked to think of the unenlightened peasants who broke up machines in the riots of the eighteen-twenties, but we are only now beginning to see fully what cruel havoc the victorious machines played with the defeated peasants. Living men were "scrapped"; and not only living men. What was really demolished in that struggle was the country skill, the country lore, the country outlook; so that now, though we have no smashed machinery, we have a people in whom the pride of life is broken down: a shattered section of the community; a living engine whose fly-wheel of tradition is in fragments, and will not revolve again. Let us mark the finality of that destruction before going further. Whatever prosperity may return to our country places, it will not be on the old terms. The "few reforms," whether in the direction of import duties, or small holdings, or "technical education" in ploughing or fruit-pruning or forestry or sheep-shearing, can never in themselves be a substitute for the lost peasant traditions, because they are not the same kind of thing. For those traditions were no institutions set up and cherished by outside authority. Associated though they were with industrial and material well-being, they meant much more than that to country folk; they lived in the popular tastes and habits, and they passed on spontaneously from generation to generation, as a sort of rural civilization. And you cannot create that sort of thing by Act of Parliament, or by juggling with tariffs, or by school lessons. An imitation of the shell of it might be set up; but the life of it is gone, not to be restored. That is the truth of the matter. The old rural outlook of England is dead; and the rural English, waiting for something to take its place, for some new tradition to grow up amongst them, are in a state of stagnation. In looking for signs of new growth, it must be observed that not all steps in the transition are equally significant. Amongst the modifications of habit slowly proceeding in the village to-day, there are some which should be regarded rather as a final relinquishment of old ways than as a spontaneous forward movement into new ones. Thus, although the people comply more and more willingly with the by-laws of the sanitary authority, I could not say with conviction that this is anything more than a compliance. As they grow less used to squalor, no doubt they cannot bear its offensiveness so well as of old; but we may not infer from this fact that any new and positive aspirations towards a comelier home-life have been born in them. The improvement is only one of those negative changes that have been thrust upon them from the outside. Nor can anything better be said of their increasing conformity to the requirements of the new thrift. I think it true that the wages are spent more prudently than of old. The sight of a drunken man begins to be unusual; he who does not belong to a "club" is looked upon as an improvident fool; but to imagine the people thus parsimonious for the pleasure of it is to imagine a vain thing. Their occasional outbursts of extravagance and generosity go to show that their innermost taste has not found a suitable outlet in wage-earning economy. That miserly "thrift" which is preached to them as the whole duty of "the Poor"--what attractions can it have for their human nature? If men practise it, they do so under the compulsion of anxiety, of fear. Their acquiescence may seem like a change; yet as it springs from no germinating tastes or desires or inner initiative, so it acquires no true momentum. Not in that, nor in any other submissive adaptation to the needs of the passing moment, shall we see where the villagers are really rousing out of stagnation into a new mode of life. On the other hand, where their vitality goes out, under no necessity, but of its own accord, to do something new just for the sake of doing it, there a true growth is proceeding; and there are signs that this is happening. Especially one notes three main directions in which, as I think, the village is astir--three directions, coinciding with three kinds of opportunity. The opportunities are those afforded, first by the Church and other agencies of a missionary kind; second, by newspapers; and third, by political agitation. In each of these directions the village instincts appear to be finding something that they want, and to be moving towards it spontaneously--for they are under no compulsion to move. The invitations from the Church, it is true, never cease; but no villager is obliged to accept them against his will, any more than a horse need drink water put before him. 1. In estimating the influence of the Church (Dissent has but a small following here) it should be remembered that until some time after the enclosure of the common the village held no place of worship of any denomination. Moreover, the comparatively few inhabitants of that time were free from interference by rich people or by resident employers. They had the valley to themselves; they had always lived as they liked, and been as rough as they liked; and there must have been memories amongst them--quite recent memories then--of the lawless life of other heath-dwellers, their near neighbours, in the wide waste hollows of Hindhead. We may therefore surmise that when the church was built a sprinkling at least of the villagers were none too well pleased. This may partly explain the sullen hostility of which the clergy are still the objects in certain quarters of the village, and which the Pharisaism of some of their friends does much to keep alive. The same causes may have something to do with the fact that the majority of the labouring men appear to take no interest at all in religion. Still, there are more than a few young men, and of the old village stock too, who yield very readily to the influences of the Church. A family tradition no doubt predisposes them to do so; for, be it said, not all of the old villagers were irreligious. Echoes of a rustic Christianity, gentle and resigned as that which the Vicar of Wakefield taught to his flock, may be heard to-day in the talk of aged men and women here and there; and though that piety has gone rather out of fashion, the taste for something like it survives in these young men. The Church attracts them; they approve its ideas of decorous life; it is a school of good manners to them, if not of high thinking, with the result that they begin to be quite a different sort of people from their fathers and grandfathers. A pleasant suavity and gentleness marks their behaviour. They are greatly self-respecting. Their tendency is to adopt and live up to the middle-class code of respectability. Neither by temperament nor by outlook are they equipped for the hardship of real labouring life. These are the men, rather, who get the lighter work required by the residential people in the villa gardens; or they fill odd places in the town, where character is wanted more than strength or skill. They fill them well, too, in very trustworthy and industrious fashion. A few of them have learnt trades, and are saving money, as bricklayers, carpenters, clerks even. It was from the ranks of this group that a young man emerged, some years ago, as a speculating builder. He put up three or four cottages, and then came to grief; but I never heard that anybody but himself suffered loss by the collapse of his venture. He has left the neighbourhood, and I mention him now only to exhibit the middle-class tendencies of his kind. You will not find any of these men going to a public-house. The "Institute" caters for them, with its decorous amusements--billiards, dominoes, cribbage; but they do not much affect the Institute Reading Room; indeed, I believe them to be intellectually very docile to authority. Opinions they have, on questions of the day, but not opinions formed by much effort of their own. The need of the village, as they have felt it, is less for mental than for ethical help. They desire something to guide their conduct and their pastimes, and this leads them to respond to the invitation of the Church and its allied influences. I have an impression, too, that indirectly, through their example, others are affected by those influences who do not so consciously yield to them; at any rate a softening of manners seems to be in progress in the village. It is not much, perhaps; it is certainly very indefinite, and no doubt there are other causes helping to further it; but, such as it is, the chief credit for it is due to the lead given by the Church. Indeed, no other agency has done anything at all in the way of proposing to the people an art of living, a civilization, to replace that of the old rustic days. 2. With few exceptions the newspapers--chiefly weeklies, but here and there a daily--which come into the villagers' hands are of the "yellow press" kind; but for once a good effect may be attributed to them. It resembles that which, in a smaller way, springs from the opportunities of travelling afforded by railways. Just as few of our people now are wholly restricted in their ideas of the world to this valley and the horizons visible from its sides, but the most of them, in excursion holidays at least, have seen a little of the extent and variety of England, so, thanks to the cheap press, ideas and information about the whole world are finding their way into the cottages of the valley; and at the present stage it is not greatly important that the information is less trustworthy than it might be. The main thing is that the village mind should stretch itself, and look beyond the village; and this is certainly happening. The mere material of thought, the quantity of subjects in which curiosity may take an interest, is immeasurably greater than it was even twenty years ago; and, if but sleepily as yet, still the curiosity of the villagers begins to wake up. However superior you may think yourself, you must not now approach any of the younger labouring men in the assumption that they have not heard of the subject you speak of. The coal-heaver, whose poverty of ideas I described farther back, was talking to me (after that chapter was written) about the life of coal-miners. He told of the poor wages they get for their dangerous work; he discoursed of mining royalties, and explained some points as to freightage and railway charges; and he was drifting towards the subject of Trades Unions when our short walk home together came to an end. Of course in this case the man's calling had given a direction to his curiosity; but there are many subjects upon which the whole village may be supposed to be getting ideas. Shackleton and the South Pole are probably household words in most of the cottages; it may be taken for granted that the wonders of flying machines are being eagerly watched; it must not be taken for granted at all that the villagers are ignorant about disease germs, and the causes of consumption, and the spreading of plague by rats. Long after the King's visit to India, ideas of Indian scenes will linger in the valley; and presently, when the Panama Canal nears completion, and pictures of it begin to be given in the papers, there will hardly be a labourer but is more or less familiar with the main features of the work, and is more or less aware of its immense political and commercial importance. Thus the field of vision opens out vastly, ideas coming into it in enough variety and abundance to begin throwing side-lights upon one another and to illumine the whole village outlook upon life. And while the field widens, the people are winning their way to a greater power of surveying it intelligently; for one must notice how the newspapers, besides giving information, encourage an acceptance of non-parochial views. The reader of them is taken into the public confidence. Instead of a narrow village tradition, national opinions are at his disposal, and he is helped to see, as it were from the outside, the general aspect of questions which, but for the papers, he would only know by his individual experience from the inside. To give one illustration: the labourer out of work understands now more than his own particular misfortunes from that cause. He is discovering that unemployment is a world-wide evil, which spreads like an infectious disease, and may be treated accordingly. It is no small change to note, for in such ways, all unawares, the people fall into the momentous habit of thinking about abstract ideas which would have been beyond the range of their forefathers' intellectual power; and with the ideas, their sentiments gain in dignity, because the newspapers, with whatever ulterior purpose, still make their appeal to high motives of justice, or public spirit, or public duty. Fed on this fare, a national or standardized sentiment is growing amongst the villagers, in place of the local prejudices which, in earlier times, varied from valley to valley and allowed the people of one village occasionally to look upon those in the next as their natural enemies. 3. Once or twice before I have mentioned, as characteristic of the peasant outlook, the fatalism which allowed the poor to accept their position as part of the unalterable scheme of the universe, and I associated the attitude with their general failure to think in terms of cause and effect. It would seem that this settled state of mind is slowly giving way under the political excitement of the last ten years. I cannot say, as yet, that anything worthy to be called hope has dawned upon the cottagers; but an inclination to look into things for themselves is discernible. The change, such as it is, was begun--or, let us say, the ground was prepared for its beginning--by the distress of unemployment which followed the South African War; for then was bred that great discontent which came to the surface at last in the General Election of 1906. I well remember how, on the day when the Liberal victory in this division was made known, the labouring men, standing about with nothing to do, gladdened at the prospects of the relief which they supposed must at once follow, and how their hungry eyes sparkled with excitement. "Time there _was_ a change," one of them said to me, "with so many o' we poor chaps out o' work." Then, as the months went by, and things worsened rather than bettered, reaction set in. "'Twas bad enough under the Conservatives, but 'tis ten times worse under the Liberals." That was the opinion I heard expressed, often enough to suggest that it was passing into a by-word. So, to all appearance, the old apathy was falling upon the people, as no doubt it had often done before after a momentary gleam of hope, confirming them in the belief that, whatever happened, it would not, as they said, "make much odds to the likes o' we." This time, however, a new factor in the situation had been introduced, which tended to keep alive in village minds the possibility that Poverty, instead of being the act of God, was an effect of causes which might be removed. The gospel of "Tariff Reform" promised so much as to make it worth the people's while to pay a little attention to politics. Men who had never before in their lives tried to follow a logical argument began at last to store up in their memory reasons and figures in support of the fascinating doctrine, and if they were puzzle-headed over it, they were not more so than their leaders. Besides, in their case merely to have begun is much. Look at the situation. During six or seven years, there has been before the village a vision of better times to be realized by political action, and by support of a programme or a policy, and the interest which the people have taken in it marks a definite step forwards from the lethargy of stagnation in which they had previously been sunk. True, this particular vision seems fading now. Just when it ought to have been growing clearer and nearer, if it was to justify itself, it becomes dim and remote, and my neighbours, I fancy, are reverting to their customary attitude of aloofness from party politics; but I should be much surprised to find that it is quite in the old spirit. For the old spirit was one of indifference; it rested in the persuasion that politicians of either side were only seeking their own ends, and that the game was a rich man's game, in which the poor were not meant to share. That, however, is hardly the persuasion now. If the labourers hold aloof, keeping their own counsel, it is no longer as outsiders, but as interested watchers, ready to take part strongly whenever a programme shall be put before them that deserves their help. I have suggested that the tendency of those who are influenced by the Church is towards a middle-class outlook, and that their interest centres in developments of taste and conduct rather than of intellect and opinion. Nothing so definite can be said as to the effects of newspaper reading and political excitement; nevertheless, I am conscious of effects everywhere present. The labourers whose interests turn in this direction seem to be treading in the footsteps of the skilled artisans in the town, towards ambitions not in all respects identical with those of the middle-classes. Of course the unskilled labourer earning eighteen shillings a week has not equal opportunities with the man who earns thirty-six; he cannot buy the newspapers and occasional books to which the other treats himself and his children, and in general he is less well informed. But the same grave and circumspect talk goes down with the one as with the other; to both the same topics are interesting. And for me the probability of a development for our village labourers similar to that of the town artisans is heightened, by recollection of what artisans themselves were like, say a quarter of a century ago. I knew a few of these very well. As craftsmen they were as able as those of to-day; but their crafts had not taught them to think. While they worked by rule of thumb, outside their work they were as full of prejudices, and as unable to grasp reasons, as any of my village neighbours. The most of them, in fact, had been born in villages near the town, and retained a good deal of the rural outlook. Their gardens, and the harvest--yes, and odd scraps of very ancient folk-lore which they still believed--occupied an important place in their attention. They had quite the old attitude towards their employers; quite the old stubborn distrust of innovations in their work. When, however, you turn to their successors, you find a difference. I will not say that they are less able than their predecessors, or less trustworthy; but they have broken away from all that old simplicity of mind; they are thinking for themselves, and informing themselves, with an unresting and unhasting interest, about what the rest of the world knows. It fills me with shame, when I consider my own so much better opportunities, to find how much these hard-working men have learnt, and with what cool tenacity they think. Where they are most wanting is in enthusiasm and the hopes that breed it; or say, in belief that the world may yet change for the better--though here, too, political excitement is doing its fateful work. I find them very jealous for their children to do well: free education has not sapped their sense of parental responsibility, but has inspired them with ambitions, though not for themselves. For themselves they are conscious of a want of that book-learned culture which the practice of their skilled crafts cannot bestow, and this makes them suspicious of those who have it and diffident in conversation with them. But underneath this reticence and willingness to hear dwells a quiet scepticism which has no docility in it, and is not to be persuaded out of its way by any eloquence or any emotion. Missionary influences, like those of church and chapel, make but little impression on these quiet-eyed men. The tendency is towards a scientific rather than an æsthetic outlook. And just as, amongst the skilled craftsmen, there are individuals representing every stage of the advance from five-and-twenty years ago until now, so the earlier stages at least of the same advance are represented, one beyond another, by labouring men in this village. I could not find any labourers who are so far forward as the forwardest artisans; but I could find some who have travelled, say, half the way, and many who have reached different points between that and the stagnation which was the starting-point for all. Hence I cannot doubt that the villagers in general are moving on the route along which the town artisans have passed a generation ahead of them. They are hindered by great poverty; hampered by the excessive fatigues of their daily work; entrammelled by remnants of the peasant traditions which still cling about them; but the movement has begun. The first stupefying effect of their eviction from the peasant life is passing away, and they are setting their faces towards the future, to find a new way of life. It may be urged that, along with the Church, the newspaper and politics, education should have been named, as a fourth power affecting the village destinies. A moment's consideration, however, will discover that it does not come into the same category with those three influences, if only for this reason, that it is forced upon the village children from outside, while the older people have no chance to interest themselves in it as they have in the Church teachings or in the daily paper. No spontaneous movement, therefore, such as I have outlined in the other cases, can be traced in regard to education; but I had a stronger reason than that for omitting mention of it. To be quite plain, I do not think it is making anything like so much impression on the village life as it ought to make, and as it is commonly supposed to be making. It is not quite a failure; but it is by no means a great success. In so far as it has enabled the people to read their papers (and it has not done that very well) it has been serviceable; but neither as a cause of change nor as a guide into happier ways of life has it any claim to especial mention in these chapters. I am not saying that it is unworthy of attention: on the contrary, there is no subject relating to the village that demands so much. If, as I believe, it is one, and the foremost, of those activities which are largely abortive because they have not got into touch with the spontaneous movement of the village life, the matter is of the utmost seriousness. But this is not the place for entering into it; for I have not set out to criticize the varied experiments in reform which are being tried upon the labouring people. My book is finished, now that I have pointed to the inner changes going on in the village itself. As to the future of those changes, I will not add to what I have already said, but there is evidently much room for speculation; and those who best know the villagers--their brave patience, their sincerity, the excellent groundwork of their nature--and those who see how full of promise are the children, generation after generation, until hardship and neglect spoil them, will be slow to believe what leisured folk are so fond of saying--namely, that these lowly people owe their lowliness to defects in their inborn character. It is too unlikely. The race which, years ago, in sequestered villages, unaided by the outer world at all, and solely by force of its own accumulated traditions, could build up that sturdy peasant civilization which has now gone--that race, I say, is not a race naturally deficient. There is no saying what its offspring may not achieve, once they get their powers of intellect awake on modern lines and can draw freely upon the great world for ideas. At any rate, the hope is great enough to forbid the indulgence of any deep regret for what has gone by. The old system had gone on long enough. For generations the villagers had grown up and lived and died with large tracts of their English vitality neglected, unexplored; and I do not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyone who believes in the English. Rather it should reconcile us to the disillusionments of this present time of transition. They are devastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of that pleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fancied it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now that the landscape is not peopled by a comfortable folk, whose dear and intimate love of it gave a human interest to every feature of its beauty; I know that those who live there have in fact lost touch with its venerable meanings, while all their existence has turned sordid and anxious and worried; and knowing this, I feel a forlornness in country places, as if all their best significance were gone. But, notwithstanding this, I would not go back. I would not lift a finger, or say a word, to restore the past time, for fear lest in doing so I might be retarding a movement which, when I can put these sentiments aside, looks like the prelude to a renaissance of the English country-folk. Note.--In the preceding chapters no reference is made either to the new Insurance Act or to recent labour unrest. The book was, in fact, already in the publishers' hands when those matters began to excite general attention; and it hardly seems necessary now, merely for the sake of being momentarily up to date, to begin introducing allusions which after all would leave the main argument unchanged. _December_, 1911. THE END BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD 
19229	----	ANTICIPATIONS OF THE REACTION OF MECHANICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS UPON HUMAN LIFE AND THOUGHT BY H. G. WELLS AUTHOR OF "LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM," "THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU," AND "TALES OF SPACE AND TIME." _SECOND EDITION_ LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD. 1902 CONTENTS I. LOCOMOTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1 II. THE PROBABLE DIFFUSION OF GREAT CITIES 33 III. DEVELOPING SOCIAL ELEMENTS 66 IV. CERTAIN SOCIAL REACTIONS 103 V. THE LIFE-HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY 143 VI. WAR IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 176 VII. THE CONFLICT OF LANGUAGES 215 VIII. THE LARGER SYNTHESIS 245 IX. FAITH, MORALS, AND PUBLIC POLICY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 279 ANTICIPATIONS I LOCOMOTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY It is proposed in this book to present in as orderly an arrangement as the necessarily diffused nature of the subject admits, certain speculations about the trend of present forces, speculations which, taken all together, will build up an imperfect and very hypothetical, but sincerely intended forecast of the way things will probably go in this new century.[1] Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces of the performance. Hitherto such forecasts have been presented almost invariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation of the satirical opportunity has been too much for the writer;[2] the narrative form becomes more and more of a nuisance as the speculative inductions become sincerer, and here it will be abandoned altogether in favour of a texture of frank inquiries and arranged considerations. Our utmost aim is a rough sketch of the coming time, a prospectus, as it were, of the joint undertaking of mankind in facing these impending years. The reader is a prospective shareholder--he and his heirs--though whether he will find this anticipatory balance-sheet to his belief or liking is another matter. For reasons that will develop themselves more clearly as these papers unfold, it is extremely convenient to begin with a speculation upon the probable developments and changes of the means of land locomotion during the coming decades. No one who has studied the civil history of the nineteenth century will deny how far-reaching the consequences of changes in transit may be, and no one who has studied the military performances of General Buller and General De Wet but will see that upon transport, upon locomotion, may also hang the most momentous issues of politics and war. The growth of our great cities, the rapid populating of America, the entry of China into the field of European politics are, for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of new methods of locomotion. And while so much hangs upon the development of these methods, that development is, on the other hand, a process comparatively independent, now at any rate, of most of the other great movements affected by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising, and of experiments made, and upon laws of political economy, almost as inevitable as natural laws. Such great issues, supposing them to be possible, as the return of Western Europe to the Roman communion, the overthrow of the British Empire by Germany, or the inundation of Europe by the "Yellow Peril," might conceivably affect such details, let us say, as door-handles and ventilators or mileage of line, but would probably leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotion untouched. The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relation to the Western European peoples. It is no longer dependent upon them, or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadays sets out upon his pilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron, and the immemorial Hindoo goes a-shopping in a train, and in Japan and Australasia and America, there are plentiful hands and minds to take up the process now, even should the European let it fall. The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a very interesting phase in that great development of means of land transit that has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam engine running upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, the first great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode of transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this century's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of the addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind. A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the history of the world? Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the development strikes one--as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin strikes one--as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the need for the railway and steam engine had only just arisen, and--to use one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever dropped from the lips of man--the demand created the supply; it was quite the other way about. There was really no urgent demand for such things at the time; the current needs of the European world seem to have been fairly well served by coach and diligence in 1800, and, on the other hand, every administrator of intelligence in the Roman and Chinese empires must have felt an urgent need for more rapid methods of transit than those at his disposal. Nor was the development of the steam locomotive the result of any sudden discovery of steam. Steam, and something of the mechanical possibilities of steam, had been known for two thousand years; it had been used for pumping water, opening doors, and working toys, before the Christian era. It may be urged that this advance was the outcome of that new and more systematic handling of knowledge initiated by Lord Bacon and sustained by the Royal Society; but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new habits of mind that spread outward from that centre played their part. The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this development invented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's engine was running along its rails and Evan's boat was walloping up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles to application as occur in the story of electricity to justify our attribution of the steam engine to the scientific impulse. Nor does this particular invention seem to have been directly due to the new possibilities of reducing, shaping, and casting iron, afforded by the substitution of coal for wood in iron works; through the greater temperature afforded by a coal fire. In China coal has been used in the reduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt these new facilities did greatly help the steam engine in its invasion of the field of common life, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. It was, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented series of causes, that set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, and in another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisive factor. One peculiar condition of its production in England seems to have supplied just one ingredient that had been missing for two thousand years in the group of conditions that were necessary before the steam locomotive could appear. This missing ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple, profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steam utilization could be worked out. If one studies Stephenson's "Rocket" in detail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that structure to have come into existence _de novo_, however urgently the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindling forests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs in low hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and the Alleghanies for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From this fact it followed that some quite unprecedented pumping appliances became necessary, and the thoughts of practical men were turned thereby to the long-neglected possibilities of steam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for weeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got under again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two estates in England--rather as a toy than in earnest--before the middle of the seventeenth century, and the attempt to employ it was so obvious as to be practically unavoidable.[3] The water trickling into the coal measures[4] acted, therefore, like water trickling upon chemicals that have long been mixed together dry and inert. Immediately the latent reactions were set going. Savery, Newcomen, a host of other workers, culminating in Watt, working always by steps that were at least so nearly obvious as to give rise again and again to simultaneous discoveries, changed this toy of steam into a real, a commercial thing, developed a trade in pumping engines, created foundries and a new art of engineering, and almost unconscious of what they were doing, made the steam locomotive a well-nigh unavoidable consequence. At last, after a century of improvement on pumping engines, there remained nothing but the very obvious stage of getting the engine that had been developed on wheels and out upon the ways of the world. Ever and again during the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon the roads and pronounced a failure--one monstrous Palæoferric creature was visible on a French high road as early as 1769--but by the dawn of the nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By 1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion and almost financially possible, and from his hands it puffed its way, slowly at first, and then, under Stephenson, faster and faster, to a transitory empire over the earth. It was a steam locomotive--but for all that it was primarily _a steam engine for pumping_ adapted to a new end; it was a steam engine whose ancestral stage had developed under conditions that were by no means exacting in the matter of weight. And from that fact followed a consequence that has hampered railway travel and transport very greatly, and that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief in its practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavy for the high road--it had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linked are steam engines and railways in our minds that, in common language now, the latter implies the former. But indeed it is the result of accidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties that we travel to-day on rails. Railway travelling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal of locomotive convenience, so far as travellers are concerned, is surely a highly mobile conveyance capable of travelling easily and swiftly to any desired point, traversing, at a reasonably controlled pace, the ordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of speed and long-distance travelling to specialized ways restricted to swift traffic, and possibly furnished with guide-rails. For the collection and delivery of all sorts of perishable goods also the same system is obviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such a system would admit of that secular progress in engines and vehicles that the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completely arrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put at once upon the ways without interference with the established traffic. Had such an ideal been kept in view from the first the traveller would now be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of from seventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of the trouble, waiting, expense, and delay that arises between the household or hotel and the actual rail. It was an ideal that must have been at least possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago, and, had it been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromise to compromise as it always has done and as it will do very probably for many centuries yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with an infinitely more practicable method of communication, but with one capable of a steady and continual evolution from year to year. But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediately cheaper, and along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth Century Progress, quite heedless of the possibility of ending in a _cul-de-sac_. The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition of their ancestry, were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy, and their inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working for lightness and smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placing them upon the tramways that were already in existence--chiefly for the transit of heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a very interesting and curious result. These tram-lines very naturally had exactly the width of an ordinary cart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw in the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh, or found anything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a horse determine the dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first the passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in the carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would have seemed "Utopian"--a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents--to propose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the horse-cart gauge, the 4 ft. 8½ in. gauge, _nemine contradicente_, established itself in the world, and now everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale that limits alike its comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as it were, trots the ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely to trot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatens catastrophe at every point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, most authorities are agreed, is the limit of our speed for land travel, so far as existing conditions go.[5] Only a revolutionary reconstruction of the railways or the development of some new competing method of land travel can carry us beyond that. People of to-day take the railways for granted as they take sea and sky; they were born in a railway world, and they expect to die in one. But if only they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of all influences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly enough that this vast and elaborate railway system of ours, by which the whole world is linked together, is really only a vast system of trains of horse-waggons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines upon wheels. Is that, in spite of its present vast extension, likely to remain the predominant method of land locomotion--even for so short a period as the next hundred years? Now, so much capital is represented by the existing type of railways, and they have so firm an establishment in the acquiescence of men, that it is very doubtful if the railways will ever attempt any very fundamental change in the direction of greater speed or facility, unless they are first exposed to the pressure of our second alternative, competition, and we may very well go on to inquire how long will it be before that second alternative comes into operation--if ever it is to do so. Let us consider what other possibilities seem to offer themselves. Let us revert to the ideal we have already laid down, and consider what hopes and obstacles to its attainment there seem to be. The abounding presence of numerous experimental motors to-day is so stimulating to the imagination, there are so many stimulated persons at work upon them, that it is difficult to believe the obvious impossibility of most of them--their convulsiveness, clumsiness, and, in many cases, exasperating trail of stench will not be rapidly fined away.[6] I do not think that it is asking too much of the reader's faith in progress to assume that so far as a light powerful engine goes, comparatively noiseless, smooth-running, not obnoxious to sensitive nostrils, and altogether suitable for high road traffic, the problem will very speedily be solved. And upon that assumption, in what direction are these new motor vehicles likely to develop? how will they react upon the railways? and where finally will they take us? At present they seem to promise developments upon three distinct and definite lines. There will, first of all, be the motor truck for heavy traffic. Already such trucks are in evidence distributing goods and parcels of various sorts. And sooner or later, no doubt, the numerous advantages of such an arrangement will lead to the organization of large carrier companies, using such motor trucks to carry goods in bulk or parcels on the high roads. Such companies will be in an exceptionally favourable position to organize storage and repair for the motors of the general public on profitable terms, and possibly to co-operate in various ways with the manufactures of special types of motor machines. In the next place, and parallel with the motor truck, there will develop the hired or privately owned motor carriage. This, for all except the longest journeys, will add a fine sense of personal independence to all the small conveniences of first-class railway travel. It will be capable of a day's journey of three hundred miles or more, long before the developments to be presently foreshadowed arrive. One will change nothing--unless it is the driver--from stage to stage. One will be free to dine where one chooses, hurry when one chooses, travel asleep or awake, stop and pick flowers, turn over in bed of a morning and tell the carriage to wait--unless, which is highly probable, one sleeps aboard.[7]... And thirdly there will be the motor omnibus, attacking or developing out of the horse omnibus companies and the suburban lines. All this seems fairly safe prophesying. And these things, which are quite obviously coming even now, will be working out their many structural problems when the next phase in their development begins. The motor omnibus companies competing against the suburban railways will find themselves hampered in the speed of their longer runs by the slower horse traffic on their routes, and they will attempt to secure, and, it may be, after tough legislative struggles, will secure the power to form private roads of a new sort, upon which their vehicles will be free to travel up to the limit of their very highest possible speed. It is along the line of such private tracks and roads that the forces of change will certainly tend to travel, and along which I am absolutely convinced they will travel. This segregation of motor traffic is probably a matter that may begin even in the present decade. Once this process of segregation from the high road of the horse and pedestrian sets in, it will probably go on rapidly. It may spread out from short omnibus routes, much as the London Metropolitan Railway system has spread. The motor carrier companies, competing in speed of delivery with the quickened railways, will conceivably co-operate with the long-distance omnibus and the hired carriage companies in the formation of trunk lines. Almost insensibly, certain highly profitable longer routes will be joined up--the London to Brighton, for example, in England. And the quiet English citizen will, no doubt, while these things are still quite exceptional and experimental in his lagging land, read one day with surprise in the violently illustrated popular magazines of 1910, that there are now so many thousand miles of these roads already established in America and Germany and elsewhere. And thereupon, after some patriotic meditations, he may pull himself together. We may even hazard some details about these special roads. For example, they will be very different from macadamized roads; they will be used only by soft-tired conveyances; the battering horseshoes, the perpetual filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of laden carts will never wear them. It may be that they will have a surface like that of some cycle-racing tracks, though since they will be open to wind and weather, it is perhaps more probable they will be made of very good asphalt sloped to drain, and still more probable that they will be of some quite new substance altogether--whether hard or resilient is beyond my foretelling. They will have to be very wide--they will be just as wide as the courage of their promoters goes--and if the first made are too narrow there will be no question of gauge to limit the later ones. Their traffic in opposite directions will probably be strictly separated, and it will no doubt habitually disregard complicated and fussy regulations imposed under the initiative of the Railway Interest by such official bodies as the Board of Trade. The promoters will doubtless take a hint from suburban railway traffic and from the current difficulty of the Metropolitan police, and where their ways branch the streams of traffic will not cross at a level but by bridges. It is easily conceivable that once these tracks are in existence, cyclists and motors other than those of the constructing companies will be able to make use of them. And, moreover, once they exist it will be possible to experiment with vehicles of a size and power quite beyond the dimensions prescribed by our ordinary roads--roads whose width has been entirely determined by the size of a cart a horse can pull.[8] Countless modifying influences will, of course, come into operation. For example, it has been assumed, perhaps rashly, that the railway influence will certainly remain jealous and hostile to these growths: that what may be called the "Bicycle Ticket Policy" will be pursued throughout. Assuredly there will be fights of a very complicated sort at first, but once one of these specialized lines is in operation, it may be that some at least of the railway companies will hasten to replace their flanged rolling stock by carriages with rubber tyres, remove their rails, broaden their cuttings and embankments, raise their bridges, and take to the new ways of traffic. Or they may find it answer to cut fares, widen their gauges, reduce their gradients, modify their points and curves, and woo the passenger back with carriages beautifully hung and sumptuously furnished, and all the convenience and luxury of a club. Few people would mind being an hour or so longer going to Paris from London, if the railway travelling was neither rackety, cramped, nor tedious. One could be patient enough if one was neither being jarred, deafened, cut into slices by draughts, and continually more densely caked in a filthy dust of coal; if one could write smoothly and easily at a steady table, read papers, have one's hair cut, and dine in comfort[9]--none of which things are possible at present, and none of which require any new inventions, any revolutionary contrivances, or indeed anything but an intelligent application of existing resources and known principles. Our rage for fast trains, so far as long-distance travel is concerned, is largely a passion to end the extreme discomfort involved. It is in the daily journey, on the suburban train, that daily tax of time, that speed is in itself so eminently desirable, and it is just here that the conditions of railway travel most hopelessly fail. It must always be remembered that the railway train, as against the motor, has the advantage that its wholesale traction reduces the prime cost by demanding only one engine for a great number of coaches. This will not serve the first-class long-distance passenger, but it may the third. Against that economy one must balance the necessary delay of a relatively infrequent service, which latter item becomes relatively greater and greater in proportion to the former, the briefer the journey to be made. And it may be that many railways, which are neither capable of modification into suburban motor tracks, nor of development into luxurious through routes, will find, in spite of the loss of many elements of their old activity, that there is still a profit to be made from a certain section of the heavy goods traffic, and from cheap excursions. These are forms of work for which railways seem to be particularly adapted, and which the diversion of a great portion of their passenger traffic would enable them to conduct even more efficiently. It is difficult to imagine, for example, how any sort of road-car organization could beat the railways at the business of distributing coal and timber and similar goods, which are taken in bulk directly from the pit or wharf to local centres of distribution. It must always be remembered that at the worst the defeat of such a great organization as the railway system does not involve its disappearance until a long period has elapsed. It means at first no more than a period of modification and differentiation. Before extinction can happen a certain amount of wealth in railway property must absolutely disappear. Though under the stress of successful competition the capital value of the railways may conceivably fall, and continue to fall, towards the marine store prices, fares and freights pursue the sweated working expenses to the vanishing point, and the land occupied sink to the level of not very eligible building sites: yet the railways will, nevertheless, continue in operation until these downward limits are positively attained. An imagination prone to the picturesque insists at this stage upon a vision of the latter days of one of the less happily situated lines. Along a weedy embankment there pants and clangs a patched and tarnished engine, its paint blistered, its parts leprously dull. It is driven by an aged and sweated driver, and the burning garbage of its furnace distils a choking reek into the air. A huge train of urban dust trucks bangs and clatters behind it, _en route_ to that sequestered dumping ground where rubbish is burnt to some industrial end. But that is a lapse into the merely just possible, and at most a local tragedy. Almost certainly the existing lines of railway will develop and differentiate, some in one direction and some in another, according to the nature of the pressure upon them. Almost all will probably be still in existence and in divers ways busy, spite of the swarming new highways I have ventured to foreshadow, a hundred years from now. In fact, we have to contemplate, not so much a supersession of the railways as a modification and specialization of them in various directions, and the enormous development beside them of competing and supplementary methods. And step by step with these developments will come a very considerable acceleration of the ferry traffic of the narrow seas through such improvements as the introduction of turbine engines. So far as the high road and the longer journeys go this is the extent of our prophecy.[10] But in the discussion of all questions of land locomotion one must come at last to the knots of the network, to the central portions of the towns, the dense, vast towns of our time, with their high ground values and their narrow, already almost impassable, streets. I hope at a later stage to give some reasons for anticipating that the centripetal pressure of the congested towns of our epoch may ultimately be very greatly relieved, but for the next few decades at least the usage of existing conditions will prevail, and in every town there is a certain nucleus of offices, hotels, and shops upon which the centrifugal forces I anticipate will certainly not operate. At present the streets of many larger towns, and especially of such old-established towns as London, whose central portions have the narrowest arteries, present a quite unprecedented state of congestion. When the Green of some future _History of the English People_ comes to review our times, he will, from his standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets of London quite or even more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthy kennels, the mudholes and darkness of the streets of the seventeenth century to our enlightened minds. He will echo our question, "Why _did_ people stand it?" He will be struck first of all by the omnipresence of mud, filthy mud, churned up by hoofs and wheels under the inclement skies, and perpetually defiled and added to by innumerable horses. Imagine his description of a young lady crossing the road at the Marble Arch in London, on a wet November afternoon, "breathless, foul-footed, splashed by a passing hansom from head to foot, happy that she has reached the further pavement alive at the mere cost of her ruined clothes."... "Just where the bicycle might have served its most useful purpose," he will write, "in affording a healthy daily ride to the innumerable clerks and such-like sedentary toilers of the central region, it was rendered impossible by the danger of side-slip in this vast ferocious traffic." And, indeed, to my mind at least, this last is the crowning absurdity of the present state of affairs, that the clerk and the shop hand, classes of people positively starved of exercise, should be obliged to spend yearly the price of a bicycle upon a season-ticket, because of the quite unendurable inconvenience and danger of urban cycling. Now, in what direction will matters move? The first and most obvious thing to do, the thing that in many cases is being attempted and in a futile, insufficient way getting itself done, the thing that I do not for one moment regard as the final remedy, is the remedy of the architect and builder--profitable enough to them, anyhow--to widen the streets and to cut "new arteries." Now, every new artery means a series of new whirlpools of traffic, such as the pensive Londoner may study for himself at the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue with Oxford Street, and unless colossal--or inconveniently steep--crossing-bridges are made, the wider the affluent arteries the more terrible the battle of the traffic. Imagine Regent's Circus on the scale of the Place de la Concorde. And there is the value of the ground to consider; with every increment of width the value of the dwindling remainder in the meshes of the network of roads will rise, until to pave the widened streets with gold will be a mere trifling addition to the cost of their "improvement." There is, however, quite another direction in which the congestion may find relief, and that is in the "regulation" of the traffic. This has already begun in London in an attack on the crawling cab and in the new bye-laws of the London County Council, whereby certain specified forms of heavy traffic are prohibited the use of the streets between ten and seven. These things may be the first beginning of a process of restriction that may go far. Many people living at the present time, who have grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transient characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic in the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of things, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed the presence of all the chief constituents of this vehicular torrent--the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses--everything, indeed, except the few private carriages--are as novel, as distinctively things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle telegraph. The streets of the great towns of antiquity, the streets of the great towns of the East, the streets of all the mediæval towns, were not intended for any sort of wheeled traffic at all--were designed primarily and chiefly for pedestrians. So it would be, I suppose, in any one's ideal city. Surely Town, in theory at least, is a place one walks about as one walks about a house and garden, dressed with a certain ceremonious elaboration, safe from mud and the hardship and defilement of foul weather, buying, meeting, dining, studying, carousing, seeing the play. It is the growth in size of the city that has necessitated the growth of this coarser traffic that has made "Town" at last so utterly detestable. But if one reflects, it becomes clear that, save for the vans of goods, this moving tide of wheeled masses is still essentially a stream of urban pedestrians, pedestrians who, by reason of the distances they have to go, have had to jump on 'buses and take cabs--in a word, to bring in the high road to their aid. And the vehicular traffic of the street is essentially the high road traffic very roughly adapted to the new needs. The cab is a simple development of the carriage, the omnibus of the coach, and the supplementary traffic of the underground and electric railways is a by no means brilliantly imagined adaptation of the long-route railway. These are all still new things, experimental to the highest degree, changing and bound to change much more, in the period of specialization that is now beginning. Now, the first most probable development is a change in the omnibus and the omnibus railway. A point quite as important with these means of transit as actual speed of movement is frequency: time is wasted abundantly and most vexatiously at present in waiting and in accommodating one's arrangements to infrequent times of call and departure. _The more frequent a local service, the more it comes to be relied upon._ Another point--and one in which the omnibus has a great advantage over the railway--is that it should be possible to get on and off at any point, or at as many points on the route as possible. But this means a high proportion of stoppages, and this is destructive to speed. There is, however, one conceivable means of transit that is not simply frequent but continuous, that may be joined or left at any point without a stoppage, that could be adapted to many existing streets at the level or quite easily sunken in tunnels, or elevated above the street level,[11] and that means of transit is the moving platform, whose possibilities have been exhibited to all the world in a sort of mean caricature at the Paris Exhibition. Let us imagine the inner circle of the district railway adapted to this conception. I will presume that the Parisian "rolling platform" is familiar to the reader. The district railway tunnel is, I imagine, about twenty-four feet wide. If we suppose the space given to six platforms of three feet wide and one (the most rapid) of six feet, and if we suppose each platform to be going four miles an hour faster than its slower fellow (a velocity the Paris experiment has shown to be perfectly comfortable and safe), we should have the upper platform running round the circle at a pace of twenty-eight miles an hour. If, further, we adopt an ingenious suggestion of Professor Perry's, and imagine the descent to the line made down a very slowly rotating staircase at the centre of a big rotating wheel-shaped platform, against a portion of whose rim the slowest platform runs in a curve, one could very easily add a speed of six or eight miles an hour more, and to that the man in a hurry would be able to add his own four miles an hour by walking in the direction of motion. If the reader is a traveller, and if he will imagine that black and sulphurous tunnel, swept and garnished, lit and sweet, with a train much faster than the existing underground trains perpetually ready to go off with him and never crowded--if he will further imagine this train a platform set with comfortable seats and neat bookstalls and so forth, he will get an inkling in just one detail of what he perhaps misses by living now instead of thirty or forty years ahead. I have supposed the replacement to occur in the case of the London Inner Circle Railway, because there the necessary tunnel already exists to help the imagination of the English reader, but that the specific replacement will occur is rendered improbable by the fact that the circle is for much of its circumference entangled with other lines of communication--the North-Western Railway, for example. As a matter of fact, as the American reader at least will promptly see, the much more practicable thing is that upper footpath, with these moving platforms beside it, running out over the street after the manner of the viaduct of an elevated railroad. But in some cases, at any rate, the demonstrated cheapness and practicability of tunnels at a considerable depth will come into play. Will this diversion of the vast omnibus traffic of to-day into the air and underground, together with the segregation of van traffic to specific routes and times, be the only change in the streets of the new century? It may be a shock, perhaps, to some minds, but I must confess I do not see what is to prevent the process of elimination that is beginning now with the heavy vans spreading until it covers all horse traffic, and with the disappearance of horse hoofs and the necessary filth of horses, the road surface may be made a very different thing from what it is at present, better drained and admirably adapted for the soft-tired hackney vehicles and the torrent of cyclists. Moreover, there will be little to prevent a widening of the existing side walks, and the protection of the passengers from rain and hot sun by awnings, or such arcades as distinguish Turin, or Sir F. Bramwell's upper footpaths on the model of the Chester rows. Moreover, there is no reason but the existing filth why the roadways should not have translucent _velaria_ to pull over in bright sunshine and wet weather. It would probably need less labour to manipulate such contrivances than is required at present for the constant conflict with slush and dust. Now, of course, we tolerate the rain, because it facilitates a sort of cleaning process.... Enough of this present speculation. I have indicated now the general lines of the roads and streets and ways and underways of the Twentieth Century. But at present they stand vacant in our prophecy, not only awaiting the human interests--the characters and occupations, and clothing of the throng of our children and our children's children that flows along them, but also the decorations our children's children's taste will dictate, the advertisements their eyes will tolerate, the shops in which they will buy. To all that we shall finally come, and even in the next chapter I hope it will be made more evident how conveniently these later and more intimate matters follow, instead of preceding, these present mechanical considerations. And of the beliefs and hopes, the thought and language, the further prospects of this multitude as yet unborn--of these things also we shall make at last certain hazardous guesses. But at first I would submit to those who may find the "machinery in motion" excessive in this chapter, we must have the background and fittings--the scene before the play.[12] FOOTNOTES: [1] In the earlier papers, of which this is the first, attention will be given to the probable development of the civilized community in general. Afterwards these generalizations will be modified in accordance with certain broad differences of race, custom, and religion. [2] Of quite serious forecasts and inductions of things to come, the number is very small indeed; a suggestion or so of Mr. Herbert Spencer's, Mr. Kidd's _Social Evolution_, some hints from Mr. Archdall Reid, some political forecasts, German for the most part (Hartmann's _Earth in the Twentieth Century_, e.g.), some incidental forecasts by Professor Langley (_Century Magazine_, December, 1884, e.g.), and such isolated computations as Professor Crookes' wheat warning, and the various estimates of our coal supply, make almost a complete bibliography. Of fiction, of course, there is abundance: _Stories of the Year_ 2000, and _Battles of Dorking_, and the like--I learn from Mr. Peddie, the bibliographer, over one hundred pamphlets and books of that description. But from its very nature, and I am writing with the intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in this application. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of demonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of speculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific method. The very form of fiction carries with it something of disavowal; indeed, very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents. [3] It might have been used in the same way in Italy in the first century, had not the grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed. [4] And also into the Cornwall mines, be it noted. [5] It might be worse. If the biggest horses had been Shetland ponies, we should be travelling now in railway carriages to hold two each side at a maximum speed of perhaps twenty miles an hour. There is hardly any reason, beyond this tradition of the horse, why the railway carriage should not be even nine or ten feet wide, the width, that is, of the smallest room in which people can live in comfort, hung on such springs and wheels as would effectually destroy all vibration, and furnished with all the equipment of comfortable chambers. [6] Explosives as a motive power were first attempted by Huyghens and one or two others in the seventeenth century, and, just as with the turbine type of apparatus, it was probably the impetus given to the development of steam by the convenient collocation of coal and water and the need of an engine, that arrested the advance of this parallel inquiry until our own time. Explosive engines, in which gas and petroleum are employed, are now abundant, but for all that we can regard the explosive engine as still in its experimental stages. So far, research in explosives has been directed chiefly to the possibilities of higher and still higher explosives for use in war, the neglect of the mechanical application of this class of substance being largely due to the fact, that chemists are not as a rule engineers, nor engineers chemists. But an easily portable substance, the decomposition of which would evolve energy, or--what is, from the practical point of view, much the same thing--an easily portable substance, which could be decomposed electrically by wind or water power, and which would then recombine and supply force, either in intermittent thrusts at a piston, or as an electric current, would be infinitely more convenient for all locomotive purposes than the cumbersome bunkers and boilers required by steam. The presumption is altogether in favour of the possibility of such substances. Their advent will be the beginning of the end for steam traction on land and of the steam ship at sea: the end indeed of the Age of Coal and Steam. And even with regard to steam there may be a curious change of method before the end. It is beginning to appear that, after all, the piston and cylinder type of engine is, for locomotive purposes--on water at least, if not on land--by no means the most perfect. Another, and fundamentally different type, the turbine type, in which the impulse of the steam spins a wheel instead of shoving a piston, would appear to be altogether better than the adapted pumping engine, at any rate, for the purposes of steam navigation. Hero, of Alexandria, describes an elementary form of such an engine, and the early experimenters of the seventeenth century tried and abandoned the rotary principle. It was not adapted to pumping, and pumping was the only application that then offered sufficient immediate encouragement to persistence. The thing marked time for quite two centuries and a half, therefore, while the piston engines perfected themselves; and only in the eighties did the requirements of the dynamo-electric machine open a "practicable" way of advance. The motors of the dynamo-electric machine in the nineteenth century, in fact, played exactly the _rôle_ of the pumping engine in the eighteenth, and by 1894 so many difficulties of detail had been settled, that a syndicate of capitalists and scientific men could face the construction of an experimental ship. This ship, the _Turbinia_, after a considerable amount of trial and modification, attained the unprecedented speed of 34½ knots an hour, and His Majesty's navy has possessed, in the _Turbinia's_ younger and greater sister, the _Viper_, now unhappily lost, a torpedo-destroyer capable of 41 miles an hour. There can be little doubt that the sea speeds of 50 and even 60 miles an hour will be attained within the next few years. But I do not think that these developments will do more than delay the advent of the "explosive" or "storage of force" engine. [7] The historian of the future, writing about the nineteenth century, will, I sometimes fancy, find a new meaning in a familiar phrase. It is the custom to call this the most "Democratic" age the world has ever seen, and most of us are beguiled by the etymological contrast, and the memory of certain legislative revolutions, to oppose one form of stupidity prevailing to another, and to fancy we mean the opposite to an "Aristocratic" period. But indeed we do not. So far as that political point goes, the Chinaman has always been infinitely more democratic than the European. But the world, by a series of gradations into error, has come to use "Democratic" as a substitute for "Wholesale," and as an opposite to "Individual," without realizing the shifted application at all. Thereby old "Aristocracy," the organization of society for the glory and preservation of the Select Dull, gets to a flavour even of freedom. When the historian of the future speaks of the past century as a Democratic century, he will have in mind, more than anything else, the unprecedented fact that we seemed to do everything in heaps--we read in epidemics; clothed ourselves, all over the world, in identical fashions; built and furnished our houses in stereo designs; and travelled--that naturally most individual proceeding--in bales. To make the railway train a perfect symbol of our times, it should be presented as uncomfortably full in the third class--a few passengers standing--and everybody reading the current number either of the _Daily Mail_, _Pearson's Weekly_, _Answers_, _Tit Bits_, or whatever Greatest Novel of the Century happened to be going.... But, as I hope to make clearer in my later papers, this "Democracy," or Wholesale method of living, like the railways, is transient--a first makeshift development of a great and finally (to me at least) quite hopeful social reorganization. [8] So we begin to see the possibility of laying that phantom horse that haunts the railways to this day so disastrously. [9] A correspondent, Mr. Rudolf Cyrian, writes to correct me here, and I cannot do better, I think, than thank him and quote what he says. "It is hardly right to state that fifty miles an hour 'is the limit of our speed for land travel, so far as existing conditions go.' As far as English traffic is concerned, the statement is approximately correct. In the United States, however, there are several trains running now which average over considerable distances more than sixty miles an hour, stoppages included, nor is there much reason why this should not be considerably increased. What especially hampers the development of railways in England--as compared with other countries--is the fact that the rolling-stock templet is too small. Hence carriages in England have to be narrower and lower than carriages in the United States, although both run on the same standard gauge (4 feet 8½ inches). The result is that several things which you describe as not possible at present, such as to 'write smoothly and easily at a steady table, read papers, have one's hair cut, and dine in comfort,' are not only feasible, but actually attained on some of the good American trains. For instance, on the _present_ Empire State Express, running between New York and Buffalo, or on the _present_ Pennsylvania, Limited, running between New York and Chicago, and on others. With the Pennsylvania, Limited, travel stenographers and typewriters, whose services are placed at the disposal of passengers free of charge. But the train on which there is the least vibration of any is probably the new Empire State Express, and on this it is certainly possible to write smoothly and easily at a steady table." [10] Since this appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ I have had the pleasure of reading 'Twentieth Century Inventions,' by Mr. George Sutherland, and I find very much else of interest bearing on these questions--the happy suggestion (for the ferry transits, at any rate) of a rail along the sea bottom, which would serve as a guide to swift submarine vessels, out of reach of all that superficial "motion" that is so distressing, and of all possibilities of collision. [11] To the level of such upper story pavements as Sir F. Bramwell has proposed for the new Holborn to Strand Street, for example. [12] I have said nothing in this chapter, devoted to locomotion, of the coming invention of flying. This is from no disbelief in its final practicability, nor from any disregard of the new influences it will bring to bear upon mankind. But I do not think it at all probable that aeronautics will ever come into play as a serious modification of transport and communication--the main question here under consideration. Man is not, for example, an albatross, but a land biped, with a considerable disposition towards being made sick and giddy by unusual motions, and however he soars he must come to earth to live. We must build our picture of the future from the ground upward; of flying--in its place. II THE PROBABLE DIFFUSION OF GREAT CITIES Now, the velocity at which a man and his belongings may pass about the earth is in itself a very trivial matter indeed, but it involves certain other matters not at all trivial, standing, indeed, in an almost fundamental relation to human society. It will be the business of this chapter to discuss the relation between the social order and the available means of transit, and to attempt to deduce from the principles elucidated the coming phases in that extraordinary expansion, shifting and internal redistribution of population that has been so conspicuous during the last hundred years. Let us consider the broad features of the redistribution of the population that has characterized the nineteenth century. It may be summarized as an unusual growth of great cities and a slight tendency to depopulation in the country. The growth of the great cities is the essential phenomenon. These aggregates having populations of from eight hundred thousand upward to four and five millions, are certainly, so far as the world outside the limits of the Chinese empire goes, entirely an unprecedented thing. Never before, outside the valleys of the three great Chinese rivers, has any city--with the exception of Rome and perhaps (but very doubtfully) of Babylon--certainly had more than a million inhabitants, and it is at least permissible to doubt whether the population of Rome, in spite of its exacting a tribute of sea-borne food from the whole of the Mediterranean basin, exceeded a million for any great length of time.[13] But there are now ten town aggregates having a population of over a million, nearly twenty that bid fair to reach that limit in the next decade, and a great number at or approaching a quarter of a million. We call these towns and cities, but, indeed, they are of a different order of things to the towns and cities of the eighteenth-century world. Concurrently with the aggregation of people about this new sort of centre, there has been, it is alleged, a depletion of the country villages and small townships. But, so far as the counting of heads goes, this depletion is not nearly so marked as the growth of the great towns. Relatively, however, it is striking enough. Now, is this growth of large towns really, as one may allege, a result of the development of railways in the world, or is it simply a change in human circumstances that happens to have arisen at the same time? It needs only a very general review of the conditions of the distribution of population to realize that the former is probably the true answer. It will be convenient to make the issue part of a more general proposition, namely, that _the general distribution of population in a country must always be directly dependent on transport facilities_. To illustrate this point roughly we may build up an imaginary simple community by considering its needs. Over an arable country-side, for example, inhabited by a people who had attained to a level of agricultural civilization in which war was no longer constantly imminent, the population would be diffused primarily by families and groups in farmsteads. It might, if it were a very simple population, be almost all so distributed. But even the simplest agriculturists find a certain convenience in trade. Certain definite points would be convenient for such local trade and intercourse as the people found desirable, and here it is that there would arise the germ of a town. At first it might be no more than an appointed meeting place, a market square, but an inn and a blacksmith would inevitably follow, an altar, perhaps, and, if these people had writing, even some sort of school. It would have to be where water was found, and it would have to be generally convenient of access to its attendant farmers. Now, if this meeting place was more than a certain distance from any particular farm, it would be inconvenient for that farmer to get himself and his produce there and back, and to do his business in a comfortable daylight. He would not be able to come and, instead, he would either have to go to some other nearer centre to trade and gossip with his neighbours or, failing this, not go at all. Evidently, then, there would be a maximum distance between such places. This distance in England, where traffic has been mainly horse traffic for many centuries, seems to have worked out, according to the gradients and so forth, at from eight to fifteen miles, and at such distances do we find the country towns, while the horseless man, the serf, and the labourer and labouring wench have marked their narrow limits in the distribution of the intervening villages. If by chance these gathering places have arisen at points much closer than this maximum, they have come into competition, and one has finally got the better of the other, so that in England the distribution is often singularly uniform. Agricultural districts have their towns at about eight miles, and where grazing takes the place of the plough, the town distances increase to fifteen.[14] And so it is, entirely as a multiple of horse and foot strides, that all the villages and towns of the world's country-side have been plotted out.[15] A third, and almost final, factor determining town distribution in a world without railways, would be the seaport and the navigable river. Ports would grow into dimensions dependent on the population of the conveniently accessible coasts (or river-banks), and on the quality and quantity of their products, and near these ports, as the conveniences of civilization increased, would appear handicraft towns--the largest possible towns of a foot-and-horse civilization--with industries of such a nature as the produce of their coasts required. It was always in connection with a port or navigable river that the greater towns of the pre-railway periods arose, a day's journey away from the coast when sea attack was probable, and shifting to the coast itself when that ceased to threaten. Such sea-trading handicraft towns as Bruges, Venice, Corinth, or London were the largest towns of the vanishing order of things. Very rarely, except in China, did they clamber above a quarter of a million inhabitants, even though to some of them there was presently added court and camp. In China, however, a gigantic river and canal system, laced across plains of extraordinary fertility, has permitted the growth of several city aggregates with populations exceeding a million, and in the case of the Hankow trinity of cities exceeding five million people. In all these cases the position and the population limit was entirely determined by the accessibility of the town and the area it could dominate for the purposes of trade. And not only were the commercial or natural towns so determined, but the political centres were also finally chosen for strategic considerations, in a word--communications. And now, perhaps, the real significance of the previous paper, in which sea velocities of fifty miles an hour, and land travel at the rate of a hundred, and even cab and omnibus journeys of thirty or forty miles, were shown to be possible, becomes more apparent. At the first sight it might appear as though the result of the new developments was simply to increase the number of giant cities in the world by rendering them possible in regions where they had hitherto been impossible--concentrating the trade of vast areas in a manner that had hitherto been entirely characteristic of navigable waters. It might seem as though the state of affairs in China, in which population has been concentrated about densely-congested "million-cities," with pauper masses, public charities, and a crowded struggle for existence, for many hundreds of years, was merely to be extended over the whole world. We have heard so much of the "problem of our great cities"; we have the impressive statistics of their growth; the belief in the inevitableness of yet denser and more multitudinous agglomerations in the future is so widely diffused, that at first sight it will be thought that no other motive than a wish to startle can dictate the proposition that not only will many of these railway-begotten "giant cities" reach their maximum in the commencing century, but that in all probability they, and not only they, but their water-born prototypes in the East also, are destined to such a process of dissection and diffusion as to amount almost to obliteration, so far, at least, as the blot on the map goes, within a measurable further space of years. In advancing this proposition, the present writer is disagreeably aware that in this matter he has expressed views entirely opposed to those he now propounds; and in setting forth the following body of considerations he tells the story of his own disillusionment. At the outset he took for granted--and, very naturally, he wishes to imagine that a great number of other people do also take for granted--that the future of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to a sort of rule-of-three sum. If in one hundred years the population of London has been multiplied by seven, then in two hundred years--! And one proceeds to pack the answer in gigantic tenement houses, looming upon colossal roofed streets, provide it with moving ways (the only available transit appliances suited to such dense multitudes), and develop its manners and morals in accordance with the laws that will always prevail amidst over-crowded humanity so long as humanity endures. The picture of this swarming concentrated humanity has some effective possibilities, but, unhappily, if, instead of that obvious rule-of-three sum, one resorts to an analysis of operating causes, its plausibility crumbles away, and it gives place to an altogether different forecast--a forecast, indeed, that is in almost violent contrast to the first anticipation. It is much more probable that these coming cities will not be, in the old sense, cities at all; they will present a new and entirely different phase of human distribution. The determining factor in the appearance of great cities in the past, and, indeed, up to the present day, has been the meeting of two or more transit lines, the confluence of two or more streams of trade, and easy communication. The final limit to the size and importance of the great city has been the commercial "sphere of influence" commanded by that city, the capacity of the alluvial basin of its commerce, so to speak, the volume of its river of trade. About the meeting point so determined the population so determined has grouped itself--and this is the point I overlooked in those previous vaticinations--in accordance with _laws that are also considerations of transit_. The economic centre of the city is formed, of course, by the wharves and landing places--and in the case of railway-fed cities by the termini--where passengers land and where goods are landed, stored, and distributed. Both the administrative and business community, traders, employers, clerks, and so forth, must be within a convenient access of this centre; and the families, servants, tradesmen, amusement purveyors dependent on these again must also come within a maximum distance. At a certain stage in town growth the pressure on the more central area would become too great for habitual family life there, and an office region would differentiate from an outer region of homes. Beyond these two zones, again, those whose connection with the great city was merely intermittent would constitute a system of suburban houses and areas. But the grouping of these, also, would be determined finally by the convenience of access to the dominant centre. That secondary centres, literary, social, political, or military, may arise about the initial trade centre, complicates the application but does not alter the principle here stated. They must all be within striking distance. The day of twenty-four hours is an inexorable human condition, and up to the present time all intercourse and business has been broken into spells of definite duration by intervening nights. Moreover, almost all effective intercourse has involved personal presence at the point where intercourse occurs. The possibility, therefore, of going and coming and doing that day's work has hitherto fixed the extreme limits to which a city could grow, and has exacted a compactness which has always been very undesirable and which is now for the first time in the world's history no longer imperative. So far as we can judge without a close and uncongenial scrutiny of statistics, that daily journey, that has governed and still to a very considerable extent governs the growth of cities, has had, and probably always will have, a maximum limit of two hours, one hour each way from sleeping place to council chamber, counter, workroom, or office stool. And taking this assumption as sound, we can state precisely the maximum area of various types of town. A pedestrian agglomeration such as we find in China, and such as most of the European towns probably were before the nineteenth century, would be swept entirely by a radius of four miles about the business quarter and industrial centre; and, under these circumstances, where the area of the feeding regions has been very large the massing of human beings has probably reached its extreme limit.[16] Of course, in the case of a navigable river, for example, the commercial centre might be elongated into a line and the circle of the city modified into an ellipse with a long diameter considerably exceeding eight miles, as, for example, in the case of Hankow. If, now, horseflesh is brought into the problem, an outer radius of six or eight miles from the centre will define a larger area in which the carriage folk, the hackney users, the omnibus customers, and their domestics and domestic camp followers may live and still be members of the city. Towards that limit London was already probably moving at the accession of Queen Victoria, and it was clearly the absolute limit of urban growth--until locomotive mechanisms capable of more than eight miles an hour could be constructed. And then there came suddenly the railway and the steamship, the former opening with extraordinary abruptness a series of vast through-routes for trade, the latter enormously increasing the security and economy of the traffic on the old water routes. For a time neither of these inventions was applied to the needs of intra-urban transit at all. For a time they were purely centripetal forces. They worked simply to increase the general volume of trade, to increase, that is, the pressure of population upon the urban centres. As a consequence the social history of the middle and later thirds of the nineteenth century, not simply in England but all over the civilized world, is the history of a gigantic rush of population into the magic radius of--for most people--four miles, to suffer there physical and moral disaster less acute but, finally, far more appalling to the imagination than any famine or pestilence that ever swept the world. Well has Mr. George Gissing named nineteenth-century London in one of his great novels the "Whirlpool," the very figure for the nineteenth-century Great City, attractive, tumultuous, and spinning down to death. But, indeed, these great cities are no permanent maëlstroms. These new forces, at present still so potently centripetal in their influence, bring with them, nevertheless, the distinct promise of a centrifugal application that may be finally equal to the complete reduction of all our present congestions. The limit of the pre-railway city was the limit of man and horse. But already that limit has been exceeded, and each day brings us nearer to the time when it will be thrust outward in every direction with an effect of enormous relief. So far the only additions to the foot and horse of the old dispensation that have actually come into operation, are the suburban railways, which render possible an average door to office hour's journey of ten or a dozen miles--further only in the case of some specially favoured localities. The star-shaped contour of the modern great city, thrusting out arms along every available railway line, knotted arms of which every knot marks a station, testify sufficiently to the relief of pressure thus afforded. Great Towns before this century presented rounded contours and grew as a puff-ball swells; the modern Great City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed. But, as our previous paper has sought to make clear, these suburban railways are the mere first rough expedient of far more convenient and rapid developments. We are--as the Census Returns for 1901 quite clearly show--in the early phase of a great development of centrifugal possibilities. And since it has been shown that a city of pedestrians is inexorably limited by a radius of about four miles, and that a horse-using city may grow out to seven or eight, it follows that the available area of a city which can offer a cheap suburban journey of thirty miles an hour is a circle with a radius of thirty miles. And is it too much, therefore, in view of all that has been adduced in this and the previous paper, to expect that the available area for even the common daily toilers of the great city of the year 2000, or earlier, will have a radius very much larger even than that? Now, a circle with a radius of thirty miles gives an area of over 2800 square miles, which is almost a quarter that of Belgium. But thirty miles is only a very moderate estimate of speed, and the reader of the former paper will agree, I think, that the available area for the social equivalent of the favoured season-ticket holders of to-day will have a radius of over one hundred miles, and be almost equal to the area of Ireland.[17] The radius that will sweep the area available for such as now live in the outer suburbs will include a still vaster area. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the London citizen of the year 2000 A.D. may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb, and that the vast stretch of country from Washington to Albany will be all of it "available" to the active citizen of New York and Philadelphia before that date. This does not for a moment imply that cities of the density of our existing great cities will spread to these limits. Even if we were to suppose the increase of the populations of the great cities to go on at its present rate, this enormous extension of available area would still mean a great possibility of diffusion. But though most great cities are probably still very far from their maxima, though the network of feeding railways has still to spread over Africa and China, and though huge areas are still imperfectly productive for want of a cultivating population, yet it is well to remember that for each great city, quite irrespective of its available spaces, a maximum of population is fixed. Each great city is sustained finally by the trade and production of a certain proportion of the world's surface--by the area it commands commercially. The great city cannot grow, except as a result of some quite morbid and transitory process--to be cured at last by famine and disorder--beyond the limit the commercial capacity of that commanded area prescribes. Long before the population of this city, with its inner circle a third of the area of Belgium, rose towards the old-fashioned city density, this restriction would come in. Even if we allowed for considerable increase in the production of food stuffs in the future, it still remains inevitable that the increase of each city in the world must come at last upon arrest. Yet, though one may find reasons for anticipating that this city will in the end overtake and surpass that one and such-like relative prophesying, it is difficult to find any data from which to infer the absolute numerical limits of these various diffused cities. Or perhaps it is more seemly to admit that no such data have occurred to the writer. So far as London, St. Petersburg, and Berlin go, it seems fairly safe to assume that they will go well over twenty millions; and that New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago will probably, and Hankow almost certainly, reach forty millions. Yet even forty millions over thirty-one thousand square miles of territory is, in comparison with four millions over fifty square miles, a highly diffused population. How far will that possible diffusion accomplish itself? Let us first of all consider the case of those classes that will be free to exercise a choice in the matter, and we shall then be in a better position to consider those more numerous classes whose general circumstances are practically dictated to them. What will be the forces acting upon the prosperous household, the household with a working head and four hundred a year and upwards to live upon, in the days to come? Will the resultant of these forces be, as a rule, centripetal or centrifugal? Will such householders in the greater London of 2000 A.D. still cluster for the most part, as they do to-day, in a group of suburbs as close to London as is compatible with a certain fashionable maximum of garden space and air; or will they leave the ripened gardens and the no longer brilliant villas of Surbiton and Norwood, Tooting and Beckenham, to other and less independent people? First, let us weigh the centrifugal attractions. The first of these is what is known as the passion for nature, that passion for hillside, wind, and sea that is evident in so many people nowadays, either frankly expressed or disguising itself as a passion for golfing, fishing, hunting, yachting, or cycling; and, secondly, there is the allied charm of cultivation, and especially of gardening, a charm that is partly also the love of dominion, perhaps, and partly a personal love for the beauty of trees and flowers and natural things. Through that we come to a third factor, that craving--strongest, perhaps, in those Low German peoples, who are now ascendant throughout the world--for a little private _imperium_ such as a house or cottage "in its own grounds" affords; and from that we pass on to the intense desire so many women feel--and just the women, too, who will mother the future--their almost instinctive demand, indeed, for a household, a separate sacred and distinctive household, built and ordered after their own hearts, such as in its fulness only the country-side permits. Add to these things the healthfulness of the country for young children, and the wholesome isolation that is possible from much that irritates, stimulates prematurely, and corrupts in crowded centres, and the chief positive centrifugal inducements are stated, inducements that no progress of inventions, at any rate, can ever seriously weaken. What now are the centripetal forces against which these inducements contend? In the first place, there are a group of forces that will diminish in strength. There is at present the greater convenience of "shopping" within a short radius of the centre of the great city, a very important consideration indeed to many wives and mothers. All the inner and many of the outer suburbs of London obtain an enormous proportion of the ordinary household goods from half a dozen huge furniture, grocery, and drapery firms, each of which has been enabled by the dearness and inefficiency of the parcels distribution of the post-office and railways to elaborate a now very efficient private system of taking orders and delivering goods. Collectively these great businesses have been able to establish a sort of monopoly of suburban trade, to overwhelm the small suburban general tradesman (a fate that was inevitable for him in some way or other), and--which is a positive world-wide misfortune--to overwhelm also many highly specialized shops and dealers of the central district. Suburban people nowadays get their wine and their novels, their clothes and their amusements, their furniture and their food, from some one vast indiscriminate shop or "store" full of respectable mediocre goods, as excellent a thing for housekeeping as it is disastrous to taste and individuality.[18] But it is doubtful if the delivery organization of these great stores is any more permanent than the token coinage of the tradespeople of the last century. Just as it was with that interesting development, so now it is with parcels distribution: private enterprise supplies in a partial manner a public need, and with the organization of a public parcels and goods delivery on cheap and sane lines in the place of our present complex, stupid, confusing, untrustworthy, and fantastically costly chaos of post-office, railways, and carriers, it is quite conceivable that Messrs. Omnium will give place again to specialized shops. It must always be remembered how timid, tentative, and dear the postal and telephone services of even the most civilized countries still are, and how inexorably the needs of revenue, public profit, and convenience fight in these departments against the tradition of official leisure and dignity. There is no reason now, except that the thing is not yet properly organized, why a telephone call from any point in such a small country as England to any other should cost much more than a postcard. There is no reason now, save railway rivalries and retail ideas--obstacles some able and active man is certain to sweep away sooner or later--why the post-office should not deliver parcels anywhere within a radius of a hundred miles in a few hours at a penny or less for a pound and a little over,[19] put our newspapers in our letter-boxes direct from the printing-office, and, in fact, hand in nearly every constant need of the civilized household, except possibly butcher's meat, coals, green-grocery, and drink. And since there is no reason, but quite removable obstacles, to prevent this development of the post-office, I imagine it will be doing all these things within the next half-century. When it is, this particular centripetal pull, at any rate, will have altogether ceased to operate. A second important centripetal consideration at present is the desirability of access to good schools and to the doctor. To leave the great centres is either to abandon one's children, or to buy air for them at the cost of educational disadvantages. But access, be it noted, is another word for transit. It is doubtful if these two needs will so much keep people close to the great city centres as draw them together about secondary centres. New centres they may be--compare Hindhead, for example--in many cases; but also, it may be, in many cases the more healthy and picturesque of the existing small towns will develop a new life. Already, in the case of the London area, such once practically autonomous places as Guildford, Tunbridge Wells, and Godalming have become economically the centres of lax suburbs, and the same fate may very probably overtake, for example, Shrewsbury, Stratford, and Exeter, and remoter and yet remoter townships. Indeed, for all that this particular centripetal force can do, the confluent "residential suburbs" of London, of the great Lancashire-Yorkshire city, and of the Scotch city, may quite conceivably replace the summer lodging-house watering-places of to-day, and extend themselves right round the coast of Great Britain, before the end of the next century, and every open space of mountain and heather be dotted--not too thickly--with clumps of prosperous houses about school, doctor, engineers, book and provision shops. A third centripetal force will not be set aside so easily. The direct antagonist it is to that love of nature that drives people out to moor and mountain. One may call it the love of the crowd; and closely allied to it is that love of the theatre which holds so many people in bondage to the Strand. Charles Lamb was the Richard Jefferies of this group of tendencies, and the current disposition to exaggerate the opposition force, especially among English-speaking peoples, should not bind us to the reality of their strength. Moreover, interweaving with these influences that draw people together are other more egotistical and intenser motives, ardent in youth and by no means--to judge by the Folkestone Leas--extinct in age, the love of dress, the love of the crush, the hot passion for the promenade. Here, no doubt, what one may speak of loosely as "racial" characteristics count for much. The common actor and actress of all nationalities, the Neapolitan, the modern Roman, the Parisian, the Hindoo, I am told, and that new and interesting type, the rich and liberated Jew emerging from his Ghetto and free now absolutely to show what stuff he is made of, flame out most gloriously in this direction. To a certain extent this group of tendencies may lead to the formation of new secondary centres within the "available" area, theatrical and musical centres--centres of extreme Fashion and Selectness, centres of smartness and opulent display--but it is probable that for the large number of people throughout the world who cannot afford to maintain households in duplicate these will be for many years yet strictly centripetal forces, and will keep them within the radius marked by whatever will be the future equivalent in length of, say, the present two-shilling cab ride in London. And, after all, for all such "shopping" as one cannot do by telephone or postcard, it will still be natural for the shops to be gathered together in some central place. And "shopping" needs refreshment, and may culminate in relaxation. So that Bond Street and Regent Street, the Boulevard des Capuchins, the Corso, and Broadway will still be brilliant and crowded for many years for all the diffusion that is here forecast--all the more brilliant and crowded, perhaps, for the lack of a thronging horse traffic down their central ways. But the very fact that the old nucleus is still to be the best place for all who trade in a concourse of people, for novelty shops and art shops, and theatres and business buildings, by keeping up the central ground values will operate against residence there and shift the "masses" outwardly. And once people have been driven into cab, train, or omnibus, the only reason why they should get out to a residence here rather than there is the necessity of saving time, and such a violent upward gradient of fares as will quite outbalance the downward gradient of ground values. We have, however, already forecast a swift, varied, and inevitably competitive suburban traffic. And so, though the centre will probably still remain the centre and "Town," it will be essentially a bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous, a pedestrian place, its pathways reinforced by lifts and moving platforms, and shielded from the weather, and altogether a very spacious, brilliant, and entertaining agglomeration. Enough now has been said to determine the general nature of the expansion of the great cities in the future, so far as the more prosperous classes are concerned. It will not be a regular diffusion like the diffusion of a gas, but a process of throwing out the "homes," and of segregating various types of people. The omens seem to point pretty unmistakably to a wide and quite unprecedented diversity in the various suburban townships and suburban districts. Of that aspect of the matter a later paper must treat. It is evident that from the outset racial and national characteristics will tell in this diffusion. We are getting near the end of the great Democratic, Wholesale, or Homogeneous phase in the world's history. The sport-loving Englishman, the sociable Frenchman, the vehement American will each diffuse his own great city in his own way. And now, how will the increase in the facilities of communication we have assumed affect the condition of those whose circumstances are more largely dictated by economic forces? The mere diffusion of a large proportion of the prosperous and relatively free, and the multiplication of various types of road and mechanical traction, means, of course, that in this way alone a perceptible diffusion of the less independent classes will occur. To the subsidiary centres will be drawn doctor and schoolmaster, and various dealers in fresh provisions, baker, grocer, butcher; or if they are already established there they will flourish more and more, and about them the convenient home of the future, with its numerous electrical and mechanical appliances, and the various bicycles, motor-cars, photographic and phonographic apparatus that will be included in its equipment will gather a population of repairers, "accessory" dealers and working engineers, a growing class which from its necessary intelligence and numbers will play a very conspicuous part in the social development of the twentieth century. The much more elaborate post-office and telephone services will also bring intelligent ingredients to these suburban nuclei, these restorations of the old villages and country towns. And the sons of the cottager within the affected area will develop into the skilled vegetable or flower gardeners, the skilled ostler--with some veterinary science--and so forth, for whom also there will evidently be work and a living. And dotted at every convenient position along the new roads, availing themselves no doubt whenever possible of the picturesque inns that the old coaching days have left us, will be wayside restaurants and tea houses, and motor and cycle stores and repair places. So much diffusion is practically inevitable. In addition, as we have already intimated, many Londoners in the future may abandon the city office altogether, preferring to do their business in more agreeable surroundings. Such a business as book publishing, for example, has no unbreakable bonds to keep it in the region of high rent and congested streets. The days when the financial fortunes of books depended upon the colloquial support of influential people in a small Society are past; neither publishers nor authors as a class have any relation to Society at all, and actual access to newspaper offices is necessary only to the ranker forms of literary imposture. That personal intercourse between publishers and the miscellaneous race of authors which once justified the central position has, I am told, long since ceased. And the withdrawing publishers may very well take with them the printers and binders, and attract about them their illustrators and designers.... So, as a typical instance, one--now urban--trade may detach itself. Publishing is, however, only one of the many similar trades equally profitable and equally likely to move outward to secondary centres, with the development and cheapening of transit. It is all a question of transit. Limitation of transit contracts the city, facilitation expands and disperses it. All this case for diffusion so far is built up entirely on the hypothesis we attempted to establish in the first paper, that transit of persons and goods alike is to become easier, swifter, and altogether better organized than it is at present. The telephone will almost certainly prove a very potent auxiliary indeed to the forces making for diffusion. At present that convenience is still needlessly expensive in Great Britain, and a scandalously stupid business conflict between telephone company and post-office delays, complicates, and makes costly and exasperating all trunk communications; but even under these disadvantages the thing is becoming a factor in the life of ordinary villadom. Consider all that lies within its possibilities. Take first the domestic and social side; almost all the labour of ordinary shopping can be avoided--goods nowadays can be ordered and sent either as sold outright, or on approval, to any place within a hundred miles of London, and in one day they can be examined, discussed, and returned--at any rate, in theory. The mistress of the house has all her local tradesmen, all the great London shops, the circulating library, the theatre box-office, the post-office and cab-rank, the nurses' institute and the doctor, within reach of her hand. The instrument we may confidently expect to improve, but even now speech is perfectly clear and distinct over several hundred miles of wire. Appointments and invitations can be made; and at a cost varying from a penny to two shillings any one within two hundred miles of home may speak day or night into the ear of his or her household. Were it not for that unmitigated public nuisance, the practical control of our post-office by non-dismissable Civil servants, appointed so young as to be entirely ignorant of the unofficial world, it would be possible now to send urgent messages at any hour of the day or night to any part of the world; and even our sacred institution of the Civil Service can scarcely prevent this desirable consummation for many years more. The business man may then sit at home in his library and bargain, discuss, promise, hint, threaten, tell such lies as he dare not write, and, in fact, do everything that once demanded a personal encounter. Already for a great number of businesses it is no longer necessary that the office should be in London, and only habit, tradition, and minor considerations keep it there. With the steady cheapening and the steady increase in efficiency of postal and telephonic facilities, and of goods transit, it seems only reasonable to anticipate the need for that expensive office and the irksome daily journey will steadily decline. In other words, what will still be economically the "city," as distinguished from the "agricultural" population, will probably be free to extend, in the case of all the prosperous classes not tied to large establishments in need of personal supervision, far beyond the extreme limits of the daily hour journey. But the diffusion of the prosperous, independent, and managing classes involves in itself a very considerable diffusion of the purely "working" classes also. Their centres of occupation will be distributed, and their freedom to live at some little distance from their work will be increased. Whether this will mean dotting the country with dull, ugly little streets, slum villages like Buckfastleigh in Devon, for example, or whether it may result in entirely different and novel aspects, is a point for which at present we are not ready. But it bears upon the question that ugliness and squalor upon the main road will appeal to the more prosperous for remedy with far more vigour than when they are stowed compactly in a slum. Enough has been said to demonstrate that old "town" and "city" will be, in truth, terms as obsolete as "mail coach." For these new areas that will grow out of them we want a term, and the administrative "urban district" presents itself with a convenient air of suggestion. We may for our present purposes call these coming town provinces "urban regions." Practically, by a process of confluence, the whole of Great Britain south of the Highlands seems destined to become such an urban region, laced all together not only by railway and telegraph, but by novel roads such as we forecast in the former chapter, and by a dense network of telephones, parcels delivery tubes, and the like nervous and arterial connections. It will certainly be a curious and varied region, far less monotonous than our present English world, still in its thinner regions, at any rate, wooded, perhaps rather more abundantly wooded, breaking continually into park and garden, and with everywhere a scattering of houses. These will not, as a rule, I should fancy, follow the fashion of the vulgar ready-built villas of the existing suburb, because the freedom people will be able to exercise in the choice of a site will rob the "building estate" promoter of his local advantage; in many cases the houses may very probably be personal homes, built for themselves as much as the Tudor manor-houses were, and even, in some cases, as æsthetically right. Each district, I am inclined to think, will develop its own differences of type and style. As one travels through the urban region, one will traverse open, breezy, "horsey" suburbs, smart white gates and palings everywhere, good turf, a Grand Stand shining pleasantly; gardening districts all set with gables and roses, holly hedges, and emerald lawns; pleasant homes among heathery moorlands and golf links, and river districts with gaily painted boat-houses peeping from the osiers. Then presently a gathering of houses closer together, and a promenade and a whiff of band and dresses, and then, perhaps, a little island of agriculture, hops, or strawberry gardens, fields of grey-plumed artichokes, white-painted orchard, or brightly neat poultry farm. Through the varied country the new wide roads will run, here cutting through a crest and there running like some colossal aqueduct across a valley, swarming always with a multitudinous traffic of bright, swift (and not necessarily ugly) mechanisms; and everywhere amidst the fields and trees linking wires will stretch from pole to pole. Ever and again there will appear a cluster of cottages--cottages into which we shall presently look more closely--about some works or workings, works, it may be, with the smoky chimney of to-day replaced by a gaily painted windwheel or waterwheel to gather and store the force for the machinery; and ever and again will come a little town, with its cherished ancient church or cathedral, its school buildings and museums, its railway-station, perhaps its fire-station, its inns and restaurants, and with all the wires of the countryside converging to its offices. All that is pleasant and fair of our present countryside may conceivably still be there among the other things. There is no reason why the essential charm of the country should disappear; the new roads will not supersede the present high roads, which will still be necessary for horses and subsidiary traffic; and the lanes and hedges, the field paths and wild flowers, will still have their ample justification. A certain lack of solitude there may be perhaps, and-- Will conspicuous advertisements play any part in the landscape?... But I find my pen is running ahead, an imagination prone to realistic constructions is struggling to paint a picture altogether prematurely. There is very much to be weighed and decided before we can get from our present generalization to the style of architecture these houses will show, and to the power and nature of the public taste. We have laid down now the broad lines of road, railway, and sea transit in the coming century, and we have got this general prophecy of "urban regions" established, and for the present that much must suffice. And as for the world beyond our urban regions? The same line of reasoning that leads to the expectation that the city will diffuse itself until it has taken up considerable areas and many of the characteristics, the greenness, the fresh air, of what is now country, leads us to suppose also that the country will take to itself many of the qualities of the city. The old antithesis will indeed cease, the boundary lines will altogether disappear; it will become, indeed, merely a question of more or less populous. There will be horticulture and agriculture going on within the "urban regions," and "urbanity" without them. Everywhere, indeed, over the land of the globe between the frozen circles, the railway and the new roads will spread, the net-work of communication wires and safe and convenient ways. To receive the daily paper a few hours late, to wait a day or so for goods one has ordered, will be the extreme measure of rusticity save in a few remote islands and inaccessible places. The character of the meshes in that wider network of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from the urban district, will vary with the soil, the climate and the tenure of the land--will vary, too, with the racial and national differences. But throughout all that follows, this mere relativity of the new sort of town to the new sort of country over which the new sorts of people we are immediately to consider will be scattered, must be borne in mind. * * * * * [At the risk of insistence, I must repeat that, so far, I have been studiously taking no account of the fact that there is such a thing as a boundary line or a foreigner in the world. It will be far the best thing to continue to do this until we can get out all that will probably happen universally or generally, and in particular the probable changes in social forces, social apparatus and internal political methods. We shall then come to the discussion of language, nationality and international conflicts, equipped with such an array of probabilities and possibilities as will enable us to guess at these special issues with an appearance of far more precision than would be the case if we considered them now.] FOOTNOTES: [13] It is true that many scholars estimate a high-water mark for the Roman population in excess of two millions; and one daring authority, by throwing out suburbs _ad libitum_ into the Campagna, suburbs of which no trace remains, has raised the two to ten. The Colosseum could, no doubt, seat over 80,000 spectators; the circuit of the bench frontage of the Circus Maximus was very nearly a mile in length, and the Romans of Imperial times certainly used ten times as much water as the modern Romans. But, on the other hand, habits change, and Rome as it is defined by lines drawn at the times of its greatest ascendancy--the city, that is, enclosed by the walls of Aurelian and including all the regiones of Augustus, an enclosure from which there could have been no reason for excluding half or more of its population--could have scarcely contained a million. It would have packed very comfortably within the circle of the Grands Boulevards of Paris--the Paris, that is, of Louis XIV., with a population of 560,000; and the Rome of to-day, were the houses that spread so densely over the once vacant Campus Martius distributed in the now deserted spaces in the south and east, and the Vatican suburb replaced within the ancient walls, would quite fill the ancient limits, in spite of the fact that the population is under 500,000. But these are incidental doubts on a very authoritative opinion, and, whatever their value, they do not greatly affect the significance of these new great cities, which have arisen all over the world, as if by the operation of a natural law, as the railways have developed. [14] It will be plain that such towns must have clearly defined limits of population, _dependant finally on the minimum yearly produce of the district they control_. If ever they rise above that limit the natural checks of famine, and of pestilence following enfeeblement, will come into operation, and they will always be kept near this limit by the natural tendency of humanity to increase. The limit would rise with increasing public intelligence, and the organization of the towns would become more definite. [15] I owe the fertilizing suggestion of this general principle to a paper by Grant Allen that I read long ago in _Longman's Magazine_. [16] It is worth remarking that in 1801 the density of population in the City of London was half as dense again as that of any district, even of the densest "slum" districts, to-day. [17] Be it noted that the phrase "available area" is used, and various other modifying considerations altogether waived for the present. [18] Their temporary suppression of the specialist is indeed carried to such an extent that one may see even such things as bronze ornaments and personal jewellery listed in Messrs. Omnium's list, and stored in list designs and pattern; and their assistants will inform you that their brooch, No. 175, is now "very much worn," without either blush or smile. [19] The present system of charging parcels by the pound, when goods are sold by the pound, and so getting a miserly profit in the packing, is surely one of the absurdest disregards of the obvious it is possible to imagine. III DEVELOPING SOCIAL ELEMENTS The mere differences in thickness of population and facility of movement that have been discussed thus far, will involve consequences remarkable enough, upon the _facies_ of the social body; but there are certain still broader features of the social order of the coming time, less intimately related to transit, that it will be convenient to discuss at this stage. They are essentially outcomes of the enormous development of mechanism which has been the cardinal feature of the nineteenth century; for this development, by altering the method and proportions of almost all human undertakings,[20] has altered absolutely the grouping and character of the groups of human beings engaged upon them. Throughout the world for forty centuries the more highly developed societies have always presented under a considerable variety of superficial differences certain features in common. Always at the base of the edifice, supporting all, subordinate to all, and the most necessary of all, there has been the working cultivator, peasant, serf, or slave. Save for a little water-power, a little use of windmills, the traction of a horse or mule, this class has been the source of all the work upon which the community depends. And, moreover, whatever labour town developments have demanded has been supplied by the muscle of its fecund ranks. It has been, in fact--and to some extent still is--the multitudinous living machinery of the old social order; it carried, cropped, tilled, built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owning this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often equestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility, in most European countries it is organized as a nobility; it is represented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and in China--the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organized social system the old order ever developed--it finds its equivalent in the members of a variously buttoned mandarinate, who ride, not on horses, but on a once adequate and still respectable erudition. These two primary classes may and do become in many cases complicated by subdivisions; the peasant class may split into farmers and labourers, the gentlemen admit a series of grades and orders, kings, dukes, earls, and the like, but the broad distinction remains intact, as though it was a distinction residing in the nature of things.[21] From the very dawn of history until the first beginnings of mechanism in the eighteenth century, this simple scheme of orders was the universal organization of all but savage humanity, and the chief substance of history until these later years has been in essence the perpetual endeavour of specific social systems of this type to attain in every region the locally suitable permanent form, in face of those two inveterate enemies of human stability, innovation, and that secular increase in population that security permits. The imperfection of the means of communication rendered political unions of a greater area than that swept by a hundred-mile radius highly unstable. It was a world of small states. Lax empires came and went, at the utmost they were the linking of practically autonomous states under a common _Pax_. Wars were usually wars between kingdoms, conflicts of this local experiment in social organization with that. Through all the historical period these two well-defined classes of gentle and simple acted and reacted upon each other, every individual in each class driven by that same will to live and do, that imperative of self-establishment and aggression that is the spirit of this world. Until the coming of gunpowder, the man on horseback--commonly with some sort of armour--was invincible in battle in the open. Wherever the land lay wide and unbroken, and the great lines of trade did not fall, there the horseman was master--or the clerkly man behind the horseman. Such a land was aristocratic and tended to form castes. The craftsman sheltered under a patron, and in guilds in a walled town, and the labourer was a serf. He was ruled over by his knight or by his creditor--in the end it matters little how the gentleman began. But where the land became difficult by reason of mountain or forest, or where water greatly intersected it, the pikeman or closer-fighting swordsman or the bowman could hold his own, and a democratic flavour, a touch of repudiation, was in the air. In such countries as Italy, Greece, the Alps, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, the two forces of the old order, the aristocrat and the common man, were in a state of unstable equilibrium through the whole period of history. A slight change[22] in the details of the conflict for existence could tilt the balance. A weapon a little better adapted to one class than the other, or a slight widening of the educational gap, worked out into historically imposing results, to dynastic changes, class revolutions and the passing of empires. Throughout it was essentially one phase of human organization. When one comes to examine the final result, it is astonishing to remark the small amount of essential change, of positively final and irreparable alteration, in the conditions of the common life. Consider, for example, how entirely in sympathy was the close of the eighteenth century with the epoch of Horace, and how closely equivalent were the various social aspects of the two periods. The literature of Rome was living reading in a sense that has suddenly passed away, it fitted all occasions, it conflicted with no essential facts in life. It was a commonplace of the thought of that time that all things recurred, all things circled back to their former seasons; there was nothing new under the sun. But now almost suddenly the circling has ceased, and we find ourselves breaking away. Correlated with the sudden development of mechanical forces that first began to be socially perceptible in the middle eighteenth century, has been the appearance of great masses of population, having quite novel functions and relations in the social body, and together with this appearance such a suppression, curtailment, and modification of the older classes, as to point to an entire disintegration of that system. The _facies_ of the social fabric has changed, and--as I hope to make clear--is still changing in a direction from which, without a total destruction and rebirth of that fabric, there can never be any return. The most striking of the new classes to emerge is certainly the shareholding class, the owners of a sort of property new in the world's history. Before the eighteenth century the only property of serious importance consisted of land and buildings. These were "real" estate. Beyond these things were live-stock, serfs, and the furnishings of real estate, the surface aspect of real estate, so to speak, personal property, ships, weapons, and the Semitic invention of money. All such property had to be actually "held" and administered by the owner, he was immediately in connection with it and responsible for it. He could leave it only precariously to a steward and manager, and to convey the revenue of it to him at a distance was a difficult and costly proceeding. To prevent a constant social disturbance by lapsing and dividing property, and in the absence of any organized agency to receive lapsed property, inheritance and preferably primogeniture were of such manifest advantage that the old social organization always tended in the direction of these institutions. Such usury as was practised relied entirely on the land and the anticipated agricultural produce of the land. But the usury and the sleeping partnerships of the Joint Stock Company system which took shape in the eighteenth and the earlier half of the nineteenth century opened quite unprecedented uses for money, and created a practically new sort of property and a new proprietor class. The peculiar novelty of this property is easily defined. Given a sufficient sentiment of public honesty, share property is property that can be owned at any distance and that yields its revenue without thought or care on the part of its proprietor; it is, indeed, absolutely irresponsible property, a thing that no old world property ever was. But, in spite of its widely different nature, the laws of inheritance that the social necessities of the old order of things established have been applied to this new species of possession without remark. It is indestructible, imperishable wealth, subject only to the mutations of value that economic changes bring about. Related in its character of absolute irresponsibility to this shareholding class is a kindred class that has grown with the growth of the great towns, the people who live upon ground rents. There is every indication that this element of irresponsible, independent, and wealthy people in the social body, people who feel the urgency of no exertion, the pressure of no specific positive duties, is still on the increase, and may still for a long time increasingly preponderate. It overshadows the responsible owner of real property or of real businesses altogether. And most of the old aristocrats, the old knightly and landholding people, have, so to speak, converted themselves into members of this new class. It is a class with scarcely any specific characteristics beyond its defining one, of the possession of property and all the potentialities property entails, with a total lack of function with regard to that property. It is not even collected into a distinct mass. It graduates insensibly into every other class, it permeates society as threads and veins of gold permeate quartz. It includes the millionaire snob, the political-minded plutocrat, the wealthy sensualist, open-handed religious fanatics, the "Charitable," the smart, the magnificently dull, the great army of timid creatures who tremble through life on a safe bare sufficiency,[23] travellers, hunters, minor poets, sporting enthusiasts, many of the officers in the British Army, and all sorts and conditions of amateurs. In a sense it includes several modern royalties, for the crown in several modern constitutional states is a _corporation sole_, and the monarch the unique, unlimited, and so far as necessity goes, quite functionless shareholder. He may be a heavy-eyed sensualist, a small-minded leader of fashion, a rival to his servants in the gay science of etiquette, a frequenter of race-courses and music-halls, a literary or scientific quack, a devotee, an amateur anything--the point is that his income and sustenance have no relation whatever to his activities. If he fancies it, or is urged to it by those who have influence over him, he may even "be a king!" But that is not compulsory, not essential, and there are practically no conditional restrictions whatever laid upon him. Those who belong to this shareholding class only partially, who partially depend upon dividends and partially upon activities, occur in every rank and order of the whole social body. The waiter one tips probably has a hundred or so in some remote company, the will of the eminent labour reformer reveals an admirably distributed series of investments, the bishop sells tea and digs coal, or at any rate gets a profit from some unknown persons tea-selling or coal-digging, to eke out the direct recompense of his own modest corn-treading. Indeed, above the labouring class, the number of individuals in the social body whose gross income is entirely the result of their social activities is very small. Previously in the world's history, saving a few quite exceptional aspects, the possession and retention of property was conditional upon activities of some sort, honest or dishonest, work, force, or fraud. But the shareholding ingredient of our new society, so far as its shareholding goes, has no need of strength or wisdom; the countless untraceable Owner of the modern world presents in a multitudinous form the image of a Merovingian king. The shareholder owns the world _de jure_, by the common recognition of the rights of property; and the incumbency of knowledge, management, and toil fall entirely to others. He toils not, neither does he spin; he is mechanically released from the penalty of the Fall, he reaps in a still sinful world all the practical benefits of a millennium--without any of its moral limitations. It will be well to glance at certain considerations which point to the by no means self-evident proposition, that this factor of irresponsible property is certain to be present in the social body a hundred years ahead. It has, no doubt, occurred to the reader that all the conditions of the shareholder's being unfit him for co-operative action in defence of the interests of his class. Since shareholders do nothing in common, except receive and hope for dividends, since they may be of any class, any culture, any disposition, or any level of capacity, since there is nothing to make them read the same papers, gather in the same places, or feel any sort of sympathy with each other beyond the universal sympathy of man for man, they will, one may anticipate, be incapable of any concerted action to defend the income they draw from society against any resolute attack. Such crude and obvious denials of the essential principles of their existence as the various Socialistic bodies have proclaimed have, no doubt, encountered a vast, unorganized, negative opposition from them, but the subtle and varied attack of natural forces they have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor the natural organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether too chaotic and diffused for positive defence. And the question of the prolonged existence of this comparatively new social phenomenon, either in its present or some modified form, turns, therefore, entirely on the quasi-natural laws of the social body. If they favour it, it will survive; when they do not, it will vanish as the mists of the morning before the sun. Neglecting a few exceptional older corporations which, indeed, in their essence are not usurious, but of unlimited liability, the shareholding body appeared first, in its present character, in the seventeenth century, and came to its full development in the mid-nineteenth. Was its appearance then due only to the attainment of a certain necessary degree of public credit, or was it correlated with any other force? It seems in accordance with facts to relate it to another force, the development of mechanism, so far as certain representative aspects go. Hitherto the only borrower had been the farmer, then the exploring trader had found a world too wide for purely individual effort, and then suddenly the craftsmen of all sorts and the carriers discovered the need of the new, great, wholesale, initially expensive appliances that invention was offering them. It was the development of mechanism that created the great bulk of modern shareholding, it took its present shape distinctively only with the appearance of the railways. The hitherto necessary but subordinate craftsman and merchant classes were to have new weapons, new powers, they were to develop to a new importance, to a preponderance even in the social body. But before they could attain these weapons, before this new and novel wealth could be set up, it had to pay its footing in an apportioned world, it had to buy its right to disturb the established social order. The dividend of the shareholder was the tribute the new enterprise had to pay the old wealth. The share was the manumission money of machinery. And essentially the shareholder represents and will continue to represent the responsible managing owner of a former state of affairs in process of supersession. If the great material developments of the nineteenth century had been final, if they had, indeed, constituted merely a revolution and not an absolute release from the fixed conditions about which human affairs circled, we might even now be settling accounts with our Merovingians as the socialists desire. But these developments were not final, and one sees no hint as yet of any coming finality. Invention runs free and our state is under its dominion. The novel is continually struggling to establish itself at the relative or absolute expense of the old. The statesman's conception of social organization is no longer stability but growth. And so long as material progress continues, this tribute must continue to be paid; so long as the stream of development flows, this necessary back eddy will endure. Even if we "municipalize" all sorts of undertakings we shall not alter the essential facts, we shall only substitute for the shareholder the corporation stockholder. The figure of an eddy is particularly appropriate. Enterprises will come and go, the relative values of kinds of wealth will alter, old appliances, old companies, will serve their time and fall in value, individuals will waste their substance, individual families and groups will die out, certain portions of the share property of the world may be gathered, by elaborate manipulation, into a more or less limited number of hands, conceivably even families and groups will be taxed out by graduated legacy duties and specially apportioned income taxes, but, for all such possible changes and modifications, the shareholding element will still endure, so long as our present progressive and experimental state of society obtains. And the very diversity, laxity, and weakness of the general shareholding element, which will work to prevent its organizing itself in the interests of its property, or of evolving any distinctive traditions or positive characters, will obviously prevent its obstructing the continual appearance of new enterprises, of new shareholders to replace the loss of its older constituents.... At the opposite pole of the social scale to that about which shareholding is most apparent, is a second necessary and quite inevitable consequence of the sudden transition that has occurred from a very nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one. This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great number of people without either property or any evident function in the social organism. This new ingredient is most apparent in the towns, it is frequently spoken of as the Urban Poor, but its characteristic traits are to be found also in the rural districts. For the most part its individuals are either criminal, immoral, parasitic in more or less irregular ways upon the more successful classes, or labouring, at something less than a regular bare subsistence wage, in a finally hopeless competition against machinery that is as yet not so cheap as their toil. It is, to borrow a popular phrase, the "submerged" portion of the social body, a leaderless, aimless multitude, a multitude of people drifting down towards the abyss. Essentially it consists of people who have failed to "catch on" to the altered necessities the development of mechanism has brought about, they are people thrown out of employment by machinery, thrown out of employment by the escape of industries along some newly opened line of communication to some remote part of the world, or born under circumstances that give them no opportunity of entering the world of active work. Into this welter of machine-superseded toil there topples the non-adaptable residue of every changing trade; its members marry and are given in marriage, and it is recruited by the spendthrifts, weaklings, and failures of every superior class. Since this class was not apparent in masses in the relatively static, relatively less eliminatory, society of former times, its appearance has given rise to a belief that the least desirable section of the community has become unprecedentedly prolific, that there is now going on a "Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit." But sooner or later, as every East End doctor knows, the ways of the social abyss lead to death, the premature death of the individual, or death through the death or infertility of the individual's stunted offspring, or death through that extinction which moral perversion involves. It is a recruited class, not a breeding multitude. Whatever expedients may be resorted to, to mitigate or conceal the essential nature of this social element, it remains in its essence wherever social progress is being made, the contingent of death. Humanity has set out in the direction of a more complex and exacting organization, and until, by a foresight to me at least inconceivable, it can prevent the birth of just all the inadaptable, useless, or merely unnecessary creatures in each generation, there must needs continue to be, in greater or less amount, this individually futile struggle beneath the feet of the race; somewhere and in some form there must still persist those essentials that now take shape as the slum, the prison, and the asylum. All over the world, as the railway network has spread, in Chicago and New York as vividly as in London or Paris, the commencement of the new movement has been marked at once by the appearance of this bulky irremovable excretion, the appearance of these gall stones of vicious, helpless, and pauper masses. There seems every reason to suppose that this phenomenon of unemployed citizens, who are, in fact, unemployable, will remain present as a class, perishing individually and individually renewed, so long as civilization remains progressive and experimental upon its present lines. Their drowning existences may be utilized, the crude hardship of their lot may be concealed or mitigated,[24] they may react upon the social fabric that is attempting to eliminate them, in very astounding ways, but their presence and their individual doom, it seems to me, will be unavoidable--at any rate, for many generations of men. They are an integral part of this physiological process of mechanical progress, as inevitable in the social body as are waste matters and disintegrating cells in the body of an active and healthy man. The appearance of these two strange functionless elements, although the most striking symptom of the new phase of progressive mechanical civilization now beginning, is by no means the most essential change in progress. These appearances involve also certain disappearances. I have already indicated pretty clearly that the vast irregular development of irresponsible wealthy people is swallowing up and assimilating more and more the old class of administrative land-owning gentlemen in all their grades and degrees. The old upper class, as a functional member of the State, is being effaced. And I have also suggested that the old lower class, the broad necessary base of the social pyramid, the uneducated inadaptable peasants and labourers, is, with the development of toil-saving machinery, dwindling and crumbling down bit by bit towards the abyss. But side by side with these two processes is a third process of still profounder significance, and that is the reconstruction and the vast proliferation of what constituted the middle class of the old order. It is now, indeed, no longer a middle class at all. Rather all the definite classes in the old scheme of functional precedence have melted and mingled,[25] and in the molten mass there has appeared a vast intricate confusion of different sorts of people, some sailing about upon floating masses of irresponsible property, some buoyed by smaller fragments, some clinging desperately enough to insignificant atoms, a great and varied multitude swimming successfully without aid, or with an amount of aid that is negligible in relation to their own efforts, and an equally varied multitude of less capable ones clinging to the swimmers, clinging to the floating rich, or clutching empty-handed and thrust and sinking down. This is the typical aspect of the modern community. It will serve as a general description of either the United States or any western European State, and the day is not far distant when the extension of means of communication, and of the shareholding method of conducting affairs, will make it applicable to the whole world. Save, possibly, in a few islands and inaccessible places and regardless of colour or creed, this process of deliquescence seems destined to spread. In a great diversity of tongues, in the phases of a number of conflicting moral and theological traditions, in the varying tones of contrasting racial temperaments, the grandchildren of black and white, and red and brown, will be seeking more or less consciously to express themselves in relation to these new and unusual social conditions. But the change itself is no longer amenable to their interpretations, the world-wide spreading of swift communication, the obliteration of town and country, the deliquescence of the local social order, have an air of being processes as uncontrollable by such collective intelligence as men can at present command, and as indifferent to his local peculiarities and prejudices as the movements of winds and tides.... It will be obvious that the interest of this speculation, at any rate, centres upon this great intermediate mass of people who are neither passively wealthy, the sleeping partners of change, nor helplessly thrust out of the process. Indeed, from our point of view--an inquiry into coming things--these non-effective masses would have but the slightest interest were it not for their enormous possibilities of reaction upon the really living portion of the social organism. This really living portion seems at first sight to be as deliquescent in its nature, to be drifting down to as chaotic a structure as either the non-functional owners that float above it or the unemployed who sink below. What were once the definite subdivisions of the middle class modify and lose their boundaries. The retail tradesman of the towns, for example--once a fairly homogeneous class throughout Europe--expands here into vast store companies, and dwindles there to be an agent or collector, seeks employment or topples outright into the abyss. But under a certain scrutiny one can detect here what we do not detect in our other two elements, and that is that, going on side by side with the processes of dissolution and frequently masked by these, there are other processes by which men, often of the most diverse parentage and antecedent traditions, are being segregated into a multitude of specific new groups which may presently develop very distinctive characters and ideals. There are, for example, the unorganized myriads that one can cover by the phrase "mechanics and engineers," if one uses it in its widest possible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describe such a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universally applicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced, oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough, until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his additions of crockery and plumbing, the electrical engineer with his little tests and wires, the mining engineer, the railway maker, the motor builder, and the irrigation expert. Even if we take some specific branch of all this huge mass of new employment the coming of mechanism has brought with it, we still find an undigested miscellany. Consider the rude levy that is engaged in supplying and repairing the world's new need of bicycles! Wheelwrights, watchmakers, blacksmiths, music-dealers, drapers, sewing-machine repairers, smart errand boys, ironmongers, individuals from all the older aspects of engineering, have been caught up by the new development, are all now, with a more or less inadequate knowledge and training, working in the new service. But is it likely that this will remain a rude levy? From all these varied people the world requires certain things, and a failure to obtain them involves, sooner or later, in this competitive creation, an individual replacement and a push towards the abyss. The very lowest of them must understand the machine they contribute to make and repair, and not only is it a fairly complex machine in itself, but it is found in several types and patterns, and so far it has altered, and promises still to alter, steadily, by improvements in this part and that. No limited stock-in-trade of knowledge, such as suffices for a joiner or an ostler, will serve. They must keep on mastering new points, new aspects, they must be intelligent and adaptable, they must get a grasp of that permanent something that lies behind the changing immediate practice. In other words, they will have to be educated rather than trained after the fashion of the old craftsman. Just now this body of irregulars is threatened by the coming of the motors. The motors promise new difficulties, new rewards, and new competition. It is an ill look-out for the cycle mechanic who is not prepared to tackle the new problems that will arise. For all this next century this particular body of mechanics will be picking up new recruits and eliminating the incompetent and the rule-of-thumb sage. Can it fail, as the years pass, to develop certain general characters, to become so far homogeneous as to be generally conscious of the need of a scientific education, at any rate in mechanical and chemical matters, and to possess, down to its very lowest ranks and orders, a common fund of intellectual training? But the makers and repairers of cycles, and that larger multitude that will presently be concerned with motors, are, after all, only a small and specialized section of the general body of mechanics and engineers. Every year, with the advance of invention, new branches of activity, that change in their nature and methods all too rapidly for the establishment of rote and routine workers of the old type, call together fresh levies of amateurish workers and learners who must surely presently develop into, or give place to, bodies of qualified and capable men. And the point I would particularly insist upon here is, that throughout all its ranks and ramifications, from the organizing heads of great undertakings down to the assistant in the local repair shop, this new, great, and expanding body of mechanics and engineers will tend to become an educated and adaptable class in a sense that the craftsmen of former times were not educated and adaptable. Just how high the scientific and practical education may rise in the central levels of this body is a matter for subsequent speculation, just how much initiative will be found in the lowest ranks depends upon many very complex considerations. But that here we have at least the possibility, the primary creative conditions of a new, numerous, intelligent, educated, and capable social element is, I think, a proposition with which the reader will agree. What are the chief obstacles in the way of the emergence, from out the present chaos, of this social element equipped, organized, educated, conscious of itself and of distinctive aims, in the next hundred years? In the first place there is the spirit of trade unionism, the conservative contagion of the old craftsmanship. Trade Unions arose under the tradition of the old order, when in every business, employer and employed stood in marked antagonism, stood as a special instance of the universal relationship of gentle or intelligent, who supplied no labour, and simple, who supplied nothing else. The interest of the employer was to get as much labour as possible out of his hirelings; the complementary object in life of the hireling, whose sole function was drudgery, who had no other prospect until death, was to give as little to his employer as possible. In order to keep the necessary labourer submissive, it was a matter of public policy to keep him uneducated and as near the condition of a beast of burden as possible, and in order to keep his life tolerable against that natural increase which all the moral institutions of his state promoted, the labourer--stimulated if his efforts slackened by the touch of absolute misery--was forced to devise elaborate rules for restricting the hours of toil, making its performance needlessly complex, and shirking with extreme ingenuity and conscientiousness. In the older trades, of which the building trade is foremost, these two traditions, reinforced by unimaginative building regulations, have practically arrested any advance whatever.[26] There can be no doubt that this influence has spread into what are practically new branches of work. Even where new conveniences have called for new types of workmen and have opened the way for the elevation of a group of labourers to the higher level of versatile educated men,[27] the old traditions have to a very large extent prevailed. The average sanitary plumber of to-day in England insists upon his position as a mere labourer as though it were some precious thing, he guards himself from improvement as a virtuous woman guards her honour, he works for specifically limited hours and by the hour with specific limitations in the practice of his trade, on the fairly sound assumption that but for that restriction any fool might do plumbing as well as he; whatever he learns he learns from some other plumber during his apprenticeship years--after which he devotes himself to doing the minimum of work in the maximum of time until his brief excursion into this mysterious universe is over. So far from invention spurring him onward, every improvement in sanitary work in England, at least, is limited by the problem whether "the men" will understand it. A person ingenious enough to exceed this sacred limit might as well hang himself as trouble about the improvement of plumbing. If England stood alone, I do not see why each of the new mechanical and engineering industries, so soon as it develops sufficiently to have gathered together a body of workers capable of supporting a Trade Union secretary, should not begin to stagnate in the same manner. Only England does not stand alone, and the building trade is so far not typical, inasmuch as it possesses a national monopoly that the most elaborate system of protection cannot secure any other group of trades. One must have one's house built where one has to live, the importation of workmen in small bodies is difficult and dear, and if one cannot have the house one wishes, one must needs have the least offensive substitute; but bicycle and motor, iron-work and furniture, engines, rails, and ships one can import. The community, therefore, that does least to educate its mechanics and engineers out of the base and servile tradition of the old idea of industry will in the coming years of progress simply get a disproportionate share of the rejected element, the trade will go elsewhere, and the community will be left in possession of an exceptionally large contingent for the abyss. At present, however, I am dealing not with the specific community, but with the generalized civilized community of A.D. 2000--we disregard the fate of states and empires for a time--and, for that emergent community, wherever it may be, it seems reasonable to anticipate, replacing and enormously larger and more important than the classes of common workmen and mechanics of to-day, a large fairly homogeneous body--big men and little men, indeed, but with no dividing lines--of more or less expert mechanics and engineers, with a certain common minimum of education and intelligence, and probably a common-class consciousness--a new body, a new force, in the world's history. For this body to exist implies the existence of much more than the primary and initiating nucleus of engineers and skilled mechanics. If it is an educated class, its existence implies a class of educators, and just as far as it does get educated the schoolmasters will be skilled and educated men. The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of the England of to-day, in--or a little way out of--orders, with his smattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuous mathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparable snobbishness, certainly does not represent the schoolmaster of this coming class. Moreover, the new element will necessarily embody its collective, necessarily distinctive, and unprecedented thoughts in a literature of its own, its development means the development of a new sort of writer and of new elements in the press. And since, if it does emerge, a revolution in the common schools of the community will be a necessary part of the process, then its emergence will involve a revolutionary change in the condition of classes that might otherwise remain as they are now--the older craftsman, for example. The process of attraction will not end even there; the development of more and more scientific engineering and of really adaptable operatives will render possible agricultural contrivances that are now only dreams, and the diffusion of this new class over the country side--assuming the reasoning in my second chapter to be sound--will bring the lever of the improved schools under the agriculturist. The practically autonomous farm of the old epoch will probably be replaced by a great variety of types of cultivation, each with its labour-saving equipment. In this, as in most things, the future spells variation. The practical abolition of impossible distances over the world will tend to make every district specialize in the production for which it is best fitted, and to develop that production with an elaborate precision and economy. The chief opposing force to this tendency will be found in those countries where the tenure of the land is in small holdings. A population of small agriculturists that has really got itself well established is probably as hopelessly immovable a thing as the forces of progressive change will have to encounter. The Arcadian healthiness and simplicity of the small holder, and the usefulness of little hands about him, naturally results in his keeping the population on his plot up to the limit of bare subsistence. He avoids over-education, and his beasts live with him and his children in a natural kindly manner. He will have no idlers, and even grand-mamma goes weeding. His nett produce is less than the production of the larger methods, but his gross is greater, and usually it is mortgaged more or less. Along the selvage of many of the new roads we have foretold, his hens will peck and his children beg, far into the coming decades. This simple, virtuous, open-air life is to be found ripening in the north of France and Belgium, it culminated in Ireland in the famine years, it has held its own in China--with a use of female infanticide--for immemorable ages, and a number of excellent persons are endeavouring to establish it in England at the present time. At the Cape of Good Hope, under British rule, Kaffirs are being settled upon little inalienable holdings that must inevitably develop in the same direction, and over the Southern States the nigger squats and multiplies. It is fairly certain that these stagnant ponds of population, which will grow until public intelligence rises to the pitch of draining them, will on a greater scale parallel in the twentieth century the soon-to-be-dispersed urban slums of the nineteenth. But I do not see how they can obstruct, more than locally, the reorganization of agriculture and horticulture upon the ampler and more economical lines mechanism permits, or prevent the development of a type of agriculturist as adaptable, alert, intelligent, unprejudiced, and modest as the coming engineer. Another great section of the community, the military element, will also fall within the attraction of this possible synthesis, and will inevitably undergo profound modification. Of the probable development of warfare a later chapter shall treat, and here it will suffice to point out that at present science stands proffering the soldier vague, vast possibilities of mechanism, and, so far, he has accepted practically nothing but rifles which he cannot sight and guns that he does not learn to move about. It is quite possible the sailor would be in the like case, but for the exceptional conditions that begot ironclads in the American Civil War. Science offers the soldier transport that he does not use, maps he does not use, entrenching devices, road-making devices, balloons and flying scouts, portable foods, security from disease, a thousand ways of organizing the horrible uncertainties of war. But the soldier of to-day--I do not mean the British soldier only--still insists on regarding these revolutionary appliances as mere accessories, and untrustworthy ones at that, to the time-honoured practice of his art. He guards his technical innocence like a plumber. Every European army is organized on the lines of the once fundamental distinction of the horse and foot epoch, in deference to the contrast of gentle and simple. There is the officer, with all the traditions of old nobility, and the men still, by a hundred implications, mere sources of mechanical force, and fundamentally base. The British Army, for example, still cherishes the tradition that its privates are absolutely illiterate, and such small instruction as is given them in the art of war is imparted by bawling and enforced by abuse upon public drill grounds. Almost all discussion of military matters still turns upon the now quite stupid assumption that there are two primary military arms and no more, horse and foot. "Cyclists are infantry," the War Office manual of 1900 gallantly declares in the face of this changing universe. After fifty years of railways, there still does not exist, in a world which is said to be over devoted to military affairs, a skilled and organized body of men, specially prepared to seize, repair, reconstruct, work, and fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars between European powers, prepared and organized to accept the old conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leave the art of war essentially unmodified, but sooner or later--it may be in the improvised struggle that follows the collapse of some one of these huge, witless, fighting forces--the new sort of soldier will emerge, a sober, considerate, engineering man--no more of a gentleman than the man subordinated to him or any other self-respecting person.... Certain interesting side questions I may glance at here, only for the present, at least, to set them aside unanswered, the reaction, for example, of this probable development of a great mass of educated and intelligent efficients upon the status and quality of the medical profession, and the influence of its novel needs in either modifying the existing legal body or calling into being a parallel body of more expert and versatile guides and assistants in business operations. But from the mention of this latter section one comes to another possible centre of aggregation in the social welter. Opposed in many of their most essential conditions to the capable men who are of primary importance in the social body, is the great and growing variety of non-productive but active men who are engaged in more or less necessary operations of organization, promotion, advertisement, and trade. There are the business managers, public and private, the political organizers, brokers, commission agents, the varying grades of financier down to the mere greedy camp followers of finance, the gamblers pure and simple, and the great body of their dependent clerks, typewriters, and assistants. All this multitude will have this much in common, that it will be dealing, not with the primary inexorable logic of natural laws, but with the shifting, uncertain prejudices and emotions of the general mass of people. It will be wary and cunning rather than deliberate and intelligent, smart rather than prompt, considering always the appearance and effect before the reality and possibilities of things. It will probably tend to form a culture about the political and financial operator as its ideal and central type, opposed to, and conflicting with, the forces of attraction that will tend to group the new social masses about the scientific engineer.[28]... Here, then (in the vision of the present writer), are the main social elements of the coming time: (i.) the element of irresponsible property; (ii.) the helpless superseded poor, that broad base of mere toilers now no longer essential; (iii.) a great inchoate mass of more or less capable people engaged more or less consciously in applying the growing body of scientific knowledge to the general needs, a great mass that will inevitably tend to organize itself in a system of interdependent educated classes with a common consciousness and aim, but which may or may not succeed in doing so; and (iv.) a possibly equally great number of non-productive persons living in and by the social confusion. All these elements will be mingled confusedly together, passing into one another by insensible gradations, scattered over the great urban regions and intervening areas our previous anticipations have sketched out. Moreover, they are developing, as it were unconsciously, under the stimulus of mechanical developments, and with the bandages of old tradition hampering their movements. The laws they obey, the governments they live under, are for the most part laws made and governments planned before the coming of steam. The areas of administration are still areas marked out by conditions of locomotion as obsolete as the quadrupedal method of the pre-arboreal ancestor. In Great Britain, for example, the political constitution, the balance of estates and the balance of parties, preserves the compromise of long-vanished antagonisms. The House of Lords is a collection of obsolete territorial dignitaries fitfully reinforced by the bishops and a miscellany (in no sense representative) of opulent moderns; the House of Commons is the seat of a party conflict, a faction fight of initiated persons, that has long ceased to bear any real relation to current social processes. The members of the lower chamber are selected by obscure party machines operating upon constituencies almost all of which have long since become too vast and heterogeneous to possess any collective intelligence or purpose at all. In theory the House of Commons guards the interests of classes that are, in fact, rapidly disintegrating into a number of quite antagonistic and conflicting elements. The new mass of capable men, of which the engineers are typical, these capable men who must necessarily be the active principle of the new mechanically equipped social body, finds no representation save by accident in either assembly. The man who has concerned himself with the public health, with army organization, with educational improvement, or with the vital matters of transport and communication, if he enter the official councils of the kingdom at all, must enter ostensibly as the guardian of the interests of the free and independent electors of a specific district that has long ceased to have any sort of specific interests at all.[29]... And the same obsolescence that is so conspicuous in the general institutions of the official kingdom of England, and that even English people can remark in the official empire of China, is to be traced in a greater or lesser degree in the nominal organization and public tradition throughout the whole world. The United States, for example, the social mass which has perhaps advanced furthest along the new lines, struggles in the iron bonds of a constitution that is based primarily on a conception of a number of comparatively small, internally homogeneous, agricultural states, a bunch of pre-Johannesburg Transvaals, communicating little, and each constituting a separate autonomous democracy of free farmers--slaveholding or slaveless. Every country in the world, indeed, that is organized at all, has been organized with a view to stability within territorial limits; no country has been organized with any foresight of development and inevitable change, or with the slightest reference to the practical revolution in topography that the new means of transit involve. And since this is so, and since humanity is most assuredly embarked upon a series of changes of which we know as yet only the opening phases, a large part of the history of the coming years will certainly record more or less conscious endeavours to adapt these obsolete and obsolescent contrivances for the management of public affairs to the new and continually expanding and changing requirements of the social body, to correct or overcome the traditions that were once wisdom and which are now obstruction, and to burst the straining boundaries that were sufficient for the ancient states. There are here no signs of a millennium. Internal reconstruction, while men are still limited, egotistical, passionate, ignorant, and ignorantly led, means seditions and revolutions, and the rectification of frontiers means wars. But before we go on to these conflicts and wars certain general social reactions must be considered. FOOTNOTES: [20] Even the characteristic conditions of writing books, that least mechanical of pursuits, have been profoundly affected by the typewriter. [21] To these two primary classes the more complicated societies have added others. There is the priest, almost always in the social order of the pre-railway period, an integral part, a functional organ of the social body, and there are the lawyer and the physician. And in the towns--constituting, indeed, the towns--there appear, as an outgrowth of the toiling class, a little emancipated from the gentleman's direct control, the craftsman, the merchant, and the trading sailor, essentially accessory classes, producers of, and dealers in, the accessories of life, and mitigating and clouding only very slightly that broad duality. [22] Slight, that is, in comparison with nineteenth-century changes. [23] It included, one remembers, Schopenhauer, but, as he remarked upon occasion, not Hegel. [24] A very important factor in this mitigation, a factor over which the humanely minded cannot too greatly rejoice, will be the philanthropic amusements of the irresponsible wealthy. There is a growing class of energetic people--organizers, secretaries, preachers--who cater to the philanthropic instinct, and who are, for all practical purposes, employing a large and increasing section of suitable helpless people, in supplying to their customers, by means of religious acquiescence and light moral reforms, that sense of well-doing which is one of the least objectionable of the functionless pleasures of life. The attempts to reinstate these failures by means of subsidized industries will, in the end, of course, merely serve to throw out of employment other just subsisting strugglers; it will probably make little or no difference in the nett result of the process. [25] I reserve any consideration of the special case of the "priest." [26] I find it incredible that there will not be a sweeping revolution in the methods of building during the next century. The erection of a house-wall, come to think of it, is an astonishingly tedious and complex business; the final result exceedingly unsatisfactory. It has been my lot recently to follow in detail the process of building a private dwelling-house, and the solemn succession of deliberate, respectable, perfectly satisfied men, who have contributed each so many days of his life to this accumulation of weak compromises, has enormously intensified my constitutional amazement at my fellow-creatures. The chief ingredient in this particular house-wall is the common brick, burnt earth, and but one step from the handfuls of clay of the ancestral mud hut, small in size and permeable to damp. Slowly, day by day, the walls grew tediously up, to a melody of tinkling trowels. These bricks are joined by mortar, which is mixed in small quantities, and must vary very greatly in its quality and properties throughout the house. In order to prevent the obvious evils of a wall of porous and irregular baked clay and lime mud, a damp course of tarred felt, which cannot possibly last more than a few years, was inserted about a foot from the ground. Then the wall, being quite insufficient to stand the heavy drift of weather to which it is exposed, was dabbled over with two coatings of plaster on the outside, the outermost being given a primitive picturesqueness by means of a sham surface of rough-cast pebbles and white-wash, while within, to conceal the rough discomfort of the surface, successive coatings of plaster, and finally, paper, were added, with a wood-skirting at the foot thrice painted. Everything in this was hand work, the laying of the bricks, the dabbing of the plaster, the smoothing of the paper; it is a house built of hands--and some I saw were bleeding hands--just as in the days of the pyramids, when the only engines were living men. The whole confection is now undergoing incalculable chemical reactions between its several parts. Lime, mortar, and microscopical organisms are producing undesigned chromatic effects in the paper and plaster; the plaster, having methods of expansion and contraction of its own, crinkles and cracks; the skirting, having absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream at last of much more revolutionary affairs, of a thing running to and fro along a temporary rail, that will squeeze out wall as one squeezes paint from a tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets. Moreover, I do not see at all why the walls of small dwelling-houses should be so solid as they are. There still hangs about us the monumental traditions of the pyramids. It ought to be possible to build sound, portable, and habitable houses of felted wire-netting and weather-proofed paper upon a light framework. This sort of thing is, no doubt, abominably ugly at present, but that is because architects and designers, being for the most part inordinately cultured and quite uneducated, are unable to cope with its fundamentally novel problems. A few energetic men might at any time set out to alter all this. And with the inevitable revolutions that must come about in domestic fittings, and which I hope to discuss more fully in the next paper, it is open to question whether many ground landlords may not find they have work for the house-breakers rather than wealth unlimited falling into their hands when the building leases their solicitors so ingeniously draw up do at last expire. [27] The new aspects of building, for example, that have been brought about by the entrance of water and gas into the house, and the application of water to sanitation. [28] The future of the servant class and the future of the artist are two interesting questions that will be most conveniently mentioned at a later stage, when we come to discuss the domestic life in greater detail than is possible before we have formed any clear notion of the sort of people who will lead that life. [29] Even the physical conditions under which the House of Commons meets and plays at government, are ridiculously obsolete. Every disputable point is settled by a division, a bell rings, there is shouting and running, the members come blundering into the chamber and sort themselves with much loutish shuffling and shoving into the division lobbies. They are counted, as illiterate farmers count sheep; amidst much fuss and confusion they return to their places, and the tellers vociferate the result. The waste of time over these antics is enormous, and they are often repeated many times in an evening. For the lack of time, the House of Commons is unable to perform the most urgent and necessary legislative duties--it has this year hung up a cryingly necessary Education Bill, a delay that will in the end cost Great Britain millions--but not a soul in it has had the necessary common sense to point out that an electrician and an expert locksmith could in a few weeks, and for a few hundred pounds, devise and construct a member's desk and key, committee-room tapes and voting-desks, and a general recording apparatus, that would enable every member within the precincts to vote, and that would count, record, and report the votes within the space of a couple of minutes. IV CERTAIN SOCIAL REACTIONS We are now in a position to point out and consider certain general ways in which the various factors and elements in the deliquescent society of the present time will react one upon another, and to speculate what definite statements, if any, it may seem reasonable to make about the individual people of the year 2000--or thereabouts--from the reaction of these classes we have attempted to define. To begin with, it may prove convenient to speculate upon the trend of development of that class about which we have the most grounds for certainty in the coming time. The shareholding class, the rout of the Abyss, the speculator, may develop in countless ways according to the varying development of exterior influences upon them, but of the most typical portion of the central body, the section containing the scientific engineering or scientific medical sort of people, we can postulate certain tendencies with some confidence. Certain ways of thought they must develop, certain habits of mind and eye they will radiate out into the adjacent portions of the social mass. We can even, I think, deduce some conception of the home in which a fairly typical example of this body will be living within a reasonable term of years. The mere fact that a man is an engineer or a doctor, for example, should imply now, and certainly will imply in the future, that he has received an education of a certain definite type; he will have a general acquaintance with the scientific interpretation of the universe, and he will have acquired certain positive and practical habits of mind. If the methods of thought of any individual in this central body are not practical and positive, he will tend to drift out of it to some more congenial employment. He will almost necessarily have a strong imperative to duty quite apart from whatever theological opinions he may entertain, because if he has not such an inherent imperative, life will have very many more alluring prospects than this. His religious conclusions, whatever they may be, will be based upon some orderly theological system that must have honestly admitted and reconciled his scientific beliefs; the emotional and mystical elements in his religion will be subordinate or absent. Essentially he will be a moral man, certainly so far as to exercise self-restraint and live in an ordered way. Unless this is so, he will be unable to give his principal energies to thought and work--that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,--a point we must leave open here--it will appear without any trappings of sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's sake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession to the flesh necessary to secure efficiency. Assuming in our typical case that pure indulgence does not appear or flares and passes, then either he will be single or more or less married. The import of that "more or less" will be discussed later, for the present we may very conveniently conceive him married under the traditional laws of Christendom. Having a mind considerably engaged, he will not have the leisure for a wife of the distracting, perplexing personality kind, and in our typical case, which will be a typically sound and successful one, we may picture him wedded to a healthy, intelligent, and loyal person, who will be her husband's companion in their common leisure, and as mother of their three or four children and manager of his household, as much of a technically capable individual as himself. He will be a father of several children, I think, because his scientific mental basis will incline him to see the whole of life as a struggle to survive; he will recognize that a childless, sterile life, however pleasant, is essentially failure and perversion, and he will conceive his honour involved in the possession of offspring. Such a couple will probably dress with a view to decent convenience, they will not set the fashions, as I shall presently point out, but they will incline to steady and sober them, they will avoid exciting colour contrasts and bizarre contours. They will not be habitually promenaders, or greatly addicted to theatrical performances; they will probably find their secondary interests--the cardinal one will of course be the work in hand--in a not too imaginative prose literature, in travel and journeys and in the less sensuous aspects of music. They will probably take a considerable interest in public affairs. Their _ménage_, which will consist of father, mother, and children, will, I think, in all probability, be servantless. They will probably not keep a servant for two very excellent reasons, because in the first place they will not want one, and in the second they will not get one if they do. A servant is necessary in the small, modern house, partly to supplement the deficiencies of the wife, but mainly to supplement the deficiencies of the house. She comes to cook and perform various skilled duties that the wife lacks either knowledge or training, or both, to perform regularly and expeditiously. Usually it must be confessed that the servant in the small household fails to perform these skilled duties completely. But the great proportion of the servant's duties consists merely in drudgery that the stupidities of our present-day method of house construction entail, and which the more sanely constructed house of the future will avoid. Consider, for instance, the wanton disregard of avoidable toil displayed in building houses with a service basement without lifts! Then most dusting and sweeping would be quite avoidable if houses were wiselier done. It is the lack of proper warming appliances which necessitates a vast amount of coal carrying and dirt distribution, and it is this dirt mainly that has so painfully to be removed again. The house of the future will probably be warmed in its walls from some power-generating station, as, indeed, already very many houses are lit at the present day. The lack of sane methods of ventilation also enhances the general dirtiness and dustiness of the present-day home, and gas-lighting and the use of tarnishable metals, wherever possible, involve further labour. But air will enter the house of the future through proper tubes in the walls, which will warm it and capture its dust, and it will be spun out again by a simple mechanism. And by simple devices such sweeping as still remains necessary can be enormously lightened. The fact that in existing homes the skirting meets the floor at right angles makes sweeping about twice as troublesome as it will be when people have the sense and ability to round off the angle between wall and floor. So one great lump of the servant's toil will practically disappear. Two others are already disappearing. In many houses there are still the offensive duties of filling lamps and blacking boots to be done. Our coming house, however, will have no lamps to need filling, and, as for the boots, really intelligent people will feel the essential ugliness of wearing the evidence of constant manual toil upon their persons. They will wear sorts of shoes and boots that can be cleaned by wiping in a minute or so. Take now the bedroom work. The lack of ingenuity in sanitary fittings at present forbids the obvious convenience of hot and cold water supply to the bedroom, and there is a mighty fetching and carrying of water and slops to be got through daily. All that will cease. Every bedroom will have its own bath-dressing room which any well-bred person will be intelligent and considerate enough to use and leave without the slightest disarrangement. This, so far as "upstairs" goes, really only leaves bedmaking to be done, and a bed does not take five minutes to make. Downstairs a vast amount of needless labour at present arises out of table wear. "Washing up" consists of a tedious cleansing and wiping of each table utensil in turn, whereas it should be possible to immerse all dirty table wear in a suitable solvent for a few minutes and then run that off for the articles to dry. The application of solvents to window cleaning, also, would be a possible thing but for the primitive construction of our windows, which prevents anything but a painful rub, rub, rub, with the leather. A friend of mine in domestic service tells me that this rubbing is to get the window dry, and this seems to be the general impression, but I think it incorrect. The water is not an adequate solvent, and enough cannot be used under existing conditions. Consequently, if the window is cleaned and left wet, it dries in drops, and these drops contain dirt in solution which remain as spots. But water containing a suitable solvent could quite simply be made to run down a window for a few minutes from pinholes in a pipe above into a groove below, and this could be followed by pure rain water for an equal time, and in this way the whole window cleaning in the house could, I imagine, be reduced to the business of turning on a tap. There remains the cooking. To-day cooking, with its incidentals, is a very serious business; the coaling, the ashes, the horrible moments of heat, the hot black things to handle, the silly vague recipes, the want of neat apparatus, and the want of intelligence to demand or use neat apparatus. One always imagines a cook working with a crimsoned face and bare blackened arms. But with a neat little range, heated by electricity and provided with thermometers, with absolutely controllable temperatures and proper heat screens, cooking might very easily be made a pleasant amusement for intelligent invalid ladies. Which reminds one, by-the-by, as an added detail to our previous sketch of the scenery of the days to come, that there will be no chimneys at all to the house of the future of this type, except the flue for the kitchen smells.[30] This will not only abolish the chimney stack, but make the roof a clean and pleasant addition to the garden spaces of the home. I do not know how long all these things will take to arrive. The erection of a series of experimental labour-saving houses by some philanthropic person, for exhibition and discussion, would certainly bring about a very extraordinary advance in domestic comfort even in the immediate future, but the fashions in philanthropy do not trend in such practical directions; if they did, the philanthropic person would probably be too amenable to flattery to escape the pushful patentee and too sensitive to avail himself of criticism (which rarely succeeds in being both penetrating and polite), and it will probably be many years before the cautious enterprise of advertising firms approximates to the economies that are theoretically possible to-day. But certainly the engineering and medical sorts of person will be best able to appreciate the possibilities of cutting down the irksome labours of the contemporary home, and most likely to first demand and secure them. The wife of this ideal home may probably have a certain distaste for vicarious labour, that so far as the immediate minimum of duties goes will probably carry her through them. There will be few servants obtainable for the small homes of the future, and that may strengthen her sentiments. Hardly any woman seems to object to a system of things which provides that another woman should be made rough-handed and kept rough-minded for her sake, but with the enormous diffusion of levelling information that is going on, a perfectly valid objection will probably come from the other side in this transaction. The servants of the past and the only good servants of to-day are the children of servants or the children of the old labour base of the social pyramid, until recently a necessary and self-respecting element in the State. Machinery has smashed that base and scattered its fragments; the tradition of self-respecting inferiority is being utterly destroyed in the world. The contingents of the Abyss, even, will not supply daughters for this purpose. In the community of the United States no native-born race of white servants has appeared, and the emancipated young negress degenerates towards the impossible--which is one of the many stimulants to small ingenuities that may help very powerfully to give that nation the industrial leadership of the world. The servant of the future, if indeed she should still linger in the small household, will be a person alive to a social injustice and the unsuccessful rival of the wife. Such servants as wealth will retain will be about as really loyal and servile as hotel waiters, and on the same terms. For the middling sort of people in the future maintaining a separate _ménage_ there is nothing for it but the practically automatic house or flat, supplemented, perhaps, by the restaurant or the hotel. Almost certainly, for reasons detailed in the second chapter of these Anticipations, this household, if it is an ideal type, will be situated away from the central "Town" nucleus and in pleasant surroundings. And I imagine that the sort of woman who would be mother and mistress of such a home would not be perfectly content unless there were a garden about the house. On account of the servant difficulty, again, this garden would probably be less laboriously neat than many of our gardens to-day--no "bedding-out," for example, and a certain parsimony of mown lawn.... To such a type of home it seems the active, scientifically trained people will tend. But usually, I think, the prophet is inclined to over estimate the number of people who will reach this condition of affairs in a generation or so, and to under estimate the conflicting tendencies that will make its attainment difficult to all, and impossible to many, and that will for many years tint and blotch the achievement of those who succeed with patches of unsympathetic colour. To understand just how modifications may come in, it is necessary to consider the probable line of development of another of the four main elements in the social body of the coming time. As a consequence and visible expression of the great new growth of share and stock property there will be scattered through the whole social body, concentrated here perhaps, and diffused there, but everywhere perceived, the members of that new class of the irresponsible wealthy, a class, as I have already pointed out in the preceding chapter, miscellaneous and free to a degree quite unprecedented in the world's history. Quite inevitably great sections of this miscellany will develop characteristics almost diametrically opposed to those of the typical working expert class, and their gravitational attraction may influence the lives of this more efficient, finally more powerful, but at present much less wealthy, class to a very considerable degree of intimacy. The rich shareholder and the skilled expert must necessarily be sharply contrasted types, and of the two it must be borne in mind that it is the rich shareholder who spends the money. While occupation and skill incline one towards severity and economy, leisure and unlimited means involve relaxation and demand the adventitious interest of decoration. The shareholder will be the decorative influence in the State. So far as there will be a typical shareholder's house, we may hazard that it will have rich colours, elaborate hangings, stained glass adornments, and added interests in great abundance. This "leisure class" will certainly employ the greater proportion of the artists, decorators, fabric makers, and the like, of the coming time. It will dominate the world of art--and we may say, with some confidence, that it will influence it in certain directions. For example, standing apart from the movement of the world, as they will do to a very large extent, the archaic, opulently done, will appeal irresistibly to very many of these irresponsible rich as the very quintessence of art. They will come to art with uncritical, cultured minds, full of past achievements, ignorant of present necessities. Art will be something added to life--something stuck on and richly reminiscent--not a manner pervading all real things. We may be pretty sure that very few will grasp the fact that an iron bridge or a railway engine may be artistically done--these will not be "art" objects, but hostile novelties. And, on the other hand, we can pretty confidently foretell a spacious future and much amplification for that turgid, costly, and deliberately anti-contemporary group of styles of which William Morris and his associates have been the fortunate pioneers. And the same principles will apply to costume. A non-functional class of people cannot have a functional costume, the whole scheme of costume, as it will be worn by the wealthy classes in the coming years, will necessarily be of that character which is called fancy dress. Few people will trouble to discover the most convenient forms and materials, and endeavour to simplify them and reduce them to beautiful forms, while endless enterprising tradesmen will be alert for a perpetual succession of striking novelties. The women will ransack the ages for becoming and alluring anachronisms, the men will appear in the elaborate uniforms of "games," in modifications of "court" dress, in picturesque revivals of national costumes, in epidemic fashions of the most astonishing sort.... Now, these people, so far as they are spenders of money, and so far as he is a spender of money, will stand to this ideal engineering sort of person, who is the vitally important citizen of a progressive scientific State, in a competitive relation. In most cases, whenever there is something that both want, one against the other, the shareholder will get it; in most cases, where it is a matter of calling the tune, the shareholder will call the tune. For example, the young architect, conscious of exceptional ability, will have more or less clearly before him the alternatives of devoting himself to the novel, intricate, and difficult business of designing cheap, simple, and mechanically convenient homes for people who will certainly not be highly remunerative, and will probably be rather acutely critical, or of perfecting himself in some period of romantic architecture, or striking out some startling and attractive novelty of manner or material which will be certain, sooner or later, to meet its congenial shareholder. Even if he hover for a time between these alternatives, he will need to be a person not only of exceptional gifts, but what is by no means a common accompaniment of exceptional gifts, exceptional strength of character, to take the former line. Consequently, for many years yet, most of the experimental buildings and novel designs, that initiate discussion and develop the general taste, will be done primarily to please the more originative shareholders and not to satisfy the demands of our engineer or doctor; and the strictly commercial builders, who will cater for all but the wealthiest engineers, scientific investigators, and business men, being unable to afford specific designs, will--amidst the disregarded curses of these more intelligent customers--still simply reproduce in a cheaper and mutilated form such examples as happen to be set. Practically, that is to say, the shareholder will buy up almost all the available architectural talent. This modifies our conception of the outer appearance of that little house we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionally prosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack something of the neat directness implicit in our description, something of that inevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends--for very many years, at any rate. It will almost certainly be tinted, it may even be saturated, with the secondhand archaic. The owner may object, but a busy man cannot stop his life work to teach architects what they ought to know. It may be heated electrically, but it will have sham chimneys, in whose darkness, unless they are built solid, dust and filth will gather, and luckless birds and insects pass horrible last hours of ineffectual struggle. It may have automatic window-cleaning arrangements, but they will be hidden by "picturesque" mullions. The sham chimneys will, perhaps, be made to smoke genially in winter by some ingenious contrivance, there may be sham open fireplaces within, with ingle nooks about the sham glowing logs. The needlessly steep roofs will have a sham sag and sham timbered gables, and probably forced lichens will give it a sham appearance of age. Just that feeble-minded contemporary shirking of the truth of things that has given the world such stockbroker in armour affairs as the Tower Bridge and historical romance, will, I fear, worry the lucid mind in a great multitude of the homes that the opening half, at least, of this century will produce. In quite a similar way the shareholding body will buy up all the clever and more enterprising makers and designers of clothing and adornment, he will set the fashion of almost all ornament, in bookbinding and printing and painting, for example, furnishing, and indeed of almost all things that are not primarily produced "for the million," as the phrase goes. And where that sort of thing comes in, then, so far as the trained and intelligent type of man goes, for many years yet it will be simply a case of the nether instead of the upper millstone. Just how far the influence and contagion of the shareholding mass will reach into this imaginary household of non-shareholding efficients, and just how far the influence of science and mechanism will penetrate the minds and methods of the rich, becomes really one of the most important questions with which these speculations will deal. For this argument that he will perhaps be able to buy up the architect and the tailor and the decorator and so forth is merely preliminary to the graver issue. It is just possible that the shareholder may, to a very large extent--in a certain figurative sense, at least--buy up much of the womankind that would otherwise be available to constitute those severe, capable, and probably by no means unhappy little establishments to which our typical engineers will tend, and so prevent many women from becoming mothers of a regenerating world. The huge secretion of irresponsible wealth by the social organism is certain to affect the tone of thought of the entire feminine sex profoundly--the exact nature of this influence we may now consider. The gist of this inquiry lies in the fact that, while a man's starting position in this world of to-day is entirely determined by the conditions of his birth and early training, and his final position the slow elaborate outcome of his own sustained efforts to live, a woman, from the age of sixteen onward--as the world goes now--is essentially adventurous, the creature of circumstances largely beyond her control and foresight. A virile man, though he, too, is subject to accidents, may, upon most points, still hope to plan and determine his life; the life of a woman is all accident. Normally she lives in relation to some specific man, and until that man is indicated her preparation for life must be of the most tentative sort. She lives, going nowhere, like a cabman on the crawl, and at any time she may find it open to her to assist some pleasure-loving millionaire to spend his millions, or to play her part in one of the many real, original, and only derivatives of the former aristocratic "Society" that have developed themselves among independent people. Even if she is a serious and labour-loving type, some shareholder may tempt her with the prospect of developing her exceptional personality in ease and freedom and in "doing good" with his money. With the continued growth of the shareholding class, the brighter-looking matrimonial chances, not to speak of the glittering opportunities that are not matrimonial, will increase. Reading is now the privilege of all classes, there are few secrets of etiquette that a clever lower-class girl will fail to learn, there are few such girls, even now, who are not aware of their wide opportunities, or at least their wide possibilities, of luxury and freedom, there are still fewer who, knowing as much, do not let it affect their standards and conception of life. The whole mass of modern fiction written by women for women, indeed, down to the cheapest novelettes, is saturated with the romance of _mésalliance_. And even when the specific man has appeared, the adventurous is still not shut out of a woman's career. A man's affections may wander capriciously and leave him but a little poorer or a little better placed; for the women they wander from, however, the issue is an infinitely graver one, and the serious wandering of a woman's fancy may mean the beginning of a new world for her. At any moment the chances of death may make the wife a widow, may sweep out of existence all that she had made fundamental in her life, may enrich her with insurance profits or hurl her into poverty, and restore all the drifting expectancy of her adolescence.... Now, it is difficult to say why we should expect the growing girl, in whom an unlimited ambition and egotism is as natural and proper a thing as beauty and high spirits, to deny herself some dalliance with the more opulent dreams that form the golden lining to these precarious prospects? How can we expect her to prepare herself solely, putting all wandering thoughts aside, for the servantless cookery, domestic Kindergarten work, the care of hardy perennials, and low-pitched conversation of the engineer's home? Supposing, after all, there is no predestinate engineer! The stories the growing girl now prefers, and I imagine will in the future still prefer, deal mainly with the rich and free; the theatre she will prefer to visit will present the lives and loves of opulent people with great precision and detailed correctness; her favourite periodicals will reflect that life; her schoolmistress, whatever her principles, must have an eye to her "chances." And even after Fate or a gust of passion has whirled her into the arms of our busy and capable fundamental man, all these things will still be in her imagination and memory. Unless he is a person of extraordinary mental prepotency, she will almost insensibly determine the character of the home in a direction quite other than that of our first sketch. She will set herself to realize, as far as her husband's means and credit permit, the ideas of the particular section of the wealthy that have captured her. If she is a fool, her ideas of life will presently come into complete conflict with her husband's in a manner that, as the fumes of the love potion leave his brain, may bring the real nature of the case home to him. If he is of that resolute strain to whom the world must finally come, he may rebel and wade through tears and crises to his appointed work again. The cleverer she is, and the finer and more loyal her character up to a certain point, the less likely this is to happen, the more subtle and effective will be her hold upon her husband, and the more probable his perversion from the austere pursuit of some interesting employment, towards the adventures of modern money-getting in pursuit of her ideals of a befitting life. And meanwhile, since "one must live," the nursery that was implicit in the background of the first picture will probably prove unnecessary. She will be, perforce, a person not only of pleasant pursuits, but of leisure. If she endears herself to her husband, he will feel not only the attraction but the duty of her vacant hours; he will not only deflect his working hours from the effective to the profitable, but that occasional burning of the midnight oil, that no brain-worker may forego if he is to retain his efficiency, will, in the interests of some attractive theatrical performance or some agreeable social occasion, all too frequently have to be put off or abandoned. This line of speculation, therefore, gives us a second picture of a household to put beside our first, a household, or rather a couple, rather more likely to be typical of the mass of middling sort of people in those urban regions of the future than our first projection. It will probably not live in a separate home at all, but in a flat in "Town," or at one of the subordinate centres of the urban region we have foreseen. The apartments will be more or less agreeably adorned in some decorative fashion akin to but less costly than some of the many fashions that will obtain among the wealthy. They will be littered with a miscellaneous literature, novels of an entertaining and stimulating sort predominating, and with _bric-à-brac_; in a childless household there must certainly be quaint dolls, pet images, and so forth, and perhaps a canary would find a place. I suspect there would be an edition or so of "Omar" about in this more typical household of "Moderns," but I doubt about the Bible. The man's working books would probably be shabby and relegated to a small study, and even these overlaid by abundant copies of the _Financial_--something or other. It would still be a servantless household, and probably not only without a nursery but without a kitchen, and in its grade and degree it would probably have social relations directly or intermediately through rich friends with some section, some one of the numerous cults of the quite independent wealthy. Quite similar households to this would be even more common among those neither independent nor engaged in work of a primarily functional nature, but endeavouring quite ostensibly to acquire wealth by political or business ingenuity and activity, and also among the great multitude of artists, writers, and that sort of people, whose works are their children. In comparison with the state of affairs fifty years ago, the child-infested household is already conspicuously rare in these classes. These are two highly probably _ménages_ among the central mass of the people of the coming time. But there will be many others. The _ménage à deux_, one may remark, though it may be without the presence of children, is not necessarily childless. Parentage is certainly part of the pride of many men--though, curiously enough, it does not appear to be felt among modern European married women as any part of their honour. Many men will probably achieve parentage, therefore, who will not succeed in inducing, or who may possibly even be very loth to permit, their wives to undertake more than the first beginnings of motherhood. From the moment of its birth, unless it is kept as a pet, the child of such marriages will be nourished, taught, and trained almost as though it were an orphan, it will have a succession of bottles and foster-mothers for body and mind from the very beginning. Side by side with this increasing number of childless homes, therefore, there may develop a system of Kindergarten boarding schools. Indeed, to a certain extent such schools already exist, and it is one of the unperceived contrasts of this and any former time how common such a separation of parents and children becomes. Except in the case of the illegitimate and orphans, and the children of impossible (many public-house children, _e.g._), or wretched homes, boarding schools until quite recently were used only for quite big boys and girls. But now, at every seaside town, for example, one sees a multitude of preparatory schools, which are really not simply educational institutions, but supplementary homes. In many cases these are conducted and very largely staffed by unmarried girls and women who are indeed, in effect, assistant mothers. This class of capable schoolmistresses is one of the most interesting social developments of this period. For the most part they are women who from emotional fastidiousness, intellectual egotism, or an honest lack of passion, have refused the common lot of marriage, women often of exceptional character and restraint, and it is well that, at any rate, their intelligence and character should not pass fruitlessly out of being. Assuredly for this type the future has much in store. There are, however, still other possibilities to be considered in this matter. In these Anticipations it is impossible to ignore the forces making for a considerable relaxation of the institution of permanent monogamous marriage in the coming years, and of a much greater variety of establishments than is suggested by these possibilities within the pale. I guess, without attempting to refer to statistics, that our present society must show a quite unprecedented number and increasing number of male and female celibates--not religious celibates, but people, for the most part, whose standard of personal comfort has such a relation to their earning power that they shirk or cannot enter the matrimonial grouping. The institution of permanent monogamous marriage--except in the ideal Roman Catholic community, where it is based on the sanction of an authority which in real Roman Catholic countries a large proportion of the men decline to obey--is sustained at present entirely by the inertia of custom, and by a number of sentimental and practical considerations, considerations that may very possibly undergo modification in the face of the altered relationship of husband and wife that the present development of childless _ménages_ is bringing about. The practical and sustaining reason for monogamy is the stability it gives to the family; the value of a stable family lies in the orderly upbringing in an atmosphere of affection that it secures in most cases for its more or less numerous children. The monogamous family has indisputably been the civilizing unit of the pre-mechanical civilized state. It must be remembered that both for husband and wife in most cases monogamic life marriage involves an element of sacrifice, it is an institution of late appearance in the history of mankind, and it does not completely fit the psychology or physiology of any but very exceptional characters in either sex. For the man it commonly involves considerable restraint; he must ride his imagination on the curb, or exceed the code in an extremely dishonouring, furtive, and unsatisfactory manner while publicly professing an impossible virtue; for the woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. There are probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases of bitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases, practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward that in the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among the middling class of people, at any rate, has sufficed, there comes the great development of associations and tendernesses that arises out of intimate co-operation in an established home, and particularly out of the linking love and interest of children's lives.... But how does this fit into the childless, disunited, and probably shifting _ménage_ of our second picture? It must be borne in mind that it has been the middling and lower mass of people, the tenants and agriculturists, the shopkeepers, and so forth, men needing before all things the absolutely loyal help of wives, that has sustained permanent monogamic marriage whenever it has been sustained. Public monogamy has existed on its merits--that is, on the merits of the wife. Merely ostensible reasons have never sufficed. No sort of religious conviction, without a real practical utility, has ever availed to keep classes of men, unhampered by circumstances, to its restrictions. In all times, and holding all sorts of beliefs, the specimen humanity of courts and nobilities is to be found developing the most complex qualifications of the code. In some quiet corner of Elysium the bishops of the early Georges, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the contemporary French and Spanish courts, the patriarchs of vanished Byzantium, will find a common topic with the spiritual advisers of the kingdoms of the East in this difficult theme,--the theme of the concessions permissible and expedient to earnest believers encumbered with leisure and a superfluity of power.... It is not necessary to discuss religious development, therefore, before deciding this issue. We are dealing now with things deeper and forces infinitely more powerful than the mere convictions of men. Will a generation to whom marriage will be no longer necessarily associated with the birth and rearing of children, or with the immediate co-operation and sympathy of husband and wife in common proceedings, retain its present feeling for the extreme sanctity of the permanent bond? Will the agreeable, unemployed, childless woman, with a high conception of her personal rights, who is spending her husband's earnings or income in some pleasant discrepant manner, a type of woman there are excellent reasons for anticipating will become more frequent--will she continue to share the honours and privileges of the wife, mother, and helper of the old dispensation? and in particular, will the great gulf that is now fixed by custom between her and the agreeable unmarried lady who is similarly employed remain so inexorably wide? Charity is in the air, and why should not charming people meet one another? And where is either of these ladies to find the support that will enable her to insist upon the monopoly that conventional sentiment, so far as it finds expression, concedes her? The danger to them both of the theory of equal liberty is evident enough. On the other hand, in the case of the unmarried mother who may be helped to hold her own, or who may be holding her own in the world, where will the moral censor of the year 1950 find his congenial following to gather stones? Much as we may regret it, it does very greatly affect the realities of this matter, that with the increased migration of people from home to home amidst the large urban regions that, we have concluded, will certainly obtain in the future, even if moral reprobation and minor social inconveniences do still attach to certain sorts of status, it will probably be increasingly difficult to determine the status of people who wish to conceal it for any but criminal ends. In another direction there must be a movement towards the relaxation of the marriage law and of divorce that will complicate status very confusingly. In the past it has been possible to sustain several contrasting moral systems in each of the practically autonomous states of the world, but with a development and cheapening of travel and migration that is as yet only in its opening phase, an increasing conflict between dissimilar moral restrictions must appear. Even at present, with only the most prosperous classes of the American and Western European countries migrating at all freely, there is a growing amount of inconvenience arising out of these--from the point of view of social physiology--quite arbitrary differences. A man or woman may, for example, have been the injured party in some conjugal complication, may have established a domicile and divorced the erring spouse in certain of the United States, may have married again there with absolute local propriety, and may be a bigamist and a criminal in England. A child may be a legal child in Denmark or Australia, and a bastard in this austerer climate. These things are, however, only the first intimations of much more profound reactions. Almost all the great European Powers, and the United States also, are extending their boundaries to include great masses of non-Christian polygamous peoples, and they are permeating these peoples with railways, printed matter, and all the stimulants of our present state. With the spread of these conveniences there is no corresponding spread of Christianity. These people will not always remain in the ring fence of their present regions; their superseded princes, and rulers, and public masters, and managers, will presently come to swell the shareholding mass of the appropriating Empire. Europeans, on the other hand, will drift into these districts, and under the influence of their customs, intermarriages and interracial reaction will increase; in a world which is steadily abolishing locality, the compromise of local concessions, of localized recognition of the "custom of the country," cannot permanently avail. Statesmen will have to face the alternative of either widening the permissible variations of the marriage contract, or of acute racial and religious stresses, of a vast variety of possible legal betrayals, and the appearance of a body of self-respecting people, outside the law and public respect, a body that will confer a touch of credit upon, because it will share the stigma of, the deliberately dissolute and criminal. And whether the moral law shrivels relatively by mere exclusiveness--as in religious matters the Church of England, for example, has shrivelled to the proportions of a mere sectarian practice--or whether it broadens itself to sustain justice in a variety of sexual contracts, the nett result, so far as our present purpose goes, will be the same. All these forces, making for moral relaxation in the coming time, will probably be greatly enhanced by the line of development certain sections of the irresponsible wealthy will almost certainly follow. Let me repeat that the shareholding rich man of the new time is in a position of freedom almost unparalleled in the history of men. He has sold his permission to control and experiment with the material wealth of the community for freedom--for freedom from care, labour, responsibility, custom, local usage and local attachment. He may come back again into public affairs if he likes--that is his private concern. Within the limits of the law and his capacity and courage, he may do as the imagination of his heart directs. Now, such an experimental and imperfect creature as man, a creature urged by such imperious passions, so weak in imagination and controlled by so feeble a reason, receives such absolute freedom as this only at infinite peril. To a great number of these people, in the second or third generation, this freedom will mean vice, the subversion of passion to inconsequent pleasures. We have on record, in the personal history of the Roman emperors, how freedom and uncontrolled power took one representative group of men, men not entirely of one blood nor of one bias, but reinforced by the arbitrary caprice of adoption and political revolution. We have in the history of the Russian empresses a glimpse of similar feminine possibilities. We are moving towards a time when, through this confusion of moral standards I have foretold, the pressure of public opinion in these matters must be greatly relaxed, when religion will no longer speak with a unanimous voice, and when freedom of escape from disapproving neighbours will be greatly facilitated. In the past, when depravity had a centre about a court, the contagion of its example was limited to the court region, but every idle rich man of this great, various, and widely diffused class, will play to a certain extent the moral _rôle_ of a court. In these days of universal reading and vivid journalism, every novel infraction of the code will be known of, thought about, and more or less thoroughly discussed by an enormous and increasing proportion of the common people. In the past it has been possible for the churches to maintain an attitude of respectful regret towards the lapses of the great, and even to co-operate in these lapses with a sympathetic privacy, while maintaining a wholesome rigour towards vulgar vice. But in the coming time there will be no Great, but many rich, the middling sort of people will probably be better educated as a whole than the rich, and the days of their differential treatment are at an end. It is foolish, in view of all these things, not to anticipate and prepare for a state of things when not only will moral standards be shifting and uncertain, admitting of physiologically sound _ménages_ of very variable status, but also when vice and depravity, in every form that is not absolutely penal, will be practised in every grade of magnificence and condoned. This means that not only will status cease to be simple and become complex and varied, but that outside the system of _ménages_ now recognized, and under the disguise of which all other _ménages_ shelter, there will be a vast drifting and unstable population grouped in almost every conceivable form of relation. The world of Georgian England was a world of Homes; the world of the coming time will still have its Homes, its real Mothers, the custodians of the human succession, and its cared-for children, the inheritors of the future, but in addition to this Home world, frothing tumultuously over and amidst these stable rocks, there will be an enormous complex of establishments, and hotels, and sterile households, and flats, and all the elaborate furnishing and appliances of a luxurious extinction. And since in the present social chaos there does not yet exist any considerable body of citizens--comparable to the agricultural and commercial middle class of England during the period of limited monarchy--that will be practically unanimous in upholding any body of rules of moral restraint, since there will probably not appear for some generations any body propounding with wide-reaching authority a new definitely different code to replace the one that is now likely to be increasingly disregarded, it follows that the present code with a few interlined qualifications and grudging legal concessions will remain nominally operative in sentiment and practice while being practically disregarded, glossed, or replaced in numberless directions. It must be pointed out that in effect, what is here forecast for questions of _ménage_ and moral restraints has already happened to a very large extent in religious matters. There was a time when it was held--and I think rightly--that a man's religious beliefs, and particularly his method of expressing them, was a part not of his individual but of his social life. But the great upheavals of the Reformation resulted finally in a compromise, a sort of truce, that has put religious belief very largely out of intercourse and discussion. It is conceded that within the bounds of the general peace and security a man may believe and express his belief in matters of religion as he pleases, not because it is better so, but because for the present epoch there is no way nor hope of attaining unanimous truth. There is a decided tendency that will, I believe, prevail towards the same compromise in the question of private morals. There is a convention to avoid all discussion of creeds in general social intercourse; and a similar convention to avoid the point of status in relation to marriage, one may very reasonably anticipate, will be similarly recognized. But this impending dissolution of a common standard of morals does not mean universal depravity until some great reconstruction obtains any more than the obsolescence of the Conventicle Act means universal irreligion. It means that for one Morality there will be many moralities. Each human being will, in the face of circumstances, work out his or her particular early training as his or her character determines. And although there will be a general convention upon which the most diverse people will meet, it will only be with persons who have come to identical or similar conclusions in the matter of moral conduct and who are living in similar _ménages_, just as now it is only with people whose conversation implies a certain community or kinship of religious belief, that really frequent and intimate intercourse will go on. In other words, there will be a process of moral segregation[31] set up. Indeed, such a process is probably already in operation, amidst the deliquescent social mass. People will be drawn together into little groups of similar _ménages_ having much in common. And this--in view of the considerations advanced in the first two chapters, considerations all converging on the practical abolition of distances and the general freedom of people to live anywhere they like over large areas--will mean very frequently an actual local segregation. There will be districts that will be clearly recognized and marked as "nice," fast regions, areas of ramshackle Bohemianism, regions of earnest and active work, old-fashioned corners and Hill Tops. Whole regions will be set aside for the purposes of opulent enjoyment--a thing already happening, indeed, at points along the Riviera to-day. Already the superficial possibilities of such a segregation have been glanced at. It has been pointed out that the enormous urban region of the future may present an extraordinary variety of districts, suburbs, and subordinate centres within its limiting boundaries, and here we have a very definite enforcement of that probability. In the previous chapter I spoke of boating centres and horsey suburbs, and picturesque hilly districts and living places by the sea, of promenade centres and theatrical districts; I hinted at various fashions in architecture, and suchlike things, but these exterior appearances will be but the outward and visible sign of inward and more spiritual distinctions. The people who live in the good hunting country and about that glittering Grand Stand, will no longer be even pretending to live under the same code as those picturesque musical people who have concentrated on the canoe-dotted river. Where the promenaders gather, and the bands are playing, and the pretty little theatres compete, the pleasure seeker will be seeking such pleasure as he pleases, no longer debased by furtiveness and innuendo, going his primrose path to a congenial, picturesque, happy and highly desirable extinction. Just over the hills, perhaps, a handful of opulent shareholders will be pleasantly preserving the old traditions of a landed aristocracy, with servants, tenants, vicar, and other dependents all complete, and what from the point of view of social physiology will really be an arrested contingent of the Abyss, but all nicely washed and done good to, will pursue home industries in model cottages in a quite old English and exemplary manner. Here the windmills will spin and the waterfalls be trapped to gather force, and the quiet-eyed master of the machinery will have his office and perhaps his private home. Here about the great college and its big laboratories there will be men and women reasoning and studying; and here, where the homes thicken among the ripe gardens, one will hear the laughter of playing children, the singing of children in their schools, and see their little figures going to and fro amidst the trees and flowers.... And these segregations, based primarily on a difference in moral ideas and pursuits and ideals, will probably round off and complete themselves at last as distinct and separate cultures. As the moral ideas realize themselves in _ménage_ and habits, so the ideals will seek to find expression in a literature, and the passive drifting together will pass over into a phase of more or less conscious and intentional organization. The segregating groups will develop fashions of costume, types of manners and bearing, and even, perhaps, be characterized by a certain type of facial expression. And this gives us a glimpse, an aspect of the immediate future of literature. The kingdoms of the past were little things, and above the mass of peasants who lived and obeyed and died, there was just one little culture to which all must needs conform. Literature was universal within the limits of its language. Where differences of view arose there were violent controversies, polemics, and persecutions, until one or other rendering had won its ascendency. But this new world into which we are passing will, for several generations at least, albeit it will be freely inter-communicating and like a whispering gallery for things outspoken, possess no universal ideals, no universal conventions: there will be the literature of the thought and effort of this sort of people, and the literature, thought, and effort of that.[32] Life is already most wonderfully arbitrary and experimental, and for the coming century this must be its essential social history, a great drifting and unrest of people, a shifting and regrouping and breaking up again of groups, great multitudes seeking to find themselves. The safe life in the old order, where one did this because it was right, and that because it was the custom, when one shunned this and hated that, as lead runs into a mould, all that is passing away. And presently, as the new century opens out, there will become more and more distinctly emergent many new cultures and settled ways. The grey expanse of life to-day is grey, not in its essence, but because of the minute confused mingling and mutual cancelling of many-coloured lives. Presently these tints and shades will gather together here as a mass of one colour, and there as a mass of another. And as these colours intensify and the tradition of the former order fades, as these cultures become more and more shaped and conscious, as the new literatures grow in substance and power, as differences develop from speculative matter of opinion to definite intentions, as contrasts and affinities grow sharper and clearer, there must follow some very extensive modifications in the collective public life. But one series of tints, one colour must needs have a heightening value amidst this iridescent display. While the forces at work in the wealthy and purely speculative groups of society make for disintegration, and in many cases for positive elimination, the forces that bring together the really functional people will tend more and more to impose upon them certain common characteristics and beliefs, and the discovery of a group of similar and compatible class interests upon which they can unite. The practical people, the engineering and medical and scientific people, will become more and more homogeneous in their fundamental culture, more and more distinctly aware of a common "general reason" in things, and of a common difference from the less functional masses and from any sort of people in the past. They will have in their positive science a common ground for understanding the real pride of life, the real reason for the incidental nastiness of vice, and so they will be a sanely reproductive class, and, above all, an educating class. Just how much they will have kept or changed of the deliquescent morality of to-day, when in a hundred years or so they do distinctively and powerfully emerge, I cannot speculate now. They will certainly be a moral people. They will have developed the literature of their needs, they will have discussed and tested and thrashed out many things, they will be clear where we are confused, resolved where we are undecided and weak. In the districts of industrial possibility, in the healthier quarters of the town regions, away from the swamps and away from the glare of the midnight lights, these people will be gathered together. They will be linked in professions through the agency of great and sober papers--in England the _Lancet_, the _British Medical Journal_, and the already great periodicals of the engineering trades, foreshadow something, but only a very little, of what these papers may be. The best of the wealthy will gravitate to their attracting centres.... Unless some great catastrophe in nature break down all that man has built, these great kindred groups of capable men and educated, adequate women must be, under the operation of the forces we have considered so far, the element finally emergent amidst the vast confusions of the coming time. FOOTNOTES: [30] That interesting book by Mr. George Sutherland, _Twentieth Century Inventions_, is very suggestive on these as on many other matters. [31] I use the word "segregation" here and always as it is used by mineralogists to express the slow conveyance of diffused matter upon centres of aggregation, such a process as, for example, must have occurred in the growth of flints. [32] Already this is becoming apparent enough. The literary "Boom," for example, affected the entire reading public of the early nineteenth century. It was no figure of speech that "everyone" was reading Byron or puzzling about the Waverley mystery, that first and most successful use of the unknown author dodge. The booming of Dickens, too, forced him even into the reluctant hands of Omar's Fitzgerald. But the factory-syren voice of the modern "boomster" touches whole sections of the reading public no more than fog-horns going down Channel. One would as soon think of Skinner's Soap for one's library as So-and-so's Hundred Thousand Copy Success. Instead of "everyone" talking of the Great New Book, quite considerable numbers are shamelessly admitting they don't read that sort of thing. One gets used to literary booms just as one gets used to motor cars, they are no longer marvellous, universally significant things, but merely something that goes by with much unnecessary noise and leaves a faint offence in the air. Distinctly we segregate. And while no one dominates, while for all this bawling there are really no great authors of imperial dimensions, indeed no great successes to compare with the Waverley boom, or the boom of Macaulay's History, many men, too fine, too subtle, too aberrant, too unusually fresh for any but exceptional readers, men who would probably have failed to get a hearing at all in the past, can now subsist quite happily with the little sect they have found, or that has found them. They live safely in their islands; a little while ago they could not have lived at all, or could have lived only on the shameful bread of patronage, and yet it is these very men who are often most covetously bitter against the vulgar preferences of the present day. V THE LIFE-HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY In the preceding four chapters there has been developed, in a clumsy laborious way, a smudgy, imperfect picture of the generalized civilized state of the coming century. In terms, vague enough at times, but never absolutely indefinite, the general distribution of the population in this state has been discussed, and its natural development into four great--but in practice intimately interfused--classes. It has been shown--I know not how convincingly--that as the result of forces that are practically irresistible, a world-wide process of social and moral deliquescence is in progress, and that a really functional social body of engineering, managing men, scientifically trained, and having common ideals and interests, is likely to segregate and disentangle itself from our present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. It has been pointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasing variety of morals, _ménages_, occupations and types, at present so mingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing the promise of local concentration that may presently change that greyness into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted colours will be greatly repeated in this present chapter. In the course of these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves to take a few concrete glimpses of households, costumes, conveyances, and conveniences of the coming time, but only as incidental realizations of points in this general thesis. And now, assuming, as we must necessarily do, the soundness of these earlier speculations, we have arrived at a stage when we may consider how the existing arrangements for the ostensible government of the State are likely to develop through their own inherent forces, and how they are likely to be affected by the processes we have forecast. So far, this has been a speculation upon the probable development of a civilized society _in vacuo_. Attention has been almost exclusively given to the forces of development, and not to the forces of conflict and restraint. We have ignored the boundaries of language that are flung athwart the great lines of modern communication, we have disregarded the friction of tariffs, the peculiar groups of prejudices and irrational instincts that inspire one miscellany of shareholders, workers, financiers, and superfluous poor such as the English, to hate, exasperate, lie about, and injure another such miscellany as the French or the Germans. Moreover, we have taken very little account of the fact that, quite apart from nationality, each individual case of the new social order is developing within the form of a legal government based on conceptions of a society that has been superseded by the advent of mechanism. It is this last matter that we are about to take into consideration. Now, this age is being constantly described as a "Democratic" age; "Democracy" is alleged to have affected art, literature, trade and religion alike in the most remarkable ways. It is not only tacitly present in the great bulk of contemporary thought that this "Democracy" is now dominant, but that it is becoming more and more overwhelmingly predominant as the years pass. Allusions to Democracy are so abundant, deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it is worth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most cases really is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and faded associations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire just exactly what the original implications and present realities of "Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very different conception of the nature and future of this sort of political arrangement from that generally assumed. We have already seen in the discussion of the growth of great cities, that an analytical process may absolutely invert the expectation based on the gross results up-to-date, and I believe it will be equally possible to show cause for believing that the development of Democracy also is, after all, not the opening phase of a world-wide movement going on unbendingly in its present direction, but the first impulse of forces that will finally sweep round into a quite different path. Flying off at a tangent is probably one of the gravest dangers and certainly the one most constantly present, in this enterprise of prophecy. One may, I suppose, take the Rights of Man as they are embodied in the French Declaration as the ostentations of Democracy; our present Democratic state may be regarded as a practical realization of these claims. As far as the individual goes, the realization takes the form of an untrammelled liberty in matters that have heretofore been considered a part of social procedure, in the lifting of positive religious and moral compulsions, in the recognition of absolute property, and in the abolition of special privileges and special restrictions. Politically modern Democracy takes the form of denying that any specific person or persons shall act as a matter of intrinsic right or capacity on behalf of the community as a whole. Its root idea is representation. Government is based primarily on election, and every ruler is, in theory at least, a delegate and servant of the popular will. It is implicit in the Democratic theory that there _is_ such a thing as a popular will, and this is supposed to be the net sum of the wills of all the citizens in the State, so far as public affairs are concerned. In its less perfect and more usual state the Democratic theory is advanced either as an ethical theory which postulates an absence of formal acquiescence on the part of the governed as injustice, or else as a convenient political compromise, the least objectionable of all possible methods of public control, because it will permit only the minimum of general unhappiness.... I know of no case for the elective Democratic government of modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon countless important public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference; that an electional system simply places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers; that neither men nor their rights are identically equal, but vary with every individual, and, above all, that the minimum or maximum of general happiness is related only so indirectly to the public control that people will suffer great miseries from their governments unresistingly, and, on the other hand, change their rulers on account of the most trivial irritations. The case against all the prolusions of ostensible Democracy is indeed so strong that it is impossible to consider the present wide establishment of Democratic institutions as being the outcome of any process of intellectual conviction; it arouses suspicion even whether ostensible Democracy may not be a mere rhetorical garment for essentially different facts, and upon that suspicion we will now inquire. Democracy of the modern type, manhood suffrage and so forth, became a conspicuous phenomenon in the world only in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Its genesis is so intimately connected with the first expansion of the productive element in the State, through mechanism and a co-operative organization, as to point at once to a causative connection. The more closely one looks into the social and political life of the eighteenth century the more plausible becomes this view. New and potentially influential social factors had begun to appear--the organizing manufacturer, the intelligent worker, the skilled tenant, and the urban abyss, and the traditions of the old land-owning non-progressive aristocratic monarchy that prevailed in Christendom, rendered it incapable--without some destructive shock or convulsion--of any re-organization to incorporate or control these new factors. In the case of the British Empire an additional stress was created by the incapacity of the formal government to assimilate the developing civilization of the American colonies. Everywhere there were new elements, not as yet clearly analyzed or defined, arising as mechanism arose; everywhere the old traditional government and social system, defined and analyzed all too well, appeared increasingly obstructive, irrational, and feeble in its attempts to include and direct these new powers. But now comes a point to which I am inclined to attach very great importance. The new powers were as yet shapeless. It was not the conflict of a new organization with the old. It was the preliminary dwarfing and deliquescence of the mature old beside the embryonic mass of the new. It was impossible then--it is, I believe, only beginning to be possible now--to estimate the proportions, possibilities, and inter-relations of the new social orders out of which a social organization has still to be built in the coming years. No formula of definite re-construction had been evolved, or has even been evolved yet, after a hundred years. And these swelling inchoate new powers, whose very birth condition was the crippling, modification, or destruction of the old order, were almost forced to formulate their proceedings for a time, therefore, in general affirmative propositions that were really in effect not affirmative propositions at all, but propositions of repudiation and denial. "These kings and nobles and people privileged in relation to obsolescent functions cannot manage our affairs"--that was evident enough, that was the really essential question at that time, and since no other effectual substitute appeared ready made, the working doctrine of the infallible judgment of humanity in the gross, as distinguished from the quite indisputable incapacity of sample individuals, became, in spite of its inherent absurdity, a convenient and acceptable working hypothesis. Modern Democracy thus came into being, not, as eloquent persons have pretended, by the sovereign people consciously and definitely assuming power--I imagine the sovereign people in France during the first Revolution, for example, quite amazed and muddle-headed with it all--but by the decline of old ruling classes in the face of the _quasi_-natural growth of mechanism and industrialism, and by the unpreparedness and want of organization in the new intelligent elements in the State. I have compared the human beings in society to a great and increasing variety of colours tumultuously smashed up together, and giving at present a general and quite illusory effect of grey, and I have attempted to show that there is a process in progress that will amount at last to the segregation of these mingled tints into recognizable distinct masses again. It is not a monotony, but an utterly disorderly and confusing variety that makes this grey, but Democracy, for practical purposes, does really assume such a monotony. Like 'infinity', the Democratic formula is a concrete-looking and negotiable symbol for a negation. It is the aspect in political disputes and contrivances of that social and moral deliquescence the nature and possibilities of which have been discussed in the preceding chapters of this volume. Modern Democracy first asserted itself in the ancient kingdoms of France and Great Britain (counting the former British colonies in America as a part of the latter), and it is in the French and English-speaking communities that Democracy has developed itself most completely. Upon the supposition we have made, Democracy broke out first in these States because they were leading the way in material progress, because they were the first States to develop industrialism, wholesale mechanisms, and great masses of insubordinate activity outside the recognized political scheme, and the nature and time and violence of the outbreak was determined by the nature of the superseded government, and the amount of stress between it and the new elements. But the detachment of a great section of the new middle-class from the aristocratic order of England to form the United States of America, and the sudden rejuvenescence of France by the swift and thorough sloughing of its outworn aristocratic monarchy, the consequent wars and the Napoleonic adventure, checked and modified the parallel development that might otherwise have happened in country after country over all Europe west of the Carpathians. The monarchies that would probably have collapsed through internal forces and given place to modern democratic states were smashed from the outside, and a process of political re-construction, that has probably missed out the complete formal Democratic phase altogether--and which has been enormously complicated through religious, national, and dynastic traditions--set in. Throughout America, in England, and, after extraordinary experiments, in France, political democracy has in effect legally established itself--most completely in the United States--and the reflection and influence of its methods upon the methods of all the other countries in intellectual contact with it, have been so considerable as practically to make their monarchies as new in their kind, almost, as democratic republics. In Germany, Austria, and Italy, for example, there is a press nearly as audible as in the more frankly democratic countries, and measurably akin in influence; there are constitutionally established legislative assemblies, and there is the same unofficial development of powerful financial and industrial powers with which the ostensible Government must make terms. In a vast amount of the public discussion of these States, the postulates of Democracy are clearly implicit. Quite as much in reality as the democratic republics of America, are they based not on classes but upon a confusion; they are, in their various degrees and with their various individual differences, just as truly governments of the grey. It has been argued that the grey is illusory and must sooner or later pass, and that the colour that will emerge to predominance will take its shape as a scientifically trained middle-class of an unprecedented sort, not arising out of the older middle-classes, but replacing them. This class will become, I believe, at last consciously _the_ State, controlling and restricting very greatly the three non-functional masses with which it is as yet almost indistinguishably mingled. The general nature of its formation within the existing confusion and its emergence may, I think, with a certain degree of confidence, be already forecast, albeit at present its beginnings are singularly unpromising and faint. At present the class of specially trained and capable people--doctors, engineers, scientific men of all sorts--is quite disproportionally absent from political life, it does not exist as a factor in that life, it is growing up outside that life, and has still to develop, much more to display, a collective intention to come specifically in. But the forces are in active operation to drag it into the centre of the stage for all that. The modern democracy or democratic quasi-monarchy conducts its affairs as though there was no such thing as special knowledge or practical education. The utmost recognition it affords to the man who has taken the pains to know, and specifically to do, is occasionally to consult him upon specific points and override his counsels in its ampler wisdom, or to entrust to him some otherwise impossible duty under circumstances of extreme limitation. The man of special equipment is treated always as if he were some sort of curious performing animal. The gunnery specialist, for example, may move and let off guns, but he may not say where they are to be let off--some one a little ignorant of range and trajectory does that; the engineer may move the ship and fire the battery, but only with some man, who does not perfectly understand, shouting instructions down a tube at him. If the cycle is to be adapted to military requirements, the thing is entrusted to Lieutenant-Colonel Balfour. If horses are to be bought for the British Army in India, no specialist goes, but Lord Edward Cecil. These people of the governing class do not understand there is such a thing as special knowledge or an inexorable fact in the world; they have been educated at schools conducted by amateur schoolmasters, whose real aim in life--if such people can be described as having a real aim in life--is the episcopal bench, and they have learnt little or nothing but the extraordinary power of appearances in these democratic times. To look right and to be of good report is to succeed. What else is there? The primarily functional men are ignored in the ostensible political scheme, it operates as though they did not exist, as though nothing, in fact, existed but the irresponsible wealthy, and the manipulators of irresponsible wealth, on the one hand, and a great, grey, politically indifferent community on the other. Having regard only to the present condition of political life, it would seem as though this state of affairs must continue indefinitely, and develop only in accordance with the laws of inter-action between our charlatan governing class on the one hand, and the grey mass of governed on the other. There is no way apparent in the existing political and social order, whereby the class of really educated persons that the continually more complicated mechanical fabric of social life is developing may be expected to come in. And in a very great amount of current political speculation, the development and final emergence of this class is ignored, and attention is concentrated entirely upon the inherent process of development of the political machine. And even in that it is very easy to exaggerate the preponderance of one or other of what are really very evenly balanced forces in the machine of democratic government. There are two chief sets of parts in the machine that have a certain antagonistic relation, that play against each other, and one's conception of coming developments is necessarily determined by the relative value one gives to these opposing elements. One may compare these two groups to the Power and the Work, respectively, at the two ends of a lever.[33] On the one hand there is that which pays for the machine, which distributes salaries and rewards, subsidizes newspapers and so forth--the central influence.[34] On the other hand, there is the collectively grey voting mass, with certain prejudices and traditions, and certain laws and limitations of thought upon which the newspapers work, and which, within the confines of its inherent laws, they direct. If one dwell chiefly on the possibilities of the former element, one may conjure up a practical end to democracy in the vision of a State "run" entirely by a group of highly forcible and intellectual persons--usually the dream takes the shape of financiers and their associates, their perfected mechanism of party control working the elections boldly and capably, and their public policy being directed towards financial ends. One of the common prophecies of the future of the United States is such a domination by a group of trust organizers and political bosses. But a man, or a group of men, so strong and intelligent as would be needed to hold an entire party machine within the confines of his--or their collective--mind and will, could, at the most, be but a very transitory and incidental phenomenon in the history of the world. Either such an exploitation of the central control will have to be covert and subtle beyond any precedent in human disingenuousness, or else its domination will have to be very amply modified indeed, by the requirements of the second factor, and its proceedings made very largely the resultant of that second factor's forces. Moreover, very subtle men do not aim at things of this sort, or aiming, fail, because subtlety of intelligence involves subtlety of character, a certain fastidiousness and a certain weakness. Now that the garrulous period, when a flow of language and a certain effectiveness of manner was a necessary condition to political pre-eminence, is passing away, political control falls more and more entirely into the hands of a barristerish intriguing sort of person with a tough-wearing, leathery, practical mind. The sort of people who will work the machine are people with "faith," as the popular preachers say, meaning, in fact, people who do not analyze, people who will take the machine as it is, unquestioningly, shape their ambitions to it, and--saving their vanity--work it as it wants to go. The man who will be boss will be the man who wants to be boss, who finds, in being boss, a complete and final satisfaction, and not the man who complicates things by wanting to be boss in order to be, or do, something else. The machines are governed to-day, and there is every reason to believe that they will continue to be governed, by masterful-looking resultants, masters of nothing but compromise, and that little fancy of an inner conspiracy of control within the machine and behind ostensible politics is really on all fours with the wonderful Rodin (of the Juif Errant) and as probable as anything else in the romances of Eugene Sue. If, on the other hand, we direct attention to the antagonistic element in the machine, to Public Opinion, to the alleged collective mind of the grey mass, and consider how it is brought to believe in itself and its possession of certain opinions by the concrete evidence of daily newspapers and eloquent persons saying as much, we may also very readily conjure up a contrasted vision of extraordinary demagogues or newspaper syndicates working the political machine from that direction. So far as the demagogue goes, the increase of population, the multiplication of amusements and interests, the differentiation of social habits, the diffusion of great towns, all militate against that sufficient gathering of masses of voters in meeting-houses which gave him his power in the recent past. It is improbable that ever again will any flushed undignified man with a vast voice, a muscular face in incessant operation, collar crumpled, hair disordered, and arms in wild activity, talking, talking, talking, talking copiously out of the windows of railway carriages, talking on railway platforms, talking from hotel balconies, talking on tubs, barrels, scaffoldings, pulpits--tireless and undammable--rise to be the most powerful thing in any democratic state in the world. Continually the individual vocal demagogue dwindles, and the element of bands and buttons, the organization of the press and procession, the share of the machine, grows. Mr. Harmsworth, of the London _Daily Mail_, in a very interesting article has glanced at certain possibilities of power that may vest in the owners of a great system of world-wide "simultaneous" newspapers, but he does not analyze the nature of the influence exercised by newspapers during the successive phases of the nineteenth century, nor the probable modifications of that influence in the years to come, and I think, on the whole, he inclines very naturally to over estimate the amount of intentional direction that may be given by the owner of a paper to the minds and acts of his readers, and to exceed the very definite limits within which that influence is confined. In the earlier Victorian period, the more limited, partly educated, and still very homogeneous enfranchised class, had a certain habit of thinking; its tranquil assurance upon most theological and all moral and æsthetic points left political questions as the chief field of exercise for such thinking as it did, and, as a consequence, the dignified newspapers of that time were able to discuss, and indeed were required to discuss not only specific situations but general principles. That indeed was their principal function, and it fell rather to the eloquent men to misapply these principles according to the necessity of the occasion. The papers did then very much more than they do now to mould opinion, though they did not direct affairs to anything like the extent of their modern successors. They made roads upon which events presently travelled in unexpected fashions. But the often cheaper and always more vivid newspapers that have come with the New Democracy do nothing to mould opinion. Indeed, there is no longer upon most public questions--and as I have tried to make clear in my previous paper, there is not likely to be any longer--a collective opinion to be moulded. Protectionists, for example, are a mere band, Free Traders are a mere band; on all these details we are in chaos. And these modern newspapers simply endeavour to sustain a large circulation and so merit advertisements by being as miscellaneously and vividly interesting as possible, by firing where the crowd seems thickest, by seeking perpetually and without any attempt at consistency, the greatest excitement of the greatest number. It is upon the cultivation and rapid succession of inflammatory topics that the modern newspaper expends its capital and trusts to recover its reward. Its general news sinks steadily to a subordinate position; criticism, discussion, and high responsibility pass out of journalism, and the power of the press comes more and more to be a dramatic and emotional power, the power to cry "Fire!" in the theatre, the power to give enormous value for a limited time to some personality, some event, some aspect, true or false, without any power of giving a specific direction to the forces this distortion may set going. Directly the press of to-day passes from that sort of thing to some specific proposal, some implication of principles and beliefs, directly it chooses and selects, then it passes from the miscellaneous to the sectarian, and out of touch with the grey indefiniteness of the general mind. It gives offence here, it perplexes and bores there; no more than the boss politician can the paper of great circulation afford to work consistently for any ulterior aim. This is the limit of the power of the modern newspaper of large circulation, the newspaper that appeals to the grey element, to the average democratic man, the newspaper of the deliquescence, and if our previous conclusion that human society has ceased to be homogeneous and will presently display new masses segregating from a great confusion, holds good, that will be the limit of its power in the future. It may undergo many remarkable developments and modifications,[35] but none of these tend to give it any greater political importance than it has now. And so, after all, our considerations of the probable developments of the party machine give us only negative results, so long as the grey social confusion continues. Subject to that continuance the party machine will probably continue as it is at present, and Democratic States and governments follow the lines upon which they run at the present time. Now, how will the emergent class of capable men presently begin to modify the existing form of government in the ostensibly democratic countries and democratic monarchies? There will be very many variations and modifications of the methods of this arrival, an infinite complication of detailed incidents, but a general proposition will be found to hold good. The suppression of the party machine in the purely democratic countries and of the official choice of the rich and privileged rulers in the more monarchical ones, by capable operative and administrative men inspired by the belief in a common theory of social order, will come about--peacefully and gradually as a process of change, or violently as a revolution--but inevitably as the outcome either of the imminence or else of the disasters of war. That all these governments of confusion will drift towards war, with a spacious impulse and a final vehemence quite out of comparison greater than the warlike impulses of former times, is a remarkable but by no means inexplicable thing. A tone of public expression, jealous and patriotic to the danger-point, is an unavoidable condition under which democratic governments exist. To be patriotically quarrelsome is imperative upon the party machines that will come to dominate the democratic countries. They will not possess detailed and definite policies and creeds because there are no longer any detailed and definite public opinions, but they will for all that require some ostensible purpose to explain their cohesion, some hold upon the common man that will ensure his appearance in numbers at the polling place sufficient to save the government from the raids of small but determined sects. That hold can be only of one sort. Without moral or religious uniformity, with material interests as involved and confused as a heap of spelicans, there remains only one generality for the politician's purpose, the ampler aspect of a man's egotism, his pride in what he imagines to be his particular kind--his patriotism. In every country amenable to democratic influences there emerges, or will emerge, a party machine, vividly and simply patriotic--and indefinite upon the score of any other possible consideration between man and man. This will hold true, not only of the ostensibly democratic states, but also of such reconstituted modern monarchies as Italy and Germany, for they, too, for all their legal difference, rest also on the grey. The party conflicts of the future will turn very largely on the discovery of the true patriot, on the suspicion that the crown or the machine in possession is in some more or less occult way traitorous, and almost all other matters of contention will be shelved and allowed to stagnate, for fear of breaking the unity of the national mechanism. Now, patriotism is not a thing that flourishes in the void,--one needs a foreigner. A national and patriotic party is an anti-foreign party; the altar of the modern god, Democracy, will cry aloud for the stranger men. Simply to keep in power, and out of no love of mischief, the government or the party machine will have to insist upon dangers and national differences, to keep the voter to the poll by alarms, seeking ever to taint the possible nucleus of any competing organization with the scandal of external influence. The party press will play the watch-dog and allay all internal dissensions with its warning bay at some adjacent people, and the adjacent peoples, for reasons to be presently expanded, will be continually more sensitive to such baying. Already one sees country yelping at country all over the modern world, not only in the matter of warlike issues, but with a note of quite furious commercial rivalry--quite furious and, indeed, quite insane, since its ideal of trading enormously with absolutely ruined and tradeless foreigners, exporting everything and importing nothing, is obviously outside reason altogether. The inexorable doom of these governments based on the grey, is to foster enmity between people and people. Even their alliances are but sacrifices to intenser antagonisms. And the phases of the democratic sequence are simple and sure. Forced on by a relentless competition, the tone of the outcries will become fiercer and fiercer; the occasions of excitement, the perilous moments, the ingenuities of annoyance, more and more dramatic,--from the mere emptiness and disorder of the general mind! Jealousies and anti-foreign enactments, tariff manipulations and commercial embitterment, destructive, foolish, exasperating obstructions that benefit no human being, will minister to this craving without completely allaying it. Nearer, and ever nearer, the politicians of the coming times will force one another towards the verge, not because they want to go over it, not because any one wants to go over it, but because they are, by their very nature, compelled to go that way, because to go in any other direction is to break up and lose power. And, consequently, the final development of the democratic system, so far as intrinsic forces go, will be, not the rule of the boss, nor the rule of the trust, nor the rule of the newspaper; no rule, indeed, but international rivalry, international competition, international exasperation and hostility, and at last--irresistible and overwhelming--the definite establishment of the rule of that most stern and educational of all masters--_War_. At this point there opens a tempting path, and along it historical precedents, like a forest of notice-boards, urge us to go. At the end of the vista poses the figure of Napoleon with "Cæsarism" written beneath it. Disregarding certain alien considerations for a time, assuming the free working out of democracy to its conclusion, we perceive that, in the case of our generalized state, the party machine, together with the nation entrusted to it, must necessarily be forced into passionate national war. But, having blundered into war, the party machine will have an air of having accomplished its destiny. A party machine or a popular government is surely as likely a thing to cause a big disorder of war and as unlikely a thing to conduct it, as the wit of man, working solely to that end, could ever have devised. I have already pointed out why we can never expect an elected government of the modern sort to be guided by any far-reaching designs, it is constructed to get office and keep office, not to do anything in office, the conditions of its survival are to keep appearances up and taxes down,[36] and the care and management of army and navy is quite outside its possibilities. The military and naval professions in our typical modern State will subsist very largely upon tradition, the ostensible government will interfere with rather than direct them, and there will be no force in the entire scheme to check the corrupting influence of a long peace, to insist upon adequate exercises for the fighting organization or ensure an adequate adaptation to the new and perpetually changing possibilities of untried apparatus. Incapable but confident and energetic persons, having political influence, will have been permitted to tamper with the various arms of the service, the equipment will be largely devised to create an impression of efficiency in times of peace in the minds of the general voting public, and the really efficient soldiers will either have fretted themselves out of the army or have been driven out as political non-effectives, troublesome, innovating persons anxious to spend money upon "fads." So armed, the New Democracy will blunder into war, and the opening stage of the next great war will be the catastrophic breakdown of the formal armies, shame and disasters, and a disorder of conflict between more or less equally matched masses of stupefied, scared, and infuriated people. Just how far the thing may rise from the value of an alarming and edifying incident to a universal catastrophe, depends upon the special nature of the conflict, but it does not alter the fact that any considerable war is bound to be a bitter, appalling, highly educational and constitution-shaking experience for the modern democratic state. Now, foreseeing this possibility, it is easy to step into the trap of the Napoleonic precedent. One hastens to foretell that either with the pressure of coming war, or in the hour of defeat, there will arise the Man. He will be strong in action, epigrammatic in manner, personally handsome and continually victorious. He will sweep aside parliaments and demagogues, carry the nation to glory, reconstruct it as an empire, and hold it together by circulating his profile and organizing further successes. He will--I gather this from chance lights upon contemporary anticipations--codify everything, rejuvenate the papacy, or, at any rate, galvanize Christianity, organize learning in meek intriguing academies of little men, and prescribe a wonderful educational system. The grateful nations will once more deify a lucky and aggressive egotism.... And there the vision loses breath. Nothing of the sort is going to happen, or, at any rate, if it happens, it will happen as an interlude, as no necessary part in the general progress of the human drama. The world is no more to be recast by chance individuals than a city is to be lit by sky rockets. The purpose of things emerges upon spacious issues, and the day of individual leaders is past. The analogies and precedents that lead one to forecast the coming of military one-man-dominions, the coming of such other parodies of Cæsar's career as that misapplied, and speedily futile chess champion, Napoleon I. contrived, are false. They are false because they ignore two correlated things; first, the steady development of a new and quite unprecedented educated class as a necessary aspect of the expansion of science and mechanism, and secondly, the absolute revolution in the art of war that science and mechanism are bringing about. This latter consideration the next chapter will expand, but here, in the interests of this discussion, we may in general terms anticipate its gist. War in the past has been a thing entirely different in its nature from what war, with the apparatus of the future, will be--it has been showy, dramatic, emotional, and restricted; war in the future will be none of these things. War in the past was a thing of days and heroisms; battles and campaigns rested in the hand of the great commander, he stood out against the sky, picturesquely on horseback, visibly controlling it all. War in the future will be a question of preparation, of long years of foresight and disciplined imagination, there will be no decisive victory, but a vast diffusion of conflict--it will depend less and less on controlling personalities and driving emotions, and more and more upon the intelligence and personal quality of a great number of skilled men. All this the next chapter will expand. And either before or after, but, at any rate, in the shadow of war, it will become apparent, perhaps even suddenly, that the whole apparatus of power in the country is in the hands of a new class of intelligent and scientifically-educated men. They will probably, under the development of warlike stresses, be discovered--they will discover themselves--almost surprisingly with roads and railways, carts and cities, drains, food supply, electrical supply, and water supply, and with guns and such implements of destruction and intimidation as men scarcely dream of yet, gathered in their hands. And they will be discovered, too, with a growing common consciousness of themselves as distinguished from the grey confusion, a common purpose and implication that the fearless analysis of science is already bringing to light. They will find themselves with bloodshed and horrible disasters ahead, and the material apparatus of control entirely within their power. "Suppose, after all," they will say, "we ignore these very eloquent and showy governing persons above, and this very confused and ineffectual multitude below. Suppose now we put on the brakes and try something a little more stable and orderly. These people in possession have, of course, all sorts of established rights and prescriptions; they have squared the law to their purpose, and the constitution does not know us; they can get at the judges, they can get at the newspapers, they can do all sorts of things except avoid a smash--but, for our part, we have these really most ingenious and subtle guns. Suppose instead of our turning them and our valuable selves in a fool's quarrel against the ingenious and subtle guns of other men akin to ourselves, we use them in the cause of the higher sanity, and clear that jabbering war tumult out of the streets."... There may be no dramatic moment for the expression of this idea, no moment when the new Cromwellism and the new Ironsides will come visibly face to face with talk and baubles, flags and patriotic dinner bells; but, with or without dramatic moments, the idea will be expressed and acted upon. It will be made quite evident then, what is now indeed only a pious opinion, namely, that wealth is, after all, no ultimate Power at all, but only an influence among aimless, police-guarded men. So long as there is peace the class of capable men may be mitigated and gagged and controlled, and the ostensible present order may flourish still in the hands of that other class of men which deals with the appearances of things. But as some supersaturated solution will crystallize out with the mere shaking of its beaker, so must the new order of men come into visibly organized existence through the concussions of war. The charlatans can escape everything except war, but to the cant and violence of nationality, to the sustaining force of international hostility, they are ruthlessly compelled to cling, and what is now their chief support must become at last their destruction. And so it is I infer that, whether violently as a revolution or quietly and slowly, this grey confusion that is Democracy must pass away inevitably by its own inherent conditions, as the twilight passes, as the embryonic confusion of the cocoon creature passes, into the higher stage, into the higher organism, the world-state of the coming years. FOOTNOTES: [33] The fulcrum, which is generally treated as being absolutely immovable, being the general belief in the theory of democracy. [34] In the United States, a vast rapidly developing country, with relatively much kinetic wealth, this central influence is the financial support of the Boss, consisting for the most part of active-minded, capable business organizers; in England, the land where irresponsible realized wealth is at a maximum, a public-spirited section of the irresponsible, inspired by the tradition of an aristocratic functional past, qualifies the financial influence with an amateurish, indolent, and publicly unprofitable integrity. In Germany an aggressively functional Court occupies the place and plays the part of a permanently dominant party machine. [35] The nature of these modifications is an interesting side issue. There is every possibility of papers becoming at last papers of world-wide circulation, so far as the language in which they are printed permits, with editions that will follow the sun and change into to-morrow's issue as they go, picking up literary criticism here, financial intelligence there, here to-morrow's story, and there to-morrow's scandal, and, like some vast intellectual garden-roller, rolling out local provincialism at every revolution. This, for papers in English, at any rate, is merely a question of how long it will be before the price of the best writing (for journalistic purposes) rises actually or relatively above the falling cost of long distance electrical type setting. Each of the local editions of these world travelling papers, in addition to the identical matter that will appear almost simultaneously everywhere, will no doubt have its special matter and its special advertisements. Illustrations will be telegraphed just as well as matter, and probably a much greater use will be made of sketch and diagram than at present. If the theory advanced in this book that democracy is a transitory confusion be sound, there will not be one world paper of this sort only--like Moses' serpent after its miraculous struggle--but several, and as the non-provincial segregation of society goes on, these various great papers will take on more and more decided specific characteristics, and lose more and more their local references. They will come to have not only a distinctive type of matter, a distinctive method of thought and manner of expression, but distinctive fundamental implications, and a distinctive class of writer. This difference in character and tone renders the advent of any Napoleonic master of the newspaper world vastly more improbable than it would otherwise be. These specializing newspapers will, as they find their class, throw out many features that do not belong to that class. It is highly probable that many will restrict the space devoted to news and sham news; that forged and inflated stuff made in offices, that bulks out the foreign intelligence of so many English papers, for example. At present every paper contains a little of everything, inadequate sporting stuff, inadequate financial stuff, vague literary matter, voluminous reports of political vapourings, because no newspaper is quite sure of the sort of readers it has--probably no daily newspaper has yet a distinctive sort of reader. Many people, with their minds inspired by the number of editions which evening papers pretend to publish and do not, incline to believe that daily papers may presently give place to hourly papers, each with the last news of the last sixty minutes photographically displayed. As a matter of fact no human being wants that, and very few are so foolish as to think they do; the only kind of news that any sort of people clamours for hot and hot is financial and betting fluctuations, lottery lists and examination results; and the elaborated and cheapened telegraphic and telephonic system of the coming days, with tapes (or phonograph to replace them) in every post-office and nearly every private house, so far from expanding this department, will probably sweep it out of the papers altogether. One will subscribe to a news agency which will wire all the stuff one cares to have so violently fresh, into a phonographic recorder perhaps, in some convenient corner. There the thing will be in every house, beside the barometer, to hear or ignore. With the separation of that function what is left of the newspaper will revert to one daily edition--daily, I think, because of the power of habit to make the newspaper the specific business of some definite moments in the day; the breakfast hour, I suppose, or the "up-to-town" journey with most Englishmen now. Quite possibly some one will discover some day that there is now machinery for folding and fastening a paper into a form that will not inevitably get into the butter, or lead to bitterness in a railway carriage. This pitch of development reached, I incline to anticipate daily papers much more like the _Spectator_ in form than these present mainsails of our public life. They will probably not contain fiction at all, and poetry only rarely, because no one but a partial imbecile wants these things in punctual daily doses, and we are anticipating an escape from a period of partial imbecility. My own culture and turn of mind, which is probably akin to that of a respectable mechanic of the year 2000, inclines me towards a daily paper that will have in addition to its concentrated and absolutely trustworthy daily news, full and luminous accounts of new inventions, new theories, and new departures of all sorts (usually illustrated), witty and penetrating comments upon public affairs, criticisms of all sorts of things, representations of newly produced works of art, and an ample amount of ably written controversy upon everything under the sun. The correspondence columns, instead of being an exercising place for bores and conspicuous people who are not mercenary, will be the most ample, the most carefully collected, and the most highly paid of all departments in this paper. Personal paragraphs will be relegated to some obscure and costly corner next to the births, deaths, and marriages. This paper will have, of course, many pages of business advertisements, and these will usually be well worth looking through, for the more intelligent editors of the days to come will edit this department just like any other, and classify their advertisements in a descending scale of freshness and interest that will also be an ascending scale of price. The advertiser who wants to be an indecent bore, and vociferate for the ten millionth time some flatulent falsehood about a pill, for instance, will pay at nuisance rates. Probably many papers will refuse to print nasty and distressful advertisements about people's insides at all. The entire paper will be as free from either greyness or offensive stupidity in its advertisement columns as the shop windows in Bond Street to-day, and for much the same reason,--because the people who go that way do not want that sort of thing. It has been supposed that, since the real income of the newspaper is derived from advertisements, large advertisers will combine in the future to own papers confined to the advertisements of their specific wares. Some such monopoly is already attempted; several publishing firms own or partially own a number of provincial papers, which they adorn with strange "Book Chat" columns conspicuously deficient in their information; and a well-known cycle tyre firm supplies "Cycling" columns that are mere pedestals for the Head-of-King-Charles make of tyre. Many quack firms publish and give away annual almanacks replete with economical illustrations, offensive details, and bad jokes. But I venture to think, in spite of such phenomena, that these suggestions and attempts are made with a certain disregard of the essential conditions of sound advertisement. Sound advertisement consists in perpetual alertness and newness, in appearance in new places and in new aspects, in the constant access to fresh minds. The devotion of a newspaper to the interest of one particular make of a commodity or group of commodities will inevitably rob its advertisement department of most of its interest for the habitual readers of the paper. That is to say, the newspaper will fail in what is one of the chief attractions of a good newspaper. Moreover, such a devotion will react upon all the other matter in the paper, because the editor will need to be constantly alert to exclude seditious reflections upon the Health-Extract-of-Horse-Flesh or Saved-by-Boiling-Jam. His sense of this relation will taint his self-respect and make him a less capable editor than a man whose sole affair is to keep his paper interesting. To these more interesting rival papers the excluded competitor will be driven, and the reader will follow in his wake. There is little more wisdom in the proprietor of an article in popular demand buying or creating a newspaper to contain all his advertisements than in his buying a coal pit for the same purpose. Such a privacy of advertisement will never work, I think, on a large scale; it is probably at or near its maximum development now, and this anticipation of the advertiser-owned paper, like that of hourly papers, and that wonderfully powerful cosmic newspaper syndicate, is simply another instance of prophesying based only on a present trend, an expansion of the obvious, instead of an analysis of determining forces. [36] One striking illustration of the distinctive possibilities of democratic government came to light during the last term of office of the present patriotic British Government. As a demonstration of patriotism large sums of money were voted annually for the purpose of building warships, and the patriotic common man paid the taxes gladly with a dream of irresistible naval predominance to sweeten the payment. But the money was not spent on warships; only a portion of it was spent, and the rest remained to make a surplus and warm the heart of the common man in his tax-paying capacity. This artful dodge was repeated for several years; the artful dodger is now a peer, no doubt abjectly respected, and nobody in the most patriotic party so far evolved is a bit the worse for it. In the organizing expedients of all popular governments, as in the prospectuses of unsound companies, the disposition is to exaggerate the nominal capital at the expense of the working efficiency. Democratic armies and navies are always short, and probably will always be short, of ammunition, paint, training and reserve stores; battalions and ships, since they count as units, are over-numerous and go short-handed, and democratic army reform almost invariably works out to some device for multiplying units by fission, and counting men three times instead of twice in some ingenious and plausible way. And this must be so, because the sort of men who come inevitably to power under democratic conditions are men trained by all the conditions of their lives to so set appearances before realities as at last to become utterly incapable of realities. VI WAR In shaping anticipations of the future of war there arises a certain difficulty about the point of departure. One may either begin upon such broad issues as the preceding forecasts have opened, and having determined now something of the nature of the coming State and the force of its warlike inclination, proceed to speculate how this vast ill-organized fourfold organism will fight; or one may set all that matter aside for a space, and having regard chiefly to the continually more potent appliances physical science offers the soldier, we may try to develop a general impression of theoretically thorough war, go from that to the nature of the State most likely to be superlatively efficient in such warfare, and so arrive at the conditions of survival under which these present governments of confusion will struggle one against the other. The latter course will be taken here. We will deal first of all with war conducted for its own sake, with a model army, as efficient as an imaginative training can make it, and with a model organization for warfare of the State behind it, and then the experience of the confused modern social organism as it is impelled, in an uncongenial metamorphosis, towards this imperative and finally unavoidable efficient state, will come most easily within the scope of one's imagination. The great change that is working itself out in warfare is the same change that is working itself out in the substance of the social fabric. The essential change in the social fabric, as we have analyzed it, is the progressive supersession of the old broad labour base by elaborately organized mechanism, and the obsolescence of the once valid and necessary distinction of gentle and simple. In warfare, as I have already indicated, this takes the form of the progressive supersession of the horse and the private soldier--which were the living and sole engines of the old time--by machines, and the obliteration of the old distinction between leaders, who pranced in a conspicuously dangerous and encouraging way into the picturesque incidents of battle, and the led, who cheered and charged and filled the ditches and were slaughtered in a wholesale dramatic manner. The old war was a matter of long dreary marches, great hardships of campaigning, but also of heroic conclusive moments. Long periods of campings--almost always with an outbreak of pestilence--of marchings and retreats, much crude business of feeding and forage, culminated at last, with an effect of infinite relief, in an hour or so of "battle." The battle was always a very intimate tumultuous affair, the men were flung at one another in vast excited masses, in living fighting machines as it were, spears or bayonets flashed, one side or the other ceased to prolong the climax, and the thing was over. The beaten force crumpled as a whole, and the victors as a whole pressed upon it. Cavalry with slashing sabres marked the crowning point of victory. In the later stages of the old warfare musketry volleys were added to the physical impact of the contending regiments, and at last cannon, as a quite accessory method of breaking these masses of men. So you "gave battle" to and defeated your enemy's forces wherever encountered, and when you reached your objective in his capital the war was done.... The new war will probably have none of these features of the old system of fighting. The revolution that is in progress from the old war to a new war, different in its entire nature from the old, is marked primarily by the steady progress in range and efficiency of the rifle and of the field-gun--and more particularly of the rifle. The rifle develops persistently from a clumsy implement, that any clown may learn to use in half a day, towards a very intricate mechanism, easily put out of order and easily misused, but of the most extraordinary possibilities in the hands of men of courage, character, and high intelligence. Its precision at long range has made the business of its care, loading and aim subsidiary to the far more intricate matter of its use in relation to the contour of the ground within its reach. Even its elaboration as an instrument is probably still incomplete. One can conceive it provided in the future with cross-thread telescopic sights, the focussing of which, corrected by some ingenious use of hygroscopic material, might even find the range, and so enable it to be used with assurance up to a mile or more. It will probably also take on some of the characters of the machine-gun. It will be used either for single shots or to quiver and send a spray of almost simultaneous bullets out of a magazine evenly and certainly, over any small area the rifleman thinks advisable. It will probably be portable by one man, but there is no reason really, except the bayonet tradition, the demands of which may be met in other ways, why it should be the instrument of one sole man. It will, just as probably, be slung with its ammunition and equipment upon bicycle wheels, and be the common care of two or more associated soldiers. Equipped with such a weapon, a single couple of marksmen even, by reason of smokeless powder and carefully chosen cover, might make themselves practically invisible, and capable of surprising, stopping, and destroying a visible enemy in quite considerable numbers who blundered within a mile of them. And a series of such groups of marksmen so arranged as to cover the arrival of reliefs, provisions, and fresh ammunition from the rear, might hold out against any visible attack for an indefinite period, unless the ground they occupied was searched very ably and subtly by some sort of gun having a range in excess of their rifle fire. If the ground they occupied were to be properly tunnelled and trenched, even that might not avail, and there would be nothing for it but to attack them by an advance under cover either of the night or of darkness caused by smoke-shells, or by the burning of cover about their position. Even then they might be deadly with magazine fire at close quarters. Save for their liability to such attacks, a few hundreds of such men could hold positions of a quite vast extent, and a few thousand might hold a frontier. Assuredly a mere handful of such men could stop the most multitudinous attack or cover the most disorderly retreat in the world, and even when some ingenious, daring, and lucky night assault had at last ejected them from a position, dawn would simply restore to them the prospect of reconstituting in new positions their enormous advantage of defence. The only really effective and final defeat such an attenuated force of marksmen could sustain, would be from the slow and circumspect advance upon it of a similar force of superior marksmen, creeping forward under cover of night or of smoke-shells and fire, digging pits during the snatches of cessation obtained in this way, and so coming nearer and nearer and getting a completer and completer mastery of the defender's ground until the approach of the defender's reliefs, food, and fresh ammunition ceased to be possible. Thereupon there would be nothing for it but either surrender or a bolt in the night to positions in the rear, a bolt that might be hotly followed if it were deferred too late. Probably between contiguous nations that have mastered the art of war, instead of the pouring clouds of cavalry of the old dispensation,[37] this will be the opening phase of the struggle, a vast duel all along the frontier between groups of skilled marksmen, continually being relieved and refreshed from the rear. For a time quite possibly there will be no definite army here or there, there will be no controllable battle, there will be no Great General in the field at all. But somewhere far in the rear the central organizer will sit at the telephonic centre of his vast front, and he will strengthen here and feed there and watch, watch perpetually the pressure, the incessant remorseless pressure that is seeking to wear down his countervailing thrust. Behind the thin firing line that is actually engaged, the country for many miles will be rapidly cleared and devoted to the business of war, big machines will be at work making second, third, and fourth lines of trenches that may be needed if presently the firing line is forced back, spreading out transverse paths for the swift lateral movement of the cyclists who will be in perpetual alertness to relieve sudden local pressures, and all along those great motor roads our first "Anticipations" sketched, there will be a vast and rapid shifting to and fro of big and very long range guns. These guns will probably be fought with the help of balloons. The latter will hang above the firing line all along the front, incessantly ascending and withdrawn; they will be continually determining the distribution of the antagonist's forces, directing the fire of continually shifting great guns upon the apparatus and supports in the rear of his fighting line, forecasting his night plans and seeking some tactical or strategic weakness in that sinewy line of battle. It will be evident that such warfare as this inevitable precision of gun and rifle forces upon humanity, will become less and less dramatic as a whole, more and more as a whole a monstrous thrust and pressure of people against people. No dramatic little general spouting his troops into the proper hysterics for charging, no prancing merely brave officers, no reckless gallantry or invincible stubbornness of men will suffice. For the commander-in-chief on a picturesque horse sentimentally watching his "boys" march past to death or glory in battalions, there will have to be a loyal staff of men, working simply, earnestly, and subtly to keep the front tight, and at the front, every little isolated company of men will have to be a council of war, a little conspiracy under the able man its captain, as keen and individual as a football team, conspiring against the scarcely seen company of the foe over yonder. The battalion commander will be replaced in effect by the organizer of the balloons and guns by which his few hundreds of splendid individuals will be guided and reinforced. In the place of hundreds of thousands of more or less drunken and untrained young men marching into battle--muddle-headed, sentimental, dangerous and futile hobbledehoys--there will be thousands of sober men braced up to their highest possibilities, intensely doing their best; in the place of charging battalions, shattering impacts of squadrons and wide harvest-fields of death, there will be hundreds of little rifle battles fought up to the hilt, gallant dashes here, night surprises there, the sudden sinister faint gleam of nocturnal bayonets, brilliant guesses that will drop catastrophic shell and death over hills and forests suddenly into carelessly exposed masses of men. For eight miles on either side of the firing lines--whose fire will probably never altogether die away while the war lasts--men will live and eat and sleep under the imminence of unanticipated death.... Such will be the opening phase of the war that is speedily to come. And behind the thin firing line on either side a vast multitude of people will be at work; indeed, the whole mass of the efficients in the State will have to be at work, and most of them will be simply at the same work or similar work to that done in peace time--only now as combatants upon the lines of communication. The organized staffs of the big road managements, now become a part of the military scheme, will be deporting women and children and feeble people and bringing up supplies and supports; the doctors will be dropping from their civil duties into pre-appointed official places, directing the feeding and treatment of the shifting masses of people and guarding the valuable manhood of the fighting apparatus most sedulously from disease;[38] the engineers will be entrenching and bringing up a vast variety of complicated and ingenious apparatus designed to surprise and inconvenience the enemy in novel ways; the dealers in food and clothing, the manufacturers of all sorts of necessary stuff, will be converted by the mere declaration of war into public servants; a practical realization of socialistic conceptions will quite inevitably be forced upon the fighting State. The State that has not incorporated with its fighting organization all its able-bodied manhood and all its material substance, its roads, vehicles, engines, foundries, and all its resources of food and clothing; the State which at the outbreak of war has to bargain with railway and shipping companies, replace experienced station-masters by inexperienced officers, and haggle against alien interests for every sort of supply, will be at an overwhelming disadvantage against a State which has emerged from the social confusion of the present time, got rid of every vestige of our present distinction between official and governed, and organized every element in its being. I imagine that in this ideal war as compared with the war of to-day, there will be a very considerable restriction of the rights of the non-combatant. A large part of existing International Law involves a curious implication, a distinction between the belligerent government and its accredited agents in warfare and the general body of its subjects. There is a disposition to treat the belligerent government, in spite of the democratic status of many States, as not fully representing its people, to establish a sort of world-citizenship in the common mass outside the official and military class. Protection of the non-combatant and his property comes at last--in theory at least--within a measurable distance of notice boards: "Combatants are requested to keep off the grass." This disposition I ascribe to a recognition of that obsolescence and inadequacy of the formal organization of States, which has already been discussed in this book. It was a disposition that was strongest perhaps in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, and stronger now than, in the steady and irresistible course of strenuous and universal military preparation, it is likely to be in the future. In our imaginary twentieth century State, organized primarily for war, this tendency to differentiate a non-combatant mass in the fighting State will certainly not be respected, the State will be organized as a whole to fight as a whole, it will have triumphantly asserted the universal duty of its citizens. The military force will be a much ampler organization than the "army" of to-day, it will be not simply the fists but the body and brain of the land. The whole apparatus, the whole staff engaged in internal communication, for example, may conceivably not be State property and a State service, but if it is not it will assuredly be as a whole organized as a volunteer force, that may instantly become a part of the machinery of defence or aggression at the outbreak of war.[39] The men may very conceivably not have a uniform, for military uniforms are simply one aspect of this curious and transitory phase of restriction, but they will have their orders and their universal plan. As the bells ring and the recording telephones click into every house the news that war has come, there will be no running to and fro upon the public ways, no bawling upon the moving platforms of the central urban nuclei, no crowds of silly useless able-bodied people gaping at inflammatory transparencies outside the offices of sensational papers because the egregious idiots in control of affairs have found them no better employment. Every man will be soberly and intelligently setting about the particular thing he has to do--even the rich shareholding sort of person, the hereditary mortgager of society, will be given something to do, and if he has learnt nothing else he will serve to tie up parcels of ammunition or pack army sausage. Very probably the best of such people and of the speculative class will have qualified as cyclist marksmen for the front, some of them may even have devoted the leisure of peace to military studies and may be prepared with novel weapons. Recruiting among the working classes--or, more properly speaking, among the People of the Abyss--will have dwindled to the vanishing point; people who are no good for peace purposes are not likely to be any good in such a grave and complicated business as modern war. The spontaneous traffic of the roads in peace, will fall now into two streams, one of women and children coming quietly and comfortably out of danger, the other of men and material going up to the front. There will be no panics, no hardships, because everything will have been amply pre-arranged--we are dealing with an ideal State. Quietly and tremendously that State will have gripped its adversary and tightened its muscles--that is all. Now the strategy of this new sort of war in its opening phase will consist mainly in very rapid movements of guns and men behind that thin screen of marksmen, in order to deal suddenly and unexpectedly some forcible blow, to snatch at some position into which guns and men may be thrust to outflank and turn the advantage of the ground against some portion of the enemy's line. The game will be largely to crowd and crumple that line, to stretch it over an arc to the breaking point, to secure a position from which to shell and destroy its supports and provisions, and to capture or destroy its guns and apparatus, and so tear it away from some town or arsenal it has covered. And a factor of primary importance in this warfare, because of the importance of seeing the board, a factor which will be enormously stimulated to develop in the future, will be the aerial factor. Already we have seen the captive balloon as an incidental accessory of considerable importance even in the wild country warfare of South Africa. In the warfare that will go on in the highly-organized European States of the opening century, the special military balloon used in conjunction with guns, conceivably of small calibre but of enormous length and range, will play a part of quite primary importance. These guns will be carried on vast mechanical carriages, possibly with wheels of such a size as will enable them to traverse almost all sorts of ground.[40] The aeronauts, provided with large scale maps of the hostile country, will mark down to the gunners below the precise point upon which to direct their fire, and over hill and dale the shell will fly--ten miles it may be--to its billet, camp, massing night attack, or advancing gun. Great multitudes of balloons will be the Argus eyes of the entire military organism, stalked eyes with a telephonic nerve in each stalk, and at night they will sweep the country with search-lights and come soaring before the wind with hanging flares. Certainly they will be steerable. Moreover, when the wind admits, there will be freely-moving steerable balloons wagging little flags to their friends below. And so far as the resources of the men on the ground go, the balloons will be almost invulnerable. The mere perforation of balloons with shot does them little harm, and the possibility of hitting a balloon that is drifting about at a practically unascertainable distance and height so precisely as to blow it to pieces with a timed shell, and to do this in the little time before it is able to give simple and precise instructions as to your range and position to the unseen gunners it directs, is certainly one of the most difficult and trying undertakings for an artilleryman that one can well imagine. I am inclined to think that the many considerations against a successful attack on balloons from the ground, will enormously stimulate enterprise and invention in the direction of dirigible aerial devices that can fight. Few people, I fancy, who know the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim, and Chanute, but will be inclined to believe that long before the year A.D. 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound. Directly that is accomplished the new invention will be most assuredly applied to war. The nature of the things that will ultimately fight in the sky is a matter for curious speculation. We begin with the captive balloon. Against that the navigable balloon will presently operate. I am inclined to think the practicable navigable balloon will be first attained by the use of a device already employed by Nature in the swimming-bladder of fishes. This is a closed gas-bag that can be contracted or expanded. If a gas-bag of thin, strong, practically impervious substance could be enclosed in a net of closely interlaced fibres (interlaced, for example, on the pattern of the muscles of the bladder in mammals), the ends of these fibres might be wound and unwound, and the effect of contractility attained. A row of such contractile balloons, hung over a long car which was horizontally expanded into wings, would not only allow that car to rise and fall at will, but if the balloon at one end were contracted and that at the other end expanded, and the intermediate ones allowed to assume intermediate conditions, the former end would drop, the expanded wings would be brought into a slanting condition over a smaller area of supporting air, and the whole apparatus would tend to glide downwards in that direction. The projection of a small vertical plane upon either side would make the gliding mass rotate in a descending spiral, and so we have all the elements of a controllable flight. Such an affair would be difficult to overset. It would be able to beat up even in a fair wind, and then it would be able to contract its bladders and fall down a long slant in any direction. From some such crude beginning a form like a soaring, elongated, flat-brimmed hat might grow, and the possibilities of adding an engine-driven screw are obvious enough. It is difficult to see how such a contrivance could carry guns of any calibre unless they fired from the rear in the line of flight. The problem of recoil becomes a very difficult one in aerial tactics. It would probably have at most a small machine-gun or so, which might fire an explosive shell at the balloons of the enemy, or kill their aeronauts with distributed bullets. The thing would be a sort of air-shark, and one may even venture to picture something of the struggle the deadlocked marksmen of 1950, lying warily in their rifle-pits, will see. One conceives them at first, each little hole with its watchful, well-equipped couple of assassins, turning up their eyes in expectation. The wind is with our enemy, and his captive balloons have been disagreeably overhead all through the hot morning. His big guns have suddenly become nervously active. Then, a little murmur along the pits and trenches, and from somewhere over behind us, this air-shark drives up the sky. The enemy's balloons splutter a little, retract, and go rushing down, and we send a spray of bullets as they drop. Then against our aerostat, and with the wind driving them clean overhead of us, come the antagonistic flying-machines. I incline to imagine there will be a steel prow with a cutting edge at either end of the sort of aerostat I foresee, and conceivably this aerial ram will be the most important weapon of the affair. When operating against balloons, such a fighting-machine will rush up the air as swiftly as possible, and then, with a rapid contraction of its bladders, fling itself like a knife at the sinking war-balloon of the foe. Down, down, down, through a vast alert tension of flight, down it will swoop, and, if its stoop is successful, slash explosively at last through a suffocating moment. Rifles will crack, ropes tear and snap; there will be a rending and shouting, a great thud of liberated gas, and perhaps a flare. Quite certainly those flying machines will carry folded parachutes, and the last phase of many a struggle will be the desperate leap of the aeronauts with these in hand, to snatch one last chance of life out of a mass of crumpling, fallen wreckage. But in such a fight between flying-machine and flying-machine as we are trying to picture, it will be a fight of hawks, complicated by bullets and little shells. They will rush up and up to get the pitch of one another, until the aeronauts sob and sicken in the rarefied air, and the blood comes to eyes and nails. The marksmen below will strain at last, eyes under hands, to see the circling battle that dwindles in the zenith. Then, perhaps, a wild adventurous dropping of one close beneath the other, an attempt to stoop, the sudden splutter of guns, a tilting up or down, a disengagement. What will have happened? One combatant, perhaps, will heel lamely earthward, dropping, dropping, with half its bladders burst or shot away, the other circles down in pursuit.... "What are they doing?" Our marksmen will snatch at their field-glasses, tremulously anxious, "Is that a white flag or no?... If they drop now we have 'em!" But the duel will be the rarer thing. In any affair of ramming there is an enormous advantage for the side that can contrive, anywhere in the field of action, to set two vessels at one. The mere ascent of one flying-ram from one side will assuredly slip the leashes of two on the other, until the manoeuvring squadrons may be as thick as starlings in October. They will wheel and mount, they will spread and close, there will be elaborate manoeuvres for the advantage of the wind, there will be sudden drops to the shelter of entrenched guns. The actual impact of battle will be an affair of moments. They will be awful moments, but not more terrible, not more exacting of manhood than the moments that will come to men when there is--and it has not as yet happened on this earth--equal fighting between properly manned and equipped ironclads at sea. (And the well-bred young gentlemen of means who are privileged to officer the British Army nowadays will be no more good at this sort of thing than they are at controversial theology or electrical engineering or anything else that demands a well-exercised brain.)... Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war must become a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind. The victor in that aerial struggle will tower with pitilessly watchful eyes over his adversary, will concentrate his guns and all his strength unobserved, will mark all his adversary's roads and communications, and sweep them with sudden incredible disasters of shot and shell. The moral effect of this predominance will be enormous. All over the losing country, not simply at his frontier but everywhere, the victor will soar. Everybody everywhere will be perpetually and constantly looking up, with a sense of loss and insecurity, with a vague stress of painful anticipations. By day the victor's aeroplanes will sweep down upon the apparatus of all sorts in the adversary's rear, and will drop explosives and incendiary matters upon them,[41] so that no apparatus or camp or shelter will any longer be safe. At night his high floating search-lights will go to and fro and discover and check every desperate attempt to relieve or feed the exhausted marksmen of the fighting line. The phase of tension will pass, that weakening opposition will give, and the war from a state of mutual pressure and petty combat will develop into the collapse of the defensive lines. A general advance will occur under the aerial van, ironclad road fighting-machines may perhaps play a considerable part in this, and the enemy's line of marksmen will be driven back or starved into surrender, or broken up and hunted down. As the superiority of the attack becomes week by week more and more evident, its assaults will become more dashing and far-reaching. Under the moonlight and the watching balloons there will be swift noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and the never-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part. And now men on the losing side will thank God for the reprieve of a pitiless wind, for lightning, thunder, and rain, for any elemental disorder that will for a moment lift the descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an elemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces, blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside the wisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chance to get their own again or die. Such adventures may rescue pride and honour, may cause momentary dismay in the victor and palliate disaster, but they will not turn back the advance of the victors, or twist inferiority into victory. Presently the advance will resume. With that advance the phase of indecisive contest will have ended, and the second phase of the new war, the business of forcing submission, will begin. This should be more easy in the future even than it has proved in the past, in spite of the fact that central governments are now elusive, and small bodies of rifle-armed guerillas far more formidable than ever before. It will probably be brought about in a civilized country by the seizure of the vital apparatus of the urban regions--the water supply, the generating stations for electricity (which will supply all the heat and warmth of the land), and the chief ways used in food distribution. Through these expedients, even while the formal war is still in progress, an irresistible pressure upon a local population will be possible, and it will be easy to subjugate or to create afresh local authorities, who will secure the invader from any danger of a guerilla warfare upon his rear. Through that sort of an expedient an even very obdurate loser will be got down to submission, area by area. With the destruction of its military apparatus and the prospective loss of its water and food supply, however, the defeated civilized State will probably be willing to seek terms as a whole, and bring the war to a formal close. In cases where, instead of contiguous frontiers, the combatants are separated by the sea, the aerial struggle will probably be preceded or accompanied by a struggle for the command of the sea. Of this warfare there have been many forecasts. In this, as in all the warfare of the coming time, imaginative foresight, a perpetual alteration of tactics, a perpetual production of unanticipated devices, will count enormously. Other things being equal, victory will rest with the force mentally most active. What type of ship may chance to be prevalent when the great naval war comes is hard guessing, but I incline to think that the naval architects of the ablest peoples will concentrate more and more upon speed and upon range and penetration, and, above all, upon precision of fire. I seem to see a light type of ironclad, armoured thickly only over its engines and magazines, murderously equipped, and with a ram--as alert and deadly as a striking snake. In the battles of the open she will have little to fear from the slow fumbling treacheries of the submarine, she will take as little heed of the chance of a torpedo as a barefooted man in battle does of the chance of a fallen dagger in his path. Unless I know nothing of my own blood, the English and Americans will prefer to catch their enemies in ugly weather or at night, and then they will fight to ram. The struggle on the high seas between any two naval powers (except, perhaps, the English and American, who have both quite unparalleled opportunities for coaling) will not last more than a week or so. One or other force will be destroyed at sea, driven into its ports and blockaded there, or cut off from its supply of coal (or other force-generator), and hunted down to fight or surrender. An inferior fleet that tries to keep elusively at sea will always find a superior fleet between itself and coal, and will either have to fight at once or be shot into surrender as it lies helpless on the water. Some commerce-destroying enterprise on the part of the loser may go on, but I think the possibilities of that sort of thing are greatly exaggerated. The world grows smaller and smaller, the telegraph and telephone go everywhere, wireless telegraphy opens wider and wider possibilities to the imagination, and how the commerce-destroyer is to go on for long without being marked down, headed off, cut off from coal, and forced to fight or surrender, I do not see. The commerce-destroyer will have a very short run; it will have to be an exceptionally good and costly ship in the first place, it will be finally sunk or captured, and altogether I do not see how that sort of thing will pay when once the command of the sea is assured. A few weeks will carry the effective frontier of the stronger power up to the coast-line of the weaker, and permit of the secure resumption of the over-sea trade of the former. And then will open a second phase of naval warfare, in which the submarine may play a larger part. I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea. It must involve physical inconvenience of the most demoralizing sort simply to be in one for any length of time. A first-rate man who has been breathing carbonic acid and oil vapour under a pressure of four atmospheres becomes presently a second-rate man. Imagine yourself in a submarine that has ventured a few miles out of port, imagine that you have headache and nausea, and that some ship of the _Cobra_ type is flashing itself and its search-lights about whenever you come up to the surface, and promptly tearing down on your descending bubbles with a ram, trailing perhaps a tail of grapples or a net as well. Even if you get their boat, these nicely aerated men you are fighting know they have a four to one chance of living; while for your submarine to be "got" is certain death. You may, of course, throw out a torpedo or so, with as much chance of hitting vitally as you would have if you were blindfolded, turned round three times, and told to fire revolver-shots at a charging elephant. The possibility of sweeping for a submarine with a seine would be vividly present in the minds of a submarine crew. If you are near shore you will probably be near rocks--an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would, probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun or pompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In no way can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact, practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping its way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better to attack such a vessel and capture it boldly with a few desperate men on a tug. At the utmost the submarine will be used in narrow waters, in rivers, or to fluster or destroy ships in harbour or with poor-spirited crews--that is to say, it will simply be an added power in the hands of the nation that is predominant at sea. And, even then, it can be merely destructive, while a sane and high-spirited fighter will always be dissatisfied if, with an indisputable superiority of force, he fails to take.[42] No; the naval warfare of the future is for light, swift ships, almost recklessly not defensive and with splendid guns and gunners. They will hit hard and ram, and warfare which is taking to cover on land will abandon it at sea. And the captain, and the engineer, and the gunner will have to be all of the same sort of men: capable, headlong men, with brains and no ascertainable social position. They will differ from the officers of the British Navy in the fact that the whole male sex of the nation will have been ransacked to get them. The incredible stupidity that closes all but a menial position in the British Navy to the sons of those who cannot afford to pay a hundred a year for them for some years, necessarily brings the individual quality of the British naval officer below the highest possible, quite apart from the deficiencies that must exist on account of the badness of secondary education in England. The British naval officer and engineer are not made the best of, good as they are, indisputably they might be infinitely better both in quality and training. The smaller German navy, probably, has an ampler pick of men relatively, is far better educated, less confident, and more strenuous. But the abstract navy I am here writing of will be superior to either of these, and like the American, in the absence of any distinction between officers and engineers. The officer will be an engineer. The military advantages of the command of the sea will probably be greater in the future than they have been in the past. A fleet with aerial supports would be able to descend upon any portion of the adversary's coast it chose, and to dominate the country inland for several miles with its gun-fire. All the enemy's sea-coast towns would be at its mercy. It would be able to effect landing and send raids of cyclist-marksmen inland, whenever a weak point was discovered. Landings will be enormously easier than they have ever been before. Once a wedge of marksmen has been driven inland they would have all the military advantages of the defence when it came to eject them. They might, for example, encircle and block some fortified post, and force costly and disastrous attempts to relieve it. The defensive country would stand at bay, tethered against any effective counter-blow, keeping guns, supplies, and men in perpetual and distressing movement to and fro along its sea-frontiers. Its soldiers would get uncertain rest, irregular feeding, unhealthy conditions of all sorts in hastily made camps. The attacking fleet would divide and re-unite, break up and vanish, amazingly reappear. The longer the defender's coast the more wretched his lot. Never before in the world's history was the command of the sea worth what it is now. But the command of the sea is, after all, like military predominance on land, to be insured only by superiority of equipment in the hands of a certain type of man, a type of man that it becomes more and more impossible to improvise, that a country must live for through many years, and that no country on earth at present can be said to be doing its best possible to make. All this elaboration of warfare lengthens the scale between theoretical efficiency and absolute unpreparedness. There was a time when any tribe that had men and spears was ready for war, and any tribe that had some cunning or emotion at command might hope to discount any little disparity in numbers between itself and its neighbour. Luck and stubbornness and the incalculable counted for much; it was half the battle not to know you were beaten, and it is so still. Even to-day, a great nation, it seems, may still make its army the plaything of its gentlefolk, abandon important military appointments to feminine intrigue, and trust cheerfully to the homesickness and essential modesty of its influential people, and the simpler patriotism of its colonial dependencies when it comes at last to the bloody and wearisome business of "muddling through." But these days of the happy-go-lucky optimist are near their end. War is being drawn into the field of the exact sciences. Every additional weapon, every new complication of the art of war, intensifies the need of deliberate preparation, and darkens the outlook of a nation of amateurs. Warfare in the future, on sea or land alike, will be much more one-sided than it has ever been in the past, much more of a foregone conclusion. Save for national lunacy, it will be brought about by the side that will win, and because that side knows that it will win. More and more it will have the quality of surprise, of pitiless revelation. Instead of the seesaw, the bickering interchange of battles of the old time, will come swiftly and amazingly blow, and blow, and blow, no pause, no time for recovery, disasters cumulative and irreparable. The fight will never be in practice between equal sides, never be that theoretical deadlock we have sketched, but a fight between the more efficient and the less efficient, between the more inventive and the more traditional. While the victors, disciplined and grimly intent, full of the sombre yet glorious delight of a grave thing well done, will, without shouting or confusion, be fighting like one great national body, the losers will be taking that pitiless exposure of helplessness in such a manner as their natural culture and character may determine. War for the losing side will be an unspeakable pitiable business. There will be first of all the coming of the war, the wave of excitement, the belligerent shouting of the unemployed inefficients, the flag-waving, the secret doubts, the eagerness for hopeful news, the impatience of the warning voice. I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the grey old general--the general who learnt his art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with his epaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historical value, his spurs and his sword--riding along on his obsolete horse, by the side of his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. And the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the old time. They will believe in him to the end. They have been brought up in their schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers have mingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their faith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The "smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose for them, lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slope their obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death. They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; Religion and the Ratepayer and the Rights of the Parent working through the instrumentality of the Best Club in the World have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered, with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolute stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the subaltern--the son of the school-burking, shareholding class--a slightly taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical headmaster to use a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."... The major you see is a man of the world, and very pleasantly meets the grey general's eye. He is, one may remark by the way, something of an army reformer, without offence, of course, to the Court people or the Government people. His prospects--if only he were not going to be shot--are brilliant enough. He has written quite cleverly on the question of Recruiting, and advocated as much as twopence more a day and billiard rooms under the chaplain's control; he has invented a military bicycle with a wheel of solid iron that can be used as a shield; and a war correspondent and, indeed, any one who writes even the most casual and irresponsible article on military questions is a person worth his cultivating. He is the very life and soul of army reform, as it is known to the governments of the grey--that is to say, army reform without a single step towards a social revolution.... So the gentlemanly old general--the polished drover to the shambles--rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that haunts my mind. I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do, against modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever they come against a sanely-organized army. There is nowhere they can come in, there is nothing they can do. The scattered invisible marksmen with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet the bitterest and cruellest things will have to happen, thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful disease, before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very carefully-educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical recognition.[43]... Well, in the ampler prospect even this haunting tragedy of innumerable avoidable deaths is but an incidental thing. They die, and their troubles are over. The larger fact after all is the inexorable tendency in things to make a soldier a skilled and educated man, and to link him, in sympathy and organization, with the engineer and the doctor, and all the continually developing mass of scientifically educated men that the advance of science and mechanism is producing. We are dealing with the inter-play of two world-wide forces, that work through distinctive and contrasted tendencies to a common end. We have the force of invention insistent upon a progress of the peace organization, which tends on the one hand to throw out great useless masses of people, the People of the Abyss, and on the other hand to develop a sort of adiposity of functionless wealthy, a speculative elephantiasis, and to promote the development of a new social order of efficients, only very painfully and slowly, amidst these growing and yet disintegrating masses. And on the other hand we have the warlike drift of such a social body, the inevitable intensification of international animosities in such a body, the absolute determination evident in the scheme of things to smash such a body, to smash it just as far as it is such a body, under the hammer of war, that must finally bring about rapidly and under pressure the same result as that to which the peaceful evolution slowly tends. While we are as yet only thinking of a physiological struggle, of complex reactions and slow absorptions, comes War with the surgeon's knife. War comes to simplify the issue and line out the thing with knife-like cuts. The law that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people must develop and consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten in war and give way upon all points where its interests conflict with the interests of more capable people. It must foster and accelerate that natural segregation, which has been discussed in the third and fourth chapters of these "Anticipations," or perish. The war of the coming time will really be won in schools and colleges and universities, wherever men write and read and talk together. The nation that produces in the near future the largest proportional development of educated and intelligent engineers and agriculturists, of doctors, schoolmasters, professional soldiers, and intellectually active people of all sorts; the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeeds most subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homes that gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions, death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguish incompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; the nation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the nation that will be the most powerful in warfare as in peace, will certainly be the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000. In the long run no heroism and no accidents can alter that. No flag-waving, no patriotic leagues, no visiting of essentially petty imperial personages hither and thither, no smashing of the windows of outspoken people nor seizures of papers and books, will arrest the march of national defeat. And this issue is already so plain and simple, the alternatives are becoming so pitilessly clear, that even in the stupidest court and the stupidest constituencies, it must presently begin in some dim way to be felt. A time will come when so many people will see this issue clearly that it will gravely affect political and social life. The patriotic party--the particular gang, that is, of lawyers, brewers, landlords, and railway directors that wishes to be dominant--will be forced to become an efficient party in profession at least, will be forced to stimulate and organize that educational and social development that may at last even bring patriotism under control. The rulers of the grey, the democratic politician and the democratic monarch, will be obliged year by year by the very nature of things to promote the segregation of colours within the grey, to foster the power that will finally supersede democracy and monarchy altogether, the power of the scientifically educated, disciplined specialist, and that finally is the power of saints, the power of the thing that is provably right. It may be delayed, but it cannot be defeated; in the end it must arrive--if not to-day and among our people, then to-morrow and among another people, who will triumph in our overthrow. This is the lesson that must be learnt, that some tongue and kindred of the coming time must inevitably learn. But what tongue it will be, and what kindred that will first attain this new development, opens far more complex and far less certain issues than any we have hitherto considered. FOOTNOTES: [37] Even along such vast frontiers as the Russian and Austrian, for example, where M. Bloch anticipates war will be begun with an invasion of clouds of Russian cavalry and great cavalry battles, I am inclined to think this deadlock of essentially defensive marksmen may still be the more probable thing. Small bodies of cyclist riflemen would rush forward to meet the advancing clouds of cavalry, would drop into invisible ambushes, and announce their presence--in unknown numbers--with carefully aimed shots difficult to locate. A small number of such men could always begin their fight with a surprise at the most advantageous moment, and they would be able to make themselves very deadly against a comparatively powerful frontal attack. If at last the attack were driven home before supports came up to the defenders, they would still be able to cycle away, comparatively immune. To attempt even very wide flanking movements against such a snatched position would be simply to run risks of blundering upon similar ambushes. The clouds of cavalry would have to spread into thin lines at last and go forward with the rifle. Invading clouds of cyclists would be in no better case. A conflict of cyclists against cyclists over a country too spacious for unbroken lines, would still, I think, leave the struggle essentially unchanged. The advance of small unsupported bodies would be the wildest and most unprofitable adventure; every advance would have to be made behind a screen of scouts, and, given a practical equality in the numbers and manhood of the two forces, these screens would speedily become simply very attenuated lines. [38] So far, pestilence has been a feature of almost every sustained war in the world, but there is really no reason whatever why it should be so. There is no reason, indeed, why a soldier upon active service on the victorious side should go without a night's rest or miss a meal. If he does, there is muddle and want of foresight somewhere, and that our hypothesis excludes. [39] Lady Maud Rolleston, in her very interesting _Yeoman Service_, complains of the Boers killing an engine-driver during an attack on a train at Kroonstadt, "which was," she writes, "an abominable action, as he is, in law, a non-combatant." The implicit assumption of this complaint would cover the engineers of an ironclad or the guides of a night attack, everybody, in fact, who was not positively weapon in hand. [40] Experiments will probably be made in the direction of armoured guns, armoured search-light carriages, and armoured shelters for men, that will admit of being pushed forward over rifle-swept ground. To such possibilities, to possibilities even of a sort of land ironclad, my inductive reason inclines; the armoured train seems indeed a distinct beginning of this sort of thing, but my imagination proffers nothing but a vision of wheels smashed by shells, iron tortoises gallantly rushed by hidden men, and unhappy marksmen and engineers being shot at as they bolt from some such monster overset. The fact of it is, I detest and fear these thick, slow, essentially defensive methods, either for land or sea fighting. I believe invincibly that the side that can go fastest and hit hardest will always win, with or without or in spite of massive defences, and no ingenuity in devising the massive defence will shake that belief. [41] Or, in deference to the Rules of War, fire them out of guns of trivial carrying power. [42] A curious result might very possibly follow a success of submarines on the part of a naval power finally found to be weaker and defeated. The victorious power might decide that a narrow sea was no longer, under the new conditions, a comfortable boundary line, and might insist on marking its boundary along the high-water mark of its adversary's adjacent coasts. [43] There comes to hand as I correct these proofs a very typical illustration of the atmosphere of really almost imbecile patronage in which the British private soldier lives. It is a circular from some one at Lydd, some one who evidently cannot even write English, but who is nevertheless begging for an iron hut in which to inflict lessons on our soldiers. "At present," says this circular, "it is pretty to see in the Home a group of Gunners busily occupied in wool-work or learning basket-making, whilst one of their number sings or recites, and others are playing games or letter-writing, but even quite recently the members of the Bible Reading Union and one of the ladies might have been seen painfully crowded behind screens, choosing the 'Golden Text' with lowered voices, and trying to pray 'without distraction,' whilst at the other end of the room men were having supper, and halfway down a dozen Irish militia (who don't care to read, but are keen on a story) were gathered round another lady, who was telling them an amusing temperance tale, trying to speak so that the Bible readers should not hear her and yet that the Leinsters _should_ was a difficulty, but when the Irishmen begged for a song--difficulty became _impossibility_, and their friend had to say, '_No._' Yet this is just the double work required in Soldiers' Homes, and above all at Lydd, where there is so little safe amusement to be had in camp, and none in the village." These poor youngsters go from this "safe amusement" under the loving care of "lady workers," this life of limitation, make-believe and spiritual servitude that a self-respecting negro would find intolerable, into a warfare that exacts initiative and a freely acting intelligence from all who take part in it, under the bitterest penalties of shame and death. What can you expect of them? And how can you expect any men of capacity and energy, any men even of mediocre self-respect to knowingly place themselves under the tutelage of the sort of people who dominate these organized degradations? I am amazed the army gets so many capable recruits as it does. And while the private lives under these conditions, the would-be capable officer stifles amidst equally impossible surroundings. He must associate with the uneducated products of the public schools, and listen to their chatter about the "sports" that delight them, suffer social indignities from the "army woman," worry and waste money on needless clothes, and expect to end by being shamed or killed under some unfairly promoted incapable. Nothing illustrates the intellectual blankness of the British army better than its absolute dearth of military literature. No one would dream of gaining any profit by writing or publishing a book upon such a subject, for example, as mountain warfare in England, because not a dozen British officers would have the sense to buy such a book, and yet the British army is continually getting into scrapes in mountain districts. A few unselfish men like Major Peech find time to write an essay or so, and that is all. On the other hand, I find no less than five works in French on this subject in MM. Chapelet & Cie.'s list alone. On guerilla warfare again, and after two years of South Africa, while there is nothing in English but some scattered papers by Dr. T. Miller Maguire, there are nearly a dozen good books in French. As a supplement to these facts is the spectacle of the officers of the Guards telegraphing to Sir Thomas Lipton on the occasion of the defeat of his Shamrock II., "Hard luck. Be of good cheer. Brigade of Guards wish you every success." This is not the foolish enthusiasm of one or two subalterns, it is collective. They followed that yacht race with emotion! is a really important thing to them. No doubt the whole mess was in a state of extreme excitement. How can capable and active men be expected to live and work between this upper and that nether millstone? The British army not only does not attract ambitious, energetic men, it repels them. I must confess that I see no hope either in the rulers, the traditions, or the manhood of the British regular army, to forecast its escape from the bog of ignorance and negligence in which it wallows. Far better than any of projected reforms would it be to let the existing army severely alone, to cease to recruit for it, to retain (at the expense of its officers, assisted perhaps by subscriptions from ascendant people like Sir Thomas Lipton) its messes, its uniforms, its games, bands, entertainments, and splendid memories as an appendage of the Court, and to create, in absolute independence of it, battalions and batteries of efficient professional soldiers, without social prestige or social distinctions, without bands, dress uniforms, colours, chaplains or honorary colonels, and to embody these as a real marching army perpetually _en route_ throughout the empire--a reading, thinking, experimenting army under an absolutely distinct war office, with its own colleges, depôts and training camps perpetually ready for war. I cannot help but think that, if a hint were taken from the _Turbinia_ syndicate, a few enterprising persons of means and intelligence might do much by private experiment to supplement and replace the existing state of affairs. VII THE CONFLICT OF LANGUAGES We have brought together thus far in these Anticipations the material for the picture of a human community somewhere towards the year 2000. We have imagined its roads, the type and appearance of its homes, its social developments, its internal struggle for organization; we have speculated upon its moral and æsthetic condition, read its newspaper, made an advanced criticism upon the lack of universality in its literature, and attempted to imagine it at war. We have decided in particular that unlike the civilized community of the immediate past which lived either in sharply-defined towns or agriculturally over a wide country, this population will be distributed in a quite different way, a little more thickly over vast urban regions and a little less thickly over less attractive or less convenient or less industrial parts of the world. And implicit in all that has been written there has appeared an unavoidable assumption that the coming community will be vast, something geographically more extensive than most, and geographically different from almost all existing communities, that the outline its creative forces will draw not only does not coincide with existing political centres and boundaries, but will be more often than not in direct conflict with them, uniting areas that are separated and separating areas that are united, grouping here half a dozen tongues and peoples together and there tearing apart homogeneous bodies and distributing the fragments among separate groups. And it will now be well to inquire a little into the general causes of these existing divisions, the political boundaries of to-day, and the still older contours of language and race. It is first to be remarked that each of these sets of boundaries is superposed, as it were, on the older sets. The race areas, for example, which are now not traceable in Europe at all must have represented old regions of separation; the language areas, which have little or no essential relation to racial distribution, have also given way long since to the newer forces that have united and consolidated nations. And the still newer forces that have united and separated the nineteenth century states have been, and in many cases are still, in manifest conflict with "national" ideas. Now, in the original separation of human races, in the subsequent differentiation and spread of languages, in the separation of men into nationalities, and in the union and splitting of states and empires, we have to deal essentially with the fluctuating manifestations of the same fundamental shaping factor which will determine the distribution of urban districts in the coming years. Every boundary of the ethnographical, linguistic, political, and commercial map--as a little consideration will show--has indeed been traced in the first place by the means of transit, under the compulsion of geographical contours. There are evident in Europe four or five or more very distinct racial types, and since the methods and rewards of barbaric warfare and the nature of the chief chattels of barbaric trade have always been diametrically opposed to racial purity, their original separation could only have gone on through such an entire lack of communication as prevented either trade or warfare between the bulk of the differentiating bodies. These original racial types are now inextricably mingled. Unobservant, over-scholarly people talk or write in the profoundest manner about a Teutonic race and a Keltic race, and institute all sorts of curious contrasts between these phantoms, but these are not races at all, if physical characteristics have anything to do with race. The Dane, the Bavarian, the Prussian, the Frieslander, the Wessex peasant, the Kentish man, the Virginian, the man from New Jersey, the Norwegian, the Swede, and the Transvaal Boer, are generalized about, for example, as Teutonic, while the short, dark, cunning sort of Welshman, the tall and generous Highlander, the miscellaneous Irish, the square-headed Breton, and any sort of Cornwall peasant are Kelts within the meaning of this oil-lamp anthropology.[44] People who believe in this sort of thing are not the sort of people that one attempts to convert by a set argument. One need only say the thing is not so; there is no Teutonic race, and there never has been; there is no Keltic race, and there never has been. No one has ever proved or attempted to prove the existence of such races, the thing has always been assumed; they are dogmas with nothing but questionable authority behind them, and the onus of proof rests on the believer. This nonsense about Keltic and Teutonic is no more science than Lombroso's extraordinary assertions about criminals, or palmistry, or the development of religion from a solar myth. Indisputably there are several races intermingled in the European populations--I am inclined to suspect the primitive European races may be found to be so distinct as to resist confusion and pamnyxia through hybridization--but there is no inkling of a satisfactory analysis yet that will discriminate what these races were and define them in terms of physical and moral character. The fact remains there is no such thing as a racially pure and homogeneous community in Europe distinct from other communities. Even among the Jews, according to Erckert and Chantre and J. Jacobs, there are markedly divergent types, there may have been two original elements and there have been extensive local intermixtures. Long before the beginnings of history, while even language was in its first beginnings--indeed as another aspect of the same process as the beginning of language--the first complete isolations that established race were breaking down again, the little pools of race were running together into less homogeneous lagoons and marshes of humanity, the first paths were being worn--war paths for the most part. Still differentiation would be largely at work. Without frequent intercourse, frequent interchange of women as the great factor in that intercourse, the tribes and bands of mankind would still go on separating, would develop dialectic and customary, if not physical and moral differences. It was no longer a case of pools perhaps, but they were still in lakes. There were as yet no open seas of mankind. With advancing civilization, with iron weapons and war discipline, with established paths and a social rule and presently with the coming of the horse, what one might call the areas of assimilation would increase in size. A stage would be reached when the only checks to transit of a sufficiently convenient sort to keep language uniform would be the sea or mountains or a broad river or--pure distance. And presently the rules of the game, so to speak, would be further altered and the unifications and isolations that were establishing themselves upset altogether and brought into novel conflict by the beginnings of navigation, whereby an impassable barrier became a highway. The commencement of actual European history coincides with the closing phases of what was probably a very long period of a foot and (occasional) horseback state of communications; the adjustments so arrived at being already in an early state of rearrangement through the advent of the ship. The communities of Europe were still for the larger part small isolated tribes and kingdoms, such kingdoms as a mainly pedestrian militia, or at any rate a militia without transport, and drawn from (and soon drawn home again by) agricultural work, might hold together. The increase of transit facilities between such communities, by the development of shipping and the invention of the wheel and the made road, spelt increased trade perhaps for a time, but very speedily a more extensive form of war, and in the end either the wearing away of differences and union, or conquest. Man is the creature of a struggle for existence, incurably egoistic and aggressive. Convince him of the gospel of self-abnegation even, and he instantly becomes its zealous missionary, taking great credit that his expedients to ram it into the minds of his fellow-creatures do not include physical force--and if that is not self-abnegation, he asks, what is? So he has been, and so he is likely to remain. Not to be so, is to die of abnegation and extinguish the type. Improvement in transit between communities formerly for all practical purposes isolated, means, therefore, and always has meant, and I imagine, always will mean, that now they can get at one another. And they do. They inter-breed and fight, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Unless Providence is belied in His works that is what they are meant to do. A third invention which, though not a means of transit like the wheeled vehicle and the ship, was yet a means of communication, rendered still larger political reactions possible, and that was the development of systems of writing. The first empires and some sort of written speech arose together. Just as a kingdom, as distinguished from a mere tribal group of villages, is almost impossible without horses, so is an empire without writing and post-roads. The history of the whole world for three thousand years is the history of a unity larger than the small kingdom of the Heptarchy type, endeavouring to establish itself under the stress of these discoveries of horse-traffic and shipping and the written word, the history, that is, of the consequences of the partial shattering of the barriers that had been effectual enough to prevent the fusion of more than tribal communities through all the long ages before the dawn of history. East of the Gobi Pamir barrier there has slowly grown up under these new conditions the Chinese system. West and north of the Sahara Gobi barrier of deserts and mountains, the extraordinarily strong and spacious conceptions of the Romans succeeded in dominating the world, and do, indeed, in a sort of mutilated way, by the powers of great words and wide ideas, in Cæsarism and Imperialism, in the titles of Czar, Kaiser, and Imperator, in Papal pretension and countless political devices, dominate it to this hour. For awhile these conceptions sustained a united and to a large extent organized empire over very much of this space. But at its stablest time, this union was no more than a political union, the spreading of a thin layer of Latin-speaking officials, of a thin network of roads and a very thin veneer indeed of customs and refinements, over the scarcely touched national masses. It checked, perhaps, but it nowhere succeeded in stopping the slow but inevitable differentiation of province from province and nation from nation. The forces of transit that permitted the Roman imperialism and its partial successors to establish wide ascendancies, were not sufficient to carry the resultant unity beyond the political stage. There was unity, but not unification. Tongues and writing ceased to be pure without ceasing to be distinct. Sympathies, religious and social practices, ran apart and rounded themselves off like drops of oil on water. Travel was restricted to the rulers and the troops and to a wealthy leisure class; commerce was for most of the constituent provinces of the empire a commerce in superficialities, and each province--except for Italy, which latterly became dependent on an over-seas food supply--was in all essential things autonomous, could have continued in existence, rulers and ruled, arts, luxuries, and refinements just as they stood, if all other lands and customs had been swept out of being. Local convulsions and revolutions, conquests and developments, occurred indeed, but though the stones were altered the mosaic remained, and the general size and character of its constituent pieces remained. So it was under the Romans, so it was in the eighteenth century, and so it would probably have remained as long as the post-road and the sailing-ship were the most rapid forms of transit within the reach of man. Wars and powers and princes came and went, that was all. Nothing was changed, there was only one state the more or less. Even in the eighteenth century the process of real unification had effected so little, that not one of the larger kingdoms of Europe escaped a civil war--not a class war, but a really _internal_ war--between one part of itself and another, in that hundred years. In spite of Rome's few centuries of unstable empire, internal wars, a perpetual struggle against finally triumphant disruption seemed to be the unavoidable destiny of every power that attempted to rule over a larger radius than at most a hundred miles. So evident was this that many educated English persons thought then, and many who are not in the habit of analyzing operating causes, still think to-day, that the wide diffusion of the English-speaking people is a mere preliminary to their political, social, and linguistic disruption--the eighteenth-century breach with the United States is made a precedent of, and the unification that followed the war of Union and the growing unification of Canada is overlooked--that linguistic differences, differences of custom, costume, prejudice, and the like, will finally make the Australian, the Canadian of English blood, the Virginian, and the English Africander, as incomprehensible and unsympathetic one to another as Spaniard and Englishman or Frenchman and German are now. On such a supposition all our current Imperialism is the most foolish defiance of the inevitable, the maddest waste of blood, treasure, and emotion that man ever made. So, indeed, it might be--so, indeed, I certainly think it would be--if it were not that the epoch of post-road and sailing-ship is at an end. We are in the beginning of a new time, with such forces of organization and unification at work in mechanical traction, in the telephone and telegraph, in a whole wonderland of novel, space-destroying appliances, and in the correlated inevitable advance in practical education, as the world has never felt before. The operation of these unifying forces is already to be very distinctly traced in the check, the arrest indeed, of any further differentiation in existing tongues, even in the most widely spread. In fact, it is more than an arrest even, the forces of differentiation have been driven back and an actual process of assimilation has set in. In England at the commencement of the nineteenth century the common man of Somerset and the common man of Yorkshire, the Sussex peasant, the Caithness cottar and the common Ulsterman, would have been almost incomprehensible to one another. They differed in accent, in idiom, and in their very names for things. They differed in their ideas about things. They were, in plain English, foreigners one to another. Now they differ only in accent, and even that is a dwindling difference. Their language has become ampler because now they read. They read books--or, at any rate, they learn to read out of books--and certainly they read newspapers and those scrappy periodicals that people like bishops pretend to think so detrimental to the human mind, periodicals that it is cheaper to make at centres and uniformly, than locally in accordance with local needs. Since the newspaper cannot fit the locality, the locality has to broaden its mind to the newspaper, and to ideas acceptable in other localities. The word and the idiom of the literary language and the pronunciation suggested by its spelling tends to prevail over the local usage. And moreover there is a persistent mixing of peoples going on, migration in search of employment and so on, quite unprecedented before the railways came. Few people are content to remain in that locality and state of life "into which it has pleased God to call them." As a result, dialectic purity has vanished, dialects are rapidly vanishing, and novel differentiations are retarded or arrested altogether. Such novelties as do establish themselves in a locality are widely disseminated almost at once in books and periodicals. A parallel arrest of dialectic separation has happened in France, in Italy, in Germany, and in the States. It is not a process peculiar to any one nation. It is simply an aspect of the general process that has arisen out of mechanical locomotion. The organization of elementary education has no doubt been an important factor, but the essential influence working through this circumstance is the fact that paper is relatively cheap to type-setting, and both cheap to authorship--even the commonest sorts of authorship--and the wider the area a periodical or book serves the bigger, more attractive, and better it can be made for the same money. And clearly this process of assimilation will continue. Even local differences of accent seem likely to follow. The itinerant dramatic company, the itinerant preacher, the coming extension of telephones and the phonograph, which at any time in some application to correspondence or instruction may cease to be a toy, all these things attack, or threaten to attack, the weeds of differentiation before they can take root.... And this process is not restricted to dialects merely. The native of a small country who knows no other language than the tongue of his country becomes increasingly at a disadvantage in comparison with the user of any of the three great languages of the Europeanized world. For his literature he depends on the scanty writers who are in his own case and write, or have written, in his own tongue. Necessarily they are few, because necessarily with a small public there can be only subsistence for a few. For his science he is in a worse case. His country can produce neither teachers nor discoverers to compare with the numbers of such workers in the larger areas, and it will neither pay them to write original matter for his instruction nor to translate what has been written in other tongues. The larger the number of people reading a tongue, the larger--other things being equal--will be not only the output of more or less original literature in that tongue, but also the more profitable and numerous will be translations of whatever has value in other tongues. Moreover, the larger the reading public in any language the cheaper will it be to supply copies of the desired work. In the matter of current intelligence the case of the speaker of the small language is still worse. His newspaper will need to be cheaply served, his home intelligence will be cut and restricted, his foreign news belated and second hand. Moreover, to travel even a little distance or to conduct anything but the smallest business enterprise will be exceptionally inconvenient to him. The Englishman who knows no language but his own may travel well-nigh all over the world and everywhere meet some one who can speak his tongue. But what of the Welsh-speaking Welshman? What of the Basque and the Lithuanian who can speak only his mother tongue? Everywhere such a man is a foreigner and with all the foreigner's disadvantages. In most places he is for all practical purposes deaf and dumb. The inducements to an Englishman, Frenchman or German to become bi-lingual are great enough nowadays, but the inducements to a speaker of the smaller languages are rapidly approaching compulsion. He must do it in self-defence. To be an educated man in his own vernacular has become an impossibility, he must either become a mental subject of one of the greater languages or sink to the intellectual status of a peasant. But if our analysis of social development was correct the peasant of to-day will be represented to-morrow by the people of no account whatever, the classes of extinction, the People of the Abyss. If that analysis was correct, the essential nation will be all of educated men, that is to say, the essential nation will speak some dominant language or cease to exist, whatever its primordial tongue may have been. It will pass out of being and become a mere local area of the lower social stratum,--a Problem for the philanthropic amateur. The action of the force of attraction of the great tongues is cumulative. It goes on, as bodies fall, with a steady acceleration. The more the great tongues prevail over the little languages the less will be the inducement to write and translate into these latter, the less the inducement to master them with any care or precision. And so this attack upon the smaller tongues, this gravitation of those who are born to speak them, towards the great languages, is not only to be seen going on in the case of such languages as Flemish, Welsh, or Basque, but even in the case of Norwegian and of such a great and noble tongue as the Italian, I am afraid that the trend of things makes for a similar suppression. All over Italy is the French newspaper and the French book. French wins its way more and more there, as English, I understand, is doing in Norway, and English and German in Holland. And in the coming years when the reading public will, in the case of the Western nations, be practically the whole functional population, when travel will be more extensive and abundant, and the inter-change of printed matter still cheaper and swifter--and above all with the spread of the telephone--the process of subtle, bloodless, unpremeditated annexation will conceivably progress much more rapidly even than it does at present. The Twentieth Century will see the effectual crowding out of most of the weaker languages--if not a positive crowding out, yet at least (as in Flanders) a supplementing of them by the superposition of one or other of a limited number of world-languages over the area in which each is spoken. This will go on not only in Europe, but with varying rates of progress and local eddies and interruptions over the whole world. Except in the special case of China and Japan, where there may be a unique development, the peoples of the world will escape from the wreckage of their too small and swamped and foundering social systems, only up the ladders of what one may call the aggregating tongues. What will these aggregating world-languages be? If one has regard only to its extension during the nineteenth century one may easily incline to overrate the probabilities of English becoming the chief of these. But a great part of the vast extension of English that has occurred has been due to the rapid reproduction of originally English-speaking peoples, the emigration of foreigners into English-speaking countries in quantities too small to resist the contagion about them, and the compulsion due to the political and commercial preponderance of a people too illiterate to readily master strange tongues. None of these causes have any essential permanence. When one comes to look more closely into the question one is surprised to discover how slow the extension of English has been in the face of apparently far less convenient tongues. English still fails to replace the French language in French Canada, and its ascendency is doubtful to-day in South Africa, after nearly a century of British dominion. It has none of the contagious quality of French, and the small class that monopolizes the direction of British affairs, and probably will monopolize it yet for several decades, has never displayed any great zeal to propagate its use. Of the few ideas possessed by the British governing class, the destruction and discouragement of schools and colleges is, unfortunately, one of the chief, and there is an absolute incapacity to understand the political significance of the language question. The Hindoo who is at pains to learn and use English encounters something uncommonly like hatred disguised in a facetious form. He will certainly read little about himself in English that is not grossly contemptuous, to reward him for his labour. The possibilities that have existed, and that do still in a dwindling degree exist, for resolute statesmen to make English the common language of communication for all Asia south and east of the Himalayas, will have to develop of their own force or dwindle and pass away. They may quite probably pass away. There is no sign that either the English or the Americans have a sufficient sense of the importance of linguistic predominance in the future of their race to interfere with natural processes in this matter for many years to come. Among peoples not actually subject to British or American rule, and who are neither waiters nor commercial travellers, the inducements to learn English, rather than French or German, do not increase. If our initial assumptions are right, the decisive factor in this matter is the amount of science and thought the acquisition of a language will afford the man who learns it. It becomes, therefore, a fact of very great significance that the actual number of books published in English is less than that in French or German, and that the proportion of serious books is very greatly less. A large proportion of English books are novels adapted to the minds of women, or of boys and superannuated business men, stories designed rather to allay than stimulate thought--they are the only books, indeed, that are profitable to publisher and author alike. In this connection they do not count, however; no foreigner is likely to learn English for the pleasure of reading Miss Marie Corelli in the original, or of drinking untranslatable elements from _The Helmet of Navarre_. The present conditions of book production for the English reading public offer no hope of any immediate change in this respect. There is neither honour nor reward--there is not even food or shelter--for the American or Englishman who devotes a year or so of his life to the adequate treatment of any spacious question, and so small is the English reading public with any special interest in science, that a great number of important foreign scientific works are never translated into English at all. Such interesting compilations as Bloch's work on war, for example, must be read in French; in English only a brief summary of his results is to be obtained, under a sensational heading.[45] Schopenhauer again is only to be got quite stupidly Bowdlerized, explained, and "selected" in English. Many translations that are made into English are made only to sell, they are too often the work of sweated women and girls--very often quite without any special knowledge of the matter they translate--they are difficult to read and untrustworthy to quote. The production of books in English, except the author be a wealthy amateur, rests finally upon the publishers, and publishers to-day stand a little lower than ordinary tradesmen in not caring at all whether the goods they sell are good or bad. Unusual books, they allege--and all good books are unusual--are "difficult to handle," and the author must pay the fine--amounting, more often than not, to the greater portion of his interest in the book. There is no criticism to control the advertising enterprises of publishers and authors, and no sufficiently intelligent reading public has differentiated out of the confusion to encourage attempts at critical discrimination. The organs of the great professions and technical trades are as yet not alive to the part their readers must play in the public life of the future, and ignore all but strictly technical publications. A bastard criticism, written in many cases by publishers' employees, a criticism having a very direct relation to the advertisement columns, distributes praise and blame in the periodic press. There is no body of great men either in England or America, no intelligence in the British Court, that might by any form of recognition compensate the philosophical or scientific writer for poverty and popular neglect. The more powerful a man's intelligence the more distinctly he must see that to devote himself to increase the scientific or philosophical wealth of the English tongue will be to sacrifice comfort, the respect of the bulk of his contemporaries, and all the most delightful things of life, for the barren reward of a not very certain righteous self-applause. By brewing and dealing in tied houses,[46] or by selling pork and tea, or by stock-jobbing and by pandering with the profits so obtained to the pleasures of the established great, a man of energy may hope to rise to a pitch of public honour and popularity immeasurably in excess of anything attainable through the most splendid intellectual performances. Heaven forbid I should overrate public honours and the company of princes! But it is not always delightful to be splashed by the wheels of cabs. Always before there has been at least a convention that the Court of this country, and its aristocracy, were radiant centres of moral and intellectual influence, that they did to some extent check and correct the judgments of the cab-rank and the beer-house. But the British Crown of to-day, so far as it exists for science and literature at all, exists mainly to repudiate the claims of intellectual performance to public respect. These things, if they were merely the grievances of the study, might very well rest there. But they must be recognized here because the intellectual decline of the published literature of the English language--using the word to cover all sorts of books--involves finally the decline of the language and of all the spacious political possibilities that go with the wide extension of a language. Conceivably, if in the coming years a deliberate attempt were made to provide sound instruction in English to all who sought it, and to all within the control of English-speaking Governments, if honour and emolument were given to literary men instead of being left to them to most indelicately take, and if the present sordid trade of publishing were so lifted as to bring the whole literature, the whole science, and all the contemporary thought of the world--not some selection of the world's literature, not some obsolete Encyclopædia sold meanly and basely to choke hungry minds, but a real publication of all that has been and is being done--within the reach of each man's need and desire who had the franchise of the tongue, then by the year 2000 I would prophesy that the whole functional body of human society would read, and perhaps even write and speak, our language. And not only that, but it might be the prevalent and everyday language of Scandinavia and Denmark and Holland, of all Africa, all North America, of the Pacific coasts of Asia and of India, the universal international language, and in a fair way to be the universal language of mankind. But such an enterprise demands a resolve and intelligence beyond all the immediate signs of the times; it implies a veritable renascence of intellectual life among the English-speaking peoples. The probabilities of such a renascence will be more conveniently discussed at a later stage, when we attempt to draw the broad outline of the struggle for world-wide ascendency that the coming years will see. But here it is clear that upon the probability of such a renascence depends the extension of the language, and not only that, but the preservation of that military and naval efficiency upon which, in this world of resolute aggression, the existence of the English-speaking communities finally depends. French and German will certainly be aggregating languages during the greater portion of the coming years. Of the two I am inclined to think French will spread further than German. There is a disposition in the world, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects of all things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts that the French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do not breed with the _abandon_ of rabbits or negroes. These are considerations that affect the dissemination of French very little. The French reading public is something different and very much larger than the existing French political system. The number of books published in French is greater than that published in English; there is a critical reception for a work published in French that is one of the few things worth a writer's having, and the French translators are the most alert and efficient in the world. One has only to see a Parisian bookshop, and to recall an English one, to realize the as yet unattainable standing of French. The serried ranks of lemon-coloured volumes in the former have the whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos and no limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frank indecency to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I remember my amazement to discover three copies of a translation of that most wonderful book, the _Text-book of Psychology_ of Professor William James,[ERRATUM: for 'The Text Book of Psychology,' _read_ 'The Principles of Psychology'.] in a shop in L'Avenue de l'Opera--three copies of a book that I have never seen anywhere in England outside my own house,--and I am an attentive student of bookshop windows! And the French books are all so pleasant in the page, and so cheap--they are for a people that buys to read. One thinks of the English bookshop, with its gaudy reach-me-downs of gilded and embossed cover, its horribly printed novels still more horribly "illustrated," the exasperating pointless variety in the size and thickness of its books. The general effect of the English book is that it is something sold by a dealer in _bric-à-brac_, honestly sorry the thing is a book, but who has done _his_ best to remedy it, anyhow! And all the English shopful is either brand new fiction or illustrated travel (of '_Buns with the Grand Lama_' type), or gilded versions of the classics of past times done up to give away. While the French bookshop reeks of contemporary intellectual life! These things count for French as against English now, and they will count for infinitely more in the coming years. And over German also French has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to sacrifice. There has been in Germany a more powerful parallel to what one may call the "honest Saxon" movement among the English, that queer mental twist that moves men to call an otherwise undistinguished preface a "Foreword," and find a pleasurable advantage over their fellow-creatures in a familiarity with "eftsoons." This tendency in German has done much to arrest the simplification of idiom, and checked the development of new words of classical origin. In particular it has stood in the way of the international use of scientific terms. The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian have a certain community of technical, scientific, and philosophical phraseology, and it is frequently easier for an Englishman with some special knowledge of his subject to read and appreciate a subtle and technical work in French, than it is for him to fully enter into the popular matter of the same tongue. Moreover, the technicalities of these peoples, being not so immediately and constantly brought into contrast and contact with their Latin or Greek roots as they would be if they were derived (as are so many "patriotic" German technicalities) from native roots, are free to qualify and develop a final meaning distinct from their original intention. In the growing and changing body of science this counts for much. The indigenous German technicality remains clumsy and compromised by its everyday relations, to the end of time it drags a lengthening chain of unsuitable associations. And the shade of meaning, the limited qualification, that a Frenchman or Englishman can attain with a mere twist of the sentence, the German must either abandon or laboriously overstate with some colossal wormcast of parenthesis.... Moreover, against the German tongue there are hostile frontiers, there are hostile people who fear German preponderance, and who have set their hearts against its use. In Roumania, and among the Slav, Bohemian, and Hungarian peoples, French attacks German in the flank, and has as clear a prospect of predominance. These two tongues must inevitably come into keen conflict; they will perhaps fight their battle for the linguistic conquest of Europe, and perhaps of the world, in a great urban region that will arise about the Rhine. Politically this region lies now in six independent States, but economically it must become one in the next fifty years. It will almost certainly be the greatest urban region in all the world except that which will arise in the eastern States of North America, and that which may arise somewhere about Hankow. It will stretch from Lille to Kiel, it will drive extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and fling an arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital of the old world. Paris will be its West End, and it will stretch a spider's web of railways and great roads of the new sort over the whole continent. Even when the coal-field industries of the plain give place to the industrial application of mountain-born electricity, this great city region will remain, I believe, in its present position at the seaport end of the great plain of the Old World. Considerations of transit will keep it where it has grown, and electricity will be brought to it in mighty cables from the torrents of the central European mountain mass. Its westward port may be Bordeaux or Milford Haven, or even some port in the south-west of Ireland--unless, which is very unlikely, the velocity of secure sea-travel can be increased beyond that of land locomotion. I do not see how this great region is to unify itself without some linguistic compromise--the Germanization of the French-speaking peoples by force is too ridiculous a suggestion to entertain. Almost inevitably with travel, with transport communications, with every condition of human convenience insisting upon it, formally or informally a bi-lingual compromise will come into operation, and to my mind at least the chances seem even that French will emerge on the upper hand. Unless, indeed, that great renascence of the English-speaking peoples should, after all, so overwhelmingly occur as to force this European city to be tri-lingual, and prepare the way by which the whole world may at last speak together in one tongue. These are the aggregating tongues. I do not think that any other tongues than these are quite likely to hold their own in the coming time. Italian may flourish in the city of the Po valley, but only with French beside it. Spanish and Russian are mighty languages, but without a reading public how can they prevail, and what prospect of a reading public has either? They are, I believe, already judged. By A.D. 2000 all these languages will be tending more and more to be the second tongues of bi-lingual communities, with French, or English, or less probably German winning the upper hand. But when one turns to China there are the strangest possibilities. It is in Eastern Asia alone that there seems to be any possibility of a synthesis sufficiently great to maintain itself, arising outside of, and independently of, the interlocked system of mechanically sustained societies that is developing out of mediæval Christendom. Throughout Eastern Asia there is still, no doubt, a vast wilderness of languages, but over them all rides the Chinese writing. And very strong--strong enough to be very gravely considered--is the possibility of that writing taking up an orthodox association of sounds, and becoming a world speech. The Japanese written language, the language of Japanese literature, tends to assimilate itself to Chinese, and fresh Chinese words and expressions are continually taking root in Japan. The Japanese are a people quite abnormal and incalculable, with a touch of romance, a conception of honour, a quality of imagination, and a clearness of intelligence that renders possible for them things inconceivable of any other existing nation. I may be the slave of perspective effects, but when I turn my mind from the pettifogging muddle of the English House of Commons, for example, that magnified vestry that is so proud of itself as a club--when I turn from that to this race of brave and smiling people, abruptly destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the Japanese were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process of synthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them be! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the educated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. In front and rear of China the English language stands. It has the start of all other languages--the mechanical advantage--the position. And if only we, who think and write and translate and print and put forth, could make it worth the world's having! FOOTNOTES: [44] Under the intoxication of the Keltic Renascence the most diverse sorts of human beings have foregathered and met face to face, and been photographed Pan-Keltically, and have no doubt gloated over these collective photographs, without any of them realizing, it seems, what a miscellaneous thing the Keltic race must be. There is nothing that may or may not be a Kelt, and I know, for example, professional Kelts who are, so far as face, manners, accents, morals, and ideals go, indistinguishable from other people who are, I am told, indisputably Assyroid Jews. [45] _Is War Now Impossible?_ and see also footnote, p. 210. [46] It is entirely for their wealth that brewers have been ennobled in England, never because of their services as captains of a great industry. Indeed, these services have been typically poor. While these men were earning their peerages by the sort of proceedings that do secure men peerages under the British Crown, the German brewers were developing the art and science of brewing with remarkable energy and success. The Germans and Bohemians can now make light beers that the English brewers cannot even imitate; they are exporting beer to England in steadily increasing volume. VIII THE LARGER SYNTHESIS We have seen that the essential process arising out of the growth of science and mechanism, and more particularly out of the still developing new facilities of locomotion and communication science has afforded, is the deliquescence of the social organizations of the past, and the synthesis of ampler and still ampler and more complicated and still more complicated social unities. The suggestion is powerful, the conclusion is hard to resist, that, through whatever disorders of danger and conflict, whatever centuries of misunderstanding and bloodshed, men may still have to pass, this process nevertheless aims finally, and will attain to the establishment of one world-state at peace within itself. In the economic sense, indeed, a world-state is already established. Even to-day we do all buy and sell in the same markets--albeit the owners of certain ancient rights levy their tolls here and there--and the Hindoo starves, the Italian feels the pinch, before the Germans or the English go short of bread. There is no real autonomy any more in the world, no simple right to an absolute independence such as formerly the Swiss could claim. The nations and boundaries of to-day do no more than mark claims to exemptions, privileges, and corners in the market--claims valid enough to those whose minds and souls are turned towards the past, but absurdities to those who look to the future as the end and justification of our present stresses. The claim to political liberty amounts, as a rule, to no more than the claim of a man to live in a parish without observing sanitary precautions or paying rates because he had an excellent great-grandfather. Against all these old isolations, these obsolescent particularisms, the forces of mechanical and scientific development fight, and fight irresistibly; and upon the general recognition of this conflict, upon the intelligence and courage with which its inflexible conditions are negotiated, depends very largely the amount of bloodshed and avoidable misery the coming years will hold. The final attainment of this great synthesis, like the social deliquescence and reconstruction dealt with in the earlier of these anticipations, has an air of being a process independent of any collective or conscious will in man, as being the expression of a greater Will; it is working now, and may work out to its end vastly, and yet at times almost imperceptibly, as some huge secular movement in Nature, the raising of a continent, the crumbling of a mountain-chain, goes on to its appointed culmination. Or one may compare the process to a net that has surrounded, and that is drawn continually closer and closer upon, a great and varied multitude of men. We may cherish animosities, we may declare imperishable distances, we may plot and counter-plot, make war and "fight to a finish;" the net tightens for all that. Already the need of some synthesis at least ampler than existing national organizations is so apparent in the world, that at least five spacious movements of coalescence exist to-day; there is the movement called Anglo-Saxonism, the allied but finally very different movement of British Imperialism, the Pan-Germanic movement, Pan-Slavism, and the conception of a great union of the "Latin" peoples. Under the outrageous treatment of the white peoples an idea of unifying the "Yellow" peoples is pretty certain to become audibly and visibly operative before many years. These are all deliberate and justifiable suggestions, and they all aim to sacrifice minor differences in order to link like to like in greater matters, and so secure, if not physical predominance in the world, at least an effective defensive strength for their racial, moral, customary, or linguistic differences against the aggressions of other possible coalescences. But these syntheses or other similar synthetic conceptions, if they do not contrive to establish a rational social unity by sanely negotiated unions, will be forced to fight for physical predominance in the world. The whole trend of forces in the world is against the preservation of _local_ social systems however greatly and spaciously conceived. Yet it is quite possible that several or all of the cultures that will arise out of the development of these Pan-this-and-that movements may in many of their features survive, as the culture of the Jews has survived, political obliteration, and may disseminate themselves, as the Jewish system has disseminated itself, over the whole world-city. Unity by no means involves homogeneity. The greater the social organism the more complex and varied its parts, the more intricate and varied the interplay of culture and breed and character within it. It is doubtful if either the Latin or the Pan-Slavic idea contains the promise of any great political unification. The elements of the Latin synthesis are dispersed in South and Central America and about the Mediterranean basin in a way that offers no prospect of an economic unity between them. The best elements of the French people lie in the western portion of what must become the greatest urban region of the Old World, the Rhine-Netherlandish region; the interests of North Italy draw that region away from the Italy of Rome and the South towards the Swiss and South Germany, and the Spanish and Portuguese speaking halfbreeds of South America have not only their own coalescences to arrange, but they lie already under the political tutelage of the United States. Nowhere except in France and North Italy is there any prospect of such an intellectual and educational evolution as is necessary before a great scheme of unification can begin to take effect. And the difficulties in the way of the pan-Slavic dream are far graver. Its realization is enormously hampered by the division of its languages, and the fact that in the Bohemian language, in Polish and in Russian, there exist distinct literatures, almost equally splendid in achievement, but equally insufficient in quantity and range to establish a claim to replace all other Slavonic dialects. Russia, which should form the central mass of this synthesis, stagnates, relatively to the Western states, under the rule of reactionary intelligences; it does not develop, and does not seem likely to develop, the merest beginnings of that great educated middle class, with which the future so enormously rests. The Russia of to-day is indeed very little more than a vast breeding-ground for an illiterate peasantry, and the forecasts of its future greatness entirely ignore that dwindling significance of mere numbers in warfare which is the clear and necessary consequence of mechanical advance. To a large extent, I believe, the Western Slavs will follow the Prussians and Lithuanians, and be incorporated in the urbanization of Western Europe, and the remoter portions of Russia seem destined to become--are indeed becoming--Abyss, a wretched and disorderly Abyss that will not even be formidable to the armed and disciplined peoples of the new civilization, the last quarter of the earth, perhaps, where a barbaric or absentee nobility will shadow the squalid and unhappy destinies of a multitude of hopeless and unmeaning lives. To a certain extent, Russia may play the part of a vaster Ireland, in her failure to keep pace with the educational and economic progress of nations which have come into economic unity with her. She will be an Ireland without emigration, a place for famines. And while Russia delays to develop anything but a fecund orthodoxy and this simple peasant life, the grooves and channels are growing ever deeper along which the currents of trade, of intellectual and moral stimulus, must presently flow towards the West. I see no region where anything like the comparatively dense urban regions that are likely to arise about the Rhineland and over the eastern states of America, for example, can develop in Russia. With railways planned boldly, it would have been possible, it might still be possible, to make about Odessa a parallel to Chicago, but the existing railways run about Odessa as though Asia were unknown; and when at last the commercial awakening of what is now the Turkish Empire comes, the railway lines will probably run, not north or south, but from the urban region of the more scientific central Europeans down to Constantinople. The long-route land communications in the future will become continually more swift and efficient than Baltic navigation, and it is unlikely, therefore, that St. Petersburg has any great possibilities of growth. It was founded by a man whose idea of the course of trade and civilization was the sea wholly and solely, and in the future the sea must necessarily become more and more a last resort. With its spacious prospects, its architectural magnificence, its political quality, its desertion by the new commerce, and its terrible peasant hinterland, it may come about that a striking analogy between St. Petersburg and Dublin will finally appear. So much for the Pan-Slavic synthesis. It seems improbable that it can prevail against the forces that make for the linguistic and economic annexation of the greater part of European Russia and of the minor Slavonic masses, to the great Western European urban region. The political centre of gravity of Russia, in its resistance to these economic movements, is palpably shifting eastward even to-day, but that carries it away from the Central European synthesis only towards the vastly more enormous attracting centre of China. Politically the Russian Government may come to dominate China in the coming decades, but the reality beneath any such formal predominance will be the absorption of Russia beyond the range of the European pull by the synthesis of Eastern Asia. Neither the Russian literature nor the Russian language and writing, nor the Russian civilization as a whole have the qualities to make them irresistible to the energetic and intelligent millions of the far East. The chances seem altogether against the existence of a great Slavonic power in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They seem, at the first glance, to lie just as heavily in favour of an aggressive Pan-Germanic power struggling towards a great and commanding position athwart Central Europe and Western Asia, and turning itself at last upon the defeated Slavonic disorder. There can be no doubt that at present the Germans, with the doubtful exception of the United States, have the most efficient middle class in the world, their rapid economic progress is to a very large extent, indeed, a triumph of intelligence, and their political and probably their military and naval services are still conducted with a capacity and breadth of view that find no parallel in the world. But the very efficiency of the German as a German to-day, and the habits and traditions of victory he has accumulated for nearly forty years, may prove in the end a very doubtful blessing to Europe as a whole, or even to his own grandchildren. Geographical contours, economic forces, the trend of invention and social development, point to a unification of all Western Europe, but they certainly do not point to its Germanization. I have already given reasons for anticipating that the French language may not only hold its own, but prevail against German in Western Europe. And there are certain other obstacles in the way even of the union of indisputable Germans. One element in Germany's present efficiency must become more and more of an encumbrance as the years pass. The Germanic idea is deeply interwoven with the traditional Empire and with the martinet methods of the Prussian monarchy. The intellectual development of the Germans is defined to a very large extent by a court-directed officialdom. In many things that court is still inspired by the noble traditions of education and discipline that come from the days of German adversity, and the predominance of the Imperial will does, no doubt, give a unity of purpose to German policy and action that adds greatly to its efficacy. But for a capable ruler, even more than for a radiantly stupid monarch, the price a nation must finally pay is heavy. Most energetic and capable people are a little intolerant of unsympathetic capacity, are apt on the under side of their egotism to be jealous, assertive, and aggressive. In the present Empire of Germany there are no other great figures to balance the Imperial personage, and I do not see how other great figures are likely to arise. A great number of fine and capable persons must be failing to develop, failing to tell, under the shadow of this too prepotent monarchy. There are certain limiting restrictions imposed upon Germans through the Imperial activity, that must finally be bad for the intellectual atmosphere which is Germany's ultimate strength. For example, the Emperor professes a violent and grotesque Christianity with a ferocious pro-Teutonic Father and a negligible Son, and the public mind is warped into conformity with the finally impossible cant of this eccentric creed. His Imperial Majesty's disposition to regard criticism as hostility stifles the public thought of Germany. He interferes in university affairs and in literary and artistic matters with a quite remarkable confidence and incalculable consequences. The inertia of a century carries him and his Germany onward from success to success, but for all that one may doubt whether the extraordinary intellectuality that distinguished the German atmosphere in the early years of the century, and in which such men as Blumenthal and Moltke grew to greatness, in which Germany grew to greatness, is not steadily fading in the heat and blaze of the Imperial sunshine. Discipline and education have carried Germany far; they are essential things, but an equally essential need for the coming time is a free play for men of initiative and imagination. Is Germany to her utmost possibility making capable men? That, after all, is the vital question, and not whether her policy is wise or foolish, or her commercial development inflated or sound. Or is Germany doing no more than cash the promises of those earlier days? After all, I do not see that she is in a greatly stronger position than was France in the early sixties, and, indeed, in many respects her present predominance is curiously analogous to that of the French Empire in those years. Death at any time may end the career of the present ruler of Germany--there is no certain insurance of one single life. This withdrawal would leave Germany organized entirely with reference to a Court, and there is no trustworthy guarantee that the succeeding Royal Personality may not be something infinitely more vain and aggressive, or something weakly self-indulgent or unpatriotic and morally indifferent. Much has been done in the past of Germany, the infinitely less exacting past, by means of the tutor, the Chamberlain, the Chancellor, the wide-seeing power beyond the throne, who very unselfishly intrigues his monarch in the way that he should go. But that sort of thing is remarkably like writing a letter by means of a pen held in lazy tongs instead of the hand. A very easily imagined series of accidents may place the destinies of Germany in such lazy tongs again. When that occasion comes, will the new class of capable men on which we have convinced ourselves in these anticipations the future depends--will it be ready for its enlarged responsibilities, or will the flower of its possible members be in prison for _lèse majesté_, or naturalized Englishmen or naturalized Americans or troublesome privates under officers of indisputably aristocratic birth, or well-broken labourers, won "back to the land," under the auspices of an Agrarian League? In another way the intensely monarchical and aristocratic organization of the German Empire will stand in the way of the political synthesis of greater Germany. Indispensable factors in that synthesis will be Holland and Switzerland--little, advantageously situated peoples, saturated with ideas of personal freedom. One can imagine a German Swiss, at any rate, merging himself in a great Pan-Germanic republican state, but to bow the knee to the luridly decorated God of His Imperial Majesty's Fathers will be an altogether more difficult exploit for a self-respecting man.... Moreover, before Germany can unify to the East she must fight the Russian, and to unify to the West she must fight the French and perhaps the English, and she may have to fight a combination of these powers. I think the military strength of France is enormously underrated. Upon this matter M. Bloch should be read. Indisputably the French were beaten in 1870, indisputably they have fallen behind in their long struggle to maintain themselves equal with the English on the sea, but neither of these things efface the future of the French. The disasters of 1870 were probably of the utmost benefit to the altogether too sanguine French imagination. They cleared the French mind of the delusion that personal Imperialism is the way to do the desirable thing, a delusion many Germans (and, it would seem, a few queer Englishmen and still queerer Americans) entertain. The French have done much to demonstrate the possibility of a stable military republic. They have disposed of crown and court, and held themselves in order for thirty good years; they have dissociated their national life from any form of religious profession; they have contrived a freedom of thought and writing that, in spite of much conceit to the contrary, is quite impossible among the English-speaking peoples. I find no reason to doubt the implication of M. Bloch that on land to-day the French are relatively far stronger than they were in 1870, that the evolution of military expedients has been all in favour of the French character and intelligence, and that even a single-handed war between France and Germany to-day might have a very different issue from that former struggle. In such a conflict it will be Germany, and not France, that will have pawned her strength to the English-speaking peoples on the high seas. And France will not fight alone. She will fight for Switzerland or Luxembourg, or the mouth of the Rhine. She will fight with the gravity of remembered humiliations, with the whole awakened Slav-race at the back of her antagonist, and very probably with the support of the English-speaking peoples. It must be pointed out how strong seems the tendency of the German Empire to repeat the history of Holland upon a larger scale. While the Dutch poured out all their strength upon the seas, in a conflict with the English that at the utmost could give them only trade, they let the possibilities of a great Low German synthesis pass utterly out of being. (In those days Low Germany stretched to Arras and Douay.) They positively dragged the English into the number of their enemies. And to-day the Germans invade the sea with a threat and intention that will certainly create a countervailing American navy, fundamentally modify the policy of Great Britain, such as it is, and very possibly go far to effect the synthesis of the English-speaking peoples. So involved, I do not see that the existing Germanic synthesis is likely to prevail in the close economic unity, the urban region that will arise in Western Europe. I imagine that the German Empire--that is, the organized expression of German aggression to-day--will be either shattered or weakened to the pitch of great compromises by a series of wars by land and sea; it will be forced to develop the autonomy of its rational middle class in the struggles that will render these compromises possible, and it will be finally not Imperial German ideas, but central European ideas possibly more akin to Swiss conceptions, a civilized republicanism finding its clearest expression in the French language, that will be established upon a bilingual basis throughout Western Europe, and increasingly predominant over the whole European mainland and the Mediterranean basin, as the twentieth century closes. The splendid dream of a Federal Europe, which opened the nineteenth century for France, may perhaps, after all, come to something like realization at the opening of the twenty-first. But just how long these things take, just how easily or violently they are brought about, depends, after all, entirely upon the rise in general intelligence in Europe. An ignorant, a merely trained or a merely cultured people, will not understand these coalescences, will fondle old animosities and stage hatreds, and for such a people there must needs be disaster, forcible conformities and war. Europe will have her Irelands as well as her Scotlands, her Irelands of unforgettable wrongs, kicking, squalling, bawling most desolatingly, for nothing that any one can understand. There will be great scope for the shareholding dilettanti, great opportunities for literary quacks, in "national" movements, language leagues, picturesque plotting, and the invention of such "national" costumes as the world has never seen. The cry of the little nations will go up to heaven, asserting the inalienable right of all little nations to sit down firmly in the middle of the high-road, in the midst of the thickening traffic, and with all their dear little toys about them, play and play--just as they used to play before the road had come.... And while the great states of the continent of Europe are hammering down their obstructions of language and national tradition or raising the educational level above them until a working unity is possible, and while the reconstruction of Eastern Asia--whether that be under Russian, Japanese, English, or native Chinese direction--struggles towards attainment, will there also be a great synthesis of the English-speaking peoples going on? I am inclined to believe that there will be such a synthesis, and that the head and centre of the new unity will be the great urban region that is developing between Chicago and the Atlantic, and which will lie mainly, but not entirely, south of the St. Lawrence. Inevitably, I think, that region must become the intellectual, political, and industrial centre of any permanent unification of the English-speaking states. There will, I believe, develop about that centre a great federation of white English-speaking peoples, a federation having America north of Mexico as its central mass (a federation that may conceivably include Scandinavia) and its federal government will sustain a common fleet, and protect or dominate or actually administer most or all of the non-white states of the present British Empire, and in addition much of the South and Middle Pacific, the East and West Indies, the rest of America, and the larger part of black Africa. Quite apart from the dominated races, such an English-speaking state should have by the century-end a practically homogeneous citizenship of at least a hundred million sound-bodied and educated and capable _men_. It should be the first of the three powers of the world, and it should face the organizing syntheses of Europe and Eastern Asia with an intelligent sympathy. By the year 2000 all its common citizens should certainly be in touch with the thought of Continental Europe through the medium of French; its English language should be already rooting firmly through all the world beyond its confines, and its statesmanship should be preparing openly and surely, and discussing calmly with the public mind of the European, and probably of the Yellow state, the possible coalescences and conventions, the obliteration of custom-houses, the homologization of laws and coinage and measures, and the mitigation of monopolies and special claims, by which the final peace of the world may be assured for ever. Such a synthesis, at any rate, of the peoples now using the English tongue, I regard not only as a possible, but as a probable, thing. The positive obstacles to its achievement, great though they are, are yet trivial in comparison with the obstructions to that lesser European synthesis we have ventured to forecast. The greater obstacle is negative, it lies in the want of stimulus, in the lax prosperity of most of the constituent states of such a union. But such a stimulus, the renascence of Eastern Asia, or a great German fleet upon the ocean, may presently supply. Now, all these three great coalescences, this shrivelling up and vanishing of boundary lines, will be the outward and visible accompaniment of that inward and social reorganization which it is the main object of these Anticipations to display. I have sought to show that in peace and war alike a process has been and is at work, a process with all the inevitableness and all the patience of a natural force, whereby the great swollen, shapeless, hypertrophied social mass of to-day must give birth at last to a naturally and informally organized, educated class, an unprecedented sort of people, a New Republic dominating the world. It will be none of our ostensible governments that will effect this great clearing up; it will be the mass of power and intelligence altogether outside the official state systems of to-day that will make this great clearance, a new social Hercules that will strangle the serpents of war and national animosity in his cradle. Now, the more one descends from the open uplands of wide generalization to the parallel jungle of particulars, the more dangerous does the road of prophesying become, yet nevertheless there may be some possibility of speculating how, in the case of the English-speaking synthesis at least, this effective New Republic may begin visibly to shape itself out and appear. It will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some cases wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement in the attainment of these aims. It will be very loosely organized in its earlier stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a certain direction, who will presently discover with a sort of surprise the common object towards which they are all moving. Already there are some interesting aspects of public activity that, diverse though their aims may seem, do nevertheless serve to show the possible line of development of this New Republic in the coming time. For example, as a sort of preliminary sigh before the stirring of a larger movement, there are various Anglo-American movements and leagues to be noted. Associations for entertaining travelling samples of the American leisure class in guaranteed English country houses, for bringing them into momentary physical contact with real titled persons at lunches and dinners, and for having them collectively lectured by respectable English authors and divines, are no doubt trivial things enough; but a snob sometimes shows how the wind blows better than a serious man. The Empire may catch the American as the soldier caught the Tartar. There is something very much more spacious than such things as this, latent in both the British and the American mind, and observable, for instance, in the altered tone of the Presses of both countries since the Venezuela Message and the Spanish American War. Certain projects of a much ampler sort have already been put forward. An interesting proposal of an interchangeable citizenship, so that with a change of domicile an Englishman should have the chance of becoming a citizen of the United States, and an American a British citizen or a voter in an autonomous British colony, for example, has been made. Such schemes will, no doubt, become frequent, and will afford much scope for discussion in both countries during the next decade or so.[47] The American constitution and the British crown and constitution have to be modified or shelved at some stage in this synthesis, and for certain types of intelligence there could be no more attractive problem. Certain curious changes in the colonial point of view will occur as these discussions open out. The United States of America are rapidly taking, or have already taken, the ascendency in the iron and steel and electrical industries out of the hands of the British; they are developing a far ampler and more thorough system of higher scientific education than the British, and the spirit of efficiency percolating from their more efficient businesses is probably higher in their public services. These things render the transfer of the present mercantile and naval ascendency of Great Britain to the United States during the next two or three decades a very probable thing, and when this is accomplished the problem how far colonial loyalty is the fruit of Royal Visits and sporadic knighthoods, and how far it has relation to the existence of a predominant fleet, will be near its solution. An interesting point about such discussions as this, in which indeed in all probability the nascent consciousness of the New Republic will emerge, will be the solution this larger synthesis will offer to certain miserable difficulties of the present time. Government by the elect of the first families of Great Britain has in the last hundred years made Ireland and South Africa two open sores of irreconcilable wrong. These two English-speaking communities will never rest and never emerge from wretchedness under the vacillating vote-catching incapacity of British Imperialism, and it is impossible that the British power, having embittered them, should ever dare to set them free. But within such an ampler synthesis as the New Republic will seek, these states could emerge to an equal fellowship that would take all the bitterness from their unforgettable past. Another type of public activity which foreshadows an aspect under which the New Republic will emerge is to be found in the unofficial organizations that have come into existence in Great Britain to watch and criticize various public departments. There is, for example, the Navy League, a body of intelligent and active persons with a distinctly expert qualification which has intervened very effectively in naval control during the last few years. There is also at present a vast amount of disorganized but quite intelligent discontent with the tawdry futilities of army reform that occupy the War Office. It becomes apparent that there is no hope of a fully efficient and well-equipped official army under parliamentary government, and with that realization there will naturally appear a disposition to seek some way to military efficiency, as far as is legally possible, outside War Office control. Already recruiting is falling off, it will probably fall off more and more as the patriotic emotions evoked by the Boer War fade away, and no trivial addition to pay or privilege will restore it. Elementary education has at last raised the intelligence of the British lower classes to a point when the prospect of fighting in distant lands under unsuitably educated British officers of means and gentility with a defective War Office equipment and inferior weapons has lost much of its romantic glamour. But an unofficial body that set itself to the establishment of a school of military science, to the sane organization and criticism of military experiments in tactics and equipment, and to the raising for experimental purposes of volunteer companies and battalions, would find no lack of men.... What an unofficial syndicate of capable persons of the new sort may do in these matters has been shown in the case of the _Turbinia_, the germ of an absolute revolution in naval construction. Such attempts at unofficial soldiering would be entirely in the spirit in which I believe the New Republic will emerge, but it is in another line of activity that the growing new consciousness will presently be much more distinctly apparent. It is increasingly evident that to organize and control public education is beyond the power of a democratic government. The meanly equipped and pretentiously conducted private schools of Great Britain, staffed with ignorant and incapable young men, exist, on the other hand, to witness that public education is no matter to be left to merely commercial enterprise working upon parental ignorance and social prejudice. The necessary condition to the effective development of the New Republic is a universally accessible, spacious, and varied educational system working in an atmosphere of efficient criticism and general intellectual activity. Schools alone are of no avail, universities are merely dens of the higher cramming, unless the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and lecturers are in touch with and under the light of an abundant, contemporary, and fully adult intellectuality. At present, in Great Britain at least, the headmasters entrusted with the education of the bulk of the influential men of the next decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and etiolated creatures, scholarship boys manured with annotated editions, and brought up under and protected from all current illumination by the kale-pot of the Thirty-nine Articles. Many of them are less capable teachers and even less intelligent men than many Board School teachers. There is, however, urgent need of an absolutely new type of school--a school that shall be, at least, so skilfully conducted as to supply the necessary training in mathematics, dialectics, languages, and drawing, and the necessary knowledge of science, without either consuming all the leisure of the boy or destroying his individuality, as it is destroyed by the ignorant and pretentious blunderers of to-day; and there is an equally manifest need of a new type of University, something other than a happy fastness for those precociously brilliant creatures--creatures whose brilliance is too often the hectic indication of a constitutional unsoundness of mind--who can "get in" before the portcullis of the nineteenth birthday falls. These new educational elements may either grow slowly through the steady and painful pressure of remorseless facts, or, as the effort to evoke the New Republic becomes more conscious and deliberate, they may be rapidly brought into being by the conscious endeavours of capable men. Assuredly they will never be developed by the wisdom of the governments of the grey. It may be pointed out that in an individual and disorganized way a growing sense of such needs is already displayed. Such great business managers as Mr. Andrew Carnegie, for example, and many other of the wealthy efficients of the United States of America, are displaying a strong disinclination to found families of functionless shareholders, and a strong disposition to contribute, by means of colleges, libraries, and splendid foundations, to the future of the whole English-speaking world. Of course, Mr. Carnegie is not an educational specialist, and his good intentions will be largely exploited by the energetic mediocrities who control our educational affairs. But it is the intention that concerns us now, and not the precise method or effect. Indisputably these rich Americans are at a fundamentally important work in these endowments, and as indisputably many of their successors--I do not mean the heirs to their private wealth, but the men of the same type who will play their _rôle_ in the coming years--will carry on this spacious work with a wider prospect and a clearer common understanding. The establishment of modern and efficient schools is alone not sufficient for the intellectual needs of the coming time. The school and university are merely the preparation for the life of mental activity in which the citizen of the coming state will live. The three years of university and a lifetime of garrulous stagnation which constitutes the mind's history of many a public schoolmaster, for example, and most of the clergy to-day, will be impossible under the new needs. The old-fashioned university, secure in its omniscience, merely taught; the university of the coming time will, as its larger function, criticize and learn. It will be organized for research--for the criticism, that is, of thought and nature. And a subtler and a greater task before those who will presently swear allegiance to the New Republic is to aid and stimulate that process of sound adult mental activity which is the cardinal element in human life. After all, in spite of the pretentious impostors who trade upon the claim, literature, contemporary literature, is the breath of civilized life, and those who sincerely think and write the salt of the social body. To mumble over the past, to live on the classics, however splendid, is senility. The New Republic, therefore, will sustain its authors. In the past the author lived within the limits of his patron's susceptibility, and led the world, so far as he did lead it, from that cage. In the present he lives within the limits of a particularly distressful and ill-managed market. He must please and interest the public before he may reason with it, and even to reach the public ear involves other assiduities than writing. To write one's best is surely sufficient work for a man, but unless the author is prepared to add to his literary toil the correspondence and alert activity of a business man, he may find that no measure of acceptance will save him from a mysterious poverty. Publishing has become a trade, differing only from the trade in pork or butter in the tradesman's careless book-keeping and his professed indifference to the quality of his goods. But unless the whole mass of argument in these Anticipations is false, publishing is as much, or even more, of a public concern than education, and as little to be properly discharged by private men working for profit. On the other hand, it is not to be undertaken by a government of the grey, for a confusion cannot undertake to clarify itself; it is an activity in which the New Republic will necessarily engage. The men of the New Republic will be intelligently critical men, and they will have the courage of their critical conclusions. For the sake of the English tongue, for the sake of the English peoples, they will set themselves to put temptingly within the reach of all readers of the tongue, and all possible readers of the tongue, an abundance of living literature. They will endeavour to shape great publishing trusts and associations that will have the same relation to the publishing office of to-day that a medical association has to a patent-medicine dealer. They will not only publish, but sell; their efficient book-shops, their efficient system of book-distribution will replace the present haphazard dealings of quite illiterate persons under whose shadows people in the provinces live.[48] If one of these publishing groups decides that a book, new or old, is of value to the public mind, I conceive the copyright will be secured and the book produced all over the world in every variety of form and price that seems necessary to its exhaustive sale. Moreover, these publishing associations will sustain spaciously conceived organs of opinion and criticism, which will begin by being patiently and persistently good, and so develop into power. And the more distinctly the New Republic emerges, the less danger there will be of these associations being allowed to outlive their service in a state of ossified authority. New groups of men and new phases of thought will organize their publishing associations as children learn to talk.[49] And while the New Republic is thus developing its idea of itself and organizing its mind, it will also be growing out of the confused and intricate businesses and undertakings and public services of the present time, into a recognizable material body. The synthetic process that is going on in the case of many of the larger of the businesses of the world, that formation of Trusts that bulks so large in American discussion, is of the utmost significance in this connection. Conceivably the first impulse to form Trusts came from a mere desire to control competition and economize working expenses, but even in its very first stages this process of coalescence has passed out of the region of commercial operations into that of public affairs. The Trust develops into the organization under men far more capable than any sort of public officials, of entire industries, of entire departments of public life, quite outside the ostensible democratic government system altogether. The whole apparatus of communications, which we have seen to be of such primary importance in the making of the future, promises to pass, in the case of the United States at least, out of the region of scramble into the domain of deliberate control. Even to-day the Trusts are taking over quite consciously the most vital national matters. The American iron and steel industries have been drawn together and developed in a manner that is a necessary preliminary to the capture of the empire of the seas. That end is declaredly within the vista of these operations, within their initial design. These things are not the work of dividend-hunting imbeciles, but of men who regard wealth as a convention, as a means to spacious material ends. There is an animated little paper published in Los Angeles in the interests of Mr. Wilshire, which bears upon its forefront the maxim, "Let the Nation own the Trusts." Well, under their mantle of property, the Trusts grow continually more elaborate and efficient machines of production and public service, while the formal nation chooses its bosses and buttons and reads its illustrated press. I must confess I do not see the negro and the poor Irishman and all the emigrant sweepings of Europe, which constitute the bulk of the American Abyss, uniting to form that great Socialist party of which Mr. Wilshire dreams, and with a little demonstrating and balloting taking over the foundry and the electrical works, the engine shed and the signal box, from the capable men in charge. But that a confluent system of Trust-owned business organisms, and of Universities and re-organized military and naval services may presently discover an essential unity of purpose, presently begin thinking a literature, and behaving like a State, is a much more possible thing.... In its more developed phases I seem to see the New Republic as (if I may use an expressive bull) a sort of outspoken Secret Society, with which even the prominent men of the ostensible state may be openly affiliated. A vast number of men admit the need but hesitate at the means of revolution, and in this conception of a slowly growing new social order organized with open deliberation within the substance of the old, there are no doubt elements of technical treason, but an enormous gain in the thoroughness, efficiency, and stability of the possible change. So it is, or at least in some such ways, that I conceive the growing sense of itself which the new class of modern efficients will develop, will become manifest in movements and concerns that are now heterogeneous and distinct, but will presently drift into co-operation and coalescence. This idea of a synthetic reconstruction within the bodies of the English-speaking States may very possibly clothe itself in quite other formulæ than my phrase of the New Republic; but the need is with us, the social elements are developing among us, the appliances are arranging themselves for the hands that will use them, and I cannot but believe that the idea of a spacious common action will presently come. In a few years I believe many men who are now rather aimless--men who have disconsolately watched the collapse of the old Liberalism--will be clearly telling themselves and one another of their adhesion to this new ideal. They will be working in schools and newspaper offices, in foundries and factories, in colleges and laboratories, in county councils and on school boards--even, it may be, in pulpits--for the time when the coming of the New Republic will be ripe. It may be dawning even in the schools of law, because presently there will be a new and scientific handling of jurisprudence. The highly educated and efficient officers' mess will rise mechanically and drink to the Monarch, and sit down to go on discussing the New Republic's growth. I do not see, indeed, why an intelligent monarch himself, in these days, should not waive any silliness about Divine Right, and all the ill-bred pretensions that sit so heavily on a gentlemanly King, and come into the movement with these others. When the growing conception touches, as in America it has already touched, the legacy-leaving class, there will be fewer new Asylums perhaps, but more university chairs.... So it is I conceive the elements of the New Republic taking shape and running together through the social mass, picking themselves out more and more clearly, from the shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ideas, will not rest. The clearest and simplest statement, the clearest and simplest method, is inevitably associated with the conceptions of that science upon which the New Republic will arise. There will be a time, in peace it may be, or under the stresses of warfare, when the New Republic will find itself ready to arrive, when the theory will have been worked out and the details will be generally accepted, and the new order will be ripe to begin. And then, indeed, it will begin. What life or strength will be left in the old order to prevent this new order beginning? FOOTNOTES: [47] I foresee great scope for the ingenious persons who write so abundantly to the London evening papers upon etymological points, issues in heraldry, and the correct Union Jack, in the very pleasing topic of a possible Anglo-American flag (for use at first only on unofficial occasions). [48] In a large town like Folkestone, for example, it is practically impossible to buy any book but a "boomed" novel unless one has ascertained the names of the author, the book, the edition, and the publisher. There is no index in existence kept up to date that supplies these particulars. If, for example, one wants--as I want (1) to read all that I have not read of the work of Mr. Frank Stockton, (2) to read a book of essays by Professor Ray Lankaster the title of which I have forgotten, and (3) to buy the most convenient edition of the works of Swift, one has to continue wanting until the British Museum Library chances to get in one's way. The book-selling trade supplies no information at all on these points. [49] One of the least satisfactory features of the intellectual atmosphere of the present time is the absence of good controversy. To follow closely an honest and subtle controversy, and to have arrived at a definite opinion upon some general question of real and practical interest and complicated reference, is assuredly the most educational exercise in the world--I would go so far as to say that no person is completely educated who has not done as much. The memorable discussions in which Huxley figured, for example, were extraordinarily stimulating. We lack that sort of thing now. A great number of people are expressing conflicting opinions upon all sorts of things, but there is a quite remarkable shirking of plain issues of debate. There is no answering back. There is much indirect answering, depreciation of the adversary, attempts to limit his publicity, restatements of the opposing opinion in a new way, but no conflict in the lists. We no longer fight obnoxious views, but assassinate them. From first to last, for example, there has been no honest discussion of the fundamental issues in the Boer War. Something may be due to the multiplication of magazines and newspapers, and the confusion of opinions that has scattered the controversy-following public. It is much to be regretted that the laws of copyright and the methods of publication stand in the way of annotated editions of works of current controversial value. For example, Mr. Andrew Lang has assailed the new edition of the "Golden Bough." His criticisms, which are, no doubt, very shrewd and penetrating, ought to be accessible with the text he criticizes. Yet numerous people will read his comments who will never read the "Golden Bough;" they will accept his dinted sword as proof of the slaughter of Mr. Fraser, and many will read the "Golden Bough" and never hear of Mr. Lang's comments. Why should it be so hopeless to suggest an edition of the "Golden Bough" with footnotes by Mr. Lang and Mr. Fraser's replies? There are all sorts of books to which Mr. Lang might add footnotes with infinite benefit to every one. Mr. Mallock, again, is going to explain how Science and Religion stand at the present time. If only some one would explain in the margin how Mr. Mallock stands, the thing would be complete. Such a book, again, as these "Anticipations" would stand a vast amount of controversial footnoting. It bristles with pegs for discussion--vacant pegs; it is written to provoke. I hope that some publisher, sooner or later, will do something of this kind, and will give us not only the text of an author's work, but a series of footnotes and appendices by reputable antagonists. The experiment, well handled, might prove successful enough to start a fashion--a very beneficial fashion for authors and readers alike. People would write twice as carefully and twice as clearly with that possible second edition (with footnotes by X and Y) in view. Imagine "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture" as it might have been edited by the late Professor Huxley; Froude's edition of the "Grammar of Assent;" Mr. G. B. Shaw's edition of the works of Mr. Lecky; or the criticism of art and life of Ruskin,--the "Beauties of Ruskin" annotated by Mr. Whistler and carefully prepared for the press by Professor William James. Like the tomato and the cucumber, every book would carry its antidote wrapped about it. Impossible, you say. But is it? Or is it only unprecedented? If novelists will consent to the illustration of their stories by artists whose chief aim appears to be to contradict their statements, I do not see why controversial writers who believe their opinions are correct should object to the checking of their facts and logic by persons with a different way of thinking. Why should not men of opposite opinions collaborate in their discussion? IX THE FAITH, MORALS, AND PUBLIC POLICY OF THE NEW REPUBLIC If the surmise of a developing New Republic--a Republic that must ultimately become a World State of capable rational men, developing amidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations and institutions--be indeed no idle dream, but an attainable possibility in the future, and to that end it is that the preceding Anticipations have been mainly written, it becomes a speculation of very great interest to forecast something of the general shape and something even of certain details of that common body of opinion which the New Republic, when at last it discovers and declares itself, will possess. Since we have supposed this New Republic will already be consciously and pretty freely controlling the general affairs of humanity before this century closes, its broad principles and opinions must necessarily shape and determine that still ampler future of which the coming hundred years is but the opening phase. There are many processes, many aspects of things, that are now, as it were, in the domain of natural laws and outside human control, or controlled unintelligently and superstitiously, that in the future, in the days of the coming New Republic, will be definitely taken in hand as part of the general work of humanity, as indeed already, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the control of pestilences has been taken in hand. And in particular, there are certain broad questions much under discussion to which, thus far, I have purposely given a value disproportionately small:-- While the New Republic is gathering itself together and becoming aware of itself, that other great element, which I have called the People of the Abyss, will also have followed out its destiny. For many decades that development will be largely or entirely out of all human control. To the multiplying rejected of the white and yellow civilizations there will have been added a vast proportion of the black and brown races, and collectively those masses will propound the general question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible wealth, will have been working out, and will continue to work out, so long as there is such a thing as irresponsible wealth pervading the social body. That too the New Republic must in its very development overcome. In the preceding chapter it is clearly implicit that I believe that the New Republic, as its consciousness and influence develop together, will meet, check, and control these things; but the broad principles upon which the control will go, the nature of the methods employed, still remain to be deduced. And to make that deduction, it is necessary that the primary conception of life, the fundamental, religious, and moral ideas of these predominant men of the new time should first be considered. Now, quite inevitably, these men will be religious men. Being themselves, as by the nature of the forces that have selected them they will certainly be, men of will and purpose, they will be disposed to find, and consequently they will find, an effect of purpose in the totality of things. Either one must believe the Universe to be one and systematic, and held together by some omnipresent quality, or one must believe it to be a casual aggregation, an incoherent accumulation with no unity whatsoever outside the unity of the personality regarding it. All science and most modern religious systems presuppose the former, and to believe the former is, to any one not too anxious to quibble, to believe in God. But I believe that these prevailing men of the future, like many of the saner men of to-day, having so formulated their fundamental belief, will presume to no knowledge whatever, will presume to no possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. They will have no positive definition of God at all. They will certainly not indulge in "that something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (not defined) or any defective claptrap of that sort. They will content themselves with denying the self-contradictory absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology,[50] they will regard the whole of being, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation of God to their souls, and they will set themselves simply to that revelation, seeking its meaning towards themselves faithfully and courageously. Manifestly the essential being of man in this life is his will; he exists consciously only to _do_; his main interest in life is the choice between alternatives; and, since he moves through space and time to effects and consequences, a general purpose in space and time is the limit of his understanding. He can know God only under the semblance of a pervading purpose, of which his own individual freedom of will is a part, but he can understand that the purpose that exists in space and time is no more God than a voice calling out of impenetrable darkness is a man. To men of the kinetic type belief in God so manifest as purpose is irresistible, and, to all lucid minds, the being of God, save as that general atmosphere of imperfectly apprehended purpose in which our individual wills operate, is incomprehensible. To cling to any belief more detailed than this, to define and limit God in order to take hold of Him, to detach one's self and parts of the universe from God in some mysterious way in order to reduce life to a dramatic antagonism, is not faith, but infirmity. Excessive strenuous belief is not faith. By faith we disbelieve, and it is the drowning man, and not the strong swimmer, who clutches at the floating straw. It is in the nature of man, it is in the present purpose of things, that the real world of our experience and will should appear to us not only as a progressive existence in space and time, but as a scheme of good and evil. But choice, the antagonism of good and evil, just as much as the formulation of things in space and time, is merely a limiting condition of human being, and in the thought of God as we conceive of Him in the light of faith, this antagonism vanishes. God is no moralist, God is no partisan; He comprehends and cannot be comprehended, and our business is only with so much of His purpose as centres on our individual wills. So, or in some such phrases, I believe, these men of the New Republic will formulate their relationship to God. They will live to serve this purpose that presents Him, without presumption and without fear. For the same spacious faith that will render the idea of airing their egotisms in God's presence through prayer, or of any such quite personal intimacy, absurd, will render the idea of an irascible and punitive Deity ridiculous and incredible.... The men of the New Republic will hold and understand quite clearly the doctrine that in the real world of man's experience, there is Free Will. They will understand that constantly, as a very condition of his existence, man is exercising choice between alternatives, and that a conflict between motives that have different moral values constantly arises. That conflict between Predestination and Free Will, which is so puzzling to untrained minds, will not exist for them. They will know that in the real world of sensory experience, will is free, just as new sprung grass is green, wood hard, ice cold, and toothache painful. In the abstract world of reasoning science there is no green, no colour at all, but certain lengths of vibration; no hardness, but a certain reaction of molecules; no cold and no pain, but certain molecular consequences in the nerves that reach the misinterpreting mind. In the abstract world of reasoning science, moreover, there is a rigid and inevitable sequence of cause and effect; every act of man could be foretold to its uttermost detail, if only we knew him and all his circumstances fully; in the abstract world of reasoned science all things exist now potentially down to the last moment of infinite time. But the human will does not exist in the abstract world of reasoned science, in the world of atoms and vibrations, that rigidly predestinate scheme of things in space and time. The human will exists in this world of men and women, in this world where the grass is green and desire beckons and the choice is often so wide and clear between the sense of what is desirable and what is more widely and remotely right. In this world of sense and the daily life, these men will believe with an absolute conviction, that there is free will and a personal moral responsibility in relation to that indistinctly seen purpose which is the sufficient revelation of God to them so far as this sphere of being goes.... The conception they will have of that purpose will necessarily determine their ethical scheme. It follows manifestly that if we do really believe in Almighty God, the more strenuously and successfully we seek in ourselves and His world to understand the order and progress of things, and the more clearly we apprehend His purpose, the more assured and systematic will our ethical basis become. If, like Huxley, we do not positively believe in God, then we may still cling to an ethical system which has become an organic part of our lives and habits, and finding it manifestly in conflict with the purpose of things, speak of the non-ethical order of the universe. But to any one whose mind is pervaded by faith in God, a non-ethical universe in conflict with the incomprehensibly ethical soul of the Agnostic, is as incredible as a black horned devil, an active material anti-god with hoofs, tail, pitchfork, and Dunstan-scorched nose complete. To believe completely in God is to believe in the final rightness of all being. The ethical system that condemns the ways of life as wrong, or points to the ways of death as right, that countenances what the scheme of things condemns, and condemns the general purpose in things as it is now revealed to us, must prepare to follow the theological edifice upon which it was originally based. If the universe is non-ethical by our present standards, we must reconsider these standards and reconstruct our ethics. To hesitate to do so, however severe the conflict with old habits and traditions and sentiments may be, is to fall short of faith. Now, so far as the intellectual life of the world goes, this present time is essentially the opening phase of a period of ethical reconstruction, a reconstruction of which the New Republic will possess the matured result. Throughout the nineteenth century there has been such a shattering and recasting of fundamental ideas, of the preliminaries to ethical propositions, as the world has never seen before. This breaking down and routing out of almost all the cardinal assumptions on which the minds of the Eighteenth Century dwelt securely, is a process akin to, but independent of, the development of mechanism, whose consequences we have traced. It is a part of that process of vigorous and fearless criticism which is the reality of science, and of which the development of mechanism and all that revolution in physical and social conditions we have been tracing, is merely the vast imposing material bye product. At present, indeed, its more obvious aspect on the moral and ethical side is destruction, any one can see the chips flying, but it still demands a certain faith and patience to see the form that ensues. But it is not destruction, any more than a sculptor's work is stone-breaking. The first chapter in the history of this intellectual development, its definite and formal opening, coincides with the opening of the nineteenth century and the publication of Malthus's _Essay on Population_. Malthus is one of those cardinal figures in intellectual history who state definitely for all time, things apparent enough after their formulation, but never effectively conceded before. He brought clearly and emphatically into the sphere of discussion a vitally important issue that had always been shirked and tabooed heretofore, the fundamental fact that the main mass of the business of human life centres about reproduction. He stated in clear, hard, decent, and unavoidable argument what presently Schopenhauer was to discover and proclaim, in language, at times, it would seem, quite unfitted for translation into English. And, having made his statement, Malthus left it, in contact with its immediate results. Probably no more shattering book than the _Essay on Population_ has ever been, or ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile Liberalism of the Deists and Atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear as daylight that all forms of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthly golden ages must be either futile or insincere or both, until the problems of human increase were manfully faced. It proffered no suggestions for facing them (in spite of the unpleasant associations of Malthus's name), it aimed simply to wither the Rationalistic Utopias of the time and by anticipation, all the Communisms, Socialisms, and Earthly Paradise movements that have since been so abundantly audible in the world. That was its aim and its immediate effect. Incidentally it must have been a torturing soul-trap for innumerable idealistic but intelligent souls. Its indirect effects have been altogether greater. Aiming at unorthodox dreamers, it has set such forces in motion as have destroyed the very root-ideas of orthodox righteousness in the western world. Impinging on geological discovery, it awakened almost simultaneously in the minds of Darwin and Wallace, that train of thought that found expression and demonstration at last in the theory of natural selection. As that theory has been more and more thoroughly assimilated and understood by the general mind, it has destroyed, quietly but entirely, the belief in human equality which is implicit in all the "Liberalizing" movements of the world. In the place of an essential equality, distorted only by tradition and early training, by the artifices of those devils of the Liberal cosmogony, "kingcraft" and "priestcraft," an equality as little affected by colour as the equality of a black chess pawn and a white, we discover that all men are individual and unique, and, through long ranges of comparison, superior and inferior upon countless scores. It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. The confident and optimistic Radicalism of the earlier nineteenth century, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of Liberalism, have bogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The Socialist has shirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism is a thing of the past, it is no longer a doctrine, but a faction. There must follow some newborn thing. And as effectually has the mass of criticism that centres about Darwin destroyed the dogma of the Fall upon which the whole intellectual fabric of Christianity rests. For without a Fall there is no redemption, and the whole theory and meaning of the Pauline system is vain. In conjunction with the wide vistas opened by geological and astronomical discovery, the nineteenth century has indeed lost the very habit of thought from which the belief in a Fall arose. It is as if a hand had been put upon the head of the thoughtful man and had turned his eyes about from the past to the future. In matters of intelligence, at least, if not yet in matters of ethics and conduct, this turning round has occurred. In the past thought was legal in its spirit, it deduced the present from pre-existing prescription, it derived everything from the offences and promises of the dead; the idea of a universe of expiation was the most natural theory amidst such processes. The purpose the older theologians saw in the world was no more than the revenge--accentuated by the special treatment of a favoured minority--of a mysteriously incompetent Deity exasperated by an unsatisfactory creation. But modern thought is altogether too constructive and creative to tolerate such a conception, and in the vaster past that has opened to us, it can find neither offence nor promise, only a spacious scheme of events, opening out--perpetually opening out--with a quality of final purpose as irresistible to most men's minds as it is incomprehensible, opening out with all that inexplicable quality of design that, for example, some great piece of music, some symphony of Beethoven's, conveys. We see future beyond future and past behind past. It has been like the coming of dawn, at first a colourless dawn, clear and spacious, before which the mists whirl and fade, and there opens to our eyes not the narrow passage, the definite end we had imagined, but the rocky, ill-defined path we follow high amidst this limitless prospect of space and time. At first the dawn is cold--there is, at times, a quality of terror almost in the cold clearness of the morning twilight; but insensibly its coldness passes, the sky is touched with fire, and presently, up out of the dayspring in the east, the sunlight will be pouring.... And these men of the New Republic will be going about in the daylight of things assured. And men's concern under this ampler view will no longer be to work out a system of penalties for the sins of dead men, but to understand and participate in this great development that now dawns on the human understanding. The insoluble problems of pain and death, gaunt, incomprehensible facts as they were, fall into place in the gigantic order that evolution unfolds. All things are integral in the mighty scheme, the slain builds up the slayer, the wolf grooms the horse into swiftness, and the tiger calls for wisdom and courage out of man. All things are integral, but it has been left for men to be consciously integral, to take, at last, a share in the process, to have wills that have caught a harmony with the universal will, as sand grains flash into splendour under the blaze of the sun. There will be many who will never be called to this religious conviction, who will lead their little lives like fools, playing foolishly with religion and all the great issues of life, or like the beasts that perish, having sense alone; but those who, by character and intelligence, are predestinate to participate in the reality of life, will fearlessly shape all their ethical determinations and public policy anew, from a fearless study of themselves and the apparent purpose that opens out before them. Very much of the cry for faith that sounds in contemporary life so loudly, and often with so distressing a note of sincerity, comes from the unsatisfied egotisms of unemployed, and, therefore, unhappy and craving people; but much is also due to the distress in the minds of active and serious men, due to the conflict of inductive knowledge, with conceptions of right and wrong deduced from unsound, but uncriticised, first principles. The old ethical principles, the principle of equivalents or justice, the principle of self-sacrifice, the various vague and arbitrary ideas of purity, chastity, and sexual "sin," came like rays out of the theological and philosophical lanterns men carried in the darkness. The ray of the lantern indicated and directed, and one followed it as one follows a path. But now there has come a new view of man's place in the scheme of time and space, a new illumination, dawn; the lantern rays fade in the growing brightness, and the lanterns that shone so brightly are becoming smoky and dim. To many men this is no more than a waning of the lanterns, and they call for new ones, or a trimming of the old. They blame the day for putting out these flares. And some go apart, out of the glare of life, into corners of obscurity, where the radiation of the lantern may still be faintly traced. But, indeed, with the new light there has come the time for new methods; the time of lanterns, the time of deductions from arbitrary first principles is over. The act of faith is no longer to follow your lantern, but to put it down. We can see about us, and by the landscape we must go.[51] How will the landscape shape itself to the dominant men of the new time and in relation to themselves? What is the will and purpose that these men of will and purpose will find above and comprehending their own? Into this our inquiry resolves itself. They will hold with Schopenhauer, I believe, and with those who build themselves on Malthus and Darwin, that the scheme of being, in which we live is a struggle of existences to expand and develop themselves to their full completeness, and to propagate and increase themselves. But, being men of action, they will feel nothing of the glamour of misery that irresponsible and sexually vitiated shareholder, Schopenhauer, threw over this recognition. The final object of this struggle among existences they will not understand; they will have abandoned the search for ultimates; they will state this scheme of a struggle as a proximate object, sufficiently remote and spacious to enclose and explain all their possible activities. They will seek God's purpose in the sphere of their activities, and desire no more, as the soldier in battle desires no more, than the immediate conflict before him. They will admit failure as an individual aspect of things, as a soldier seeking victory admits the possibility of death; but they will refuse to admit as a part of their faith in God that any existence, even if it is an existence that is presently entirely erased, can be needless or vain. It will have reacted on the existences that survive; it will be justified for ever in the modification it has produced in them. They will find in themselves--it must be remembered I am speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men as a whole--a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put in order, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. They will all be artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directness and an impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frame of their ethics, the more spacious scheme to which they will shape the schemes of their individual wills, will be the elaboration of that future world state to which all things are pointing. They will not conceive of it as a millennial paradise, a blissful inconsequent stagnation, but as a world state of active ampler human beings, full of knowledge and energy, free from much of the baseness and limitations, the needless pains and dishonours of the world disorder of to-day, but still struggling, struggling against ampler but still too narrow restrictions and for still more spacious objects than our vistas have revealed. For that as a general end, for the special work that contributes to it as an individual end, they will make the plans and the limiting rules of their lives. It is manifest that a reconstructed ethical system, reconstructed in the light of modern science and to meet the needs of such temperaments and characters as the evolution of mechanism will draw together and develop, will give very different values from those given by the existing systems (if they can be called systems) to almost all the great matters of conduct. Under scientific analysis the essential facts of life are very clearly shown to be two--birth and death. All life is the effort of the thing born, driven by fears, guided by instincts and desires, to evade death, to evade even the partial death of crippling or cramping or restriction, and to attain to effective procreation, to the victory of another birth. Procreation is the triumph of the living being over death; and in the case of man, who adds mind to his body, it is not only in his child but in the dissemination of his thought, the expression of his mind in things done and made, that his triumph is to be found. And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity--beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge--and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.... The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence. To make life convenient for the breeding of such people will seem to them not the most virtuous and amiable thing in the world, as it is held to be now, but an exceedingly abominable proceeding. Procreation is an avoidable thing for sane persons of even the most furious passions, and the men of the New Republic will hold that the procreation of children who, by the circumstances of their parentage, _must_ be diseased bodily or mentally--I do not think it will be difficult for the medical science of the coming time to define such circumstances--is absolutely the most loathsome of all conceivable sins. They will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of the population--the small minority, for example, afflicted with indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for intoxication--exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused. And I imagine also the plea and proof that a grave criminal is also insane will be regarded by them not as a reason for mercy, but as an added reason for death. I do not see how they can think otherwise on the principles they will profess. The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while; like Abraham, they will have the faith to kill, and they will have no superstitions about death. They will naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime. And since they will regard, as indeed all men raised above a brutish level do regard, a very long term of imprisonment as infinitely worse than death, as being, indeed, death with a living misery added to its natural terror, they will, I conceive, where the whole tenor of a man's actions, and not simply some incidental or impulsive action, seems to prove him unfitted for free life in the world, consider him carefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killing will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime. If deterrent punishments are used at all in the code of the future, the deterrent will neither be death, nor mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of the life by imprisonment, nor any horrible things like that, but good scientifically caused pain, that will leave nothing but a memory. Yet even the memory of overwhelming pain is a sort of mutilation of the soul. The idea that only those who are fit to live freely in an orderly world-state should be permitted to live, is entirely against the use of deterrent punishments at all. Against outrageous conduct to children or women, perhaps, or for very cowardly or brutal assaults of any sort, the men of the future may consider pain a salutary remedy, at least during the ages of transition while the brute is still at large. But since most acts of this sort done under conditions that neither torture nor exasperate, point to an essential vileness in the perpetrator, I am inclined to think that even in these cases the men of the coming time will be far less disposed to torture than to kill. They will have another aspect to consider. The conscious infliction of pain _for the sake of the pain_ is against the better nature of man, and it is unsafe and demoralizing for any one to undertake this duty. To kill under the seemly conditions science will afford is a far less offensive thing. The rulers of the future will grudge making good people into jailers, warders, punishment-dealers, nurses, and attendants on the bad. People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it. That is a current sentiment even to-day, but the men of the New Republic will have the courage of their opinions. And the type of men that I conceive emerging in the coming years will deal simply and logically not only with the business of death, but with birth. At present the sexual morality of the civilized world is the most illogical and incoherent system of wild permissions and insane prohibitions, foolish tolerance and ruthless cruelty that it is possible to imagine. Our current civilization is a sexual lunatic. And it has lost its reason in this respect under the stresses of the new birth of things, largely through the difficulties that have stood in the way, and do still, in a diminishing degree, stand in the way of any sane discussion of the matter as a whole. To approach it is to approach excitement. So few people seem to be leading happy and healthy sexual lives that to mention the very word "sexual" is to set them stirring, to brighten the eye, lower the voice, and blanch or flush the cheek with a flavour of guilt. We are all, as it were, keeping our secrets and hiding our shames. One of the most curious revelations of this fact occurred only a few years ago, when the artless outpourings in fiction of certain young women who had failed to find light on problems that pressed upon them for solution (and which it was certainly their business as possible wives and mothers to solve) roused all sorts of respectable people to a quite insane vehemence of condemnation. Now, there are excellent reasons and a permanent necessity for the preservation of decency, and for a far more stringent suppression of matter that is merely intended to excite than at present obtains, and the chief of these reasons lies in the need of preserving the young from a premature awakening, and indeed, in the interests of civilization, in positively delaying the period of awakening, retarding maturity and lengthening the period of growth and preparation as much as possible. But purity and innocence may be prolonged too late; innocence is really no more becoming to adults than a rattle or a rubber consoler, and the bashfulness that hampers this discussion, that permits it only in a furtive silly sort of way, has its ugly consequences in shames and cruelties, in miserable households and pitiful crises, in the production of countless, needless, and unhappy lives. Indeed, too often we carry our decency so far as to make it suggestive and stimulating in a non-natural way; we invest the plain business of reproduction with a mystic religious quality far more unwholesome than a savage nakedness could possibly be. The essential aspect of all this wild and windy business of the sexual relations is, after all, births. Upon this plain fact the people of the emergent New Republic will unhesitatingly go. The pre-eminent value of sexual questions in morality lies in the fact that the lives which will constitute the future are involved. If they are not involved, if we can dissociate this relationship from this issue, then sexual questions become of no more importance than the morality of one's deportment at chess, or the general morality of outdoor games. Indeed, then the question of sexual relationships would be entirely on all fours with, and probably very analogous to, the question of golf. In each case it would be for the medical man and the psychologist to decide how far the thing was wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressive bad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy. An able-bodied man continually addicted to love-making that had no result in offspring would be just as silly and morally objectionable as an able-bodied man who devoted his chief energies to hitting little balls over golf-links. But no more. Both would probably be wasting the lives of other human beings--the golfer must employ his caddie. It is entirely the matter of births, and a further consideration to be presently discussed, that makes this analogy untrue. It does not, however, make it so untrue as to do away with the probability that in many cases the emergent men of the new time will consider sterile gratification a moral and legitimate thing. St. Paul tells us that it is better to marry than to burn, but to beget children on that account will appear, I imagine, to these coming men as an absolutely loathsome proceeding. They will stifle no spread of knowledge that will diminish the swarming misery of childhood in the slums, they will regard the disinclination of the witless "Society" woman to become a mother as a most amiable trait in her folly. In our bashfulness about these things we talk an abominable lot of nonsense; all this uproar one hears about the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit and the future of the lower races takes on an entirely different complexion directly we face known, if indelicate, facts. Most of the human types, that by civilized standards are undesirable, are quite willing to die out through such suppressions if the world will only encourage them a little. They multiply in sheer ignorance, but they do not desire multiplication even now, and they can easily be made to dread it. Sensuality aims not at life, but at itself. I believe that the men of the New Republic will deliberately shape their public policy along these lines. They will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and all places where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a land legislation that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean-white squatter on the move; they will see to it that no parent can make a profit out of a child, so that childbearing shall cease to be a hopeful speculation for the unemployed poor; and they will make the maintenance of a child the first charge upon the parents who have brought it into the world. Only in this way can progress escape being clogged by the products of the security it creates. The development of science has lifted famine and pestilence from the shoulders of man, and it will yet lift war--for some other end than to give him a spell of promiscuous and finally cruel and horrible reproduction. No doubt the sentimentalist and all whose moral sense has been vigorously trained in the old school will find this rather a dreadful suggestion; it amounts to saying that for the Abyss to become a "hotbed" of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy of the ruling class in the days to come. At any rate, it will be a terminating evil. At present the Abyss is a hotbed breeding undesirable and too often fearfully miserable children. _That_ is something more than a sentimental horror. Under the really very horrible morality of to-day, the spectacle of a mean-spirited, under-sized, diseased little man, quite incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, married to some underfed, ignorant, ill-shaped, plain and diseased little woman, and guilty of the lives of ten or twelve ugly ailing children, is regarded as an extremely edifying spectacle, and the two parents consider their reproductive excesses as giving them a distinct claim upon less fecund and more prosperous people. Benevolent persons throw themselves with peculiar ardour into a case of this sort, and quite passionate efforts are made to strengthen the mother against further eventualities and protect the children until they attain to nubile years. Until the attention of the benevolent persons is presently distracted by a new case.... Yet so powerful is the suggestion of current opinions that few people seem to see nowadays just what a horrible and criminal thing this sort of family, seen from the point of view of social physiology, appears. And directly such principles as these come into effective operation, and I believe that the next hundred years will see this new phase of the human history beginning, there will recommence a process of physical and mental improvement in mankind, a raising and elaboration of the average man, that has virtually been in suspense during the greater portion of the historical period. It is possible that in the last hundred years, in the more civilized states of the world, the average of humanity has positively fallen. All our philanthropists, all our religious teachers, seem to be in a sort of informal conspiracy to preserve an atmosphere of mystical ignorance about these matters, which, in view of the irresistible nature of the sexual impulse, results in a swelling tide of miserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half the population of the world, in every generation, restrained from or tempted to evade reproduction! This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved. If birth were all the making of a civilized man, the men of the future, on the general principles we have imputed to them, would under no circumstances find the birth of a child, healthy in body and brain, more than the most venial of offences. But birth gives only the beginning, the raw material, of a civilized man. The perfect civilized man is not only a sound strong body but a very elaborate fabric of mind. He is a fabric of moral suggestions that become mental habits, a magazine of more or less systematized ideas, a scheme of knowledge and training and an æsthetic culture. He is the child not only of parents but of a home and of an education. He has to be carefully guarded from physical and moral contagions. A reasonable probability of ensuring home and education and protection without any parasitic dependence on people outside the kin of the child, will be a necessary condition to a moral birth under such general principles as we have supposed. Now, this sweeps out of reason any such promiscuity of healthy people as the late Mr. Grant Allen is supposed to have advocated--but, so far as I can understand him, did not. But whether it works out to the taking over of the permanent monogamic marriage of the old morality, as a going concern, is another matter. Upon this matter I must confess my views of the trend of things in the future do not seem to be finally shaped. The question involves very obscure physiological and psychological considerations. A man who aims to become a novelist naturally pries into these matters whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often hard to come by. It is probable that a great number of people could be paired off in couples who would make permanently happy and successful monogamic homes for their sound and healthy children. At any rate, if a certain freedom of regrouping were possible within a time limit, this might be so. But I am convinced that a large proportion of married couples in the world to-day are not completely and happily matched, that there is much mutual limitation, mutual annulment and mutual exasperation. Home with an atmosphere of contention is worse than none for the child, and it is the interest of the child, and that alone, that will be the test of all these things. I do not think that the arrangement in couples is universally applicable, or that celibacy (tempered by sterile vice) should be its only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of two childless people should have an indissoluble permanence or prohibit an ampler grouping. The question is greatly complicated by the economic disadvantage of women, which makes wifehood the chief feminine profession, while only for an incidental sort of man is marriage a source of income, and further by the fact that most women have a period of maximum attractiveness after which it would be grossly unfair to cast them aside. From the point of view we are discussing, the efficient mother who can make the best of her children, is the most important sort of person in the state. She is a primary necessity to the coming civilization. Can the wife in any sort of polygamic arrangement, or a woman of no assured status, attain to the maternal possibilities of the ideal monogamic wife? One is disposed to answer, No. But then, on the other hand, does the ordinary monogamic wife do that? We are dealing with the finer people of the future, strongly individualized people, who will be much freer from stereotyped moral suggestions and much less inclined to be dealt with wholesale than the people of to-day. I have already shown cause in these Anticipations to expect a period of disorder and hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality. I am inclined to think that, when the New Republic emerges on the other side of this disorder, there will be a great number of marriage contracts possible between men and women, and that the strong arm of the State will insist only upon one thing--the security and welfare of the child. The inevitable removal of births from the sphere of an uncontrollable Providence to the category of deliberate acts, will enormously enhance the responsibility of the parent--and of the State that has failed to adequately discourage the philoprogenitiveness of the parent--towards the child. Having permitted the child to come into existence, public policy and the older standard of justice alike demand, under these new conditions, that it must be fed, cherished, and educated, not merely up to a respectable minimum, but to the full height of its possibilities. The State will, therefore, be the reserve guardian of all children. If they are being undernourished, if their education is being neglected, the State will step in, take over the responsibility of their management, and enforce their charge upon the parents. The first liability of a parent will be to his child, and for his child; even the dues of that darling of our current law, the landlord, will stand second to that. This conception of the responsibility of the parents and the State to the child and the future runs quite counter to the general ideas of to-day. These general ideas distort grim realities. Under the most pious and amiable professions, all the Christian states of to-day are, as a matter of fact, engaged in slave-breeding. The chief result, though of course it is not the intention, of the activities of priest and moralist to-day in these matters, is to lure a vast multitude of little souls into this world, for whom there is neither sufficient food, nor love, nor schools, nor any prospect at all in life but the insufficient bread of servitude. It is a result that endears religion and purity to the sweating employer, and leads unimaginative bishops, who have never missed a meal in their lives, and who know nothing of the indescribable bitterness of a handicapped entry into this world, to draw a complacent contrast with irreligious France. It is a result that must necessarily be recognized in its reality, and faced by these men who will presently emerge to rule the world; men who will have neither the plea of ignorance, nor moral stupidity, nor dogmatic revelation to excuse such elaborate cruelty. And having set themselves in these ways to raise the quality of human birth, the New Republicans will see to it that the children who do at last effectually get born come into a world of spacious opportunity. The half-educated, unskilled pretenders, professing impossible creeds and propounding ridiculous curricula, to whom the unhappy parents of to-day must needs entrust the intelligences of their children; these heavy-handed barber-surgeons of the mind, these schoolmasters, with their ragtag and bobtail of sweated and unqualified assistants, will be succeeded by capable, self-respecting men and women, constituting the most important profession of the world. The windy pretences of "forming character," supplying moral training, and so forth, under which the educationalist of to-day conceals the fact that he is incapable of his proper task of training, developing and equipping the mind, will no longer be made by the teacher. Nor will the teacher be permitted to subordinate his duties to the entirely irrelevant business of his pupils' sports. The teacher will teach, and confine his moral training, beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the exhibition of a capable person doing his duty as well as it can be done. He will know that his utmost province is only a part of the educational process, that equally important educational influences are the home and the world of thought about the pupil and himself. The whole world will be thinking and learning; the old idea of "completing" one's education will have vanished with the fancy of a static universe; every school will be a preparatory school, every college. The school and college will probably give only the keys and apparatus of thought, a necessary language or so, thoroughly done, a sound mathematical training, drawing, a wide and reasoned view of philosophy, some good exercises in dialectics, a training in the use of those stores of fact that science has made. So equipped, the young man and young woman will go on to the technical school of their chosen profession, and to the criticism of contemporary practice for their special efficiency, and to the literature of contemporary thought for their general development.... And while the emergent New Republic is deciding to provide for the swarming inferiority of the Abyss, and developing the morality and educational system of the future, in this fashion, it will be attacking that mass of irresponsible property that is so unavoidable and so threatening under present conditions. The attack will, of course, be made along lines that the developing science of economics will trace in the days immediately before us. A scheme of death duties and of heavy graduated taxes upon irresponsible incomes, with, perhaps, in addition, a system of terminable liability for borrowers, will probably suffice to control the growth of this creditor elephantiasis. The detailed contrivances are for the specialist to make. If there is such a thing as bitterness in the public acts of the New Republicans, it will probably be found in the measures that will be directed against those who are parasitic, or who attempt to be parasitic, upon the social body, either by means of gambling, by manipulating the medium of exchange, or by such interventions upon legitimate transactions as, for example, the legal trade union in Great Britain contrives in the case of house property and land. Simply because he fails more often than he succeeds, there is still a disposition among sentimental people to regard the gambler or the speculator as rather a dashing, adventurous sort of person, and to contrast his picturesque gallantry with the sober certainties of honest men. The men of the New Republic will be obtuse to the glamour of such romance; they will regard the gambler simply as a mean creature who hangs about the social body in the hope of getting something for nothing, who runs risks to filch the possessions of other men, exactly as a thief does. They will put the two on a footing, and the generous gambler, like the kindly drunkard, in the face of their effectual provision for his little weakness, will cease to complain that his worst enemy is himself. And, in dealing with speculation, the New Republic will have the power of an assured faith and purpose, and the resources of an economic science that is as yet only in its infancy. In such matters the New Republic will entertain no superstition of _laissez faire_. Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent but imperfect machine. And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world-state with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult, and it will have cast aside any coddling laws to save adult men from themselves.[52] It will tolerate no dark corners where the people of the Abyss may fester, no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant plague-preserves. Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come--white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test. And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is said that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If there are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the legislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for the special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish the Jew. We are much more likely to find we have abolished the Caucasian solicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people take up against the Jews. There is something very ugly about many Jewish faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jew asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and cunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jew is mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than the average European, but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he is simply on all fours with the short, dark Welsh. He foregathers with those of his own nation, and favours them against the stranger, but so do the Scotch. I see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to dread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of mediævalism, a sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against the present progress of things. He was the mediæval Liberal; his persistent existence gave the lie to Catholic pretensions all through the days of their ascendency, and to-day he gives the lie to all our yapping "nationalisms," and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming of the world-state. He has never been known to burke a school. Much of the Jew's usury is no more than social scavenging. The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die.... And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear. The world has a purpose greater than happiness; our lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works through him to greater issues.... This, I believe, will be the distinctive quality of the New Republican's belief. And, for that reason, I have not even speculated whether he will hold any belief in human immortality or no. He will certainly not believe there is any _post mortem_ state of rewards and punishments because of his faith in the sanity of God, and I do not see how he will trace any reaction between this world and whatever world there may be of disembodied lives. Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession to-day tend in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether. So, to a greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time. We may find that issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at present we have not turned over the leaf. On this side, in this life, the relevancy of things points not in the slightest towards the immortality of our egotisms, but convergently and overpoweringly to the future of our race, to that spacious future, of which these weak, ambitious Anticipations are, as it were, the dim reflection seen in a shallow and troubled pool. For that future these men will live and die. FOOTNOTES: [50] As, for example, that God is an omniscient mind. This is the last vestige of that barbaric theology which regarded God as a vigorous but uncertain old gentleman with a beard and an inordinate lust for praise and propitiation. The modern idea is, indeed, scarcely more reasonable than the one it has replaced. A mind thinks, and feels, and wills; it passes from phase to phase; thinking and willing are a succession of mental states which follow and replace one another. But omniscience is a complete knowledge, not only of the present state, but of all past and future states, and, since it is all there at any moment, it cannot conceivably pass from phase to phase, it is stagnant, infinite, and eternal. An omniscient mind is as impossible, therefore, as an omnipresent moving body. God is outside our mental scope; only by faith can we attain Him; our most lucid moments serve only to render clearer His inaccessibility to our intelligence. We stand a little way up in a scale of existences that may, indeed, point towards Him, but can never bring Him to our scope. As the fulness of the conscious mental existence of a man stands to the subconscious activities of an amoeba or of a visceral ganglion cell, so our reason forces us to admit other possible mental existences may stand to us. But such an existence, inconceivably great as it would be to us, would be scarcely nearer that transcendental God in whom the serious men of the future will, as a class, believe. [51] It is an interesting byway from our main thesis to speculate on the spiritual pathology of the functionless wealthy, the half-educated independent women of the middle class, and the people of the Abyss. While the segregating new middle class, whose religious and moral development forms our main interest, is developing its spacious and confident Theism, there will, I imagine, be a steady decay in the various Protestant congregations. They have played a noble part in the history of the world, their spirit will live for ever, but their formulæ and organization wax old like a garment. Their moral austerity--that touch of contempt for the unsubstantial æsthetic, which has always distinguished Protestantism--is naturally repellent to the irresponsible rich and to artistic people of the weaker type, and the face of Protestantism has ever been firm even to hardness against the self-indulgent, the idler, and the prolific, useless poor. The rich as a class and the people of the Abyss, so far as they move towards any existing religious body, will be attracted by the moral kindliness, the picturesque organization and venerable tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. We are only in the very beginning of a great Roman Catholic revival. The diversified countryside of the coming time will show many a splendid cathedral, many an elaborate monastic palace, towering amidst the abounding colleges and technical schools. Along the moving platforms of the urban centre, and athwart the shining advertisements that will adorn them, will go the ceremonial procession, all glorious with banners and censer-bearers, and the meek blue-shaven priests and barefooted, rope-girdled, holy men. And the artful politician of the coming days, until the broom of the New Republic sweep him up, will arrange the miraculous planks of his platform always with an eye upon the priest. Within the ample sheltering arms of the Mother Church many eccentric cults will develop. The curious may study the works of M. Huysmans to learn of the mystical propitiation of God, Who made heaven and earth, by the bedsores of hysterical girls. The future as I see it swarms with Durtals and Sister Teresas; countless ecstatic nuns, holding their Maker as it were _in deliciæ_, will shelter from the world in simple but costly refuges of refined austerity. Where miracles are needed, miracles will occur. Except for a few queer people, nourished on "Maria Monk" and suchlike anti-papal pornography, I doubt if there will be any Protestants left among the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main current will probably take up with weird science-denouncing sects of the faith-healing type, or with such pseudo-scientific gibberish as Theosophy. Mrs. Piper (in an inelegant attitude and with only the whites of her eyes showing) has restored the waning faith of Professor James in human immortality, and I do not see why that lady should stick at one dogma amidst the present quite insatiable demand for creeds. Shintoism and either a cleaned or, more probably, a scented Obi, might in vigorous hands be pushed to a very considerable success in the coming years; and I do not see any absolute impossibility in the idea of an after-dinner witch-smelling in Park Lane with a witchdoctor dressed in feathers. It might be made amazingly picturesque. People would attend it with an air of intellectual liberality, not, of course, believing in it absolutely, but admitting "there must be Something in it." That Something in it! "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," and after that he is ready to do anything with his mind and soul. It is by faith we disbelieve. And, of course, there will be much outspoken Atheism and Anti-religion of the type of the Parisian Devil-Worship imbecilities. Young men of means will determine to be "wicked." They will do silly things that will strike them as being indecent and blasphemous and dreadful--black masses and suchlike nonsense--and then they will get scared. The sort of thing it will be to shock orthodox maiden aunts and make Olympus ring with laughter. A taking sort of nonsense already loose, I find, among very young men is to say, "Understand, I am non-moral." Two thoroughly respectable young gentlemen coming from quite different circles have recently introduced their souls to me in this same formula. Both, I rejoice to remark, are married, both are steady and industrious young men, trustworthy in word and contract, dressed in accordance with current conceptions, and behaving with perfect decorum. One, no doubt for sinister ends, aspires to better the world through a Socialistic propaganda. That is all. But in a tight corner some day that silly little formula may just suffice to trip up one or other of these men. To many of the irresponsible rich, however, that little "Understand, I am non-moral" may prove of priceless worth. [52] _Vide_ Mr. Archdall Read's excellent and suggestive book, "The Present Evolution of Man." THE END * * * * * PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 
46025	----	VOL. XXI FEBRUARY 6, 1909 NO. 19 CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY II. THE PLACE AND ITS SOCIAL FORCES [Illustration] A JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTIVE PHILANTHROPY PUBLISHED BY THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK ROBERT W. DEFOREST, President; OTTO T. BANNARD, Vice-President; J. P. MORGAN, Treasurer; EDWARD T. DEVINE, General Secretary 105 EAST TWENTY-SECOND STREET, NEW YORK 174 ADAMS STREET, CHICAGO THIS ISSUE TWENTY-FIVE CENTS TWO DOLLARS A YEAR ENTERED AT THE POST OFFICE, NEW YORK, AS SECOND CLASS MATTER * * * * * { 1646 } Telephones { } Stuyvesant { 1647 } Millard & Company _Stationers and Printers_ 12 East 16th Street (Bet. Fifth Ave. & Union Square) New York ENGRAVING LITHOGRAPHING BLANK BOOK MAKING CATALOG AND PAMPHLET WORK AT REASONABLE PRICES * * * * * The.... Sheltering Arms * * * * * William R. Peters President 92 William Street Herman C. Von Post Secretary 32 West 57th Street Charles W. 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THE SECOND OF THREE FRONTISPIECES.] CHARITIES _AND_ The Commons THE COMMON WELFARE THE BILL FOR A CHILDREN'S BUREAU An unusually well managed and effective hearing before the House of Representatives committee on expenditures in the Interior Department was held in Washington on January 27, following the White House Conference on Dependent Children. No happier practical expression of the unanimous conclusions of the conference could have been conceived than this gathering of nearly all the conference leaders, representing every section of the country and all shades of opinion in dealing with childhood's problems. Many persons listened to the unanimous plea that the federal government should heed the cry of the child and espouse its cause at least to the extent of providing a children's bureau manned by experts in such questions as the causes and treatment of orphanage, illegitimacy, juvenile delinquency, infant mortality, child labor, physical degeneracy, accidents, and diseases of children, to whom those engaged in dealing with these problems could direct inquiries for information based on adequate and authoritative research. The gathering of such information and its dissemination in bulletins easily understood by the common people, the making available for all parts of the country the results of the experience and suggestions of the most favored parts and of any foreign experience in dealing with problems similar to our own,--in short just such service as the government now renders so cheerfully to the farmer though the scientific work of the bureaus of its well equipped Department of Agriculture is all that the bill for the children's bureau asks. Upon the question of the propriety, constitutionality and expediency of the federal government doing this work there was not and cannot well be a single objection made. For the first year an appropriation of $51,820 is asked. As was carefully pointed out by several speakers, much of the work to be done is partially undertaken and could be done more adequately by existing governmental agencies such as the Census Bureau whose work would not be duplicated if we make it the sole business of some one bureau to bring together in one place and focus on the problems of childhood the information desired by child helping agencies and to find out what is needed to stimulate greater efficiency in work for children. No administrative powers or duties of inspection with respect to children's institutions or work are proposed or intended to be given to the federal children's bureau. Therefore only those whose deeds will not stand the light of publicity need fear the operations of the bureau or expect anything but help and stimulus in the better performance of their service to the public. All these points were made with singular unanimity and earnestness by many speakers who were heard by the committee and were seconded by the still larger number who recorded their names and the societies they represented as favoring the bureau. The judges of the leading juvenile courts were present in person, including Judge Lindsey of Denver, Judge Mack of Chicago, Judge DeLacy of Washington and Judge Feagin of Montgomery, Ala. Herbert Parsons, who introduced the bill in the House, and Secretary Lovejoy of the National Child Labor Committee, which stands sponsor for the bill, conducted the hearing jointly. Miss Lillian D. Wald, who originally suggested to the National Child Labor Committee the advisability of such a bureau, made the opening address, giving in substance the very clear and able argument for its creation which she had presented the previous evening at the banquet of the children's conference. She pointed out the universal demand for it in the following language: And not only have the twenty-five thousand clergymen and their congregations shown their desire to participate in furthering this bill, but organizations of many diverse kinds have assumed a degree of sponsorship that indicates indisputably how universal has been its call to enlightened mind and heart. The national organizations of women's clubs, the consumers' leagues throughout the country, college and school alumnæ associations, societies for the promotion of special interests of children, the various state child labor committees, representing in their membership and executive committee education, labor, law, medicine and business, have officially given endorsement. The press, in literally every section of the country, has given the measure serious editorial discussion and approval. Not one dissenting voice has it been possible to discover. THE NEED AND THE OPPORTUNITY In speaking of the work which the bureau would do, we quote again from Miss Wald: The children's bureau would not merely collect and classify information but it would be prepared to furnish to every community in the land information that was needed, diffuse knowledge that had come through expert study of facts valuable to the child and to the community. Many extraordinarily valuable methods have originated in America and have been seized by communities other than our own as valuable social discoveries. Other communities have had more or less haphazard legislation and there is abundant evidence of the desire to have judicial construction to harmonize and comprehend them. As matters now are within the United States, many communities are retarded or hampered by the lack of just such information and knowledge, which, if the bureau existed, could be readily available. Some communities within the United States have been placed in most advantageous positions as regards their children, because of the accident of the presence of public spirited individuals in their midst who have grasped the meaning of the nation's true relation to the children, and have been responsible for the creation of a public sentiment which makes high demands. But nowhere in the country does the government as such, provide information concerning vitally necessary measures for the children. Evils that are unknown or that are underestimated have the best chance for undisturbed existence and extension, and where light is most needed there is still darkness. Ours is, for instance, the only great nation which does not know how many children are born and how many die in each year within its borders; still less do we know how many die in infancy of preventable diseases; how many blind children might have seen the light, for one-fourth of the totally blind need not have been so had the science that has proved this been made known in even the remotest sections of the country. At least fifteen states and the District of Columbia were represented at the hearing. Among the speakers were Edward T. Devine, editor of CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS, who pointed out the scope and importance of the inquiries the bureau would undertake; Dr. Samuel McCune Lindsay, who drew the bill for the national committee and explained its fiscal features and the plan for the organization of the work of the bureau; Jane Addams, who showed the real service the bureau would render the practical worker; Florence Kelley, who pointed out the extent of our present ignorance on the questions with which the bureau would deal; Homer Folks, who emphasized the unanimous demand for the bureau by the widely representative Conference on Dependent Children; Congressman Bennett of New York, who showed the service it would render in dealing with the peculiar problems of the children of immigrants; Bernard Flexner of Louisville, Hugh F. Fox of the State Charities Aid Association of New Jersey, Judge Mack, Judge Lindsey, and Judge Feagin, who all pointed out the service it would render the courts in dealing with children; Mrs. Ellen Spencer Mussey, who represented the General Federation of Women's Clubs; Thomas F. Walsh of Denver, Dr. L. B. Bernstein of New York, William H. Baldwin of Washington, D. C.; Secretary A. J. McKelway, and General Secretary Owen R. Lovejoy of the National Child Labor Committee. The House committee was deeply impressed and it is believed will report the bill favorably. LOCAL PLAN FOR A CHILDREN'S BUREAU Realizing that its 20,000 children between the ages of four and fourteen are its chief asset,--that children are, in fact, as important as its playgrounds or its streets or any of its other community problems,--the city of Hartford, Conn., has taken steps towards the appointment of a juvenile commission which shall relate the work of schools and playgrounds and manual training and homes and give them a balance and unity which come only from the consideration of such a question as a whole. Each of these agencies has an influence on the child for a part of its life, but each falls short of its possibilities for lack of such a comprehensive oversight and continuity of purpose as is promised by the commission. The measure presented to the Legislature for the creation of a juvenile commission is based upon the following arguments: 1. Industrial cities are producing a class of children whose parents cannot, from the very nature of things, do much more than supply them with food, clothing and a home. 2. The environment of these children, is such, both in the home and in the neighborhood, that one-sixth die before they are a year old and one-fourth before they are seven. 3. The parents cannot as individuals provide playgrounds or adequate discipline. 4. Every child has a right to a reasonable opportunity for life, health and advantages needed for development. 5. To protect the child's right to a reasonable chance for healthy development is a special work which should be done by a commission created for the purpose to supplement the work of parent and school. The suggestion for the commission came from George A. Parker, commissioner of parks, Hartford, and grew out of a meeting of the Consumers' League, followed by a talk by Dr. Hastings H. Hart. Mr. Parker's idea met with immediate endorsement from many sources and as a result the bill now before the Connecticut Legislature has influential and widespread support. It is proposed that the Court of Common Council shall refer to the commission all questions relating to minors and await its report before taking final action. The commission is to have power to investigate all questions relating to the welfare of children, to collect and compile statistics and to recommend legislation. None of its actions is to be taken in a way to lessen the parents' responsibility and no child is to be taken from its parent except in extreme cases of danger to life or limb. The commission as proposed will consist in part of city officials and in part of citizens who do not hold public office, the members to serve three years each without salary, but the expenses to be borne by the city. EDUCATION AND THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE The past few years have witnessed an advance in the evolution of medicine which has been radical and comprehensive. It was only a decade ago that the efforts of centuries devoted to empirical treatment of the individual found room for research into the causes of disease; and it has only been within recent years that such knowledge has been sufficiently comprehensive to justify its extensive application in the practical field of disease suppression. The attempt which Columbia University is making to establish a School of Sanitary Science and Public Health is prompted by the realization of the fact that most diseases are preventable with our present knowledge of their causes; that the knowledge which we now possess in regard to their causes is not properly and extensively enough applied for their prevention; and that this knowledge is best transmitted to the people by means of educational methods. Probably the most recent advance in the doctrine of preventive medicine is due to the fact that many diseases are recognized to have not only medical, but social and moral causes as well; and that their prevention is best accomplished by the enlistment of judicious co-operation of effort in these various fields. For example, a large part of the disease of the human race is directly traceable to the damaging effects of alcohol and syphilis, yet these diseases cannot be eradicated until the underlying social and moral factors are recognized and remedied. It is not difficult to appreciate the wonderful results which are capable of accomplishment, with our present scientific knowledge, by the conjoined application of scientific and social with educational methods, when we realize that smallpox could be wiped out by education of the masses on the efficacy of vaccination. The fields of preventable accidents, dangerous trades, child labor and improvement of working conditions offer opportunities for the reduction of suffering which are great almost beyond conception. Blindness could be diminished one-half by the spread of a simple, well known doctrine; typhoid, cholera, malaria and yellow fever depart as enlightenment on principles of sanitary administration creep in, and tuberculosis has resolved itself largely into a "social" disease. The problem resolves itself distinctly and emphatically into one of education; and it is to instruct the teachers of the people in methods of health preservation,--be they officers of health, with the care of thousands, or mothers with the care of one, in their keeping,--that Columbia University is striving to put its school into operation. Pending such a beginning, a series of university lectures on Sanitary Science and Public Health by the most eminent authorities of the country is being given to prepare the way for the next much desired move,--a permanent, fully-endowed institution of instruction in the principles of public health preservation and the prevention of disease. Courses of a similar nature have been organized at Cornell, Wisconsin and Illinois universities. The subjects, to be discussed by experts, include water supply and sewage disposal, health and death rates in cities, public health problems of municipalities, state and nation, milk supply and infant mortality, school hygiene, street cleaning, tenement house sanitation, personal and industrial hygiene and diseases of animals transmissible to man. The course, which was started on February 1 with a lecture by Professor Sedgwick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on The Rise and Significance of the Public Health Movement, will be continued until April 28. The lectures will be open to the public up to the capacity of the hall. CLEANING UP THE KANSAS PENITENTIARY The newspapers of January 31 contained a dispatch describing an unusual special train that left Lansing, Kansas, bound for McAlester, Vinita and Atoka, Oklahoma. The 344 passengers, sixteen of them women, were handcuffed together in pairs and groups and as the train pulled out of the station, the dispatch states that "a great cheer arose from the convicts as they saw the last of the state penitentiary." This special train was carrying away the "boarded out" convicts whom Oklahoma has been shipping to Kansas since the establishment of its territorial government. Criminals were aplenty in the old frontier days and the contract with Kansas was highly agreeable to the settlers who were glad to free Oklahoma of its "bad men." The territory paid the state forty cents a day for the maintenance of each convict kept in the Lansing penitentiary and adding to this the amount that the prisoners earned, Kansas received about forty-eight cents a day for each Oklahoma prisoner. The cost of food was about ten cents a day each. From time to time stories drifted across the border about the treatment of prisoners, but not until last year when the territory became a state and when Kate Barnard became its first commissioner of charities, was anything done toward cleaning things up in Kansas. In August the new commissioner went to Lansing as a private citizen of Guthrie, Oklahoma, and inspected the prison with other visitors. Then she presented her official card and after considerable protest was allowed to inspect the jail as commissioner of charities of Oklahoma and the newest state in the Union proceeded to show her forty-eight-year-old sister what was going on in the Kansas penitentiary. Miss Barnard found 562 men and thirteen women prisoners from Oklahoma. She spent a day crawling through the coal mines where the "props and supports of the roof were bent low under the weight of the dirt ceiling." She found that every prisoner who is put to work in the mines must dig three cars of coal a day or be punished for idleness. Three cars of coal a day is a good day's work for a strong man. Miss Barnard found seventeen-year-old boys who were unable to do their "stunt," as they called it, chained to the walls of their dark cells. She found "one Oklahoma boy shackled up to the iron wall of the dungeon. The lad was pale-faced, slender, boyish, and frail in appearance. I said: 'What are you doing here? Why don't you mind the authorities?' He answered: 'I don't know much about digging coal. I work as hard as I can; but sometimes the coal is so hard, or there is a cave-in, and it takes time to build up the walls, and then I just can't get the three cars of coal. I got over two cars the day they threw me in here.'" The coal that is taken from the prison mines is used to supply the Kansas institutions, it is said. About 1,500 tons are mined a day. As there are some dozen institutions to be supplied, this makes over 100 tons a day for each of the state institutions. In the prison twine factories the contractors are allowed to say just how much shall constitute a day's work, and as all men are not equally skillful, the inferior prisoner is pushed to the limit by fear of punishment, while the more capable ones fare much better. Miss Barnard found that the "water cure" is in regular use; that the "water hole," "where they throw us in and pump water on us" is in operation; that the "crib" where refractory prisoners are kept with hands and feet shackled and drawn together at the back, was doing active service. She found unprintable immoralities existing in some parts of the mines and she found that since August, 1905, sixty boys from Oklahoma have been imprisoned with the men in the Lansing prison. Miss Barnard's report seemed incredible to Governor Haskell. He sent another investigator who came back to Guthrie with new stories of the Lansing prison to add to Miss Barnard's. And then the governor appointed a commission to make a thorough investigation of the institution and ex-Governor Hoch named a Kansas commission to co-operate. The latter body made its investigation before the Oklahoma delegation arrived. It made eighteen recommendations changing the whole prison management, but declared Miss Barnard's report true "only in minor details." The Oklahoma commission found that her report was true to fact and that the Lansing prison was not fit for a murderer, much less for a sixteen-year-old boy. There is no state penitentiary in Oklahoma and the prisoners must be kept in the county jails for the present. This is another strong argument for the passage of the bill now before the Oklahoma Legislature for the establishment of a reformatory. It may be possible to arrange with the Department of Justice to transfer the prisoners to the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth. KOWALIGA SCHOOL DESTROYED BY FIRE On the afternoon of January 30, the Kowaliga School for Negroes, located in the high pine lands of Elmore county, Alabama, was destroyed by fire. Only two buildings remain of that unique industrial settlement which has been successfully working among the Negroes of the surrounding community for thirteen years. The school was started by William E. Benson, a son of a former slave who had returned to the Alabama plantation after the war and become one of the South's most successful Negro farmers. Young Benson was graduated from Howard University and returning to his father's plantation saw the real need for a good school for the Negro children of the community. From Patron's Hall, built by the combined efforts of "the neighbors," Kowaliga School was started. When the five buildings were burned there were 280 pupils and twelve teachers in attendance. The loss will be about $20,000 with practically no insurance owing to the extreme difficulty that Negroes always experience in the South in getting their property covered against loss. The Kowaliga School is distinct in the service it is rendering to the community. Its aim is not to train skilled workmen or highly educated leaders, but rather to properly fit the Negro boys and girls of the community to live better in that community. The "book work" is carried as far as the eighth grade. The boys are taught agriculture and manual training and the girls are trained in the home life which they will probably take up on leaving school. As the school grew, Mr. Benson felt that it was not enough to train these boys and girls without giving them some opportunity to put their training to practical use. Consequently in 1900 the Dixie Industrial Company was founded "to improve the economic condition and social environment of the farm tenants of the South by establishing seasonal industries and furnishing them with steady employment the year round; to build better homes and help them to avoid the oppressions of the old system of mortgaging crops." The company now owns about 10,000 acres of farm and timber lands, operates a saw-mill, a turpentine still, cotton ginnery, cotton-seed and fertilizer mill, a store and forty farms, affording homes and employment for 300 people. It has a paid-up capital of $66,000, a surplus of $12,000, is earning eight per cent annually, and paying four per cent annual dividends. The industrial company provides work the year round for the rural population and thus fills in the time of the seasonal workers who before were busy only about half the year. The fire will not directly affect the Dixie Industrial Company. It will temporarily cripple the school and until funds are forthcoming that work must be discontinued. "It means beginning all over again after thirteen years' work," said Mr. Benson, who was in New York at the time of the fire; "but I am going back this week and make another start." REVISING CHICAGO'S CIVIL SERVICE SYSTEM A complete revision of the civil service system for Chicago is promised by Elton Lower, president of the City Civil Service Commission. After eight years' connection with the city departments the commissioner devoted himself for over a year mainly to studying the working of the civil service in Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago and to the examination of the promotional methods used by railway, manufacturing and other corporations. Securing requisite support from the city administration, he now announces a complete reversal of the form and revision of the rules under which the merit system has been operated in the city. The distinctive features of the new plan are grading by duties, descriptive titles, defining the duties of the grades, uniformity of compensation within each grade, advancement from grade to grade only by competitive examination, and a greater degree of unity and independence in the departmental administration of efficiency tests and promotional procedure within its own bounds. Examinations in all departments and grades are to subordinate scholastic to practical tests, and to give greater importance to physical conditions and the investigation of character in order to meet the requirements of service, rather than require knowledge of facts. It is hoped to raise the standard of efficiency and promotion by taking the tests in each department from its own system of keeping records and accounts. As the departments will be held individually responsible for the way they keep these, the inevitable comparison and contrasts between them will tend to level their standards up to the highest. Salaries may be raised only for an entire rank and not for individuals within the rank. Provision for grouping employes within the grades is made on the basis of efficiency, seniority or time required by service. The passing mark will be the only test of physical fitness. A similar flat-grading is proposed for work requiring skill and experience. Testing the applicant's qualifications in these respects, as is done for New York and Boston by the trade schools, is preferred for Chicago. A free transfer permits employes to pass from one department to another for promotional examinations, the original entrance examination thus giving a city employe a slight advantage over outsiders in competing for grades. Identification tests include finger prints. The civil service commission began to institute these features among the employes of its own office some time ago. It first secured proper quarters and modern sanitary facilities, and then began training employes for its own work for which experienced applicants were lacking. Mr. Lower maintains that if such a system is firmly established and built up it will be likely to withstand lax administration because "it will take as much study and thought to tear it down as to construct it." Whatever wrong things may be introduced into it, he thinks, "will make conditions no worse than they have been under the system that has hitherto prevailed." The Chicago Public Library will profit as much by the re-classification of its force and by this scheme of promotion as any other city administration, since its work has suffered more for the lack of finer tests of efficiency within more specialized grades, and also from being under the same regulations as other departments with whose requirements its service has little or nothing in common. To have a civil, self-regulating service system virtually its own, will free its directors, the librarian and his staff for that initiative which will give to this fourth largest library in the United States the leadership which may be rightly demanded for it. ANOTHER ATTEMPT FOR A NEW CHICAGO CHARTER The Chicago Charter Convention reassembled last week at its own initiative to renew its attempt to prepare a city charter that the Legislature will adopt and the people will accept at the polls. Its first laborious effort was so ruthlessly made over by the contending party factions in the Legislature two years ago that the measure suited no one. Many members of the convention repudiated it and the people overwhelmingly rejected it at the polls. To conserve their hard and fundamental work, the convention ventured to reassemble last autumn and appointed a committee to revise its own bill in the light of its fate at the capitol and the polls. In so doing the amendments made by the Legislature have been carefully considered and most of them eliminated. The measure thus nearly restored to its original form has been changed to conform to suggestions prompted by the criticisms and discussions through which the bill and act passed. This revision is now to come before the convention which faces many interesting and strenuously contested issues. Among them are the limiting of the city's bonded indebtedness to four per cent, the assumption by the city of ten per cent more of the cost of public improvements, municipal suffrage for women, stringent provisions against corrupt practices, the retention of the party circle on the ballot, the local regulation of the liquor traffic and the Sunday closing of saloons, the centralizing of school management, and the consolidation of four park boards. Preliminary to all these issues the question is to be decided whether the convention will supersede itself by proposing to the Legislature either to authorize the election of a new charter commission by the people, or to call a constitutional convention. These proposals are not likely to interfere with the procedure of the present convention to complete its own charter bill. Notwithstanding the fierce factional fight that now absorbs the energies of the Legislature so that it has not yet attempted to attend to public business, one of the prominent members of the House of Representatives assured the convention that if it agreed upon a measure and rallied to its support the public sentiment of Chicago, it would be enacted and referred to the referendum vote of the people. THE SCIENCE OF BETTER BIRTH The scientific foundations for the slowly rising science of "eugenics" grow apace in the research laboratories of our universities. Some of their most authoritative representatives demonstrated this fact at the recent joint meeting of the Physicians' Club of Chicago and the Chicago Medical Society. In strictly scientific spirit and phrase, with interesting stereopticon illustrations of their biological experiments, four professors brought their facts to bear upon the doctors for their inferences as to the analogy between the heredity in animal and plant life, and the development of human kind. Two professors of zoology, Dr. Castle of Harvard and Dr. Tower of the University of Chicago gave respectively "an experimental study of heredity," and "experiments and observations on the modification and the control of inheritance." A beautiful parallel was presented by Dr. Gates, professor of botany at the University of Chicago, in studies of inheritance in the evening primrose. Dean Davenport of the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois ventured the most direct application of the suggestions from scientific experimentations to the propagation of the human race. Drawing the lessons to be learned from the breeding of animals, he said that the question preliminary to any consideration of the subject is "whether the end of our breeding is to be the production of a few superior individuals, or the general elevation of the race. If it is the first, we must proceed as in the breeding of thoroughbred race horses; if it is the second, as in the production of good fat stock for the farm." Preferential mating, he thinks, produces in the long run, persons of exceptional talent. "Like mates with like, and people with exceptional ability in any line are naturally thrown together by their common tastes and thus uniting bring forth phenomenal individuals in all lines." The solution of the problem of the deterioration of the stock lies, he thinks, not so much in stricter marriage laws, as in the absolute prevention of reproduction among "the culls, human as well as animal." To colonize other classes of the unfit as strictly as we do the insane is the only way he sees of doing this. "Let a man be taken into court and his ancestor record investigated. If we find his parents were dominantly bad, it means that he is fifty per cent bad. If his grand parents were also bad, he is twenty-five per cent more bad. When he gets to ninety per cent bad, it is certain that he must be colonized. There is a strict mathematical law that runs through it all." Whatever may be thought of such definite suggestions, it is too true as the secretary of the Physicians' Club affirms, that "man is at a distinct disadvantage when compared with domestic animals in being denied 'good' breeding. He is the child of chance and so to speak is born, not bred." Surely, however slowly, the science of improving the propagation of the human race will receive its recognition as having place among the hierarchy of the sciences and will be practically applied by those who respect themselves and have any regard for their posterity. CONFERENCE ON DENTAL HYGIENE The Conference on Oral and Dental Hygiene held in Boston recently brought out, perhaps more than anything else, the relation between, the physical condition of the teeth and the general health of the body, and the great necessity for lay intelligence in the matter. Prof. Irving Fisher of Yale, the opening speaker, dwelt on these points, and declared that civilized man tries to avoid mastication by the use of pulverized, liquified and pappified foods; that civilization has brought about a pressure of time with the result that we eat by the quick lunch counter and the clock, whereas the animal eats his meal in peace; that we eat too fast, to the injury of our teeth, as shown by the fact that those who do masticate food thoroughly have better teeth; and that experience shows thorough mastication results in better health and greater efficiency. Prof. Timothy Leary of Tufts College said that proper mastication does away with an important source of supply of putrefactive bacteria, and eliminates conditions favoring gastric cancer. Dr. Samuel A. Hopkins believes that the solution of many of the difficulties lies in seeking out the educators and in working through them and through the various settlements and the workers in public and charitable institutions. Of particular importance are all those who work with children. William H. Allen of New York lays to the ignorance and the indifference and the carelessness of the public a great many of the difficulties. He believes that if hospitals ever refuse to give bed treatment for twelve weeks to a man suffering from jaw trouble when the dentist could give "ambulant" treatment while the man supports himself and his family; if physicians ever stop spending time, money, medicine and hospital space on tubercular patients who reinfect themselves whenever food, medicine or saliva pass over their diseased teeth and gums; if dentists are ever generally added to the attending, visiting and consulting staffs of hospitals; if education of dentists for profit ever gives way to education for health and training; if the dental profession is ever given the rank with other specialties and society given the corresponding protection, it will be because laymen intervene. Dr. Horace Fletcher declared that it is definitely known that the flow of gastric juices is started in the stomach by psychic stimuli. If the food is taken without enjoyment the juices are not secreted and the food remains undigested. "Any dispute at the table, an angry word, a discussion over a bill, or a sharp retort, are sufficient to stop this digestive process," he said. Dr. David D. Scannell of the Boston School Committee made the startling statement that fully seventy-five per cent of Boston school children have dental disease, which means that there are about 75,000 school children in Boston needing attention. Dr. Scannell bases his statement upon investigations made in Brookline, New York, and through the district nursing associations. Dr. Scannell said that the present dental work in schools is done with good intention but it is sporadic. Money should be set aside for examination and treatment of all school children, conducted through an out-patient dental department on the same basis as the eye and ear departments of free treatment. Dr. Walter B. Cannon of the Harvard Medical School showed the dangers lurking in school drinking cups. His statements were supplemented in the exhibit provided by the Dental Hygiene Council of Massachusetts by pictures showing a filthy vagrant using a public drinking cup, immediately followed by a mother who gave her little girl a drink from the same cup. The exhibit is the only one in existence in this country. It was taken in part from the tuberculosis exhibit, but has been greatly increased and supplemented by an exhibit from Strasbourg. In the closing session, President Eliot of Harvard pointed out the relation between defective physical conditions and defective government. "The bad physical condition of our people is due largely to the unhealthy conditions under which the men do their ordinary work and the women pursue their domestic employments. To improve the public health we must have better regulations and laws. We cannot create and improve the public playgrounds which are open air parlors without honest and efficient city and town government," he said. Dr. Eliot thinks that the medical profession is the most altruistic of all occupations, with the possible exception of the ministry. INSURANCE AND BUILDING LOANS One of the defects of the building and loan societies, long recognized in some quarters, has been the probable loss of the home to the family of the member who dies before payment has been completed. At the time when the widow most needs the home for her children, the payments cannot be met and the association is reluctantly obliged to foreclose the mortgage. A plan to meet this situation, frequent in the aggregate, has been devised and practised in New England, by requiring the borrower to take out an insurance policy on the least expensive straight-life plan, to an amount equal to the mortgage. The insurance premium is payable monthly with the payment on the loan, the association turning it over to the insurance company, and undertaking to adjust the payments if the latter's premium periods do not coincide. The face of the policy is made payable to the loan association which, in case of death, takes from the insurance money the amount remaining unpaid on the mortgage, and gives the widow the balance with a deed for an unencumbered home. In the great majority of cases where the borrower lives to complete his payments, the policy is surrendered to him when his mortgage is cancelled, to be continued or dropped as he pleases. The plan was described at the annual banquet of the Metropolitan League of Co-operative Savings and Loan Associations, New York, by J. Q. A. Brackett, former governor of Massachusetts, who is urging it on a national scale as a necessary adjunct to what, in his native state, is termed the co-operative bank. More than two hundred men attended the banquet, representing ninety-five constituent companies with 35,129 depositors, and controlling assets of sixteen million dollars. One who attended could not fail to be impressed with the evident feeling of these men that their paramount duty is not to make money for their particular organizations, but to help the average member buy a home. Ninety per cent of them are unsalaried. One association, it was reported, has reduced its interest rate without request of its borrowers. In the words of the president, the main desire of building loan associations should be "the encouragement of the habit of saving without irritating penalties and restrictions and with equitable provision for the mishaps possible to those undertaking a contract for specific saving extending over a long period of years." THE SIGHTLESS AND THEIR WORK The wonderful gains made by the blind in overcoming their heavy handicap was brought strikingly to public attention at the second annual sale and exhibition of the New York Association for the Blind. Women were at work on small hand looms, on linen looms, and on carpet-weaving looms. A blind girl operated a power machine. Stenographers sat at their work, fingering ordinary typewriters, and transcribing notes from phonographic dictation. There were all the usual, simpler displays of chair caning, basket weaving and broom making and there was music, both vocal and instrumental. The guests were told interesting stories of many of the workers. One was of a man who applied to the association for help when first stricken blind and most despondent, thinking that all avenues of usefulness had been closed to him. As a result of the instruction given to him, he is now able to earn a good salary and to support his family. The work of the association has so increased during the past year, that besides the building on Fifty-ninth street and the workshop on Forty-second street, the special committee for the prevention of blindness has an office in the Kennedy Building at 289 Fourth avenue. In co-operation with the State Department of Health the committee is working particularly toward the prevention of ophthalmia neonatorum. Following are the members of the committee: P. Tecumseh Sherman, chairman, Dr. Eugene H. Porter, Dr. Thomas Darlington, Dr. F. Park Lewis, Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, Thomas M. Mulry, Dr. John I. Middleton, Miss Louisa L. Schuyler, Mrs. William B. Rice, Mrs. Edward R. Hewitt, Miss Winifred Holt, Miss Lillian D. Wald and George A. Hubbell, executive secretary. BERLIN'S SCHOOL OF PHILANTHROPY Europe, and especially Germany, follow very closely every new experiment along social lines, undertaken by American cities or individuals. One imitation of American methods was the establishment of separate courts for children, though neither detention homes nor the splendidly equipped schools for delinquent boys and girls, which the most progressive states of the Union have, are found in Germany. The state governments in most cases do not take the initiative; private citizens study the question and urge the necessity for a change, until public opinion, thoroughly aroused comes out so strongly in favor of a new measure, that the authorities are forced to yield. In October, 1908, a social school for women opened its doors in Berlin with the help of different societies and in co-operation with private citizens, of whom Dr. Munsterberg is the best known to the readers of this magazine. A close study of the methods of the New York and Chicago Schools of Philanthropy had been made and some of their features successfully copied. The aim of the school is to give German women new chances for service whether they wish to devote some of their time as volunteers or desire to become paid officers of philanthropic agencies. Field practice will show how the same problems, which confront social workers, repeat themselves only in a smaller way in the families and individual. To the training in both theory and practice two years are devoted. The theoretical work in pedagogy, social questions, economics and domestic science, is supplemented in the first year by kindergarten and day nursery work, and in the second year by a special training gained through working at different social agencies, like the Bureau of Charity, juvenile court committees, relief and aid societies. All these agencies hope to get a staff of experienced helpers and workers through their co-operation with the school. The state's schools, through which the girls have to pass prior to their admission, have very little of the modern spirit. In contrast too with the great variety of courses in the state _lyzeums_, the courses are restricted in number and carefully selected. They are however most appropriate for women, since they present not only a picture of the development of modern society, but emphasize particularly woman's position. The director, Dr. Alice Salomon, is one of the most able and conservative leaders of German women. There is a good attendance at the new school. THE RUDOWITZ CASE GRAHAM TAYLOR The decision of Secretary Root to deny the demand of the Russian government for the extradition of Christian Rudowitz is a great relief to all true Americans, and thousands of their foreign born fellow citizens all over the land. The right of asylum for political refugees was at stake in the case of this Lutheran Protestant peasant. The extradition was demanded on the ground that he had been identified as one of a band of twelve or fifteen marauders who were guilty of three homicides, arson and robbery in the village of Beren, Courland, in January, 1906. The defendant denied the charges of personal participation in the alleged crimes and submitted proof that Courland was then in a state of temporarily successful insurrection, and that the killing was ordered by the revolutionary party then in control, as an execution of spies who had betrayed many of their own people into the hands of the military authorities by whom they were summarily shot. The evidence upon which the whole case hinged was in the form of depositions taken in Russia and submitted by the government to the United States commissioner at Chicago. So well grounded were the suspicions with which it was regarded, that the whole record of the testimony was submitted to John H. Wigmore, dean of the Northwestern University Law School, one of the highest legal authorities in America, and author of one of the principal American text books on evidence. His careful analysis of the voluminous record in the case led him to conclude that while Rudowitz was a member of the revolutionary committee and voted for the execution of the spies, the evidence identifying him as one of the party charged with the killing "is too slight to be of any value"; that "there is no evidence of marauding or neighborhood feuds or common depredation on the part of this or any other band in any part of the evidence for the prosecution"; that there is conclusive evidence of a temporarily successful revolution "giving the military forces of the national government under their system certain rights of summary execution, and correspondingly giving such rights to the revolutionists, so as to fix upon their acts of summary force, if duly authorized by their officers, as revolutionary acts of force." These facts justified Dean Wigmore in concluding that "the killing was a purely political act, the arson was also ordered politically, being a customary incident similar to the existing government's own punitive practice in such cases." The suspicions based upon such facts in this and other cases, aroused the American spirit against the apparent attempt of the Russian government to secure the extradition of many political refugees on poorly substantiated charges of being common criminals. Hundreds of men and women faced the possibility of being forced to change their names and hide themselves. Great mass meetings were held in the principal cities to protest not only against the extradition of Rudowitz, but against the continuation of the present treaty with Russia under which it was asked. Conservative citizens, to the American manor born, such as President Cyrus Northrup of the University of Minnesota, W. H. Huestis of Minneapolis, Charles Cheney Hyde, professor of International Law at Northwestern University, Councillor W. J. Calhoun of Chicago, joined their protests with those of recently arrived refugees and such friends of theirs as Jane Addams, Jenkin Lloyd Jones and Dr. Emil G. Hirsch. But beneath the value set upon this popular agitation for the defense of the right of asylum in America, was the confidence that there was good law under the case for Rudowitz, which would surely determine the decision of so good a lawyer as the secretary of state. Now that this confidence has been confirmed, the question is being validly raised by the press whether the qualifications exacted of those appointed to United States commissionerships are as high as was originally demanded for the delicate and difficult duties of that office. It is pointed out that when in 1793 Congress first authorized such appointments by the circuit courts, it defined the qualifications of those eligible as "discreet persons, learned in the law." Later acts, however, dropped the requirement that they should be "learned in the law" and continued the reference to "discreet persons." In substituting "United States commissioners" appointed by the district courts for the commissioners of the circuit courts in 1896, Congress provided only that no United States marshal, bailiff or janitor of a building, or certain other federal employes should hold the office. Some of the most eminent lawyers, who publicly joined in protesting against the extradition of Rudowitz, took occasion to criticise the appointment to this office of men not trained in the law, and inexperienced in the sifting of evidence, whose decisions, involving the liberty and life of men, must be based entirely upon the knowledge of the laws of evidence. Certainly this case should lead either to stricter definition of the qualifications for United States commissionerships or to far greater care in the appointments to that important office. Moreover, the injustice of putting upon a political refugee the burden of proof that he is such has been made manifest in this case. For to do so Rudowitz would have been compelled not only to bring his evidence from Russia, but also to expose to certain death those whom he would have been compelled to name as his compatriots in the struggle for liberty. SAVINGS BANK LEGISLATION: WHAT IS NEEDED? JAMES H. HAMILTON[1] Headworker of the University Settlement "Everything speaks for and nothing against the post office savings bank," writes Professor J. Conrad of the University of Halle. This is strong testimony from a German economist who is a careful student in the field of social economics, and who lives in a country which has a splendid system of municipal savings banks. But if one looks beyond Prussia and Saxony into the province of Posen he sees great stretches of neglected territory. And in this country if one looks beyond Massachusetts, with its much praised trustee savings system, into New York and Pennsylvania he sees much to be desired,--and if he looks still further west he finds a sadder neglect than the neglect of free popular education in darkest Russia. [1] Author of Savings and Savings Institutions; Macmillan, 1902. Pp. 436. Price $2.25. This book can be obtained at publisher's price through the offices of CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS. If we fully comprehend the fact that the savings bank is an educational, and not a commercial institution we will see at once that the law of supply and demand cannot properly regulate its growth. We will see on the contrary that if left to local initiative by either municipalities or trustees, the banks will likely appear where they are least needed and fail to appear where they are most needed, and the need of a general federal system, or a postal system, which will leave no neglected spots becomes perfectly clear. "Everything speaks for the post office savings bank." Postmaster General Meyer, in his article in the August number of the _North American Review_, presents this country's need of a postal savings system in a very attractive and convincing way. I think, however, that the educational aspects merit more emphasis and more extended treatment. The public, I think, needs to recognize this institution not alone as the often successful rival of the saloon, the enemy of dissipating and destructive spending, but it needs also to recognize its relationship to the strong type of citizen, with resisting power against the petty immediate wants in the interest of greater economic security, the type that can save against the rainy day, the week of sickness, and the declining powers of the later years of life. In my own judgment the highest function of the savings bank is to lead the workman back to the ownership of his tools, or since that is not literally possible, to a share in the ownership of the productive forces of society. The workman may not recognize in the share of stock, the bond, the equity in a title to real estate, the successor to the tools his forefather kept stored in his cottage. When he has been brought to see it and to make such ownership the goal of his ambition, his tribute of devotion to his wife and children, he will be a stronger and a better man in every respect, and the multiplication of this kind of citizen is as worthy an object of education as the spread of a rudimentary knowledge of letters. Universal proprietorship is no less desirable, from the social point of view, than universal education. The purpose of the savings bank is therefore not so much to instill the idea of hoarding for future spending, but of investing to increase the permanent income. Having this in mind the provision of the English postal savings system for investing in government stocks for the depositor on his request is fully warranted, and even more so the French provision for investment of the excess of deposits over the legal maximum in government stocks without request. The deposit account itself represents investment,--by trustees on behalf of the depositors. But the depositor should eventually become a conscious owner on his own account. It would seem most proper that he be supplied with information which would enable him to form an independent judgment as to different securities, and the savings bank might very well act for him in making his first investment. The one departure from precedent in Mr. Meyer's bill is in the investment of funds. It contemplates a system of loans to the local banks with a view to "keeping the money at home." The departure from the practice of investing in government securities may be good for the object intended, which relates to the incidents rather than the primary object of savings bank administration. It seems to me most unfortunate that Mr. Meyer should have selected a form of investment that would tend to defeat the primary object of savings banks in the necessarily low rate of interest. I think he must fail to fully realize that the savings bank is to educate the propertyless to become proprietors, to appreciate the need of supplementing the earnings of labor by income from accumulated capital, and not to serve as a mere place for hoarding. It is the interest rate that tickles this dormant sense into life. It seems to me a pity that he did not see in the example of the municipal savings banks in Germany and of our own trustee banks, which invest chiefly in real estate mortgages, a way of reaching the one object without injury to the other. This would be a departure from the general practice of postal savings systems which would at once "keep the money at home," and insure a higher rate of interest than the yield of government securities. Money thus invested would get back into the channels of trade as readily as if it were loaned to the local banks, and with much less objection, and the rate of interest would probably be about double. The yield should be four per cent against the two per cent proposed by the postmaster general's measure. It is certainly most refreshing and encouraging to listen to the promise of legislation that extends its benefits immediately to the common people, which contains the hope of more social solidarity. A comparison of our policies with those of old world countries in this respect is not comforting to our patriotic pride. It seems time that we were less laggard and that we should have more courage to experiment. The promise made by all political parties of a postal savings bank is probably the most encouraging sign we have had. It would be much more encouraging if the measure that is promised contained more of the results of bold experiment in other countries and contained more of an original and experimental nature that promises a more pronounced application of the true principle of savings banks, and that fosters a clearer popular understanding of that principle. It is equally important that the principle be brought out in clear relief from the point of view of the administration and of the patrons. The administration needs clearly to understand that it is not conducting a banking business but giving education in thrift, and the youthful and other patrons need to understand that they are being led in the direction of economic independence. SOCIAL EDUCATION[2] Reviewed by HELEN F. GREENE It is a long look forward and a wide one that Dr. Colin A. Scott takes in Social Education and one that social workers other than the teachers for whom the book was primarily written, will find themselves enriched by sharing. [2] Social Education by Colin A. Scott, Boston, 1908. Pp. 300. Price $1.50. This book may be obtained at publisher's price through the offices of CHARITIES AND THE COMMONS. The school as a special organ of a constantly changing social order, must itself be easily capable of change. Instead of the uniformity on which the clan and early religions insisted must come the great variety of characters and capacities which the modern highly differentiated state demands. How shall the school, called into existence by society for its own service and protection, most effectively educate the formers of the "New Society"? Turning to real life for an answer we find that "society at its best organizes itself in groups in which each individual in the various groups to which he may belong finds himself in contact with others whose weakness he supplements or whose greater powers he depends upon." "If the school is to prepare for society as it is, it would be natural to expect that some such form of social activity, however embryonic, should be found as a necessary feature of its life." "The group must be capable of going to pieces, a thing it cannot do if it is to depend on the authoritative backing or constraint of the teacher. Indeed it is only when it can go to pieces that there is any reality in the effort to hold it together." "True responsibility and even obedience of the highest type is felt only when the group is free." The positive view of liberty and independence is urged, not the negative one which teachers,--and he might have added club leaders,--are too prone to take. "If children are to be trained socially, they must feel the full effects of social causes,--not merely of society at large, but especially those of the embryonic society of child life to which they belong. They must study these effects practically, and must see to what extent, as social beings, they are real causes themselves. It is on a basis of experience of this kind that they can best interpret the larger and more complex life of adult society and the state." Declaring social serviceableness and the highest development of personality "to be the aims of the school, he urges that there shall be some test of its success in securing these." "This test can be found only in the extent to which pupils, when freed from the oversight and benevolent coercion of the teacher, can use the knowledge and carry out the habits and ideals which it is the aim of the school to foster and protect." In the three succeeding chapters, three types of school in which the social spirit has been specially manifest are criticized according to this test. The schools are: (1) Abbotsholme, the "monarchy," under the principalship of Dr. Cecil Reddie; (2) The George Junior Republic; (3) The Dewey School. In each he finds "elements of a high degree of social value, and an approximate solution of the problem of educative social organization." But it is in the two following chapters on Organized Group Work, fragments of which appeared in the _Social Education Quarterly_ of March, 1907, that Dr. Scott makes his own most valuable contribution to the problem. It is an attempt to show how it is possible, "even with crowded classes and without special equipment, to obtain in the people's schools, those co-operative and self-sustaining motives which are worthy of democracy and best able to measure the teachers' work." The experiences which he describes he calls "experiments simply in the sense that all life is experimental, and they were devised with the view that the development of intention and resourcefulness on the part of the pupil is the greatest and most undeniable duty of any form of education." The method was as follows: Each teacher said to her class: "If you had time given to you for something that you enjoy doing, and that you think worth while, what should you choose to do? "When you have decided how you would spend the time, come and tell me about your plan. You may come all together, or in groups, or each by himself; but whatever you say you want to do, you must tell the length of time you will need to finish it, and how you expect to do it." A most varied and interesting set of plans resulted. A printing group; cooking groups; groups for bookbinding; many for the writing and giving of plays, suggestive of the festival work of the Ethical Culture School, which has already been so helpful to club leaders. The history of these groups, their human and humorous experiences:--of the child who was "bossy" and the way in which the group handled her,--are given in delightful detail and carry conviction with them as to the worth of the method. To one judging socially and not pedagogically the closing chapter on The Education of the Conscience is disappointing. It seems to keep too much to the idea of personal morality as an end rather than as a means to the more vital and individually inspiring and healthful social morality; and to admit of the implication that the moral side of school life is a thing at least a little apart, rather than finding, when given a teacher with the right spirit, that, to quote Dr. Dewey, "every incident of school life is pregnant with ethical life." PITTSBURGH SURVEY INTRODUCTORY TO THIS ISSUE This second Pittsburgh issue deals with certain physical necessities of a wage earning population. It shows a city struggling for the things which primitive men have ready to hand,--clear air, clean water, pure foods, shelter and a foothold of earth. Thus we have in Pittsburgh a smoke campaign, a typhoid movement and the administrative problems of the Bureau of Health in milk and meat inspection; thus we have the necessity for sanitary regulation of dwellings wherever people live dense or deep, whether squatters' shanties such as those of Skunk Hollow or company houses such as those of Painter's Row, whether city tenements or mill-town lodgings; and the necessity further for increased numbers of low-cost dwellings. Similarly, flood prevention, traction development, bridge building and the like are so many efforts to expand, or conquer the difficulties of, the town's corrugated floor. The first issue of this series, that of January 2, pointed out that with the moving into Pittsburgh of new and immigrant peoples, the spirit of the frontier and of the mining camp possessed the wage-earning population. This spirit has characterized civic development. Wherever there has been profit in public service, private enterprises have staked their claims to perform it. While the biggest men of the community have made steel, other men have built water companies, thrown bridges across the rivers, erected inclines and laid sectional car lines. To bring system and larger public utility out of these heterogeneous units, has become the present governmental problem of the city. In a sense, this situation is repeated with respect to the institutions transplanted into Pittsburgh, or initiated there, to meet the cultural and social needs of the community. Thus we have local alderman's courts, unco-ordinated charitable enterprises, and a ward system of schools. The trend of the decade here, too, is obviously toward system,--toward a municipalization of lower courts, an expansion of the health service, an association of charities, a city system as against a vestry system of schools, a civic improvement commission that will focalize public sentiment in all movements for municipal improvement. * * * * * In the third and final issue of the series, that of March 2, the emphasis will be transferred from the civic to the industrial well-being of the wage-earning population,--the vital and irrepressible issues of hours, wages, factory inspection, accidents and the cost of living. A supplementary group of studies,--of the libraries, schools, playgrounds and children's institutions of Pittsburgh,--will also be published in the issue of March 2. PITTSBURGH THE PLACE AND ITS SOCIAL FORCES. [Illustration: FORT PITT IN 1759. The first town plan of the Point of Pittsburgh.] * * * * * The second of three special issues of Charities and The Commons, presenting the gist of the findings of the Pittsburgh Survey, as to conditions of life and labor among the wage-earning population of the Pennsylvania Steel District. I. JANUARY 2-THE PEOPLE. II. FEBRUARY 6-THE PLACE. III. MARCH 2-THE WORK. * * * * * [Illustration: PITTSBURGH _SOCIAL FORCES_ 1908 For profiles, lines A.-B.; C.-D.; and E.-F.--see pages 834 and 835.] A CITY COMING TO ITSELF ROBERT A. WOODS HEAD OF SOUTH END HOUSE, BOSTON The capacity for being seen with the eye in the large, which New York in her sky scrapers has purchased at so great a price, is the birthright of Pittsburgh. Where from so many different points one sees the involved panorama of the rivers, the various long ascents and steep bluffs, the visible signs everywhere of movement, of immense forces at work,--the pillars of smoke by day, and at night the pillars of fire against the background of hillsides strewn with jets of light,--one comes to have the convincing sense of a city which in its _ensemble_ is quite as real a thing as are the separate forces which go to make it up. The Allegheny River, providing a broad, open space up and down and across which much of this drama of modern world industry may be viewed, has at last come to mean not separation but identity of the population on either side of it. If the banks of the river were improved, it might easily be sentimentally as well as economically one of the most important common possessions of the old and the new sections of Greater Pittsburgh. This tendency of cities to reach out and include their present suburbs, and even the territory where their future suburbs are to be,--a tendency which a few years ago was mocked at,--is in these days seen to be normal and wise. The proper planning of the city's layout, the proper adjustment of civic stress upon the different types of people in a great urban community, demand the inclusion of the suburbs. Greater Pittsburgh is less satisfactory than Greater New York and Greater Chicago, only because it is less inclusive than they. Some important suburbs of old Pittsburgh are not included, and the suburbs of Allegheny are nearly all outside. The latter omission is particularly unfortunate as it is doubtful whether Allegheny by itself will raise the average civic and moral standard of the greater city. It is regrettable too that Allegheny continues to show reluctance in making common cause with her larger neighbor. The toll bridges and the many obstacles against making them free, seem to typify the difficulty of intercommunication. The two towns, however, so clearly belong together that this feeling of clan cannot long survive. From nearly every commercial point of view that is worth considering Allegheny is dependent upon Pittsburgh. In the few exceptional instances, as in the case of two or three large stores, Pittsburgh recognizes a measure of dependence upon Allegheny. It is interesting that those of the old families connected with Pittsburgh industries who still insist on having town houses, reside on the Allegheny parks or commons. A strong sense of corporate individuality comes to any community that is arrested by the challenge of great tasks. One of the influences leading to the creation of the greater city was the widening of the territory administered industrially from Pittsburgh. The best oil wells are now south rather than north of Pittsburgh, and the center of the coal regions is fast passing from the southeast to southwest and on into West Virginia. The necessity of easy transfer of iron ore from the Superior region is bringing up insistently the proposal of a canal to Lake Erie, so as to match some of Cleveland's special advantages. The nine-foot channel for the whole length of the Ohio will enable Pittsburgh's long arm to reach out and touch that of Cincinnati. That the expansion of Pittsburgh was preceded and to some extent directed by a reform administration, has tended greatly to re-enforce the belief that Pittsburgh is moving organically toward the better day in her public affairs. This is the first successful movement for municipal reform in a generation. As I pointed out in my first article, it got its immediate stimulus out of the impudent interference of the state machine in unseating a mayor who had been elected by an opposing local faction, and setting up a "recorder" in his place. Carried out under the forms of legislation, this act stung Pittsburgh people into a new feeling of municipal self-respect and led to their electing on a Democratic ticket George W. Guthrie, who had been for many years actively interested in the cause of municipal reform. Mr. Guthrie's family, like the Quincys of Boston, has been represented for three generations in the office of mayor. Mayor Guthrie has made thorough application of the principles of civil service reform. He has introduced business methods in the awarding of all contracts, including the banking of the city's funds. In a city where only a few years ago perpetual franchises were given to a street railway covering every section, Mayor Guthrie has, so far as the situation allowed, put in force the strictest new conception of the public interest in relation to public service corporations. He compelled the Pennsylvania Railroad to cease moving its trains through the middle of what is potentially the best downtown street in the city. The street railway company was required for the first time to clean and repair the streets, to meet the cost of changes required by the work of city departments, and to pay bridge tolls. Loose and costly business methods in the city departments were radically checked, and accounts with long arrearages involving heavy interest losses to the city, were brought up to date. The cost of electric lighting to the city has been reduced from ninety-six to seventy-two dollars a lamp. Economies have been effected through having the city do some of its own asphalt paving and water-pipe laying. Along with economical departmental service have gone the intelligent and effective efforts, which will be explained in other survey reports, for improving the water supply, abating the smoke nuisance, combating typhoid fever and tuberculosis by wholesale inroads upon almost unbelievable sanitary evils, and for restraining and punishing the exploiters of prostitution. Not all American reform administrations can report a decline of two mills in the rate of taxation. Had Pittsburgh not been compelled to shoulder a special burden in including Allegheny's large municipal costs accompanied with low property valuation, Mayor Guthrie would have held the rate at this low point. Under the new charter the mayor cannot succeed himself; so that the question whether Mayor Guthrie could be successful with the enlarged electorate is a theoretical one. Even if the machine should be successful, a standard has been set which the citizens will remember and return to. Under the determined leadership of A. Leo Weihl, a Voters' League has employed such methods for keeping proper standards before the voters as have been successful in Chicago, Boston and other cities. Within a few weeks, after a year or more of clever and determined pursuit, seven members of councils and two bank officials have been arrested on a charge of bribery. The officers of the league state that this step is but the beginning. It is not claimed that this means anything more than the highly public-spirited activity of a few citizens, and it may be, as is currently reported, that such activity became possible in that certain great financial interests decided to change their policy as to dealing with city officials. However it became possible it meant exposure and disgrace to a system which was rooted in traditions in Pittsburgh. Just as this tradition was broken once in the election of Mayor Guthrie as a result of a bitter sting to the self-respect of the city; so now there is a cheering prospect that this poisoned goad will rouse and mobilize an instinct for carrying moral reforms to the limit which is very powerful in Pittsburgh when a situation forces the issue. The present phase of political chicanery touches the banks, and the reaction against it will be re-enforced by the growing concern of the community in the face of bank defalcations amounting altogether to not less than five million dollars within the past four years, some if not all of which involved mysterious political complications. [Illustration: GEORGE W. GUTHRIE. Mayor of Pittsburgh.] Such an extreme outbreak of crime is related to the transition stage through which the city is passing. Along with the intoxicating accumulation and expenditure of wealth, the old type of dominating, watchful, industrial and financial leader has disappeared,--that which is typified by Mr. Carnegie, B. F. Jones,--whose firm continues the largest independent steel concern in Pittsburgh,--the Parks, the Moorheads, the Olivers, the Laughlins. The large industrial interests are in the main turned into bureaucracies whose plans in detail are decided in New York, and whose officials must guide their public actions so as to serve the corporations' interests. The merchants and professional men of the city who have always deferred to the manufacturers, have only recently begun to assert themselves. It is perhaps natural that civic co-operation should make a more effective appeal to the merchants than the manufacturers, the merchants' constituency and scene of action being very largely local. Mayor Guthrie's election was a result of this new organized element in the life of the city. His work has in the nature of the case been largely the lopping off of old evils and the piecing together of a system of administration which shall embody standards of honesty and business efficiency. Will the people of Pittsburgh be ready for the further stage of sound reconstruction, for the unified, organic development of the city as a thing in itself; for the application to the common welfare of those coherent, adventurous principles which have made possible the magnificent prosperity of the few? The proper answer to this inquiry must regard the time perspective. A strong momentum of public spirit and social service from out of the past, Pittsburgh, in becoming a great population center, did not possess. But in the last ten years the progress of this community, to one who can test it in varied and intimate ways, has proved in such matters highly significant and promising. There are significant results, for instance, of the collective action of business men for the enhancement of the general interests of the city. Such effort leads first indirectly and then directly to the improvement of the city as a place in which to live. Two considerable changes in the layout of the downtown part of the city have been brought about by special branches of trade. The wholesale grocers and the wholesale provision men have been for generations located on Liberty and Penn avenues west of the Union Station. Recently the latter have taken possession of a territory beginning a few blocks farther east and reaching for a quarter of a mile along Penn avenue, and through to the Allegheny River. A large number of the meanest tenement houses have been swept away by this process, and facilities provided for receiving and distributing fruits and vegetables, a distinct gain toward a hygienic urban commissariat. The wholesale grocers have cleaned up an equally large and equally unsanitary tenement area on the South Side, and have built vast subdivided warehouses under a single general management. Perhaps the most important aspect of these great co-operative improvement plans is the suggestion they give of the capacity of Pittsburgh citizens for making other broad modifications in the structure of the city, such as the improvement of its river fronts, the proper planning of its thoroughfares and public centers, and above all the sanitary and adequate housing of its industrial population. It is indeed by its bold pioneering in such directions as these that the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, chiefly under the leadership of H. D. W. English, has come to have an ever-growing authority in Pittsburgh, and a rather unique reputation and influence in other parts of the country. Greater Pittsburgh, as it is, with the provision for further expansion from time to time, is largely the result of the chamber's persistent effort. The improvement of the Ohio River which is to be undertaken at once by the national government, and the organization of a company to build the canal to Lake Erie, are also results of its initiative. The reduction of the smoke nuisance, the provision of a proper system of sewage disposal, the study of plans for protection against floods, and, most noteworthy of all, the inclusion of the hygienic housing of the people in the list of the city's chief economic problems, are among the statesmanlike undertakings which the chamber has been effectively promoting. The Chamber of Commerce is reinforced by local boards of trade covering the chief outlying sections of the city and including in their membership not only representatives of business carried on locally, but downtown business men who reside in the district. The boards of trade have been infected by the broad spirit of the Chamber of Commerce, and are in essence district improvement societies whose activities are focussed and forwarded by their business-like motive and methods. It can hardly be that any city has ever had so great re-enforcement of its finer life from the beneficence of a private citizen as has Pittsburgh. Under the general title of Carnegie Institute are included a public library, a museum, an art gallery, and a music hall. These, under one roof, cover an area of five acres. At a little distance are the Carnegie Technical Schools with grounds covering thirty-six acres. The total sum which Mr. Carnegie has given these different objects is upwards of $11,000,000. [Illustration: H. D. W. ENGLISH. Chairman, Civic Improvement Commission, Pittsburgh.] The library contains 300,000 volumes. The annual circulation is nearly three times this number. The service rendered by the library is greatly increased by aggressive and ingenious missionary work. There are six well-equipped branch libraries with 170 distributing stations throughout the city. Half of these are in the shape of little reading clubs and home libraries for children, conducted by the library management itself. This branch of the library's work has grown so much as to justify the establishment of a school for children's librarians. The fact that the library exists to discover and elicit new demands is made clear in the establishment of a "telephone reference," through which any person may have a subject looked up for him and a report quickly made. There are indeed more than sentimental reasons for the cherished feeling in Pittsburgh that this is the bright particular exemplar of all the Carnegie libraries. [Illustration: LEE S. SMITH. President, Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] The art gallery, some parts of which are of exceeding beauty, includes permanent exhibits of painting, sculpture and architecture. Its chief service to art thus far has consisted in a regular annual international exhibition of paintings. A very suggestive plan is followed for interesting school children in the galleries and in pictures generally. A set of photographs of the entire permanent collection is placed in one school after another for periods of two weeks each. It is expected that a continuous circuit will be kept up in this way requiring two years on each round. The museum stands among the four chief institutions of its kind in this country. It is under expert and enterprising management. A considerable part of its collections have been gathered by its own expeditions. Like the art gallery, it appeals directly to the public schools by sending out circulating collections, conducting prize essay contests, and by carrying on a young naturalists' club. [Illustration: O. H. ALLERTON, JR. President, Pittsburgh Board of Trade, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] The music hall represents among this noble group of cultural agencies the one which simply continues the results of a significant phase of the city's inherent growth; for since 1879 Pittsburgh has had some sort of worthy musical festival every year. The weekly free organ recitals are a commendable transfer to America of a well recognized form of municipal service in English cities. It is unfortunate for this purpose that the hall should not be more accessible to great numbers of people. The symphony concerts of the Pittsburgh Orchestra, whose seasons have continued during the past twelve years, are given partly in this hall and partly (in certain years) in the Exposition Building near the Point. [Illustration: T. E. BILLQUIST. Architect, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] The Carnegie Technical Schools represent the farthest steps yet taken in this country in providing vocational training for those entering non-professional callings. Considering that the greatest weakness of the whole American scheme of education is precisely at this point, the progress of the Carnegie Schools is being watched with keen attention, on both the educational and the economic side, from all parts of the country. Thus far schools of applied design and of applied science, a special vocational school for women, and a school for apprentices and journeymen, have made a strikingly successful beginning. All the schools are open day and evening. The present enrollment includes 2,000 students representing every state in the Union and many foreign countries. It can be said of the administration of the schools that it is worthy of its opportunity. The staff of instructors shows a rare spirit of fresh initiative, of quick and varied flexibility of mind, and of thoroughgoing achievement. [Illustration: JOHN W. BEATTY. Director of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] The University of Pittsburgh, is new in name but has in reality existed for more than a century. The institution has, however, not found Pittsburgh conditions conducive to academical development. Its engineering department has, somewhat to the regret of the university authorities, been by far its most important feature. A strong effort is now being made to build it up into a university worthy of a great city. A new site has been purchased and an exceptionally interesting plan for the various buildings has been accepted. When completed these structures will describe a circle up and down a hillside looking out over Schenley Park, with an administration building modelled after the Parthenon as a crowning effect. The presence of all these educational institutions at the entrance of Schenley Park, with its 420 acres, situated within twenty minutes' ride by electric cars from the heart of the city and on the way to the chief residential sections of Greater Pittsburgh, creates a civic center with a condensed attractiveness and resourcefulness that is already definitely re-enforcing the public imagination. All this cluster of enlightened agencies, however, to the discerning eye points by contrast to the ultimate, close analysis of economic as well as moral conditions among the people in all the less-favored sections of the city and in all the satellite industrial towns. The conception of a direct community of interest between employer and workman, particularly if the workman is a leader in his craft, begins to be visible as in a few streaks of dawn. But the mass of the unintelligible Hungarians and Slavs must be reached by the more generous and democratic sense of responsibility on the part of employers and the more prosperous classes generally. The work of the next decade is to bring them on a really large scale into the circle of American citizenship and up to the essential standards of American home life. The touchstone of progress and success in this great enterprise lies first of all with the public schools. The public school system of Pittsburgh is in very many respects behind accepted standards. Its chief defects come out of the faulty system of administration. Every ward has its local school board with the power of levying taxes, erecting buildings, and appointing teachers. This means that in some wards there is a good quality of instruction and properly developed curriculum, while other wards fall far short. It happens from this condition of things that in the working-class wards there is little or no provision for manual training; and in general the points of greatest need are the most poorly supplied. Objectionable political methods on the part of the local boards are pretty clearly in evidence; and such tendencies are by no means absent from the central board. Signs of progress are, however, becoming apparent here and there throughout the school system. The Carnegie Technical Schools are having a powerful influence in this direction. In the South Side, under direct encouragement from this source, and with the co-operation of local manufacturers, an evening trade school has been opened. There have been experiments in the direction of medical inspection and school nursing. There is an active agitation among the teachers for a parental school. In general the whole problem of public school administration has been thrown open for debate by the appointment of a capable state commission to report upon the subject. It is thought that for one thing it will recommend the practical abolition of the power of the local boards, so that they become simply visiting committees. The high school in Pittsburgh is and always has been an important educational influence. In popular sentiment, it occupies a place somewhat analogous to that of the College of the City of New York. In order to make its service as general as possible the present director sends to the parents of all children graduating from the grammar school an interesting printed statement of the concrete objects and value of the high school. The pressure of the demands of industry as against the attraction of general studies is of course keenly felt. An evening high school with a definitely vocational trend has recently made an encouraging beginning. The Pennsylvania method of combining public subsidy with private initiative is followed in connection with the kindergartens. A private association has supervision of all the kindergartens in the public schools as well as of some carried on in private institutions. There are altogether eighty-one kindergartens in this system. It is felt that, at least in the early stages, this method of control brings better standards of teaching and assures such collateral work as visiting in the children's homes and conducting mothers' meetings. It is needless to say, however, that in the long run such a division of responsibility will be injurious in point of effective service and of a proper sense of responsibility in the public administrative officers. This sort of apprehension is all that qualifies in the least one's impression of the admirable work of the Pittsburgh Playground Association. Its activity began twelve years ago, and now,--with an off-shoot in Allegheny,--includes the administration of six well-equipped recreation parks, twenty-four vacation schools held in school buildings, and a number of small playgrounds. The center of the system is the site of an old arsenal, thirty acres in extent, in the midst of a great working class district. At every point in all this work, discriminating effort is made to achieve positive educational results as well as to bring healthful enjoyment to the largest possible number of persons. In this respect, as well as in the definite prospect of appropriations sufficient to provide every now neglected section of the city with an ample playground, Pittsburgh stands at the forefront in this most vital phase of educational and civic advance. [Illustration: JOSEPH BUFFINGTON. Judge United States Circuit Court and one of the first citizens of Pittsburgh.] Like Chicago and other typical American cities where men are deeply absorbed in business, women have contributed a particularly important share to public betterment work. The Civic Club of Allegheny County, in which women have for the most part been the active spirits, and various women's organizations, particularly the Twentieth Century Club and the Council of Jewish Women, have accomplished many telling results in this direction. The Civic Club has the direct management of two people's bath houses; but its main service consists not in work of administration but rather in initiating enterprises to meet new problems as they arise, and then setting them loose to develop permanent organizations on their own account. In this way the club started the playground association, a municipal hospital for contagious diseases, manual training in the public schools, a legal aid society, an open-air tuberculosis camp, and a child labor association, beside having an active share in the creation of the juvenile court and the securing of progressive tenement-house legislation. [Illustration: WILLIAM M. KENNEDY. President, Civic Club of Allegheny County.] In the field of charity and philanthropy Pittsburgh shows a very substantial degree of activity and earnest motive. Very much is needed, however, both in the way of more enlightened specific and local execution and of broader co-operation for economy and completeness in each type of social service. The staff of the Pittsburgh Survey has had the privilege of submitting to many institutions and agencies the accredited results of recent experience in other cities and countries. Such suggestions have been cordially received and in some instances at once acted upon. The Pittsburgh Associated Charities, which has been organized within the year, has secured the support of nearly every phase of charitable endeavor in the city. It represents the immediate advantage which Pittsburgh, under the spur of organizations like the Civic Club, has taken of the Survey's presentation of the practical conclusions of scientific charity. The Associated Charities is so new that nothing can be said about results in the ordinary sense; but in contrast to the confusion which existed until a year ago, its clear cogent platform covering both remedies and reforms, its straight appeal to the practical men, its strong representative board, and its fit and well convinced executive officer, are achievements of the first order. [Illustration: D. P. BLACK. President Real Estate Trust Company, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] [Illustration: HENRY L. KREUSLER. (Building Construction), Member Civic Improvement Commission.] The development of the great filtration project has naturally stimulated other movements for the improvement of the public health. In this direction the municipal health department is a broadly and consistently helpful influence. The fight against tuberculosis is carried on effectively by both public and private agencies. The special commission of experts appointed by the mayor and aided financially by the Sage Foundation for tracing causes of typhoid fever aside from the water supply, will render a most important service to Pittsburgh as well as to the whole country. The successful record of the filtration plant in greatly reducing the amount of typhoid in the city, gives added point to this scientific effort to rid out the last lurking places of infection. In general, however, it must be said that the self-forgetful abandon with which many medical men in other American cities are bringing their priceless knowledge to bear upon public unsanitary conditions and unhygienic ways of life,--a type of effort which both in motive and result may almost be taken as the test of a city's progressive civilization,--has hardly as yet reached Pittsburgh. The exceptions,--notable ones,--are of the sort that prove the rule. [Illustration: CHARLES F. WELLER. Secretary of the new Associated Charities, Pittsburgh; member Pittsburgh Civic Improvement Commission; former secretary Washington Associated Charities and President's Homes Commission.] The co-ordination of charitable effort, both in its different kinds and in its different localities, is a step which needs now to be followed by the federation of agencies for social upbuilding. The playgrounds which are fast becoming the headquarters of a kind of neighborhood guild, will furnish a substantial part of the material for this comprehensive social formation. In such enterprise, organized local citizenship, especially as seen in the boards of trade, will undoubtedly afford valuable re-enforcement to the distinctively philanthropic motive. The settlement houses of which there are several, might naturally take the lead. Such a federation would ensure to each local agency information about the results of experience at every other; it would bring the momentum of concrete local knowledge to bear upon the public school system and other parts of the public administration; it would draw into the work of constructive local betterment many resourceful new individuals and new agencies, thus spreading throughout the city the new point of view in citizenship; it would bring forward from the congested sections of the city those rear detachments of citizenship without which municipal reform must continue to be shallow and casual. In the development and extension of local social organization lies much of the promise of widespread growth of public spirit in Pittsburgh. The people have a distinct capacity for the invaluable village type of loyalty. This can in due time with expanding experience be made into the most enduring type of city loyalty,--that based on neighborly co-operation gradually extended and writ large but carrying with it always that sense of reality, that nearness to the soil, in which it began. [Illustration: FRANCIS J. TORRANCE. President Pennsylvania Board of Public Charities.] Kingsley House was founded in 1894 by Rev. George Hodges, now dean of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass., but for twelve years a strong influence for realistic Christianity in Pittsburgh. It has grown to be an important center for progressive social service, and from its commanding position on a hill looking over the business section of the city it exercises an influence for social morality far beyond its immediate constituency. Its regularly organized work is gathered up into two large composite clubs, one having a membership of 600 boys and young men, the other about as many girls and young women. An average of half the total membership appears at the house daily for gymnastic training, games, industrial classes, discussions, music, etc. The tenement problem and the whole hygienic aspect of life among working people receive penetrating and persistent attention, and the importance of the service of the house in this direction is recognized throughout the city. Closely involved with such a campaign is the large country holiday work of this settlement, whereby some 4,000 persons are each summer provided for at a specially built and finely equipped vacation house. [Illustration: REV. GEORGE HODGES. Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass.; founder of Kingsley House, Pittsburgh.] The Columbian School and Settlement which is farther up in the "Hill District," is supported by public-spirited Jewish citizens. The usual variety of clubs and classes is provided, and their opportunities are received with even more than the usual eagerness by the children of recent Russian immigrants. Much attention is given to education in hygiene by means of a gymnasium, baths, and instructive district nursing, as well as through securing the enforcement of sanitary laws. This settlement has given special attention to the very useful function of serving as pacemaker to the public schools, in the matter of evening industrial schools, recreative centers and vacation schools. [Illustration: WILLIAM H. MATTHEWS. Head worker, Kingsley House, Pittsburgh; a forceful leader in the housing campaign, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] The Soho Baths Settlement adjoins a new bath house just erected by the Civic Club, and designs to supplement its service through personal influence in the homes of the neighborhood. The Woods Run House in Allegheny has taken a new start since separating its relief work from its work of neighborhood organization. Covode House, also in Allegheny, is substantially the "industrial betterment" phase of the Heinz pickle factory. The churches of Pittsburgh, which, now with a few exceptions seem to regard as a secular intrusion the introduction of broad civic interests into their counsels, and thereby often appear shamefully indifferent in matters of public morality, could be led to take part in a campaign for a better home and neighborhood life, and would soon learn practically the close bearing of all human facts upon character and spirit. Those ministers who preside over the costly and surprisingly numerous stone edifices throughout the East End, would thus be able to meet their most serious problem, that of bringing up young people with some practical sense of their responsibilities to the less favored. The downtown ministers, who are deep in gloom as to the future of their own parishes if not of the church in general, would begin to see how to touch and to serve the indifferent newcomers, and would make an effective claim on the suburban churches for assistance. The churches of Pittsburgh constitute an exceptionally important possibility in the direction of social reconstruction. Our canvass of the Protestant churches showed that a large proportion of them at least recognize the need of new forms of helpfulness and are making some effort to meet it. A large number of pastors are already organizing their congregations for a somewhat broader social service. The Catholic churches are under the care of a noble-minded bishop who is doing his utmost to make the existing system of the church provide for its vast inarticulate constituency. Many of the immigrant priests are sincere and sagacious men. The more progressive Jewish congregations do their full share in sustaining and advancing the public moral standards of the city and in promoting sound philanthropy. Yet among all the costly ecclesiastical structures,--the city is said to have $17,000,000 invested in church buildings,--there are only three or four which have any adequate equipment for the promotion of human service or friendly association. The responsibility of the rich congregations for re-enforcing the poorer ones in their struggle against adverse conditions is scarcely recognized. The problem is as in other cities. In the most crowded sections, the normal constituency of the Protestant churches has been swept away by the immigrant tide. In somewhat better conditioned neighborhoods, families have moved away and the homeless, neighborless lodger has taken their place. That is, the fundamental conditions which have created and directed the churches have disappeared; and only a broadly organized, well financed campaign can provide the fresh force, equipment, intelligence, which are indispensable to the revolutionized situation. [Illustration: ADDIE S. WEIHL. Head worker, Columbian Settlement, Pittsburgh.] The suburban churches side-step the present crisis. They are sincere but other-worldly. One minister who is genuinely interested in foreign missions feels it much on his conscience to make his people care less about the Orient and more about the East End. A few preachers deal with a present-day, near-home kingdom of God. Some presented the results of the Survey to their people; more entered into solemn account of stock at the time of the bribery arrests. The following of the churches is large, devout, loyal; but, on the whole, the church is a hospitable garrison to defend the faith, not a conquering army of righteousness. [Illustration: JULIAN KENNEDY. Consulting engineer, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] Religion as being one-half the ingenuity and adventure of diversified personal service in every kind of neighborly and civic fellowship; the truth which Dr. Parkhurst long ago voiced, that the congregation is not the minister's field but his force,--this is what has produced Pittsburgh's small but heroic group of present civic leaders. A widespread contagion of it is what Pittsburgh needs more than anything else. In this the city must find its chief resource for bringing about and continuing a better order. The response of the churches to the sickening series of breaches of trust, to bribe giving and bribe-taking, to the overwork that means debauchery, to the mill-owners' Sabbath-breaking that breaks the mill-worker's body and soul,--must be a bold relaxing from tradition and letting their dynamic go free. The outcome would be a new synthesis which would overcome the weakness and shame of sectarianism, and give a broad, strong front to the city's renascent moral life. [Illustration: JOSEPH W. MARSH. Vice-president and general manager, Standard Underground Cable Company, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] Along with the detailed, patient, comprehensive work that is needed to build up a moralized democracy, the industrial and commercial leaders of the community, including those who are the responsible representatives of absentee capitalists and landlords, must rise to a far more generous, not to say discerning, conception of their opportunity. Big men of a generation ago said, "After us the deluge,"--they cut the forests off the Alleghenies, and Pittsburgh literally suffers the curse in destructive floods once or twice every year. The way of life in the local communities about many of the great steel plants is infallibly preparing for the near future a worse form of deluge in a mass of unfit, under-vitalized, unproductive citizenship. It is but fair to say that the really big men of to-day in Pittsburgh are passing beyond the attitude of indifference to the human problem that confronts the captain of the industrial army. Indeed, the past few years have brought about a distinctly receptive point of view. The lesson to be learned and aggressively applied during the coming decade is that a great city's industrial supremacy, no less than its moral well-being, depends largely upon the proper provisioning and sheltering of the industrial rank and file, along with training in capacity for citizenship and for associated self-help. [Illustration: H. J. HEINZ. President H. J. Heinz Company, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] There have been stirring instances in the development of city life in this and other countries where a city deeply engaged in laying its material foundations, and suddenly finding itself not up to its own standard in other vital respects, has, by throwing a due share of its accumulated energy and resource into the new channels, been able to overleap intermediate stages which had been toilsomely worked out elsewhere. Such a magical achievement for the refinements of life has been made once in Pittsburgh through the surpassing initiative of a single citizen. It now needs to be repeated and outdone by the main action of the body of responsible citizens, carrying with them representatives of every grade and type of the people, in the united, elated march of a great civic and human welfare movement. Strange as it may sound, this is the sort of social phenomenon that American city life is next going to present; and it may be that Pittsburgh will lead the way. [Illustration: J. W. KINNEAR. Attorney-at-Law, Member Pittsburgh Civic Improvement Commission.] There are elemental changes coming in the life of Pittsburgh. The new immigrants will within a short generation be rising into social and political power, and their standards will in large part fix the moral and even the economic prospects of the city. The special resources of western Pennsylvania in raw material will necessarily grow less, and its need of a more developed labor force become insistent. In any case immigration cannot indefinitely recruit the labor ranks; Pittsburgh must learn to pay as it goes in terms of men as of money. The ninety per cent pure iron which Mr. Carnegie found in the waste of his competitor and secured by a long contract, is the analogue of what Pittsburgh must begin to discover in the native capacity of the children of its crude toilers. The protective tariff which for the past two decades has been like an evil divinity to intensify the haste to be rich, and to confuse and baffle all local public issues, is on an uncertain footing as never before. Already there are new American steel centers which will dispute for the market supremacy. Every one of these things will compel a moral reckoning, will constrain the city to the saving and enhancing of individual and collective human power. The historic sense newly awakened by the recent sesquicentennial celebration of the origin of the town; the downright, ingenuous pride of the people in its unexampled achievements; the inquiring attitude of an ever increasing number of citizens; their inner assurance that the city will match its prosperity with civic well-being; a beginning on the part of the moral reserve force of the city, on the one hand, and its practical organizing power, on the other, to seek a new common outlet; these provide momentum, amid many counter-currents, for an ample hope. It is of special significance that, for the first time in this country, Pittsburgh secures the advantage of several carefully devised and closely related undertakings in the new science and art of social upbuilding. The welcome extended to the staff of the Survey by leading citizens at the beginning, and their willingness from first to last to listen to its hard sayings, have given the Survey much of its essential driving power. The joint meeting in Pittsburgh of the National Municipal League and the American Civic Association, resulting in a happy co-ordination of higher methods and higher aims of city administration, especially in the session devoted to the Survey,--distinctly helped strengthen and confirm the beginnings of that new public consciousness which includes the greatness both of the city's needs and of its opportunity. The civic exhibit which went with this national gathering, displayed under perfect conditions in the Carnegie Gallery, and setting forth as its chief feature the results of the Survey in the graphic, instantaneous, inescapable language of the workshop, established its lessons in the minds and imaginations of many thousands of those who in every rank go to make up Pittsburgh's industrial forces. And now the appointment by Mayor Guthrie of a strong, representative civic commission, with Mr. English as chairman, and such exceptionably capable and responsible men as are summoned in a great public emergency, to lead committees on public hygiene, housing problems, rapid transit, municipal efficiency, industrial casualties and overstrain, education, police courts, charitable institutions, neighborhood and district improvement agencies, and city planning,--can hardly be construed otherwise than as the final precipitant of a new epoch of masterful humanism in the evolution of America's distinctive industrial metropolis. [Illustration: A. J. KELLEY, JR. President Commonwealth Real Estate Trust Company, Member Civic Improvement Commission.] [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. ITALIAN LEADER.] [Illustration: THE ALLEGHENY RIVER VALLEY.] CIVIC IMPROVEMENT POSSIBILITIES OF PITTSBURGH CHARLES MULFORD ROBINSON AUTHOR OF MODERN CIVIC ART, ETC. In studying the civic improvement possibilities of Pittsburgh, one is impressed by a curious mingling of antagonistic conditions. A wonderful natural picturesqueness is contrasted with the utmost industrial defilement, smoke and grime and refuse pervading one of the finest city sites in the world. Similarly great wealth and great squalor are side by side. Nation-wide business is done on very narrow streets. A royal munificence in public benefaction goes with a niggardliness that as yet denies to many children a decent playspace. Immense private houses, with the amplest grounds to be found perhaps in any great city, abut on meanly proportioned streets. One is impressed first by the hugeness of the city and then by its lack of coherence. It has been built up as an aggregation of integers, mighty, resourceful, pushing; but lacking as yet in unity. That power, which is the keynote of the city, is not civic. It is not communal power but a dynamic individualism. But still steep hillsides close with magnificent self-assertion the vistas of business streets, still the mighty rivers, polluted with refuse though they be, flow in great streams to meet at the "Point"; still from heights there are views of surpassing interest; and in the rolling country that encompasses the city with ravine and wooded slope, there still remain gentle loveliness and restfulness in impressive contrast with the throbbing industry of the town. Thus, in spite of itself, picturesqueness such as even Edinburgh, the "queen city of Europe," might envy is thrust upon Pittsburgh, and there is a surrounding beauty that Florence might covet. [Illustration: NATURAL BEAUTY vs. INDUSTRIAL ODDS.] In the midst of this strange mingling of opposites, of great opportunities and fearful handicaps, of vast needs and vast resources there appears the gradual stirring of a new ideal. A civic consciousness is awaking and that social conscience which has heretofore operated in individuals merely is becoming popularly active. At this wonderfully interesting juncture, the serious study of civic improvement in Pittsburgh is to be made. What Pittsburgh wants, what she has done and dreamed, what she must do, as a community, for her improvement,--these are the questions for the citizens of Greater Pittsburgh if "greater" is to have all its true significance. In discussing them let us follow these most obvious divisions of the subject: First, the congested business district of Pittsburgh proper, that is, the peninsula: its needs and its possibilities. Second, the slum district,--a band of varying width that, regardless of intervening rivers, surrounds the business section. Third, the manufacturing area, very widely extended and therefore affecting the whole city. Fourth, the homes of wealth, typified by the East End, and the educational and cultural center that is building there. Fifth, the suburban district. Sixth, the park requirements of the Greater City. Seventh, the community as a whole. [Illustration: WHERE THE CARS LOOP.] I. The business district of Pittsburgh is as restricted as that of an old world city bound in by compressing fortifications. But its boundaries are not to be readily moved like the works of men. They are the broad rivers and the obstructing hill. The district extending from the "Point," where the rivers join, to the "Hump," is approximately an equilateral triangle, of which the sides are less than half a mile in length. Into this small area is crowded the business of an enormous manufacturing center. Here the railroads and boats bring their passengers; here the trolley roads of the whole district converge; here reach the bridges with their continual traffic. The condition is similar to that of Manhattan, except that in Pittsburgh the space in proportion to the business is even smaller. [Illustration: SMITHFIELD STREET FROM FOURTH AVENUE.] The pressure in such a restricted area is of a double character. There is a pressure for traffic room, and an equally insistent pressure for building sites. One demand is as legitimate as the other. Therefore, although the streets are too narrow, relief must be sought rather by increasing their carrying efficiency than by changing their dimensions or adding to their number. To accomplish this three plans have been under consideration. One, and an obvious one, is to increase the area of the business district by leveling the low hill (the "Hump") that bounds it on the east. This plan seems now to have been abandoned. It would involve great cost, and it would not certainly better conditions in the most crowded area. Furthermore, business has about climbed to the top of the hill already. [Illustration: SESQUI-CENTENNIAL PARADE.] The other plans have to do with the trolley cars that come here from all sections of the city. As most of the cars do not pass through the district, but go out as they came in, there are numberless "loops", each of the various lines making a turn around two or three blocks, with the result that loop overlaps loop, and the cars interfere with one another as well as with general traffic. One plan would put many of the cars underground, in a subway, in the business district; the other, while permitting them to traverse the district, would carry them on into Allegheny to make their loops. It were better, however, that there should be no loops at all; that the cars should not "go out as they came in." By the substitution of long through lines for the loops which are only a survival of other times and conditions, all the advantages would be gained with none of the drawbacks of transferring the loops across the river. In the plans for a downtown subway loop, it is proposed that all the stations be located on private property, so putting no additional burden on the streets, and furthermore that the loop be open to the cars of all companies. This would give much relief; and as subways have proved too successful in other cities to be regarded any longer as experimental, it seems that one here, properly constructed and authorized with equal regard for financial and municipal interests, is a civic improvement necessary for Pittsburgh's business district. [Illustration: ONE OF THE INCLINES WHICH SCALE THE PITTSBURGH HILLS.] As it would take some years to construct the subway; and as the relief to the streets afforded by straightening out the surface car routes might be overbalanced by a rapid increase in the number of cars, it is necessary to consider other immediate measures for traffic relief. A rounding of curb corners even at alleys, and the substitution of a well laid grooved rail for the present T-rail may be here suggested. With the grooved rail there is less temptation for teamsters to use the car tracks, the tracks can be turned out more readily and the whole width of roadway is made available, instead of being divided as now into longitudinal sections. Costly as is the widening of streets, or the opening of new ones, such heroic measures are already being adopted for short distances in the peninsular district. For instance, the city is completing the widening of Sixth street, from Grant to Forbes, an improvement tending to facilitate a further eastward march of business. Of even more importance is the discussed and much needed provision of a better outlet for Grant boulevard. This comparatively new boulevard was designed to afford pleasant access to the East End on a thoroughfare free of car tracks, for those who drive or who ride in motor cars. But the boulevard itself can now be approached from the business district only by Seventh street, which is crowded with freight traffic, or by an ill paved narrow alley. The plan is to widen and repave the alley and thus carry the boulevard to Sixth street, which is slightly less crowded. Another interesting proposal is to give the boulevard, by means of a curving bridge over the Pennsylvania tracks, direct access to the Union Station, which can now be reached only by a detour. These may be called local improvements, but they have a relation to the whole district, and are likely to be worth their considerable cost. [Illustration: _The Industry Printing Company_ NIGHT SCENE IN DOWNTOWN PITTSBURGH.] [Illustration: THE "POINT" OF PITTSBURGH AS IT STANDS TO-DAY.] A new retail shopping district is building up in the East End, and by the erection of great warehouses to the north along Penn avenue, and across the river on the South Side, a great part of the heavy wholesale trade has been removed from the "Point." Nevertheless it is clear that the little triangle, which is the business heart of Pittsburgh, will remain crowded; and that with all these measures taken, the normal growth of a few busy years will produce a congestion demanding some radical measure of relief. Ultimately this might take the form of an elevated structure, or a second street-story for the tapering western end of the plat. The area thus to be raised, and so given double capacity, is not very large, and the merest glance at the topography shows that the bridge near the "Point", which strikes Pittsburgh proper well above the street grade, is about on a level with the top of the "Hump". To build a second story over the intervening streets, reserving the lower story for heavy, slow moving traffic, giving to the abutting buildings two street floors--and thereby increasing their rent productiveness, would present no insurmountable difficulties either from the engineering or the financial point of view. It is a long look ahead, and perhaps not entirely desirable; but it would be a typically Pittsburghian thing to do. [Illustration: A TRIANGLE WHICH COULD BE MADE AN APPROACH TO THE "POINT".] [Illustration: THE HAMBURG WATER FRONT. A suggestion for Pittsburgh.] In the limited space available, there can be no consideration of the commercial and industrial aspects of the waterfront; nor can there be a discussion of the project for a deep waterway from Pittsburgh to New Orleans on the one hand, and from Pittsburgh to the Great Lakes and, via the barge canal, to New York on the other. These projects are mentioned only to emphasize the city's need for safeguarding and developing in some useful way every foot of river frontage that it possesses. They would justify a careful and elaborate study of this problem, even were the present river traffic less important than it is, and were the need of breathing spots less urgent. [Illustration: THE BANK OF THE ELBE, DRESDEN, SHOWING PROMENADE, STREET AND SHIPPING.] As regards the traffic, slips might with advantage be substituted for the present sloping bank and floating docks. One commission is studying this subject, and another the problem of floods. The reports of these commissions may be awaited with confidence that their recommendations will mean improvement. Sociologically and aesthetically, the gains will be indirect. As to breathing spaces, however, these gains would be direct, and the step to be taken is yet more obvious. A great deal of river frontage,--as along the Allegheny, under the elevated tracks,--is not now utilized. If would be nothing derogatory to the commercial greatness of Pittsburgh to turn this space into a park. Nobody thought London commercially decadent when the Thames embankment was built. Unused, waste space, in fact, reflects more seriously upon a city's business enterprise than does the humanitarian or aesthetic use of it; and there is no better place for a park designed as a breathing space for shut-in workers, than a river bank with its inevitable current of air. The crowding of Pittsburgh's business district has resulted in exceedingly high land values. In the whole downtown section no open space, save the plaza before the Union Station, has been preserved for the use of the people. Public buildings have been constructed flush with the walk, and the streets are cramped and narrow. No sumptuous effect is offered anywhere. One of the buildings, however, the county court house, is the best work of H. H. Richardson. It stands on the "Hump," at the eastern edge of the business district, overlooking to the north a tract that is not yet improved. Two other buildings, the city hall and post office, are so out of date that new structures must soon take their places. Thus the opportunity has offered for a civic center group, and there are citizens who have dared to dream and plan. Unfortunately, however, the post office site has now been chosen at a place where it cannot be brought into a civic center scheme. When the choice was pending, the architects, in whose hands the matter mainly rested, were not ready with a sufficiently definite plan. This failure has spurred them on, and they will not be caught napping again. A committee of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Institute of Architects has now worked out a civic center plan that is not merely spectacular, but which aims in practical ways to provide sufficiently wide, through avenues for the transportation lines to the business district. The plan will be best understood from the accompanying diagram. [Illustration: THE SITE OF THE PROPOSED CIVIC CENTER. The tower of the court house is to the left of the Frick Building.] [Illustration: SKETCH OF CIVIC CENTER AS PROPOSED BY PITTSBURGH ARCHITECTS.] [Illustration: PLAN OF PROPOSED CIVIC CENTER.] It would substitute for a mean and shabby portion of the city an ensemble beautiful and effective, and it would bring a large open space to the very edge of a poor tenement section. Owing to the local topography, the proximity of the improvement would not change the character of a large portion of that section; but it would bring civic art almost to the doors of the residents of the neighborhood. My judgment is that the plan does not go far enough. I shall reserve my supplementary suggestion, however, for more appropriate consideration at another point in this paper. One more comment might be made upon the aesthetic possibilities of the business section before we pass to the tenement district. It is the universal experience of towns that the first streets parallel the water courses. As the business portion of Pittsburgh is located on that tapering point of land where the rivers draw together at an acute angle, it follows that streets must meet at similar angles, and the cross streets multiply them. Very often at these intersections, small triangles are formed, which might have been preserved as open spaces at slight expense before the demand for building room became so great. Although that opportunity has passed, the sharp building lot corners, with the conspicuousness given by a directly approaching street, still offer to architects an opportunity that is rare in American cities. Little advantage is taken of this opportunity. The Wabash Station is one illustration of how much more interesting from an architectural standpoint business Pittsburgh may some day be made. [Illustration: ONE OF THE MANY PITTSBURGH TRIANGLES WHICH WOULD LEND THEMSELVES TO ARCHITECTURAL TREATMENT.] [Illustration: PITTSBURGH FROM THE SOUTH SIDE--A CITY OF CONTRASTS.] [Illustration: SECOND AVENUE.] II. Completely surrounding the business district of Pittsburgh, in a belt of varying width that disregards the intercepting river, is a section of mean streets, of crowded housing conditions, and if not of genuine poverty, at least of the discomforts which poverty elsewhere brings. This juxtaposition is a familiar phenomenon in urban development, for it is based on the social necessity that the least paid wage earners live within walking distance of their work; on the willingness, and even desire, of the well-to-do to live at a distance from the noise and smoke of business sections; and on the attraction which the constant stimulus of "city" life exerts on those who have few other sources of entertainment. That the river sides do not relieve and break up this belt, is due in part to the local topography. Across the Allegheny, the land is low and subject to flood; across the Monongahela, there is only a narrow strip between the river and the highlands that, rising steeply, offer sites with purer air and wider outlook but that must be reached by riding. Neither river is itself attractive as an outlook for residences. The civic improvement needs of this poorer and crowded district may be grouped under five general heads. These are: (a) municipal,--as the matter of street improvement; (b) housing,--with which this discussion does not attempt to deal; (c) playspace and opportunity for children; (d) park provision,--which may best be considered in connection with the similar needs of the whole community; and (e) bathing facilities,--which here can be no more than mentioned. (a) Municipal. The primary municipal need, in so far at least as the region adjacent to the Allegheny is concerned, is flood prevention. That is a city matter plus a good deal else, which will be considered elsewhere in this issue. The street needs are many and pressing. Conditions in this matter are absolutely disgraceful. Narrow streets are the rule in old Pittsburgh, and smooth pavements cannot be expected upon steep streets. But with all possible allowance for these facts, there is much that might be undone. The streets are not all steep. Steep streets can be kept clean,--more easily, indeed, than others. Cobblestone pavements can be banished. [Illustration: AN ITALIAN COURT IN THE HILL DISTRICT.] Well laid brick pavements, or asphalt, or smooth wood blocks where practicable,--and all frequently flushed, are a necessity for this region. Cleanliness, too, should be the rule in the streets and alleys of the poorer sections; and it is here especially that the standard of municipal administration in Pittsburgh needs raising. Only within the past year has the public removal of rubbish been adopted as a municipal function. It may be profitably reflected that in no other area of the Pittsburgh District would an equal amount of improvement affect so many residents. With original paving costs a general tax, with sanitation in this section a matter of prime importance outside the locality itself, and with the borrowing capacity of the city very large, there ought to be a pretty general reconstruction of the street surface of this district on modern lines. Such improvement ought not to be difficult and, incidentally, should appeal to the pride of Pittsburgh. The stranger, arriving at any of the railroad stations, finds little to admire in the business district. And when he leaves that, in whatsoever direction he goes,--whether to the fashionable East End, to the Carnegie Institute, to any of the parks, to the pleasant old-fashioned homes in Allegheny, or to the heights beyond the Monongahela, he must pass through this dreary belt of municipal neglect. It is here that unfavorable first impressions become fixed. These regions give a bad character to the whole city. The necessity for playgrounds is pressing, so pressing that an earnest, self-sacrificing effort has been made to meet it. The work of the modern playground gives benefit in three directions: physical, social and educational. This is recognized by the Pittsburgh Playground Association, an incorporated body which receives appropriations from the municipality, supplements these with private donations, and with the volunteer work of individuals and clubs. In recognition of the threefold aspect of what is sweepingly called the "playground" movement, the association conducts "recreation parks" and vacation schools, as well as mere playgrounds. It holds the theory that "there should be three kinds of recreation centers: first, the school-yard for small children who cannot go more than a few squares from home; then the larger playground with apparatus and facilities for healthy play for all the boys and girls of a neighborhood; third, the athletic field, where teams may meet and where the interest of the community may center." It is clear from this that the lack of play facilities arises from insufficient material provision rather than from inadequate ideals. These provisions are gradually increasing but they have far to go before they will be complete. Thirty square feet of playground space for each child is the minimum provision recommended in Washington and London, and in a bill lately introduced in the Massachusetts Legislature. If the allowance seems too liberal, translate the "thirty square feet" into six feet by five,--the size of a desk! Rich Pittsburgh falls woefully short of this figure. Her need is for more, and more adequately fitted, playgrounds. The poorer districts need them most and the first provision should be made there. This is said with due regard to the limitation of a playground's scope. The sore need for parks located more conveniently to the immense working population, than the present parks of Pittsburgh are, and developed more appropriately to their needs, has not been confused with the community's need for children's play-spaces and recreation grounds. The latter is a separate, urgent and co-existent want, concerned, as is park provision, with the very structure of the city, involving similarly its social welfare, and making a strong appeal in the name of the children. Such a survey of available sites (without buildings or with buildings of little value) as that undertaken by the playground association the past summer should be made the basis for the reservation of sites in congested neighborhoods and outlying districts. III. The manufacturing area will not detain us long. It is no one region. Industry is evident everywhere. Pittsburgh is held inescapably beneath its thraldom. Two matters in particular present themselves in noting the relation of the manufacturing plants to the improvement of the city. One deals with their own surroundings and grounds; the other is the smoke. With a few encouraging exceptions, there has been little attempt to beautify factory surroundings. The exceptions prove what can be done, but it should be recollected that in the Pittsburgh District the handicaps to such ameliorations are particularly great. The ground is mostly clay and shale; smoke and ore dust are very trying to vegetation under the most favorable conditions, work is done at tremendous pressure, the products are heavy, and as a rule the manufacturing plots are no larger than necessary, for actual manufacture, storage, and shipping. Yet it would seem that the Chamber of Commerce might properly add to its committees one that would foster this kind of improvement. As to the smoke, Pittsburgh's most famous because most obvious drawback, the subject has in the last two years been tackled bravely by the Chamber of Commerce. Its campaign resulted in the appointment of a chief smoke inspector and three deputies, attached, significantly, to the Bureau of Health. Large powers are given to these inspectors. The undue emission of smoke is declared a "public nuisance" for which "the owner, agent, lessee or occupant" of the building, and the "general manager and superintendent, or firemen" are held accountable. In support of the ordinance, two hundred business men went in a body to the council's chamber, vigorously resisting the attacks made upon it. [Illustration: RODELPH SHALOM: JEWISH SYNAGOG.] [Illustration: SIXTH UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.] IV. The East End I can best discuss under three heads: a. The residential section. b. The educational and cultural center, which is building at its portal. c. The approach from the business section. [Illustration: CALVARY CHURCH. Designed by Cram.] As a section of beautiful homes, the East End is at once disappointing and satisfying. If there is the usual conglomeration of architectural styles and if occasional atrocities in domestic construction and landscape design for private grounds are to be found here as in other cities,--and they certainly are,--yet the general average of the domestic architecture and of the garden, or lawn planting, is unusually high. This can be asserted without regard to the money expended,--since good taste is happily not dependent on high cost. The expenditure for both houses and grounds is certainly well above the average, but this only increases the danger. It is to the credit of Pittsburgh's architects and gardeners, and to that of the well-to-do citizens who are so likely to demand their own way in the creation of their homes, that the results are so excellent. Significant in this respect is the fact that several of the churches are of great merit; and if it be said that the irregularity of topography readily lends itself to unusual and charming effects in house location and lawn development, there should be recollection of the balancing handicaps of poor soil and grimy air. [Illustration: EMORY METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.] But if private work is, as a whole, of a high order, the municipal work with the exception of some fine schools is mean, unimaginative and weak. Here surely in street work was the place for boldness, splendor, and large conception. Here liberal outlay was justifiable and would probably have been popular; here, in this comparatively new territory, obviously to be the home of the well-to-do of Pittsburgh, there was a chance to plan for the city beautiful, to design in accordance with modern artistic principles. Think of what ought to be here,--the broad avenues, with wide strips of parking at side or center; the well-built roads; the interesting vistas; the occasional bridle paths; the rapid transit facilities, in a reserved right of way partially planted out, where cars could make quick time without peril to other traffic; the round points at important intersections of avenues; and all the other beauties and conveniences known to the modern art of city building. But see what we actually find! The narrow streets persist. The heavy cars go rattling and roaring along the middle of the road on protruding and dangerous T-rails, the tracks taking a good half of the total space. The strip of parking between walk and curb, if there be any, is hopelessly narrow. Gaunt telegraph poles, burdened with a mesh of wires, stand where the trees should be. Here and there billboards and lettered fences flaunt commercialism and burlesque art in the face of beautiful homes and of the Carnegie Institute itself. Of course, there are exceptions. There are some short streets and semi-private ways that are good. But the general impression of Pittsburgh's East End has been described. If it be not too late, if the rich of Pittsburgh are willing to contemplate a generous expenditure for the better setting of their homes, they should secure a plan for the recasting on noble and comprehensive lines of the whole section. [Illustration: ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL. (Roman Catholic).] [Illustration: CHURCH OF THE ASCENSION.] Because a few such men, who command the means to make their ideas effective, have had public spirit, generous impulses and broad ideals, a very interesting educational and cultural center is developing at the portal of the East End. It is one of the few examples in this country of consciously directed growth, though it should be added that it has its limitations in the fact that as yet that growth has not had professional direction, and seems still vague and uncertain as to the general scheme. Take, for descriptive purposes, the Carnegie Institute as the center of the scheme. We find directly west of it the entrance,--yet to be formally developed,--of Schenley Park. On the edge of the park and still back of the institute, the great group of Technical schools is building. On the other, or north side of the institute, is a valuable tract as yet vacant. A bit to the east of this, and a couple of blocks north of the institute, is the new cathedral, with no adequate setting and at an unfortunate angle with the institute, but inevitably a unit of the general scheme. In the same neighborhood the new high school is to rise. On the other, or west side, of the vacant property is the Schenley Hotel in spacious grounds; further north is the War Memorial Building and across from it are the sites of the University and Athletic clubs. Then comes the new property of the University of Pittsburgh, which is built with ampleness of design. Back of all, reaching over a hill that will frame the picture in this direction, lies the Schenley Farms property,--a large tract, held at high prices for expensive development, and capable of a picturesque and beautiful treatment,--if only that costly, commonplace checkerboard development can be foregone, which consists of cutting straight streets into the hills, at vast expense, to the destruction of what is picturesque, and at the sacrifice of building area. This tract, owing to its elevation, is so conspicuous a feature that its proper treatment is essential to the artistic success of the whole scheme. The architects, who, at the exhibit of 1907, displayed a plan for a civic center, put forward also a plan for a rearrangement of the streets in this region, for a widening of public spaces, and a tying together of the various separated units. [Illustration: CHRIST METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.] There is need only to add that the site of this center is strategic from the civic improvement standpoint. It not only lies at the portal of the East End, but on the west and north the highways to the business portion, including Grant boulevard, make it a focal point. There may be criticism of its choice as an educational center, especially for the Technical Schools, on the ground that it is far from the population to whom the proffered facilities would be most helpful. But it is approximately at the Pittsburgh District's geographical center, and there is convergence of street car lines to within a quarter-mile's park walk. The city itself gave the site. [Illustration: CARNEGIE INSTITUTE. Library to Right.] [Illustration: CARNEGIE TECHNICAL SCHOOL.] [Illustration: PHIPPS CONSERVATORIES IN SCHENLEY PARK.] In speaking of the civic center scheme for the business district, earlier in this article, I held that it should be supplemented by a larger one. This larger plan would provide a fitting approach to the East End, and could be made to join the two great improvement projects. Owing to the interruption offered by Herron Hill, the usual approaches now to the East End are by Forbes street or Fifth avenue,--two mean and crowded thoroughfares, a block apart, that parallel the Monongahela and carry street car traffic by the shortest route to the Carnegie Institute region and the section beyond; by Wylie and Centre avenues (half over the hills), or in a roundabout way, by Liberty street or Penn avenue,--again relatively narrow and crowded thoroughfares, and for the most part meanly built up; or, finally, by Grant boulevard. The latter, beginning near the Union Station and cut out of a hill at much expense, was an attempt to provide a pleasant approach. Like the drives and viaducts serving the outer park reservations, it shows imagination and engineering skill. It is indirect, however, is too narrow to carry the bulk of the vehicle traffic, and with its cuttings, vacant property, sunny stretches and aggressive billboards, it is not yet inviting but it could be made attractive by terracing and parking. The need, however, aesthetically and practically is for an approach that shall be better than any of these. Forbes street and Fifth avenue run east from the jail and court house in perfectly straight lines. They are at approximately even grades for a mile, separated from each other by only a short block. At Seneca street the grade changes, and from there on any joint improvement would involve a viaduct or other device, until the streets grow parallel, and close together again for the final half mile to Schenley Park. Suppose the two streets thrown together in one broad and splendid way, from the jail straight eastward for the first mile. None of the property here is expensively built up; most of it is exceedingly poor and shabby. There are, for the whole distance, the two streets and an alley, a total width for the whole distance of probably at least 140 feet that is now public property. At short intervals there are cross streets, to the number of about a dozen; these also are public property. And there is a school in the area to be used. Thus, altogether, the municipality already owns, one may confidently say, more than half of the land that would be required. The only question is concerning its wisest utilization. It may be admitted that to buy the intervening private plats, unifying the public property and making it available for a single scheme, would involve large cost. But there would be much on the other side of the ledger. Think of the noble thoroughfare, with its special lanes for high speeding surface cars, its quadruple roadways, one for fast moving and one for slow moving vehicles in each direction, its lines of trees and shaded walks; think of its convenience, its directness, its capacity, its spectacular sufficiency; think of the increase in the value of the abutting property. Under the Pennsylvania Law of Excess Condemnation part at least of this value would accrue to the city, as in the case of the great London improvements. Even in the matter of absolute (initial) outlay, the expenditure would probably not be greater than for the subway now proposed, while it would grant practically equivalent facilities for transit, as far as rapidity is concerned, with many other advantages. Instead of expending a vast sum to give setting to a group of public buildings, in the proposed civic center, this parkway could be made to give the adequate setting incidentally. Certain ones would be placed along its margin at the western end. Further, the improvement, instead of redeeming one small space, would redeem two streets for a mile at least. It could even be extended farther by means of a viaduct or some other device, and ultimately carried clear out to Schenley Park. [Illustration: PATH IN HIGHLAND PARK.] There is no opportunity in this discussion to go into the project with detail. Even the Eastern terminus of the improvement must be left for later consideration. But it is plain that should the avenue stop at the mile, that much would be worth doing and would immensely increase the comfort and decrease the delay of getting to the East End. Further, the splendid avenue would be democratic in its benefit, since the trolleys would have their place in it. The wage earner would go bowling home or to business as well encompassed as the motorist. The social benefit of that, and of the ceaseless entertainment which the traffic of the gay avenue would offer, is to be esteemed. There is no park so popular as a great street. V. Pittsburgh's built-up suburban district is varied and far scattered. It lies along the rivers, as at Sharpsburg, in industrial towns; it lies among the hills, as at Sewickley, in purely residential areas. It is reached in some places by steam cars, and everywhere by trolley. It is the home of the millionaire and of the moderate wage earner. At times it is beautiful, and at other times it shows hardly the beginnings of aesthetic aspiration or social consciousness. No brief discussion of it is possible, for each separate suburban community would have to be taken by itself. But in a general way this can be said: As nature has given to Pittsburgh one of the most picturesque city sites in the world, so she has done what she could to circle the city with lovely suburbs. With sane and artistic planning, popular co-operation, and a degree of patience, the beautiful suburb with winding roads, entrancing views, individual privacy and communal neighborliness, might have been secured much oftener than it has been and it might have been brought within the financial reach of much greater numbers. For suburbs rapid transit is essential; and that as yet has had nothing like the development one would expect near Pittsburgh. The subway plan involves the radiation from the loop of long, straight roads furnishing to certain outlying sections a transportation much more rapid than at present offered. With low fares, this should mean much to crowded Pittsburgh. But the time to improve suburbs is before, not after, the rush thither begins. The suburbs must act as quickly as must the East End, the playground supporters, the designers of an educational center, and the builders of an adequate East End approach. In all that Pittsburgh is to do for civic improvement she must act at once, generously and with comprehensive grasp. VI. With the exception of occasional ornamental spaces, and a few parks so small that they have only neighborhood importance, the parks of the Pittsburgh district may be said to consist of four public reservations. These are Schenley and Highland, in the East End; Riverview in Allegheny; and, in the older portion of Allegheny, the reservation,--once a great hollow square,--like a New England common; now in part relinquished to the railroads. Neither in total acreage, nor in distribution, nor in manner of development, are these parks what Pittsburgh ought to have. Perhaps, of its kind, the old park in Allegheny is the most satisfying. Located close to the homes of a very large population from whom the country is far removed, it offers long, level stretches of greensward where good trees cast grateful shadows, with walks that one may use even when on business, with numberless benches that are never empty on summer days and evenings, a little lake at one place and now and again a fountain where the splash of cool water gives ceaseless entertainment. It is a pity that this park was deprived of nearly half its former area, that the railroad might have a convenient path. Highland and Schenley, over in Pittsburgh's East End, are elaborately and expensively "improved." You get into Highland through a monumental entrance; costly beds of annuals confront you; from the reservoir heights there is a superb view; in a lower corner there is a Zoo, which is remarkably well set; and there are some charming retreats. It is a pretty good park of its kind,--a very costly, luxurious kind; and though it is located in an expensive residential neighborhood five miles from the city hall, a good many people get to it on holidays. It does some social work although far from the amount desired. Schenley does very little. The Phipps Conservatories, happily located near the entrance, are much visited when "a show" is on; somewhere in the inner recesses of the park there is a driving circuit, of which the crude old grand stand looms on the landscape like a combination of lumber yard and weatherbeaten country barn, and somewhere else there are golf links, maintained by a private club, where you may play if properly introduced! On the Fourth of July, fire works bring a crowd to the park. But it is significant that while there are costly bridges and many drives, there are no paths or walks. The cars touch only one projecting corner, and there are no park carriages. He who has not his own horses, or his own motor car, need not enter the East End's Schenley Park. For it is, typically, the East End's park, adapted fairly well to its neighborhood, but not at all serving the democratic needs of Greater Pittsburgh. Here is a great industrial city. The scores of thousands of people whom the parks should serve are many of them foreigners, and the mass of them are workers over a single piece. Practically all of them work amid smoke and grime. The beauty of nature may be a new thought to these people. They should be helped to appreciate it, but they must be given first what they do understand and enjoy,--entertainment, vivacity, and brilliancy. If Schenley Park is little visited; a trolley park far away, where swings and boats, slides and ponies, keep something going all the time, is crowded day by day; and when, in the moonlight, shadows lie on the hills of Schenley, and the stars look down on deserted though free acres, other parks that are garish with a blaze of electric lights are thronged with people who have gladly paid a fee for admittance. There they find something to see and to do. Industrial Pittsburgh ought to take pride in developing the special kind of park facilities that its population needs, and in setting an example to other cities. A comprehensive system of children's playgrounds would do something toward this; the proposed mall or parkway approach to the East End, where some thousands of the relatively poor would find, almost at their doors, a mile long open space with its ceaseless urban entertainment, would do something more; a system of small open spaces or outdoor social centers, where a man could smoke his pipe and chat with his neighbors, his wife at his side and his children at hand, would make further contribution; and the riverside park proposed for the business district, still further. But there should be two or three well-distributed and readily accessible large parks that would be real municipal pleasure grounds. Here should be ample athletic fields, a swimming pool, and a large field house; a band playing at frequent intervals; swings and boats; cheap conveyances that would make the whole space available; illuminations and song festivals; and refectory accommodations, with tables placed attractively out of doors, and wholesome food and drink at low prices. Tired workers, going to this free public park, should find entertainment. Little by little, and incidentally, they might learn there the more tranquil pleasure of contemplating nature. There are various places in Pittsburgh where such parks could be established. One, that seems to be singularly adaptable is Brunot's Island. There is Maple Park on the South Side. For a neighborhood park, which by mere convenience of location and inherent interest should invite the Pittsburgh workman out of doors, the steep bank that rises across the Monongahela offers a site very distinctive and appropriate. Day and night the interest of its outlook would not cease. It would require little development. Inclined roads already scale the cliff, and midway stations would make any terrace available. And whatever landscape improvements were made would be visible and enjoyable from the business streets themselves. In Allegheny such a park site is already owned on Monument Hill. [Illustration: PANTHER HOLLOW. Schenley Park.] The site of the penitentiary may some day become another available park site, for a penitentiary in the heart of a city is undesirable. Another wonderful park site, so wonderful that it is difficult to perceive why it has been so long neglected since track elevation has made it available, is the tip of the "Point." To-day it is a dumping ground. Aside from the historical and natural charm of this location, should be noted the breadth of outlook it offers, its free currents of air, its proximity to a large working population and the possibility of its attractive connection with a yet larger area by means of the suggested embankments which would practically form a riverside promenade and parkway to it. With the acquisition of more parks it would be possible to arrange an interesting connecting system of boulevards and parkways. It is not enough simply to designate an existing street a boulevard. Calling it so does not make it so. And when Pittsburgh awakes to her greatness, and appreciates the surpassing beauty that might be hers, there is no reason to doubt that among other things she will commission the planning of an excellent system of drives. There are naturally beautiful runs, now despoiled with mean dwellings and made little better than open sewers, that might be transformed into parkways; and there are hills and stretches of fair country that could be had now for a song for an outlying park system. It is true that all this will demand money, but there are no improvements that by long term bonds can be so justly made a mortgage on the distant future as those for parks. School houses, fire houses, public buildings, deteriorate with the lapse of time, but parks and boulevards become yearly of greater value. VII. The final word, which has to do with the needs of the whole community, hardly requires saying. It is a plea for comprehensive planning. Surely, if ever a city needed the definite plan that an outside commission could make for it, it is Pittsburgh. In most cities the "improvement" problem is largely aesthetic. In Pittsburgh, it is also economic and social. Its correct solution is something more than a desideratum; it is a need. [Illustration: SESQUI-CENTENNIAL ARCH.] EFFECT OF FORESTS ON ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN THE PITTSBURGH DISTRICT [Illustration] W. W. ASHE U. S. FOREST SERVICE Three rivers determined the location of Pittsburgh. They have been important factors in creating its industrial position; they are now important agents affecting the health and earnings of thousands of its citizens. The two score of iron and coal towns which are known as the Pittsburgh District, fringe the banks of these rivers. Mine, factory and furnace alternate with the residence settlements of the laborers, and they and the railroads compete with the streams themselves for ownership of the narrow strip of land between low water and flood crest. With every recession of the floods, man crowds the streams, only to be driven back when they reassert their suzerainty. Whatever can be done therefore, to tame their caprices, to equalize their flow, either by lowering the flood crests or increasing the low water stages, adds to the well-being and prosperity of men who work at forge and furnace, or go with the barges,--men whose living is from day to day, and to whom the idle day brings want. The flood is the open expression of the rivers' authority. But they have another and more subtle influence. It is less direct, but it has a wider relation to the well being of the city, not only affecting the laborer who lives on the lowlands, but affecting all citizens alike. The rivers and their tributaries near which Pittsburgh and the surrounding towns are situated, furnish these in most instances with their water supply. The character of this water affects the health of the users, and their working efficiency. All the drinking water used in the Pittsburgh District, except that from artesian wells or similar primarily pure sources, has been contaminated by the sewage of towns and villages higher up the rivers. Through such contaminated water typhoid fever and other zymotic intestinal diseases are widely disseminated. Scarcely a town in the steel and coal district has not been devastated by an outbreak of this dread scourge. The condition of Wilkinsburg is typical, its water supply being contaminated by the sewage of more than twenty towns. The new filtration plant for Greater Pittsburgh delivers to most of the city a drink much superior in quality to the highly polluted waters generally used. But filtration is only a first step toward purity, and toward decreasing typhoid fever and the other water-borne diseases. Filtration removes a high percentage of the pathogenic bacteria by which these diseases are transmitted; but a highly contaminated water, such as that of the Allegheny River, purified even by the best methods of sand filtration, is not pure water. Intelligent users must at length realize this and demand for their own health not a purified water merely, but a primarily pure supply, safeguarded by sedimentation and filtration against occasional contamination. Within easy reach of Pittsburgh and nearly every one of its satellite towns, lie abundant sources of primarily pure supply, in the forest-protected mountain streams. Hitherto the cost of purchasing a forested watershed and holding it as unproductive property has deterred cities from seeking such sources. That difficulty no longer exists. Forest lands have now a recognized and constantly increasing earning power. If a watershed is purchased at a reasonable price and is well managed, it will become, as stumpage further appreciates in worth, a valuable municipal asset. Or if a town is small and unwilling to assume the responsibility of such management; it can well co-operate with the state in developing a system which will secure to it pure water, and at the same time preserve to the state the earning power of its forests which are among its most valuable natural resources. Domestic water supply, however, is largely a matter local to each town or each group of towns. But the wage earners of the whole Pittsburgh section are yearly vitally affected by the rivers in a different way. The earnings and even the lives of thousands, especially of those living in the low districts of the larger cities, are threatened by the winter and spring floods. These floods frequently result in losses to wage earners aggregating several million dollars a year. In the flood of March, 1907, it is estimated that more than 2,000 families in the river districts of Pittsburgh, and an equal number in the low lying sections of nearby cities, were forced from their homes or their stores by high water. Quantities of personal effects were injured or destroyed; lives were lost; and much suffering followed the winter exposure. The effect of the flood in increasing certain kinds of disease is shown by a comparison of the pneumonia and typhoid records in the flooded wards of Pittsburgh. Dr. Beaty of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health gives us the number of cases of these two diseases in certain wards on the North Side, which are largely tenanted by laborers, and were partly inundated. In March and April, 1906, when there was no flood, there were fourteen cases of pneumonia and forty-eight of typhoid fever. In March and April, 1907, when the flood had a height of thirty-six feet, there were forty cases of pneumonia and 118 cases of typhoid fever, more than twice the number of the preceding year. During the flood the water and dwellings in these districts became badly contaminated by human waste, since the flooding of toilets and sewers prevented their use. At the same time many families usually dependent upon street hydrants for domestic water had to make use of this extremely impure river water. This affected large numbers of people, many of them recently arrived foreigners unacquainted with methods of securing ready relief. But a more general suffering was occasioned by the loss in wages through the closing of large establishments whose plants were flooded. It was estimated at the time by one of the local newspapers that more than 100,000 people in the Pittsburgh District were idle for an average period of a week on account of the March flood of 1907. A typical example is the National Tube Works, where different departments were closed from ten to fourteen days, throwing about 10,000 men out of regular work. About 4,000 of these were employed for three days as laborers, cleaning up after the water subsided. The same thing is yearly repeated in many other large factories as well as on the railroads. It is no exceptional occurrence. A similar, though less severe flood occurred two months earlier the same year and another in March, 1908. It is indeed an exceptional spring when there is not a flood. The losses to laborers by curtailment of wages from this cause are seldom so excessive as they were in the flood of March, 1907, but they amount annually to more than $100,000. Moreover, this loss takes place in the winter, when the wage earner can least afford it. [Illustration: DENUDED LAND DEVOID OF HUMUS, ON THE MOUNTAINS; LARGELY RESPONSIBLE FOR FLOODS ON THE MONONGAHELA RIVER.] [Illustration: RAILROAD BRIDGE DESTROYED BY FRESHET. THREE MEN WERE KILLED IN THE WRECK WHICH FOLLOWED.] [Illustration: FARMING LAND DESTROYED BY FLOODS. MONONGAHELA RIVER.] [Illustration: WAGE-EARNERS' HOMES ABANDONED ON ACCOUNT OF FRESHET.] The river floods cannot be prevented by local effort. Their damage is by no means confined to Pittsburgh; it extends the entire course of the Ohio River and its most important tributaries; its causes originate in other states besides Pennsylvania. Although the state and even the cities might well co-operate in certain ways, the prevention of these floods is a problem for the Federal government to consider. The cause of a flood lies partly in natural conditions. The run-off of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers is naturally concentrated and the highest floods occur when a deep snow on a frozen soil is suddenly melted by heavy warm rain. But their height has been accentuated by human agency; and this points to the two necessary phases of river flood control work. One is the re-establishment of normal forest conditions. This means not so much a great extension of the forest area, although there are many steep slopes now cleared which should be re-wooded; but it means the restocking as densely as possible of lands which have been cut or badly burned and are thinly or partially wooded. This is a means to an end. The forest produces a deep mat of leaves and mould, the humus which not only has a high water storage capacity itself but determines largely the porousness and absorptive power of the underlying soil. This function of the forest is not incompatible with the use of its timber. The most rapid growth of timber is secured by maintaining the deepest humus; but the cutting of it must be adjusted under skilled direction in order not to jeopardize the water storage function of the soil. Furthermore, there is need of more evergreen forests. The pine and hemlock have been largely removed from the mountain sources of the Ohio. But these trees prolong the melting of deep snows, even under warm rains, for several days longer than deciduous trees. The re-establishment of forests of conifers will therefore contribute to lowering the crests of floods by distributing the flow over five or six days instead of two or three. This is one phase of the work of river control. [Illustration: FEDERAL STREET DURING FLOOD OF MARCH 14, 1907.] On account, however, of the large areas of open farm-land that lie on the watershed of the Ohio and that cannot be reforested, additional means are necessary for storing the surplus storm water. There should be storage reservoirs such as are now being used at the head of the Mississippi River for regulating the flow of the river above St. Paul. These reservoirs must be on wooded watersheds; otherwise they will silt up and they will hold back some of the storm water and lower the height of floods, they will have an additional value for they can be used as reservoirs for domestic water supply. They can also be made to increase the dry season flow of the streams, thus furnishing a stable water power for industrial use and permitting steady navigation during summer and autumn when the water stage is frequently too low even for coal barges. Thus, by means of the forests will be secured not only a reduction in floods but also a greater earning capacity to the region through the development of the latent power of its streams. The rivers, then, are at once the making and the menace of Pittsburgh. It is through the forests and by reservoirs that the menace can be removed and the highest utility of the streams established. The purity of the water for drinking purposes can thus be assured. This involves a betterment in the health of the community and an increase in the efficiency of the laborer. The equalization of the river flow can also be thus attained. And this involves, first, the lessening of flood losses, and, second, the increasing of the power of the streams to meet the exacting requirements of water power development. The lowering of the floods secures also a further betterment in health by improving the sanitary condition of the districts subject to inundations, and a betterment of economic conditions, both by giving the laborer more steady work during flood and low flow periods, and by opening to him, through the creation of new industries, a wider field of employment. [Illustration: A MILE OF WATER ON PENN AVENUE DURING PITTSBURGH'S RECORD FLOOD, MARCH, 1907.] THE TRANSIT SITUATION IN PITTSBURGH JOHN P. FOX SECRETARY TRANSIT COMMITTEE, CITY CLUB OF NEW YORK; MEMBER TRAMWAYS AND LIGHT RAILWAYS' ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Transit has a place in the study of living conditions in an industrial city like Pittsburgh. Many of the workers are dependent on street cars to take them to and from home, about their occupations, and to places of recreation. Cheap and efficient transit can enable families living under crowded and unhealthy conditions to move to larger, healthier, and less expensive quarters, and still to reach their work. Low fares and good service bring the operators in a suburban mill town in touch with the full resources of the labor supply in the central city, and also effect a large and direct pay roll economy for carpenters, plumbers, painters, and other city trades whose employes move from point to point during working hours. Again, in no place are people packed together more closely than in the cars, under more conditions favorable to the spread of disease and especially of tuberculosis. And among accidents, few are more numerous, more costly to corporation and community, and more unnecessary, than those caused by street cars. The street railway system of Pittsburgh is a surface electric system, under the management of the Pittsburgh Railways Company. This company is the consolidation of many other companies, different groups of which had previously combined. The Pittsburgh Railways Company, again, is under the management of the Philadelphia Company, which largely dominates the gas and electricity supply. The Philadelphia Company is said to be controlled by nonresident investors. The present owners and local managers may well be without personal responsibility for the acts or omissions of their predecessors, and yet be crippled by exorbitant obligations to them. Their legal responsibility as to the performance of public service is, however, clear cut. All the available through thoroughfares leading to the heart of the city from the South Side, North Side, and East End are occupied by the Pittsburgh Railways Company under franchises granted to its subsidiary companies, and as a practical proposition it is impossible to construct additional surface lines or extend surface transit facilities to new areas providing for the growth of the city, except in subordination to these strategic lines. This restriction of course does not apply to rapid transit lines,--subway or elevated. The principal franchises to these streets held by the original companies appear to be indeterminate in duration, as in Massachusetts, the city having reserved the right to revoke a franchise at any time that a company failed to comply with all the conditions of the agreement. The terms of the original franchises (the Second avenue line being the exception to many of these points) provide for an annual compensation to the city, either a car tax and a percentage of the net profits or a fixed rental in place of one or both of the former. The streets must always be kept in good repair, and in certain cases, at least, clean (either from curb to curb, or along the car tracks). The city sometimes retained the power to alter the conditions, and notably reserved the right to purchase any road after twenty years, at a price to be fixed by five disinterested appraisers. Important provisions of these original franchises are not being observed by the existing company. These facts must be borne in mind in discussing both the equipment of the present system to meet the social needs of Pittsburgh, and ways open to the public to effect improvement. Though the steam roads have played an important part in the past, the growth of Pittsburgh is now chiefly along electric car lines. The radiation of surface lines from the business center out over the district seems quite complete, especially considering the topography of the city and the suburbs. Large areas of vacant land available for single houses, can be reached for five cents from the business district. While the radiation of surface lines may be satisfactory, the equipment and operation are exceedingly unsatisfactory, as every practical man in the railway company will admit. The present system has its base located on the point between the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. Most of the lines begin as loops through these business streets, operating without transfers between the different lines and without through cars. [Illustration: FOR PROFILE LINES AND CAR ROUTES, SEE MAP FACING PAGE 784.] A five-cent fare carries one varying distances from this business center, before a second fare is charged. The longest ride for one fare is about eight miles; while a continuous ride of fourteen miles on another route, costs fifteen cents. Passengers cannot change cars in the business center without paying two fares, and a ride across the city and suburbs may cost as much as twenty-five cents. Free transfers, are given between many lines before they enter the downtown district; but no transfers are issued after 11:30 P. M., and none on holidays such as the Fourth of July, when travel is heaviest. The cars till recently have had no cross seats, longitudinal seats having been used, according to the company, "to allow an extra large capacity," viz., standing capacity. Trailers are run at the rush hours. A line of express cars runs east from the business center to East Liberty, through Liberty avenue, making few stops, though the speed on sample runs was found to be sometimes slower than that of cars on the parallel Penn avenue. The speed of the cars is fast enough for surface operation, except when the power is poor, on steep grades or in the congested district. The service is very unsatisfactory both as to the few cars run and as to the amount of standing, which is inexcusably large. The rails are of the girder type, one obsolete in first-class systems; and are in very bad shape everywhere. The property is very much run down, except for a few new pay-as-you enter cars. The only real rapid transit in Pittsburgh is furnished by the Pennsylvania and other steam railroads, the common time scheduled from the Union Station to East Liberty being ten minutes by train, against thirty minutes by surface express cars. [Illustration: PROFILES OF PITTSBURGH THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY Maps under the direction of SHELBY M. HARRISON 1908] Before taking up in detail the discussion of improvements on existing lines, it may be well to touch on the financial condition of the Pittsburgh Railways Company, and to consider whether the property can afford to make such improvements; for one hears the excuse for bad conditions that the company is not earning a dividend and was forced even to reduce the service. The Boston Elevated Railway Company, which operates all the surface, elevated and subway lines about Boston, is regarded as a very prosperous concern, paying dividends of from six to eight per cent. the net earnings per car mile after paying taxes being 6.54 cents. The Pittsburgh Railways Company, according to its last public report, had net earnings, after paying taxes, of 12.55 cents per car mile, about double the amount of the Boston company. This is a most remarkable financial showing, and at once raises the question, where does the money all go to and why cannot more of the excessive profits be diverted to better service and equipment? The Boston company is operating to-day three subways and one elevated line, besides having contracted to build two more subways and another elevated. It is obvious that the Pittsburgh Railways Company could not only give a first class service on existing lines, but could also assume the fixed charges of a real rapid transit system, if profits were not diverted to pay excessive rentals and other fixed charges on the many companies consolidated at different times. Some way must be found to cut down these exorbitant charges, for the present management can hardly expect the public to endure existing conditions much longer, when the earnings are so vast. People in other cities, when really aroused, have found ways to bring the most intrenched monopolies to terms. The congestion of cars in the business district of Pittsburgh is a very curious phenomenon. Most people, seeing the frequent blockades at street junctions in the rush hours, would say that there were already too many cars on the streets, and that the overcrowding is a necessity, only to be remedied by building a rapid transit line. Others, however, see that the terminal loops cause much of the congestion, and that by rearranging or abolishing these, even more cars could easily be handled in and out of the crowded center. As a matter of fact, at no place in Pittsburgh does the number of cars passing hourly reach even half the maximum number found possible in other cities; 43 cars in thirty minutes was the largest number counted by the writer, against 128 cars in Berlin. The maximum Pittsburgh hourly rate on a single track would be 86 cars; Boston has scheduled 220 an hour; Berlin runs as many as 256; while Brooklyn handles over 300. At the busiest junction in Pittsburgh, the writer found a rate of 276 cars an hour in all directions, against 557 in Berlin, where there were many more vehicles besides. The overcrowding of the Pittsburgh cars is either intentional or due to bad operating methods. The seating capacity of the present surface lines has been far from reached. Take Fifth avenue at Smithfield street, for example. In one half-hour in the evening from 5 to 5:30 P. M. about 2,290 passengers were carried east one night in forty-three cars, thirty-two being motor cars and eleven trailers. If every motor car had hauled a trailer, and four additional pairs of cars been run, every passenger could have been seated, whereas 785 were obliged to stand, or more than fifty per cent of those seated. The total number of cars in one hour would only be 144 against 256 in Berlin. If the company had cross seats in all the cars, merely seventeen more trailers on Fifth avenue, added to the present number of motor cars, would have seated all the passengers, with a total of only 120 cars an hour. In Berlin the street railway company provides as many as 3,116 seats in half an hour, and the London County Council as many as 3,538 seats, against the 1,504 in Pittsburgh. It may be wondered how it is possible to get so many cars past as in Berlin. It is done by fine traffic regulation by the police, who use careful judgment, and do not hold up traffic too long in any one direction, as is common in other cities, even in London, the home of street regulation. Again, the Berlin tracks are so good and the motormen so careful, that the latter operate cars over switches and junctions at speeds which are never seen in Pittsburgh, car following car with amazing rapidity. And the Berlin manager proposes to run even more cars. [Illustration: MOTOR CAR AND DOUBLE-DECK TRAILER CROSSING POTSDAMER PLATZ, BERLIN. 557 CARS AN HOUR AGAINST 276 IN PITTSBURGH.] In no city does the writer recall so much standing required of passengers as in Pittsburgh. It would appear to be the company's object to run few enough cars to make people stand on every trip throughout the day, and as nearly the whole length of each line as possible. There is little relief during the slack hours, as every car, sooner or later, seems to have its standing load. In other cities of the country, a marked change of policy towards the public has shown itself in the largely increased number of seats furnished. It is a question whether it is a good policy for any public service corporation, no matter how securely intrenched, to continue the policies of the past. [Illustration: SECOND CLASS BERLIN ELEVATED AND SUBWAY CAR. FARE 3-1/2 CENTS. SOFT LIGHTING; NO STRAPS; DESIGNED BY ONE OF THE FIRST ARCHITECTS OF BERLIN.] It is one thing to allow a few persons who like it to stand on the car platform; it is another to require it of mothers, overworked girls, the tired, the ill, the infirm. No one knows how much disease is spread through such crowding. In no place are conditions more ripe for infection,--with the extreme of personal contact, the mixture of every class, the constant rubbing against one another and the holding of dirty strap. Under such conditions, when a consumptive coughs, who is safe? The seating capacity of a city car line seems hardly to have a final limit, for some new way is constantly found to squeeze in more or larger cars. To get some figures by which to judge Pittsburgh, let us take the 256 cars run hourly on a single track in Berlin, or call it 250. If double-deck cars were run in Pittsburgh, of the same length and width as the largest cars now in use, each could easily seat as many as 120 passengers. This would allow a perfectly feasible capacity of 30,000 seats an hour, against a rate of 3,008 actually found on Fifth avenue. Why double-deck cars are not run in this country is a mystery to every English manager and to not a few Americans. They nearly treble the seating capacity, and yet weigh no more than our wastefully heavy rolling stock. They give passengers decent room and air space. They are far more economical even than trailers. Roofs on these cars are now enclosed, and smoking is made possible all the year round. They can climb and descend hills more quickly and safely than single-deck cars of equal capacity, because more weight can be concentrated on the wheels. Two types have been designed for Pittsburgh of the same length and width as existing cars, both having an enclosed roof adapted for winter. The higher one would have 120 seats. The other type, low enough to go under existing railroad bridges, would furnish ninety-eight seats on one car, with four entrances each side. If such cars had been used on Fifth avenue the night when 2,290 passengers were counted in half an hour, they could have furnished seats for every person, with seven per cent excess. Only twenty-five cars instead of forty-three would have been needed, which would have required fifty men against the seventy-five actually employed for the 1,508 seats. To furnish more seats with trailers would cost more than the present system; but double-deck cars would cut thirty-three per cent off the operating expense, and the company would gain more than the immense monetary saving. They would lose less fares, have the good will of the public, and fewer accidents. The new pay-as-you-enter cars are the most expensive thing with which to furnish seats, and they take twice as long to load as a double-deck car, the introduction of which would appear to be the wisest move the company could make, as well as the best thing for the public. One of the most objectionable features of the Pittsburgh railway system is the looping back of all cars in the business district, without either through cars or free transfers between the north, south, east, and west sides of the city. In the expensive days of horse cars, there was more excuse for short hauls and double fares; but for the wealthy Pittsburgh electric system, there is no excuse for not serving the entire district, at least within the city limits, for a five cent fare. Boston has had through cars across the city for about twenty years, and for ten years the company has had no higher fare than five cents for the entire Metropolitan district of a dozen cities and towns. The longest ride is at least sixteen miles, with free transfers given at about forty points. Berlin has the most complete system of through cars, connecting every part of the city for a single fare, allowing a ride of thirteen miles or two hours for two and one-half cents. It seems very doubtful if the present restricted plan of operation pays nearly as well as would through cars and single fares for the entire city. The loops tie up many cars and men in the business district, because of the long stops at a few points and the slowness of switching. But one thing is certain, and that is the gross injustice of a ten cent fare across the city. Its tendency to isolate such public institutions as the Carnegie Institute, the Technical Schools, the University of Pittsburgh, is a very serious matter. An apprentice who attends the evening courses at the Technical Schools three nights a week, pays $5 a year for his tuition. If he has to ride each way, it costs him about $7.80 a year from only the nearest part of the city, $15.60 from the rest. Is this good public policy toward the ambitious workman who is unfortunate enough not to live within the favored zone? Is it good sense that the railway company shall charge twenty cents a round trip to so many who appreciate the free advantages of the Carnegie Institute, and thus bar many of the poorest from ever reaching its doors? The company may reply that all such public institutions should be located in the business district, where all lines center. But the city must grow beyond that congested triangle, and why should not the company's policy grow as well? The same question might be asked in connection with the company's refusal to give transfers after 11:30 P. M., and on the holidays when travel is heaviest. Altogether, it is not a matter for wonder that the public is a unit against the railway. The whole fare system of Pittsburgh needs careful scrutiny. Should workmen's fares be introduced, to give every family a chance to live where it can find the best house, the most congenial neighbors, and the desirable surroundings, and yet get to work without exorbitant car fares? The London County Council, from its workmen's homes, seven miles out in the suburbs, gives a ride to the city, with a seat for every passenger, for two cents at the rush hour. One London steam road gives workmen an eleven mile ride for two cents each way. English managers say that American companies throw away large profits by maintaining too high fares. The question of public policy to consider about workmen's fares is not whether more people could be carried or whether they would pay, for foreign experience has settled these points, but whether more riding is necessary and desirable, that is, whether satisfactory living conditions can be provided within walking distance of where people work. A feature of transit requiring more attention is the matter of car ventilation. The Pittsburgh company is said to be trying a method of artificial ventilation for its cars. For such densely packed spaces, a constant supply of fresh air is an urgent necessity. A downward movement of warm air, if found practicable, would be the most hygienic and economical. The car transoms should have handles attached to make proper opening and shutting easy. At the present time, there is often too much cold air blowing into the cars, because there is no easy way for the conductor to close the ventilators. The coal stoves should be banished from the interiors. While there are spitting signs in the cars for the instruction of passengers, some of the employes appear to be the subjects who need most attention. The constant expectoration of motormen through vestibule doors, and the fouling of front steps, are practices that are not conducive to health or happiness. To reduce the wear and tear on the nerves of the community the noise from car operation ought to be much less. Excessive gong ringing is far too common in Pittsburgh. Ninety-four blows in a minute is a ridiculous frequency. One sound from a good gong is enough to inform a vehicle that it is in the way. Too much pounding simply exasperates a teamster. There should be very little need of gong ringing anyway. A properly trained motorman slows down for pedestrians and obstructions, and does not rely on the gong to get them off the track before he is too near for safety. For the car gearing, the London mixture of sawdust and oil should be tried in the gear cases. The London cars almost startle one with their quietness. They are kept in perfect order, with no loose parts to rattle, no bad rails to pound over. While the Pittsburgh rail joints are often quiet, the tracks at junctions are in a condition most injurious to the cars, and a cause of excessive noise, there being actual gaps in the rail heads over which the cars must jump. Bad track maintenance has allowed much corrugation to creep in, viz., little waves along the heads of the rails, which are both noisy and expensive. The unfortunate supplanting of magnetic brakes by air brakes will increase the flat wheel nuisance. Worn trolley wheels cause unnecessary noise overhead. Rails on curves should be greased. The Pittsburgh Railways Company, in its latest reports, gives no figures for the cost and number of street car accidents. Such omission invites close scrutiny, and there are many dangerous features about the cars and the operation. One excellent thing in use by the company is the magnetic brake[3], which, however jerky and sudden may be the type in use in Pittsburgh, is in its latest form far safer than air brakes in every respect. Unfortunately, the company is not using this latest type, but is adopting air brakes on new cars. Air brakes are one thing on steam roads, where rails are seldom slippery and where there is usually plenty of time to stop; but for city streets and Pittsburgh grades, they are an added source of danger. The magnetic brake can now stop a car in one-third of the distance that air can, and cannot skid the wheels up to speeds of thirty-two miles an hour. It is little affected by a greasy rail, and its tremendous reserve power makes it almost impossible for a motorman to have an accident,--the hand attachment providing safety in case of an electrical breakdown. The best test of brakes yet made, which has just been completed in England, has settled these points beyond all question. [3] A brake with which powerful magnets drag on the track and stop the wheels as well. [Illustration: LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL CAR WITH SEVENTY-TWO SEATS. THE SAFEST TYPE IN THE WORLD, WITH THE LATEST MAGNETIC BRAKES AND AUTOMATIC WHEEL GUARDS.] [Illustration: LIVERPOOL DOUBLE-DECK CAR, WHICH CANNOT RUN OVER ANYONE. SIXTY-FOUR SEATS WHERE PITTSBURGH WOULD HAVE TWENTY-EIGHT.] With the best magnetic brakes, projecting fenders ought to be unnecessary. Such fenders are prohibited in Europe, as doing more harm than good. A perfect wheel guard seems really the only thing needed, and such has been found by the city of Liverpool, which has had in use for seven years the noted plow guard, which has pushed 415 persons off the track and absolutely saved people from being run over. It should be applied in some form at once on all the Pittsburgh cars. Many Pittsburgh cars have no wheel guard at all. To take up a few more danger points: Dim headlights, due to insufficient power, are another source of risk. Gong ringing by hand, the practice in Pittsburgh, is an antiquated method especially objectionable with the magnetic brake, where the motorman must both brake and ring with the same hand. There are no power brakes on the trail cars,--a serious omission. Single truck cars are not safe on many of the sharp curves, as between Forbes street and Homestead. When rails are dirty, they should be cleaned, not sanded. The car sanders are of a type that is useless on curves. The carrying of jacks on every car is an excellent thing, which the Pittsburgh company was the first in the country to adopt. But there should also be an emergency lantern, an emergency lamp inside the cars, blocks to hold a car up, a saw, etc., as in Berlin. The storing of cars out-of-doors, as at Highland Park, results in icy steps on winter mornings, and is a shiftless practice. The Pittsburgh rule to descend dangerous grades with wheel brakes on, instead of magnetic brakes, is exactly the most dangerous thing, as has been shown again and again in England. The type of rail in use and the method of laying are very unsatisfactory, and Philadelphia standards are greatly needed. The Pittsburgh rails and their condition are certainly an anomaly in the steel center of the world. [Illustration: SIGN AT FREE TRANSFER STATION, NUREMBERG, SHOWING WHERE EACH CAR-LINE GOES.] [Illustration: DECORATED STOPPING POST IN NUREMBERG.] [Illustration: NUREMBERG MUNICIPAL CAR, SHOWING ILLUMINATED ROUTE NUMBER USED FOR EACH LINE.] There are other matters about the system besides those affecting health and safety which need improvement. It is very hard for strangers to find their way around. There are seldom signs on the street to show just where cars stop, whereas in Europe every stopping place has a printed sign. The signs on the cars are often too dim to read, and half the time show only where the car came from, not where it is going to. The routes of the cars are seldom given as they should be. The Berlin sign system with its route numbers instead of confusing colors, and such completeness that no stranger need ask a question to find his way about is urgently needed. Every stopping place in Pittsburgh needs to be called out, as in Boston. The car lights should be placed over the seats, and the glare of bare filaments avoided. If the company cannot furnish a decent voltage on all the routes, then electricity should be abandoned for lighting cars, in favor of the brighter incandescent gas or acetylene used on steam roads. Windows do not open wide enough for coolness in summer, especially on the newest cars, and they are not always well washed. English cars are cleaned every night from top to bottom, and go out as bright as new every morning. Even the trucks are daily cleaned with oil. Dirty city air or passengers are regarded in England as no excuse for dirty cars. The immediate transit needs of Pittsburgh, then, are evidently: First, the running of enough cars throughout the day to furnish sufficient seats at all times and stop the dangerous overcrowding. Second, the substitution of through routes for loops with universal free transfers and a five cent fare at least within the city limits. Third, the improvement of equipment and operation, so that there shall be more healthful conditions, more safety, less noise and more convenience. Fourth, besides these, there should be a thorough study of present conditions, the city's growth and needs, to determine a transit policy for the future. [Illustration: BERLIN CAR TRACKS, LAID IN GRASSY LAWNS, WITH FLOWER BEDS EACH SIDE. THE COMPANY'S PREFERENCE.] Before taking up the rapid transit question, however, let us consider how the improvements necessary to the existing surface system may be obtained. Throughout his administration the present mayor of Pittsburgh has tried to get things done. Vain attempts have been made to get sufficient cars run and to abolish the downtown loops, with their inconvenience to passengers, unjust fares and street congestion. Where new lines have been needed in unserved districts, the company has refused to make extensions except on the unreasonable and impossible condition of perpetual franchises without compensation to the city. Under the different franchises, large sums are due the city for car taxes, rentals and the cost of neglected paving and street cleaning, the total claimed by the city amounting to about a million dollars. The present company, while meeting some obligations the past year, has refused to pay any of these old debts, though admitting its liability for at least a part of them, and the city has brought lawsuits to recover the money. It would have been easy for Mayor Guthrie to have resorted to grandstand plays. But more important than that, he has held the company in _statu quo_ until legal complications have been developed and are now in shape for the city to enforce its rights. An examination of the original franchises opens up some surprising possibilities for the city. These grants were for different routes and conferred no running powers over other lines. In fact, the franchise of the Pittsburgh, Allegheny and Manchester Passenger Railway Company contains the express provision that the ordinance should not be construed to grant or confer upon any other company the right to traverse the streets. As the different companies consolidated, they neglected to obtain from the city the right to run cars over one another's lines, and to-day the Pittsburgh Railways Company is operating its whole system in a way which has been declared illegal in a recent court decision. In the Erie decision, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that, under the state constitution, no street railway company had a right to run over the tracks of another company without express municipal consent, a city having the power to impose reasonable regulations for the operation of lines under an ordinance. If the Pittsburgh Railways Company intends to obey the laws of the state, it must either break up its system into the original car lines and operate them separately, or else it must apply to the city for a permit to legalize its present methods of operation. In giving its permission, the city could dictate its own terms, as long as they were reasonable and constitutional; and it would certainly seem reasonable to require sufficient cars and seats, the abolition of the loops, and the universal five-cent fare as in other cities. If the company would not accept a reasonable ordinance, it might threaten to break up the system, and charge the public a separate fare for each line. It would seem doubtful, however, if the courts would permit any such burden on the public, and the company would hardly attempt to abandon the unity of its system pending litigation. If it tried to do so, after any decision favorable to the city, on the ground that it could not afford to meet the city's requirements, then the courts, on injunction proceedings brought by the city, would be in position to probe the street railway finances, determine the real value of the properties and what would be a fair return on the money actually invested. This would bring out the immense net earnings of the system, absorbed in the charges on an inflated capital, and might lead to a complete reorganization of the companies, on a proper capitalization. The city appears to have just the opportunity needed to bring about the improvement of the whole transit situation, and the people of Pittsburgh should see that the desired results are gained and that no false move is made. The rights of company and investor would be looked after by the courts, while the public might not only get the long needed improvements, but also see a surplus income from their fares available for a real rapid transit system. Such an outcome would put the Pittsburgh surface system on a sound basis, and the company might be the gainer in the end. The city has a further hold on the situation, in the fact that some of the most important franchises can be revoked for non-fulfillment of conditions. Five, at least, of the ordinances provide that any failure to comply with any of the terms may, at the option of the city councils, be held to work a revocation of the privileges granted. The failure to pay the agreed car taxes, percentage of receipts, or rentals, and to pave and clean the streets properly makes it possible for the city to declare forfeited these franchises so vital to the company. The latter would then have to apply for new privileges and the city could dictate the terms. Further, apart, from this possible right of forfeiture, the city is secure in its right to purchase some of these railways which have been in existence twenty years or more. By exercising this option, the city would not be committed to municipal operation any more than Boston or New York, where upwards of fifty million dollars have been invested by those cities in rapid transit lines. Pittsburgh would simply own the tracks and could lease them to the present company or another company, too, if competition were desirable, and make terms which would forever prevent neglect of the public interests. The cost of purchase should not be great, as it would be fixed by appraisers appointed by the courts. The physical property would not be very valuable after the franchises had been revoked, for the tracks are all in bad condition. After purchase, the city could maintain the tracks itself, laying modern rails, and keeping the pavement repaired and clean, the rentals paying the expense. It seems to be the consensus of opinion of eminent legal authorities that all grants of franchises for public utilities are made upon the implied condition that the corporation receiving them will properly perform its obligations by furnishing reasonable accommodations to the public; and that when a corporation has committed its property to a public use, the public has a right to require proper performance of such duties under penalty of forfeiture of the franchise. What has been said as to the city's expressly reserved powers on certain grants may be illustrated by a summary of two franchises. The consent of the city for the construction, maintenance and operation of the lines of the Citizens' Passenger Railway Company was given upon the following conditions, among other things: First, to pay into the city treasury "for each car run over its road," twenty dollars per annum, for the first five years; thirty dollars per annum for the second five years and forty dollars per annum for each year thereafter. Second, to pay into the city treasury annually three per cent of the net profits of said company for the first five years, and five per cent of the net profits of said company for each year thereafter. Third, to keep the streets over which the road passed in good repair from curb to curb. The ordinance further provided: First, that "any failure to comply with" these conditions should be held to work a revocation of the franchise. Second, that the city should have the right at the end of twenty years, by giving the company one year's notice of its intention, to acquire the road and stock by paying for the same at a rate to be fixed by five disinterested appraisers. This term has elapsed. The franchise of the Pittsburgh, Oakland and East Liberty Railway Company was conferred upon the following conditions, among others: First, the payment of an annual sum upon each car run on the road. Second, the payment of an annual sum of $200 for each year during the first five years, and $400 annually thereafter, in lieu of a percentage of profits. Third, that the company shall keep clean and in good repair from curb to curb that portion of the streets on which the road was constructed. The ordinance further provided: First, any failure to comply with any of its terms might, at the option of the city councils, be held to work the revocation of the privileges herein granted; and Second, that at any time after the end of twenty years, the city shall have the right by giving one year's notice, to purchase the road at a price to be fixed by five disinterested appraisers, to be appointed by the president judge of the Quarter Sessions Court of Allegheny county. This term has elapsed. In considering the transit needs of the future, the first question to ask is, perhaps, does Pittsburgh really need more rapid transit? For the immediate present, if the railway company were to bring the surface system up to modern standards as suggested, it would seem as though the existing lines might be satisfactory for some time to come. A number of other large American cities are getting along without fast service, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, San Francisco, etc. A radial city, with all its disadvantages, does allow a short journey home, compared with a badly developed longitudinal city, like New York. And a considerable length of time can be spent daily in travelling without harm, if conditions are agreeable, as on many suburban lines. At the same time, the growth of Pittsburgh needs to be directed according to the best public requirements, and not left to the traction company and real estate owners to work out as they see fit. Some of the broad questions that need to be considered will be discussed later,--such as the relative location of houses to business and manufacturing; the extent to which walking should be provided for; the directions in which Pittsburgh should grow. Of the more specifically transit questions, the chief ones to settle are the routes of rapid transit lines; the type of construction; and the best way to get lines built and operated. The suggestion has been made in two quarters that a highly desirable change in the business district would be effected if the streets could be built up to a higher level, leaving the present streets either for pipes and wires, or for heavy and slow moving traffic. Such an improvement would be of great benefit in case of the highest floods; but from a rapid transit standpoint, it would give little, if any, relief, because cars and vehicles would still be on the same level. If two traffic levels were maintained, there might have to be numerous inclines, which would be awkward with such narrow streets. Still, Pittsburgh may some time have to consider the problem of cross traffic at street junctions, and how best to abolish grade crossings of vehicles. Chicago is trying freight tunnels; New York is considering them; London has planned bridges at congested points, the cost of a single one of which has been figured as high as $3,500,000. Pittsburgh is fortunate in having so many railroad lines along the water fronts, which must reduce the trucking through the streets. The writer has previously advocated the running of more surface cars in the business district. Not that more cars are desirable on the streets; they are simply a necessity, until at least a rapid transit line can be built, or double-deck cars be brought into use, with their great reduction in number. The ultimately desirable thing is to remove all cars from city streets which have become too congested for safety or speed. The best example of such removal is of course in Boston, with Tremont and Boylston streets. London not long since opened a subway for surface cars under Kingsway, the new avenue across the city from north to south, with no tracks on the street above. While as yet Pittsburgh hardly needs for rapid transit purposes the removal of all surface cars downtown, still it would obviously be a great advantage in reducing accidents and giving vehicles more room. To thus relieve the streets has been one of the stated aims of the Pittsburgh Subway Company. The plans of this company appear to provide for a subway system for surface cars, consisting of a downtown terminal loop a mile in circumference, under Oliver avenue, Liberty street, Ferry street, Third avenue, and Grant street; a main tunnel to the east, passing in a straight line under Herron Hill to Junction Hollow; and two branch tunnels extending south from the main line to Brady street and Boquet street. The company has charters for several surface lines in the East End, to feed the subway and its branches. The main subway, sooner or later, would be continued east under Center avenue and Frankstown avenue to a portal at Fifth avenue. A branch tunnel is also provided from the downtown loop, north under the Allegheny River to the Allegheny Station of the Pennsylvania lines. The subway would be built by private capital; it would pay the city a percentage of its gross receipts, and be open to the cars of other companies on reasonable terms. There would be four stations in the business district, but none beyond, except one at East Liberty. The westbound cars would thus make no stops after leaving the surface, till they arrived downtown; and the longest run of five miles would be covered in ten minutes, at an average speed of thirty miles an hour. The object of the Pittsburgh Subway Company is obviously to force the Pittsburgh Railways Company to use the tunnels, under the fear of seeing a rival surface system grow up, with faster service, and superior downtown facilities. Another aim is to divert traffic from the Pennsylvania Railroad, which does a large suburban business along its main line. The whole scheme as outlined is very attractive in many ways, and deserves careful consideration. Perhaps the best way to test the value of the subway scheme is to take up every possible objection to it. One prominent feature of the project is the treatment of the business district as a thing which cannot be extended because of the hills to the east. So the cars would run from the downtown loop to East Liberty without a stop. There has been much discussion in Pittsburgh of spreading out the congested business district; and the fact that business has reached the court house, would suggest that the "Hump" is not the insurmountable bar to growth that it has been supposed. It has been suggested that heavy property owners and large stores are likely to oppose strongly any improvement which would lessen their growing returns. On the other hand, it is conceivable that equally powerful interests may throw their influence in an opposite direction and a rapid transit line would afford exceptional opportunities for real estate investment and branch stores. Fifth avenue or Penn avenue, or both, would seem to be the proper places for such lines to the east. While a business zone along these streets would be narrow because of the hills, the speed of cars would make up for greater distances; and many people might live on the hills between these streets and walk to their work in this zone. A subway along a street might cost somewhat more than a tunnel; but Pittsburgh can afford to have the thing well done. [Illustration: PROPOSED SUBWAY.] Another feature of the subway system which seems to need consideration is the proposal to run surface cars in it. Obviously, if all the Pittsburgh Railway cars could be put underground in the business district, it would be a great advantage, as far as the street surface is concerned. But of course this would not make it any easier to get on the cars, because the loading would be restricted to four stations, instead of being at every street corner. Again, there would be about sixty car routes to be provided for, and 490 cars an hour, without allowing for any increase of cars to furnish more seats. The routes and cars would have to be divided between two tracks, so that half the cars and routes would be on each track, viz., thirty routes and 245 cars an hour. This traffic would obviously fill the subway at the outset, without any room for growth, unless double-deck cars were used. Again, it is against the new lesson of rapid transit, learned at great cost in New York and Berlin, that a rapid transit line should have no junctions and but one destination each way. The speed proposed for the cars from the East End is very high; for the running time of ten minutes from Kelley street to downtown would require an average speed of thirty miles an hour, including the stop at East Liberty and slowdowns for two junctions. To run at such a speed would require block signals and automatic safety stops, and would limit the number of cars to about sixty an hour. To use the subway to its full capacity, either trains must be run, or else the surface cars must be limited to the low speeds found in the Mt. Washington tunnel and the Boston subway. In a paper before the Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania, the engineer of the subway company spoke of running trains and not surface cars in the subway, suggesting that in time all the steam railroad passengers from the east should be transferred to the subway at East Liberty; all the passengers from the west alighting in Allegheny and at McKees Rocks, taking a subway built from the business district through Allegheny and under the Ohio River at McKees Rocks. The loop in the business district would have two tracks, with all trains running in the same direction around the circle. This development of the subway, however, evidently belongs to the future, and the running of surface cars would appear more within the bounds of possibility. One of the most serious questions about the subway proposition is whether it would pay. The promoters answer that they are willing to take all the risk. But if Pittsburgh really needs rapid transit, can the city afford to have it depend on any $10,000,000 or $15,000,000 experiment, and wait several years to know the results? A subway, to clear expenses, has been found to require from fifteen to twenty per cent annual income on the cost. The cost of subways in this country has ranged from $1,500,000 to $3,500,000 a mile. The New York subway cost about $3,000,000 a mile equipped. To make a subway pay as far as East Liberty, would require a minimum traffic in the heaviest rush hour one way of ten thousand passengers. It might take twice or three times this number, according to the cost and the volume of slack hour traffic. It seems a very grave question if a radiating city like Pittsburgh can support such a subway as proposed, to say nothing of a system serving adequately all parts of the city. Subways have usually turned out to be very poor investments, as many companies have learned to their cost, in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Berlin. The New York subway pays only for about half its length, a considerable part of the dividends coming out of the surplus obtained from the elevated roads. Boston can afford subways, because they are mere short links in an extensive system. Subways have other disadvantages which must be carefully considered. They might have been flooded downtown in March, 1907. On account of the cost they can only serve a very limited territory. They are extremely noisy. In New York, they are almost unendurably hot in summer, and the air is filled with iron dust. They take long to build. They are dangerous in case of fire, eighty-seven lives being lost in the Paris disaster. If deep, as in London, many people do not like to use them, even with elevators. The London underground roads are facing a very serious proposition, several already being in a receiver's hands. If shallow, they occupy or cramp the space needed for pipes, wires, and sewers, greatly disturbing the proper arrangement of underground necessities. They put passengers below ground in a place where the sun never shines, leaving to heavy traffic the light and air of the streets. Their signal advantage, on the other hand, is that they remove the traffic altogether from the street, and do not shut out light and air from the street surface.[4] [4] Since this report was drafted, two subway ordinances have been put before Pittsburgh councils:-- a. One for the Pittsburgh Subway Company for a franchise over the route already indicated, asking for a fifty year franchise without compensation to the city for the first ten years, and with payments of one, two, three and four per cent per year, respectively, on gross receipts during the decades following. The same parties who hold this charter, are now applying for a charter for the Pittsburgh Underground Railway Company. The two routes are identical. This charter is pending before the Rapid Transit Board of the commonwealth. b. The other ordinance before councils provides for the construction of a municipal four-track subway for surface cars from Seventh avenue and Grant boulevard east to Center avenue and Craig street, to be built by the City Subway Company, a corporation of three trustees chosen by the city of Pittsburgh. The city will pay the interest on bonds issued by the company, and the latter will turn over to the city such rentals as it can collect from the use of the subway, endeavoring to reimburse the city in the end for all money expended. It is stated in the proposed ordinance that this subway would be the beginning of a transit system, but who would operate the system is not specified. Ordinary elevated roads are certainly not desirable in the business part of Pittsburgh, because the streets are narrow, the buildings high; and there is still at times much smoke. There is already quite an amount of elevated freight structure, black and without ornament. It is perfectly true that an elevated road can be made practically noiseless, as notably in Paris and Berlin; and there has been no damage to property in these cities. The Berlin structure is painted white and is an ornament to the city; but the streets are much wider there than in Pittsburgh. The prospects for satisfactory rapid transit in Pittsburgh do not appear very good, unless perhaps some form of suspended railway should meet with approval. A German type which has had eight years of practical operation at Barmen and Elberfeld, is now under consideration for Berlin. Whether it would suit Pittsburgh is a question; but it has some very interesting advantages. It would cost only about a fifth of a subway's price; so that the same expenditure of money could serve five times the area,--a vital point with a radiating city. The cars could cross existing bridges, probably, without interfering with surface traffic. Studies of routes, structure, and costs make the suspended appear a type of railway which could thoroughly compete with the Pittsburgh Railways Company; and if competition is necessary, it must be of no uncertain kind. Its cars could reach the heights about the city, without excessive grades, and open up new territory as a subway system could never afford to. If operated in co-operation with the existing company, it would allow a large reduction of surface cars in the business district as soon as opened, and the removal of all tracks when desired. On the eight mile line in Germany, not a single passenger has been injured in eight years of operation. The suspended line, moreover, does not shut in the streets, as does the ordinary two track elevated structure. With double-deck cars as feeders, it seems to offer the cheapest, most convenient, and safest means of rapid transit. It would seem wise, if any rapid transit line is to be built in Pittsburgh, for the city to construct and control it, as in New York, Boston, and Paris. The city would merely have to borrow the money, and could retain control of the road in a way to get adequate service. It might be desirable to put the operation into the hands of trustees, who would run the road at a minimum cost and with only a safe margin of profit, giving the public either the largest extension of rapid transit lines possible at a five cent fare, or else serving a smaller territory with a lower fare. The Brooklyn Bridge railway was operated by public trustees most successfully for a number of years, with a two and one-half cent fare. What part the steam railroads will play in the future development of Pittsburgh depends on their own efforts. Their suburban passengers would probably find a rapid transit system more convenient, because they could reach any part of the city quickly for five cents. A terminal for such passengers, more central than the Union Station, is one of the probabilities and would afford an artery of no mean significance, but still without the other advantages of a rapid transit line. The interurban business and that along the rivers could probably be best done by the steam roads, especially if they would run a frequent and cheap service of electric cars, as is done elsewhere. The electrification of all the steam lines about the city would be a great blessing, and the city should urge and encourage the matter in every way. Till this is accomplished, much nuisance could be avoided by a shortening of the maximum length of freight trains, which could greatly reduce the noise and smoke, and, judging from the latest experience, might be more economical to the roads in the end. The whole steam railroad situation in Pittsburgh, both freight and passenger, and the disposition of freight yards need further study, and especially in comparison with Berlin where the main line has a five minute service at the slack hours, suburban branches a twenty minute service, and where the whole system is to be soon electrified at a cost of perhaps thirty-five million dollars. Any plans for the future transit of Pittsburgh should take into consideration, not only the present conditions and arrangement of the city, but also where the growth ought to be, where the healthiest sites for houses are, and other broad questions. Transit, city planning, and housing, are all closely related; and it may be well in concluding to try to get a wider view of things. Transit systems have grown up in modern cities because of the needs and desires of people for moving about more than they did a century ago. In the old days, when towns were small and the uses to which districts were put were not specialized as now, people could walk to their work, or else had space to keep a horse or two. As cities increased in size and compactness, the keeping of horses had to diminish, and distances grew, as well as the desires of people to go about more. Public conveyances consequently came more and more into use; while the constantly improving facilities, notably electricity, increased the tendency to ride. It would appear that the rate of a city's growth in people depends on the amount of intercommunication, just as the intensity of some chemical processes depends on the extent to which the different elements come together. So transit is now regarded as a necessity, and one which cities are beginning to feel, whatever the basis of ownership and operation, is too vital to be exploited solely for the gain there is in it. Passenger transportation obviously has to meet the following needs:--First, carrying people to and from work; second, carrying people about their business during working hours, including shopping; third, carrying people about on social, educational, and recreative objects. The best transit system for meeting these needs is obviously that which conquers space and time most equally for all inhabitants at the lowest cost in money, convenience, safety and health. Of course people should not do unnecessary traveling,--walking, writing, and telephoning being desirable substitutes. In American cities the economy of walking has been too much lost sight of, chiefly in the matter of getting to and from work. The largest demand on transit systems to-day is to carry people to work and back; and yet, curiously, this ought perhaps to be the least important kind of travel. For centuries, until a very recent time, everybody walked to business, and the poorest classes as well as some of the wealthy do still. The reason why so many have to live at a distance from their work is not the mere growth of cities, but our universal disregard of scientific town planning as practiced notably in Germany. We usually crowd most of our business into one center, and then have to ride a long way to get enough room for a single house. But congestion on transit lines is just awakening us to the fact that the common radial plan for a city is neither wholly necessary nor desirable. It would look now as though the ideal city is a longitudinal one, with factories on the leeward side, after the European plan as found in Vienna and the new city of Letchworth, England; houses on the windward side away from the smoke; and stores and offices between. The whole city is narrow enough to enable people to walk across town to and from work, their homes being opposite their place of work or business. One or more high speed longitudinal transit lines would make the length of the city no greater bar to travel than getting about our congested business districts which are so often without even adequate surface transit. The ideal of universal walking to work, were it possible, would obviously abolish the rush hour travel, the cause of so many of the worst features of American city transit. With existing, radial growing cities, it would seem best to try to replan on the longitudinal system as far as possible, modifying the ideal to fit topography and other present conditions. A rapid transit line is the best thing with which to begin the stretching out process in a city where no such facility already exists. By rigidly limiting the heights of buildings to the standards so successful in Europe, and then in some way preserving belts of houses alongside the business district as it begins to stretch, congestion may at least be checked. Of course it is impossible at this late day to provide many single houses within walking distance of a business district, though Boston has notably done so for both rich and poor with its Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and the West and North Ends. But the conditions of Pittsburgh allow no simple alteration to fit the ideal plan. No single transit line can serve both sides of the Ohio, or the four shores of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. Again, the question should be considered very carefully whether people ought to live too near the manufactories, on account of the smoke and the noise; and therefore whether the walking principle ought not to be waived in such a manufacturing region, and all the workers be transported up on the bluffs or beyond, where the air is purer, where more land is available for single houses, and where they can have quiet, healthy homes, making more efficient workers. If the smoke were not still so abundant, the fast transit lines should best lie along the rivers, with a belt of houses on the heights above. But as conditions are, the most desirable locations for houses are away to the east, north, and south of the business district, and so perhaps these are the regions which should first be made more accessible to the heart of the city. The location of rapid transit lines in Pittsburgh obviously needs most careful study. It does not seem enough to connect East Liberty with the business district by a straight line, without serving the intervening territory. The situation needs the broadest study and outlook and the united judgment of the best minds in the city. A transit solution cannot be left to any interested company, but needs to be reached by considering the welfare of all the inhabitants, future as well as present. [Illustration] THE ALDERMEN AND THEIR COURTS H. V. BLAXTER ALLEN H. KERR, Collaborator MEMBERS OF THE ALLEGHENY COUNTY BAR To fifty-nine aldermen is taken practically all the minor litigation of the four to five hundred thousand persons in Pittsburgh. To them the law entrusts all the preliminary matters connected with criminal prosecutions. To the educated public these courts are little known, perhaps because the amounts involved in litigation are small,--never over $300,--or because the proceedings are criminal in nature. But to the majority of Pittsburgh's vast army of foreign born, the squire's office is the only contact with law or justice. It is here that the wage earner, the alien, the Slav or the Lithuanian, comes first in criminal matters; it is here that the ignorant and illiterate enter their civil suits. This is the court of the people, such as it is. Viewed thus, the aldermanic system is lifted from insignificance to rank as a vital question of municipal government. An ancient English system supplied the model, which aimed to decide small cases quickly and with substantial justice. But, as the system works out in Pittsburgh to-day, it for the most part achieves no such end and is a reproach to the community. For Pittsburgh has been a city too busy for introspection. A crowded center echoing with the thunder of steel mills, vast industries giving employment to alien laborers, the insistent cry of "tonnage" and the absorbing demands of business, have offered little opportunity for social study or civic experiment. It is not that Pittsburgh is derelict; her charities are many and generously supported, but Pittsburgh is busy, very busy, and the public have not taken time to think. Nowhere is this ignorance of home conditions more apparent than in the matter of the courts, and especially of the aldermanic courts which are to be considered here. Before aldermen, informations or the formal charges of crime are made. Warrants for arrest issue from their offices. Hearings are held, the defendant is committed to jail, or bail is allowed. Summary convictions may be had before them, so that not only property but personal liberty is subject to their decisions. What this means can readily be understood when it is known that in 1908, 15,879 persons were incarcerated in Allegheny county. To begin with, the whole aldermanic system is an anomaly in the growth of institutions. It is taken from the middle ages, only partly altered, cut, and fitted to modern conditions and a freer people. The origin of the office is obscured in antiquity. In Gothic times they had conservators of the peace, whose duty was, as the name implies, that of keeping the public peace; and during the troublous times when Queen Isabel deposed her husband and put Edward the Third on the throne, the King, fearing a general uprising, sent out writs of peace to all the sheriffs, and Parliament ordained that good men and true be assigned to keep the peace. At the foundation of the Colony of Pennsylvania, the office of justice of the peace was brought over from England, and became an integral part of our governmental institutions. Under successive state constitutions the power of the aldermen and justices of the peace has been gradually enlarged, and their jurisdiction greatly widened. Aldermen are elected for a term of five years. Formerly their jurisdiction was limited to amounts under forty shillings, but gradually it has been increased to $300. In cases where the amount involved is less than $5.33, the equivalent of the old forty shillings, there is no appeal from an alderman's decision. Litigants for so small an amount are in most instances very poor, and a hardship is wrought when such cases are wrongly decided. Another very radical disadvantage of this provision is that it permits the use of such tribunals for purposes of spite and oppression. A landlord recently refused to relet a tenement. An altercation followed which ended in the tenant's saying that he would get even at the squire's office. Thereupon he entered suit for five dollars for an imaginary debt. At the hearing this debt was denied by the landlord. No proof was offered that it existed; nevertheless the justice promptly awarded a judgment for five dollars, and, the amount being less than the old forty shillings, the landlord had no choice but to pay. The very topography of Pittsburgh has influenced the growth of aldermanic litigation. The business district is crowded into a small triangle, hemmed in by two rivers. In consequence the aldermen in the four wards comprising the business section get a tremendous clientele. Furthermore the city has been redistricted and in the future there will be but twenty-seven aldermen, one for each of the new wards, instead of fifty-nine as heretofore. When it is known that some of the downtown aldermen make $12,000 a year from fees, under the present ward arrangement, an idea can be gathered of what will be the income of the aldermanship under the new districting which throws the heart of the business area, approximately the first four former wards, into one new ward. Of course ward lines are important only in the election of aldermen, for once elected their jurisdiction properly exercised extends over the whole county. A case may be put in the hands of any alderman whom the plaintiff may desire. In appearance the average alderman's office is not prepossessing. A counter flanked by a railing, a few chairs, a safe and a number of dockets, compose the usual furniture. The floor is nearly always bare, generally dirty, while outside the appearance of the office is much that of any shop desiring customers. Often an electric sign or gaudy lettering on the building, or other similar device is employed to make the location of the office conspicuous. With few exceptions, the offices are on the lower floors, usually opening like a store directly on the sidewalk. Where the ward boundaries permit, they are put on the main thoroughfares, sometimes so close together as to be within sight of one another, which naturally results in the sharpest kind of competition. The more progressive aldermen indulge in advertising and it is a common sight to see blotters emblazoned with the name or the alderman, his address and telephone numbers, distributed among the downtown offices. Yet these are state judicial offices presiding over subordinate courts! Each alderman has a constable who is elected at the same time and in such ways as makes the office largely political in complexion. In many offices the alderman and the constable do all the work. But in the downtown offices there are usually in addition to the alderman, a docket clerk, a writ clerk, and perhaps two deputies. The constable is not only the major domo, but usually the business getter of the outfit. It is he who mingles with the people of the ward and steers litigation in the direction of his employer. All this is to his benefit, because, like the alderman, his income is derived from fees. Such constables have often made as much as twenty dollars a day in the sections of the city settled by foreigners, but this is not the rule now, partly because the aliens are less ignorant and partly because of the influence of many national, fraternal and charitable organizations. However a conservative estimate of the income of the downtown constables at the present day would be $3,000. The business of an alderman is to get customers, try cases, prepare informations, execute commitments and various other legal documents. In civil cases, it follows from the very organization and jurisdiction of aldermanic courts, and the fact that the litigant may choose his tribunal, that the aldermen are often called upon for legal advice and opinions even in advance of the actual litigation. Each alderman knows that if he advises the complainant that he has no case another alderman will be consulted. If the latter advises suit the costs will go to him. As an alderman depends for his living on fees from litigation instituted in his court, it is not hard to find one who will tell you that you have a good case. Not long ago a landlady and two boarders,--a man and his wife,--became involved in a teapot tempest, during the course of which the landlady pointed a revolver at her boarders. A squire was consulted, who advised an information for surety of the peace. The proceeding under an act of assembly for pointing firearms would perhaps have been proper, but there was clearly no case of surety of the peace. The case came up for hearing and after a long dissertation couched in legal verbiage the squire pronounced his judgment that the case be discharged and the costs divided. The plaintiff, who was represented by an attorney, immediately refused to pay and asked the squire what he was going to do about it (by act of assembly execution cannot issue for costs alone). The squire was nonplussed, and called in his constable. After a whispered consultation, he announced that he had reconsidered and that his final judgment was that the case be discharged and the costs put on the defendant. By this time the defendant had got her cue. She refused to pay, and asked the squire what he was going to do about it. Another whispered consultation followed while the squire scratched his head in perplexity. Another reconsidered judgment was given, this time that the case be discharged and the costs put on the county. Not only do the aldermen give advice concerning prospective cases, but they solicit business and it is very common for them to hold themselves out as collecting agencies. Some aldermen who make a specialty of such work have a printed form reading: Claim against you for $________ has been put in my hands for collection. Pay at once and save yourself costs. If the claim is paid without suit a percentage charge is made for the service; if the defendant ignores the notice the alderman will enter suit. In short, we have here the anomaly of a state judicial officer whose living depends on the business he can drum up, and who can be both counsel, judge and prosecutor. From this it results that when a case is brought in an alderman's court, the alderman, the judge, considers himself in the employ of the plaintiff. At a recent hearing before an alderman, who is without exception one of the most upright and efficient in the city, the evidence of the plaintiff was very uncertain while that of the defendant was clear and convincing. The squire "reserved judgment," which means that he did not wish to give his decision in the presence of both parties. The case had been conducted by an attorney who controlled considerable aldermanic business, and this attorney not long after reaching his office was called to the telephone by the alderman who said in substance: "Now look here Mr.----, if you think you ought to get that money in that case of yours I will pay it myself, but I really cannot find for the plaintiff because I honestly think the defendant has a good defense." Only an incident, but what a flood of light it throws on the attitude of the alderman toward the plaintiff. Few cases are decided otherwise than in favor of the plaintiff. Exactly what proportion can never be known, because our courts have decided that the dockets of aldermen are private records and not open to inspection by the public. One judge on the Common Pleas Bench, a man who has wide experience in such matters, when asked if he thought that as much as one per cent of the cases are decided other than in favor of the plaintiff, replied, "No, not nearly." As a matter of fact judgment is so universally given for the plaintiff that a defendant who has had any previous experience, does not take the trouble to appear at the hearing, but if he desires to contest the matter, takes an appeal from the alderman's decision. It is a wise requirement of law that a plaintiff must make out his case affirmatively, proving all the matters essential to constitute liability on the part of the defendant. It is a matter of common knowledge, however, that aldermen give judgment on evidence of the most meager kind. A copy of a bill, its correctness unsworn to, left with the alderman is a common way of obtaining judgment for goods sold and delivered. Suits may be entered before more than one alderman, and in such cases although but one execution may issue, a defendant can be harried by threats and a multiplicity of summonses. In such cases, aldermen and their constables although legally without power, may when in league with unscrupulous creditors, be the cause of the greatest injustice. Cases have been known where constables, although knowing that a levy could not be made, would, nevertheless, frequently visit the house of the defendant, post notices of sale, demand admittance in the middle of the night, and in many other petty ways harass the defendant in the hope of forcing the payment of their costs. It is well known that much hardship is done in Pittsburgh through the instrumentality of what are known as "loan sharks," who lend small amounts at usurious rates of interest, taking as security assignments of future wages, bills of sale of household furniture, and other personal belongings. The defendants in such cases, although they are protected by law, are usually poor and ignorant, have little knowledge of legal procedure and fall an easy prey to the threats of such unscrupulous creditors. It can readily be understood how much such usurers are assisted by unscrupulous aldermen and constables. Primary in importance to the alderman is the problem of getting his costs. Not long ago a well-to-do man residing in the residential section bought some cider from a huckster and ordered some apples. The cider was left in the barrel and the apples were to be brought the following day. When they came they were refused because of their poor quality. The huckster in a rage demanded the barrel in which he had left the cider, although both the apples and the cider had been paid for. He was told he could have it in a day or two, as soon as it could be emptied. He left to seek the advice of a squire who advised him to make an information for larceny by bailee (the technical term meaning larceny of goods temporarily in one's possession). He did so and a warrant was issued for the defendant's arrest. He was arrested and appeared at the alderman's office with bondsmen. Bail was refused by the alderman on one pretext and another and the defendant was told that if he would pay the costs the alderman would see to it that the whole matter was dropped. Before the hearing the squire had gone to the defendant's business office and told him that if he would pay the costs the matter could be fixed. Needless to say, rather than spend a night in jail while new bail was being secured, the victim paid the costs, preferring to be mulcted a few dollars than to incur the notoriety and annoyance of carrying the matter to a higher court. Under such manipulation it is not difficult to see how large a volume of litigation may be instituted in the aldermanic courts. Of course this case is exceptional and there are many aldermen who never seek business or advise frivolous litigation, but even without it the volume of business is incredibly large. Some of the downtown aldermen have had as many as 500 civil cases brought in their courts in a month. Of course if there is any real controversy involved the case is appealed, but in practically all the cases the costs are paid either on appeal or by execution, the law making costs a first lien on the fund realized. A compilation of the costs paid in three hundred cases shows the average costs in each case to be $3.74. Formerly these costs had to be paid before the appeal could be taken, but by a late act an appeal can be taken without payment of the costs, if satisfactory bail be given for debt, interest and costs. However, the act works little benefit, because the alderman is the judge of the sufficiency of the bail and has it in his power to reject bondsmen until it is quicker and easier to pay the costs than bother over the allowance of bail. So that, as a matter of fact, the costs are always paid on appeal. Taking the downtown aldermen's offices where the cases sometimes number 500 in a month, the income from fees would be about $1,800 a month, which after allowance for fixed charges would leave a monthly profit to these downtown aldermen of about $1,000 in civil suits alone.[5] [5] The costs reckoned above are without execution, which when issued would swell the costs by a couple of dollars, making an average of probably six dollars. To these fees, to form some estimate of the income derived from some alderman-ships, should be added the costs paid in criminal cases which an average of one hundred cases taken at random from the criminal docket of a prominent downtown alderman show to be $4.15 in each case. In criminal cases, if the defendant is discharged the alderman's costs are paid by the county. This procedure further adds to the revenue of the office. In 1907 the county paid to the various aldermen and justices of the peace the sum of $17,884.40 for costs in such discharged criminal cases, and to sundry officers in such cases $8,840.05, or a total of $26,724.45. To one alderman alone, having an office in a downtown section largely settled by Negroes and the poorer classes, $1,711.55 was paid in 1907 by the county as costs in such discharged criminal cases brought in his office. For miscellaneous work, criminal and otherwise, fees are paid in accordance with a schedule set by a recent act of assembly, that of 1893. Some of the main items are given below. ALDERMEN'S FEES. For information or complaint on behalf of the commonwealth $.50 Docket entry on behalf of the commonwealth .25 Warrant .50 Hearing in criminal cases .50 Taking bail in criminal cases .50 Entering judgment .50 Discharge of jailer .35 Hearing parties .50 Holding inquisition under landlord and tenant act 2.00 Entering action in civil case .25 Summons .25 Entering satisfaction .15 Written notice in any case .25 Execution .30 Transcript of judgment .05 Return of proceedings on certiorari 1.00 Receiving the amount of judgment: If not over $10 .25 $10 to $40 .50 $40 to $60 .75 $60 to $100 1.00 Assignment and making record indenture .50 Marrying each couple and certificates 5.00 CONSTABLES FEES. Executing warrant $1.00 Conveying defendants to jail 1.00 For executing bail piece 1.00 Executing search warrants 1.00 For serving subpoena .50 For arresting on a capias 1.00 For notifying plaintiff where defendant has been arrested .25 For advertising sale of goods 1.00 For holding appraisement where exemption is claimed 4.00 For attending election 3.00 For travelling expenses in the performance of any duty required by law, for each mile travelled .06 It is evident that the office is lucrative, and lucrative just in proportion to the ability of the alderman to get customers. The anomaly extends to every branch of the office,--a state judicial officer with an income depending on the volume of the litigation instituted in his office. It was a wise provision of the Legislature that permitted appeals by right, rather than by allowance, providing the amount involved is over $5.33. Practically all cases therefore involving any real controversy are appealed. A defendant is given twenty days in which to take his appeal. The procedure is simple, a transcript or copy of the alderman's record is obtained, the costs paid or bail given for debt, interest and costs, and the transcript then filed in the higher court where the case is begun over again just as if it had not been already tried. As the discretion of the alderman in allowance of bail is a factor, the costs are generally paid at the time the appeal is taken. In any case, they must be paid then or when the appeal is disposed of. If they are not paid at the time the appeal is taken, when the case is disposed of in the higher court, the alderman's costs are kept out of the amount realized and may be demanded by the alderman, his transcript being the evidence from which the higher court determines what disposition has been made of the costs. Cases have come to the writer's attention where although the costs were paid at the time of taking the appeal yet the alderman's transcript has been endorsed, "Costs not paid by defendant." If such a transcript were filed without the detection of the error, upon final disposition of the case the alderman would be in a position to demand his costs a second time from the prothonotary of the higher court and receive double pay. Remembering that every case appealed from an alderman is retried, with costs to be paid over again, it is interesting to consider how much time is occupied by the Common Pleas Courts in such review work. In Allegheny there are four Common Pleas Courts. As the courts are separate and independent, litigation may be commenced in any one of them. So great has been the litigation in recent years that all these courts are far behind in their work, two being at least four years behind, the others at least two. Taking at random a term,--three months' business,--in one of the courts which is four years behind, we find 1,342 docket entries. It would be safe to say that about 1,000 entries would represent new suits, which should in due course result in jury trials. Of these 322 were cases appealed from aldermen, _i. e._ work already done and paid for, to be done over again. In these cases counting the costs actually paid we have a total of $1,322.08, and this in one term of one court. There are four terms to each court and four courts. The time occupied in retrying appeals from aldermen can be appreciated. In 1897 it was estimated that one-fourth of the work of the Common Pleas Courts consisted of the re-trial of such appeals with an aggregate of about $12,000 paid for costs in such cases prior to their determination in the Common Pleas Courts. From the figures previously given it appears that the proportion is about the same now although the increase in the volume of litigation has swelled the costs to about $15,000. Taking four consecutive terms, one at each court, we find 667 alderman's appeals in the two courts which are four years behind, and 105 alderman's appeals in the two courts which are two years behind. By law an affidavit is required with each appeal that it is not taken for delay, but the above figures indicate that this oath is disregarded. So much for civil matters, where only money and time are involved. It is the criminal side of the alderman's court where liberty is involved, that arouses greatest sympathy. Summary convictions, or proceedings under special statutes where the aldermen can impose a fine and commit to jail on default, and proceedings for the determination of the existence of the essentials of a crime, comprise the criminal jurisdiction of an alderman just as it stood in the reign of Edward III in the fourteenth century. Criminal proceedings generally are instituted by a warrant of arrest issuing upon a complaint under oath,--an information. From this information made before the alderman a warrant issues on which the accused is taken into custody. A hearing must then promptly be held; and the alderman decides whether there is sufficient evidence to hold the defendant for court; if so the prisoner is held for bail if the offense is bailable, or committed to jail in default. The alderman must then within five days return a transcript of this proceeding to a clerk of the Court of Quarter Sessions, this court being the criminal court of the county. Considerable hardship may be done by the failure of the alderman to return his record within the five days required by law; cases have been known where through neglect prisoners have been kept in jail a month before the matter has been brought to the attention of the district attorney's office and the alderman made to produce his papers. It will thus be seen that although the alderman acts in this respect only as a committing magistrate, yet on his decision rests whether the prisoner be committed to jail; for although the offense may be bailable the question of bail in the case of poor people is very material. The writer has known cases where bail has been set at $1,000 on an information for assault and battery. The power to arrest is a very important one which under any circumstances should be exercised only with sound discretion. One constable in Pittsburgh arrested a foreigner at night. Having no warrant he took him to an alderman's office, where he found the alderman out, and pretentiously used the telephone to locate him, with no results. Then substantially the following conversation took place: "Now ---- you, I will be the squire myself," taking his place behind the railing. "How much money have you?" The prisoner was found to have a few dollars on his person. "Well you are fined $---- (the exact amount the prisoner had with him) and discharged. Now get out." The fine was pocketed and the prisoner permitted to go. It is probable that the constable was drunk, but the abuse is only the more apparent. In another case an educated German was studying manufacturing methods and spent much time in the neighborhood of the steel mills. One evening he saw an alderman's constable, whom he knew by sight, on a street car handcuffed to a prisoner. With Teutonic curiosity he asked the details of the case. The constable, who was under the influence of liquor, beckoned the German over to him and deftly handcuffed him also. The German, of course, thought the affair a little joke. He was, however, taken to jail, but refused by the warden, because there was no warrant for his confinement. The constable then took the prisoner outside, and when they reached Diamond street asked him how much money he had. The German really had $600 or $700 on his person, but replied that he had only a few dollars, producing some bills and small change. The constable told him he would release him for $3.50. This the German paid and got his liberty. The latter was leaving the city the next day and, as he was a steel expert representing a foreign government, could not possibly remain to prosecute the constable. It is not likely that such abuses are common, but their existence indicates the possibilities of abuse of a system which provides for no form of supervision. There are costs connected with all these criminal matters. These costs the defendant if guilty is supposed to pay. But the fact that an alderman entertains a frivolous information does not prevent his being paid for his work. If the case is discharged the county pays. If the prisoner is committed and the case ignored by the grand jury the county pays. The percentage of bills ignored by the grand jury is sometimes as high as seventy-two per cent. This means that seventy-two per cent of persons brought before the alderman have either been put in jail or held for bail on evidence not sufficient for the basing of an indictment. In all such cases the aldermen are secured in their costs, and as we have seen in 1907 the costs returned in such discharged criminal cases to the various aldermen and justices of the peace and sundry officers amounted to $26,724.45. Taking the year 1907, we find that for the support of the criminal court the county was put to a net expense of about $150,000. By law aldermen must pay over to the county all or sometimes a proportion of fines collected depending on the special act of assembly. These fines are supposed to be voluntarily accounted for, and up to very recently very little attempt was made to test the accuracy of such returns. In 1896, however, the county controller inaugurated a system of auditing the criminal dockets of aldermen for the better ascertainment of the county's share of such fines. The returns that year increased seventy-five per cent and have been increasing steadily ever since, although in 1907 the total amount returned to the controller in such cases was but $3,714.20. In brief the whole aldermanic system is defective. At the threshold we find an office the income of which is derived from fees, depending upon the volume of business. Plaintiffs are customers, the more the merrier. Impartiality is impossible, and decision on merits almost unheard of. The fee system, which causes the injustice and corruption, has come down to us from colonial times, a relic of the days when the public purse was too lean to permit paying salaries to minor judicial officers. From a wise public economy this fee system has become, with the growth of the country, a source both of injustice and of extreme expense to the public at large. It should have been abandoned long ago, but through the indifference of the public and the political influence of the aldermen it remains and flourishes. The second radical defect of the aldermanic system is that the office is mixed with politics. An effort was made a few years ago to abolish the aldermanic courts, and it is a matter of history how sudden a death the movement met at the state capital. One of the judges of the county bench in discussing the matter recently expressed the opinion that no act of assembly could be passed to remedy the situation, because of the political influence of the aldermen. It has been the boast of this country that the judiciary is not swayed by politics, but here in the subordinate courts we have a branch of the judiciary so steeped in politics that the squire's office as a campaign center and a place of political organizing rivals the saloon. Third, we have the almost ludicrous case of judicial officers who with noteworthy exceptions are not learned in the law, are sometimes uncouth, generally ignorant, and have made their mistakes, not only in law, but in grammar, a source of constant lampooning. These are proverbial. The grave decisions of the higher courts that aldermen are state judicial officers presiding over judicial courts has a flavor of irony. Fourth, the geographical distribution of these courts, and their concurrent jurisdiction, permit plaintiffs by taking their cases to the outlying wards to use aldermanic courts for purposes of annoyance and spite, permit competition among the aldermen, and result in a general demoralization. We are driven to three conclusions: that the aldermanic system as found in Pittsburgh is always extravagant, that it is generally inefficient, that it is often corrupt. Were the minor litigation handled by an efficient tribunal, not only would respect for law among the masses be restored, but the county courts would be relieved of a considerable portion of their work, and thus be enabled to clear their crowded calendars. This would remedy at one stroke an abuse, and solve a problem which occupies the attention of the whole bench and bar. Pittsburgh is not alone in this problem. Conditions in Chicago a few years ago were similar. Their justice of the peace system had outgrown its justification, had become corrupt and woefully inefficient. Nothing had been done because of the political power of the justices and the necessity of an amendment of the state constitution. But the people took up the problem in a way that brought something about. The state constitution was amended, a municipal court organized, and as a result Chicago, in an incredibly short time, got rid of most of the evils of the old system. The Chicago solution was a municipal court of a distinctive type. A chief justice and twenty-seven associate judges with salaries, preside over a court having branches in the chief centers of the city. The court in its first six months disposed of 40,610 cases, of which but ninety-two were carried to the State Appellant Court. The Pittsburgh problem is that of creating a system along lines which would serve Pittsburgh as well or better, and which would link efficiency with expedition, impartiality and economy,--a system which would obtain immediate justice for the poor and the uninformed, and would remedy the overworked condition of the county courts. Such a system would save the public thousands of dollars a year. THE CHARITIES OF PITTSBURGH FRANCIS H. McLEAN SECRETARY FIELD DEPARTMENT FOR ORGANIZED CHARITY, CHARITIES PUBLICATION COMMITTEE The city of Pittsburgh at the time of this survey possessed six private relief societies which dealt with more than 1,000 families a year each; three which dealt with between 500 and 1,000 families, and a Department of Charities whose cases numbered over 1,000. In addition, relief was given to a number of individuals by some of the settlements, by the probation officers, and by private groups. The number relieved or the amount of material relief were not ascertained and could not be in less than from one to three years. It has developed also that other associations, whose original purposes were of a different character, some purely educational, have had smaller or larger funds to use for relief. In the summer of 1908 requests for information were sent to 422 churches. Of these sixty-one replied and of this number sixty reported that they gave relief. The more one went into this investigation, the more one appreciated the impossibility of concretely recording the number of organizations dealing in material relief. Without in the least attempting to theorize, but drawing the obvious conclusion, it may be said that Pittsburgh's primary charitable impulses to give to the poor were being disintegrated because there was no sufficient relation between the groups and no feeling of joint responsibility. In presenting a rough picture of the whole charitable field in Pittsburgh it is doubtless necessary to remind those who read this that, if the survey had been undertaken in another city, conditions similar in many respects would have been found. Though in certain directions better co-ordination would be found, and in certain other directions developments which are not here present, the fact remains that in all our cities charitable societies simply "grew." Taken in the large there are gaping rents and holes, discordant colors and bad cloth in the fabric of each city's garment. Without the repression of a single individual impulse of the right sort, the writer seriously questions whether eventually we shall not have to apply the rigorous precepts of town planning to the work of proper co-ordination and systematization of charities. Coming to medical care and nursing, the city on October 1, 1908, had fourteen general and seven special hospitals, including two supported by the city for contagious diseases. Fourteen of these reported a total property valuation of $6,848,339; nineteen a bed capacity of 2,268. Thirteen reported their number of free patients for the previous fiscal year as 10,135, the cost of maintenance of these free patients as $339,518. The capacity will soon be increased. Twelve of the above hospitals maintained dispensaries. In addition there were three dispensaries independent of hospital management. One of the three reported patients to the number of 1,955 for one year, another 5,647, the third, a state dispensary for tubercular patients, at the time of the Survey, had not completed a year's work. A valuation of the property could not be obtained. Not included above is the tuberculosis camp maintained by the Department of Charities at the county institutions at Marshalsea. Nine agencies provided nurses to visit the homes of the poor. Of these three were distinct organizations, one only being chartered; two were carried by settlement house associations, two as departments of church work, one by a religious order, and one by a school alumnæ association. So far as observations go the specialized work itself was well done. Yet the nursing associations may be specifically accused of such failure of co-ordination that the nurses were constantly crossing one another's tracks, visiting the same families, instead of having worked out, jointly, a district plan. The welfare of children is of course involved in the agencies named above. In addition there are no less than forty and possibly more institutions for their care. For the especial oversight of children within family circle influences, there is the Juvenile Court Association, two playground associations, and the Children's Aid Society of Allegheny County. These, and other agencies are described in the special article on children. For the joint care of mothers and children there are six fresh air homes and six day nurseries. There are ten institutions to provide temporary shelter, principally, for both men and women. The general intention of these agencies is to set upon their feet people who are without immediate home ties and so return them to normal conditions. Coming to the aged where the fair chance may consist simply in providing suitable institutional care, we find for them no less than eight homes, exclusive of the care provided in the city institutions of Pittsburgh located at Marshalsea and Claremont (formerly a part of the municipality of Allegheny). Six rescue homes for unfortunate women next come into the field of observation. Outside of the necessary care provided by public moneys, there would seem to be very little private provision for the care of defectives, there being for this class only one institution, a home for epileptics. A public wash and bath association, as well as a widows' home association, provide other forms of self-help to women particularly. The former furnishes women with tubs and driers to use for the washes which produce income. The latter lets nineteen houses with a total of 110 rooms at a small rental to the families of widows with limited means, thus providing pleasant sanitary quarters in a good neighborhood. It is significant of the confusion prevailing that even this last association has developed special relief funds of its own. A legal aid society has lately been organized. To this point we have been enumerating associations which, while possessing social purposes, have embodied in their fundamental aims some form of direct relief, material or otherwise, to the individual. There are other agencies purely for social reform which should be cataloged. These associations are primarily concerned with certain forms of so-called preventive philanthropy. The Civic Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the six settlements, the tuberculosis league, the child labor association, have all dealt with specific social problems, to say nothing of the endeavors of the Health Bureau in fighting improper drainage, bad housing and preventable disease and of the city administration in struggling for a better water supply and the diminution of typhoid fever. While both the child agencies and the social reform agencies last cataloged find their proper positions in other lines of the Survey, it is necessary that they be included in this bird's eye view of the whole charity organism. Drawing closer now to the organism from our bird's eye view, we observe four plainly marked divisions. The classification here made is not one which appears in any directory of charities but it is one which is peculiarly adapted to a survey of a field. A different analysis would be required for other kinds of study. We find then four lines of activity: (1) Treatment of Families in their Homes, (2) Neighborhood Aid, (3) Indoor Relief, (4) Social Aid. By (1) we refer not only to material relief but also to all other forms of aid, medical, legal, advisory, in fact to any dealing with individual families in their homes, whether the treatment be mental, moral, physical or environmental. It is with this group that this study deals. By (2) we refer to the satisfaction of the needs of neighborhoods rather than of individuals: to the general activities of settlements, of bath houses, etc., so far as those activities are not manifested in direct civic and social reforms. Of course (3) refers to all forms of institutional care, temporary or permanent,--for children or adults. Number (4) refers to all agencies or activities for civic or social reform. The last three groups are considered in detail by other contributors to the work of the general survey. In Pittsburgh as in other cities the philosophy of individualized charity still holds strongly its position. Individualized charity as against social charity involves the idea that what one does concerns only the doer and the "done to." That necessarily associated with charity is the function of umpire and director has occurred only to the larger societies. In the three last fields of our classification everything tends towards organization of a public character. The very end to be obtained, whether it be to provide hospital care, baths or child labor legislation, requires the co-operation of many people and with co-operation and the more or less resultant publicity the organizers must inevitably sense some sort of public responsibility. In the treatment of families in their homes, however, no such fundamental need of publicity exists. Therefore it is that many people, having perceived human suffering, without thought of the importance of co-relation, of adequate knowledge, or of umpiring, took the easy means of giving money and food and clothing without recognition of anything beyond. Thus, possibly hundreds of individuals and groups are serving simply as distributors of material things. It is true that one of the relief associations maintained a registration system by which people might learn what others were doing for a family, but the information was concerned mostly with the giving or withholding of material relief. More than that, it can scarcely be said that this registration system was sufficiently advertised or advertised with sufficient continuity. Even in communities where a charity organization society continuously advertises its registration system, there is still revealed a wide crudeness of thought which is crippling to any sort of decent social progress. In the city where the confidential exchange of information between societies has been best developed it is a fact that scarcely more than a score of churches register regularly. By not doing so the churches everywhere have put themselves in the wrong, they have not recognized the very sacred and high social function which is involved and which so vitally concerns the social welfare. For it will be observed that there is nothing in the recognition of the high social function which favors the centralization of relief work of any sort. It means only that there shall be a working out together of the family problems and an estimation of the remedies to be applied. Both with the smaller groups and with the larger societies the lack of co-operation has resulted in rather confused umpiring and in the application of wrong remedies. For instance it has been revealed that able-bodied men, with families, have been aided through the public charities department. What they needed and should have had was the careful attention of some private society which would bend every energy to provide work for them. Whatever conditions were responsible for the unemployment of these men (at a time when there was no particular industrial depression) there was only one way of treating them so that their own sense of initiative would not be lost. That was through one of the several private agencies to provide absolutely necessary amounts of relief to each man while pushing him into work. But with certain striking exceptions each one of the agencies was working along irrespective of the activities of others. Few societies felt that to be brought in touch with a family should mean the acceptance of the responsibility for furnishing or securing the total necessary amount of relief, material or otherwise, which might be required. As a field investigator has written: Previous to the organization of the Associated Charities in February, 1908, no center of information existed, and there was practically no attempt at co-operation among the different relief agencies. Indeed, it was tacitly understood, if not openly expressed, that families applying for aid to any agency would go to others. One city official expressed the feeling when he said, "Of course, they go to other societies; we don't give them enough to live on." The shape of the city made communication between the different districts often very difficult in the days before the telephone, and habits formed then are not wholly outlived. The main thoroughfares follow the general direction of the two rivers. These become widely separated by high hills as they extend back from the business district on the "Point," and often one must either go a long way round or climb over to get from one section to another. It was very easy for a family to have its rent paid by a church, to get groceries from the city charities, to secure a nurse if needed, besides miscellaneous aid from one or more societies and charitably inclined individuals without any one of these organizations or persons knowing that another was helping. From May 1, 1908, to September 20, 1908, the Associated Charities investigated 216 families. Of these thirty were "out-of-town" cases and twelve were false addresses, leaving 174 cases tabulated for comparison. The following shows the number of these cases duplicated by different societies and is probably a fair sample of the overlapping constantly going on: No. of cases helped by 11 societies 2 No. of cases helped by 7 societies 2 No. of cases helped by 6 societies 3 No. of cases helped by 5 societies 17 No. of cases helped by 4 societies 12 No. of cases helped by 3 societies 20 No. of cases helped by 2 societies 23 -- Total 79 A more thorough investigation than was possible with the limited number of workers would have shown that many of these cases were also receiving aid from one or more churches or individuals. It should be remembered that this comparatively small list of duplication, only covers the cases where actual investigations were made by the society itself and not the many duplications revealed in the registering of from 7,000 to 9,000 cases. The reason why no tabulations were made of these was that, owing to the incomplete registration, the returns could represent but a very incomplete set of facts much less than in the case of the families actually seen. Duplication of relief without thorough investigations, it need hardly be said, may mean one of two things. It may mean in one instance the dowering of a family which needs something else than financial aid, or it may mean, in another, the inadequate dowering which compels an otherwise decent family to beg from different quarters, thus inculcating the begging habit. It is not an unjustifiable theory to advance that it probably meant the one just as often as it meant the other in the Pittsburgh field because there had not been, previous to the coming of the Associated Charities, those frank and informal conferences between workers in the different societies, which alone can bring about that joint planning for the same families which is not only economic but just and not only just, but humane. Every charity organization society in the country can match these stories of the evils resulting from the lack of a feeling of complete responsibility, which means inevitably unfair umpiring and often no direction at all. For how can there be direction when not all that is being done is known, and when the manner and the character of the remedies are held secret. The Associated Charities workers do not claim that with their presence the uncooperative effects disappear as at the touch of a wand, but that means to bring about complete and, if need be, joint responsibility for doing the right and complete thing for each family is furnished through their offices as meeting places and neutral ground. The great weakness in the treatment of families in their homes, other than in medical and nursing care, is in the lack of thorough knowledge regarding the individual causes of conditions, the individual characteristics and connections and resources (other than material) of families, and a planning upon this knowledge. There is no need to draw illustrations from the Pittsburgh field because they can be drawn from every city, even where a greater degree of co-operation has been developed. There is the instance of the aged mother, once a successful boarding house keeper, assisted by a society to re-establish herself in this business though her increasing infirmities doomed the project to failure. This failure brought not only the mother but her widowed daughter (herself in poor health) and two children into the direst of situations. Then it was found that the money had actually been thrown away because a certain well-to-do-relative in another city had not been followed up. The clue which led in his direction had been covered up during a hurried investigation. When he was informed through correspondence of the situation he immediately made provision for the mother in his own home and for the temporary care of the others until the daughter recovered her health. There is the instance of a man and wife, the man apparently recovering from tuberculosis. No careful physical examination was made either of the husband or wife. Various attempts at finding employment for the husband were made but he began to fail. Then suddenly the wife's condition became alarming and it was discovered that she was in a more advanced stage of the disease than her husband. Meantime the couple had not been assisted in tracing the whereabouts of the husband's parents, supposed to be well-to-do. In the end, fortunately, the couple themselves received word from the parents who were in California prepared to receive the family (which included three young children) and to provide care for the sufferers and if the worst came to give a home to the children. There are the many instances, where material relief has been given to sickly families and the improper sanitation of the neighborhood or the imperfect disinfection of the houses, the causes of the conditions, have not been investigated and rectified. There are the instances where a family, left as the result of an industrial accident without its male bread winner, has not had the kind of assistance which would enable it to secure the proper settlement with the particular industrial plant in which the death occurred. There are the instances where the wayward boy has not been given the specialized training which might have turned him into an interested workman with a constantly increasing salary. There are the instances where widows have been allowed to carry too heavy burdens and where, unknowingly, children have been put illegally to work, through holes in the laws which should be blocked up. There are instances where with the failure to see the male bread winners the whole moral and physical condition of the families has rotted because shiftlessness and intemperance have been allowed to run riot. There are the instances where endless evil has developed when the most hardened of beggars, because of their very vociferousness, have been permitted to set an example of easy living to the honest and toiling people in a whole community. There are the instances where material relief has not been followed by agencies for the development of a better family life: better cooking, better home keeping, a larger fund of recreation, more harmony, better individual development, more thrift. In other words, such a development that there need not again be descent below normal living. In Pittsburgh as elsewhere there has been too much reliance upon visits to the families and upon a superficial sizing up of conditions. As a result there has been too little development of treatment beyond the mere giving or withholding of material relief and of medical and nursing relief. Notable exceptions there are, but on the whole it can but be said that material relief alone, and that in many instances by no means adequate, has bulked too large. The same must be said of outdoor relief everywhere. To-day it requires as much attention for its right development as any other field of social effort. It cannot be said that the outdoor relief agencies of Pittsburgh have been as effective as educators of the community and directors of its charitable impulses as they would have been with proper co-operation. On their own initiative they are now putting an amount of effort, and brains, and heart into the work of co-operation which assures far more definite results when the new order has established itself. For instance, it would have been possible, with proper co-ordination, for the relief agencies to gather a vast mass of data regarding dependency wrought or deepened by two social evils to which Pittsburgh is prone, the prevalence of typhoid fever and the number of uncompensated industrial accidents. It was not possible for those engaged in this survey to obtain any satisfactory data as to the approximate number of applications for aid, due, superficially at least, to these two causes. They have also been unable to obtain reliably complete data regarding the prevalence of tuberculosis in the families to which a helping hand has been extended. Nor could data regarding centers of infection and probable inciting causes of this disease be obtained. It was not possible to ascertain in how many instances physically weakened young men and women could trace as one of the causes of their condition, too early labor for wages. It was not possible to learn in how many families the mental backwardness of the children could be traced to physical condition. Nor, it must again be re-emphasized, do the relief agencies of other cities live up to their responsibilities in this direction. There have been many cities visited by the writer where long established charities, with fairly complete records and with a covering of practically the whole field, have not held in compact shape the illustrations to furnish the background which might cause people to hearken more quickly than anything else. A society, which among other activities, maintained a tuberculosis committee, was unable even to state the number of families, with whom it had come in contact, in which cases of tuberculosis had been discovered. Another city, where there was tolerably good co-operation, and where there had been considerable interest manifested in the housing problem, could not tell from its records, just where in certain specified neighborhoods the most unsanitary houses were located. The writer in this case felt personally responsible so that his position as critic must not be misunderstood. To put it plainly the Survey has only revealed again that in the whole field of outdoor relief there must be a deeper realization of the fact that as umpires in the discrimination of causes, as workers in the right forms of treatment, and as educators in revealing true conditions, there is a very heavy responsibility which all who in any way deal with the dependent or neglected in their homes, must feel. It is because their work brings them into the homes that the responsibility is the greater. Credit is due to the devoted services of many of the workers in Pittsburgh for their own self-sacrifices in order to do satisfactory work. They themselves felt the limitations which the environment of isolation had brought about and they had determined effectively to break the isolation. They alone know the amount of thoroughly good work which has been done in the past. Nor must it be forgotten that during those days of isolation the Association for the Improvement of the Poor steadily maintained a registration system which was used by not a few societies. Illustrations of thoroughly adequate treatment along the lines of material and other relief may be found in this association as well as of others. The idea of co-operation and adequate treatment was there but it required development through united action. Still considering particularly those agencies brought into the families of the poor because of material needs, we can get a much clearer picture of the actual policies involved in their work by an examination of their methods. A description of the modes of procedure of the more important societies will therefore find its place here: City Department of Charities: Relief in the homes is given in groceries, coal and shoes. The method of distribution varies slightly in the two offices: In Pittsburgh baskets containing flour, ham, potatoes, coffee, sugar and soap, valued at two dollars retail price, but costing the department less are given once in two weeks, while on the North Side orders are given on local dealers for the same amount, two dollars. Applicants come to the offices for baskets and stand in line to secure them; among them children were noticed daily. All the cases are supposed to be investigated by a visitor, and the findings reported to the examiner, who decides whether relief shall be given or not. No systematic re-investigation is made and a case continues to receive aid indefinitely although as many cases as possible are dropped at the end of the year. Society 1: Material relief is given in practically the same way as by the city charities, though the amounts are not so uniformly fixed. With exceptions the work however deals largely with the basic needs of families. Special attention is given to some tuberculosis cases. There is investigation by field workers. Society 2: Only general information possible. Average of expenditure to each applicant was a little less than two dollars. Instances were cited of payment of tuition, pensions, etc., and in one case of the purchasing of a tent and necessary equipment to enable a young man with tuberculosis to live in the fresh air. Volunteer investigators. Society 3: This organization's work included the distribution of bushels of coal, meals, free lodging, baskets of provisions, bowls of soup, garments and shoes, blankets, hospital and medical care, transportation secured, families moved, rent secured and paid, gas bills paid, Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets. Society 4: Another important society confines its work largely though not entirely to the giving of baskets of groceries and clothing. Its reports also show expenditures for tuition and board of orphans, burial expenses, etc. The report for the year 1907 showed the number of families aided to be 355, and the amount of money spent $6,562. Volunteer investigators. Society 5: Baskets of groceries, value fifty cents each, are given each week and one load (twenty-five bushels) of coal each month. Rent is also paid in many cases "often for months." Employment is secured whenever possible. Passing from the general agencies to the church societies (which do not ordinarily keep records in any city and which therefore are not included in the consideration of that subject though logically they should be), we find no complete records of work done on the part of the sixty-one churches reporting last summer except that twenty-nine were helping 491 families and that the amount of relief expended by thirty-four was $7,595.29. Under the head of remarks there were indications of some diversification from the stereotyped forms of relief. One church was educating a "bright young girl." One was loaning money. But encouraging as these instances might appear they are offset, by the story of a church worker who had been helping a family for fifteen years without seeing the husband. The thoroughness with which treatment is carried out is partially indicated by the character of the records kept, though good forms may oftentimes cover poor work. On the following page are given typical samples of forms used by three of the more prominent agencies. Below is presented the more exhaustive standard case record card used by some societies in other cities: [Illustration] [Illustration: I.--Meager blank used by Pittsburgh Department of Public Charities.] [Illustration: II.--Blank formerly used by Allegheny City Department of Public Charities,--a much more complete record, abandoned since the merging of the cities.] [Illustration: III.--Blank used by private agency.] The systems pursued by other prominent Pittsburgh agencies are as follows: Society A. Names, addresses, number in family, and religion are noted on blank cards, or written in books. Society B. Record system not in existence. No paid worker. Only record of names and amounts. Society C. Record of cases very meager, consisting only of names and addresses, with a few items of information, such as the number of children, whether married, single, widow or deserted, on cards. Society D. No systematic records. Society E. Clear general statements as to money received and expended but no case records. In addition to such a record card these societies have so called continuation sheets on which chronologically are entered all information or advice obtained and all action taken. It is apparent that there can be no systematic knowledge of families unless there is such systematic keeping of records. The separation of families into the worthy and unworthy can nowhere be found in such records, which reveal instead the innermost causes, the remedies for the removal of the causes and the resources, material or otherwise, at hand to effect the removal. In other words the three fold function; umpire of the fight itself, determiner of immediate remedies, educator of the community to give a fairer show in the future, can only be carried out with such systematic recording. After three months' effort it was found impossible to furnish any approximation of the amount spent annually for material and other outdoor relief in the city of Pittsburgh. These partial returns were obtained: (_Spent in_ _their last fiscal year_ _Agency._ _before the depression._) 9 (of 10) General Relief Societies $78,257.00 City Department of Charities 52,037.11(8 Mos.) 54 (of 422) Churches 22,161.00 4 (of 9) Nursing Societies 7,223.00[6] [6] Exclusive of private relief fund. It is unfortunate, that owing to lack of co-ordination there has been a confusion of function between outdoor relief and neighborhood agencies. Many of the latter have possessed distinctly relief funds and have been relief agencies. It is doubtful if this has been anything but a disadvantage to them. It has divided their attention between two totally different sorts of problems, two sorts which require above all else, concentration. The general isolation of the field has driven them, in many instances, thus to protect their own neighborhoods against neglect. But they have been unable in many instances to deal with these tasks adequately, and their larger feeling of social responsibility has not enabled them to build up much better plans for individual care than agencies, directly charged with this burden. They have been hampered by their own relief efforts and their legitimate work has suffered thereby. They have felt much more clearly their responsibilities as umpires of the social struggle and educators of the social conscience, than the great bulk of the strictly relief agencies. The confusion of their function, before mentioned, has been, it would appear, a rather unfortunate departure which still further muddied a not clear stream. With reference to the organization of the Associated Charities, it may be stated that the demand for it came both from the reputable societies themselves and the business community, the heavy contributors to charity. Greater harmony of action, greater efficiency in action, these were the common aims of the coalition. Several attempts had been made during the past ten years to place the charitable work of Pittsburgh on an organized basis, but without tangible results until February 21, 1908, when the Associated Charities received its charter. Its office was opened April 22 and the work of securing the co-operation of individuals, churches, relief societies and other charitable agencies, began. The society has grown rapidly along lines of work successfully followed by similar organizations in 172 American cities. It is already serving as a center of intercommunication between churches, social and charitable organizations, institutions and individuals who are interested in charitable and social service. It has already done much towards systematizing the charitable work of the city, with a view of checking the evils of unorganized charity and of making every charitable dollar do one hundred cents' worth of charitable work. While the force and equipment of the new association are necessarily small, they are growing, and the association hopes to increase its facilities, so as to keep pace with the rapidly increasing, heavy demand upon it. The constitution of this organization provides for a central council, in addition to the usual board of trustees. The council consists of one delegate elected by each of the charitable, religious and social agencies which have joined the Associated Charities. Besides these delegates, the central council includes, as ex-officio members, the mayor, director of the Department of Charities, director of public safety, director of public works, superintendent of the Bureau of Health, and superintendent of the Bureau of Police. The province of the council is to promote the development of co-operation between individual societies, to pass upon questions affecting the general welfare of the poor and the charitable activities of the city. By October 31, 1908, thirty-one societies were affiliated in the central council and the registration bureau contained 7,039 records. The bylaws of the society provide that anything which involves the welfare of the city or its social conditions may become its concern. Thus as the servant of the charitable agencies of the city it will often serve as the rallying point for social advance though it would be the last to affirm that it will be the only rallying point for the general spirit of good feeling which is slowly manifesting itself among the social organizations of the city. By the presence of this co-operating center, the co-ordination of the work of the charities of Pittsburgh should bring about: 1. Adequate material relief, when actually required. For not only will the total amounts necessary for individual families be carefully considered and worked out by joint committees but the relief may be gathered from a number of sources, from relatives, friends, employers, societies and charitably disposed individuals. The society has no relief fund of its own but its function is to organize relief. 2. The repression of mendicancy and the repression of illegitimate charitable schemes by the bureaus of registration and information and in cases of necessity, the prosecution of imposters. 3. The securing of employment, rather than the giving of material relief, wherever this is possible. 4. The inculcation of habits of thrift and providence, the development of industrial education. 5. The co-operative treatment of families to bring all members of such families up to the highest possible mental, moral and physical plane, not only to conserve the well-being of the individuals themselves but to prevent the weakening of society by adding in successive generations to those who are sub-normal (such as weak minded children). 6. Such special or institutional care of the deficient as shall work towards the same end. 7. The crystallization of the sentiment of the charitable forces of Pittsburgh, with reference to necessary social reforms. 8. Greater efficiency in the business affairs and records of the individual societies, thus imparting greater "doing" power to the same amount of charitable resources, and creating a body of social facts which can be made the basis for sound public opinion with respect to the living conditions of the community. Here then has been the evolution. Individualized impulses developing specialized organizations in an un-plotted field. The conception of individual well-doing with no conception of the general social responsibility. Added to this the growth of more or less unnecessary, weak, and in some cases fraudulent, charitable enterprises (to which we have not alluded before) because of the ease with which support could be obtained in a community generous to a fault. This support gained too without necessarily bringing with it any sense of responsibility on the part of the contributors. There is a well corroborated story, vouched for by a leading professional man of the city, that for years a woman had collected about $7,500 annually for a fresh air home which cared for only a few children. The collections continued until he and others had a private investigation made and discovered the truth. It is comparatively easy to secure the assent of many men to allow their names to be used on boards of directors if no service is required. This is not a bad practice when such men know the responsible directors and can safely vouch for their actions. But care was not always taken to ascertain this. * * * * * THE PITTSBURGH DISTRICT AND THE HOUSING SITUATION The direct work of investigation in the field of housing reform, carried on by the Pittsburgh Survey, has been intentionally limited to the question of sanitary regulation. That was the first prime need to be met. The work has been carried on under the supervision of Lawrence Veiller, the foremost authority on housing reform in this country. Mr. Veiller was the secretary of the New York State Tenement House Commission in 1900, first deputy commissioner of the New York City Tenement House Department, and is director of the Department for the Improvement of Social Conditions of the New York Charity Organization Society. In illustrations and text, no attempt is made to present a review of the development of model towns in the Pittsburgh District, or the construction of single and two-family houses. These are matters which will properly come before committees on building construction and town planning of the new Pittsburgh Civic Improvement Commission. Real estate dealers and builders have not been inactive in Pittsburgh; but the situation is so serious as to demand the development of a constructive public policy. It demands such town planning and traction development as will open up wider suburban areas and relieve congestion. It demands such radical modification of the tax system, as will put a premium, as in metropolitan Boston, on home building; rather than a premium, as in Pittsburgh, on the speculative holding of unimproved land. Pittsburgh might well be the first city to try out in America the co-operative building scheme which has gained so much momentum in England, and by which the shifting industrial worker owns not a house, but stock in a housing company, which builds wholesale. Such a plan would admirably supplement the operations of the realty companies and building and loan associations in housing the growing industrial force of the steel district, and would offer an opportunity for investment at five per cent and the public good such as opens in no other direction to the man of large means and large imagination who would leave his impress on the Pittsburgh District. --DIRECTOR PITTSBURGH SURVEY. * * * * * Such a condition could not go on indefinitely. The leaders in the societies themselves insisted upon a better sensing of social responsibility, which meant simply the better realization of one principle, co-operation, the signpost to the second stage of growth. This led not only to the manifold kinds of co-operation made possible by the formation of an Associated Charities, but to a joining of forces in other directions. So the march of social reform goes on, with the charitable agencies of the city more and more fulfilling their function of rightly estimating causes and tendencies, of providing the fair chance to the dependent and defenceless by intelligent, co-ordinated, family treatment, and of educating the public towards the need of social legislation and regeneration. [Illustration: OLD PLANING MILL KNOWN AS TAMMANY HALL, TORN DOWN THROUGH THE ACTIVITY OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH. Twenty-five families were formerly housed here in 26 rooms. Building to left continues to be occupied as tenement--10 families and 2 stores occupying 13 rooms. To the rear can be seen remnant of the planing mill. Three families occupy three rooms reached through the doors opening off the gallery.] [Illustration] THE HOUSING SITUATION IN PITTSBURGH F. ELISABETH CROWELL DEPARTMENT FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS, NEW YORK CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY Last winter, the Pittsburgh Survey, co-operating with the Bureau of Health, conducted a special investigation of the housing situation in Pittsburgh. Its purpose was a general stock-taking from the point of view of sanitary regulation. Evil conditions were found to exist in every section of the city. Over the omnipresent vaults, graceless privy sheds flouted one's sense of decency. Eyrie rookeries perched on the hillsides were swarming with men, women and children,--entire families living in one room and accommodating "boarders" in a corner thereof. Cellar rooms were the abiding places of other families. In many houses water was a luxury, to be obtained only through much effort of toiling steps and straining muscles. Courts and alleys fouled by bad drainage and piles of rubbish were playgrounds for rickety, pale-faced, grimy children. An enveloping cloud of smoke and dust through which light and air must filter made housekeeping a travesty in many neighborhoods; and every phase of the situation was intensified by the evil of overcrowding,--of houses upon lots, of families into houses, of people into rooms. Old one-family houses were found converted into multiple dwellings, showing that Pittsburgh's housing problem threatened to become a tenement-house problem as well. To cope with these conditions was a Bureau of Health, hampered by an insufficient appropriation, an inadequate force of employes, and in the large an uneducated, indifferent, public opinion. A report of the investigation was published, and was used by the housing committee of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce in its campaign of education in support of ordinances then before councils. These ordinances were in line with recommendations of Superintendent James F. Edwards of the Bureau of Health and the city administration. Councils voted an increase of $20,000 to the bureau for its work in this field. The force of employes in the tenement house division was increased from one chief inspector, three inspectors and a part-time stenographer, to one chief inspector of experience, ten inspectors, one clerk and one stenographer on full time. A new system of records was inaugurated and comprehensive measures were undertaken to obtain the complete census of all tenements in Greater Pittsburgh. Subsequently, an ordinance was passed providing for the compulsory registration of tenement houses.[7] Here, then, has been a long stride ahead in the course of housing reform in Pittsburgh, which had been inaugurated several years before by Williams H. Matthews, headworker of Kingsley House, and the leaders of the Civic Club,--pioneer work which had secured the provisions of the existing state tenement house law and the creation of a tenement division under the Bureau of Health. [7] Other ordinances affecting the housing situation have been put before councils through the instigation of Dr. Edwards. One provided for a special bond issue, [carried by the people in November], for the erection of furnaces to consume rubbish and ashes: and it is to be hoped provision will be made for its collection. Hitherto the city has been content to collect and dispose of garbage only. Rubbish and ashes in unsightly piles accumulate in back-yards until a sanitary inspector serves notice on the householder to remove them at his own expense. Another ordinance drawn for the purpose of giving the health authorities power to vacate cellar rooms in dwellings other than tenements, failed to pass. [Illustration: SAW MILL RUN. Rear view showing dry closets which emptied at edge of stream.] [Illustration: TENEMENT OF OLD DWELLING TYPE.] This leads us to the present housing situation in Pittsburgh,--a situation which should be seen in its right proportions. First, should be remembered the decades of neglect. The process of cleaning up and rehabilitation is a ten years' job. The very fact that ordinances have been passed, a tenement house census taken and fifty thousand people supplied with sanitary accommodations points the way to the long, exacting work ahead in devising legislation and enforcing it in order to bring existing structures up to what may be called the new Pittsburgh standard. In the second place, the tenement house dwellings for three or more families are, when all is said and done, but a small part of the homes of the wage-earning population. The great housing problem in Pittsburgh is that of the one-or two-family dwelling. Here is a field where even more exacting sanitary work and regulation must be done in the ensuing years. In the third place, the mill towns, as well as the city, present every phase of the evils of bad housing. It is a district problem, then, for the leaders in Pittsburgh. Finally, behind all these existing unsanitary conditions demanding regulation, is the shortage of houses throughout the Pittsburgh District which will reassert itself with returning prosperity. As a result of the campaign of last winter, the Bureau of Health is now for the first time adequately equipped to get at the existing tenement abuses and to point out the need for more housing accommodations,--new low-rental houses,--if the work of reducing overcrowding and eradicating disease breeding quarters is to be carried out on a comprehensive scale. [Illustration: CLOSET UNDER PORCH SHOWN ON SECOND PAGE FOLLOWING.] [Illustration: PITTSBURGH. A tool for producing pig iron in tonnage that beats the world.] The tenement house census shows a total of 3,364 tenement houses in the Greater City, and puts in the possession of the department a body of facts bearing upon the localization of bad housing conditions throughout Pittsburgh. This was the first logical step to be taken toward dealing intelligently and efficiently with the situation. To the accomplishment of this task the main energies of the tenement house division have been devoted up to the present time. From every source in every quarter the cry of "hard times" has been insistent and the authorities up to the present time have deemed it inexpedient to force drastic plans for improvement. They have endeavored to keep things clean, and have insisted upon necessary repairs, but orders relating to structural changes have been held in abeyance pending a revival of more prosperous financial conditions. The process of eliminating privy vaults, however, the most threatening sanitary ill, has been vigorously continued. Thus far 5,723 vaults have been filled up and abandoned and 9,323 sanitary water closets for the use of 10,471 families installed in their places. A census of the first twenty wards shows a total of 5,793 vaults still in use in these wards alone. No figures are as yet available for the remaining twenty-four wards of the Old City,--or the fifteen wards on the North Side. [Illustration: PITTSBURGH: EQUIPMENT FOR HOME LIFE. Four houses, one behind another, climbing up hillside between streets. Under the porch to the left were two filthy closets without flushing apparatus. They were the only provision for five families in the first two houses.] [Illustration: CLEARING THE VAULTS OUT OF PITTSBURGH. Each dot stands for five vaults. Illustrated by the first twenty wards. 8,567 vaults as found by present health administration. The situation to-day: 2,774 removed, 5,793 to go.] Some of the worst plague spots in Pittsburgh have been eradicated despite the fact that, by veto of the governor of Pennsylvania, power to condemn insanitary structures was not given to the health authorities. That much remains to be done is, however, as true as it was a year ago, as I found on a recent reinspection. "Tammany Hall," Pittsburgh's classic example of bad housing is no more. Unable to vacate by process of law the old planing mill which had been converted into a tenement, the authorities piled violation notice upon notice at such a rate that the owner found the old shack a losing investment, and at last agreed to tear it down. He told me sorrowfully that if "they" had let him alone until September, he could have made $1,800 on the place,--an amount sufficient to pay his taxes to the city that was ruining him. It seemed a pity some method could not be found by which he might be forced to clean out another choice bit of property which he was renting,--a long, narrow, two-story brick tenement, where ten families and two stores are occupying thirteen rooms. The water supply was a sink in one apartment, and another on the second story floor and a hydrant in the yard. Here also were the closets which are shared by seven families, living in the houses adjoining. [Illustration: STEWART'S ROW. Showing proximity of privy vaults to kitchen. Houses dilapidated.] Another familiar eye-sore on Bedford avenue was still standing,--worse still, it was rented out, at least in spots,--three families in the front, and three in the rear buildings,--Negroes and whites. It looked more dilapidated and dirtier than when I visited it last winter. The owner was notified over a year ago that the houses must be repaired and certain alterations made if they were to be occupied as tenements. She pleaded a heavy mortgage and a dying sister. The mortgage still holds, the sister is still dying, she is unable to find a purchaser for the property, and in the meantime two-room "apartments" are still to be secured for twelve dollars a month, with all ancient inconveniences:--water to be obtained from a hydrant in the yard, and shared possibly with eleven families; foul privy compartments also to be shared with neighboring families, and perchance an occasional passerby. None but the lowest class of tenants will live in these to-be-abandoned dwellings, and their continued existence constitutes a grave danger from a sanitary viewpoint, not only to the immediate neighborhood, but to the entire city. So long as the law permits such breeding places for disease, so long will the fight against filth diseases be a losing one. Stewart's Row, on West Carson street, as I found it late this fall, was evidently destined to maintain the standard of the neighborhood in the matter of bad housing as originally set by its neighbor, Painter's Row; two wooden rows of two-family houses, rickety, leaking, sheltering thirteen families; two vaults at the rear, one with contents exposed; two hydrants the sole water supply; an obstructed drain; the hillside decorated with a disgusting combination of waste water, garbage, and rubbish. Allegheny has added her quota to the problem of housing in Greater Pittsburgh. The tenement house inspectors in the course of their census-taking have unearthed more than one example of rank conditions on the North Side. In one tenement the ground floor was occupied as a stable; a cellar revealed the piled up accumulations of years; privy vaults flourish and household water supply is noticeable chiefly because of its inadequacy. Over one-fourth of the entire number of tenements found in Pittsburgh are located on the North Side. According to the chief inspector at least fifty per cent of these are in a bad condition. The Tenement House Department has thus found plenty of work ready at hand for its inspectors. Of the 3,364 tenement houses enumerated by the census, nearly fifty per cent are old dwellings originally planned and constructed to accommodate one family. Frequently, no provision is made to meet the demands of the additional number of families. Privacy is destroyed, closet facilities and water supply are inadequate, cellar and basement rooms are made to do duty as living and sleeping rooms and there is no protection from fire danger. Of the remaining number of tenements less than one-half are new-law tenements. _TENEMENT CENSUS._ _Nationality._ _No. of Fam._ _Nationality._ _% of Total._ American 5,831 American 47.41 Polish 2,054 Slavs 24.64 Hebrew 1,077 Hebrew 8.76 German 963 German 7.83 Negro 597 Negro 4.85 Italian 443 Italian 3.60 Slovak 360 British 1.44 Bohemian 176 Misc. 1.47 Croatian 165 ------ Hungarian 113 100.00 Irish 104 Syrian 98 Lithuanian 67 Russian 57 English 50 Greek 37 Austrian 31 French 21 Welsh 12 Scotch 11 Swedish 10 Servian 8 Finnish 4 Chinese 7 Norwegian 1 Spanish 1 Turkish 1 Danish 1 ------ Tot'l No. of fam. 12,300--No. of people 42,699 No. of fam. --Boarders 3,200 taking boarders 1,532 ------ Total population in tenements 45,899 The accompanying tables show the various nationalities which recruit tenement dwellers and the share contributed by each. Nearly one-half are American born; one-fourth are Slavs. Next in numerical importance are the Hebrews, then the Germans, Negroes, Italians and British. The remaining scattered groups are included under the heading "Miscellaneous." Pittsburgh's tenements shelter 12,300 families, containing 42,699 people; 1,532 families take in boarders and of these boarders there are 3,200. The total number of people living under tenement conditions (three or more families to the house), is 45,899. The welfare of over forty thousand people is dependent then on tenement house standards and their enforcement in Pittsburgh. This is perhaps eight per cent of the total population, a small proportion when compared with New York for instance. The primary housing problem of the wage-earning population in Pittsburgh, remains then not a tenement problem in the strict legal sense, but a one- and two-family dwelling problem. This is the aspect of the situation which Pittsburgh must face in its entirety if the city is to profit by the experience of older communities. "If you think Pittsburgh is bad, you ought to see Glasgow," said one man. "Look at the tenements in New York," said another. Yet, if the city's phenomenal growth continues to be equalled by her phenomenal indifference to the necessity of raising the housing standard for her least paid laborers, the day may come, and soon, when Pittsburgh will make a close third to these cities. Because of hard times, vast numbers of immigrants have left Pittsburgh, and temporarily the rental agencies have plenty of idle houses upon their lists. These houses throw light on the situation. Two, three, four, and five-room apartments are available at an average monthly rental of from two and a half to five dollars a room in many sections of the city. There are also some single houses to be obtained for the same price. Over half of these dwellings are without any modern sanitary accommodations, and many are in a wretched state of repair. The majority of the houses are in the most sordid quarters of the city where living is high, at any price. Certain dwellings are offered especially for foreigners or Negroes, dilapidation, lack of conveniences, and an undesirable locality being distinguishing features of these houses. [Illustration: COMBINATION REAR TENEMENT AND ALLEY DWELLING, WEBSTER AVENUE. NEGROES AND WHITES LIVE HERE.] We label the foreigner as an undesirable neighbor; we offer him the meanest housing accommodations at our disposal; we lump him with the least desirable classes of our citizens; then we marvel at his low standards of living. Give him better, cheaper, houses where he may have a decent and comfortable home, instead of a mere shelter from the elements, unwholesome, overcrowded and expensive, and then see what his standard of living would be. The natural conformation of the land with its steep declivities, and its winding, tortuous valleys, has added much to the difficulty of the housing situation. Adequate transportation facilities would open up territory on the South and West sides where countless people could be housed. The trend of the mills away from the city to nearby river sites, attracted by lower tax rates and unlimited space will offer further relief and improvement, especially where great employers of labor, in laying out their plants as at Mariana, and Vandergrift and Gary take heed of the proper housing and sanitation of the towns that will grow up about them. As the situation stands to-day, however, bad housing conditions are multiplying in the surrounding industrial towns; and they must face the same problem. Its seriousness demands the formulation of public policies that shall encourage every form of building operation that will produce sanitary houses at low rentals, whether they are private homes or company houses of creditable standard, or dwellings put up by building and loan companies, commercial builders, or co-operative housing companies, along English lines. A Chamber of Commerce report states: "The city of Pittsburgh, along with its vast industrial development, has grown so phenomenally in population during the past ten years that it has been clearly impossible for the growth in housing accommodation to keep pace. Careful and comprehensive investigations show conclusively that the housing facilities of the Greater City have completely broken down, not only in point of reasonably proper conditions but in amount of available real estate." [Illustration: VIEW OF YARD SHOWN OPPOSITE. Corner of rear buildings. Pump in foreground of picture opposite is the sole water supply for both rows of houses. Here rubbish is added to dilapidation.] "We have not the time, nor is it our function to investigate the housing situation of the city. Let the charitable or philanthropic agencies make a systematic study of the evils that exist, and we will gladly lend the support of our influence to any recommendations which they may offer," said a leading spirit in one of Pittsburgh's great commercial organizations. To this man the proper housing of the workingman had a charitable aspect. "We don't want to go into the housing business. We are manufacturers, not real estate dealers. We may be forced to build houses in certain new districts in order to attract and hold labor, but in an old, settled community let the laboring man take care of himself. We don't believe in paternalism." I quote the president of a great steel company. Said a prominent real estate man: "There certainly are other more attractive investments for private capital than the building of small houses,--taxes are high, the demand for such dwellings has fallen off considerably and the returns are uncertain, owing to the difficulty of collecting rents in times such as these." And the laboring man says: "I want a decent home at a moderate rental, within reasonable distance of my work." Can he get it? Rigorous sanitary work by the health authorities will help. But more than that is needed. [Illustration: PHIPPS MODEL TENEMENT. Rebecca Street, Allegheny, October 21, 1908. Four room apartments rent from $4.25 to $5 a week; three room apartments from $3.25 to $4 per week. Steam heat, gas slot meter, sinks and water closets in each apartment.] [Illustration: YARD SHOWING BATTERIES OF PRIVY VAULTS AND DILAPIDATED CONDITION OF STEPS LEADING TO THIRD STORY. TWO ROOM APARTMENTS RENT FOR $12 PER MONTH.] PITTSBURGH'S HOUSING LAWS EMILY WAYLAND DINWIDDIE SECRETARY NEW YORK TENEMENT HOUSE COMMITTEE; FORMER SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION, PHILADELPHIA One would expect to see bad housing in Pittsburgh as a natural result of the congested condition of the city, partially hemmed in by waterways, and of the presence of an increasing population of factory workers ready to accept whatever living accommodations are available near their places of employment. Unhealthful homes, however, are especially dangerous in Pittsburgh, where their influence has been combined with that of city crowding, and of smoky, gas-laden air and polluted water. Badly constructed houses and defective drainage are an evil in the case of the country laborer, but far worse for a Pittsburgh factory employe. The tenement, with its usual accompaniments, has been a growing menace, although it has not yet obtained so great a hold as in many large cities. In 1900, one-ninth of the total population of the city was living in buildings now legally defined as "tenements,"--that is, occupied by three or more families each. Since that time it is said that the proportion of tenements and tenement dwellers has become considerably larger. The city has recognized its dangers and a beginning has been made in the framing of state legislation and city ordinances to meet them. The housing and health laws applying to Pittsburgh in many respects are like those for Philadelphia. There is no department of health, but there is a bureau of health in the Department of Public Safety, and similarly a bureau of building inspection. The powers of the Bureau of Health in relation to housing conditions are more limited than those of corresponding departments in many other cities in the lack of authority to vacate buildings unfit for habitation. The writer had occasion to visit in Pittsburgh a large ramshackle frame tenement house, insufficiently lighted and ventilated, dirty and miserably overcrowded. The building, which had originally been a mill, was obviously unfit for occupation. For some time "Tammany Hall" had been almost as notorious in Pittsburgh as the infamous "Gotham Court" was in New York. The whole frame work was so poorly constructed that it seemed hopeless that the owner would consider improvements worth while for a building of this character, yet the Bureau of Health could not have the house vacated, and the tenants continued to live in their wretched quarters.[8] [8] After long delays this house has now been torn down. The Bureau of Health took a determined stand in requiring compliance with the law if the building was to continue to be occupied as a tenement, and the owner finally became wearied and had the house destroyed. Since 1867, one year after its creation, the Board of Health in New York has had authority to vacate buildings unfit for occupation, and in 1887 it was expressly included in the law that this power applied to any building "unfit for human habitation because of defects in drainage, plumbing, ventilation, or the construction of the same, or because of the existence of a nuisance on the premises, and which is likely to cause sickness among its occupants." This provision is still in force at the present day and has been extended to the Tenement House Department as well. In the course of a year the latter department alone vacated between one and two hundred houses. Similar powers are held in other cities. In Boston and Chicago they are exercised. In Washington many buildings have been not only vacated, but demolished. Nor is this authority confined to the largest cities; Jersey City, with a population 100,000 less than Pittsburgh's, and Rochester, with 40,000 less than Jersey City, both have health boards with full powers in this regard. [Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE NUMBER OF PERSONS PER ACRE IN EACH WARD IN 1900 (U.S. CENSUS FIGURES--)] [Illustration: ONE OF THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS.] Apart from this lack, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health in relation to existing houses other than tenements, has under state law much the same general authority and obligations as in other cities. Its duty is to have nuisances abated and conditions dangerous to health removed. Specific provisions, however, affecting the proper maintenance of one-and two-family dwellings are almost entirely lacking, although these are found in Pittsburgh in much greater numbers than the tenement houses, and as shown in recent investigations, are greatly in need of regulation. The state laws contain practically no requirements for them except in regard to the cleaning of privy-vaults and to plumbing. There is no city sanitary code. A general state health law of 1895 gives the director of the Department of Public Safety in conjunction with the Bureau of Health, power to prescribe rules and regulations for enforcing the provisions of the act, but the power has never been exercised to frame sanitary requirements for dwelling houses. Dark, damp cellar rooms, wholly under ground, one "town pump" serving as the sole water supply for thirteen houses; water-closets in dark unventilated holes under sidewalks, are examples of conditions found in Pittsburgh, and not definitely prohibited except in tenement houses. An ordinance to prevent cellar occupancy and to provide for the cleaning up of unsanitary conditions in houses other than tenements was introduced in councils the past year by the Chamber of Commerce, but it failed to pass. Such absence of requirements tends seriously to block the sanitary improvement of the smaller houses. Specific mandatory provisions make for uniform, fair treatment, requiring as much of one house owner as of another. They give efficient health authorities a stronger case in dealing with offenders and make it more difficult for inefficient ones to evade their responsibilities. A code is needed. * * * * * ... PROSPECTUS ... =THE TENEMENT IMPROVEMENT COMPANY,= Modeled after the Octavia Hill Association of Philadelphia, was formed for the betterment of the housing of the poor of Pittsburgh, for the following reasons: First. There is no tenement house commissioner in Pittsburgh. Second. Laws relating to the water supply, sewerage, garbage collecting, overcrowding and use of houses for immoral purposes, are either not in existence or not enforced: Third. There are within a radius of twenty-five miles of Pittsburgh 35,000 Slavs, 4,000 Bohemians, 30,000 Poles, 10,000 Croatians, 8,000 Ruthenians, 1,000 Russians, 2,000 Servians, 35,000 Italians: these low-class foreigners must of necessity overcrowd the already congested districts. Fourth. Conditions such as these make for moral and physical contagion, intemperance, pauperism, crime, anarchy and the destruction of the home. Fifth. This city is already aroused to the necessity of caring for the children before they become criminals, but these efforts are of little value unless strengthened by the influence of decent and respectable homes. Sixth. Pittsburgh, in proportion to its wealth and prosperity, has done nothing to improve the housing conditions of the very poor. =The Purpose of the Company= is to buy, build or remodel tenements in the worst localities, put them in sanitary condition, install tenants of moral character at the same rents paid before and have weekly visits of inspection made by women rent collectors. The Company will agree to manage, on these same lines, tenement houses for property holders on commission. * * * * * FOLDER OF 1893. The beginning of housing reform in Pittsburgh. * * * * * An important ordinance, dealing with one unsanitary feature of the city, was passed by councils in 1901. This makes it unlawful to continue the existence of cesspools and privy-vaults on any lot contiguous to a public sewer. A state law of 1901 prohibited the construction of a new cesspool or privy-vault on premises where a sewer was adjacent, and the same prohibition was previously contained in the plumbing regulations of the Bureau of Health, issued in 1895; but existing privy-vaults are made unlawful only by the ordinance of 1901. This provision is of great value. The privy-vault may be tolerated in country districts, but in small city yards, close to kitchens and bedrooms, groceries and butcher shops, its dangers are increased a thousand fold. The risk is especially great where typhoid is prevalent, as is the case in Pittsburgh, where as far back as the health records go the disease has been practically epidemic and where up to 1908 the typhoid rate was higher than in any other city. That the contagion of typhoid fever is contained in the discharges of the patient, and that the specific organism may live in these for a long period is well known, but only in the past decade has the part played by house flies in the dissemination of the disease been emphasized: "Flies are attracted to all kinds of filth. A fly after lighting on the discharges from a typhoid patient thrown into one of the vaults may have on its legs the specific bacteria and can then carry the infection from place to place; it may be to the food of the nearest neighbor, or to that in a nearby street stand or shop, or it is possible it may carry it to a greater distance." For house drainage, Pittsburgh has a good plumbing code in its detailed provisions similar to those in New York and Philadelphia. It is in the form of a state act, passed in 1901, and responsibility for its enforcement rests in the Bureau of Health. Besides containing strict requirements for new work, it gives the bureau certain important powers with reference to plumbing in existing buildings. [Illustration: THE FRANKLIN FLATS OF THE TENEMENT IMPROVEMENT OF PITTSBURGH. THE ONLY MODEL TENEMENT IN THE OLD CITY.] Tenement houses,--that is, buildings occupied by three or more families,--are the subject of special legislation. Two tenement laws were enacted in 1903. One applying principally to the maintenance of tenement buildings is enforced by the Bureau of Health. It forbids the use of tenement cellars for living purposes; a cellar being defined as a "story more than one-half below the street or ground level." It permits living in basement rooms only when they are eight and one-half feet high and are properly lighted and ventilated according to the specific terms of the law, and are not damp or otherwise unfit for habitation. It requires for every room in existing tenements either a window equal in size to one-tenth of the floor area of the room, and opening upon the street or alley, or upon a yard or court, with a sectional area of not less than twenty-five square feet; or else a fifteen square foot window opening to an adjoining outside room in the same apartment. No rooms may be occupied unless they contain seven hundred cubic feet of air space, nor unless they are eight feet high from floor to ceiling in every part, except that attic rooms need be eight feet high in only one-half their area. Overcrowding is prohibited by the requirement that in any room there must be four hundred cubic feet of air space for each adult, and two hundred for each child occupying the room. In new tenement houses an independent water supply is required for every suite of rooms; in existing tenement buildings, or buildings hereafter converted to tenement use, there must be a water supply on every floor, accessible to all tenants on the floor without the necessity for their passing through any apartment but their own. The space under all sinks is required to be left open, without enclosing woodwork. A water-closet is required for every apartment in a new tenement building, except that where apartments consist of but one or two rooms, one closet for three rooms is sufficient. In existing tenement houses one closet for two apartments is required, and for existing buildings converted to tenement use after the passage of the law, one closet for six rooms, but not less than one to a floor. Water-closets located in the yard are permitted where the Bureau of Health considers this arrangement necessary. [Illustration: MRS. FRANKLIN P. IAMS. Mrs. Iams, Miss Kate C. McKnight, E. Z. Smith, and other leaders of the Civic Club of Allegheny County, have been among the pioneer workers in housing reform in Pittsburgh.] Cleanliness and good repair of all parts of the house are required. The keeping of horses, cows, pigs, sheep, goats or poultry in tenement houses is prohibited, also the use of any part of a tenement house for a stable or for the storage of anything dangerous to life or health. The keeping of inflammable or combustible material under any stairway in a tenement house is prohibited. The act prescribes fines for violation and makes it mandatory upon the Bureau of Health to employ one or more special tenement house inspectors to inspect tenements and see that the requirements of the law are enforced. The main points of the law are excellent, but it contains an undesirable feature in placing a premium upon the conversion of existing buildings to tenement uses. There seems scarcely room for question that if the working population of the city must be crowded into multiple dwellings, it is better for it to be into houses constructed and properly fitted for the purpose. But the law encourages the squeezing of three or more families into old, ill-adapted houses, erected for other purposes. A new house may not be built for tenement uses unless it has a separate sink for every suite of rooms, and a water-closet for every suite, or where suites consist of but one or two rooms each, a water-closet for every three rooms; but an old building, not constructed for the purpose, may at any time be made to serve as a tenement house if it has a sink and a water-closet on every floor, regardless of how many families may be occupying the floor, providing only that there is at least one water-closet for six rooms. A landlord may lawfully turn an old dilapidated mill into a tenement as in the case previously cited and provide only two sinks (one in a restaurant) and a yard hydrant for twenty-five families, but if he wishes to build a new tenement for this number of families the law requires him to put in twenty-five sinks. To aid in the enforcement of the above law there was enacted in 1908 an ordinance requiring all tenement houses in the city to be registered in the offices of the Bureau of Health, and providing penalties for failure to comply. An act of 1895 established a Bureau of Building Inspection in the city Department of Public Safety. Officials of this bureau are required to examine buildings in the course of construction or alteration, and houses reported in an insecure or dangerous condition. The superintendent and inspectors, as in other cities, are required to be men of practical experience in work connected with building construction, but must not be engaged in such work while holding office. Plans and specifications for all new construction or extensive alteration work must be filed with the bureau, and work of this character may not be carried on without a permit from the bureau, to be granted within ten days, when the plans and specifications conform to law. Where a permit is refused, the party aggrieved may appeal to a commission, to be appointed by the director of the Department of Public Safety, and to consist of three persons, either master builders, civil engineers, or architects; but authority is in no case granted to this commission to set aside or alter any provisions of the act, or to require the issuance of a permit for a building to be constructed otherwise than as required by the act. Such a fixed law without discretionary powers granted to the building inspecting officials, or to the Bureau of Appeals, is an important safeguard to the community. The experience of New York affords conclusive evidence of the danger of an opposite policy. For example, previous to 1901, the laws applying to New York fixed a limit to the percentage of the lot which might be covered over by a new tenement building, requiring the remainder to be left vacant, in order to provide proper yard and court space for light and ventilation. But the superintendent of buildings was granted power to modify this requirement, and the result was that it was practically nullified. The New York Tenement House Commission of 1900 examined several hundred new buildings erected under the law, in the Borough of Manhattan, and found that only one per cent had the prescribed reasonable air-space. In theory, discretionary powers have advantages in giving a law sufficient flexibility to meet varying conditions, but in practice, where granted to modify reasonable legislation, they place worthy officials in the difficult position of being obliged to refuse,--in opposition to any influence that may be brought to bear,--to exercise discretion plainly permitted to them, and they open to unworthy officials of all grades innumerable opportunities for corruption and unjust discrimination. In Pittsburgh the specific provisions in relation to details of building construction are incorporated in the main in state laws, but there are also certain city ordinances regulating building construction. Building requirements affecting sanitation and safety in dwellings for one or two families, apart from those enforced by the Bureau of Health and previously referred to, are few in number, although in Pittsburgh the great majority of the population is housed in buildings of this character, making the situation a vastly different one from that in New York, where seventy-one per cent of the families live in multiple dwellings and the proper control of these is the important matter. [Illustration: ROBERT GARLAND. Chairman of the Housing Committee, Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.] A few provisions affecting all dwellings, which may be mentioned, are a requirement that beneath new houses cellars shall extend under the whole building and be ventilated from both ends, and that in low, damp, or made ground, the bottom of all cellars shall be covered with bricks, concrete or asphalt, at least three inches deep. Also every new dwelling house must have an open space attached to it at the rear or side, equal to at least 144 square feet clear, unobstructed by any overhanging structure. Proper rain leaders must be provided to conduct water from the roof to the ground or sewer, in such a way as to protect walls and foundations. There are also restrictions in regard to frame extensions and frame sheds, provisions for roof exits, giving means of escape in case of fire, and requirements for strength of construction. Comparing Pittsburgh's housing laws with the new building code of Cleveland, Ohio,--a city with somewhat similar conditions, brings out striking defects in the former. For example, Cleveland, for new one-and two-family dwellings, has excellent detailed requirements as to the percentage of the lot which may be covered by dwellings; as to the sizes of courts and air-shafts, the provision of intakes to give a current of air through enclosed courts, the sizes of yards, the minimum sizes permitted for rooms, and the lighting and ventilation of rooms and of water-closet compartments and bathroom. Corresponding to these light and air provisions for dwellings, in Pittsburgh, there is only the requirement of 144 square feet of yard-space at the rear or side. There is no law, ordinance or regulation for houses other than tenements, prohibiting the construction of dark, unventilated rooms and halls, and of the "culture tube" air-shafts,--which have been the curse of other cities. For tenement houses the building requirements are much stricter than for other dwellings. New houses of this class on interior lots must have at the rear or side at least twenty per cent of the lot left open,--on corner lots ten per cent,--as a yard to provide light and air. This open space must be at least eight feet wide throughout its entire length. Courts between tenement houses or wings of tenements may not be less than ten feet wide. All courts and air-shafts, except vent shafts for water-closets or bathrooms, are required to be open on one side to the street or yard. Every room in a new tenement must have a window opening on the street or on the open space described above. The distance of such a window from the wall or party line opposite must be at least eight feet. The halls on each floor are required to have windows to the street or open space, unless light and ventilation is otherwise provided to the satisfaction of superintendent of the Bureau of Building Inspection. The requirements for the size of rooms and of windows, for basement and cellar apartments and for sinks and water-closets, are the same as in the tenement house health law. New tenement houses, four stories or more in height, are required to be fireproof throughout. The same penalties are fixed for violating the tenement building law as for violation of the tenement health law. Right of appeal from decisions of the superintendent of building inspection is granted, as in the case of the general building law. The act does not require that an official certificate that a completed new tenement house complies with the law must be issued before the building is occupied. This important safeguard is entirely lacking. A visitor not long since was in a new tenement house in Pittsburgh, occupied by a number of families, with the usual quota of children. The house had been let and the families had moved in, although the building was by no means completed, and there were even no balusters on the stairs, which were entirely open on the side, creating an extremely dangerous condition, especially on the third floor. In this house, too, no fire-escapes of any kind had been supplied. The writer has also seen a number of other new tenement houses fully occupied, but without any proper means of escape in case of fire,--contrary to law. The discretion allowed in the tenement building law, in regard to hall lighting, is another dangerous feature, although less important than the absence of the certificate requirements. In addition to the tenement house building law, there are several acts relating to fire-escapes on tenement houses. A law of 1885 requires a tenement building three or more stories in height to have outside iron fire-escapes, with balconies and slanting stairways, except where the authorities permit some other kind of escape. The number and location of fire-escapes is not definitely provided. They are "to be arranged in such a way as to make them readily accessible, safe and adequate." A law of 1889 requires, in addition, that at least one window in each tenement house room above the second floor be provided with a chain-rope long enough to reach the ground or with any other appliances approved by the Board of Fire Commissioners. The same act requires the lighting of tenement house halls and stairways at night and the burning of red lights at the head and foot of each flight of stairs and at the intersection of all hallways with main corridors; and an alarm or gong ready for use and capable of being heard throughout the building is also required. It will be seen at once that the wholesale discretionary powers granted in regard to the enforcement of the above fire-escape provisions make it easily possible for them to be nullified. Finally, the removal of garbage, which has an important relation to the sanitary condition of the houses, is insufficiently regulated in Pittsburgh. A state act, and subsequent city ordinance, authorize the Bureau of Health and Department of Public Safety to provide for the removal of garbage. How frequently it shall be removed is not specified by law. Specifications of contract are that it be removed daily from markets, hotels, etc., and three times a week in the closely built up wards, and twice a week in the outlying wards. Nearly two-thirds of the annual appropriation for all the work of the Bureau of Health is expended in paying for this service. The carrying away of ashes and rubbish has up to the present time in no way been regulated by law. A step looking in this direction has been taken during the past year, however. On recommendation of the superintendent of health an ordinance authorizing a bond issue for the creation of furnaces for the final disposal of rubbish has been passed by councils and voted for by the people and specifications relating to these are now being drawn up. The beginning which has thus been made in the line of recognizing housing dangers and of framing state legislation and city ordinances to meet them affords a basis for the development of a consistent public policy in this field. [Illustration: ONE PITTSBURGH TYPE OF ONE-FAMILY HOUSE. Row of five new one-family brick houses, opposite Fort Pitt Malleable Iron Works. Five rooms in each house; bathtub and closet; sink in kitchen. McKees Rocks.] [Illustration: PLAY IN SKUNK HOLLOW. THE BALL TEAM.] SKUNK HOLLOW A POCKET OF CIVIC NEGLECT IN PITTSBURGH FLORENCE LARRABEE LATTIMORE MEMBER INVESTIGATING STAFF, RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION The main thoroughfare is respectable and non-committal. It offers but one clue to the melodrama, the violence and misfortune, which its brick fronts so innocently conceal. This clue is a narrow, dusty alley-way, which cuts through the brick fronts, runs back about eighty feet, and then turns sharply to the left and takes unto itself the name of Ewing street. Ewing street runs along the edge of a valley called Skunk Hollow. It pursues a serpentine course between two irregular rows of shacks,--the one back to back with the preoccupied brick houses, the other balancing itself uncertainly on the edge of the valley,--and finally ends in a number of branching foot-paths. This street and Skunk Hollow below it, both effectively shut off and concealed from casual inspection by the row of brick houses, are bound up into a pocket edition of civic neglect. One cannot tell, without inquiry, whether the shacks on Ewing street are for horses, cows, or human beings; it is said that the owners do not care, so long as the rent is paid. But whether it is the desirability of being in a "dead-head row" commanding a view of the valley, or the advantage of having a house which while showing but one or two stories above the street, takes a private drop of one story in the rear and accommodates itself to the abrupt decline of the cliff, there is no doubt that the cliff-edge structures are far more popular than their stunted neighbors across the way. In them one finds the most desirable clinical material for a study of Pittsburgh's ills, all in one well packed group of abnormalities. Do you wish to see the housing problem? You need only follow Ewing street its short length of a city block and observe. The level of one side of Ewing street and the characteristic drop of the other, have brought out two typical forms of Pittsburgh architecture described by a resident small boy as "squatters" and "clingers." Together they form the nondescript shelters of a parasitical class of persons, white and colored, unassorted. In such fantastic and general dilapidation are these rows of unpainted shelters that some of them are falling to the ground without the formality of condemnation proceedings. Most of them have running water in the kitchens; a very few have sanitary toilets and shout the fact on black and white rental signs. Cellar rooms abound and are often used as sleeping rooms; in those houses built together into a block they are windowless. The toilets back of them are in the old boxed battery style, unflushed, and send their contamination down the grooves of the slope to Skunk Hollow at the bottom. [Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON SKUNK HOLLOW. Luna Park is seen on the skyline at the right.] [Illustration: A FIRMLY ENTRENCHED SHANTY, FRONTING ON NO ROAD BUT GUARDED BELLIGERENTLY BY ITS COLORED OWNER.] The hollow, reached by sewage through winding crevices in rubbish, and by goats and dogs over hills of tin cans and refuse, is reached by the people themselves down flights of decaying steps. In the street at the bottom, a wooden surface drain goes companionably along side by side with the foot-path. Occasionally a trickling stream from the hill joins forces with it and the whole falls at last through a basket-drop into an open sewer. The disheveled exterior which gives Ewing street the personality of a gang-leader with his hat on one side, is not so marked in the hollow. The hollow has a kind of sullen reticence. Here sanitary conditions are, if possible, of graver aspect. It is literally a cesspool. In this cesspool is a strong and dangerous community life. Till now you have been absorbed in the setting of the neighborhood, but now, as you begin to observe the people who slouch past you, you note that they correspond to their environments. The rakish aspect of Ewing street, and the morbid silence of the hollow are reflected in the manners of their respective inhabitants. On Ewing street, one of the first houses you visit is reached by a drop of five or six broken steps, and looks like a bowling alley shack. It is long, narrow, and has two small windows and a door in the street end. On the porch is a notorious colored woman, raided out of the worst houses in Pittsburgh, ready to toss out her fine and pass on, when temporarily hindered by arrest. Tacked to her piazza is a sign informing the passerby that religious services are held within, and pasted around the dilapidated smokestack is the sign "To let." "Nobody came as long as it was a mission," said the patrolman, "they do come now. Always booze on Sundays there; nothing but crime." The old colored aunty, who owns a little cabin next door in the rear, tells you later with bulging eyes and darkey gesticulation, that the real trouble is that the ghost of Charlie Barber who died there two years ago, comes back nights and by flinging up the windows and banging the door, breaks up both services and carousels. She says he has driven most of the colored ladies "plumb spiritualistic" and that "Mrs. K----, a white, Irish lady in the next house but one, goes to meetings in the city three times a week and spends so much for collections that her children have no shoes to wear to school." Sure enough you find the children shut up in the house; the father, a laborer, out of work; the mother doing a washing. "Truant officers? What are they?" she asks. In the back yard of this home lives a red-turbaned colored scold, owner of a much coveted hydrant upon which four families are dependent for water. Her house is a fenced-in triangle on a trackless waste of rubbish. It is to be approached only by original methods. The neighbors, however, say that it is on "Christian street." They say that the owner sells out little plots here and there on the hillside for a hundred or so dollars apiece. Most of the houses are owned by the tenants, the lots having been sold to them unimproved by old Pittsburgh estates. Building permits for frame dwellings have been refused, and, as the owners cannot afford to build with brick they stay on in shanties too far gone to improve. No sword wielded in defense of a feudal castle was ever more keen than the tongue of the turbaned owner of this estate on Christian street as she raises her black fist over the fence and dares you to swing her gate! [Illustration: A SKUNK HOLLOW DAIRY. The cows live in the boarded up shed. The surface drains running beside the walk, empty into the well from which the people draw water.] Next to her is a burnt-out shell of a four-family house; no attempt is being made to prop it up or tear it down, and it hangs there towards the street with uncertain intentions. The owner will tell you that it "was fired on a dark night,--not by a friend," and then he will shrug his shoulders and mutter something about the neighborhood. He sits on his little stoop all day, this owner does, in his Sunday suit and best hat, replete with darkey respectability. Crutches are beside him and his feet are bandaged. Sitting near him, like a jack-knife on the point of snapping shut, is an old black mammy, her eyes glazed with coming blindness. She wears Prunella gaiters, a calico gown, and a sunbonnet with a wide limp frill, and is as much a personification of the old South as the man is of the new. She points fondly over her shoulder to her two stuffy rooms, crammed with knick-knacks, and tells you they must go under the hammer next week unless she can get help. This young man here would pay her a rent of eight dollars a month for three rooms, but he is just out of the hospital and unable to work. His leg was crushed in the steel mill six weeks ago and not one penny has been sent him yet by his bosses. Both of them are living on credit and hope. The neighborhood isn't very bad, they say, "although there are some very disbelieving people in it." But they don't know a better, where folks would let out to niggers. So far then we have found instances of bad streets, unsanitary housing, trade accidents and the race problem. Then one comes to a house, one story high at the street two at the rear, which has two rooms opening in front and two toward the hollow. In these rooms live an Irish widower and his two children of ten and twelve years, together with a miscellaneous lot of colored people. They quarrel, and have to be watched by the police. A step farther we meet a Scottish mill laborer out of work. He proudly points to the playhouse he has built for his two little girls "to keep 'em off the street." It is set up against the toilet, but that can't be helped. The mixed family next door pick rags "and carry on" in the shed hard by. The woman there has "chronic tonsilitis" which is dangerous for the children. The mother wishes there was some better place for the children to play. Up to this point one feels that this is a settlement of mill-ends; mill-ends of people, living in mill-ends of houses, on mill-end jobs, if they work at all. It does not seem possible that anyone could come to live on Ewing street from deliberate choice. With something of a start one finds, in this row of demoralization, a home just vacated by a charitable agency for the help of colored children. It was a temporary home for boys and girls and babies, occupying the ground floor and basement of a house unsanitary and dark, having no gas, no running water, and no yard, only a rickety back stoop, offering an unparalleled view of Skunk Hollow. In a middle room, dark except for one outer window and one cut through into the back room, slept eight or ten children two in a bed, feet to feet, boys and girls from infancy to twelve years. The institution has gone now to a better neighborhood. This particular house hasn't a bad name; it was the one further down that was raided last month. Two under-age girls were found there, but the madam got off with a fine and the girls disappeared. Some other people of doubtful credentials are moving in; maybe they are good and maybe not. They are carrying in their household goods now. They do not look unlike the others of the neighborhood. A thin colored woman stands off and watches, rocking her baby in her arms. She is seized with a fit of coughing, and turns into the dark doorway of her shack. One does not need to follow her to know that she represents one more city problem. The vantage point for a view of Skunk Hollow seems to be the back stoops of the clingers on the edge of the basin. Here one becomes aware that the hollow is a public dumping ground of ashes and tin cans. As wagons drive up and drop their contents the air itself becomes full of refuse. An occasional thin stream of water trickling down from where you stand. This is the Ewing street sewage making its way to the bottom of the valley. [Illustration: INSTITUTIONAL CHARITY IN SKUNK HOLLOW.] The hollow seems to follow the bed of an old river; it winds away around a huge hill of gravel where two railroads lie. On a delta between the railroad tracks, the boys have improvised a playground. Farther along there is a straggling bunch of houses. You notice a little girl washing clothes on one of the back piazzas. A little boy runs out and cuffs her until she runs into the house crying, and a man comes out and chases the boy. The boy climbs a neighbor's fence and vanishes. A colored woman and a white woman are seen on the path that winds through this settlement; they go into one of the houses and shut the door. An Italian comes out of the same door a minute later, and walks off down the railway track. The rears of these houses present another solid line of reeking, broken-down toilets with box vaults, unflushed, on platforms built level with the rear floor of the houses. Tucked in between disreputable families of the lowest type are, here and there, bright faced thrifty Italians. Two families have been brought to Skunk Hollow from respectable neighborhoods because of the hard times. In one of their houses renting for nine dollars a month, the rear room is a ten by six, cubicle, with a two by two window in it directly opposite and two feet away from the doorway of the toilet. The air? Well, the window has a solid shutter and when that is closed the air isn't so bad and keeps out disease. As the mother talks, two little chained dogs bark at the babies loaded on her arms, and on the edge of the railing, which prevents the unwary from stepping off the platform into a landslide of rubbish below, fruit and clothes are drying, macaroni is soaking, and busybody flies are hurrying from one thing to another. Any typhoid? Oh yes, the grandmother died with it, and one of the children had it, but was taken to a hospital and got well. Towards the end of Neville street, in the heart of the hollow, we come to a back yard. The house, for its own reasons, prefers to front on the railroad. In the yard is a large shed patched with odds and ends of all sorts of boards, layer upon layer. The people in the house,--most of whom are "women boarders",--say it is used just to put things in. As a venture you suggest cows? Yes, there are cows there, three, the milk is sold for the babies in the neighborhood. The man says the cows "graze upon the hills around the hollow." He glances at the hills and laughs. It is true the cows haven't grazed there this summer, and in the winter it is best for them to be in a warm dark shed. As we climb back up the stairs in the late afternoon, we meet the lamp lighter going down with his ladder. Early? Yes, but it is not well to go into the Hollow as late as dusk. There are only sixteen lamps there,--soon lighted, but people have their own reasons for turning them off and few of them burn till morning. The hollow doesn't wish the light. At the end of Ewing street, by the alley of entrance, stand two patrolmen. They are side by side looking meditatively down into the valley. They are watching for the little boy who climbed the fence. "He's a Juvenile Court boy named Matthew S----," they say. "He's home on probation. It's a queer thing about the Juvenile Court, it takes children away and locks 'em up because the neighborhood's bad, and then it sends 'em home on probation." These men, without knowing it, were asking for a single judge for the Juvenile Court. "He promises to do right," one of them continued, "but they ain't enough probation women to see that he does keep straight and he's the worst one we've got on the beat." This one was asking for an adequate number of probation officers. "Now, do you see that tight, brick house down there beyond?" they asked. "That's a colored disorderly house,--run for booze. That little white girl who's washing on them steps goes there all the time. She stays out nights,--away from home. The father works hard and brings home all his money; but the woman,--she don't care. Ain't the Juvenile Court no way of catching the mother? She ought to go to the workhouse." He was asking for an enforcement of the adult delinquency law. The conversation ran on and the patrolman told more of the affairs of Skunk Hollow. He told of speak-easies, and hang-outs of all kinds, masked under the appearance of small grocery shops. At the foot of the stairs, he said, an Italian interpreter was found dead within the year, struck from behind by an Irish-American. The man smoking there and talking to the little girl over the fence had done it, but there was no evidence. Two little children belonging to the colored woman who keeps the disorderly house were playing in the dust. The patrolmen were letting them stay home until they could get them in a raid. "Where do you suppose they'll bring up?" one of them said. "The mother won't get more than a fine and she can pay it." "Now watch the boys!" said the other. "Here comes a freight." The train wound slowly into a nest of little boys playing ball. After it had passed there was not a boy to be seen. "Catching rides" said the patrolman with an appreciative chuckle. "They'll go round the hill and come back by way of the main street. Then I'll chase 'em in for playing where they ain't no right, and back they'll come to Skunk Hollow. I wish I had some other place to send them." The playground problem again! On the skyline around the hollow the church spires stood out blacker than the smoke in which the valley was shrouded. An American flag waved from the school house on the main thoroughfare, and the fanciful towers of Luna Park peered jeeringly into this pest hole of neglect. "Shame, ain't it?" said one of the patrolmen. [Illustration] FOUR TYPES OF HOUSING ILLS IN MILL TOWNS [Illustration: SCHOEN: Box-like rows of company houses with out-buildings between.] [Illustration: DUQUESNE: Filthy wooden-drain and yard hydrant.] [Illustration: McKEESPORT. Strawberry Alley, Interior Court of Jerusalem or "Bowery." The hydrant at the right was in close proximity to octagonal privy structure and was only water supply for the entire court. On the date the photograph was taken, the hydrant had been out of business for two days and tenants had carried their water from another court across the street.] [Illustration: BRADDOCK. Rubbish in rear yard of Willow Alley; where the children play. Two hydrants and two vaults are expected to equip thirty apartments.] PAINTER'S ROW THE STUDY OF A GROUP OF COMPANY HOUSES AND THEIR TENANTS [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._] [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PAINTER'S ROW AS IT STOOD IN THE SPRING OF 1908.] PAINTER'S ROW THE UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION AS A PITTSBURGH LANDLORD F. ELISABETH CROWELL FORMER SUPERINTENDENT, ST. ANTHONY'S HOSPITAL, PENSACOLA, FLORIDA. The United States Steel Corporation owns property on the South Side of Pittsburgh just beyond the Point Bridge. Here is located the old Painter's Mill, which is one of the plants of the Carnegie Steel Company, which in turn is one of the constituent companies of the United States Steel Corporation; and here, also, stands what remains of Painter's Row, where the company has housed certain of its employes, mostly immigrants. When the Carnegie Steel Company took over Painter's Mill, it renovated the plant so as to turn out the sort and quantity of output which the Carnegie name stands for. When it took over Painter's Row, it did nothing. When, a little over a year ago, and several years after the purchase of the property, I made a detailed investigation of the place, I found half a thousand people living there under conditions that were unbelievable,--back-to-back houses with no through ventilation; cellar kitchens; dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated, overcrowded sleeping rooms, no drinking water supply on the premises; and a dearth of sanitary accommodations that was shameful. Painter's Row was originally a succession of six rows, some brick, some frame, built on the side of a hill that slopes from the foot of a lofty palisade down to the Ohio. Houses and mills immediately adjoin and tenants are even housed in an old brick building, in another part of which some of the mill offices are located. Sluggish clouds of thick smoke hang over the cluster of roofs and the air is full of soot and fine dust. Noise presses in from every quarter,--from the roaring mill, from the trolley cars clattering and clanging through the narrow street which divides mill and rows into two sections, from the trains on the through tracks above the topmost row and from the sidings which separate the lowest row from the river bank and which are in constant use for the hauling of freight to and from the mills. * * * * * (The story of Painter's Row should be considered in its bearings. The United States Steel Corporation is building a remarkable new town at Gary, Indiana; its subsidiary companies have promoted house building along original lines, notably at Vandergrift, Ambridge and Lorain, and the Carnegie Steel Company has fair, low rental houses at Munhall and elsewhere. On the other hand, other Pittsburgh corporations own company houses which have been equally as bad as Painter's Row; and a similar story could be written of a shack at one time owned by one of the foremost Protestant churches of Pittsburgh, and razed to the ground only because the headworker of Kingsley House had the courage to publish its picture and the name of the owner. We have no animosity in singling out one corporation; but we have a very serious purpose in detailing the facts as to this row of company houses. There is ground for difference of opinion from a business as well as a social point of view, as to whether it is desirable for an industrial corporation to own and rent homes to its employes. But if industrial chairmen, presidents and superintendents become landlords, they must bear the responsibilities of landlords; and only as the public holds them up to these responsibilities as stiffly as their stockholders hold them up to dividends, will they be in position to devise and carry out policies which, as individuals, we may assume they would act upon. This story of one high-spirited New England stockholder and 500 company tenants indicates, moreover, that some investors are willing to lead the public in such demands. With the standards it is setting at Gary, the United States Steel Corporation cannot afford to be responsible for such conditions as these at Painter's Row, whether in the Pennsylvania steel district, at its mines in Northern Michigan, or at its plants in the South. For the Survey to have selected a lesser, independent company for criticism, would have been to lay ourselves open to the charge of fear of the big offender; for us to have found a more humanly destructive group of bad houses, would have been impossible. DIRECTOR OF THE SURVEY.) * * * * * [Illustration: WEST CARSON STREET AT TIME OF FIRST INSPECTION. Tenements of Painter's Row at left; nine families on first and second floors without toilet accommodations. One-family houses at right.] [Illustration: WHERE THE TENEMENTS WERE TORN DOWN. Present site of row shown in picture on opposite page. Closets and sinks installed in topmost row, tenants of which formerly had to go 360 steps to get water.] Dirt and noise are inseparable adjuncts to life in a mill district, deplorable, but unavoidable; but workers in the mills need not necessarily be deprived of sufficient light and air such as it is, and water, and the common decencies of life. In the winter of 1908, I spent several days in Painter's Row. I watched grimy little children at play. I talked with the women, the home-makers; I saw men who had been working on the night shift lying like fallen logs, huddled together in small, dark, stuffy rooms, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion that follows in the wake of heavy physical labor. Above all, I sought to learn how the tenants fared in these three things: ventilation and water and sanitary conveniences. [Illustration: CELLAR BED ROOM. Windows entirely below passage level, showing how some households maintain standards against difficulties.] [Illustration: PASSAGE AND AREA. Showing below at right windows of cellar bed room shown above.] [Illustration: THE "TOWN PUMP." Drinking water supply for 568 people living in Painter's Row; and for the operatives in the mill.] In the two rows nearest the river, there were twenty-eight houses divided from cellar to roof by a party wall, so that the rooms in each apartment were arranged one above the other; the result was that there was no through ventilation, and consequently the rooms were ill-smelling at all times and stiflingly close in summer. There were in the different rows, twenty-seven cellar and basement kitchens, dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated. Besides these, there were six cellar rooms more than halfway below the ground level, that were occupied solely as sleeping rooms. The windows of these cellars were small, and the little light and air that could gain admittance under the best of circumstances was obstructed by a row of ramshackle sheds which bordered the narrow area upon which these windows opened. There were many other gloomy rooms which it would be but repetition to describe. But the tale of dark, ill-ventilated sleeping quarters would be incomplete without passing mention of a space under a staircase that had been walled off and that was entered from a kitchen. Into this "hole in the wall" a bed had been squeezed by some hook or crook, and there two boarders stowed their bodies at night. I found the worst overcrowding in the row at the top of the hill. In one apartment, a man, his wife, and baby and two boarders slept in one room, and five boarders occupied two beds in an adjoining room. In another apartment of three rooms, the man, his wife and baby slept in the kitchen, their two boarders in a second room; and the third room was sub-let and occupied as a living and sleeping room by five persons,--a man, his wife and child and two boarders. This last room was a small one, containing two beds, a stove, table, trunks and chairs. Once inside, there was scarcely room to turn comfortably. Not one house in the entire settlement had any provision for supplying drinking water to its tenants. Mill water was piped out to the rows,--an ugly, dirty fluid, which, however tired or thirsty they were, the people would not put to their lips. I asked the question at every doorstep and got the same reply. They went to an old pump in the mill yard,--360 steps from the farthest apartment, down seventy-five stairs. This "town pump" was the sole supply of drinking water within reach of ninety-one households, comprising 568 persons. [Illustration: PIPE EMPTYING MILL-WATER INTO OPEN DRAIN BETWEEN ROWS.] The water pumped from the mill was used for cleansing purposes. When the pressure was low, there was none even of that to be had. In only two cases was this wash water piped directly into the house. Tenants in the other houses carried it from bent pipes that emptied into open drains running between the rows, or into troughs at the end of the buildings, whence it had to be carried up two or three flights of stairs if they happened to live in the upper stories. From these same apartments the waste water had to be carried out and down and emptied into the drains. The marvel was not that some of the homes were dirty; the wonder was that any of them were clean,--for against such obstacles cleanliness was to be secured only at the expense of tired muscles and aching backs. I talked with one mother whose two rooms on the top floor were spotless, and whose children were well looked after. Day after day, and many times a day, she carried the water up and down that her home and her children might be kept decent and clean. I looked at her bent shoulders, gaunt arms and knotted hands. Work aplenty,--necessary work,--there was and always will be for her to do, but those shoulders and arms and hands had to strain laboriously over unnecessary work as well. "God! Miss, but them stairs is bad," she said. As was said at the beginning, when the Carnegie Steel Company took over Painter's Mill, it renovated the equipment of the plant; when it took over Painter's Row, it did nothing. One row of four houses had waste sinks in the apartments and another row of one-family houses had a curious wooden chute arrangement on the back porches, down which waste water was poured that ran through open wooden drains in the rear yard to the open drain between this row of houses and the next. A similar arrangement had been made for the convenience of six families living in the second story of the row of tenement houses, where two wooden chutes from the porch above carried the waste water down to the curb at Carson street. They carried other things besides waste water,--filth of every description was emptied down these chutes,--for these six families, and three families below on the first floor had no closet accommodation and were living like animals. Some families disposed of slops and excreta in the way just indicated; others used a bucket containing ashes, which was emptied into a wooden garbage bin on the street at the end of the row of houses. Officials of the mill company, when this condition of affairs was pointed out to them, replied that the vault in the rear of this row of houses was built for the use of these families as well as for the other nineteen families in these two rows, and that they could secure a key to a closet compartment by applying for it at the offices. As a matter of fact these people had never been offered keys and they volunteered the statement to the investigator that they had no closets. The vault just mentioned was halfway up the hill between these two rows of houses. To reach it, anyone living in an end apartment in the second story front would be obliged to walk half the length of the second story porch to where the inside stairs led down to the street, then along the street (for the sidewalk was but two and a half feet wide, and completely covered with old lumber and debris of every description), then up a difficult flight of outside stairs, steep and with narrow treads, then two or three steps on the level, then more stairs, and so on until one had taken a hundred and eighty-six steps, sixty-five of which were stairs. This was called "closet accommodations" for want of a better term. [Illustration: WOODEN CHUTE FROM A SECOND STORY GALLERY, DUMPING ITS FILTH AT THE CURB ON CARSON STREET.] [Illustration: THE LOWER ROWS IN 1907. Showing frame two-family dwellings between Carson street and the river. Open drain between the rows; bad surface drainage. Twelve families at right had no toilets.] [Illustration: ONE YEAR LATER: THE ROWS TORN DOWN.] Equally bad conditions prevailed in the row of houses nearest the river. Closets for these houses were formerly located across the railroad tracks on the edge of the bank. During the flood in the spring of 1907, these were swept away and had never been replaced. The twelve families living in this row also used buckets and emptied the contents into the river. One family in the next row of houses claimed that they had never been given a closet key. In all, twenty-two of the ninety-one families were living without the first elementary conveniences that make for sanitation. The full evil of this state of affairs is not really clear until one remembers that these families were occupying two-and three-room apartments, nearly all of them having several children, and anywhere from two to five boarders each. It is fair to ask, why even immigrant laborers put up with such conditions? To the minds of the men, for two very good and sufficient reasons. The houses were near the mill and rents were cheap. The ledge of land along the foot of Mt. Washington affords few building sites; and the Painter's Mill section is, perhaps, the extreme example of the general housing-shortage of the South Side. Men who work in heat, work ten or twelve hours a day, and work at night alternate fortnights, want to live near the mill. Especially is this true of day laborers who work on repair gangs and cleaning-up work, and who may be called out at any time. This is as true of the mill towns, as of the working force of such a plant as Painter's Mill, in the heart of the city. On the other hand, the mill management wants these men there, for just such emergency calls. The rents in Painter's Row averaged $2.40 a room monthly,--cheaper by far than these laborers could secure accommodations from ordinary landlords in many other sections of Pittsburgh; and that is a dominating consideration to a man with a family, earning $1.65 a day, or a single immigrant whose whole purpose in coming to America is to make money and who will stomach any personal ills to hold on to it. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these rents aggregated the company over $7,000 a year. Such an item is a bagatelle in the balance sheet of the United States Steel Corporation; and it would be foolish to suppose that the rows were rented out to their employes as a money making scheme. They were rented out on easy terms to keep laborers within call at any hour of the day or night, and the fact that Painter's Mill is an old plant and likely to be abandoned, no doubt influenced the management in holding the housing property as it stood without rehabilitation. But the fact remains that these rentals amounted to a sum nearly sufficient to pay the whole taxes on the Painter's Mill property, mill, equipment, land and houses. [Illustration: DARK COVERED PASSAGE WAY THROUGH WHICH WOMEN AND CHILDREN WERE OBLIGED TO GO TO REACH PUMP IN MILL YARD.] To-day, the situation in Painter's Row is very different. Three rows of houses have been torn down, and radical improvements made to others. A variety of factors entered into this change and the story is worth the telling. The evolution of social consciousness is interesting, whether in an individual or a corporation. The initial factor in such a development may be one of several,--motives of self-interest, the weight of public opinion or the letting of light into dark places. Motives of self-interest did not suffice to make the Carnegie Steel Company a good landlord in the present instance. In other words, the company had not recognized it to be worth while as a business consideration to house its human machinery with a view of maintaining such machinery at its highest state of efficiency. Its mills, with their equipment, were repaired and improved in order to increase the quality and quantity of their output. But common laborers were too easily replaced for an effort to be made to conserve their health or well-being by repairing or improving these houses in which they lived. If ten men fell out, ten more were ready to step in and fill their places. [Illustration: PAINTER'S ROW TO-DAY. Privy and open drain. Stagnant waste water, garbage, and mill building of the United States Steel Corporation.] But Painter's Row was not the only instance of bad housing in Pittsburgh. Other landlords were equally indifferent, and evil housing conditions were found all over the city. In March, a preliminary report on general housing conditions in Pittsburgh was published by the Pittsburgh Survey. One paragraph dealt with conditions in Painter's Row. The fact that the responsibility for the situation there could be fixed directly upon one of the great corporations enhanced the value of the paragraph as a quotable news item, and _Collier's Weekly_ seized upon it as a text for an editorial. The editorial brought it under the eye of a New England stockholder whose New England conscience was stirred. His protest at the United States Steel headquarters in New York brought from there a communication so favorable to the company that he felt justified in criticising the editors of _Collier's_ for their apparently unwarranted statements; and they, in turn, called upon the Survey to substantiate the quotation. In support of this paragraph, which was but a few lines long in the published report, the full details of how things stood at Painter's Row, as I have put them down here, were transmitted by the editors to the inquiring stockholder. He was aroused, convinced and in position to lodge another protest, this time with the facts behind it. Light had been let in. Meanwhile, pressure was brought to bear upon the owners of Painter's Row from a second quarter. The health authorities were insistent that all houses occupied by three or more families should be altered so as to conform to the requirements of the tenement house law, thus making mandatory the installation of sinks and water-closets in such houses. This also involved the cutting of windows in half a dozen gloomy cellar rooms in one building, in order to procure the required amount of light and ventilation, a structural change which would have so weakened the supporting walls of the building as to have rendered it unsafe. The windows were not cut, the sinks and closets were not installed; instead, the building was razed to the ground,--the best possible thing that could have happened. Two other rows of two-family houses were also demolished. They were old, ramshackle, frame buildings, not worth repairing. Last fall, I inspected Painter's Row for the second time. I found the noise as incessant, the smoke and dust as penetrating, as nine months before. The children were as grimy but they were fewer in number, for as a result of these changes the settlement had been reduced to twenty-eight families. When I reached the topmost row of houses on the hillside, my inspection partook of the nature of a triumphal progress. Some of the tenants remembered me. Gleefully they showed me their sinks with drinking water in every apartment, and told of the closets that had been installed in the basement. Every fixture was clean and in perfect condition,--a refutation of the old argument that such people unaccustomed to these conveniences in the old country will not care for them when supplied. I found a like state of affairs in another building formerly occupied as a tenement, now housing but two families. Here also sinks and inside water-closets had been installed. By so much, then, had life in Painter's Row been made more tolerable. Two rows of one-family brick houses remained untouched. The families living in these houses continued to get along without drinking water on the premises and continued to use outside privy vaults; a few were occupying cellar kitchens. In one row, waste water and garbage were still emptied down wooden chutes leading to open drains through the yards. The result was odorous and unhealthy. Much had been accomplished, something still remained to be done. The company which had gone beyond the requirement of the law in some things still fell short in others. Sooner or later, the health authorities would force the removal of the privy vaults. The old pump had served Painter's Row loyally and well, and would continue to serve it as long as the bucket brigade moved back and forth between these remaining houses and the mill-yard for their water. Sometimes a little child trudged along with a great pail half filled. Again, it was the man of the family, tired after a hard day, who brought in the ration of water. In a way, that big, grimy pump with its old iron handle and primitive spoutings, summed up the Painter's Row situation,--of an industry of great mechanics who could overhaul an old plant and make it pay, but had not brought water a few paces up the hill, or dropped a sewer a few paces down to the river below that men and women and children might live like men and women and children. [Illustration: THE "HOLE IN THE WALL."] [Illustration] LITTLE JIM PARK LEROY SCOTT AUTHOR OF TO HIM THAT HATH, ETC. I had taken a car over to Painter's Mill and Painter's Row and got off at the farther end of the dingy, smoke-hung settlement. I went through and about the houses which the great Carnegie Company leases to its workers (with no trouble about collecting the rent, for that is taken from their wages),--houses so close to the mill, some even wall to wall with it, that they share almost equally with the mill its smoke and grime and clangor,--houses which had been as unsanitary and disease-breeding as any I have ever seen offered the poor even by hardened slum landlords. And then, after I had gone through the rows of houses, at the end of the settlement nearest Pittsburgh, I came upon a sudden contrast. It was an open space, with a portion of it canopied, and over the canopy this black-lettered sign: * * * * * LITTLE JIM PARK * * * * * It wasn't much of a park,--just a little bit of ground, in area hardly more than an average city lot, with a second-hand iron fence around it, with rough benches, a pavement of tan-bark and a few flowerbeds bordered with whitewashed bricks. A poor, pitiably insignificant little place,--yet startlingly pleasant when compared with its surroundings. On the one side, with a row of dreary houses between, rumbled and belched the mill; at its back was a littered waste; at its front, across the street, was a steep hill topped by the ramshackle houses of Stewart's Row, and this hill was muddy, stubbled over with lank dead weeds, gullied with foul-looking, foul-smelling streams of waste water and garbage. I entered the park, sat down beneath the canopy, and my imagination proceeded to explain how the park had been established. Its name was a certain clue. "Little Jim Park,"--that fairly reeked with ultra-sentimentality. Some rich woman had been emotionally stirred by the stories of the cheerless life of tenement children,--the Little Jims and the Little Rosies; she had chanced to see how especially cheerless the life of the children of Painter's Row; she had established the park, and given it as title the more or less generic name by which tenement children are known to sentiment, "Little Jim." I had just credited the park to my Lady Bountiful,--had just finished with Romance,--when Realism sauntered into the park and took the other end of my bench. He was a working man, whose decent clothes and white collar told me this was his day off. His coat collar was turned up, his slouch hat pulled down. One jaw stood out with a quid of tobacco, and his face was deeply wrinkled. He was perhaps twenty-one. "Won't you tell me," I asked, "who gave this park to Painter's Row?" He smiled good-naturedly at me. "Who give it? Nobody give it." "Then how did you get it?" "We took it," said he. "Took it! But the name,----?" "Oh, we just took that, too." Here was something new in the park-building line. I drew nearer. "I wish you'd tell me about it," I asked. "Sure, I'll tell," said he, and I could detect pride in the park in both the young fellow's tone and manner. He tossed his quid down upon the tan-bark. "Used to be a little old church standing here. Little Jim church they called it, Queer name for a church, wasn't it? Damned if I know why they named it that. For the last five or six years it wasn't used at all, and last spring it just collapsed. The Hunkies come scramblin' over it and carried away all the wood to burn, and what was left was certainly a mess. "Well, I don't know just who started the idea,--I guess it was John Donohue and Jim Leary (they works around the rolls in the mill),--but pretty soon a lot of us guys had decided it would be great if we could clear up the place and make a park. So we started at the job, and when any of us was laid off over at the mill we was workin' here. The iron fence we got when they tore down part of Painter's Row,--it was just old junk you know; the bricks 'round the flower beds were some left over from buildin' a brewery down the street, we just helped ourselves to 'em; the arch over the gate we made out of an old pipe; the flag-pole there used to be a pump handle of a barge pump down on the river,--we swiped that; the ball on top of the flag-pole a carpenter give us. We chipped in and bought this tent, and we chipped in and bought a flag. The first one was whipped to pieces by the wind and we had to chip in and buy another before the summer was over. Then we set out some flowers, splashed around with some paint and whitewash, and the park was done. The name of the church seemed sorter to belong to the place, so we called it 'Little Jim Park.' "The park was what you might say opened on Decoration Day when the kids come in and sang and performed. It was a great place for the kids to play all summer, and a fine place for us to sit around of evenings and chin and sing. Never had nothin' of the sort here before, you know. But the big show here at Little Jim Park was Old Home Week, when we had it all fixed up with buntin' and had it lit up of nights. I guess the park ain't much to look at just now, for the geraniums have all been took up, and the fellows are takin' care of 'em in their houses through the winter. But in summer, when the flowers are out, and things are fixed up, I tell you what Little Jim Park looks mighty good to Painter's Row!" * * * * * Somehow, when he had finished, this little park, a park _by_ the people, seemed to be a thousand fold more beautiful, a thousand fold more significant. It and the great mill stood there in striking contrast; the mill and the houses expressing the indifference of the company to its human machines, the park the spontaneous expression of a great native desire, though choked down by long hours and the general oppressive dinginess,--the up-reaching, outreaching desire of the people for light, for air, for natural happiness, for development. [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Stella._ PITTSBURGH TYPES. AN OLD SLAV.] [Illustration: _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._ WASH-DAY IN A HOMESTEAD COURT.] THE MILL TOWN COURTS AND THEIR LODGERS MARGARET F. BYINGTON FORMER DISTRICT AGENT, BOSTON ASSOCIATED CHARITIES From the cinder path beside a railroad that crosses the level part of Homestead, you enter an alley, bordered on one side by stables and on the other by shabby two-story frame houses. The doors of the houses are closed, but dishpans and old clothes decorating their exterior, mark them as inhabited. You turn from the alley through a narrow passageway, and find yourself in a small court, on three sides of which are smoke-grimed houses, on the fourth, low stables. The open space teems with life and movement. Children, dogs and hens make it lively under foot; overhead long lines of flapping clothes are to be dodged. A group of women stand gossiping in one corner waiting their turn at the pump,--this pump being one of the two sources of water supply for the twenty families who live here. Another woman is dumping the contents of her washtubs upon the paved ground, and the greasy, soapy water runs into an open drain a few feet from the pump. In the center of the court, a circular wooden building with ten compartments opening into one vault, flushed only by this waste water, constitutes the toilet facilities for over a hundred people. For the sixty-three rooms in the houses about the court shelter a group of twenty families, Polish, Slavic, and Hungarian, Jewish and even Negro; and twenty-seven little children find in this crowded brick-paved space their only playground. The cinder path has led us to the heart of the sanitary evils of the steel town. For this court typifies those conditions which result when there crowd in upon an industrial district, hundreds of unskilled immigrant laborers, largely single men, largely country people, who want a place to sleep for the least possible cash. Most of the petty local landlords who provide quarters care nothing for the condition of their places, and regard the wages of these transients as legitimate spoils. To determine the extent of such congestion, I made a study of the twenty-one courts in the second ward of Homestead, where yards, toilets, and water supply are used in common. In these courts lived 239 families, 102 of whom took lodgers. Even of those who lived in two-room tenements, a half took lodgers. Fifty-one families, including sometimes four or five people, lived in one-room tenements. One-half the families used their kitchens as sleeping rooms. Only three houses had running water inside, and in at least three instances over 110 people were dependent on one yard-hydrant for water. These are but fragmentary indications, but the situation seemed serious enough to warrant an intensive study, with the help of an interpreter, of these courts. The background of life in this section is a gloomy one. The level land forming the second ward, cut off from the river by the mill and from the country by the steep hill behind, forms a pocket where the smoke settles heavily. Here, on the original site of the town, gardens as well as alleys have been utilized for building small frame houses. The space is nearly covered. In some instances these houses are built in haphazard fashion on the lots; more often they surround a court, such as I have described. Though they vary in character, these groups usually consist of four or six two-story houses facing the street and a similar number facing the alley. Between these rows is a small court connected with the street by a narrow passage. Fifty-eight per cent of the houses have only four rooms, and only four have more than six. The former class usually shelters two families, one having the two rooms on the street and the other the two on the court. In summer, to give some through ventilation to the stifling rooms, doors leading to the stairway between the front and rear rooms are left open. As the families are often friends and fellow countrymen, this opportunity for friendly intercourse is not unwelcome. Indeed, the cheerful gossip that enlivens wash day, like the card-playing in the court on a summer evening, suggests the friendliness of village days. Nothing in the surroundings of these festivities, however, bears out the suggestion. Accumulations of rubbish and broken brick pavements, render the courts as a whole untidy and unwholesome. Some of the houses have little porches that might give a sense of homelikeness, but for the most part they are bare and dingy. As they are built close to the street with only this busy court behind, the owner can hardly have that bit of garden so dear to the heart of former country dwellers. Only, here and there, a little bed of lettuce with its note of delicate green or the vivid red of a geranium blossom brightens the monotony. Dreary as is the exterior, however, the greatest evils to the dwellers in the court arise from other things, from inadequate water supply, from meager toilet facilities, from overcrowding. The conditions as to water supply are very serious. In all the twenty-one courts only three families had running water in their houses, and even the hydrants in the courts were not for individual families. In no court were fewer than five families using one hydrant or pump, while in exceptional instances there were as many as nineteen, twenty and twenty-one families. As waste water pipes are also wanting in the houses, the heavy tubs of water must be carried out as well as in. In this smoky town a double amount of washing and cleaning must be done. The wash is a heavy one, and when the weather permits, it is done in the yard. This addition of tubs, wringers, clothes baskets, and soapy water on the pavement to the already populous court makes it no very serviceable playground for children. The toilet accommodations, while possibly more adequate than the water supply, are unsatisfactory in consequence of the lack of running water. There is not a single indoor closet in any of these courts. The streets of Homestead all have sewers, and by a borough ordinance, even the outside vaults must be connected with them. These are, however, ordinarily flushed only by the waste water, which flows from the yards directly into them; when conditions become intolerable, the tenants wash them out with a hose attached to the hydrant. As long as they are in the yards, this totally inadequate device is apparently the only one possible. The closets, moreover, which are usually in the center of the courts only a few yards from the kitchen doors, create from the point of view either of sanitation or decency an intolerable condition. While occasionally three or four families must use one compartment, usually only two families need do so. But even this means that often they are not locked and that no one has a special sense of responsibility, in consequence of which they are frequently filthy. It is not perhaps surprising that this state of affairs is tolerated by people who have lived on farms and were used to meager toilet facilities; but the discomfort and danger here are infinitely greater than in the country, and here the conditions are remediable. The overcrowding within the houses shown by the accompanying chart makes the water and toilet conditions more unendurable. Half the families who do not take lodgers and eighty-five per cent of those who do, average more than two persons to the room,--a number indicative, generally, of conditions which do not permit moral or physical well being. FAMILIES CLASSIFIED AS TO AVERAGE NUMBER OF PERSONS PER ROOM. Number of persons per room 1 2 3 4 5 5 plus Families without lodgers, total, 137. percentage 13.8 35.7 38 9.7 1.4 1.4 With lodgers, Total 102, percentage 5.8 8.8 42 30.4 6.8 5.8 Let us consider first the causes of such congestion in so small a town, next its nature and results, and finally the possibility of improvement. Three factors are involved in producing this state of affairs, the growth of the mill and town, the low wage of the laborer, and his ambition. The mill has developed fast, and in spite of improved machinery has rapidly increased the number of its employes. In 1892, at the time of the strike, 4,000 men were employed; now nearly 7,000, exclusive of the clerical force. Moreover at each addition to the size of the mill, homes are destroyed to give it place. And further, the steep slopes of a hill hinder the growth of the town. Although suburbs are gradually building beyond this hill, car-fare is an item to be considered when a man earns $1.60 a day, and as there have not been, except during the hard times of 1908, a sufficient number of cheap houses for rent, the people accustomed to small quarters have crowded together along these alleys. The lowest paid workingmen are naturally the ones that inhabit them. Of 220 men, eighty-eight per cent were unskilled workers receiving less than two dollars a day. This figure is usual among the Slavs, since of the 3,602 employed in the mill, eighty-five per cent are unskilled. That the greatest overcrowding is in the families taking lodgers, shows a general tendency to economize in this way rather than by crowding the family into too small a tenement. The three dollars a month which the lodgers pay for their room might seem a small return for the labor and loss of privacy of home life; but in more than three-quarters of the families taking lodgers the income from them covered the rent, while in one-fifth of the families it was twice the rent or even more. This tendency to economize even at the loss of home life, induced primarily by low wages, has a further cause in the ambition of the Slavs to own a home in a better locality, or to buy a bit of property in the old country to which they may some day return. Again and again in explaining why they took lodgers these excuses were given, "Saving to educate the children", "The father does not earn enough to support the family", "Taking boarders in order to start a bank account". Thrift, it would seem, is not a virtue to be recommended indiscriminately. Figures as to overcrowding are in themselves but a lifeless display; when you see them exemplified in individual homes they become terribly significant. I entered one morning a two-room tenement,--the kitchen, perhaps twelve by fifteen feet, was steaming with vapor from a big washtub on a chair in the middle of the room. Here the mother was trying to wash, and at the same time to keep the elder of her two babies from going into a tub full of boiling water standing on the floor. On one side of the room was a huge, puffy bed, one feather tick to sleep on and another for covering; near the window a sewing machine, in the corner an organ,--all these besides the inevitable cook stove whereon in the place of honor was cooking the evening's soup. Asleep upstairs in the second room were one boarder and the man of the house. The two other boarders were at work. Can you picture the effect on the mother of such a home, the overwork for her, the brief possibility of rest when the babies come? Yet it is even more disastrous to the children. And, as appears in the accompanying chart, many of the families who take boarders are families with children. WITH LODGERS WITHOUT LODGERS No CHILDREN FAMILIES FAMILIES 0 30 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 24 XXXXXXXXXXXX 1 30 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 46 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 2 25 XXXXXXXXXXXXX 26 XXXXXXXXXXXXX 3 10 XXXXX 22 XXXXXXXXXXX 4 7 XXXX 15 XXXXXXXX 5 0 7 XXXX The situation brings serious results both to the health and the character of the children. The overworked mother has neither time nor patience for their care and training. As half of the families use the kitchen for sleeping, there is a close mingling of the lodgers with the family which endangers the children's morals. In only four instances were girls over fourteen found in the families taking lodgers, but even the younger children learn evil quickly from the free spoken men. One man in a position to know the situation intimately, spoke of the appalling familiarity with vice among the children in these families. A priest told me that he preached to the women against this way of saving money, but as long as wages are low and the good ambition to own a home or have a bank account can find no other way of fulfilling itself, it is difficult to persuade them to give it up. The crowding and other ills have also serious physical consequences. The birth rate and the deaths of children under two, show that while among the Slavs in the second ward a child died for every three that were born, among the other population of Homestead one died for every six that were born. Against many of these deaths was the entry "malnutrition due to poor food and overcrowding." Sadder still is the case of those wailing babies who do survive and begin life with an under-vitalized system ready for both the disease and the dissipation that attend weak bodies and wills. Outside of the crowded tenement rooms where are the many children to play? In investigating the conditions in one narrow court, I opened a door into a low shed where the entrails of a chicken lay on the floor. It was foul and dark and I turned away in disgust, but the bright little boy beside me piped up cheerily, "Oh that's our gypsy cave." A sorry region, surely, for a child's imagination to rove! [Illustration: _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._ EVENING SCENE IN A HOMESTEAD COURT.] [Illustration: _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._ SLAVIC COURT, HOMESTEAD. Showing typical toilet and water supply; also a few of the boarders in these houses.] The congestion in Homestead must be considered not only from the standpoint of the family and the child, however, but of the single man. His problem is no small one. In the figures for the mill we find that 30.5 per cent of the total number of Slavs are unmarried. This large group, in the period before they send back for a wife or sweetheart, must find some sort of a home. While some are scattered in families and create the lodging problem we have been considering, others live in groups over which a "boarding boss" presides. In West Homestead, for example, in about twenty houses there were three hundred Bulgarians, among whom at the time of the depression there were only three women. These scattered houses hidden away on the outskirts of the town housed a group of happy, industrious men, all ambitious to hoard their money and return to the old country as men of property. They cared little how they lived so long as they lived cheaply. One of these homes consisted of two rooms one above the other, each perhaps twelve by twenty feet. In the kitchen I saw the wife of the boarding boss getting dinner, some sort of hot apple cake and a stew of the cheapest cuts of meat. Along one side of the room was an oilcloth covered table with a plank bench on each side, and above a long row of handleless white cups in a rack, and a shelf with tin knives and forks on it. Near the up-to-date range, the only real piece of furniture in the room, hung the "buckets" in which all mill men carry their noon or midnight meal. A crowd of men were lounging cheerfully about talking, smoking and enjoying life, making the most of the leisure enforced by the shutdown in the mill. In the room above, double iron bedsteads were set close together and on them comfortables were neatly laid. Here besides the "boarding boss" and his wife and two babies, lived twenty men. The boss, himself, was a stalwart Bulgarian who had come to this country several years ago, and by running this house besides working in the mill, had accumulated a good deal of money. The financial arrangements of such an establishment are simple. The boarding boss runs the house, and the men pay him three dollars a month for a place to sleep, for having their clothes washed, and their food cooked. In addition an account is kept of the food purchased, and the total is divided among the men at each pay day. The housewife purchases and cooks what special food each man chooses to order: beef, pork, lamb, each with a tag of some sort labeling the order, and all frying together. A separate statement is kept of these expenses for each boarder. Such an account for a group of men in a small Slavic household may prove of interest. The family (which consisted of a man, his wife, his brother, and three children, eleven, eight, one, and four boarders), occupied a house of four rooms, one of them dark, for which they paid a rent of fourteen dollars. The man, though he had been in this country about twelve years, was still earning only $10.80 a week with which to meet the needs of his growing family. One-half the cost of the food was paid by the boarders including the brother, amounting for each man to about $1.06 a week. For the whole family, the expenditure was as follows: flour and bread, $2.03; vegetables, $1.06; fruit, $.56; milk, eggs, etc., $1.98; sugar, $.49; sundries, $.73; meat, $5.78; a total of $12.63. Besides this the boarders ordered "extras," and the following table for a month expresses the men's individual likings: EXPENSES FOR THE MONTH. _Pamhay._ _Baker._ _Drobry._ _Pilich._ _Timko._ Beef .87 1.20 .48 Pork 3.71 .92 2.14 3.04 2.30 Veal .90 Eggs .10 .05 Milk .21 1.90 Cheese .10 .19 .09 .05 Fuel .15 .25 .25 ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Total $3.96 $3.34 $3.04 $4.43 $2.88 This made the average total expenditure about $8.02 a month for each man. Adding $3 a month for room and washing, the total expense each is about $11. These men make from $9.90 to $12 a week. It is obvious therefore that a large margin remains for saving or indulgence, after clothes are provided. They are thus able if they will to send for wife and children, to fulfill their duties to aged parents, or to provide for their own future. While this program is an economical one, it by no means furnishes to this great group of homeless foreigners a normal life. Though some expect to return and others to send for their families when they have made their fortunes, all for the time being are in a strange country with neither the pleasures nor restraints of home life. To those who have no family at home or no desire to save, the temptation to spend money carelessly is great. Unfortunately the saloons get a large tribute. On pay Saturday, the household usually clubs together to buy a case of beer and drink it at home. These ordinarily jovial gatherings are sometimes interrupted by fights, and the police have to be called in. One officer, who had been on the force for nine years, said that while in general these men were a good-natured, easy-going crowd, and in all his experience he had never arrested a sober "Hunkie," when they were drunk there was trouble. The punishment usually inflicted for their disorderly conduct is of course, a small fine, which has little or no effect. It is indeed currently said that the bigger the fine the better they like it, as they feel that it indicates increased importance. [Illustration: A CONTRAST--I. _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._ CLOSE QUARTERS. ONE ROOM AND THREE IN THE FAMILY.] It is not surprising that excesses exist in a town which offers so little opportunity for wholesome recreation, and whose leaders have failed to realize any obligation toward the newcomers. The Carnegie Library represents the only considerable effort to reach them. The clubs are open to the Slavs. Aside from a class in English, however, they are not adapted to non-English speaking people. Even the Slavic books which the library bought for their benefit are seldom used. I found that a number of the influential Slavs in Homestead did not know that these books were in the library; therefore I judge that one reason why they are not used is a lack of proper advertising. That the building is on the hill away from their homes, that it has an imposing entrance which makes the working man hesitate to enter, and that certain forms must be gone through before books can be secured, or the club joined,--these things have doubtless acted as deterrent influences. However desirous the management of the library may be to reach them, the Slav's ignorance of our language and customs will keep many from ever getting inside. If a library is really to reach the foreign population, it must not wait for them to come to it; it must go to them. A simple reading room opening right into the courts where the people live, where they could drop in after the day's work, find newspapers and books in their own tongue, and where the Americanized Slav could reach his newly-come brethren, teaching them both English and citizenship, would become an important center of influence. For though these people are in many respects aliens, they are not unwilling to accept American standards. The quickness, for example, with which the women adopt our dress, reveals an adaptability which might find expression in more important ways. That they are glad when they can afford it, to have really attractive homes, is shown by these pictures. They are the homes of two families from the same place in the old country, one a newcomer, the other one of the "oldest inhabitants" of the Slavic community. [Illustration: A CONTRAST--II. _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._ INTERIOR OF HOUSE OF WELL-TO-DO SLAVIC FAMILY.] In the first instance, as the man earns but $9.90 a week, rent must be kept low if other bills are to be paid and a little provision made for the future. It is hard enough in a one-room tenement, though the furniture includes only absolute necessities, to keep all one's crowded belongings in order. On wash day morning, when this picture was taken, there are extra complications. On the whole, therefore, the home will be seen to be as neat as circumstances permit. The bright pictures on the wall manifest a desire to make it attractive. The other picture, a "front room" with its leather covered furniture, is in a five-roomed house which the family owns. The vivid-colored sacred pictures relieve the severity of the room; and they reveal a dominant note of Slavic life, for if happiness is to stay with the family, the priest must come yearly to "bless the home." The family who came many years ago, has by slow thrift accumulated the means to obtain this house. And though the mother, who is now a widow, still takes boarders, the family has in general the standards of Americans. This instance I introduce because it is well to recognize that low standards are not necessarily permanent. When Slavs do buy their homes, the size and attractiveness of them indicates that the unsanitary surroundings and crowded quarters of early days were simply tolerated until the ambition could be attained. With a house on the outskirts of the town, a garden about it, and a glimpse of the larger out-of-doors, they begin to feel that the dreams of their emigration have come true. Only the few however have fulfilled the dreams and it is back in the squalid courts that we find the typical problems of every industrial center that has felt the tide of immigration. The Homestead community has so far shown a general indifference to the problems which its industry creates. The mill demands strong, cheap labor, but concerns itself little whether that labor is provided with living conditions that will maintain its efficiency or secure the efficiency of the next generation. The housing situation is in the hands of men actuated only by a greed of profit. The community, on the other hand though realizing the situation, does not take its responsibility for the aliens in its midst with sufficient seriousness to attempt to limit the power of these landlords. The Slavs themselves, moreover, are people used to the limitations of country life, and are ignorant of the evil effects of transferring the small rooms, the overcrowding, the insufficient sanitary provisions which are possible with all outdoors about them, to these crowded courts under the shadow of the mill. And, as we said, their ambition to save and buy property, here or in the old country, is a further incentive to overcrowding. Summing up the results of the indifference of the community and the ignorance and ambition of the Slavs, we find a high infant death rate, an acquaintance with vice among little children, intolerable sanitary conditions, a low standard of living, a failure of the community to assimilate the new race. As we waited in one of the little railroad stations of Homestead, a Slovak came in and sat down beside a woman with a two year old child. He made shy advances to the baby, coaxing her in a voice of heartbreaking loneliness. She would not come to him, and finally her mother took her away. As they went, the Slovak turned sadly to the rest of the company, taking us all into his confidence, and said simply, "Me wife, me babe, Hungar." But were his family in America, it would mean death for one baby in three; it would mean hard work in a little, dirty, unsanitary house for the mother; it would mean sickness and evil. With them in Hungary, it means for him isolation, and loneliness, and the abnormal life of the crowded lodging house. [Illustration: _Photograph by Lewis W. Hine._ BUCH ALLEY. Showing conditions in the unpaved alleys.] [Illustration: [THESE SILHOUETTES REPRESENT 622 DEATHS IN 1907 FROM TYPHOID FEVER IN PITTSBURGH.]] THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF TYPHOID THE FEVER'S ECONOMIC COST TO PITTSBURGH AND THE LONG FIGHT FOR PURE WATER FRANK E. WING ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR PITTSBURGH SURVEY; SUPERINTENDENT CHICAGO TUBERCULOSIS INSTITUTE One convincing and startling feature of the Pittsburgh Civic Exhibit in November was a frieze of small silhouettes three inches apart stretching in line around both ends and one side of the large hall in Carnegie Institute in which the exhibit of the Pittsburgh Survey was installed. The frieze was over 250 feet in length, and the figures were distributed in correct proportion by age and sex. They represented six hundred and twenty-two persons in all, the death-toll from typhoid fever in Pittsburgh during the year 1907. Accompanying this frieze, placed prominently over the doors where everyone could read them, were duplicates of the following sign in large display letters: * * * * * IF THE DEATH RATE HAD BEEN 25 PER 100,000, still considerably greater than that in Albany, Ann Arbor, Ansonia, Atlantic City, Binghamton, Boston, Bridgeport, Brockton, Cambridge, Canton, Detroit, Fall River, Hartford, Jersey City, Lawrence, Lowell, Milwaukee, New York, Rochester, St. Paul, Springfield, Syracuse, Worcester, and a score of other cities having a fairly pure water supply, but _114_ of these persons would have died and the line would _be only 2/9 as long_. _Who is Responsible for this Sacrifice?_ * * * * * And next to this placard was another sign, showing in comparative columns the amount of typhoid fever in Pittsburgh during the four months that had elapsed since the opening of a great municipal filtration plant, compared with the amount for the same months of the previous year; for example ninety-six cases in October, 1908, as against 593 in October, 1907. The typhoid problem in Pittsburgh in its larger cause has always been a water problem; in its consequences it has become one of the city's biggest social and economic problems; in its solution, it has been tied up with all the politics of a boss-ridden city. The story of filtration is the story of the navigation of an unwieldy craft through a tempestuous channel. Buffeted by cross winds of public opinion, its sails battered and torn by squalls of commercial opposition and abuse, guided now to the right and now to the left by frequently changing pilots, a plaything for the waves of councils, its booty coveted by buccaneers of each political faction, filtration and its freightage of health (or contracts) has been a prize over which the elements in the municipal life of Pittsburgh have battled hard and long. The docking of this craft in safety and security is one of Pittsburgh's greatest civic achievements; its protracted passage is her most enduring disgrace. In handling the question of typhoid in Pittsburgh, we must then, deal with three distinct themes: water, economics, and politics. [Illustration: Silhouettes are not here classified as to age, sex and occupation.] [Illustration] I.--WATER. THE MENACE. The publicly supplied drink of Pittsburgh has been river water and whatever that river water contained. Prior to the opening of the new filtration plant last summer, that part of the city known as "old Pittsburgh," comprising the first twenty-three[9] wards, received its water supply from cribs in the bed of the Allegheny River at Brilliant Station, about seven miles above the city. Water taken from these cribs (and since 1905 from an artificial channel of sheet piling along the shore) was pumped into reservoirs on Herron Hill and Highland Park, and then turned unfiltered into the water mains for distribution to the shops and residences throughout the city. [9] Ward numbers in this article refer to the existing or old notations. A new ward system has just been adopted. [Illustration] With the exception of two or three wards, which receive a company supply of filtered water, that part of the city known as the South Side, comprising wards twenty-four to thirty-six, and ward forty-three, formerly the Borough of Sheraden, receives its water from the Monongahela direct, and from the Ohio direct, just below the junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny. The former city of Allegheny, the present North Side, was supplied directly from the Allegheny River from two sources; first from the Allegheny at a point near Montrose, about eleven miles up the river, and second from another point on the Allegheny near Sixteenth street. This latter source of supply was discontinued on March 5, 1908. [Illustration: THE NEW FILTRATION BASINS.] [Illustration] [Illustration] The Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers are turbid at all times, and after a rain or in the spring, so muddy that a platinum wire cannot be seen more than a quarter of an inch from the surface. In addition to this, investigations have shown that the rivers commonly carry in solution the soluble chemical products of the mills along their shores,--organic and inorganic, acid and alkali; oils, fats, and other carbon compounds; dead animals,--rats, cats and dogs; flesh-disintegrated and putrescent; as well as the offscourings of iron and steel mills, tanneries and slaughter houses, and similar industries. But this is not all. Seventy-five up-river towns,--with an estimated population of 350,000 inhabitants,--in the Allegheny or tributary valleys; and in the Monongahela a long string of towns, Swissvale, Homestead, Braddock, Rankin and McKeesport, all furnish their supply of common sewage as a further contamination of the already dirty water with its long list of disease-breeding bacteria. These conditions have existed since Pittsburgh came into prominence as an industrial center. Typhoid has been endemic. The duration of this "plague" in Pittsburgh, unbelievable though its sufferance may appear in view of the facts already given, is a matter of history and record. For thirty-five years, up to the beginning of 1908, the city was in the grip of a scourge which has been in the words of the most recent treatise on typhoid[10], "one of the black records in the sanitary history of our country." Here and there clamorous, indignant voices were raised against it; but public sentiment had become so callous that it only spasmodically and halfheartedly demanded the carrying into operation of a tardy system of filtration. In the meantime, those who could not afford to buy distilled or spring water, continued to drink this filth. [10] Whipple, Typhoid Fever, p. 158. [Illustration] With what result? For the last twenty-five years, an average death rate of 102.3 per 100,000 population; since 1889 never below 107; for the last nine years an average of 130; and last year, the year of the completion of Pittsburgh's filtration plant, 131.5 deaths and 1,115 cases for every 100,000 inhabitants. A black record this, in the face of uncontrovertible evidence from other cities, both in this country and abroad, that the purification of the water supply should blot out at least seven-ninths of the typhoid fever. In contrast with Pittsburgh's high mortality, the average for other large American and European cities since 1898 may be seen from the following list: Pittsburgh 130.0 Allegheny 104.4 Washington 59.0 Philadelphia 54.7 Baltimore 35.3 San Francisco 30.5 St. Louis 30.3 Chicago 27.3 Boston 24.5 New York 18.2 Paris 17.4 London 11.7 Vienna 5.2 Berlin 4.2 The very even distribution of typhoid in Pittsburgh,--another indication pointing to infected water as the chief cause,--is seen in the map on page 927, on which each dot represents a case of typhoid within the year,--July 1, 1907, to June 30, 1908, the period covered by the main part of this study. The second map shows the relative mortality, by wards, for the same period. The following chart shows the relative rise and fall from year to year in cases and deaths during the past twenty-five years, and is based on estimates of population provided by the United States Census Bureau. The morbidity figures are taken from the United States census prior to 1901, and from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health records following that year. [Illustration] Previous to 1883 very little attempt was made to compel physicians to report typhoid cases to the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health; hence no reliable morbidity records are available up to that time. But in the year 1882 an ordinance was passed requiring such reports to be made. It is very certain that several years elapsed before a majority of the cases was actually reported, and even at the present time, in spite of prosecutions and a more enlightened sentiment, many cases never reach the bureau. Yet the number of cases actually reported in Pittsburgh proper, since 1883, reaches the astounding total of 54,857. In other words, within the past twenty-five years, one person to every six of the total population has had an attack of typhoid fever. [Illustration: TYPHOID FEVER CASES AND DEATHS PER 100,000 POPULATION IN PITTSBURGH FROM 1883 TO 1907] But even more telling in its significance is the fact that out of these 54,857 reported cases, 8,149, or 14.8 per cent died as a result of their illness. Over eight thousand men, women and children were sacrificed here in Pittsburgh in the last twenty-five years to a disease known by modern science to depend for its very existence upon lax methods of handling food, drink and waste. Over eight thousand graves have been dug, half of them (4,069) since February 6, 1899, more than nine years ago, when the report of Pittsburgh's Filtration Commission, advising the necessity of a pure water supply, was placed in the hands of the Pittsburgh councils. In life, these eight thousand people, standing single file, four feet apart, would form a line six and one-sixth miles long, extending from the court house in a straight line to the Filtration Plant; or from the Point Bridge down the Ohio as far as the Borough of Emsworth. [Illustration] II.--THE COST. In order to establish a sure ground for estimate as to the economic drain of this disease upon this community, a concrete study of the cost of typhoid in six selected wards of Greater Pittsburgh was undertaken by the Pittsburgh Survey. The sections of the city chosen are fairly representative of living conditions among the wage-earning population. Wards 8 and 11, in what is commonly known as the Hill District, represent a congested quarter made up largely of Russian Jews, Austrians and Italians, with a considerable number of Americans and American Negroes. The residents of these two wards are chiefly employes of the small trades and the sweating and stogie industries, clerks, factory hands, common laborers, etc., who are rather below the average scale of earning capacity. They number about 22,000 for the two wards and among them there were forty-four per cent of the cases studied. Wards 25, 26 and 27 are on the South Side. Their total population is about 33,000; mill hands, mostly of Slavic origin, occupy those parts of these wards bordering the Monongahela River, and a better-off class of Americans occupy the hilltops overlooking the river. The wards would, therefore, represent a rather uneven population, as based on nationality or wage scale, but were not a large factor in this study, as only eight per cent of the cases covered were found in these wards. [Illustration] [Illustration: PITTSBURGH DISTRIBUTION BY WARDS OF TYPHOID FEVER CASES JULY 1, 1906 TO JUNE 30, 1907 SAME PERIOD AS THAT OF STUDY OF ECONOMIC COST IN WARDS 8, 11, 21, 25, 26 AND 27] [Illustration: PITTSBURGH. TYPHOID FEVER DEATH RATE PER 100,000 BY WARDS FROM JULY 1ST, 1906 TO JUNE 30TH, 1907 ~NOTE:~ WARDS 42, 43 & 44 WERE NOT INCORPORATED AT TIME OF STUDY.] [Illustration] Ward 21, the other section selected, is in area one of the largest in the city, lying to the east in what is known as the Homewood District. The population of this ward is about 26,000, living mostly in good homes, with occasional poorer dwellings along the railroad and in some of the "runs." In the main, they represent a high wage or small salaried class. From this section, the other half of the cases studied, about forty-eight per cent was taken. The period covered by the investigation was one year, beginning July 1, 1906, and ending June 30, 1907. The field work was done by Miss Anna B. Heldman, visiting nurse of the Columbian School Settlement, whose personal acquaintance with many of the families of the Hill District, and whose six or eight years' experience in caring for typhoid patients in this same neighborhood, enabled her to secure in detail many facts that might have escaped a person less familiar with the district or the families concerned. An analysis of the cases thus studied, shows that there were either reported to the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health, or known to the investigator, but not reported, 433 cases of typhoid fever in wards 8 and 11, 94 in wards 25, 26, and 27, and 502 in ward 21--a total of 1,029 in these six wards within the one year studied. These cases occurred in 844 families. Miss Heldman, five months after the close of this year period, was able to locate but 338 of these families, the remainder having either moved out of the state, or been lost track of by people living in the neighborhood. There were 2,045 individuals in these 338 families, or an average of 6.4 persons per family. Of this number, 448 individuals, or 22 per cent had typhoid fever within the year. Out of these 448 cases, there were 26 deaths and 422 recoveries, an exceptionally low percentage of deaths to cases. [Illustration: Line representing 8,149 people who have died from typhoid fever in Pittsburgh since report of Filtration Commission in 1899 advising necessity of pure water. Standing in marching order, single file, four feet apart, they would make a procession six miles long.] Of the 448 patients, 187 were wage earners, contributing all or part of their earnings to the family income. As a result of their illness, these 187 wage earners lost 1,901 weeks' work, or 36.6 years. This averaged over ten weeks per patient, and represented an actual loss in wages of $23,573.15. In addition, other wage earners lost 322 weeks' work while caring for patients, thereby losing $3,326.50 in wages, and bringing the total of wages lost to $26,899.65. [Illustration] The other large item of cost is that of expense for care and treatment of patients. Ninety cases were treated in hospitals for all or part of the time, as pay patients, half-charity, or full-charity cases. To meet these hospital expenses, $2,332.00 was paid to hospitals by full-pay patients themselves, and $1,834.50 was paid the hospitals by either individuals or charitable organizations for the care of half-pay patients, making the total cost of caring for 90 hospital patients $4,166.50. This is an understatement, because it omits the contribution of the hospitals themselves to the care of half-charity and full-charity patients. If figures were available, there should be added the amount represented by the difference in the money paid to hospitals and the actual cost of maintenance, presumably another $1,800.[11] [11] Out of the 448 cases studied, twenty-four of the ninety cases treated in hospitals were as full charity patients and sixteen were taken as half charity cases; of the 358 cases treated at home, fifty received outside aid and ninety-six were compelled to incur a debt for all of their expenses, with no immediate prospects of being able to repay it. Moreover, many received sick benefits and others were a direct drain on the business interests of the city from the fact that their employers kept them on their pay-rolls during sickness, at half pay. The expenses of the remaining 358 patients cared for in their homes amounted to $12,889.90 for doctors' bills, $1,965.50 for nurses, $2,640.60 for medicines and drugs; $1,810.10 for milk, $629.20 for ice, $861.50 for servants made necessary by the illness of those naturally caring for the home, and $1,204.45 for other expenses, of which the largest single item was the cost of a trip to Colorado and return at the doctor's orders, for a patient threatened with tuberculosis. The total of these expenses was $22,000.35. [Illustration] The funeral expenses of the 26 patients who died, amounted to $3,186.00. It may be argued that sooner or later funeral expenses must inevitably be met, and that they should not, therefore, be charged against this account. Under the circumstances, however, these expenses were premature, and were directly chargeable to typhoid fever. Consequently, it has seemed fair from the point of view of this study, to include them. The grand total loss in wages and in expenses thus outlined was $56,252.50. Further analysis shows that the average loss in wages per patient among the 187 wage earners was $126; that the average cost per patient in loss of wages and expenses for the 446 patients was $128; and that the average cost in loss of wages and expenses for each typhoid death among the 448 cases was $2,164. Consider the losses in these wards in their bearing upon the city as a whole. There were 5,421 cases of typhoid fever in Greater Pittsburgh in 1907. If the cost to each patient was $128, typhoid fever cost the city that year $693,888 in expenses and loss of wages alone. There were 622 deaths from typhoid fever in Greater Pittsburgh during the same period. If we put the value of these lives lost at so low a figure as $4,000, an additional loss of $2,448,000 was sustained. Or in round numbers $3,142,000 was the minimum economic loss to the community of Greater Pittsburgh, due to typhoid fever alone in the year 1907. This is a conservative estimate, in view of recent values placed on deaths from tuberculosis.[12] The two and a half million dollar death item might be doubled without overstating the case. [12] Prof. Irving Fisher, of Yale, in a paper read at the International Congress on Tuberculosis in Washington last October, held that "the money cost of tuberculosis, including capitalized earning power lost by death, exceeds $8,000 per death." The average "expectation of life" lost through death from typhoid fever is not greatly different from that of tuberculosis. [Illustration] When it is considered that typhoid fever has been almost constantly prevalent within the city limits, with practically no abatement, for the past thirty-five years, it requires only a little applied mathematics to calculate the probable enormity of the money loss to the community, through the ravages of this disease alone, year after year. Was it not time for it to stop? In the face of over a $3,000,000 loss last year, $5,450,000 was not more than the city could afford to pay for the filtration plant that is purifying the drinking water. Nor was it extravagance for the mayor and city councils to grant the superintendent of the Bureau of Health an increased staff of tenement house and milk inspectors, to make it possible to clean up other sources of infection, and hasten the time when typhoid fever in Pittsburgh shall constitute a no greater menace than in any other well-kept American city. * * * * * I have used the term "economic cost" of typhoid fever with reference to Pittsburgh families. The mere phrase carries with it no knowledge of all those family readjustments and inconveniences, the distress of mind and unalloyed misery that must be considered before we can form any adequate idea of what such sickness holds for a wage earning population. Were it necessary to measure the result of typhoid fever only in cold cash, it would be a relatively easy task. In the first place there are the thousand and one makeshifts and re-establishments that must be reckoned with in order to get a clear idea of what typhoid means to those poorer families, where, without the invasion of sickness, the business of getting bread is a constant struggle. In a family consisting of a man, wife and three children, the sixteen year old daughter, who had not been very strong, contracted typhoid. At the end of sixteen weeks in bed and thirty-two weeks out of work, she had developed a marked case of tuberculosis. Not being strong enough to go back to her former employment, she secured work in a bakery where she was subsequently seen coughing as she wrapped up bread for customers. The father of this girl, during her sickness, was keeping six cows on the premises and selling milk to customers living in the neighborhood. [Illustration] The twenty-year-old wife of a Hungarian laborer had a six weeks' old baby when she came down with a slow case of the fever. She remained at home for a week with no one but herself to do the work and care for the baby. The husband, who did not realize the cause of her weakness, gave her a beating each day when he came home, because he thought her lazy. He made her carry up coal for the fires until she became so delirious that he could not keep her in the house. She was then sent to a hospital and the baby given to friends. The woman died in a week and the baby two weeks later. A family of five, consisting of father, mother and three little children, cooked, ate and slept in one uncurtained room. The mother and four year old girl were taken sick at the same time. The girl occupied an Arbuckle coffee box, with a pillow and pillow-case for a mattress, and the man's overcoat was her only covering. The mother slept in the only bed, furnished with a mattress and one small comforter, and shared it at night with the father, the baby and their six year old girl, who lay across the foot of the bed. The girl was in danger of contracting pneumonia from exposure. A family of seven occupied a store and kitchen on the first floor and two rooms upstairs. A small bedroom was the only one which had a fireplace; and the entire family slept there; the mother (who had typhoid), in the only bed, and the father and five children in a row on the floor. In another family, the six year old boy had the fever, and was found lying on an improvised bed, his little dog tied beside him. The mother had rested the ends of two boards in a china closet at one end of the kitchen, and on a chair at the other, so that she might care for the patient, do the cooking and attend to the baby at the same time. By this make-shift, the father was able to keep at his work. [Illustration] One family, consisting of father, mother and five children, managed ordinarily with a bed for the parents, a child's bed for the eight year old girl, a two-third size bed for the eighteen and sixteen year old daughters, and a cot for the fourteen year and ten year old sons, one sleeping at each end. First the mother and one of the boys were taken sick, and during the early part of their illness, no one was disturbed. But within a month, and before the first two patients got well, the four other children came down with typhoid, making six in the family sick together. Then the father slept on the floor and the sick mother got out of her bed to give place to two of the children, she, herself, sleeping at the foot of the bed until one of the children became delirious. After that she moved to the foot of the two-thirds bed. In the day time she had no place to lie down, and sat all day in a chair until she became so weak that she could hardly walk. Occasionally she helped her husband who did the cooking and cared for the patients, by paring potatoes and doing other small work about the kitchen. No one had time to keep the kitchen sink clean, and the accumulation of vegetable matter became so filthy that it had to be reported to the Bureau of Health. With family income cut off, and with nothing saved, the family would have been penniless had it not been that the doctor made his bill moderate; the family was trusted for groceries, milk and ice; friends gave about twenty dollars in cash, and Columbian Settlement furnished bedding and the services of a visiting nurse. The mother did not fully recover for about six months. The father, who suffered a good deal from loss of sleep and exposure while caring for the patients, contracted a cold. This developed into a serious case of asthma from which he died. [Illustration] To these and many similar families there were more serious results than the debts incurred. A school girl's unrecovered health, a stogie roller's reduced speed, a blacksmith's and a tailor's loss of strength, a case of tuberculosis developed, a boy become a truant, a family broken up and deserted, a baby's death,--all are of tremendous concern as items in the annual wear and tear of the city's potential resources. They are items of "economic cost" that cannot be handled by the statistical method. They are, after all, the real human finger marks that typhoid leaves when its clutches are loosened. * * * * * Such a showing, then, of actual economic and personal loss as this study of six Pittsburgh wards brought out, is offered as a final leverage to those who in other American cities may be endeavoring to dislodge inertia and clear their water supplies. This investigation of typhoid fever, however, as it was found in the households of the wage earners of Pittsburgh, had its immediate practical bearings. The sanitary facts it brought out showed unequivocally the necessity for ridding the city of other sources of infection at the same time that the water supply was cleared. There was evidence that many of the after cases in the families studied, were due to conditions existing entirely apart from the water. Reports on housing conditions in Pittsburgh show that a favorable laboratory for the growth and dispersal of germs exists in the city's unsanitary dwellings. Insufficient water supply renders cleanliness almost impossible. Overcrowding means increased possibilities of infection through contact with food and drink in the combined family kitchen, pantry, dining-room, and bedroom. Pittsburgh's thousands of open privy vaults afford ideal conditions for the spread of disease by flies and other insects, and by personal contact. Such plague spots as Saw Mill Run, with its string of double-and triple-decker rear privy vaults discharging on the banks of a stream which are flushed off only when the water rises after a rain, afford further examples, deplorable and disgusting. [Illustration] How much of the Pittsburgh typhoid has been due to direct contagion from such conditions as these, can only be inferred at the present writing. In line with the general question of contagion, and secondary cause, however, our data afford some clews. They show that in forty of the families studied, the first case was followed in from ten days to one or two months by other cases, seventy-six cases in all, in addition to the original forty. It shows further that in at least eighteen of these families, one or more of the following conditions existed: Family crowded into one or two rooms; home dirty and poorly kept; the person who cared for the patient also doing the family cooking; well and sick members of the family sleeping in the same room and often in the same bed; privy vaults in exceedingly bad condition, and often stopped up and overflowing with filth. In one family, consisting of man, wife, four children and three lodgers, crowded into two dirty rooms, a three year old boy was taken sick in October. The mother did the family cooking and cared for the patient. The cesspool in the yard which was in bad condition was used by two families. Another member of the family became ill November 3, and the mother came down on December 19. There were seven cases in this one courtyard within the year. In another instance a man, wife, and nine children were living in three rooms. The sixteen year old son was taken sick on June 20 and was sent to the hospital. Then in July came the thirteen year old daughter for whom her mother cared at home. The mother also did the family cooking. The father, mother and eleven year old son all slept in the same room with the patient. All three of them followed within a month, and another son twelve years old, was taken sick in August. [Illustration] In another family of eight, the sink in the kitchen and the toilet in the yard were in a very filthy condition. The mother and one son were taken sick in August. The sick and the well slept together in the crowded bedrooms. In November four more members of the family came down with the disease, on the sixth, ninth, eleventh and fifteenth, respectively. Let the reader judge for himself whether or not, in the face of these facts, it can be expected that filtered water alone will solve the problem. The Pittsburgh Typhoid Fever Commission is a recognition of these facts, and a recognition also from a national and scientific point of view, that probably never again in the history of any large American city will there be such a favorable laboratory in which to study the epidemiological facts of typhoid fever both before and after filtration. The commission was appointed in April, 1908, by Mayor Guthrie; is made possible by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, and by the co-operation of the bureaus of health and water, which offered the free use of their laboratories for analytical and administrative purposes. Dr. James F. Edwards is chairman, and the membership includes Dr. Dixon of the State Board of Health, Prof. Wm. T. Sedgwick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. E. S. Rosenau, of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, who has been directing the elaborate governmental investigations into typhoid in the District of Columbia. The following report is made (January 1) by Dr. E. G. Matson, of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health, executive officer of the committee. [Illustration] The work of the commission to date has consisted of a minute investigation of all cases of typhoid which have appeared since May 1, 1908, including the sanitary condition of their living and working places. Investigations have also been made into neighborhoods where there appeared to be fewer cases than the average of the city, the milk supply, and the water supply, both public and private. It is remarkable that not even the smallest outbreak has been traced to milk. A particular feature of the study of water supply is that in connection with the acidity of the Monongahela and the eastern affluents of the Allegheny and its effect upon the sewage discharged by an enormous town population into them. So far typhoid has declined greatly in Pittsburgh since January, 1908, as compared with the average or even the minimum of previous years. This decline has naturally been a subject of great interest though it is too soon to give the results of investigations. We have ascertained that this decline has been shared by the towns on the lower Allegheny, which have hitherto been supposed to be the most important source of our epidemics. During November and December, which would represent the first months of the filtered water period, typhoid has been reported from the filtered water area at the rate of the most favorable American cities, and in Allegheny, which receives nearly the same water unfiltered, at about twice this rate. III.--THE STORY OF THE LONG FIGHT FOR PURE WATER. And now we come to the story of the long fight for pure water in Pittsburgh. The irony of the situation is, that there should ever have been a long fight in a city which has since 1863 publicly recognized the danger of impure water, the significance of which has almost continually been brought before the people by press and platform alike, for the past fifteen years. The story of the whole filtration movement cannot be separated from the story of the struggle for supremacy of contending factions in the dominant political party. And the result,--excess typhoid with its terrible cost,--becomes part of the penalty the city has had to pay for such corruption as the present graft proceedings in councils are bringing to light. [Illustration] The situation at the beginning of the filtration movement in 1895-96 was this: One of the strongest political machines in the history of municipal government was in absolute control in Pittsburgh. It mattered not who was elected mayor; he had no responsible power. Heads of departments were appointed by outgoing councils. This meant that department heads held over, and used their power to re-elect as in-coming councilmen the outgoing councilmen who had elected them. Moreover, councils were controlled by the ring.[13] In this way the political machine was self-perpetuating. The directors of public works drew specifications for public improvements; councils awarded contracts; and it is a matter of notorious record that the well-known firm of which one of the ring leaders was a member usually secured the contracts. [13] For an analysis of Pittsburgh politics during this period under the leadership of Magee and Flinn, see Lincoln Steffens's The Shame of the Cities. The municipal election in February, 1896, was hard and bitterly fought. George W. Guthrie headed the reform party as candidate for mayor. According to one authority the majority of ballots cast were for Guthrie, but when the count came in officially a few days after election, the ring had won. With the mayor, both branches of councils, and the director of public works all of the dominant party, the carrying out of their ante-election pledges so far as filtration was concerned would seem a matter of course. True to these pledges, a resolution for the appointment of a Filtration Commission, to include the mayor, the president of each council, and eight citizens,--making eleven in all,--passed City Councils on June 8, 1896, and was approved by the mayor on June 10. [Illustration] The commission was promptly appointed and set to work to make a thorough investigation into the relative merits of various methods of filtration and water supplies in use in cities of the United States and Europe. Allen Hazen, a leading expert on filtration, was employed for the first phase of the investigation, and Prof. William T. Sedgwick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, eminent as a sanitary expert, investigated the typhoid situation in the city. Morris Knowles, C. E., was appointed resident engineer in local charge of all items of experiment and investigation. Various members of the commission visited European and American cities to study filtration methods; extended bacteriological and analytical studies of the Allegheny River water were made; small, slow, sand filter beds and standard make mechanical filters were set up at the experiment station to test the relative merits of each as applied to Allegheny River water; and nothing was left undone as a means of arriving at a sound conclusion. Over two and a half years elapsed between the appointment of the commission and the rendering of its report. The report, which was very elaborate, was presented at a joint session of councils on February 6, 1899, and showed that the members of the commission were united in their belief that, all things taken into consideration, a slow, sand filtration plant should be constructed. In accordance with its recommendation steps were immediately taken for the issue and sale of bonds to provide the necessary funds, a public election for this purpose being held on September 19, 1899. The appropriation ordinance for the year 1900 contained "No. 100; for the purpose of extension and improvement of water supply and distribution, including the filtration of such water supply, and providing and furnishing meters to be used in connection therewith ... $2,500,000." The ordinance authorizing the controller to issue bonds for the purpose as above specified was passed by Select Council in March, and approved by the mayor April 3. So that prior to May 1, 1900, a fund of $2,500,000 became available, and the prospect for the prompt erection of the plant would have been bright, but for the fact that during the four years since 1896 certain changes in the attitude of the members of the ring toward one another had taken place, that were destined to involve further complications. One member (Magee) had aspirations toward the United States Senate. In this he encountered opposition from the other end of the state, and in the struggle for state supremacy that followed, Pittsburgh was left largely to another member of the ring. [Illustration] In the early part of 1900 E. M. Bigelow, who for a long time had been director of public works, had a row with this leader (Flinn) over certain matters of public work. The result was that on June 11, 1900, the ring-controlled councils threw Mr. Bigelow out of office and elected as director of public works a man more friendly to the ring. This break between Flinn and Bigelow was the beginning of the long series of events that retarded the filtration movement for at least four years. Bigelow was now "out." The new director of public works, appointed by councils was acceptable to the ring that was "in"; so was the membership of councils. The question with Bigelow was, naturally, how to get back into office. This is the way he accomplished his desire. The ousted director had a brother, who, it is said, had an old grudge against the ring. He went to Harrisburg and prevailed upon the State Legislature to grant Pittsburgh a new charter, abolishing the office of mayor and substituting that of recorder, this office to be filled by the governor until April, 1903, when the regularly elected recorder would come into office. The charter also gave the recorder much larger powers than the mayor had previously enjoyed, among them the appointment of heads of departments and the right to enter into contracts hitherto the prerogative of councils alone. [Illustration] As might be expected, the newly appointed recorder soon exercised the authority vested in him by the terms of the new charter, and on June 11, 1901, removed the head of the department of public works again installing Mr. Bigelow in that important position, just one year after he had been removed by councils. It must be remembered that while Mr. Bigelow had again secured the directorship of the Department of Public Works, there had been no change in councils, which were still enrolled on the side of the ring. While councils could not now stop the preparation of plans and specifications for the proposed filtration plant, they could make a lot of trouble in other ways; and so they did. There are contradictory statements at this time as to just how much progress had been made on plans during the year that Mr. Bigelow was out of office. One side claims that "sixty per cent of the plans had been drawn"; the other said, "only part of the plans." At any rate, within six weeks Mr. Bigelow removed the engineer who had served under his immediate predecessor, appointed as resident engineer Morris Knowles (who was later appointed chief engineer of the newly created Bureau of Filtration), and directed him to start work on plans for the filtration plant. At the same time councils proceeded in an attack on the director for alleged delay in the preparation of plans; and on November 11, 1901, presented a report to its filtration committee declaring Mr. Bigelow entirely responsible for all the delay in the preparation of plans and specifications, adding that these delays had been "gross and inexcusable." This report was accompanied by a resolution ordering Director Bigelow to furnish within ten days, to the filtration committee, for its approval, all the plans and specifications for the work lying north of the Western Pennsylvania Railroad, directing him further to proceed with the utmost diligence to the completion of the plans and specifications for the remainder of the plant, and to submit the same to the filtration committee on or before December 2, 1901. The report and resolution were adopted by both councils on the day of their presentation. The real motive for this attack is readily inferred. [Illustration] In the meantime the opposing faction had been working with the governor, and after a notorious meeting at the Duquesne club, the governor was prevailed upon to remove his first appointed recorder, on the pretext that he had displaced several old soldiers from office, and to appoint another recorder in his place,--this time a man upon whom the machine could rely. At the close of the letter of removal, the governor added a now famous postscript, "I was not bribed." With the appointment of the new recorder, Bigelow was again forced out of the office of director of public works. This put the ring again in full control, with even greater powers than it had before. A year and a half had elapsed since the $2,500,000 became available, and all that the people had to show for it were eighty-five acres of land, part of the plans and specifications completed, and over 600 more deaths from the scourge of typhoid fever. The next move was made within ten days after Director Bigelow's dismissal, when another ordinance for the letting of the contract was introduced. It quickly passed both councils and received the recorder's approval. By this ordinance the contract was not to exceed $1,500,000 and was to be for the construction of "so much of the filtration plant as is shown upon the drawings and description in the specifications, as and to be known as contract No. 1." [Illustration] Under this ordinance the new director advertised for bids, which were received and opened. It appeared that the lowest bid was made by the T. A. Gillespie Company, at about $1,292,000. The director and recorder were preparing to let this contract for part of the work to the Gillespie Company, and it looked as though the faction of the ring now in the saddle would win the stakes. But they had not reckoned all the odds. The opponents of the ring, in this two-sided hold-up game, brought out another winning card. It was in the person of John P. Edgar, a citizen of Steubenville, Ohio, but the owner of property in the thirty-seventh ward, Pittsburgh, who entered suit in the United States Circuit Court at Pittsburgh for an injunction to restrain the recorder and director of public works from awarding the contract. The case was argued before Judge Buffington on March 3, 1902, W. B. Rodgers and George W. Guthrie appearing for the plaintiff, and Thomas D. Carnahan, city solicitor, for the city. Suit was based on the allegation that no estimate had been presented to councils for the whole cost of the improvement, and that the letting of this partial contract would be in violation of the new charter, which required that before any contract for public improvement could be entered into, such an estimate for the entire cost must have been presented. The city solicitor showed that an estimate had been made of the entire cost, but this estimate had not been made public or submitted to councils. Mr. Rodgers maintained that this estimate must be submitted to councils and approved by them. He and Mr. Guthrie also claimed that the contract should embrace the completion of the work. On March 13, 1902, Judge Buffington issued the injunction prayed for. The court held that the estimate of the whole cost, required by the charter, must be made to councils and become a matter of public information, and that such an estimate had not been made. [Illustration] The machine was temporarily blocked, but five days after the injunction had been granted, the recorder instructed his director of public works to have blueprints, plans and estimates of the entire filtration system ready to present to councils at as early a date as possible, thus starting the necessary legal steps for placing a new contract. Within a month these plans and estimates, involving an expenditure of $3,635,500, were prepared and submitted to councils, and three ordinances for the letting of contracts were presented. The increase over the first estimate was explained as due to an increase in the number of services to be metered, and to a general increase in the cost of materials. These three ordinances were indefinitely postponed, however, in councils, because more money for the construction of the plant under the increased estimate was not available. The next hold-up came from the city controller, who on May 1, 1902, sent the following letter in duplicate to Recorder Brown and Director McCandless: In view of the uncertainty attending the proposed filtration of the water, and the doubt as to the ultimate disposition of the matter by councils, this department desires to notify you that on and after May 10, no indebtedness against that appropriation for any purpose, except for labor or supplies previously furnished, should be incurred, as, under the decision of the court, there is now no authority for any expenditure for filtration purposes. In the meantime, about April, 1902, and all through that summer, advocates of a mountain water supply were at work. At the same time changes in councils threw out of the Filtration Committee members favoring sand filtration and elected opponents of the plan to its membership. The result was that on July 21, 1902, an ordinance was brought forward authorizing the Filtration Committee to prepare, in conjunction with the superintendent of the Bureau of Water Supply, or some other competent engineer designated by the director of public works, estimates showing the entire cost of the installation of the proposed sand filtration plant. Early in January, 1903, this resolution had passed both councils. It was, however, vetoed by the recorder on the ground that it was unnecessary, the Department of Public Works, he held, having already furnished full estimates, in good faith, and being ready to assist councils further in any manner that might be suggested. The recorder added in his veto: "If the purpose of this resolution is ultimately to defeat the proposed plan of sand filtration and substitute therefor a system of mechanical filtration, I am unalterably opposed to it." An attempt to pass the resolution over the recorder's veto was made, but it failed for lack of the necessary three-fifths vote. [Illustration] In the meantime an ordinance was presented authorizing a public election for a bond issue large enough to cover the difference between the amount of money then available and the amount required under the increased estimate. All that came of this was an inquiry by the sub-committee to which it had been referred as to whether the new estimate included coverings for the filter beds, and whether the South Side was to be given filtered water. After ten months' further delay, this sub-committee reported that the estimate did not provide for covered filter beds and that it made no provision for the South Side. Another year and a half had elapsed, with 650 additional deaths from typhoid fever; 1,250 to date. [Illustration] In April, 1903, by the election of Mayor Hays, the Bigelow faction again came into power and Mr. Bigelow was reappointed director of public works. Councils reorganized. A reform, or Bigelow man, was elected to the presidency of councils, control of committees was secured, and by the middle of 1903, the Bigelow faction was again in full power. By this time the South Side was demanding filtered water. The new estimates presented by Director Bigelow in September, 1903, included ten filter beds for the South Side, and the raising of the pumping capacity for the first twenty-three wards by twenty million gallons, and included also, new machinery and boilers for the Brilliant pumping station, and a fifty-inch steel main across the city to supply the South Side and the Monongahela River wards of the old city. These brought the total new estimate up to over seven million dollars. The time between September 21, 1903, and January 12, 1904, was required to get a resolution through councils and approved by the mayor, authorizing the finance committee to employ three experts, Col. Alexander M. Miller of Washington, John W. Hill of Philadelphia, and Rudolph Herring of New York, "to verify and make a report on or before March 1, 1904, to the committee on finance, as to the correctness of the estimates made by the director of public works." Under this resolution the experts were employed and went to work. In the meantime, councils had received a petition from the Pittsburgh Section of the American Chemical Society, urging the establishment of a sand filtration plant; also a resolution of the Civic Club of Allegheny county, and a resolution of the permanent civic committee of the women's clubs of Allegheny county, urging sand filtration at an early date. During 1903 there were 450 deaths from typhoid fever. On February 27, 1904, the filtration experts made their report recommending a receiving basin, three sedimentation basins, a clear water basin, and forty filter beds. They also recommended sand filtration and covers for filter beds, but cut down the capacity of the various parts of the plant sufficiently to reduce the estimated cost by $700,000. On March 31, 1904, the Bureau of Filtration in the Department of Public Works was created for the purpose of constructing these important works. No further opposition of a serious character was met, and in July of that year a second bond election for $5,000,000 was held and passed by a vote of nearly two to one. These bonds were issued in September; plans and specifications for the enlarged plant were prepared as soon as possible; bids were advertised; and the contract was let on March 4, 1905. With the final award of the contract the fight for pure water was practically won. Director Bigelow again stepped out of office in 1900 with the election of a mayor independent of either Republican faction; but the work of pushing the plant forward to completion was carried on by the Guthrie administration under the efficient supervision of Directors Clark and Shepherd, and Superintendent Knowles; so that by October, 1908, the plant was supplying a good quality of filtered water to the first twenty-three wards,--the old city. The settling of the pending litigation between the city and the Monongahela and other private water companies on the South Side, together with the taking over of that property by the city was all that remained to be done before filtered water could be supplied to that part of the city.[14] [14] In January, the Monongahela Water Company notified the city of its decision to abide by the decree of the Supreme Court, which granted permission to the city to take possession of this plant and system in consideration of $1,975,000. In the meantime the North Side (Allegheny City) still has unfiltered water. Immediately after Allegheny was annexed to the Greater City in December, 1907, steps were taken to pave the way for filtered water there. $750,000 was appropriated for ten extra filter beds on city-owned land adjoining the plant, and their construction is now under way. Their use for the North Side involves extra pumping facilities, however. A plan to bring the old Allegheny pumping station at Montrose down to Aspinwall for this purpose was recently blocked by members of councils from the North Side. Satisfactory explanation for this action does not seem to be forthcoming. The reason alleged was that its removal would throw some of the men out of a job. In the meantime Allegheny continues drinking unfiltered water with no immediate prospect of relief, and the same sort of political influence that delayed filtration in the old city so long, seems to be accomplishing similar results on the North Side. * * * * * In conclusion, let me apply the economic facts brought out in the first section of this article, to the four years of unnecessary delays in the construction of the filtration plant, from April 3, 1900, to April 29, 1904. They must be considered in making up the whole bill of the city in the cause of pure water. During all this time, more than $2,200,000, on which the city was paying three and one half per cent interest, was lying in the banks favored by the administration, bringing the city but two per cent; and the death rate from typhoid fever was the highest of any of the large cities in the United States. But for this delay the plant might have been brought to completion on January 1, 1904, or at least as far advanced as it was January 1, 1908, and four years,--1904, 1905, 1906 and 1907,--of excess typhoid fever might have been avoided. Not a startling statement, perhaps, on the face of it. But consider seriously what these four years of excess typhoid fever have meant to the people of Pittsburgh in deaths and economic cost. I have told you of but half of the people of six wards out of forty-three, one year out of four. In 1904, with an estimated population of 352,852, there were 503 deaths from typhoid in Pittsburgh. Cities with a fairly pure water supply do not have over twenty-five deaths annually per 100,000 population from typhoid. Had Pittsburgh's typhoid fever death rate in 1904 been twenty-five per 100,000, there would have been but 88 deaths instead of 503, and the grim total of 415 lives would not have been blotted out. By allowing $2,000 as the cost in loss of wages and expenses for each death (a little under the actual costs in the concrete study of economic cost already given), and allowing our previous minimum of $4,000 as the value of each life, the total excess deaths in 1904 alone from lack of pure water was a loss to the community of $2,490,000. There were 425 unnecessary deaths in 1906, and a wastage of $2,550,000; 289 unnecessary deaths in 1905, and a wastage of $1,734,000; 415 unnecessary deaths in 1904, and a wastage of $2,490,000. In the four years the community lost $9,000,000,--over $4,000,000 more than the cost of the filtration plant. And in those four years, 1,538 lives were unnecessarily sacrificed. There are those who will say, and perhaps rightly, that Pittsburgh's filtration plant of to-day is the magnificent triumph of construction that it is, only because of those years of delay in shaping the final plans; that while those who fought the measure tooth and nail for so many years did not have that purpose in mind, yet the set-backs they were able to accomplish, have made in the end for a larger, better, more efficient and more far-serving plant than could have been possible, had the first plans been carried hastily to completion. Such may be the case. If so, let the people be thankful that the cause of pure water triumphed ultimately over a lethargic public sentiment, selfish political purposes, and municipal shortsightedness. Let them at the same time remember at what cost to themselves and to their city the fight was won. And let the plant itself stand as an object lesson of tardy justice, and a monument to those hundreds of lives that paid the penalty unwillingly and unknowingly of being part and parcel of an unaroused municipal conscience. [Illustration: GROSS NUMBER OF TYPHOID CASES, 1885 TO 1907. GROSS NUMBER OF TYPHOID CASES AND DEATHS REPORTED IN PITTSBURGH FROM 1885 TO 1907] PITTSBURGH'S FOREGONE ASSET, THE PUBLIC HEALTH A RUNNING SUMMARY OF THE PRESENT ADMINISTRATIVE SITUATION SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS Starting at the lowest level, let us formulate our initial axiom in terms of dollars. A sound man can do more work than a sick man. Therefore he can make more money. A sound city can do more work than a sick city. Therefore, in the long run, it can accumulate more wealth. Public health is a public asset. This is a truth which, in her single-minded purpose of commercial and industrial expansion, Pittsburgh long ago forgot, if, indeed, she ever stopped to realize it. Consequently, at a time when all the other great American cities have organized their forces thoroughly and are waging battle, with greater or less scientific skill, against that most potent of all destroyers, the germ, this mighty aggregation of half a million human beings has only just declared war, and has barely established its outposts. After two years of preparation to meet conditions which have been half a century in forming and solidifying, Pittsburgh's little regular army of defence now faces the most complicated problem of municipal betterment to be found in American hygiene. A health bureau performs a defensive and protective function. Its intelligence department must keep it apprised of every manifestation on the part of the enemy; and it must rally to the threatened point to check the advance before it be too late, whether the emergency be a school epidemic of diphtheria, or a localized onset of typhoid. It must maintain a jealous watchfulness over the food and water supplies that are brought into the city, lest with them shall come the invading diseases. And its statistics of death and disability must point out for repair, the breaches made in its walls by the never-ceasing onslaught. Such a sanitary garrison has little rest, and no respites, for the besieging germ never sleeps. The date of Pittsburgh's last annual health report is 1899. That fact is crammed with meaning. Strategically it means that for nearly a decade the sentries have all been asleep at their posts. Politically it has meant that those responsible for the administration of the city were too lethargic, too ignorant, or too indifferent to disturb that profound Rip Van Winkleism. Civically it means "Who cares!", and that companion gem, "What's the use?". Between public indifference, private selfishness, and political inertia, the germ has pretty well had its own sweet way with Pittsburgh, and the city's annual waste of life from absolutely preventable disease has been a thing to make humanity shudder, had it been expressed in the lurid terms of battle, holocaust, or flood, instead of the dumbly accepted figures of tuberculosis, typhoid, and infant mortality. Presumably, before this article gets into print, the Pittsburgh health report for the year 1907 will have been issued. What laborious exhumation of dilapidated statistical skeletons that report represents, I have not space to explain here. The important and significant point is that the authorities are at last at work, and energetically, under the leadership of a skilled sanitarian, Dr. James F. Edwards, superintendent of the Bureau of Health. It would be pleasant to add that Dr. Edwards goes into action with his hands free; pleasant, but quite untrue. On the contrary, he is bound and hampered to an extent that would devitalize the efforts of any but the most patient of enthusiasts. His forces are not under his own control, since under the Pennsylvania system he is at the head, not of a department, but of a bureau of the Department of Public Safety, administered by a layman. The law gives him no power to choose or discharge his own subordinates within the limits of the civil service; all that he can do is to train and educate such of them as most need it, when they come to him. He has no specific supervision or control over public or charitable institutions, those prolific culture-beds of contagion. Even the Municipal Hospital for Contagious Diseases has been taken out of his hands and put under other management. He cannot condemn a building inimical to the public safety, nor can he revoke a milk license. He cannot abate a nuisance without going to court for it. And, lest the powers of his bureau should wax too great and impinge upon individual privilege, old laws have been raked up and carefully interpreted to restrict the scope of its work. Yet in spite of all this, wonderful to say, the efforts of the bureau seem to have made an initial impress already on the death rate, and, even more important, to have gathered to its support some tangible force of public opinion. "Seem to have made," I say, because figures in this connection are largely a matter of conjecture. Basis for any detailed comparison between present and past, is lacking. What is certain, however, is that the sanitary forces are doing work which must inevitably have its effect in life-saving in the future; and the efficacy, if not the qualitative result, of that work is hopefully apparent. The first attack was made on a condition of affairs which would have disgraced a country village, the prevalence of unprotected outhouses, scattered over the length and breadth of the landscape; not only lurking in the slums, but peering from the proud eminence of hilltops down upon the homes of wealth and elegance below. Through the agency of flies in summer and of wind or heavy rains in winter, these relics of communal barbarity spread filth and contagion through the city. How many of them existed at their maximum will never be known. There are still six thousand survivors, but the number is being reduced daily. Proceeding under an ordinance which declares them illegal, Dr. Edwards began his campaign modestly. Opposition he foresaw, but he waited to keep it, as far as might be, sporadic, and to prevent it from concentrating. In the year 1905 only forty-six of these nuisances had been abolished. In 1906, six hundred of them fell. Thereupon the sensitive nerve of property rights thrilled the alarm throughout the commercial body. Reform was threatening rental profits; was becoming "radical," and "destructive." People with pulls, real or imagined, rushed to councils with demands for the repeal of the ordinance. But here an unexpected ally appeared. Destruction of the old meant construction of the new and modern, with much accruing increment to the plumbing trade. Therefore these shrewd business sanitarians hastened before the committee with lawyers and arguments, and so effectually backed up the case of the Health Bureau, that the repeal project was killed then and there. In the enthusiasm of well-won victory plumbers' supplies soared heavenward, with the result of bringing the unfortunate property owners down upon the Bureau of Health in agonized droves, begging for protection from the masters of the situation. Thereupon the bureau quietly allowed an extension of time, until the enthusiastic plumbers, somewhat chastened, saw the point and came nearer to earth in their prices; after which the process continued, and has been continuing, with accelerated progress. For the issue had now been decided. The proprietors of noisome property had lost the first skirmish. In 1907, 7,755 notices were served on recalcitrants, and 3,590 privies were abolished. By the end of 1910, Dr. Edwards hopes to have relegated these nuisances to a purely historical status. Encouraged, the Bureau of Health sought from the Legislature the power to condemn unsanitary dwellings. At present, in order to destroy property prejudicial to the public health, the bureau must go to court and prove the conditions unsanitary,--a cumbrous, expensive, and uncertain process. It is not long since a presumably upright and intelligent occupant of the bench held that a house which leaked so badly that the floors were rotted and the plaster peeled from the walls could not, on that account, be adjudged unsanitary. The bill passed the Legislature, prescribing condemnatory powers, with a proviso for court review and damages to the owner if the condemnation should be found unjustified. Governor Stuart vetoed the bill on the ground that it was too sweeping. If the local undertakers haven't passed a vote of thanks to the governor, they have missed a gracious opportunity. What would have been the one most effectual check upon the city's mortality, the wiping out of those death-in-life conditions of housing which make for tuberculosis, the active contagions, and above all the undermined vitality represented in Pittsburgh statistics under every division from general debility to suicide,--that the gubernatorial veto has effectually blocked. So certain large and small owners of slum property have an extension of immunity for their rentals drawn, at the worst, from premises where they wouldn't house their pigs,--particularly if they designed to eat the pigs afterward. Evil housing conditions are almost invariably reflected in the mortality figures of tuberculosis. Yet Pittsburgh's given death rate from tuberculosis is low; hardly half the normal rate for American cities, in general: so low, indeed, that I doubt whether any sanitarian would give implicit credence to it. Similarly, the death rate from pneumonia and bronchitis is suspiciously high. For example, in 1907 there were a quarter as many deaths attributed to bronchitis, as to consumption, an incredible assumption. Dr. Matson, who is in charge of the bureau's statistics, has decided, with a wisdom born of experience, to regard _fatal_ cases of bronchitis as belonging, statistically, in the pneumonia column; so I shall lump the two diseases. In the first eight months of last year (which is as far as the monthly figures have been supplied to me) there were but 565 deaths set down to tuberculosis in all forms, whereas the pneumonia and bronchitis totals aggregated upwards of 1,100. This is a condition which, so far as I know, has never been paralleled in any American city. The inference is inevitable that deaths, which should properly be ascribed to the great white plague, are reported by physicians under other heads. This is due, usually, to the influence of the decedent's family, who fear to lose their places if it be known that there is "consumption in the house," or who will perhaps, forfeit the insurance money if the true cause of death appear on the records. Very wisely Dr. Edwards is proceeding, not upon local certificates, which may lie, but upon universally recognized facts, which cannot; and is planning an exhaustive tuberculosis campaign. In this campaign will be concentrated the local official health force, the Pittsburgh Tuberculosis League, and the local dispensary of the State Board of Health, all working in conjunction with a special Tuberculosis Commission now in process of organization by the city government. At present the consumptive poor of Pittsburgh have a small, practically a negligible chance of life. The great, rich, busy city that slowly kills them, has no means to care for them while they are dying. There is no municipal tuberculosis hospital. To be sure, Marshalsea, outside the city, can care for some thirty victims; but they are taken there, usually, only when they are too weak to resist effectually. For Marshalsea is the Poor House. And there is inbred in the American an indestructible, illogical, pathetically self-respecting something which makes the term "Poor House" a poison to his soul. Live he might, within those walls. He prefers to stay outside and die. The late Dr. Charles Harrington of the Massachusetts department, wisest and most human of health officials, said to me once in one of his characteristic bursts of impatience with the stupidity of Things as they Are: "If I had the choice to make between naming a refuge for the helpless sick 'Poor-house' or 'Sure-Death,' I'd choose 'Sure-Death' every time. You could get more people to go to it." Marshalsea doesn't save many of the consumptives who come to its gates. Non-consumptives it does save, indirectly, since it removes from a susceptible environment, a certain number of spreaders of infection. Private effort does its altruistic but minute best in Pittsburgh; the Tuberculosis League has a hospital in which it can take care of fifty to sixty patients. And the State Board of Health relieves the situation a little by maintaining one of its admirable tuberculosis dispensaries in the city, with a staff of visiting nurses; and sends a few hopeful cases to its sanatoriums. Perhaps 100 victims of the plague can be cared for in proper institutions. There are to-day in the city probably 3,000 sufferers in a sufficiently advanced stage to be a peril to all with whom they come into contact. At a very moderate estimate three-fifths of this number are unable to afford proper home care, and of this three-fifths (all of whom will die, barring the few that can be accommodated in the hospitals) probably one-third,--again my estimate is conservative,--could be saved under proper conditions. That is, Pittsburgh of the mighty mills, Pittsburgh of the heaped-up millions, Pittsburgh of the rampant industrialism which has spread its influence to the far corners of the world, stands by helpless while six hundred lives are going out needlessly, not because they might not be saved, but because there is no place in which to save them. Nor is this the worst; since, in the slow process of dying, these victims will radiate the poison to hundreds, directly; indirectly to thousands, who are now well, strong, and unsuspecting the inevitable doom. What can the Health Bureau, the officially constituted army of defence, do to remedy this condition? Nothing. That is the answer which goes over the telephone wires, once, twice, half a dozen times a day, to people who ask for advice for helpless cases of consumption. I suppose that the sorriest duty of a health official, is to deny the application of some man upon whose life depends the support of other lives, for a fighting chance to get well and do his work in the world. Ask Dr. Edwards, oh comfortable resident Pittsburgher, how often he has had to do the very thing in the last year. It may give you new light on your civic responsibilities. Not so often will that hopeless response be made in the future. The united forces, drawn together by the forming Tuberculosis Commission, will make it their first business to provide some refuge of increasing adequacy, for those who are now distributing the infection. Meantime, though there is little to be done for those already stricken, the city is being covered, district by district, by the visiting nurses of the league, of the State Dispensary and of the Health Bureau, soon to be re-enforced by five special nurses from the commission, and all training and instructing the consumptive in those measures of prevention which safeguard the people about him from contracting the disease. One-third of all who die in Pittsburgh, die without having anything to say about it. That is, they die under five years of age. One-fourth of all who die, die without having anything to say about anything. That is, they die under one year of age. Most of these deaths are preventable, being the outcome of conditions which, humanly speaking, have no right to exist. Chief among the causes is bad milk. Pittsburgh uses 40,000 gallons of milk per day, coming from a wide radius in both Pennsylvania and Ohio. Before the present administration, this vitally important merchandise received rather less attention than the corner-stand vending of collar buttons. At the beginning of 1906 the Bureau of Health had one lone milk inspector. He collected samples, and, if one may judge by the brief records of analyses, he didn't imperil his own health by over-assiduity in the job. Dairy inspection was an unthought-of phase of activity. In August, 1906, two more inspectors were acquired and began, by prosecutions, to do some work in the matter of discouraging the use of formaldehyde. There was even some inspection of stores and adjacent dairies. Now the bureau has six men in the milk division, two of whom are dairy inspectors and one a veterinarian, and all of whom do conscientiously the work the city pays them to do. Two more have been arranged for, with which addition Dr. Edwards believes he will have a sufficient force to inaugurate a higher standard of supply. Unfortunately there is no official standard, though an ordinance is being prepared establishing bacterial and temperature requirements. Unfortunately, too, the law has been interpreted to mean that the Bureau of Health must issue licenses on demand; and that it cannot revoke these licenses. What has been done thus far is chiefly in the line of educating the dairymen and dealers. Dr. Edwards admits frankly that, while he regards pasteurization as a make-shift only, he believes that it will be necessary for a time to accept the deteriorated quality of milk consequent upon pasteurization, for the sake of destroying the pathogenic bacteria with which the supply swarms. Analyses made last summer showed an average of a million bacteria per cubic centimetre. The limit of reasonable safety is usually set at half that number. As for conditions as they existed at that time in certain local dairies, I can do no better than quote from the report of Dr. Goler, the health officer of Rochester and an international authority on milk supply: Go out to one of those dairies near the country club which supplies milk to some of the families living in the best localities and see the conditions under which milk is produced for the future citizens of the state and the nation. A dirty one-room house that once did duty as an out-house, supplied with water by a hose, a few old tubs in which cans, bottles and utensils are washed in cold water, and where all the waste flows into a vault beneath the foundation of the house. A damp, dark, old stable festooned with cobwebs, without drainage, where all the liquid refuse finds its way through cracks in the floor to the space beneath the structure, and where, on filthy floors, in some cases raised but one poor plank above the common floor of the stable, the swill-fed cows stand and give milk for some of the babies of Pittsburgh aristocracy, whose parents are willing to pay the munificent sum of eight cents a quart for the product. Visit cow stable after cow stable within easy motor ride from Pittsburgh, and the conditions of filthiness prevailing in the stables are only exceeded by the depth of manure and mud in the barnyards. The conditions of the cows, cans, utensils and barnyards at the distant points from which the city draws its milk may be judged by the fact that they pasteurize the milk before bringing it to the city and pasteurize it again before it is sent out from the dairy. Dairy inspection, it is fair to say, has recently ameliorated the worst of these conditions. Increasingly careful supervision of the retail milk dealers, and constant inspection of the less cleanly stores, which has discouraged many of them out of existence, tend to minimize the danger of contamination of milk at the other end of the line. There is, however, an additional peril in the well-water supply often used to wash cans and bottles. The milk-inspection force faces a situation outlined in the latest complete figures (not yet in print); those for 1907, which show a total infant mortality of more than a thousand from diseases inferentially due to bad milk. The poorer quarters of the city where prices rule at six or seven cents a quart, exhibit the heaviest figures, and there is the typical rising curve of the mortality line in hot weather. Last summer that curve, while still unpleasantly in evidence, was noticeably modified. Education of mothers of the slums was largely responsible. The Bureau of Health put a corps of six special nurses in the field who went about from house to house, instructing mothers in the hygienic care of their children, and working in conjunction with the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Milk and Ice Association, one of the most efficient charitable enterprises in the city. Probably the infant mortality for the whole year of 1908 would have been low but for the winter epidemic of measles, which killed more victims than scarlet fever, diphtheria, smallpox, chickenpox, and all the other active contagions put together. Now the city, having learned a costly lesson in the seriousness of this too commonly disregarded disease, quarantines for it. It is perhaps, hardly ingenuous to include smallpox in the foregoing comparison, as that disease is now a practically negligible quantity. Since the epidemic of 1903 Pittsburgh has been the best vaccinated of American cities. Wherefrom depends a corollary for the consideration of the anti-vaccinationists, that for two years there has not been a death from this loathsome and unnecessary infection in the city, nor has a single original case developed. [Illustration: DISEASE-INCUBATORS. Some Pittsburgh cow-stables which lower the standards set by progressive producers.] We are prone, in this country, to study the public health too much in terms of death rates, and too little in the character of the survivors. Applying this latter test to the children of Pittsburgh's slums, we shall find cause to wonder whether, in a sense, the deaths are not too few rather than too many. Would it not be better for the unfortunate and innocent victims themselves, and certainly for the community at large, that this puny, helpless breed of hunger, filth, and misery which creeps about the city's man-made jungles, should succumb in infancy to the conditions that bred but cannot support them? For there are certain phases of existence in which a high death rate is less to be feared than a high birth rate. Anti-race-suicide has a fine, rotund ring, as it issues from the presidential lips. But President Roosevelt has never, I take it, been in Mulberry Alley, or Our Alley, or a certain unnamed court off Washington street that wafts its stenches into the boulevard below, or any one of a score of other hopeless thoroughfares which might give him pause in the promulgation of his doctrine. Nor are conditions of life here in the city's choked up center greatly worse than in the "runs" which diversify the landscape of the newer parts of the city; damp, heavy-aired, steaming canyons, into which the poorest classes have been pushed; over the rim, and "off the earth," as it were. There they live, pasty women and weazened children, in the heavy air, polluted, as like as not, by the stenches from the creeks which are little else but open sewers. One such little isolated population I found, in a huddle of houses, under a towering steel bridge, faithfully reproducing, in what was practically open country, the deadliest living conditions of the crowded center of population. To return to the central slums, there are whole districts which might well (were it of any avail) be placarded, as are certain New York flats: * * * * * NO ROOM HERE FOR CHILDREN. * * * * * Settlement workers know the truth about this matter. Here are the words of one of them: "Not one child in ten comes to us from the river-bottom section without a blood or skin disease, usually of long standing. Not one out of ten comes to us physically up to the normal for his or her age. Worse than that, few of them are up to the mental standard, and an increasing percentage are imbecile." What can a Bureau of Health do to [Illustration: (By permission of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health). WHERE HUMAN LIFE IS CHEAP.] alleviate such a status? Nothing: the problem is too big for official solution. Either a sense of responsibility on the part of the mill owner toward his employes who must live near the mills will start a housing movement that will do away with the present outrageous rentals for disgraceful accommodations, or an aroused public conscience will, by one means or another, make a clean sweep of these pest holes. Or, a third, and ugly alternative. London's East End is open for the inspection of travelling Pittsburghers. There they may see in its fullness the crop of pauperism, dependence, and degeneracy which is bred in the third and fourth generations, of conditions no worse than their own average, and not so bad as their own worst. As an escape from the slum there is the school. Here again Pittsburgh is in the dark ages of hygiene. Every public school is a law unto itself. The principal, always a layman, and not unusually an ignorant one in health matters, decides when a pupil shall be isolated for a contagious or suspicious ailment. Is it surprising that a short time ago a certain skin disease infected an entire institution, or that eye and scalp ailments are often widely diffused among the scholars? From an inspection of buildings and pupils Dr. Goler draws these conclusions: The school buildings are in many cases crowded, dark, dirty, often of three stories, and bad fire risks. The condition of the children in these schools good and bad, rich and poor, may be shown by the large proportion having defective teeth, reduced hearing, imperfect vision. An excessively large number of them are mouth breathers, partially so because they are unable to breathe through their noses in the smoky air of Pittsburgh, and a very considerable number are below stature for weight of that determined for the average child. In a large percentage, the defects of teeth, nose and throat, bring them below the physical normal. These are the children that wear out in childhood. [Illustration: PSEUDO-RELIGIOUS 10-CENT LODGING HOUSE. In cellar of river-front building; flooded out every year. Dilapidated, unsanitary and unventilated, this and similar lodging houses were breeding place of disease. Closed by Bureau of Health, following investigation and report for Pittsburgh Survey, by James Forbes, mendicancy expert of the New York Charity Organization Society. A lodging house code has since been established.] In no manner of justice, can the Bureau of Health be held to account in this matter. In co-operation with the Civic Club, settlements, physicians and school principals, Dr. Edwards sought to establish a medical inspection of public schools, such an inspection as would, for example, undoubtedly have checked almost at its inception the disastrous onset of measles of last year. But the measure never got past the legal department of the city administration. In view of the present conditions in the schools, Dr. Goler's closing and pregnant suggestion has a special force: _"Ought not the Pittsburgh schools to be closed and the children repaired?"_ Semi-public institutions in Pittsburgh are quite independent of hygienic control or inspection. This seems to me one of the crying evils of the present status. Let me give a few examples: An inmate of an institution for children was infected by another child who had virulent skin disease and soon afterward he became totally blind. This was a repetition of a past experience of the same institution in which a child contracted trachoma within the institution walls, is totally blind in consequence and a charge upon the state. Last spring an institution was found in charge of a matron whose special qualification for her care of very young children was experience. She had had ten of her own, all of whom died of intestinal disease and rickets in early childhood. She was feeding the little ones in her care on coffee and other food suited only to robust grownups. Every child in a certain charitable institution, a short time ago, was suffering from skin and scalp disease. Lack of arrangements for effective isolation, in case of contagious disease, is more common than provision for isolation. A refuge for fallen women has, naturally, a large percentage of inmates suffering from venereal disease. The women of one refuge work in the laundry which gets a certain amount of outside trade. Among other things it washes towels for a hotel. Contraction of gonorrhea or syphilis from infected towels or garments is a well-recognized medical fact. A laundry with infected women on its working force cannot but be a public peril. Grim facts are piling up on the records of the Pittsburgh Tuberculosis Dispensary as to advanced cases of tuberculosis among the little charges of charitable institutions. Instances such as these might be multiplied. As in the case of the public schools the authorities are helpless. Even over the city's own institution, the Municipal Hospital, the Bureau of Health has no control. It has been transferred to the Bureau of Charities within the last year. It receives only contagious diseases, and is too small for the requirements in time of epidemic, having proper accommodation for only eighty, with a crowded capacity of 125. Dr. Booth of the Bureau of Health, who acts as visiting physician by special appointment to the Bureau of Charities, tells me that up to 1905 the plant was housed in buildings erected in the seventies. The furnishings were beds and bedding from the fire and police departments, regarded as being no longer fit for use by the city's paid servants, and therefore proper charity for the city's helpless sick. Two years ago, Dr. Booth put an end to this system by burning the last consignment of furnishings (for reasons principally entomological); and announcing that he would admit to the hospital no more equipment, discarded as unfit by the police and fire forces. Now the plant has its own furnishings. The building is modern but of an obsolete and unsatisfactory type, and has not sufficient grounds for its convalescents. All the other hospitals in the city are private institutions. There is no co-ordination of hospital work among them, and their distribution is such that localities where there are the most ambulance calls are without easily available hospital plants. To sum up, these are some few of Pittsburgh's immediate needs, if it is to fight its battle successfully for fewer deaths and a better living product: Autonomy of the official health authorities (preferably a department of health, not a bureau) under the executive and administrative control of a physician or sanitarian. A tuberculosis hospital for advanced cases which are now spreading infection throughout the city. More visiting nurses and more sanitary inspectors. Eventually a hospital for the incipient cases that can be saved. Municipal collection and disposal of the rubbish which accumulates everywhere, seriously hampering efforts to make the city hygienically clean and which must now be removed at private expense. A general hospital of sufficient size, proper equipment, and adequate surroundings. Some reasonable division and co-ordination of effort on the part of the private hospitals. Authority to condemn and destroy unsanitary buildings. Authority to condemn and destroy, upon its entrance to the city, or upon discovery within the city limits, unclean, infected, or adulterated milk, and to refuse and revoke milk licenses. Establishment of a standard for milk. Medical inspection of schools and school children. Medical and sanitary inspection of hospitals, and of all public or semi-public chartered institutions. These authorizations to be embodied in a city code. At present the health officials work almost wholly under the state law. * * * * * [Illustration: GERM HATCHERIES. THESE FRONT ON THE GRANT BOULEVARD.] What is Pittsburgh going to do about it? Though the foregoing rather general survey may suggest pessimistically "the little done, the undone vast," yet there is not lacking, in the view, definite promise as well as progress. Many and diverse agencies are helping the cause. The monthly reports of the bureau keep a public, which has for years been in a state of Egyptian darkness as to the how and wherefore of its mortality, fully informed. A Civic Improvement Commission has been appointed by Mayor Guthrie, one of the sub-committees of which will deal with needed hygienic reforms. The Chamber of Commerce has appointed a special committee to co-operate with the Health Bureau for the betterment of housing conditions, and another to aid in improving the milk supply. For the protection of the communities downstream, a sewage disposal plant has been voted; and badly needed it is, as is shown by the fact that, at the present writing, two thousand people are ill in the suburb of Bellevue, from drinking water polluted by Pittsburgh's sewage. The Allegheny County Medical Society has constituted a committee on public instruction in health matters; also a milk commission. The Tuberculosis Commission will soon be in the field with its broad campaign. Municipally there has been an important step forward in the establishment of a disinfection corps which sterilizes and makes safe, at the public expense if necessary, the premises from which a consumptive has been removed. Anti-tuberculosis education by the various corps of visiting nurses is extending into every corner of the city that harbors a dangerous consumptive. The state school commission has recommended medical inspection of schools. City ordinances providing for milk standards, and rubbish disposal, are in prospect. The Bureau of Health, only a short time ago a rusted and ineffectual machine fed by incompetents from other departments, has, under its new head, developed an _esprit de corps_, and is now welded into a compact, dependable organization. And this organization will constantly have a supply of better trained men to draw upon, since the University of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Technical Schools have, at Dr. Edwards's suggestion, arranged for special courses in sanitary engineering and practical hygiene. Yes; Pittsburgh is awake to the needs of the situation. But the true test is yet to come. Thus far it has been but the laying out of the lines of battle and a few preliminary, and, on the whole, victorious skirmishes. For when hygienic and sanitary reform impinges, in its advance, as it needs must, upon the private purse of some, the political purposes of others, and the industrial and commercial license of the whole, then will come the tug of war. Then, according as shortsighted selfishness shall prevail over, or succumb to, civic pride and patriotism, the victory will be to the germ or to the city. 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